Category Archives: Social Engineering

Stormy Weather

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

For those of us who are not admirers of President Trump, it’s even more painful to see the Democratic opposition descend into the stupendous dishonesty of the Russian Collusion story. When the intelligentsia of the nation looses its ability to think — when it becomes a dis-intelligentsia — then there are no stewards of reality left. Trump is crazy enough, but the “resistance” is dragging the country into dangerous madness.

It’s hard not to be impressed by the evidence in the public record that the FBI misbehaved pretty badly around the various election year events of 2016. And who, besides Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, and Dean Baquet of The New York Times, can pretend to be impressed by the so far complete lack of evidence of Russian “meddling” to defeat Hillary Clinton? I must repeat: so far. This story has been playing for a year and a half now, and as the days go by, it seems more and more unlikely that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is sitting on any conclusive evidence. During this time, everything and anything has already leaked out of the FBI and its parent agency the Department of Justice, including embarrassing hard evidence of the FBI’s own procedural debauchery, and it’s hard to believe that Mr. Mueller’s office is anymore air-tight than the rest of the joint.

If an attorney from Mars came to Earth and followed the evidence already made public, he would probably suspect that the FBI and DOJ colluded with the Clinton Campaign and the Democratic Party to derail the Trump campaign train, and then engineer an “insurance policy” train wreck of his position in office. Also, in the process, to nullify any potential legal action against Clinton, including the matter of her email server, her actions with the DNC to subvert the Sanders primary campaign, the Steele dossier being used to activate a FISA warrant for surveillance of the Trump campaign, the arrant, long-running grift machine of the Clinton Foundation (in particular, the $150 million from Russian sources following the 2013 Uranium One deal, when she was Secretary of State), and the shady activities of Barack Obama’s inner circle around the post-election transition. There is obviously more there there than in the Resistance’s Russia folder.

I don’t even understand why Robert Mueller ever had credible standing to preside over this special investigation. He is, after all, the close friend and once-mentor of the figure who is very likely the fulcrum in any case against Trump: James Comey, the former FBI director fired by Trump — theoretically to obstruct justice, the keystone in the effort to find an impeachable offense.

I’m not comfortable acting as a supporter or defender of Trump, but I’m even less comfortable with the appearance of a rogue security and law enforcement apparatus gone blatantly political. The so far poorly-explained antics at the FBI and DOJ reflect badly on all vested authority in the country — and especially for any faction that pretends to be on the side of justice. This is a much larger problem than the public debate seems to recognize. We are not far from a point where nobody will be able to believe anything official in this land.

I remain convinced that this circus of scandal and counter-scandal will not necessarily be resolved by the legal machinery, at least not in any meaningful time frame that would allow the political establishment to pull its head out of its ass and actually start paying attention to the public interest. Rather, the circus tent will just blow down in the financial crisis that is spinning toward the US mainland like a superstorm. Mr. Trump now has full, gold-plated ownership of the parabolic stock market, a shuddering bond market, a wobbling currency, and an implacable debt quandary. These are conditions that can blow a society up for real.

Untying PropOrNot: Who They Are … and a Look at 2017’s Biggest Fake News Story

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By George Eliason, an American journalist living in Ukraine.

Source: Washington’s Blog

Preface by Washington’s Blog: A leading cybersecurity expert has publicly said that Mr. Eliason’s research as  presented in this article does not violate the law.  Washington’s Blog does not express an opinion about whether or not the claims set forth in this article are accurate or not. Make up your own mind.

A little over a year ago, the deep-state graced the world with Propornot. Thanks to them, 2017 became the year of fake news. Every news website and opinion column now had the potential to be linked to the Steele dossier and Trump collusion with Russia. Every journalist was either with us or against us. Every one that was against us became Russia’s trolls.

Fortunately for the free world, the anonymous group known as Propornot that tried to “out” every website as a potential Russian colluder, in the end only implicated themselves.

Turnabout is fair play and that’s always the fun part, isn’t it? With that in mind, I know the dogs are going to howl this evening over this one.

The damage Propornot did to scores of news and opinions websites in late 2016-2017 provides the basis of a massive civil suit. I mean huge, as in the potential is there for a tobacco company sized  class-action sized lawsuit. I can say that because I know a lot about a number of entities that are involved and the enormous amount of money behind them.

How serious is this? In 2016, a $10,000 reward was put out for the identities of Propornot players. No one has claimed it yet, and now, I guess no one will. There are times in your life that taking a stand has a cost. To make sure the story gets out and is taken seriously, this is one of those times.

If that’s what it takes for you to understand the danger Propornot and the groups around them pose to everyone you love, if you understand it, everything will have been well worth it.

In this article, you’ll meet some of the people staffing Propornot. You’ll meet the people and publications that provide their expenses and cover the logistics. You’ll meet a few of the deep state players. We’ll deal with them very soon. They need to see this as the warning shot over the bow and start playing nice with regular people.  After that, you’ll meet the NGO’s that are funding and orchestrating all of it. How am I doing so far?

The image that you see is the clincher or game winner that supplies the necessary proof up front and the direct path to Propornot. This was a passive scan of propornot.com showing the administrative dashboard belongs to the InterpreterMag.com as shown on the left of the image. On the right, it shows that uploads to Propornot.com come from InterpreterMag.com and is a product of that publication.

Now we have the first layer of Propornot, fake news, and our 1st four contestants. We havea slew of new media organizations that are influenced by, or feeding Propornot. Remember, fake news got off the ground and got its wings because of the attention this website received from the Washington Post in Dec. 2016.

At the Interpreter Mag level, here are the people:

  • Michael Weiss is the Editor-in-Chief at the InterpreterMag.com. According to his Linkd profile, he is also a National Security Analyst for CNN since Jul 2017 as well as an Investigative Reporter for International Affairs for CNN since Apr 2017. He has been a contributor there since 2015. He has been a Senior Editor at The Daily Beast since Jun 2015.

With the lengthy CNN cred’s, how much involvement does CNN have in fake news? Yes, I know, but we’re talking about Propornot.

  • James Miller’s bio at the InterpreterMag.com includes Managing Editor of The Interpreter where he reports on Russia, Ukraine, and Syria. James runs the “Under The Black Flag” column at RFE/RL which provides news, opinion, and analysis about the impact of the Islamic State extremist group in Syria, Iraq, and beyond. He is a contributor at Reuters, The Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, and other publications. He is an expert on verifying citizen journalism and has been covering developments in the Middle East, specifically Syria and Iran, since 2009. Follow him on Twitter: @MillerMENA- Miller even works for the US Embassy in Kiev “diplo-page” the Kiev Post.

The Interpreter is a product of the Atlantic Council. The Digital Forensics Research Lab has been carrying the weight in Ukrainian-Russian affairs for the Atlantic Council. Fellows working with the Atlantic Council in this area include:

  • Bellingcat- Aric Toler and Eliot Higgins- This linked article shows how an underwear salesman became one of the most important faces of the deep state.  Don’t laugh, the image is really appropriate. Higgins’ insecurity runs so deep because of his failures that Higgins tries to get publications censured that question his author-i-tie.
  • Anne Applebaum
  • StopFake- Irena Chalupa- Chalupa is the sister to the same Alexandra Chalupa that brought the term Russian hacking to worldwide attention. Irena Chalupa is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center. She is also a senior correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), where she has worked for more than twenty years. Ms. Chalupa previously served as an editor for the Atlantic Council, where she covered Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Irena Chalupa is also the news anchor for Ukraine’s propaganda channel Stopfake.org She is a Ukrainian Diaspora leader. The Chalupa’s are the 1st family of Ukrainian propaganda. She works with and for Ukrainian Intelligence through the Atlantic Council, Stopfake, and her sisters Andrea (Euromaidanpr) and Alexandra.

The strand that ties this crew together is they all work for Ukrainian Intelligence. If you hit the links, the ties are documented very clearly. We’ll get to that point again shortly, but let’s go further:

Propornot-> Atlantic Council -> Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG)

Who are the BBG? According to Wikipedia- “The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) is an independent agency of the United States government. According to its website, its mission is to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy. The BBG supervised Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Television Marti, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcast Networks.

The board of the BBG was eliminated and replaced with a single appointed chief executive officer as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, which was passed in December 2016.”

On January 1, 2016, the  Interpreter became a special project of RFE/RL and under the oversight of the BBG. The Secretary of State had a seat on the board of the BBG until December 2016. Why the change?

During the 2016 election, the BBG developed a major conflict of interest. At least two BBG board members worked actively for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. These government officials were working against the president-elect after the election. It looks like it didn’t go unnoticed. In the following linked article, it shows that they should be investigated for their part in an attempted coup.

From a Nov 7, 2016, article– “Karen Kornbluh is helping refine and to get Hillary Clinton’s message out. ” All of them are names to watch if Clinton wins — and key jobs at the FCC and other federal agencies are up for grabs.”

According to her bio: Karen founded the New America Foundation’s Work and Family Program and is a senior fellow for Digital Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Karen has written extensively about technology policy, women, and family policy for The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post. New York Times columnist David Brooks cited her Democracy article “Families Valued,” focused on “juggler families” as one of the best magazine articles of 2006.

Michael Kempner is the founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of MWW Group, a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter, and may get a greater role if she is elected.  Kempner is a member of the Public Relations Hall of Fame. Michael Kempner hired Anthony Weiner after the sexting scandal broke in 2011.

Jeff Shell, chairman of the BBG and  Universal Filmed Entertainment is supporting a secondary role by being an honor roll donor to the Atlantic Council. While the BBG is supposed to be neutral it has continuously helped increase tensions in Eastern Europe. While giving to the Atlantic Council may not be illegal while in his position, currently, the Atlantic Council’s main effort is to ignite a war with Russia. This may set up a major conflict of interest.

According to journalist Robert Parry “The people that will be taking senior positions and especially in foreign policy believe “This consensus is driven by a broad-based backlash against a president who has repeatedly stressed the dangers of overreach and the need for restraint, especially in the Middle East.”

Parry goes on to say that at the forefront of this is the Atlantic Council, a think tank associated with NATO. Their main goal is a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.”

So, to make sense of all this, most of the people listed would have held cabinet positions in a Hillary Clinton presidency. If the Interpreter is a project of RFE/RL then the decision to go ahead with Propornot would have to go across their desk. That includes then Sec of State, John Kerry.

The unasked question of why would a US Government Agency do this (?) needs to be addressed. All the people listed above were actively working for Clinton to get her elected and throw Donald Trump’s campaign off the rails.

After the election, they were going to take care of Clinton’s “deplorables” by dissecting alternative media. I wrote about this before the election and I warned several major new sites what they could expect. I was right on the money. After she lost, it was already in motion. The deplorable media didn’t fall into a particular political pattern other than they did not promote Hillary Clinton.

The purpose of Propornot has been to get people to demand freedom of speech be rolled back. This was/is to be done by destroying fact-based media. If you read further, the entire plan is laid out starting from 2015 when it started coming together.

These people want reality shaped on what the perceived majority (louder) group believes to be true, regardless of what the facts are. Perception based reality is only a Facebook like away from killing one person or elevating another to hero status regardless of what they have done.

That little statement about the free speech rally says it all. It’s something that would hardly be noticed unless you were looking for it because it is part of the meta-data.

Now you can say it’s only a sentence and who cares? Nobody communicates through metadata do they? Wasn’t that what Propornot was all about? Yes, they do communicate through metadata. That’s why I look at it.

Do you see it? No? Look again. There in the metadata, at the bottom of the image is an ad for a job. Go for it and remember to mention the header. It could just as easily be hacking instructions, or a do not disturb sign. That’s why it pays to really research carefully.

The Boston ‘Free Speech’ Rally was billed by the social networks and MSM as a fascist rally. It was really a Free Speech Rally. What they learned is that with just a little nudge, they can make you demand nationalist repression. Nice going Boston!

Hey, is this starting to sound a little conspiratorial? If it is, we need ruskie hackers with Guy Fawkes masks to make this work. They have to admit to changing international politics through hacking in 2016, belong to a foreign country, code in Russian, and use spear phishing techniques to lure people in. Let’s not forget that they also have to work for some form of Intelligence.

Most importantly, they have to work with and influence all of the people above. They will definitely impact US foreign policy toward Russia. Let’s raise the stakes even more. The hackers have to answer to whoever is funding a lot of the illegal and immoral activities.

They are not even savvy enough to stay clear of outing each other. This is the Pravy Sektor hacker RUH8.  The common thread for these hackers is clear if you read the linked material on the profiles that make up these organizations. They work for Bellingcat, Informnapalm, the Atlantic Council, Ukrainian Intel, and the Diaspora.

In a follow-up article, I have reason to ask if they were given access to United States Government Top Secret Secure Servers. I’m not kidding.

In a Euromaidan Press article dated November 2nd, 2016, the hackers state enthusiastically “Ukrainian hackers have a rather high level of work. So the help of the USA… I don’t know, why would we need it? We have all the talent and special means for this. And I don’t think that the USA or any NATO country would make such sharp movements in international politics.”

And we have a winner. In 2016 the sharp movement in international politics was caused by…survey says….hacking!!!!

According to Donna Brazille, the Democratic Party servers were hacked multiple times and the hacking didn’t stop until December 2016. At this juncture, we should be able to agree that Seth Rich leaked the information to Wikileaks. But, now we are talking about other hacks. In the above linked article, these hacker specifically say their favorite route is spear phishing email accounts.

In the article, you’ll also see they work directly for Ukrainian Intel. Bellingcat works directly for Ukrainian Intel and works with them and the Atlantic Council. Stopfake is a product of Irena Chalupa who works for RFE/RL, the Atlantic Council and the Ukrainian government. Stopfake works directly with them and is a product of the Ukrainian government. Crowdstrike has an ongoing relationship with Ukrainian Intel and these particular hackers. Crowdstrike conjured up Fancy Bear. Well say, hello to the real fancy bear of 2016 (*fancybear is technically a set of tools and not people).

This means that former Secretary of State John Kerry approved of Ukrainian Intelligence hackers having access to servers inside a US Government Agency because of Propornot and the Atlantic Councils reliance on the hackers.

How are the Ukrainian hackers tied into Propornot at any level? James Miller isn’t shy about using their work. Propornot relies on the work of the Atlantic Council, Aric Toler, Aaron Weisburd, Clint Watts, and Joel Harding. The Ukrainian hackers work directly with InformNapalm and are the go-to resource for most of the people involved and all of the people just named.

Below we have assessed the details of the reports from InformNapalm, and have expanded on their investigation. — James Miller

Americans are attacking Americans for a foreign country for what amounts to pennies. We’ll deal with them again soon.

Who does the Atlantic Council work for? It’s the same people that staff RFE/RL.

“On 29 January 2016 in Washington, U.S.A., Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) President Eugene Czolij and Atlantic Council President and CEO Frederick Kempe officially signed a Memorandum of Agreement to renew the cooperation between the UWC and the Atlantic Council, that began in September 2014.

In accordance with this Memorandum, the UWC will continue its cooperation with the Atlantic Council on implementing the “Ukraine in Europe Initiative”, which aims to galvanize international support for an independent, sovereign and territorially integral Ukraine, including Crimea. This initiative is also intended to support reforms in Ukraine and its EuroAtlantic integration, and to counter Russian disinformation.”

This one little paragraph spells out clearly what I have shown in detail throughout this article.

The Ukrainian World Congress is represented in the US Congress by the Ukrainian Caucus headed up by ISIS supporter and Nazi cheerleader Marcy Kaptur. Her Ukrainian Caucus represents people  with political positions that scared Adolf Hitler in WWII.

The obvious takeaway is that a lawsuit is a bare minimum that needs to happen. People need to be investigated for crimes against the state. When we take a closer look at who had potential access to top-secret servers, that will become painfully obvious.

These people have tried and are trying to rip the fabric of society in pieces. At the very least, they have earned a good tarring…and feathering. When you look at the financial end of this a lawsuit in the billions would barely touch it.

Just one company the Ukrainian Diaspora started for this is valued over 100 million dollars. This will need to be a class action suit with a cease and desist to the BBG.

In early 2015, almost 2 years before most people took the idea of censorship seriously, I documented its inception. In the same way, it happens with many of the biggest stories of our times, I stumbled onto it by accident.

In early March 2015, Ukrainian Information Policy designer Joel Harding laid out what to expect going forward in the following statements: “In military IIO operations center on the ability to influence foreign audiences, US, and global audiences, and adversely affect enemy decision making through an integrated approach. Even current event news is released in this fashion. Each portal is given messages that follow the same themes because it is an across the board mainstream effort that fills the information space entirely when it is working correctly.

The purpose of “Inform and Influence Operations”  is not to provide a perspective, opinion, or lay out a policy. It is defined as the ability to make audiences “think and act” in a manner favorable to the mission objectives. This is done through applying perception management techniques which target the audiences emotions, motives, and reasoning.

These techniques are not geared for debate. It is to overwhelm and change the target psyche.

Using these techniques information sources can be manipulated and those that write, speak, or think counter to the objective are relegated as propaganda, ill-informed, or irrelevant.”- Harding

While the above sounds gloriously overoptimistic, Harding, along with his little band of Kremlin Troll hunters personally started developing the idea of organizations capable of blackballing journalists and publications in a way that could not be construed as censorship.

From another March 2015 article– A “Disinformation Charter” for Media and Bloggers: Top-down censorship should be avoided. But rival media, from Al-Jazeera to the BBC, Fox and beyond, need to get together to create a charter of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Vigorous debate and disagreement qre ,of course, to be encouraged—but media organizations that practice conscious deception should be excluded from the community. A similar code can be accepted by bloggers and other online influencers.

This “Disinformation Charter” for responsible behavior (Ministry of Truth?) he describes is to fight “conscious deception” can only be weighed against how he describes Propaganda. “The word is frequently used to describe any news emerging one’s opponent.”– Harding

Journalists that need to be excluded are those “our side” label as propagandists or active measure agents.”

Harding’s connections in media are very large. Through his friend Mathew Armstrong, Harding had access to and the ear of the board of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). The BBG board is staffed by the who’s who of network and radio broadcast, print media and shortwave CEO’s and heavy hitters. They are behind RFE/RL (Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty).

On the other end of this in 2015, Joel Harding was assembling a group of miscreants to attack the social networks of different journalist and publications. The crude logic behind a direct assault was that by developing, training, and overseeing vast troll networks they could speak over their opposition (people that their employers wanted to be silenced) and subdue dissident online conversation and control the information.

Where this wasn’t feasible, they set up hack and harass attacks at various publication to get them to stop publishing hard-hitting journalists. This still hasn’t been effective because it caused publishers to dig in and harden their internet properties instead.

The softer more indirect approach Harding pushed in March 2015 quickly developed into the unified media strategy he wanted for the US and Europe. Control the information and don’t allow contradicting information or news into the media stream. When it does get in, call it propaganda.

Enter Propornot.

 

The truth about « fake news »

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While NATO was busy setting up a vast network with which to accuse Russia of perpetuating propaganda from the Soviet era, Washington was suddenly swamped by a wave of hysteria. In an attempt to discredit the new US President, the dominant media accuse him of talking rubbish – in response, the President accuses them of propagating fake news. This cacophony is amplified by the swift development of the social media, which had once been intended for use as weapons of the State Department against nationalist regimes, but which today are popular forums used to combat abuse by all kinds of elites – with Washington at the top of the list.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: Voltaire Network

As soon as the announcement of his surprise election was made public, and even before he had access to the White House, the immense majority of US and NATO media began screaming about the negligence and insanity of President Trump. Battle was joined between the media class and the new President, with each side accusing the other of propagating fake news.

Almost everywhere in the NATO countries – and only in these countries – political representatives began denouncing fake news. This was intended to reveal the supposed influence of Russian propaganda within the « Western democracies ». The State which has been the most seriously impacted by this campaign is France, whose President Emmanuel Macron recently announced the drafting of a law specifically aimed at fighting these « attacks on democracy », but only during « an electoral period ».

The fact that the English expression fake news is maintained in all the languages of the NATO countries attests to the Anglo-Saxon origin of the problem, when in fact the phrase designates a phenomenon as old as the world – false information.

At the origin of the campaign against « fake news » – NATO

In 2009, at the NATO summit in Strasbourg-Kehl, President Obama announçed his intention of creating an Alliance « Strategic Communication » service [1]. It took six years to implement, using elements of the 77th Brigade of the British Land Army and the 361st Civil Affairs Brigade of the United States Land Army (based in Germany and Italy).

At first, their mission was to counter communications accusing the US deep state of having itself organised the attacks of 9/11, then those accusing the Anglo-Saxons of having planned the « Arab Springs » and the war against Syria — such communications were termed « conspiracy theories ». However, the situation evolved rapidly in such a way as to convince the populations of the Alliance that Russia was continuing to apply propaganda from the Soviet era – and thus that NATO was still useful.

Finally, in April 2015, the European Union created a « Work Group for Strategic Communications – East » (East StratCom Task Force). Every week, this group addresses a report on Russian propaganda to thousands of journalists. For example, its last edition (dated 11 January 2018) accuses Sputnik of pretending that the Copenhagen zoo feeds its predators with abandoned household pets. Lord help us, the « democracies » are under attack ! Clearly, it is difficult for these specialists to find meaningful examples of Russian interference. In August of the same year, NATO inaugurated its « Centre for Strategic Communication » in Riga (Latvia). The following year, the US State Department created a Global Engagement Center which works on the same principles.

How Facebook, Hillary Clinton’s pet obsession, turned against her

In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at the instigation of Jared Cohen (leading member of the Policy Planning Staff ), persuaded herself that it was possible to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran by manipulating the social media. This theory did not have the desired affect. However, two years later, in 2011, the same Jared Cohen — since become the the CEO of Google Ideas — managed to mobilise the youth of Cairo. Although the « revolution » of Tahrir Square had not swayed the opinion of the Egyptian people, the myth of the extension of the American way of life via Facebook was born. As a result, the State Department sponsored a number of associations and assemblies to promote Facebook.

However, the US Presidential election of 2016 was a shock. An outsider, real estate promoter Donald Trump, eliminated all his rivals one by one, including Hillary Clinton, and was swept into the White House, having benefited from the advice of Facebook. For the first time, the dream of the Muse of professional politicians became reality, but worked against her. Overnight, Facebook was demonised by the dominant Press.

It became evident on this occasion that it is possible to artificially create crowd movements with the social media, but that after a few days, media users regain their senses. This is the constant fact for all systems of information manipulation — they are fleeting. The only form of lie which makes it possible to create long-term behaviour patterns supposes that one has forced the citizens into a form of minor engagement, in other words, that one has brainwashed them [2].

Indeed, Facebook understood this very well, creating its « Politics & Government Outreach Program » and handing it over to the care of Katie Harbath. It was intended to create collective emotions in favour of one client or another, but does not seek to organise lasting campaigns [3]. This is why President Macron proposes to legislate the social media only during electoral periods. He was himself elected thanks to a brief disorder created jointly by a weekly newspaper and Facebook against his rival François Fillon — an operation orchestrated by Jean-Pierre Jouyet [4]. Furthermore, Emmanuel Macron’s fear that next time the social media may be used against him fits with NATO’s desire to demonstrate the continuity of USSR-Russia propaganda. As an example of manipulation, Macron therefore cites an interview with Sputnik concerning his private life and the publishing of an allegation concerning a foreign bank account.

The Christopher Steele Report

During the US Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s team ordered an inquiry on Donald Trump from an ex-agent of the British Secret Services, Christopher Steele. Ex-chief of MI6’s « Russia House », he was known for his scandalous and always unverifiable allegations. After having accused Vladimir Putin, without proof, of having commanded the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko by Polonium 210, he accused him of having caught Donald Trump in a sex trap and blackmailing him. The Steele Report was then discretely handed to various journalists, politicians and master spies, and finally published [5].

This is the source of the hypothesis according to which, seeking to get his puppet elected and hamper the election of Hillary Clinton, the lord of the Kremlin had ordered « his » media to buy publicity on Facebook and spread lies about the ex-Secretary of State – a hypothesis which may be supported by a conversation between the Australian ambassador in London with one of Donald trump’s advisors [6]. It doesn’t matter that Russia Today and Sputnik only spent a total of a few thousand dollars for publicity which rarely concerned Mrs. Clinton, the US ruling class is persuaded that they turned back the popular tide in favour of the Democrat candidate and her 1.2 billion dollar campaign. In Washington, people persist in believing that technological inventions can be used to manipulate the human race.

It is no longer a question of noting that Donald Trump and his partisans ran their campaign on Facebook because the totality of the written and audiovisual Press was hostile to them, but pretending that Facebook was manipulated by Russia in order to prevent the election of the Muse of Washington.

The legal privilege of Google, Facebook and Twitter

By seeking to prove the interference of Moscow, the US Press underlined the exorbitant privilege enjoyed by Google, Facebook and Twitter — these three companies are not considered responsible for their content. From the point of view of US law, they are no more than transporters of information (common carrier).

The experiments carried out by Facebook, which demonstrated the possibility of creating collective emotions on one hand, and the legal non-responsibility of this company on the other, attest to an anomaly in the system.

Particularly since the privilege enjoyed by Google, Facebook and Twitter is clearly undue. Indeed, these three companies act in at least two different ways to modify the content they transport. First of all, they unilaterally censor certain messages, either via the direct intervention of their personnel, or mechanically, via hidden algorithms. Then they promote their vision of the truth to the detriment of other points of view (fact-checking).

For example, in 2012, Qatar ordered from Google Ideas, already directed by Jared Cohen, the creation of software which would make it possible to follow the progression of defections in the Syrian Arab Army. The point was to show that Syria was indeed a dictatorship, and that the people were beginning to revolt. But it very quickly became clear that this vision of affairs was false. The number of soldiers who defected never rose above 25,000 in an army of 450,000 men. This is why, after having promoted the software, Google discretely retired it.

Conversely, for seven years, Google promoted articles which relayed communiqués from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHD). Day after day, they gave the exact count of the number of victims in both camps. Of course, these figures are imaginary – it is impossible for anyone to count them. Never, in a time of war, has a state been able to determine, on a daily basis, the number of soldiers killed in combat and the civilians killed behind the lines. And yet, in the United Kingdom, the SOHD claims to know what the people who live there, in Syria, cannot know.

Far from being just the common carriers, Google, Facebook and Twitter are the forgers of the information they transport, and as such, they ought to be counted legally responsible for their content.

The rules of the freedom of expression

Let’s imagine that the efforts of NATO and those of President Macron against Russia in terms of audiovisual Internet traffic meet with failure. It is nonetheless necessary to enter these new medias into general law.

The principles which regulate the freedom of expression are only legitimate if they are identical for all citizens and for all media. This is not the case today. While the general law applies, there is no specific rule concerning denial or the right to reply for the messages on Internet and the social media.

As always in the history of information, the old medias attempt to sabotage the new. Thus I remember the violent editorial that the French daily Le Monde dedicated in 2002 to my work on the Internet concerning the responsibility for the attacks of 9/11. What shocked the newspaper just as much as my conclusions was that the Voltaire Network was free from the financial obligations of which it felt prisoner [7]. This is the same corporatist attitude that it demonstrates again, fifteen years later, with its service, Le Decodex. Rather than developing a critique of the articles or videos of the new medias, Le Monde proposes to note the reliability of its rival Internet sites. Of course, only the sites issued by their paper colleagues find grace in their eyes, all the others are judged less trustworthy.

To shore up the campaign against the social media, the Fondation Jean-Jaures (that is to say the foundation of the Socialist Party linked to the National Endowment for Democracy) has published an imaginary poll [8]. With a display of numbers, it aims to demonstrate that unsophisticated people – the working classes and the partisans of the National Front – are gullible. It claims that 79 % of French people believe in one conspiracy theory or another. As proof of their naïveté, it points out that 9 % of them are convinced that the Earth is flat.

However, neither myself nor any of my French friends consulted by Internet have ever met any of our compatriots who believe that the Earth is flat. The figure is obviously invented and discredits the entire study. As it happens, although it is linked to the Socialist Party, the Fondation Jean-Jaures still has Gerard Collomb as its general secretary – Collomb has since become President Macron’s Minister for the Interior. This same foundation had already published, two years ago, a study aimed at discrediting the political opponents of the system that it already qualified as « conspiracy theorists » [9].

 

Translation
Pete Kimberley

 

Freedom Rider: Oligarch Jeff Bezos

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By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Intrepid Report

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $105 billion and is the richest man in the world. But he is not just the richest man at this moment in history. He is the richest person who has ever lived. As of 2017 he and seven other billionaires had a collective net worth equal to that of the poorest 3.6 billion people on earth.

These figures have been in the news of late but without much useful analysis. The corporate media refuse to state what is obvious. Namely that inequality is worse around the world precisely because these super rich people demand it.

While pundits and politicians go on breathlessly about oligarchs in Russia, they seldom take a look at the wealthiest in their own backyard and the control they exert over the lives of millions of people. When Amazon announced it would choose a site for its new headquarters, cities across the country began a furious race to the bottom. Amazon is not alone in the thievery department. Major corporations like Walmart always request and receive public property and public funds in order to do business.

Some 235 cities have put themselves in the running for this dubious venture. Chicago is willing to give Amazon $1.3 billion in payroll taxes that prospective employees would ordinarily pay that city. If Chicago wins this booby prize, Amazon employees would pay taxes to their employer and not to the government. This is truly cutting out the middle man and makes real the rule of, by, and for the wealthiest.

The potential for public outrage isn’t lost on unprincipled politicians. Some cities now refuse to reveal how much they plan to give away. But the news to date is disheartening with Boston offering $75 million while Houston is willing to part with $268 million. Amazon says it will hire 50,000 people but their business model already pays employees so little that many of them qualify for public assistance, despite being employed.

The United States is as much of an oligarchy as countries it usually disparages but it is far more dishonest about its true nature. All talk of democracy is a lie as the rich get richer, by an additional $1 trillion in 2017, and wield more and more power over the lives of everyone else.

The Bezos juggernaut is not restricted to theft of public money. He is also the sole owner of the Washington Post, one of the most influential newspapers in the country. Bezos owns a newspaper that is an organ of the ruling elite and he also has a $600 million contract to provide the Central Intelligence Agency with cloud computing services.

The Washington Post was the force behind Propaganda or Not, an effort to destroy left wing voices like those at Black Agenda Report. Under the guise of fighting Russia and so-called fake news, the Bezos owned Post began the censorship campaign that has put the left’s presence on the Internet in such jeopardy.

Politicians outdo one another giving away public resources to the richest man on the planet who also owns a major newspaper and services the surveillance state. If it can be said that any one person rules the world, Bezos would be obvious choice. No one in Chicago, Boston, Houston or any of the other cities giving away the store ever voted for Jeff Bezos. All talk of democracy is a sham as long as the richest people take from the rest of humanity.

The effort to make government an irrelevance is thoroughly bipartisan. Republicans and Democrats alike are willing to turn over government coffers to Bezos and his ilk and the rights of the people be damned.

Whoever wins this tarnished brass ring ought to be consigned to political defeat. The mayor, aldermen, city council members or whoever else brings disaster to their locality should be punished for aiding and abetting the theft. If these cities can give to the richest man who ever lived, they can surely use public money to help their residents right now. But they will never do that because they are all bought off and compromised. They are either cynical or afraid to go against the real rulers of the country.

Bezos may look like the villain in a James Bond movie but there is nothing funny about him. He is deadly serious and so are his intentions. In a Bezos run world, every worker will be impoverished, every level of government will subsidize corporations, and anyone who speaks out will be discredited and under surveillance.

The last thing any city needs is a new Amazon headquarters. We need an end to billionaire rule in this country and around the world. That will be the salvation of the people, not more sweatshops run by wealthy people who steal from everyone else.

 

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Financial Tyranny: ‘We the People’ Are the New Permanent Underclass in America

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

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

Americans can no longer afford to get sick and there’s a reason why.

That’s because a growing number of Americans are struggling to stretch their dollars far enough to pay their bills, get out of debt and ensure that if and when an illness arises, it doesn’t bankrupt them.

This is a reality that no amount of partisan political bickering can deny.

Many Americans can no longer afford health insurance, drug costs or hospital bills. They can’t afford to pay rising healthcare premiums, out-of-pocket deductibles and prescription drug bills.

They can’t afford to live, and now they can’t afford to get sick or die, either.

To be clear, my definition of “affordable healthcare” is different from the government’s. To the government, you can “afford” to pay for healthcare if your income falls above the poverty line. That takes no account of rising taxes, the cost of living, the cost to clothe and feed a household, the cost of transportation and communication and education, or any of the other line items that add up to a life worth living.

As Helaine Olen points out in The Atlantic:

“Just because a person is insured, it doesn’t mean he or she can actually afford their doctor, hospital, pharmaceutical, and other medical bills. The point of insurance is to protect patients’ finances from the costs of everything from hospitalizations to prescription drugs, but out-of-pocket spending for people even with employer-provided health insurance has increased by more than 50 percent since 2010.”

For too many Americans, achieving any kind of quality of life has become a choice between putting food on the table and paying one’s bills or health care coverage.

It’s a gamble any way you look at it, and the medical community is not helping.

Healthcare costs are rising, driven by a medical, insurance and pharmaceutical industry that are getting rich off the sick and dying.

Indeed, Americans currently pay $3.4 trillion a year for medical care. We spent more than $10,000 per person on health care in 2016. Those attempting to shop for health insurance coverage right now are understandably experiencing sticker shock with premiums set to rise 34% in 2018. It’s estimated that costs may rise as high as $15,000 by 2023.

As Bloomberg reports, “Rising health-care costs are eating up the wage gains won by American workers, who are being asked by their employers to pick up more of the heftier tab… The cost of buying health coverage at work has increased faster than wages and inflation for years, pressuring household budgets.”

Appallingly, Americans spend more than any developed country on healthcare and have less to show for it. We don’t live as long, we have higher infant mortality rates, we have fewer hospital and physician visits, and the quality of our healthcare is generally worse. We also pay astronomical amounts for prescription drugs, compared to other countries.

Whether or not you’re insured through an employer, the healthcare marketplace, a government-subsidized program such as Medicare or Medicaid, or have no health coverage whatsoever, it’s still “we the consumers” who have to pay to subsidize the bill whenever anyone gets sick in this country. And that bill is a whopper.

While Obamacare (a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act) may have made health insurance more accessible to greater numbers of individuals, it has failed to make healthcare any more affordable.

Why?

As journalist Laurie Meisler concludes, “One big reason U.S. health care costs are so high: pharmaceutical spending. The U.S. spends more per capita on prescription medicines and over-the-counter products than any other country.”

One investigative journalist spent seven months analyzing hundreds of bills from hospitals, doctors, drug companies, and medical equipment manufacturers. His findings confirmed what we’ve known all along: health care in America is just another way of making corporations rich at consumer expense.

An examination of an itemized hospital bill (only available upon request) revealed an amazing amount of price gouging. Tylenol, which you can buy for less than $10 for a bottle, was charged to the patient at a rate of $15 per pill, for a total of $345 for a hospital stay. $8 for a plastic bag to hold the patient’s personal items and another $8 for a box of Kleenex. $23 for a single alcohol swab. $53 per pair for non-sterile gloves (adding up to $5,141 for the entire hospital stay). $10 for plastic cup in which to take one’s medicine. $93 for the use of an overhead light during a surgical procedure. $39 each time you want to hold your newborn baby. And $800 for a sterile water IV bag that costs about a dollar to make.

This is clearly not a problem that can be remedied by partisan politics.

The so-called Affordable Care Act pushed through by the Obama administration is proving to be anything but affordable for anyone over the poverty line. And the Trump administration’s “fixes” promise to be no better. Indeed, for too many Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and struggle just to get by, the tax penalty for not having health insurance will actually be cheaper than trying to find affordable coverage that actually pays for care.

This is how the middle classes, who fuel the nation’s economy and fund the government’s programs, get screwed repeatedly.

When almost 60% of Americans are so financially strapped that they don’t have even $500 in savings and nothing whatsoever put away for retirement, and yet they are being forced to pay for government programs that do little to enhance their lives, we’re not living the American dream.

We’re living a financial nightmare.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

We have no real say, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

George Harrison, who died 16 years ago this month, summed up this outrageous state of affairs in his song Taxman:

If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.

Don’t ask me what I want it for
If you don’t want to pay some more
‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman

Now my advice for those who die
Declare the pennies on your eyes
‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
And you’re working for no one but me.

In other words, in the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than indentured servants and sources of revenue.

If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

It wasn’t always this way, of course.

Early Americans went to war over the inalienable rights described by philosopher John Locke as the natural rights of life, liberty and property.

It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”

Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.

On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.

It’s all gone downhill from there.

Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.

Irwin A. Schiff was one of the nation’s most vocal tax protesters. He spent a good portion of his life arguing that the income tax was unconstitutional. He paid the price for his resistance, too: Schiff served three separate prison terms (more than 10 years in all) over his refusal to pay taxes. He died at the age of 87 serving a 14-year prison term. As constitutional activist Robert L. Schulz noted in Schiff’s obituary, “In a society where there is so much fear of government, and in particular of the I.R.S., [Schiff] was probably the most influential educator regarding the illegal and unconstitutional operation and enforcement of the Internal Revenue Code. It’s very hard to speak to power, but he did, and he paid a very heavy price.”

It’s still hard to speak to power, and those who do are still paying a very heavy price.

All the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

The national debt is $20 trillion and growing. The amount this country owes is now greater than its gross national product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens). We’re paying more than $270 billion just in interest on that debt annually. And the top two foreign countries who “own” our debt are China and Japan.

To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “For 15 years now, the United States has been putting these wars on a credit card… U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its money grabs.

While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the police state is spending our hard-earned tax dollars to further entrench its powers and entrap its citizens.

For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.

Mind you, that staggering $6 trillion is only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.

That price tag keeps growing, too.

The 16-year war in Afghanistan, which now stands as the longest and one of the most expensive wars in U.S. history, is about to get even longer and more costly, thanks to President Trump’s promise to send more troops over.

In this way, the military industrial complex will get even richer, and the American taxpayer will be forced to shell out even more funds for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?

This is still no way of life.

Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.

We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The government isn’t taking our money to make our lives better. Just take a look at the nation’s failing infrastructure, and you’ll see how little is being spent on programs that advance the common good.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

This is nothing less than financial tyranny.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

It’s tempting to say that there’s little we can do about it, except that’s not quite accurate.

There are a few things we can do (demand transparency, reject cronyism and graft, insist on fair pricing and honest accounting methods, call a halt to incentive-driven government programs that prioritize profits over people), but it will require that “we the people” stop playing politics and stand united against the politicians and corporate interests who have turned our government and economy into a pay-to-play exercise in fascism.

We’ve become so invested in identity politics that label us based on our political leanings that we’ve lost sight of the one label that unites us: we’re all Americans.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be want to pit us against one another. They want us to adopt an “us versus them” mindset that keeps us powerless and divided. Trust me, the only “us versus them” that matters anymore is “we the people” against the police state.

We’re all in the same boat, folks, and there’s only one real life preserver: that’s the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution starts with those three powerful words: “We the people.”

The message is this: there is power in our numbers.

That remains our greatest strength in the face of a governmental elite that continues to ride roughshod over the populace. It remains our greatest defense against a government that has claimed for itself unlimited power over the purse (taxpayer funds) and the sword (military might). As Patrick Henry declared in the last speech before his death, “United we stand, divided we fall. Let us not split into factions … or … exhaust [our strength] in civil commotions and intestine wars.”

This holds true whether you’re talking about health care, war spending, or the American police state.

Food for the Moon

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By rahkyt

Source: Sacred Space in Time

I don’t know how to say this politely: you are part of a remorseless, psychopathic system that circumscribes your very thought processes and forms your every opinion and belief.

This system of thought, action and being envelops you like air and you can’t see it, feel it or hear it. And yet, you do see it, feel it and hear it every day because it is in your mind as it is in the mind of every person around you.

This system is designed to cull your energy through work and play, to foster its own continuation by way of your personal energetic production. And the production of every, single soul around you. its stability is dependent upon your ignorance.

Because once you become aware of it, you begin to see it everywhere. As it has always been everywhere. Been everything. It notices your awakened state and actively seeks to lull you back to sleep or, failing in that, destroying you utterly and erasing every true sign of your existence from its collective memory.

Once you choose knowledge, you are done. Once you choose truth, you are finished.

It is best to go on ahead and believe you’re dead from that very instant like the ancient Samurais of Japan used to do, for the sake of your own psychological stability moving forward.

Because move forward you must. We must. There is work to do and little time to do it. There are dragons to slay, literally, and they have been awaiting your arrival for millennia.

And now that the time of prophecy and projection is finally upon us, as those awakened souls kindle the flames of love within others and that collective and mighty roar signals the onset of the conflagration of the Ages, your options are reduced to the potentialities of the moment. The Now.

You are brought from the heights of abstract psychological and mental confabulation to the pressing, survivalist instincts that instruct you on how to make it through this moment. And the next. And the one after that.

Don’t worry. There’s no time for wasted energy. You will know what to do.

Your spirit has been preparing for this time for eternity. When the moments of your engagement arrives, you will step the steps predestined, say the words preordained and do the things you were preconceived to do.

And that is just how its going to be. So don’t waste anymore time on worry or regret. The system and its people don’t give a damn about you. Or any of us.

We’re only sustenance. Food for the moon. And Saturn, of course.

 

America’s Painful Self-delusion

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By Allen Marshall

Source: Information Clearing House

America is the only nation brought forth by a set of beliefs, and those beliefs, captured so eloquently in our founding documents, are some of the most powerful and inspiring ever conceived. We consider this to be the land of the free, where the individual is supreme and nothing prevents us from going as far as our talents can take us. That image of America – that “brand” – is incredibly strong.

However, there’s a very large gap between that long-held image and the reality of America today. What was once a government built for the people is now a government run for the rich and powerful, one that throws the people under the bus whenever their interests differ from those of the corporate and political leaders who run the show.

And living in one world (the corrupt) while stubbornly believing you live in another (the ideal), despite mounds of evidence, causes a distinct kind of stress, often called cognitive dissonance.

Psychologists suggest that when people are in a state of cognitive dissonance, they’ll search for a way to resolve it, either by rejecting one view or the other as either wrong or unimportant. If you’re a smoker looking at the link between smoking and cancer, for example, you’ll either quit smoking or decide that the research is biased, wrong, or doesn’t apply (in other words, that you’re smart enough to quit before the long-term damage is done).

But what happens if you can’t resolve the two?

For most of us Americans, resolving our cognitive dissonance would mean either accepting that we’re impotent and living futile (and feudal) lives, or rejecting our lifestyles and actively fighting the rot in the system. If we’re not willing to do either of those, the dissonance stays – and eats at us.

People carrying this kind of ongoing, underlying stress find ways of coping with it; in America we’re doing it with self-medication, compulsive behaviors and distractions. Consider the following examples of the way we cope with the ever-present stress in our lives:

  • Drugs – Our country is awash in drugs, both legal and illegal, that keep us numb. In 2014, there were 245 million prescriptions filled for opioid pain relievers. The number of deaths from drug overdoses has risen from around 30,000 in 2005 to 64,000 in 2016. And communities across the country are being devastated by the opioid epidemic, as explained in this in-depth reporting by Cincinnati.com.
  • Drinking – People don’t only use drugs to self-medicate; drinking does the trick as well, and we’re doing a lot more of it than we used to. According to a new study in JAMA Psychiatry, overall drinking in the US increased by 11% between 2002-13, while high-risk and problem drinking rose even higher: high-risk drinking rose by 29.9%, while problem drinking rose by 50%.
  • Mental Illness – In 2015, 17.9% of adults held a diagnosis for a mental disorder, while a 2010 study found that 46.3% of children ages 13-18 had a mental disorder at some point in their young lives, and the majority of those adults and children are given prescriptions. This includes a dramatic increase in ADHD diagnoses for children: According to SharpBrains, “Among children aged 5 to 18, between 1991-92 and 2008-09, rates of ADHD diagnosis increased nearly 4-fold among boys – from 39.5 to 144.6 per 1000 – and nearly 6-fold for girls – from 12.3 and 68.5 per 1000 visits.”
  • Obesity – If drinking and drugs aren’t your thing – or even if they are – more of us are coping with stress by overeating, and it’s showing up on our waistlines. From 1990 to 2016, the average percentage of obese adults increased from 11.1% to 29.8%; when you add in the number of people who are overweight but not obese, it rises to more than two in three adults.
  • Sleeping problems – Sleep has a significant impact on our physical and mental health, and in America we’re not getting enough of it: The CDC states that 50-70 million American adults have a sleep or wakefulness disorder.
  • Media Usage – Is there any better distraction from life’s problems than media? We certainly spend a lot of our time being passively entertained: In 2016, Americans consumed an average of 10 hours of media per day, compared with 7.5 hours per day globally. Nielson reports that lower income adults spend much more time with media than do affluent adults, with adults in households with include under $25,000 watching 211 hours/month of television, versus 113 hours/month for adults in households earning $75,000 or more. (The trend is similar across other media as well.)
  • The Disease of Debt – According to the New York Fed, household debt reached a new peak in the third quarter of 2017, at $12.8 trillion. Part of our debt problem comes from the compulsive shopping we do as a distraction; the other results from denying the reality that our wages aren’t keeping up with the increase in the cost of living, meaning that we use debt to plug the gap rather than reducing our living standards to align with our reality.

We’re collectively doing so much damage to ourselves, solely to protect our psyches from the reality that the America that used to be is no longer the America we have. And who does that help? As you can see from the points above, it doesn’t help us: Instead, it helps the rich and powerful who are subverting the system. They’re corrupting everything this country once was, and by willfully refusing to acknowledge that reality, we’re inadvertently helping them to do it.

The best thing we can do – for our mental and physical health, as well as for our country – is to open our eyes to what America has become, not what we wish it still was. It’s time to face reality and take action.

Wasted lives: The worldwide tragedy of youth suicide

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Principles of goodness together with the golden seed of social justice – sharing – need to be the guiding ideals of a radically redesigned socio-economic paradigm.

By Graham Peebles

Source: Nation of Change

The pressures of modern life are colossal; for young people – those under 25 years of age – they are perhaps greater than at any other time. Competition in virtually every aspect of contemporary life, a culture obsessed with image and material success, and the ever-increasing cost of living are creating a cocktail of anxiety and self-doubt that drives some people to take their own lives and many more to self-abuse of one kind or another.

Amongst this age group today, suicide constitutes the second highest cause of death after road/traffic accidents, and is the most common cause of death in female adolescents aged 15–19 years. This fact is an appalling reflection on our society and the materialistic values driven into the minds of children throughout the world.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that in total “close to 800,000 people die due to suicide every year, which is one person every 40 seconds. Many more attempt suicide,” and those who have attempted suicide are the ones at greatest risk of trying again. Whilst these figures are startling, WHO acknowledges that suicide is widely under-reported. In some countries (throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, for example) where stigma still attaches to suicide, it is not always recorded as the cause of death when in fact it should be, meaning the overall suicide figures are without doubt a great deal higher.

Unless there is fundamental change in the underlying factors that cause suicide, the WHO forecasts that by 2020 – a mere three years away, someone, somewhere will take their own life every 20 seconds. This worldwide issue, WHO states, is increasing year on year; it is a symptom of a certain approach to living – a divisive approach that believes humanity is inherently greedy and selfish and has both created, and is perpetuated by, an unjust socio-economic system which is at the root of many of our problems.

Sliding into despair

Suicide is a global matter and is something that can no longer be dismissed, nor its societal causes ignored. It is the final act in a painful journey of anguish; it signifies a desperate attempt by the victim to be free of the pain they feel, and which, to them, is no longer bearable. It is an attempt to escape inner conflict and emotional agony, persecution or intimidation. It may follow a pattern of self-harm, alcohol or drug abuse, and, is in many cases, but not all, related to depression, which blights the lives of more than 300 million people worldwide, is debilitating and deeply painful. As William Styron states in Darkness Invisible, “The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.”

Any suicide is a tragedy and a source of great sadness, particularly if the victim is a teenager, or someone in there twenties, who had their whole life ahead of them, but for some reason or another could not face it. As with all age groups, mental illness amongst young people is cited as the principle reason for, or an impelling cause of suicide, as well as for people suffering from an untreated illness such as anxiety anorexia or bulimia; alcohol and drug abuse are also regularly mentioned, as well as isolation.

All of these factors are effects, the result of the environment in which people – young and not so young – are living: family life, the immediate society, the broader national and world society. The values and codes of behavior that these encourage, and, flowing from this environment, the manner in which people treat one another together with their prevailing attitudes. It must be here that, setting aside any individual pre-disposition, the underlying causes leading to mental illness or alcohol/drug dependency in the first place are rooted.

Unsurprisingly young people who are unemployed for a long time; who have been subjected to physical or sexual abuse; who come from broken families in which there is continuous anxiety due to job insecurity and low wages are at heightened risk of suicide, as are homeless people, young gay and bi-sexual men and those locked up in prison or young offenders institutions. In addition, WHO states that, “Experiencing conflict, […] loss and a sense of isolation are strongly associated with suicidal behavior.”

Lack of hope is another key factor. Absence of hope leads to despair, and from despair flows all manner of negative thoughts and destructive actions, including suicide. In Japan, where suicide is the leading cause of death among people aged between 15 and 39 (death by suicide in Japan is around twice that of America, France and Canada, and three times that of Germany and the U.K.), the BBC reports that, “young people are killing themselves because they have lost hope and are incapable of seeking help.” Suicides began to increase dramatically in Japan in 1988 after the Asian financial crisis and climbed again after the 2008 worldwide economic crash. Economic insecurity is thought to be the cause, driven by “the practice of employing young people on short-term contracts.”

Hope is extremely important, hope that life will improve, that circumstances will change, that people will be kinder and that life will be gentler. That one’s life has meaning. Interestingly, in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, suicides in Britain increased by almost 20 per cent, and cases of self-harm rose by 44 per cent. To many people she was a symbol of compassion and warmth in a brittle, hostile world, and somehow engendered hope.

The list of those most vulnerable to suicide is general and no doubt incomplete; suicide is an individual act and flows from specific circumstances and a particular state of mind. Generalizations miss the subtleties of each desperate cry. Some suicides are spontaneous acts, spur of the moment decisions (as is often the case in Asian countries, where poison is the most common method of suicide), others may be drawn out over years, in the case of the alcoholic for example, punctuated perhaps by times of relief and optimism, only to collapse under the weight of life’s intense demands once more.

It is these constant pressures that are often the principle causes of the slide into despair and the desire to escape the agony of daily life. They are all pervasive, hard to resist, impossible, apparently, to escape. Firstly, we are all faced with the practical demands of earning a living, paying the rent or mortgage, buying food, and covering the energy bills etc. Secondly, there are the more subtle pressures, closely related to our ability to meet the practical demands of the day: the pressure to succeed, to make something of one’s life, to be strong – particularly of you’re a young man, to be sexually active, to be popular, to know what you want and have the strength to get it; to have the confidence to dream and the determination to fulfill your dreams. And if you don’t know what you want, if you don’t have ‘dreams’ in a world of dreamers, this is seen as weakness, which will inevitably result in ‘failure’. And by failure, is meant material inadequacy as well as unfulfilled potential and perhaps loneliness, because who would want to be with a ‘failure’?

These and other expectations and pressures constitute the relentless demands faced by us all, practical and psychological, and our ability to meet them colours the way we see ourselves and determines, to a degree, how others see us. The images of what we should be, how we should behave, what we should think and aspire too, the values we should adopt and the belief system we should accept are thrust into the minds of everyone from birth. They are narrow, inhibiting, prescribed and deeply unhealthy.

The principle tool of this process of psychological and sociological conditioning is the media, as well as parents and peers, all of whom have themselves fallen foul of the same methodology, and education.

Beyond reward and punishment

Step outside the so-called norm, stand out as someone different, and risk being persecuted, bullied and socially excluded. The notion of individuality has been outwardly championed but systematically and institutionally denied. Our education systems are commonly built on two interconnected foundations – conformity and competition – and reinforced through methods, subtle and crude, of reward and punishment. All of which stifles true individuality, which needs a quiet, loving space, free from judgment in which to flower. For the most sensitive, vulnerable and uncertain, the pressure to conform, to compete and succeed, is often too much to bear. Depression, self-doubt, anxiety, self-harm, addiction and, for some, suicide, are the dire consequences.

There are many initiatives aimed at preventing suicide amongst young people – alcohol/drug services, mental health treatment, reducing access to the means of suicide – and these are of tremendous value. However if the trend of increased suicides among young people is to be reversed it is necessary to dramatically reduce the pressures on them and inculcate altogether more inclusive values. This means changing the environments in which life is lived, most notably the socio-economic environment that infects all areas of society. Worldwide, life is dominated by the neoliberal economic system, an extreme form of capitalism that has infiltrated every area of life. Under this decrepit unjust model everything is classed as a commodity, everyone as a consumer, inequality guaranteed with wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population – 1% of 1%, or less in fact. All facets of life have become commercialized, from health care to the supply of water and electricity, and the schooling of our children. The educational environment has become poisoned by the divisive values of the market place, with competition at the forefront, and competition has no place in schools and universities, except perhaps on the sports field: streaming and selection should be vetoed totally and testing, until final exams (that should be coursework based), scrapped.

All that divides within our societies should be called out and rejected, cooperation inculcated instead of competition in every area of human endeavor, including crucially the political-economic sphere; tolerance encouraged, unity built in all areas of society, local, national and global. These principles of goodness together with the golden seed of social justice – sharing – need to be the guiding ideals of a radically redesigned socio-economic paradigm, one that meets the needs of all to live dignified, fulfilled lives, promotes compassion, and, dare I say, cultivates love. Only then, will the fundamental causes of suicide, amongst young people in particular, but men and women of all ages, be eradicated.