Category Archives: Social Engineering

France never stopped looting Africa, now the tables are turning

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As developments in West Africa demonstrate, the francophone countries are no longer willing to accept French neo-colonialism. With the fear factor finally removed, Africa’s quest for genuine independence is steadily coming to fruition.

By Brad Pearce

Source: TheCradle.co

The 26 July coup in the West African nation of Niger, which threatens to undermine French and US military presence in the region, has shed light on the historical exploitation and continued practices of Francafrique – the term used to describe the persistent exploitation by the former French Empire in Africa.

France heavily relies on nuclear energy, with 68 percent of its power coming from nuclear plants. It obtains 19 percent of the uranium required to run these plants from Niger. Despite this significant contribution toward France’s energy needs, only 14.3 percent of Nigeriens have access to a power grid, and even that is often unreliable. This stark contrast highlights the disparities and ongoing exploitation by rapine foreign powers throughout the African continent. 

The Legacy of Francafrique

Francafrique has been known for its exploitative systems designed to profit from African resources, using pressure, capital, and frequently outright force to maintain control over its former empire. As a result, many African states, including Niger, continue to face poverty and underdevelopment.

Burkina Faso’s young, charismatic leader Ibrahim Traore recently spoke at the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg and decried the fact that Africa is resource-rich, but its people are poor, and criticized African leaders seeking hand-outs from the west, as they perpetuate dependency and poverty. He also described what is being imposed on Africa as a form of slavery, stating:

“As far as what concerns Burkina Faso today, for more than eight years we’ve been confronted with the most barbaric, the most violent form of imperialist neo-colonialism. Slavery continues to impose itself on us. Our predecessors taught us one thing: a slave who cannot assume his own revolt does not deserve to be pitied. We do not feel sorry for ourselves, we do not ask anyone to feel sorry for us.”

France’s inability to justify its presence in Africa with a coherent narrative further complicates the situation. Paris cannot openly confess its greed, feign a “civilizing mission,” or admit to any responsibility due to its past crimes. This lack of purpose weakens French power on the continent, leading to violence and poverty in its wake.

West Africa’s drive for further independence has left Atlanticists concerned about the opening this leaves for Eurasian powers like Russia and China to increase their influence in Africa. The west’s reaction reflects a lack of respect for the sovereignty of African countries, viewing the continent merely as a theater to maintain global dominance.

Since the Ukraine war’s onset in early 2022, Atlanticists have expressed alarm over the unwillingness of Global South states to support the west’s anti-Russia policies, a trend further amplified by the shift to multipolarism everywhere. This weakening of western hegemony has opened a path for many nations to avidly explore their geopolitical options and diversify their economies.

A report from the Munich Security Conference held in February highlighted this very real schism with the west:

“Many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have steadily lost faith in the legitimacy and fairness of an international system which has neither granted them an appropriate voice in global affairs, nor sufficiently addressed their core concerns. To many states, these failures are deeply tied to the west. They find that the western-led order has been characterized by post-colonial domination, double standards, and neglect for developing countries’ concerns.”

Fleeced by the CFA Franc

The aftermath of the Second World War marked a significant shift in global power dynamics, and the victorious powers sought to establish a new world order that would maintain peace and promote economic balance. 

In the context of African colonies, where colonial troops played a major role in the allied victory, the victorious powers, including France, aimed to retain economic control and benefit from their former colonies even as the world moved towards decolonization.

This included the establishment of new currency systems, with French leader Charles De Gaulle creating two currencies collectively known as the CFA Franc in 1945 for former colonies in the Western and Central zone.

As the push for political independence grew stronger in the late 1950s, France organized referendums in its African colonies to vote on accepting a constitution drafted by the French. 

Guinea, led by former trade unionist Sekou Toure, opposed accepting the French constitution and voted overwhelmingly against it. In a furious response, De Gaulle’s government withdrew all French administrators from Guinea and took action to sabotage the country’s infrastructure and resources. The harsh measures by Paris aimed to serve as an example of what would happen to any former French colony that resisted France’s agenda.

During the Cold War, the Communist states exploited such actions by presenting themselves as liberators and allies of African countries that sought independence from European influence. This stance has led to some Africans viewing countries like Russia as more equitable partners compared to France.

Over the years, France has demonstrated a pattern of intervening militarily – over 50 times since 1960 – in African countries to secure governments that remain compliant with French economic interests, particularly related to the continued use of the CFA Franc.

The system by which the CFA Franc operates has historically been one of a fixed exchange rate where the currency has unlimited convertibility but is permanently pegged to the French currency, previously the Franc and then the Euro. 

African currency under French control

This means that African countries cannot influence the value of their own currency, and the difference in value makes it so that France can buy African products artificially cheap while Africans are able to buy fewer goods with the money they exchange.

Worse yet, France had requirements to store, and thus profit from, the foreign reserves owned by its former colonies, though the requirement of holding 50 percent of their foreign exchange reserves in a French-ran bank was dropped for the western zone in 2019. 

Under this scheme, African states received a nominal amount of interest, but the bank benefited from lending that capital out at higher rates and attaining massive profits off of African resources and labor. This is despite the fact that many countries in Francophone Africa are major gold exporters and thus have a multitude of options for storing wealth to back a currency in alternative central banks.

While the CFA Franc system has provided some benefits in terms of stability and preventing Zimbabwean-style hyperinflation, it has also come under scrutiny for imposing requirements on African countries that are not placed on more powerful nations. The lack of control over their own currency has hindered economic growth and made these countries vulnerable to global economic shocks.

Northern African states such as Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco chose to leave the CFA Franc upon gaining independence and have experienced relatively higher prosperity. Similarly, Botswana’s success with its own national currency demonstrates that proper management can lead to stable democracy and economic growth, even for less developed nations.

Exclusive rights and privileges

The CFA Franc system has been the geopolitical equivalent of one’s father insisting he manages their savings while leaving them out of his will. There are benefits to having a trade and currency zone, such as the current ECOWAS union that covers the Western part of the continent, but by design under the CFA Franc system, independence has been an illusion by which France has fleeced these countries. 

France has been dependent on Africa for its status as a world power for more than a century. Among other privileges it has carved out for itself in post-colonial treaties, France has had the exclusive right to sell military equipment to former colonies, and enjoys the first right to any natural resources discovered. Paris makes great use of these privileges: as just one example, 36.4 percent of France’s gas is sourced from the African continent.

Moreover, a vast network of French business interests, which include major multinational companies, dominate industries such as energy, communications, and transportation in many African countries. France’s government also supports French businesses in Africa in several ways, including through an enormous public company called COFACE which guarantees French exports into these underdeveloped markets. 

Towards independence and self-reliance

This economic dependence has contributed to the perpetuation of a system where African states remain weak, pliant, and reliant on resource exports, primarily benefiting French companies and interests. Additionally, African states are obligated to ally with France in any major conflict, further eroding their national sovereignty. 

The African continent suffers from many ailments, but perhaps the most persistent and nefarious are a lack of sovereignty and access to capital. Meanwhile, much of Europe’s prosperity has been derived from looting the Global South for centuries. 

The case of Brussels, built on the wealth derived from the brutal exploitation of the Congo under Belgian King Leopold II, is a stark reminder of the deep-rooted impact of colonialism. When the monarch’s crimes against humanity were discovered, he was ultimately forced to bequeath the majority of his fortune to the Belgian state upon his death. 

Not wanting to do so, he embarked on an enormous series of public works to spend his ill-gotten gains, creating modern Brussels. Now the EU and NATO meet there and audaciously give disingenuous lectures about universal human rights while surrounded by the profits of some of the most brutal cases of oppression in human history. 

While military governments often face challenges in achieving their stated goals, it is evident that western-backed “civil democracies” have also struggled to significantly improve the security and well-being of the African public. 

The path to solving Africa’s problems lies in transformative leaders who can shrug off the legacy and remaining shackles of colonialism and enable the continent to carve out a genuine, homegrown path to independence and self-reliance.

As Maui Burns, Biden Demands Another $24 Billion…For Ukraine

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By Ron Paul

Source: Eurasia Review

I am not a big fan of Federal Government disaster relief. Too much of the time the money never gets to those who need it most, and too often Washington’s armies of disaster “experts” are more interested in pushing people around than helping them.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to look at recent footage of the devastation in Maui and then hear President Biden tell Congress that he needs another $24 billion for Ukraine. How can this Administration continue to justify tens of billions of dollars for this losing war that is not in our interest while the rest of the United States disintegrates?

Biden’s new $24 billion request comes on top of well over $120 billion already spent to fight the US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. Heritage Foundation budget expert Richard Stern has done the math and determined that Biden’s spending on the Ukraine war thus far will cost each and every American household $900. How many Americans would rather have those $900 dollars back in their pocket rather than in the pockets of Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, and Ukraine’s oligarchs?

Recent surveys have shown that a majority of Americans could not afford to cover a sudden $1,000 emergency. Will Americans connect the dots and realize that the reason they can’t find that $1,000 for an emergency is because the neocons have already sent it to Ukraine?

Ukraine has long been known as among the most corrupt countries on earth and not long ago investigative journalist Seymore Hersh wrote that Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky has embezzled at least $400 million in aid from the American people. Corruption scandals continue to break in Ukraine. Just last week Zelensky fired the heads of all local draft boards for corruption. Some press reports suggest that sales of luxury cars in Ukraine have broken all previous records. I wonder why.

No wonder the tide of US public opinion is turning against further involvement in the war. Recently CNN found that among all Americans, more than 55 percent are opposed to continued aid to Ukraine. Among Republicans the number opposing more aid to Ukraine rises to three-out-of-four. That is why we are finally starting to see more Republican Members raising concerns. I’d like to think they have seen the light that an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy is not in America’s interest, but most likely they are worried about losing elections. Whatever their motivation, this turning tide should be welcomed.

Yet the Biden Administration persists in backing Ukraine even as the US mainstream media is increasingly pointing out the obvious: Ukraine is not winning and cannot win, and continuing to pour money into a losing cause will just result in bankruptcy at home and more dead Ukrainians overseas.

Last week Newsweek published an article asking, “Does Ukraine Have Kompromat on Joe Biden?” In the article, Northeastern University Professor Max Abrahms wonders out loud whether Biden’s continued support for Ukraine might be related to compromising information held in Kiev about the many Biden family shady business ventures in Ukraine and the region. It is certainly worth considering.

Meanwhile, the residents of Maui that survived the recent horrific fire will take little comfort knowing that the Biden Administration is more interested in sending their money to Ukraine than in helping them recover.

Silencing Voices for Peace

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By W.J. Astore

Source: Bracing Views

The U.S. Mainstream Media Is Almost Always Pro-War

In the “liberal” New York Times today, I saw an article on “Putin’s forever war” that has the following short synopsis: “Vladimir Putin wants to lead Russians into a civilizational conflict with the West far larger than Ukraine. Will they follow him?”

Is this true?  Does Putin truly seek a “civilizational conflict” with the West?  One that’s “far larger” than the Ukraine war?  It doesn’t seem likely.  Russian forces have struggled in Ukraine.  Already embroiled in a destructive regional war that’s become somewhat of a quagmire, why would Putin seek to widen it?  Is Putin always the aggressor, the bad guy, and the West always the aggrieved party, the good guys, holding back a “red storm rising”?  I thought the West won the Cold War more than 30 years ago.

It’s remarkable how easy it is to get alarmist articles about Russia or China published in the U.S. mainstream media (MSM).  Wars and rumors of war dominate.  The West is always portrayed as the defender of democracy; other countries such as China and Russia are portrayed as threats to civilization and its “rules-based order.”  Strictly speaking, this is simplistic, one-sided, propaganda.

Back in 2017, I wrote about how difficult it is in the MSM to read honest accounts of war.  In the runup to the Iraq War in 2003, critical voices were actively suppressed and punished.  Back then, I focused my article on MSNBC, which like the New York Times is allegedly “liberal.”  At “liberal” newspapers and networks, shouldn’t America expect at least a few critical critiques of war narratives?  The answer here is “no,” as I wrote here:

Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota (1999-2003), was a hot media commodity as the Bush/Cheney administration was preparing for its invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ventura, a U.S. Navy veteran who gained notoriety as a professional wrestler before he entered politics, was both popular and outspoken. MSNBC won the bidding war for his services in 2003, signing him to a lucrative three-year contract to create his own show – until, that is, the network learned he was against the Iraq war. Ventura’s show quickly went away, even as the network paid him for three years to do nothing.

I heard this revealing story from a new podcast, the TARFU Report, hosted by Matt Taibbi and Alex Pareene. By his own account, Jesse Ventura was bought off by the network, which back then was owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor that was due to make billions of dollars off the war.

Of course, Ventura was hardly the only war critic to run afoul of GE/NBC. Phil Donahue, the famous talk show host, saw his highly rated show cancelled when he gave dissenters and anti-war voices a fair hearing. Ashleigh Banfield, a reporter who covered the Iraq war, gave a speech in late April 2003 that criticized the antiseptic coverage of the war (extracts to follow below). For her perceptiveness and her honesty, she was reassigned and marginalized, demoted and silenced.

So much for freedom of speech, as well as the press.

As Phil Donahue said, his show “wasn’t good for business.” NBC didn’t want to lose ratings by being associated with “unpatriotic” elements when the other networks were waving the flag in support of the Iraq war. In sidelining Ventura and Donahue, NBC acted to squelch any serious dissent from the push for war, and punished Ashleigh Banfield in the immediate aftermath of the war for her honesty in criticizing the coverage shown (and constructed) by the mainstream media, coverage that was facilitated by the U.S. military and rubber-stamped by corporate ownership.

Speaking of Banfield’s critique, here are some excerpts from her speech on Iraq war coverage in April 2003. Note that her critique remains telling for all U.S. media war coverage since then:

That said, what didn’t you see [in U.S. media coverage of the Iraq war]? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story, it just means you’re getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that’s what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism, because I’m not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid of a horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn’t see what it took to do that.

With admirable honesty, Banfield spoke of the horrific face of war at Kansas State Univ. in 2003. Soon after her speech, she was demoted (Image courtesy of KSU)

I can’t tell you how bad the civilian casualties were. I saw a couple of pictures. I saw French television pictures, I saw a few things here and there, but to truly understand what war is all about you’ve got to be on both sides…

Some of the soldiers, according to our embeds had never seen a dead body throughout the entire three-week campaign. It was like Game Boy. I think that’s amazing in two different ways. It makes you a far more successful warrior because you can just barrel right along but it takes away a lot of what war is all about, which is what I mentioned earlier. The TV technology took that away too. We couldn’t see where the bullets landed. Nobody could see the horrors of this so that we seriously revisit the concept of warfare the next time we have to deal with it.

I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I’m very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people’s opinions. It was very sanitized.

This TV show [Iraq invasion coverage] that we just gave you was extraordinarily entertaining, and I really hope that the legacy that it leaves behind is not one that shows war as glorious, because there’s nothing more dangerous than a democracy that thinks this is a glorious thing to do.

War is ugly and it’s dangerous, and in this world the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans. It’s a dangerous thing to propagate…

I’m hoping that I will have a future in news in cable, but not the way some cable news operators wrap themselves in the American flag and patriotism and go after a certain target demographic, which is very lucrative. You can already see the effects, you can already see the big hires on other networks, right wing hires to chase after this effect, and you can already see that flag waving in the corners of those cable news stations where they have exciting American music to go along with their war coverage.

Nothing has changed since Banfield’s powerful critique. Indeed, the networks have only hired more retired generals and admirals to give “unbiased” coverage of America’s military actions. And reporters and “journalists” like Brian Williams have learned too. Recall how Williams cheered the “beautiful” U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles as they were launched against Syria earlier this year [2017].

It’s not just that U.S. media coverage actively suppresses dissent of America’s wars: it passively does so as well, which is arguably more insidious. Any young journalist with smarts recognizes the way to get ahead is to be a cheerleader for U.S. military action, a stenographer to the powerful. Being a critic leads to getting fired (like Donahue); demoted and exiled (like Banfield); and, in Ventura’s case, if you can’t be fired or demoted or otherwise punished, you can simply be denied air time.

When you consider that billions and billions of dollars are at stake, whether in weapons sales or in advertising revenue tied to ratings, none of this is that surprising. What’s surprising is that so few Americans know about how pro-authority and uncritical U.S. media coverage of war and its makers is. If anything, the narrative is often that the U.S. media is too critical of the military to the detriment of the generals. Talk about false narratives and alternative facts!

America’s greed-wars persist for many reasons, but certainly a big one is the lack of critical voices in the mainstream media. Today’s journalists, thinking about their career prospects and their salaries (and who is ultimately their boss at corporate HQ), learn to censor themselves, assuming they have any radical thoughts to begin with. Some, like Brian Williams, even learn how to stop worrying and love the beautiful bombs.

[After I wrote this in 2017, I added this comment at the site.]

One thing that troubles me is the mindset that criticism of America’s wars undermines the troops. That it could even be a form of betrayal. This mindset is very dangerous. It not only protects the decisions and actions of those at the highest levels of the military and government. It acts to prolong wars and to endanger the lives of the troops (and of their “enemies” as well).

During the Iraq war, I recall instances of U.S. troops speaking clearly and frankly against the war. Their voices were heard, yet their advice was not taken. Instead, generals like David Petraeus were trotted out to assure the American people that the war was being won, even if the gains were characterized by weasel words like “fragile” and “reversible.” And so those gains have proved — even so, Petraeus remains in demand, and is still trotted out, now in mufti, to explain how we must stay the course and continue to defer to the military.

There’s a powerful book to be written here, and it should focus in part on the silencing or marginalization of anti-war voices (even those that wear or wore the uniform), even as pro-war elements are given the main stage as the voices of probity and sanity.

The Ukraine Mess is Animal Farm in Reverse: Starring Blackrock and Other Pigs

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Recently, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said that the European Union should double its assistance to Ukraine. She went on to say the EU should create a support fund of 50 billion euros by the end of the year and that everything should be done to ensure victory on the battlefield for the Ukrainians.

The European Union has created a “support package” for Ukraine for 2023 of up to €18 billion. This money, however, is not in the form of gifts, grants, or to create an emergency war chest. These billions are a loan under an EU macro-financial assistance program dubbed the MFA+ Instrument. In the fine print, EU member states are guaranteeing these loans as well as paying the interest for the Ukrainians. The move is extraordinary given that Ukraine is not an EU member and that, even before the current conflict, was one of the most corrupt governments on Earth. This begs the question, “Why?”

The EU is issuing special bonds to be sold to investors for this purpose at a time when many people in the European Union go without proper healthcare, services, and even employment. The European Union, EU Member States, and European financial institutions have already dispersed some €49 billion to President Zelensky’s regime. This figure, added to the $76.8 billion already funneled to Ukraine, dwarfs any assistance given to any other country in the world. This very conservative report from the Council of Foreign Relations shows the U.S. alone has shoveled more into Zelensky’s coffers than Afghanistan, Israel, Jordan, Ethiopia, and Iraq combined in 2020.

In all, some 47 countries have given money and arms to Ukraine. As of now, EU Institutions (?) handed Zelensky over €30 billion. The UK has forked over about €10 billion as their pensioners worry about what’s for dinner next. Germany has given somewhere around €8 billion, and Japan almost €7 billion. The Netherlands, Canada, and Poland have pitched in about €5 billion each, and the list of others about €14 billion. The numbers, as you would expect, do not all add up. A U.S. News & World Reports story from earlier this year claimed total aid to Zelensky’s country had exceeded €150 billion as of January of this year. Again, why?

The answer, this time, is really simple. BlackRock, and the new investment initiative to rebuild Ukraine (whatever’s left of it). You already knew this, right? Zelensky and BlackRock’s BlackRock CEO Larry Fink met late last year, and in November, the Ukrainian Ministry of the Economy (MoE) and BlackRock Financial Markets Advisory (FMA) signed a memorandum to structure Ukraine’s reconstruction funds (PDF). Also, in on the moneymaking schemes in war-torn Ukraine are Nestlé, International Finance Corporation, the private investment arm of the World Bank, Australia’s Tattarang Group,

Zelensky has called the rebuilding of his country, once it’s been used up as a proxy NATO against Russia, “the greatest opportunity in Europe since World War Two.” Earlier this year, Fink told Barron’s and other financial magazines that Western investors will be “flooding” Ukraine post-war and the country could become “a beacon to the rest of the world of the power of capitalism”. Also, JPMorgan Chase is joining BlackRock to help Ukraine set up a reconstruction bank to steer public seed capital.

This American Conservative report says, “BlackRock Plots to Buy Ukraine,” in a recent editorial. Author Bradley Devlin outlines the Ukraine case, while also revealing how Fink and BlackRock are transforming America into a nation of renters by artificially elevating the prices of normal houses. If ever a man were appropriately named, Fink is that man.

“Why?” Is there any doubt about why some poor untrained bartender from Kyiv is in a foxhole being bombarded by Russian artillery? Doesn’t all the misleading media, inflated Ukraine military gains, and Joe Biden’s cock of the walk attitude toward a peace deal make more sense now? And Ursula, the lady I fondly refer to as Frau von der Clucky for her chicken-like pecking and strutting about while millions either die or are in harm’s way because of all the Western world barnyard antics right out of Orwell’s Animal Farm. While someone’s Dad takes a bullet or shrapnel in Donetsk, our leaders keep crowing, snorting, braying, and hog-wallering in their capitalistic farm dream.

Why? Greed, that’s why.

Technocensorship: The Government’s War on So-Called Dangerous Ideas

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”—Ray Bradbury

What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them. Seventy years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.

Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.

By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

The revelations that Facebook worked in concert with the Biden administration to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, followed on the heels of a ruling by a federal court in Louisiana that prohibits executive branch officials from communicating with social media companies about controversial content in their online forums.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

This is the very definition of technofascism.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

First, the censors went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “hate speech.”

Then they went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.

By the time so-called extremists found themselves in the crosshairs for spouting so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.

Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

Watch and learn.

We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.

As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:

The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.

Be warned: it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

It’s happening already.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

Little by little, Americans are being conditioned to accept routine incursions on their freedoms.

This is how oppression becomes systemic, what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.

It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.

Diamond’s concerns related to Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, but it’s a powerful analogy for the steady erosion of our freedoms and decline of our country right under our noses.

As Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”

His answer: “I suspect that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Yet almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.

The same could be said of the America today: it, too, is being reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they are failing to preserve freedom for future generations.

In Easter Island’s case, as Diamond speculates:

The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”

Sound painfully familiar yet?

We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. It has vanished slowly, over the decades. The erosion of our freedoms has happened so incrementally, no one seems to have noticed. Only the older generations, remembering what true freedom was like, recognize the difference. Gradually, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry have become fewer, smaller and less important. By the time the last freedom falls, no one will know the difference.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls: with a thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother, but they add up.

Each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are on that downward slope now.

The Dynamics of War Insanity: NATO’s Ukraine Roulette

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By Alfred de Zayas

Source: Information Clearing House

Deliberate provocations of a nuclear rival, coups d’état, colour revolutions, broken promises, broken treaties, escalation of tensions, demonization, invective, double-standards — all this while asserting adherence to international legal norms and playing innocent about our aggressions, our violations of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, of articles 1(2)[1], 2(3)[2], 2(4)[3] and 39[4] of the UN Charter.

Abrams tanks, Leopard tanks, F-16, indiscriminate weapons, depleted uranium, cluster bombs. Summits illustrate how the moral compass of the collective West is lost in the avalanche of fake news[5], fake history, fake law, bellicose rhetoric, media hyperbole, serial mobbing of dissenters, persecution of whistleblowers, censorship. The Western binary mindset continues to divide the world into good and bad countries, democracies and autocracies. There is little room to accommodate a comprehensive picture of the pre-history, root causes of conflicts, and nuances. One observes an almost total absence of a sense for proportions.

The Global Majority in Latin America, Africa and Asia is increasingly alarmed by the surrealistic spectacle of a collective West that seems out of control, developing its own lethal dynamic, displaying a paroxysm of Russophobia and Sinophobia, incitement to hatred, cancel culture, refusal to entertain serious dialogue, doubling-down on eschatological demands. Many non-Western thinkers and politicians are articulating justified warnings that the on-going intestinal conflicts in the West are adversely impacting the economies of third-world countries and may ultimately result in Apocalypse for the entire planet. The West is not playing the classical Russian roulette – it has developed its own version: Ukrainian roulette, compulsive apocalyptic vabanque.

Meanwhile the Western media, notably Reuters, AP, CNN, Fox, New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, Le Monde, Figaro, FAZ, der Spiegel, even the Swiss NZZ ensure the daily indoctrination doses for the Western public, purveying skewed narratives that repeat and embellish what Washington and Brussels ordain, blithely ignoring other views and perspectives and the principle audiatur et altera pars. Freedom of the media in the collective West seems to mean the right to repeat NATO narratives ad nauseam, even when they have been proven wrong. This “freedom” also includes the freedom to ignore every critical voice about NATO and to refrain from asking critical questions at NATO press conferences.

Western media systematically fail to report on the fears of billions of human beings in the rest of the world, Brazilians, Mexicans, South Africans, Ugandans, Indians, Chinese, who want peace and stability in the world as well as a chance for sustainable development. Many in these countries blame not Russia but Washington and Brussels for provoking the Ukraine conflict. This Global majority is not interested in whether Crimea lies in Russia or Ukraine. They demand a peaceful solution to an internal Western strife, so that the spill-over does not dislocate the economies of non-Western countries. Peace must be sought and achieved at the negotiating table and not on the battlefield.

The power of propaganda

On the legal, moral and political arenas, truth is less important than the perception of truth. Since time immemorial language has shaped our perception of reality, coloured it according to the political agenda of the powerful. Propaganda was not invented in the 21st century. It has always existed and generated an opportunistic pseudo-reality, an epistemology that subverts our understanding of facts and events. Labels, caricatures, generalizations serve as shortcuts to judgment and influence our daily behaviour in making choices. We are not obliged to use these templates, but most people unthinkingly do so.

The narrative managers of the mainstream media are bent on persuading us into believing who is good and who is bad, what politicians we should like, whom we should despise, what “metaphysic” we should consider valid within the mainstream epistemology. Of course, we still have our own brains and can use them – sapere aude! As Horatius used to say[6]. The sad thing is that even highly educated persons, graduates of Harvard, Oxford, Science-Po, continue to put their trust in media outlets that do not deserve our trust. As Julius Caesar put it: quae volumus, ea credimus libenter — we believe what we want to believe[7]. Indeed, it takes temerity to realize that our own politicians and media lie to us, that they are purveyors of dis-information and practitioners of Orwellian doublethink.

The human being has an innate desire to believe in a positive metaphysic, wants to look up to some authority, needs to have benchmarks, orientation points. That is why we are all to some degree negationists, resilient to bad news. In spite of the egregious official dis-information that preceded Western aggressions in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, we still want to believe that our governments are really champions of the rule of law and human rights, that they “mean well”, even if occasionally they inadvertently “make mistakes.”

Of course, it is painful to accept that some things that affect us are ugly, but the realization actually opens new vistas. If we reject blind faith in our leaders and practice a healthy scepticism, if we pro-actively look for other views and perspective, we grow up, become mature and experience a sense of liberation from illusions, acquiring a new purpose based on the facts as they stand, and not as we would like them to be.

The function of law

Law has an epistemological function in defining what is allowed and what is reprehensible. Law is not immutable or God-given, but constitutes a codification of the rules of the game at a particular moment in time and in a particular context. Law should not be confused with justice. Law is only the expression of a certain order of things, past and future generations and other civilizations may have entirely different legal orders and different ideas as to what justice entails.

Education teaches us to respect certain “red lines” established by the scribes of our society – the law makers in Parliaments, in the United Nations, in international conferences, such as those organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which have concretized the ius in bello, the laws of war. These codifications include the rejection of indiscriminate weapons such as land mines and cluster bombs. The international Convention banning Cluster Munition (123 signatories, 111 states parties)[8] of 3 December 2008 was signed by many states that now consider furnishing cluster bombs to Ukraine. Go figure!

Judges apply the laws that have been codified by institutions possessing law-making authority. This is what we like to call the “rule of law”, which must not be confused with the “rule of justice”. Moreover, the “rule of law” is systematically undermined when the legal profession engages in brazen double-standards and international tribunals like the International Criminal Court[9] practice selectivity, investigating only some crimes, while letting the crimes committed by Western countries go unpunished.

Criminal Organizations

Articles 9 and 10 of the London Agreement of 8 August 1945, the Statute of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, as well as the Nuremberg judgment of 1 October 1946[10] created a precedent for a previously uncodified crime – membership in a “criminal organization”. Several NAZI organizations including the SS, the Gestapo and the Reich Cabinet were found to be criminal organizations, a problematic concept that flies in the face of the legal principle of the presumption of innocence.

If we fast-forward to the 21st century and consider the activities of the CIA, MI6, Mossad, targeted assassinations, overt and covert actions in violation of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, what is the relevance of the Nuremberg precedent to these organizations and to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization itself. If we compile the evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by NATO forces over the past 30 years, this would largely suffice for the International Criminal Court to issue indictments for violations of article 7 (crimes against humanity) and 8 (war crimes) of the Statute of Rome.

Initially NATO had its raison d’être under its 1949 Treaty. But the moment that the Warsaw Pact was dismantled in 1991 this justification fell away, and it gradually morphed into an imperialistic hegemonic military bloc, bent on imposing the Weltanschauung of the collective West on the rest of the world.

While Chapter VIII of the UN Charter recognizes the legitimacy of “regional arrangements” (articles 52-54) in the field of collective security, this requires that these regional arrangements be subordinated to the higher authority of the Security Council, which has a monopoly over the legal use of force. Since the 1990’s NATO has conspired to usurp the functions of the Security Council and thus far gotten away with it, although the NATO treaty must yield to the primacy of the UN Charter, pursuant to article 103 of the Charter, the “supremacy clause”. If States are dissatisfied with the current state of international law, it is for them to seek an amendment to the UN Charter pursuant to article 108.

Undoubtedly it was contrary to the UN Charter for NATO countries to use military force against Yugoslavia in 1999 in the absence of a Security Council resolution under Chapter VII and a finding under article 39 of the Charter that there had been a previous threat or breach of international peace and security and a failure of peaceful negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations. Without approval by the Security Council, NATO’s actions in Yugoslavia and elsewhere were simply illegal and engaged State civil and penal responsibility, including the obligation to pay reparations to the victims of the aggression. NATO actions since the entry into force of the Statute of Rome in 2001 deserve to be investigated under the rubric “crime of aggression” (article 5 off the Rome Statute) as complemented by the Kampala definition of aggression, and, of course under articles 7 and 8.

The end never justifies the means

The Florentine diplomat Nicolo Machiavelli never wrote the phrase “the end justifies the means” in his famous book The Prince. However, the thrust of the entire book is precisely that. Throughout the ages wielders of power have always claimed that because their goals were supposedly noble, the means to achieve those ends should be allowed. The same idea is expressed in the common idiom that you cannot make an omelette without cracking some eggs. But this is a lame excuse. What must be understood is that the evil means contaminate the end and render it evil as well.

Politicians and media in the collective West try to justify the unjustifiable, including the delivery of indiscriminate weapons to Ukraine, covering up the US involvement in the blowing up of the Nordstream pipelines[11], the responsibility of Ukraine for the bombing of the Zaporozhe nuclear plant and the Kakhovka dam[12] and other dams[13]. Politicians and media systematically engage in apologetics about the war crimes committed by NATO forces. Beyond merely whitewashing the crimes, they engage in a form of totalitarian censorship and practice a vicious persecution of whistleblowers who tell us what crimes are being committed in our name. Indeed, secrecy is an enabler of crime. Few people know that the Holocaust, the greatest crime of the twentieth century, was largely perpetrated under the cover of secrecy, that Hitler’s Führerbefehl Nr. 1 required absolute secrecy about government practices[14], that the killers of the Einzatzgruppen had to sign on pain of death that they would never reveal anything about the killings, why Heinrich Himmler reminded the killers in his 1943 Posen speech of the absolute necessity of secrecy. That is why there was the Nazi Operation 1005[15] to attempt to erase the evidence of the killings by the Einsatzgruppen, digging up mass graves and churning the skeletons, why most concentration camps in the East were evacuated and destroyed before their capture by the Soviet Army. Secrecy and denial were indispensable elements of the criminal conspiracy[16].

UN Rapporteur Nils Melzer’s book The Trial of Julian Assange[17] documents the egregious violations of the rule of law in the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador in connection with the Assange frame-up and “prosecution”. Indeed, Nils Melzer is the Emile Zola of the 21st century, demonstrating far worse judicial misconduct than Zola revealed in the 1890’s in connection with the frame-up of Alfred Dreyfus by a French military court. The Assange scandal is much worse than the Dreyfus Affair[18], but the mainstream media today has totally failed in its watchdog duty and many journalists have even joined the wolves.

What future for NATO?

Professors like John Mearsheimer[19], Richard Falk[20], Jeffrey Sachs[21], Stephen Kinzer[22] and others have expressed their concern about the dangers that NATO poses for the survival of humanity, of the logic that it should be dismantled. The best that could be hoped for is that NATO be phased out and that the Global Majority will succeed in rejecting NATO’s ambition to further expand not only in Europe but also in the Asia-Pacific region. Perhaps if the Global Majority exposes the multiple war crimes of NATO forces over the past 30 years and demands accountability from NATO countries, the perception of NATO as a “defence alliance” will be replaced by the label “criminal organization”.

When the media indoctrination and propaganda about NATO is exposed as false, when the perception in Western countries moves from positive to negative, when people realize that NATO is a Machiavellian institution that has exhausted its usefulness, it will be possible to gradually wind it down.

Ultimately, NATO must be recognized not only as a criminal organization, a blustering vestige of a moribund Western imperialism, but as a mortal danger to the survival of civilization on Earth. NATO is on the wrong side of history.

==== 

1. Among the purposes of the UN “To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace” ↑

2. All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered. ↑

3. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations. ↑

4. The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace…. ↑

5. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-13/key-takeaways-from-nato-day-two-putin-zelenskyy-matter/102595358.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/12/politics/biden-nato-summit/index.html.Compare https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/the-mask-is-off-why-ukraine-will-never-be-a-nato-member/ ↑

6. Dare to think by yourself, dare to know! Horatius, First book of Letters (20 BC). Immanuel Kant also used the expression in his 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?”

7. De bello civile, 2, 27, 2 ↑

8. https://www.clusterconvention.org/ ↑

9. A. de Zayas, Chapter 4, The Human Rights History, Clarity Press, Atlanta 2023. ↑

10. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judgen.asp ↑

11. https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream ↑

12. https://abcnews.go.com/International/strategically-vital-nova-khakovka-dam-blown-border-ukraine/story?id=99863763

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-accuses-ukraine-destroying-kakhovka-dam-behest-west-2023-06-07  / ↑

13. https://www.npr.org/2022/09/06/1121201310/ukraine-flooded-village-dam-blown-up  ↑

14. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/staatsgeheimnis-1989490.html  ↑

15. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/aktion-1005  ↑

16. A de Zayas, Völkermord als Staatsgeheimnis, Olzog Verlag, Munich 2011. ↑

17. Verso Books, New York, 2022. ↑

18. https://www.britannica.com/place/France/The-Dreyfus-Affair  ↑

19. The Great Delusion, Yale University Press, 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483306
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483306  ↑

20. https://richardfalk.org/2022/03/31/make-peace-not-war-in-ukraine/  ↑

21. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/the-war-in-ukraine-was-provoked-and-why-that-matters-if-we-want-peace  ↑

22. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stephen-kinzer-on-the-uss-immoral-proxy-war-in-ukraine/id1525433436?i=1000605659299  ↑ 

“Bidenomics” Is A Fraud Based On Deliberately Misrepresented Stats

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

Economic issues are some of the most politically abused issues often because the data politicians exploit is easy to present out of context. The vast majority of the public doesn’t spend their time immersed in the intricacies of monetary policy, unemployment stats and the processes of inflation vs deflation. They hear a soundbite on the news or social media once in a while, assume it must be true and then go on with their day.

This is how economic crisis events always seem to take the population by surprise – The establishment tells people all is well and no one questions the narrative in the face of numerous warning signs. Sometimes, the populace continues to believe that everything is fine despite the financial framework burning down around them, all because the “experts” continue to convince them that recovery is “right around the corner.”

There are numerous incentives for government officials and mainstream economists to mislead the citizenry with tales of imminent prosperity in the midst of instability. Primarily, the goal is to keep the middle-class population as docile as possible so that they don’t revolt until it’s too late (the middle class being predominantly conservative, and the greatest threat to any corrupt regime). Understand that economics is the root of power, and economic perception is the key to influencing the masses.

Hidden Indicators And Rampant Money Printing

The reality is that the US was hurtling towards stagflationary disaster ever since the crash of 2008, when Barack Obama and Joe Biden (with the help of the Federal Reserve) oversaw the near doubling of the national debt from $10 trillion to almost $20 trillion – The most egregious abuse of monetary policy that the US had ever seen.

And, keep in mind this was only the officially reported cash. Because of pressure brought by people like Ron Paul in 2011, the government was forced to pursue a limited audit of the Federal Reserve bailouts at that time. This revealed at least $16 trillion created from nothing by the Fed to prop up the failing system.

In 2006, right before the derivatives collapse, the Federal Reserve conveniently and abruptly ended their M3 money supply report. They now only report the M2 money supply, which does not include the vast assets held in corporate coffers, large time deposits in banks, institutional money market funds, short-term repurchase agreements (repo), and larger liquid assets. It was as if they knew an inflationary event was about to take place and they needed to obscure the evidence.

In other words, in economics there is the “official government data” and then there is the REAL data, which is sometimes so hidden it is impossible to quantify.

Even if we only go by the M2 report, the money supply skyrocketed starting in 2020, and rose exponentially through 2021 and 2022 – It jumped by 40% in only two years. This is why the cost of most necessities has risen 25% or more.

I’m sure most readers have noticed that inflation is not going away despite Joe Biden’s claims that he has “cut inflation in half” under his “Bidenomics” plan. This is because inflation is cumulative. The CPI might fluctuate, but the effects of inflation remain as prices tend to increase and stay high perpetually.

There Is No Such Thing As “Bidenomics”

The supposed financial progress that Biden is trying to take credit for has nothing to do with Biden’s policies. Not a thing. Unless, of course, you count market manipulation as a positive.

For example, the reduction in CPI is directly related to the continuous interest rate hikes of the Federal Reserve, which Biden has zero control over. The Fed is autonomous and makes its decisions independent of the White House or government. This is a fact openly admitted by former chairman Alan Greenspan. When the fed raises rates, debt becomes more expensive, lending slows down and thus the economy slows down.

One of the only ways that Biden can influence CPI is through artificial deflation of energy prices. The Biden Administration has been dumping US strategic oil reserves on the market for the past year as a means to suppress oil prices, thereby directly and indirectly keeping the CPI numbers down. This is not progress, it’s economic fraud.

The misuse of stats extends to other sectors, such as Biden’s attempt to take credit for the recent reduction in the US deficit. Again, this has nothing to do with Biden; the Fed’s interest rate hikes make it more expensive for the government to take on debt, therefore, debt spending drops.

It’s also not a situation that signals a recovery in the economy – The Fed continues to hike rates supposedly to stall inflation, but higher rates in a debt heavy environment lead to inevitable deflationary upheaval. As I predicted a year ago, the Fed is continuing to increase interest rates until this happens.

Employment Miracle Or Employment Scam?

This issue has been brought up by many analysts but I’ll touch on it again here because Biden is relentless in his falsehoods when it comes to employment data. FACT: 72% of all “new jobs” Biden takes credit for were originally lost during the pandemic lockdowns. The very lockdowns which Democrats avidly enforced and tried to keep in place perpetually. You can’t take credit for “creating” jobs that you are responsible for destroying.

In terms of higher labor demand, the pressure is in low wage service sector jobs and these are the majority of jobs added since Biden took office. And, this rush into retail/service was purchased with $8 trillion+ in covid stimulus cash along with a moratorium on rent and student loan payments. That much extra money in circulation buys at least a few years of consumer spending, propping up jobs numbers.

Throughout history, such gains from inflationary actions and government interventions are always short term, and they always end with a dramatic plunge in employment once the effects subside.

Biden’s Fake Manufacturing Boom

Biden has recently touted a jump in US manufacturing as the latest achievement of Bidenomics, but like every other claim he makes, you have to look at the context. These are not free market manufacturing facilities built according to market demand. Rather, Biden is pumping billions of taxpayer dollars into green tech, once again artificially engineering a “manufacturing boom” through government subsidies for products that have limited demand.

Biden wants to rig the demand, too, by enforcing climate laws which make gas, oil and coal sources too expensive and solar panels and wind turbines cheaper by comparison. For example, Biden is increasing costs for oil and gas exploration on federal lands, while greatly lowering the prices for building solar farms on federal lands. In other words, the government uses your money to create factories for green tech and then creates laws which force people to use that green tech.

In the meantime, Joe’s manufacturing “boom” paid for with tax dollars also comes at the cost of America’s oil, gas and coal industries, not to mention less energy freedom for the general public. It’s socialism, not a revolution in domestic manufacturing.

For Biden, The Key Is To Create As Many Government Cash Injections As Possible Until 2025

You want to know why Democrats are so angry that the Supreme Court blocked Biden’s plan to make taxpayers cover student loan debts? It’s not because they care about naive college kids who paid too much money for garbage degrees – It’s because student debt relief would immediately add trillions more in spending in the short term to the US economy.

An interesting side effect of the college loan moratorium is the surprising credit boost – As soon as college loan payments were put on hold, millions of former students had their credit ratings increase by default. Meaning, they could now hike their credit limits and spend MORE money they don’t have. It’s an incredibly sneaky way to artificially prop up the system WITHOUT using direct stimulus measures that rely on the central bank. This false boost will disappear by October of this year.

Biden’s constant attempts to introduce infrastructure programs are another way the government can create the illusion of recovery by using debt spending as a means to mitigate the signals of greater fiscal decline. Without Fed stimulus it’s the only option Biden has, and as rates rise it becomes costly.

The bottom line is this – The US economy is on a short timetable as long as the Fed continues to raise interest rates into weakness as a means to suppress inflation. As we witnessed in the spring, higher rates are already breaking the back of mid-tier banks across the western world and the Fed’s backstop funds are only enough to stall the debt crisis for a time. I continue to predict that once the Fed Funds Rate is raised to 6% or more, we will once again see a banking calamity similar to the 2008 crash, but this time if the Fed steps in with a bailout hyperinflation will be the immediate result.

Bidenomics is a sham in every respect. Anything that could be considered an economic improvement is due to the Federal Reserve playing the odds with interest rates. A massive 40% increase in the money supply sure helps in obscuring fiscal weakness as well. Luckily, nearly 60% of Americans in recent polls say they aren’t buying the Bidenomics fairytale – They see the dangers around them every day.

The covid event was a catalyst that revealed all the weaknesses of the US system that many of us in alternative economics have been warning about for years. And now it seems as if the establishment is trying to drag things along for just a little while longer. The reason why is up for speculation, but the fact remains that a broken structure cannot be propped up with stop gaps. I’m doubtful that Biden will be able to ride the wave created by covid stimulus until the end of 2024. Something has to give.

More Warmongers Elevated In The Biden Administration

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

The Biden administration looks set to become even more warlike than it already was if you can imagine, with virulent Russia hawk Victoria Nuland and virulent China hawk Charles Q Brown now being elevated to lofty positions by the White House.

Nuland, the wife of alpha neocon Robert Kagan, has been named acting deputy secretary of state by President Biden, at least until a new deputy secretary has been named. This places her at second in command within the State Department, second only to Tony Blinken.

In an article about Nuland’s unique role in souring relations between the US and Russia during her previous tenure in the State Department under Obama, Responsible Statecraft’s Connor Echols writes the following of the latest news:

Nuland’s appointment will be a boon for Russia hawks who want to turn up the heat on the Kremlin. But, for those who favor a negotiated end to the conflict in Ukraine, a promotion for the notoriously “undiplomatic diplomat” will be a bitter pill.

A few quick reminders are in order. When Nuland was serving in the Obama administration, she had a now-infamous leaked call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. As the Maidan Uprising roiled the country, the pair of American diplomats discussed conversations with opposition leaders, and Nuland expressed support for putting Arseniy Yatseniuk into power. (Yatseniuk would become prime minister later that month, after Russia-friendly former President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country.) At one memorable point in the call, Nuland said “Fu–k the EU” in response to Europe’s softer stance on the protests.

The controversy surrounding the call — and larger implications of U.S. involvement in the ouster of Yanukovych — kicked up tensions with Russia and contributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to seize Crimea and support an insurgency in eastern Ukraine. Her handing out  food to demonstrators on the ground in Kyiv probably didn’t help either. Nuland, along with State Department sanctions czar Daniel Fried, then led the effort to punish Putin through sanctions. Another official at State reportedly asked Fried if “the Russians realize that the two hardest-line people in the entire U.S. government are now in a position to go after them?”

In a 2015 Consortium News article titled “The Mess That Nuland Made,” the late Robert Parry singled out Nuland as the primary architect of the 2014 regime change operation in Ukraine, which, as Aaron Maté explained last year, paved the way to the war we’re seeing there today. Hopefully her position winds up being temporary.

In other news, the Senate Arms Services Committee has voted to confirm Biden’s selection of General Charles Q Brown Jr as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing Mark Milley. A full senate vote will now take place on whether to confirm Brown — currently the Air Force Chief of Staff — for the nation’s highest military office.

Brown is unambiguous about his belief that the US must hasten to militarize against China in the so-called Indo-Pacific to prepare for confrontation between the two powers, calling for more US bases in the region and increased efforts to arm Taiwan during his hearing before the Senate Arms Services Committee earlier this month.

Back in May, Moon of Alabama flagged Brown’s nomination in an article which also noted that several advocates of military restraint had been resigning from their positions within the administration, including Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state who Nuland has taken over for.

It’s too soon to draw any firm conclusions, but to see voices of restraint stepping down and proponents of escalation stepping up could be a bad portent of things to come.