The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984

As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground.  As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam.  I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late.  It depressed me.

Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times’ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.”  It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing.  Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war.  So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality.  This angered me.

The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad.  “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.”  Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.

On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley.  To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue.  When you support a U.S. war, as has always been The Times’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners.  So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted.  Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion?  They too must never have  existed since they are not mentioned.

But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a U.S. proxy war waged via Ukraine by U.S./NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.”  No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.”  U.S./NATO were “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”

Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014.  It just didn’t happen.  Never happened.  Magic by omission.  The U.S., together with the Ukrainian government “led” by the puppet-actor “President Volodymyr Zelensky,” are completely innocence parties, according to the Times.  (Note also, that nowhere in this four page diatribe is President Putin addressed by his title, as if to say that “Mr. Putin” is illegitimate and Zelensky is the real thing.)

All the problems stem from when “Mr. Putin seized Crimea and stirred up a secessionist conflict in eastern Ukraine n 2014.”

Nowhere is it mentioned that for years on end U.S./NATO has been moving troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders, that George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that Trump did the same with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, that the U.S. has set up so-called anti-ballistic missile sites in Poland and Rumania and asserted its right to a nuclear first-strike, that more and more countries have been added to NATO’s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary, that 15,000 plus mostly Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine have been killed by Ukrainian forces for years before February 2022, that the Minsk agreements were part of a scheme to give time for the arming of Ukraine, that the U.S. has rejected all calls from Russia to respect its borders and its integrity, that the U.S./NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases, that there was a vote in Crimea after the coup, that the U.S. has been for years waging economic war on Russia via sanctions, etc.  In short, all of the reasons that Russia felt that it was under attack for decades and that the U.S. was stone deaf to its appeals to negotiate these threats to its existence.  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if all were reversed and Russia had put troops and weapons in Mexico and Canada that the United States would respond forcefully.

This editorial is propaganda by omission and strident stupidity by commission.

The editorial has all its facts “wrong,” and not by accident.  The paper may say that its opinion journalists’ claims are separate from those of its newsroom, yet their claims echo the daily barrage of falsehoods from its front pages, such as:

  • Ukraine is winning on the battlefield.
  • “Russia faces decades of economic stagnation and regression even if the war ends soon.”
  • That on Jan.14, as part of its cruel attacks on civilian targets, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in Dnipro, killing many.
  • Only one man can stop this war – Vladimir Putin – because he started it.
  • Until now, the U.S. and its allies were reluctant to deploy heavy weapons to Ukraine “for fear of escalating this conflict into an all-in East-West war.”
  • Russia is desperate as Putin pursues “his delusions.”
  • Putin is “isolated from anyone who would dare to speak truth to his power.”
  • Putin began trying to change Ukraine’s borders by force in 2014.
  • During the last 11 months Ukraine has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces …. The war is at a stalemate.”
  • The Russian people are being subjected to the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery “churning out false narratives.”

This is expert opinion for dummies.  A vast tapestry of lies, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel Prize address.  The war escalation the editorial writers are promoting is in their words, “this time pitting Western arms against a desperate Russia,” as if the U.S./NATO does not have CIA and special forces in Ukraine, just weapons, and as if “this time” means it wasn’t so for the past nine years at least as the U.S. was building Ukraine’s military and arms for this very fight.

It is a fight they will lose in the days to come.  Russia was, is, and will triumph.

Everything in the editorial is disingenuous.  Simple propaganda: the good guys against the bad guys.  Putin another Hitler.  The good guys are winning, just as they did in Vietnam, until reality dawned and it had to be admitted they weren’t (and didn’t).  History is repeating itself.

Little has changed and so my morning sense of mourning when I remembered Nixon and Kissinger’s savagery at Christmas 1972 was appropriate.  As then, so today, we are being subjected to a vast tapestry of lies told by the corporate media for their bosses, as the U.S. continues its doomed efforts to control the world.  It is not Russia that is desperate now, but propagandists such as the writers of this strident and stupid editorial.  It is not the Russian people who need to wake up, as they claim, but the American people and those who still cling to the myth that The New York Times Corporation is an organ of truth.  It is the Ministry of Truth with its newspeak, double-speak, and its efforts to change the past.

Let Harold Pinter have the last words:

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Hardly Anyone Is Thinking Logically About The Risk Of Nuclear War

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its symbolic Doomsday Clock to ninety seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been set since its founding after the second world war. Chief among their reasons for doing so is the increasingly dangerous war in Ukraine.

A statement authored by the Bulletin’s editor John Mecklin is as biased against Russia as any mainstream western punditry today and makes no mention of the US empire’s role in provoking, prolonging and benefiting from this conflict, yet it still provides a fairly reasonable appraisal of the magnitude of the threat we’re staring down the barrel of at this point in history:

This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

The war in Ukraine may enter a second horrifying year, with both sides convinced they can win. Ukraine’s sovereignty and broader European security arrangements that have largely held since the end of World War II are at stake. Also, Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks.

And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high.

Mecklin encourages dialogue between Russia, Ukraine and NATO powers in order to de-escalate tensions in “this time of unprecedented global danger.” He quotes UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who warned last August that the world has entered “a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War.”

We came a hair’s breadth from nuclear annihilation during the chaotic and unpredictable brinkmanship at the height of the last cold war, and in fact had numerous close calls that could have easily wound up going another way. As former Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, humanity survived the Cuban Missile Crisis by “plain dumb luck”.

There’s no logical basis for the belief that we’ll get lucky again. Believing nuclear war won’t happen because it didn’t happen last time is a type of fallacious reasoning known as normalcy bias; it’s as rational as believing Russian roulette is safe because the man handing you the pistol didn’t blow his head off when he pulled the trigger.

But that’s the kind of sloppy thinking you’ll run into when you try to discuss this subject in public; I’m always encountering arguments that there’s no risk of nuclear war because we’ve gone all this time without disaster. One of the reasons I engage so much on social media is that I find it’s a good way of keeping tabs on the dominant propaganda narratives in our civilization and understanding what people are thinking and believing about things, and nowhere have I been met with more fuzzbrained comments than the times I’ve written about the need to prevent an entirely preventable nuclear holocaust.

The most common response I get is something along the lines of “Well if there is a nuclear war it will be Putin’s fault,” as though whose “fault” it is will matter to us while we’re watching the world end, along with the related “Well Russia shouldn’t have invaded then” and “Well Russia should stop threatening to use nukes then.” People genuinely don’t seem to understand that in the event of a full-scale nuclear war, it will really be the end of everyone. They still kind of imagine everyone still being there and shaking their fists at Russia afterward, and themselves sitting there feeling self-righteous and vindicated for correctly saying what a bad, bad man Vladimir Putin is.

They don’t understand that there will be no pundits discussing the nuclear armageddon on Fox and MSNBC, arguing about whose fault it was and which political party is to blame. They don’t get that there won’t be any war crimes tribunals in the radioactive ashes as the biosphere starves to death in nuclear winter. They don’t understand that once the nukes start flying, nobody’s shoulds or shouldn’ts about it will matter at all, and neither will your political opinions about Putin. All that will matter is that it happened, and that it can’t be taken back.

Another common response when I talk about the looming threat of nuclear war is, “Oh so you just don’t care about Ukrainians and you want them all to die.” The other day some lady responded to a Twitter thread I made about the need to avoid nuclear armageddon by saying that I must love rape and war crimes. People sincerely believe that’s a valid response to a discussion about the need to prevent the single worst thing that could possibly happen from happening. It really doesn’t seem to occur to them that they’re not actually engaging the subject at hand in any real way.

Slightly more perceptive interlocutors will argue that if we back down to tyrants just because they have nuclear weapons then everyone will try to get nukes and those who have them will become more belligerent, which will end up making nuclear war more likely in the long run. This response is a straw man fallacy because it misrepresents the argument as “just back down” rather than a call to engage in diplomacy and dialogue to de-escalate and begin sincerely negotiating toward detente, none of which is happening to any meaningful extent in this conflict. More importantly, it pretends that Russia is just invading its neighbor out of the blue instead of the well-documented reality that it is in fact responding to provocations by the US empire. The US has a moral obligation to de-escalate a conflict it knowingly provoked to advance its own interests, especially when that conflict could kill everyone in the world.

The whole “We can’t just back down to bullies like Putin” line of argumentation is further invalidated by the fact that it’s one thing to draw a line in the sand that must never be crossed — even if in the face of armageddon — but it’s quite another to say that line should be over something as small as who governs Crimea. This planet is populated with eight billion humans and countless other sentient creatures, very few of whom care one way or another who governs Crimea and almost none of whom would be willing to watch their loved ones die over it. Wanting to draw the line there is obnoxious, arrogant, and absurd.

And that’s just the shoddy brainwork of the rank-and-file public; the thinking of those who actually got us into this situation is surely just as dogshit. From what I can tell standing on this side of the thick veils of government secrecy which separate us from the truth, it appears to arise predominantly from a combination of immense hubris and zealous groupthink; hubris to think they can control all possible outcomes in a game of brinkmanship with so many small, unpredictable moving parts, and zealous groupthink in mindlessly adhering to the imperial doctrine that US unipolar planetary hegemony must be secured at all cost. They’re playing games with the life of every creature on this planet, and anyone who thinks that’s smart or wise should be as far from such decisions as possible.

The logical faceplants I’m describing here seem to arise partly from the fact that our civilization is completely inundated with empire propaganda about this conflict, and partly from the fact that people just haven’t thought terribly hard about nuclear war and what it would mean. The latter is probably because the prospect of everyone dying horrifically is such a huge, heavy, uncomfortable subject to sit down and deeply grapple with to the extent that it demands. For most people it’s just this vague, blurry mass in the periphery of their awareness, because they’ve been doing all these weird mental gymnastics to squirm and compartmentalize away from this thing rather than facing it.

But if ever there was a time to start doing some rigorous independent thinking and stop trusting the authorities to sort things out, it would be now. They’re showing us every sign that they’re just going to keep ramping up these games of nuclear chicken until they either fill their bottomless need for more complete global control or get us all killed trying. People need to start waking up to what’s going on and start making things uncomfortable for the people who are driving our world toward total destruction.

It does not need to be this way. Peace talks are possible. Diplomacy, de-escalation and detente are possible. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. We need to start building some public pressure to end this madness, because if the mushroom clouds ever show up, there is not one person alive who in that moment will believe that it was worth it.

Saturday Matinee: River’s Edge

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By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

I remember reading about the case at the time. A high school kid killed his girlfriend and left her body lying on the ground. Over the next few days, he brought some of his friends out to look at her body, and gradually word of the crime spread through his circle of friends. But for a long time, nobody called the cops.

A lot of op-ed articles were written to analyze this event, which was seen as symptomatic of a wider moral breakdown in our society. “River’s Edge,” which is a horrifying fiction inspired by the case, offers no explanation and no message; it regards the crime in much the same way the kid’s friends stood around looking at the body. The difference is that the film feels a horror that the teenagers apparently did not.

This is the best analytical film about a crime since “The Onion Field” and “In Cold Blood.” Like those films, it poses these questions: Why do we need to be told this story? How is it useful to see limited and brutish people doing cruel and stupid things? I suppose there are two answers. One, because such things exist in the world and some of us are curious about them as we are curious in general about human nature. Two, because an artist is never merely a reporter and by seeing the tragedy through his eyes, he helps us to see it through ours.

“River’s Edge” was directed by Tim Hunter, who made “Tex,” about ordinary teenagers who found themselves faced with the choice of dealing drugs. In “River’s Edge,” that choice has long since been made. These teenagers are alcoholics and drug abusers, including one whose mother is afraid he is stealing her marijuana and a 12-year-old who blackmails the older kids for six-packs.

The central figure in the film is not the murderer, Sampson (Daniel Roebuck), a large, stolid youth who seems perpetually puzzled about why he does anything. It is Layne (Crispin Glover), a strung-out, mercurial rebel who always seems to be on speed and who takes it upon himself to help conceal the crime. When his girlfriend asks him, like, well, gee, she was our friend and all, so shouldn’t we feel bad, or something, his answer is that the murderer “had his reasons.” What were they? The victim was talking back.

Glover’s performance is electric. He’s like a young Eric Roberts, and he carries around a constant sense of danger. Eventually, we realize the danger is born of paranoia; he is reflecting it at us with his fear.

These kids form a clique that exists outside the mainstream in their high school. They hang around outside, smoking and sneering. In town, they have a friend named Feck (Dennis Hopper), a drug dealer who lives inside a locked house and once killed a woman himself, so he has something in common with the kid, you see? It is another of Hopper’s possessed performances, done with sweat and the whites of his eyes.

“River’s Edge” is not a film I will forget very soon. Its portrait of these adolescents is an exercise in despair. Not even old enough to legally order a beer, they already are destroyed by alcohol and drugs, abandoned by parents who also have lost hope. When the story of the dead girl first appeared in the papers, it seemed like a freak show, an aberration. “River’s Edge” sets it in an ordinary town and makes it seem like just what the op-ed philosophers said: an emblem of breakdown. The girl’s body eventually was discovered and buried. If you seek her monument, look around you.

____________________

Watch River’s Edge on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/12027310

The Cost Of Living Has Become Extremely Oppressive And 57 Percent Of Americans Cannot Afford A $1,000 Emergency Expense

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By Michael Snyder

Source: Activist Post

I don’t have to tell you that your money doesn’t go as far as it once did.  You see it every time that you go shopping.  Our leaders flooded the system with money and pursued highly inflationary policies for years, and now we are all paying the price.  The cost of living has been rising much faster than our incomes have, and this is systematically destroying the middle class.  Survey after survey has shown that a solid majority of the population is living paycheck to paycheck, and at this point most U.S. consumers are tapped out.  In fact, one brand new survey just discovered that 57 percent of Americans cannot even afford to pay a $1,000 emergency expense…

According to Bankrate’s Annual Emergency Fund Report, 68% of people are worried they wouldn’t be able to cover their living expenses for just one month if they lost their primary source of income. And when push comes to shove, the majority (57%) of U.S. adults are currently unable to afford a $1,000 emergency expense.

When broken down by generation, Gen Zers (85%) and Millennials (79%) are more likely to be worried about covering an emergency expense.

These numbers are quite ominous, because they clearly demonstrate that we are completely and utterly unprepared for any sort of a major economic downturn.

And thanks to the rapidly rising cost of living, we are losing even more ground with each passing month.

Another survey that was recently released found that “earnings are falling behind the cost of living” for 72 percent of middle income families…

Nearly three-quarters, or 72%, of middle-income families say their earnings are falling behind the cost of living, up from 68% a year ago, according to a separate report by Primerica based on a survey of households with incomes between $30,000 and $100,000. A similar share, 74%, said they are unable to save for their future, up from 66% a year ago.

We haven’t experienced anything like this in the United States in decades.

When I walked into a Walmart store the other day, I was shocked by how high the prices are now.

Isn’t Walmart supposed to be the place with “low prices every day”?

Well, the prices were certainly not “low” when I walked through the store.

And I was stunned to learn that McDonald’s is now selling one hash brown for three dollars.

Are you kidding me?

I am sure that many of you can remember a time when they were 50 cents.

Sadly, those days are not coming back.

Food prices are going to continue to go up, and the CEO of Unilever recently admitted that his company has actually “been accelerating the rate of price increases that we’ve had to put into the market”…

“For the last 18 months we’ve seen extraordinary input cost pressure … it runs across petrochemical derived products, agricultural derived products, energy, transport, logistics,” he said.

“It’s been feeding through for quite some time now and we’ve been accelerating the rate of price increases that we’ve had to put into the market,” he added.

That doesn’t sound good at all.

And he also ominously warned that “there’s more inflationary pressure coming”…

Unilever’s view, he said, was that “we know for sure there’s more inflationary pressure coming through in our input costs.”

As food prices continue to rise, these big companies are going to look for ways to reduce input costs.

One way that they are going to do that is by starting to put crushed bugs in our food.

I know that this may sound really bizarre to you, but this is already happening in Europe…

As of yesterday, a food additive made out of powdered crickets began appearing in foods from pizza, to pasta to cereals across the European Union.

Yes, really.

Defatted house crickets are on the menu for Europeans across the continent, without the vast majority of them knowing it is now in their food.

So you might want to start reading labels a lot more carefully from now on.

Of course it isn’t just the cost of food that has become extremely oppressive.

Just about everything has gotten more expensive, and this has broken the remaining strength of the U.S. consumer.

If you doubt this, just consider some of the latest economic numbers that we have seen.

-U.S. retail sales fell once again last month…

US retail sales continued their fall in December, dropping by 1.1% as inflation remained high, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.

That’s the largest monthly decline since December 2021, and practically every category (except for building materials, groceries and sporting goods) saw sales drop from the prior month.

-Sales of existing homes have now fallen for 11 months in a row…

U.S. existing home sales slowed for the 11th consecutive month in December as higher mortgage rates, surging inflation and steep home prices sapped consumer demand from the housing market.

-More Americans than ever before are being forced to pay at least 30 percent of their incomes on rent…

The average US household is now considered ‘rent-burdened’ as a record-high number of people are spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent.

According to Moody’s Analytics’ latest affordability report, the national average rent-to-income (RTI) ratio reached 30 percent for the first time since the company began tracking the data more than 20 years ago.

U.S. consumers are being stretched financially like never before, and many are turning to debt to help them maintain their current lifestyles.

As a result, the savings rate has plunged to a historic low, credit card debt has surged to a record high, and the average rate of interest on credit card balances has also risen to a record high.  As Zero Hedge has aptly noted, this is “nothing short of catastrophic”…

The combination of record high credit card debt and record high credit card interest is nothing short of catastrophic for both the US economy, and the strapped consumer who has no choice but to keep buying on credit while hoping next month’s bill will somehow not come. Unfortunately, it will and at some point in the very near future, this will also translate into massive loan losses for US consumer banks; that’s when Powell will finally panic.

For a long time, we have been warned that the very foolish economic policies that our leaders were implementing would have deeply tragic consequences.

And now it is starting to happen right in front of our eyes.

Sadly, the truth is that this is just the beginning.

The entire system is cracking and crumbling all around us, and there is much more pain ahead.

A Dollar Collapse Is Now In Motion – Saudi Arabia Signals The End Of Petro Status

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Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Masayoshi Son, SoftBank Group Corp. Chairman and CEO, and Christine Lagarde, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director, attend the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia October 24, 2017. REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

The decline of a currency’s world reserve status is often a long process rife with denials. There are numerous economic “experts” out there that have been dismissing any and all warnings of dollar collapse for years. They just don’t get it, or they don’t want to get it. The idea that the US currency could ever be dethroned as the defacto global trade mechanism is impossible in their minds.

One of the key pillars keeping the dollar in place as the world reserve is its petro-status, and this factor is often held up as the reason why the Greenback cannot fail. The other argument is that the dollar is backed by the full force of the US military, and the US military is backed by the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve – In other words, the dollar is backed by…the dollar; it’s a very circular and naive position.

These sentiments are not only pervasive among mainstream economists, they are also all over the place within the alternative media. I suspect the main hang-up for liberty movement analysts is the notion that the globalist establishment would ever allow the dollar or the US economy to fail. Isn’t the dollar system their “golden goose”?

The answer is no, it is NOT their golden goose. The dollar is just another stepping stone towards their goal of a one-world economy and a one-world currency. They have killed the world reserve status of other currencies in the past, why wouldn’t they do the same to the dollar?

Globalist white papers and essays specifically outline the need for a diminished role for the US currency as well as a decline in the American economy in order to make way for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and a new global currency system controlled by the IMF. I warned about this years go, and my position has always been that the derailment of the dollar would likely start with the end of its petro status.

In 2017 I published an article titled ‘Saudi Coup Signals War And The New World Order Reset’. I noted at the time that the sudden power shift over to crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman indicated a change in Saudi Arabia’s relationship to the US. I stated that:

“To understand how drastic this coup has been, consider this — for decades Saudi Kings maintained political balance by doling out vital power positions to separate, carefully chosen successors. Positions such as Defense Minister, the Interior Ministry and the head of the National Guard. Today, Mohammed Bin Salman controls all three positions. Foreign policy, defense matters, oil and economic decisions and social changes are now all in the hands of one man.”

The rise of MBS was backed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), a fund comprised of trillions of dollars supplied by globalists within Carlyle Group (Bush family, etc.), Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Blackrock. MBS garnered the favor of the globalists for one specific reason – He openly supported their “Vision For 2030”, a plan for the dismantling of “fossil fuel” based energy and the implementation of carbon controls. Yes, that’s right, the head of Saudi Arabia is backing the eventual end of oil based energy, and part of that includes the end of the dollar as the petro currency.  

In exchange for their cooperation, the Saudis are being given access to ESG-like funding as well as access to AI advancements and the so-called “digital economy.”  It sounds crazy, but there is much talk of AI developments to cure numerous health problems and extend lifespan.  With those kinds of promises, it’s not surprising that Saudi elites would be willing to dump the dollar and even oil.

In 2017 I noted that:

“I believe the next phase of the global economic reset will begin in part with the breaking of petrodollar dominance. An important element of my analysis on the strategic shift away from the petrodollar has been the symbiosis between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has been the single most important key to the dollar remaining as the petrocurrency from the very beginning.”

I believed that the threat to petro status would ultimately be spurred on by a proxy war between East and West:

“World economic war is the real name of the game here, as the globalists play puppeteers to East and West. It is a geopolitical crisis they will have created to engineer public support for a solution they predetermined.”

Back then I thought that such a proxy war would be initiated in the Middle East, possibly in Iran. However, it’s clear that Ukraine is the powderkeg the globalists have chosen, at least for now, with Taiwan being the next shoe to drop.

In the years since I made these predictions the relationship between Saudi Arabia, Russia and China has grown very close. Arms deals and energy deals are becoming a mainstay of trade and this has led to a quiet but steady distancing of the Saudis from the dollar. This past week, the dominoes were set in motion for dollar collapse when Saudi Arabia announced at Davos that they are now willing to trade oil in alternative currencies.

In response, Xi Jinping pledged to ramp up efforts to promote the use of the Chinese yuan in energy deals. This falls in line with another article I wrote in 2017 titled ‘The Economic End Game Continues,’ in which I described how conflict with Eastern nations (China and Russia) would be exploited to create a catalyst for the end of the dollar’s petro status.

The importance of the Saudi announcement cannot be overstated; this is the beginning of the end of the dollar. The dollar’s world reserve status is largely dependent on its petro-status. Without one, you cannot have the other. This is almost the exact same dynamic that led to the implosion of the British Sterling decades ago as the global petro currency which resulted in the rise of the dollar to take its place.

This time, though, it will not be a single foreign currency that takes on the role of world reserve, it will be a basket currency system controlled by the IMF called Special Drawing Rights, along with a single global digital currency that is yet to be named but is now under development.

The consequences of the loss of reserve status will be devastating to the US economy. It is the only glue holding our system together – The ability to defer inflation by exporting it overseas is a superpower only the US enjoys. The Fed can print money perpetually if it wants to in order to fund the government or prop up US markets, as long as foreign central banks and corporate banks are willing to absorb dollars as a tool for global trade. If the dollar is no longer the primary international trade mechanism, the trillions upon trillions of dollars the Fed has created from thin air over the years will all come flooding back to the US through various avenues, and hyperinflation (or hyperstagflation) will be the result.

This dynamic is already in play, as foreign holders of US debt and dollars have been dumping them at record pace since 2017. The process continues at a time when the Federal Reserve is cutting it’s balance sheet and raising interest rates, which means there is no longer a buyer of last resort.

This may be why multiple foreign central banks have renewed their purchases of gold reserves and are once again stockpiling precious metals. They seem to be well aware of what is about to happen to the dollar, while the American public is kept in the dark.

The effects of the decline of the dollar may not be immediately felt, or become obvious for another year or two. What will happen is consistent inflation on top of the high prices we are already dealing with. Meaning, the Federal Reserve will continue to hold interest rates higher and prices will barely budge or they may climb in spite of monetary tightening. Even in the face of a major recessionary contraction, which I predict will be triggered starting in April, prices will STILL remain higher.

All the while the mainstream media and government economists will say they have “no idea” why inflation is so persistent, and that “nobody could have seen this coming.” Some of us saw it coming, but only because we accept the reality that the dollar’s days are numbered.

NATO Panics, Escalates Big Arms to Ukraine; U.S. ‘Will Increase Artillery Production Sixfold’; Brian Berletic: Only MICs gain from all this.

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

On January 20th, the great American military and geostrategic analyst Brian Berletic, who has had a stunningly high percentage of his predictions turning out to have been 100% accurate, did a youtube at his “The New Atlas” Website, headlining “US, Allies Send More Weapons to Ukraine in Absence of Real Solution”, and it had been sparked by Berletic’s advance knowledge that America and its allies would probably decide to send to Ukraine some of the German-manufactured Leopard tanks and some of the U.S.-manufactured Abrams tanks. Near the end of his video, at 25:24 in it, he summarized what the prior portion had already documented to be the case: that these tanks will be useless to turning the tide of this war away from a Russian victory, and into a U.S.-and-allied victory.

Then, on January 25th, came the announcements that America, Germany, and Poland, had, in fact, decided to do this (send those tanks to Ukraine), and the BBC reported that, “Germans endured months of political debate about concerns that sending tanks would escalate the conflict and make Nato a direct party to the war with Russia.” The reason why Germany’s leaders ultimately decided to go along with these supplies to Ukraine isn’t that they had concluded that doing so wouldn’t “escalate the conflict and make Nato a direct party to the war with Russia” (and that’s oblique terminology for “globalize the war in Ukraine and turn it into a very hot WW III between NATO (the U.S.) and Russia”) but was instead that “The US and Germany had resisted internal and external pressure to send their tanks to Ukraine for some time.” The BBC, being an extension of Britain’s own military contractors — such as the world’s 7th-largest weapons-manufacturer, BAE Systems — many of which had been lobbying heavily for this decision, refused to define, or to say anything about, what stood behind that amorphous phrase “external pressure”; and, so, as usual, what was causing what was happening here was being ignored; only the result was being reported. Its cause (source) was banned from being even discussed in the ‘news’-media. However, on Tuesday, January 24th, Politico bannered “U.S. closer to approving ‘significant number’ of Abrams tanks to Ukraine”, and reported that, “On Tuesday, shortly after news broke of the possible U.S. move, POLITICO reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also plans to announce that German Leopards are heading to Ukraine. Last week, Scholz told U.S. lawmakers [in Switzerland, at the pro-imperialist WEF in Davos, where many billionaires and U.S.-and-allied Governments meet privately each year and which has increasingly come to replace the United Nations that the anti-imperialist FDR had initiated to serve as the basis for international laws, and for these imperialists to come to replace those international laws, by imposing America’s “rules-based international order”] that Berlin would approve the transfer only if the U.S. donated its own tanks first.” But, still, the key individuals who stood behind this supposedly crucial international agreement, to possibly start what could quickly become a nuclear World War Three, wasn’t, at all, being indicated; it was, instead, hidden, and that question wasn’t mentioned, at all — as-if it didn’t ‘really’ matter who, or how, and why, this decision to “escalate the conflict and make Nato a direct party to the war with Russia” had been made — what had caused it to be made.

Sending these additional armaments to Ukraine runs exactly opposite to public opinion in at least the imperial country itself.

The news-report on January 18th by the American polling organization Quinnipiac was headlined “Americans On Biden’s Handling Of Classified Documents: Inappropriate & Serious, But Shouldn’t Face Charges, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Biden Handling Of The Mexican Border Hits Record Low While Majority Back His New Immigration Plan”. Buried deep in it was “U.S. AID TO UKRAINE”, reporting that

As Russia’s war against Ukraine approaches its one-year mark, 33 percent of Americans think the United States is doing too much to help Ukraine, 21 percent think the U.S. is doing too little, and 38 percent think the U.S. is doing about the right amount to help Ukraine. This compares to a Quinnipiac University poll on February 28, 2022 after the war started, when 7 percent of Americans thought the U.S. was doing too much to help Ukraine, 45 percent thought the U.S. was doing too little, and 37 percent thought the U.S. was doing about the right amount to help Ukraine.

Buried yet deeper in it was “16. In your opinion, what is the most urgent issue facing the country today: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, COVID-19, inflation, climate change, health care, racial inequality, immigration, election laws, abortion, gun violence, or crime?”

Here were the findings on that:

#1. Inflation 35%; #2. Immigration 10%; #3. Gun violence 8%; #4. Climate change 7%; #5. Something else than these named items 7%; #6. Health care 6%; #7. Crime 6%; #8. Election laws 5%; #9. Racial inequality 4%; #10. Abortion 4%; #11. DK/NA or Don’t know or not applicable 3%; #12. Russia/Ukraine 3%; #13. Covid-19 1%.

So: not only did more Americans want “U.S. AID TO UKRAINE” to be decreased than wanted it to be increased, and not only did Americans rank the issue itself as being # 12 out of 13 options for the U.S. Government to be focusing on, but the U.S. Government is and has been focusing on it more than on any other, and that focus and those expenditures are now soaring — despite what the public wants. This is normal, not unusual in America, because its Government is perhaps the most corrupt on the planet.. And there is lots of other evidence that it is profoundly corrupt and does not represent the American public. Furthermore, new evidence supporting this is coming in all the time. In fact: a higher percentage of Americans are living in prisons than is the case in any other nation on the planet. Is that consistent with America’s being a democracy?

So: Why is America’s NATO driving its members to shovel yet more weaponry into Ukraine? Is it because these countries are “democracies”? Brian Berletic has a different answer — and, unlike the propagandized one, it recognizes that that is a pure scam excuse (like the invasion and occupation of Iraq used in 2003). The “MIC” Military-Industrial Complex (and that’s controlled by the leading stockholders in the top-100 ‘Defense’ firms) is behind it. NATO is the trade-organization for those international corporations, and it (especially in the U.S. and UK) runs their Governments. That’s why this is being done.

Now that Ukraine’s government will be receiving those tanks, Ukraine is expecting ultimately to receive American jet fighters and missiles that will enable Ukraine to invade Russia at least as far as Moscow — which is only 300 miles away from Ukraine. On the afternoon of January 25th, Reuters headlined “Ukraine sets sights on fighter jets after securing tank supplies”, and reported that Yuriy Sak, who advises Ukraine’s Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, told Reuters, “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us Himars systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get.” If they get nuclear weapons, those will certainly be operated by Americans. And, of course, that has been the U.S. goal ever since Obama started by no later than June of 2011 to plan his coup to take Ukraine.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

360 Degree Surveillance: How Police Use Public-Private Partnerships to Spy on Americans

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“We live in a surveillance state founded on a partnership between government and the technology industry.”— Law Professor Avidan Y. Cover

In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.

Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.  

There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.

With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.

Indeed, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.

As law professor Avidan Y. Cover explains:

A key feature of the surveillance state is the cooperative relationship between the private sector and the government. The private sector’s role is vital to the surveillance both practically and legally. The private sector, of course, provides the infrastructure and tools for the surveillance… The private sector is also critical to the surveillance state’s legality. Under the third-party doctrine, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated when the government acquires information that people provide to corporations, because they voluntarily provide their information to another entity and assume the risk that the entity will disclose the information to the government. Therefore, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calling data, or potentially even their emails. As a result, the government does not normally need a warrant to obtain information transmitted electronically. But the Fourth Amendment is not only a source of protection for individual privacy; it also limits government excess and abuse through challenges by the people. The third-party doctrine removes this vital and populist check on government overreach.

Critical to this end run around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents is a pass play that allows police to avoid public transparency requirements (open bids, public meetings, installation protocols) by having private companies and individuals do the upfront heavy lifting, leaving police to harvest the intel on the back end.

Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.

As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.

What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.

It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.

Over the past 50 years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.

The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022. It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.

The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds. The use of automatic license plate readers (manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield. It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.

The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.

Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.

Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups. When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”

In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.

We would suggest a fourth revolutionary shift to be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.

Finally, Wandt sees autonomous cars equipped with cameras that record everything around them as yet another revolutionary expansion of surveillance to be tapped by police.

Yet in the present moment, it’s those public-private partnerships that signify a watershed moment in the transition from a police state to a surveillance state and sound a death knoll for our privacy rights. This fusion of government power and private power is also at the heart of the surveillance state’s growing stranglehold on the populace.

As always, these intrusions into our personal lives are justified in the name of national security and fighting crime. Yet while the price to be paid for having the government’s so-called protection is nothing less than our right to privacy, the guarantee of safety remains dubious, at best.

As a study on camera surveillance by researchers at City University of New York concluded, the presence of cameras were somewhat effective as a deterrent for crimes such as car burglaries and property theft, but they had no significant effect on violent crimes.

On the other hand, when you combine overcriminalization with wall-to-wall surveillance monitored by police in pursuit of crimes, the resulting suspect society inevitably gives way to a nation of criminals. In such a society, we are all guilty of some crime or other.

The predatory effect of these surveillance cameras has also yet to be fully addressed, but they are vulnerable to being hacked by third parties and abused by corporate and government employees.

After all, power corrupts. We’ve seen this abuse of power recur time and time again throughout history. For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.

Finally, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity. As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”

No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.

It’s George Orwell’s 1984 on a global scale.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, Orwell’s dystopian nightmare has become our looming reality.