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American Apocalypse: The Government’s Plot to Destabilize the Nation Is Working

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out … without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” — H. L. Mencken

The U.S. government is working hard to destabilize the nation.

No, this is not another conspiracy theory.

Although it is certainly not far-fetched to suggest that the government might be engaged in nefarious activities that run counter to the best interests of the American people, doing so will likely brand me a domestic terrorist under the FBI’s new classification system.

Observe for yourself what is happening right before our eyes.

Domestic terrorism fueled by government entrapment schemes. Civil unrest stoked to dangerous levels by polarizing political rhetoric. A growing intolerance for dissent that challenges the government’s power grabs. Police brutality tacitly encouraged by the executive branch, conveniently overlooked by the legislatures, and granted qualified immunity by the courts. A weakening economy exacerbated by government schemes that favor none but a select few. An overt embrace of domestic surveillance tactics if Congress goes along with the Trump Administration’s request to permanently re-authorize the NSA’s de-activated call records program. Heightened foreign tensions and blowback due to the military industrial complex’s profit-driven quest to police and occupy the globe.

The seeds of chaos are being sown, and it’s the U.S. government that will reap the harvest.

Mark my words, there’s trouble brewing.

Better yet, take a look at “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command.

The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.

Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.

The training video anticipates that all hell will break loose by 2030—that’s barely ten short years away—but the future is here ahead of schedule.

We’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front.

By waging endless wars abroad, by bringing the instruments of war home, by transforming police into extensions of the military, by turning a free society into a suspect society, by treating American citizens like enemy combatants, by discouraging and criminalizing a free exchange of ideas, by making violence its calling card through SWAT team raids and militarized police, by fomenting division and strife among the citizenry, by acclimating the citizenry to the sights and sounds of war, and by generally making peaceful revolution all but impossible, the government has engineered an environment in which domestic violence is becoming almost inevitable.

The danger signs are screaming out a message

The government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power.

According to the Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. government is grooming its armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems.

What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

And then comes the kicker.

Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

Drain the swamps.

Surely, we’ve heard that phrase before?

Ah yes.

Emblazoned on t-shirts and signs, shouted at rallies, and used as a rallying cry among Trump supporters, “drain the swamp” became one of Donald Trump’s most-used campaign slogans.

Far from draining the politically corrupt swamps of Washington DC of lobbyists and special interest groups, however, the Trump Administration has further mired us in a sweltering bog of corruption and self-serving tactics.

Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Now the government has adopted its own plans for swamp-draining, only it wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.”

And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting?

They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.”

They are “threats.”

They are the “enemy.”

They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).

In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.

In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal elite—the haves—from the have-nots.

If you haven’t figured it out already, we the people are the have-nots.

Suddenly it all begins to make sense.

The events of recent years: the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers.

The government is systematically locking down the nation and shifting us into martial law.

This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls.

Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that there is nothing they can do to alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

Before long, no one will even notice the floundering economy, the blowback arising from military occupations abroad, the police shootings, the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure and all of the other mounting concerns.

It’s happening already.

The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.

Few seem to care about the government’s endless wars abroad that leave communities shattered, families devastated and our national security at greater risk of blowback.

The Deep State’s tactics are working.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, Jade Helm military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and  Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.

Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned about the government’s nefarious schemes to lock down the nation.

Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

All of this has taken place right under our noses, funded with our taxpayer dollars and carried out in broad daylight without so much as a general outcry from the citizenry.

And then you have the government’s Machiavellian schemes for unleashing all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace, then demanding additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threats.

Seriously, think about it.

The government claims to be protecting us from cyberterrorism, but who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.

The government claims to be protecting us from weapons of mass destruction, but what country has one the deadliest arsenals of weapons of mass destruction and has a history of using them on the rest of the world? The U.S. government. Indeed, which country has a history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons and technologies on its own citizens? The U.S. government.

The government claims to be protecting us from foreign armed threats, but who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government. For that matter, where did ISIS get many of their deadliest weapons, including assault rifles and tanks to anti-missile defenses? From the U.S. government.

The government claims to be protecting the world from the menace of foreign strongmen, but how did Saddam Hussein build Iraq’s massive arsenal of tanks, planes, missiles, and chemical weapons during the 1980s? With help from the U.S. government. And who gave Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida “access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry”? The U.S. government.

The government claims to be protecting us from terrorist plots, but what country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.

For that matter, the government claims to be protecting us from nuclear threats, but which is the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon in wartime? The United States.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Just think about it for a minute: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars.

Almost every national security threat that the government has claimed greater powers in order to fight—all the while undermining the liberties of the American citizenry—has been manufactured in one way or another by the government.

Did I say Machiavellian? This is downright evil.

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

It’s time to wake up and stop being deceived by government propaganda.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

Be warned: in the future envisioned by the government, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will be enemies of the state.

For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

What the government failed to explain was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own making, and that “we the people” would become enemy #1.

As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re already enemies of the state.

You want to change things? Start by rejecting the political labels and the polarizing rhetoric and the “us vs. them” tactics that reduce the mass power of the populace to puny, powerless factions.

Find common ground with your fellow citizens and push back against the government’s brutality, inhumanity, greed, corruption and power grabs.

Be dangerous in the best way possible: by thinking for yourself, by refusing to be silenced, by choosing sensible solutions over political expediency and bureaucracy.

When all is said and done, the solution to what ails this country is really not that complicated: decency, compassion, common sense, generosity balanced by fiscal responsibility, fairness, a commitment to freedom principles, and a firm rejection of the craven, partisan politics of the Beltway elites who have laid the groundwork for the government’s authoritarian coup d’etat.

Let the revolution begin.

 

Long Before Epstein: Sex Traffickers & Spy Agencies

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By Elizabeth Vos

Source: Consortium News

The alleged use of sexual blackmail by spy agencies is hardly unique to the case of Jeffrey Epstein. Although the agencies involved as well as their alleged motivations and methods differ with each case, the crime of child trafficking with ties to intelligence agencies or those protected by them has been around for decades.

Some cases include the 1950s -1970s Kincora scandal and the 1981 Peter Hayman affair, both in the U.K.; and the Finders’ cult and the Franklin scandal in the U.S. in the late 1980s. Just as these cases did not end in convictions, the pedophile and accused child-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein remained at arms’ length for years.

“For almost two decades, for some nebulous reason, whether to do with ties to foreign intelligence, his billions of dollars, or his social connections, Epstein, whose alleged sexual sickness and horrific assaults on women without means or ability to protect themselves… remained untouchable,” journalist Vicky Ward wrote in The Daily Beast in July.

The protection of sex traffickers by intelligence agencies is especially interesting in the wake of  Epstein’s death. Like others, Epstein had long been purported to have links with spy agencies. Such allegations documented by Whitney Webb in her multi-part series were recently published in Mintpress News.

Webb states that Epstein was the current face of an extensive system of abuse with ties to both organized crime and intelligence interests. She told CNLive! that: “According to Nigel Rosser, a British journalist who wrote in the Evening Standard in 2001, Epstein apparently for much of the 1990s claimed that he used to work for the CIA.”

Vicky Ward, who wrote on Epstein for Vanity Fair before his first arrest, and claimed the magazine killed one of her pieces after Epstein intervened with editor Graydon Carter, said in a Tweet that one of Epstein’s clients was Adnan Khashoggi, an arms dealer who was pivotal in the Iran Contra scandal and was on the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) payroll. This was also noted in a book “By Way of Deception” by former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky.

The Times of Israel reported that Epstein was an “active business partner with former prime minister Ehud Barak” until 2015, adding: “Barak formed a limited partnership company in Israel in 2015, called Sum (E.B.) to invest in a high-tech startup…. A large part of the money used by Sum to buy the start-up stock was supplied by Epstein.”

Webb wrote he “was a long-time friend of Barak, who has long-standing and deep ties to Israel’s intelligence community.” On the board of their company sat Pinchas Bukhris, a former commander of the IDF cyber unit 8200.

Epstein’s allegedly protected status was revealed by Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who gave Epstein an infamously lenient plea deal in 2007. Acosta, who was forced to resign as President Donald Trump’s labor secretary because of that deal,  reportedly said of the case: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”

Kincora Boy’s Home

Several cases in the unsavory history linking intelligence agencies and sex scandals put the allegations against Epstein in context. Among these was the U.K. Kincora Boy’s Home, where at least 29 boys were reported to have been targeted at the Belfast, Northern Ireland, facility from the mid-1950s until the late 1970s, until it was shut in 1980. It also involved the alleged protection of child sexual abusers at the home and among their clients.

The Irish Times wrote that “destitute boys were systematically sodomised by members of Kincora staff and were supplied for abuse to prominent figures in unionist politics. The abusers – among them MPs, councillors, leading Orangemen and other influential individuals – became potentially important intelligence assets.”

The Belfast Telegraph also quoted former Labour Party MP Ken Livingstone, who said: “MI5 weren’t just aware of child abuse at Kincora Boys’ Home – they were monitoring it. They were getting pictures of a judge in one case, politicians, a lot of the establishment of Northern Ireland going in and abusing these boys.”

Three staff were eventually convicted of sexually abusing minors, which included the housemaster William McGrath, a loyalist “Orangeman” and allegedly an MI5 agent, according to the Belfast Telegraph in July 2014.

Although the U.K.’s Historical Institutional Abuse inquiry ultimately found  “no credible evidence” to support the allegations, two former U.K. intelligence officers maintained their claim of MI5’s involvement: Brian Gemmell says he alerted MI5 to the abuse at Kincora and was told to stop his investigation; and a former army intelligence officer, Colin Wallace, “consistently claimed that MI5, RUC special branch and military intelligence knew about the abuse at Kincora and used it to blackmail the pedophile ring to spy on hardline loyalists,” according to The Guardian.

The Irish outlet, An Phoblacht, wrote: “The systematic abuse of young boys in the Home and the part played by the British intelligence organisations to keep the scandal under wraps ensured that one side of the murky world of Unionist paramilitarism and its links to the crown forces was kept out of the public domain for years.”

In the U.S., the New York State Select Committee On Crime in 1982  investigated nationwide networks of trafficking underage sex workers and producing child pornography. Dale Smith, a committee investigator, noted that call services using minors also profited from “sidelines,” besides the income from peddling prostitution.  Smith said they sold information “on the sexual proclivities of the clients to agents of foreign intelligence.” Presumably, this information could be used to blackmail those in positions of power. Smith added that one call service sold information to “British and Israeli intelligence.”

The Hayman Affair

Another U.K. scandal included allegations that Sir Peter Hayman,  a British diplomat and deputy director of MI6, was a member of the Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE).

Police discovered that two of the roughly dozen pedophiles in his circle had been writing to each other about their interest in “the extreme sexual torture and murder of children,” according to the The Daily Mail.

In 2015, The Guardian reported that former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been “adamant that officials should not publicly name” Hayman, “even after she had been fully briefed on his activities….formerly secret papers released to the National Archives shows.”

Still, Hayman was unmasked as a subscriber to PIE in 1981 by M.P. Geoffrey Dickens, who also reportedly raised the national security risk of Hayman’s proclivities, implying they were a potential source of blackmail sought by intelligence agencies.

The British tabloid The Mirror reported that intelligence agencies, including the KGB and CIA, kept their own dossiers on U.K. establishment figures involved with PIE and the abuse of minors, to blackmail the targets in exchange for information.

Hayman was never charged for his association with PIE: The U.K. attorney general at the time, Sir Michael Havers, defended the decision and denied claims that Heyman was given special treatment.

Labour Party MP Barbara Castle allegedly gave a dossier she compiled on pedophiles in positions of power to U.K. journalist Don Hale in 1984 when he was editor of the Brury Messenger. Hale alleged that soon afterward, police from the “Special Branch, the division responsible for matters of national security,” raided his office and removed the Castle dossier. They then threatened him with a “D-notice,” which prevented him from publishing the story on the threat of up to 10 years in prison.

The Finders Cult

Another group accused of trafficking children, which had links to intelligence agencies, was the “Finders” cult. In 1987, The Washington Post reported that two members were arrested in connection with the alleged abuse of six children. Investigators found materials in Madison County, Virginia, which they said linked to a “commune called the Finders.”

Besides nude photographs of children, a Customs Service memo written by special agent Ramon Martinez refers to files “relating to the activities of the organization in different parts of the world, including “London, Germany, the Bahamas, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Africa, Costa Rica, and Europe.”

Martinez’s memo notes that a Finders’ telex ordered the purchase of two children in Hong Kong. Another expressed interest in “bank secrecy situations.” The memo also documents high-tech transfers to the U.K., numerous properties under the Finders’ control, the group’s interest in terrorism, explosives, and the evasion of law enforcement.

Martinez describes the swift end to his investigation. He wrote that on April 2, 1987, he arrived at the Metropolitan Police Department and was told that all the data was turned over to the State Department which, in turn, advised MPD that “all travel and use of passports by the holders was within the law and no action would be taken. Then he was told that the investigation into the Finders had become a CIA internal matter. The MPD report was classified, not available for review” and “No further action will be taken.”

Martinez was not the only person with unanswered questions. The U.S.News & World Report wrote that N. Carolina Rep. Charlie Rose (Dem.), chair of the House Administration Committee, and Florida’s Rep. Tom Lewis (Rep.) asked “Could our own government have something to do with this Finders organization and turned their backs on these children? That’s what the evidence points to,” says Lewis, adding that “I can tell you that we’ve got a lot of people scrambling, and that wouldn’t be happening if there was nothing here.”

The leniency shown by the State Department and the fact that the CIA would designate the investigation of the Finders group as “an internal matter” raises serious questions. What motive might have driven the CIA to associate with or protect a child abuse ring?

The Franklin Scandal

The Franklin Scandal erupted in 1988, centering on a child-trafficking ring operating in Omaha, Nebraska, by Lawrence E. King Jr., a former vice chairman of the National Black Republican Council: It was alleged that children were provided to politicians in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, among other illegal activities.

The late former state Sen. John Decamp alleged in his book “The Franklin Coverup” that a special committee of the Nebraska Legislature launched a probe to investigate the affair, which involved King being indicted for embezzling money from the Franklin Credit Union. The committee hired former Lincoln, Nebraska, police officer Jerry Lowe, whose reports  suggested that King was involved in “guns and money transfers to Nicaragua,” and was linked with the CIA.

James Flanery, an investigative reporter at The World Herald who reported on the scandal,  told associates that King was “running guns and money into Nicaragua,” and that the CIA was heavily involved.”

Like many scandals before and since, the Franklin case ended with no prosecution of the perpetrators. However, Paul Bonacci, one of the alleged victims, was indicted for perjury. He had alleged that he was sexually abused as a minor in Nebraska and around the country where he was flown by Lawrence King.

In 1999, the Omaha World Herald reported Bonacci was awarded $1 million in damages due to his lawsuit against King and other alleged perpetrators. Decamp, who was Bonacci’s attorney, told the newspaper “Obviously, you don’t award $1 million if you don’t think he (Bonacci) was telling the truth.”

Given the history of child trafficking rings that were allegedly connected with or enjoyed the protection of intelligence services, it is possible that similar claims about Jeffrey Epstein are something the authorities, though unlikely, should investigate.

The Real Big Brother

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Consortium News

Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post, which leads America’s news-media in their almost 100 percent support and promotion of neoconservatism, American imperialism and wars. This includes sanctions, coups, and military invasions against countries that America’s billionaires want to control but don’t yet control — such as Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, Libya, and China.

These are aggressive wars against countries which have never aggressed against the United States. They are not, at all, defensive, but the exact opposite. It’s not necessarily endless war (even Hitler hadn’t planned that), but war until the entire planet has come under the control of the U.S. Government, a government that is itself controlled by America’s billionaires, the funders of neoconservatism and imperialism — in both major American political parties, think tanks, newspapers, TV networks, etcetera.

Bezos has been a crucial part of neoconservatism, ever since, at the June 6-9 2013 Bilderberg meeting, he arranged with Donald Graham, the Washington Post’s owner, to buy that newspaper, for $250 million. Bezos had already negotiated, in March of that same year, with the neoconservative CIA Director, John Brennan, for a  $600 million ten-year cloud computing contract that transformed Amazon corporation, from being a reliable money-loser, into a reliably profitable firm.

That caused Bezos’s net worth to soar even more (and at a sharper rate of rising) than it had been doing while it had been losing money. He became the most influential salesman not only for books, but for the CIA, and for such mega-corporations as Lockheed Martin. Imperialism has supercharged his wealth, but it didn’t alone cause it. Bezos might be the most ferociously gifted business-person on the planet.

Some of America’s billionaires don’t care about international conquest as much as he does, but all of them at least accept neoconservatism; none of them, for example, establishes and donates large sums to, anti-imperialistic organizations; none of America’s billionaires is determined to end the reign of neoconservatism, nor even to help the fight to end it, or at least to end its grip over the U.S. government. None. Not even a single one of them does.

Plutocrat Bezos at the Pentagon with then Defense Secretary Ash Carter, May 2016. (Wikimedia Commons)

But many of them establish and donate large sums to neoconservative organizations, or run neocon organs such as The Washington Post.  That’s the way billionaires are, at least in the United States. All of them are imperialists. They sponsor it; they promote it and hire people who do, and demote or get rid of people who don’t. Expanding an empire is extremely profitable for its aristocrats, and always has been, even before the Roman Empire.

Bezos wants to privatize everything around the world that can become privatized, such as education, highways, health care, and pensions. The more that billionaires control those things, the less that everyone else does; and preventing control by the public helps to protect billionaires against democracy that would increase their taxes and government regulations that would reduce their profits by increasing their corporations’ expenses. So, billionaires control the government in order to increase their takings from the public.

With the help of the war promotion of  The Washington Post, Bezos is one of the world’s top personal sellers to the U.S. military-industrial complex. He controls and is the biggest investor in Amazon corporation, whose Web Services division supplies all cloud-computing services to the Pentagon, CIA and NSA. (He’s leading the charge in the most advanced facial recognition technology too.)

In April there was a headline, “CIA Considering Cloud Contract Worth ‘Tens of Billions’,” which contract could soar Bezos’s personal wealth even higher into the stratosphere, especially if he wins all of it (as he previously did).

He also globally dominates, and is constantly increasing his control over the promotion and sale of books and films, because his Amazon is the world’s largest retailer (and now also one of the largest publishers, producers and distributors.) That, too, can have a huge impact upon politics and government, indirectly, by promoting the most neocon works helping to shape intellectual discourse (and voters’ votes) in the country.

Bezos is crushing millions of retailers by his unmatched brilliance at controlling one market after another as Amazon or as an essential middleman for — and often even a controller of — Amazon’s retail competitors.

He is a strong believer in “the free market”, which he has mastered perhaps better than anyone. This means that Bezos supports the unencumbered ability of billionaires, by means of their money, to control and eventually absorb all who are less powerful than they.

Because he is so enormously gifted himself at amassing wealth, he has thus-far been able to rise to the global top, as being one of the world’s most powerful individuals. The wealthiest of all is King Salman— the owner of Saudi Arabia, whose Aramco (the world’s largest oil company) is, alone, worth over a trillion dollars. (Forbes and Bloomberg exclude monarchs from their wealth-rankings.)

In fact, Bloomberg is even so fraudulent about it as to have headlined on Aug. 10, “The 25 wealthiest dynasties on the planet control $1.4 trillion” and violated their tradition by including on their list one monarch, King Salman, whom they ranked at #4 as owning only $100 million, a ludicrously low ‘estimate’, which brazenly excluded not just Aramco but any of the net worth of Saudi Arabia.

Bloomberg didn’t even try to justify their wacky methodology, but merely presumed the gullibility of their readers for its acceptance. That King, therefore, is at least seven times as rich as Bezos is. He might possibly be as powerful as Bezos is. The supreme heir is lots wealthier even than the supreme self-made billionaire or “entrepreneur” is.

Certainly, both men are among the giants who bestride the world in our era. And both men are libertarians — champions of the belief that property rights (of which, billionaires have so much) are the basis of all rights, and so they believe that the wealthiest people possess the most rights of all, and that the poorest people have the least, and that all persons whose net worths are negative (having more debts than assets) possess no rights except what richer people might donate to or otherwise grant to them, out of kindness or otherwise (such as familial connections).

This — privatization of everything — is what libertarianism is: a person’s worth is his or her “net worth” — nothing else. That belief is pure libertarianism. It’s a belief that many if not most billionaires hold. Billionaires are imperialistic because they seek to maximize the freedom of the super-rich, regardless of whether this means increasing their takings from, or ultimately impoverishing, everyone who isn’t super-rich. They have a coherent ideology. It’s based on wealth. The public instead believes in myths that billionaires enable to be promulgated.

Like any billionaire, Bezos hires and retains employees and other agents who do what he/she wants them to do. This is their direct power. But billionaires also possess enormous indirect power by means of their interdependencies upon one-another, as each large corporation is contractually involved with other corporations, especially with large ones such as they; and, so, whatever power any particular billionaire possesses is actually a shared power, along with the others. (An example was the deal Bezos made with Graham.)

Collectively, they network together, even with ones they might never even have met personally, but only through their representatives, and even with their own major economic competitors. This is collective power which billionaires possess in addition to their individual power as hirers of employees and other agents.

Whereas Winston Smith, in the prophetic allegorical novel 1984, asked his superior and torturer O’Brien, “Does Big Brother exist?”

“‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.’

‘Does he exist in the same way as I exist?’

‘You do not exist,’ said O’Brien.”

This collective power is embodied by Bezos as well as any billionaire does.  A few of the others may embody it too, such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Charles Koch, Sergey Brin, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros,  and Jack Dorsey.  They compete against each other, and therefore have different priorities for the U.S. government; but, all of them agree much more than they disagree in regards to what the Government “should” do (especially that the U.S. military should be expanded — at taxpayer’s expense, of course, not their own).

Basically, Big Brother, in the real world is remarkably coherent and unified — far more so than the public is — and this is one of the reasons why they control Government, bypassing the public.

Here is how all of this plays out, in terms of what Bezos’s agents have been doing:

His Amazon pays low to no federal taxes because the Federal Government has written the tax-laws to encourage companies to do the types of things that Bezos has always wanted Amazon to do.

The U.S. government consequently encourages mega-corporations through taxes and regulations to crush small firms by making it harder for them to grow. That somewhat locks-in the existing aristocracy to be less self-made (as Bezos himself was, but his children won’t be).

Elected politicians overwhelmingly support this because most of their campaign funds were donated by super-rich individuals and their employees and other agents. It’s a self-reinforcing system. Super-wealth controls the government, which (along with the super-wealthy and their corporations) controls the public, which reduces economic opportunity for them. The end-result is institutionally reinforced extreme wealth-inequality, becoming more extreme all the time.

The billionaires are the real Big Brothers. And Bezos is the biggest of them all.

Where’s Ghislaine?

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

It now looks like that photo of Ghislaine Maxwell at a burger bar in California is a fake. It was allegedly taken by her close friend and lawyer, Leah Saffian. Metadata on the image file is tagged with “Meadowgate,” the media investment corporation where Saffian is president. At least one photo shows Ghislaine with Dexter, Saffian’s dog.

What is the point of this photo, which was at first assumed to be legitimate? The answer is quite simple: Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s collaborator in serial rape of 14-year-old girls, is laughing at the so-called justice system.

Here’s Maxwell’s subtext—she is protected, she will never see the inside of a prison cell for the unpardonable crime of making an unknown number of children sex slaves. The civil cases against her and the Epstein estate will fizzle out and go nowhere. She is thumbing her nose at the victims. She once referred to them as “nothing” and trailer park “trash.”   

From USA Today.

Legal experts say it will likely be difficult for prosecutors and Epstein victims to win criminal cases and civil lawsuits against the financier’s former associates… If prosecutors have strong cases against the peripheral players, they would have charged them already.

Ghislaine, the daughter of the late Mossad operative Robert Maxwell, is not a peripheral player. She recruited pervert Epstein’s girls, taught them how to perform oral sex, and loaned them out to his rich and elite friends,. None will go to prison, or even face serious investigation. London police refuse to investigate Prince Andrew. A system of law designed for commoners doesn’t apply to royalty.

After the news cycle leaves Epstein behind, Ghislaine Maxwell will resume her life as a British socialite. She’s a protected intelligence asset like her father—or he was until he stepped on the toes of the wrong people and ended up mysteriously dead. He swindled his employees out of their pension funds. After his death, Maxwell was celebrated in Israel as a national hero.

According to Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, Robert Maxwell was owned by Israeli intelligence.

“We never had any accountability for 9/11. We never had any accountability for the Kennedy assassination,” Kevin Barrett told Press TV. “We never had any accountability for Operation Gladio, which the Pentagon used to murder thousands of innocent people in Europe in false flag operations during the Cold War. We never had accountability in MKUltra when Americans were tortured to death by the CIA in mind control experiments.”

Ditto the Epstein case. It will fade into the sunset and those of us who know the truth—the elite corporate and financial class are responsible for murder, mayhem, and the rape of children and will never be held to account. Those who insist otherwise will be denounced as dangerous conspiracy theorists.

Why is the New York Times still trying to sweep the Epstein case under the rug?

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By Patrick Martin

Source: WSWS.org

A prominent article published in the Washington Post Thursday exposes the systematic violation of prison rules governing the detention of multimillionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein during the period immediately preceding his death on August 10.

Reporter Devlin Barrett writes: “At least eight Bureau of Prisons staffers knew that strict instructions had been given not to leave multimillionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alone in his cell, yet the order was apparently ignored in the 24 hours leading up to his death, according to people familiar with the matter.”

His report continues: “The fact that so many prison officials were aware of the directive—not just low-level correctional officers, but supervisors and managers—has alarmed investigators assessing what so far appears to be a stunning failure to follow instructions, these people said.”

This language is quite extraordinary, suggesting that Post reporters have reason to believe that the security failure has no legitimate explanation, and may have been the result of concerted action to leave Epstein exposed and vulnerable.

The report continues, “Investigators suspect that at least some of these individuals also knew Epstein had been left alone in a cell before he died, and they are working to determine the extent of such knowledge …”

In other words, numerous prison officials, including some in authority, were aware that Epstein—on suicide watch from July 23 to July 29—was alone in a cell, in violation of rules governing at-risk prisoners. (Other press accounts claim that his cellmate was granted bail on Friday, August 9, and released from custody, leaving Epstein by himself.)

Epstein was found dead in his cell the following morning, at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, August 10. During that night, the two guards assigned to check in on him every 30 minutes did not do so. Both were said to have been asleep for some or all of that night, rather than standing watch.

The two guards reportedly falsified the logs to show that they had checked on Epstein as required, but these logs were contradicted by video evidence from a surveillance camera monitoring the hallway outside his cell.

Investigators from the FBI and the inspector-general of the Department of Justice have taken possession of the videotapes, but have released no information about what they show, including whether there were any unauthorized visitors to Epstein’s cell the night he died.

The Post report suggests misconduct on a scale so staggering that it leaves little doubt that Epstein was either murdered or allowed to commit suicide, with the former far more likely. It defies belief that so many Bureau of Prisons employees, including managers and supervisors, could have each independently decided to ignore the rules for handling the most notorious prisoner then in federal custody.

Epstein had been arrested July 6 at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, and was being held on sex-trafficking charges that carried a possible sentence of 45 years in prison. The nature of the charges, combined with his vast wealth and his connections in high places—including to Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew of England, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—ensured maximum television and tabloid publicity for the case.

Many powerful people feared exposure if Epstein were brought to trial, and there is ample evidence that he was preparing an aggressive and highly publicized defense rather than attempting a plea bargain that would have swept the case under the rug. Epstein was meeting with his lawyers for as many as 12 hours a day, and they have described his demeanor as anything but downcast or suicidal. (Epstein denied that he had attempted suicide July 23, claiming he was the victim of an assault by a cellmate).

Under these circumstances, the real question is why the bulk of the American media, spearheaded by the New York Times, has chosen to swallow the claim of “suicide” and denounced any questioning of the official verdict as a “conspiracy theory.” Epstein was killed in downtown Manhattan, only a few miles from Times Square. But most of the reports exposing new evidence in the case have come in the pages of the Washington Post, while the Times has published lengthy reports—such as a front-page account in its edition of Sunday, August 19—which could be summed up as “nothing to see here, move along please.”

It is worth recalling that when Epstein was first arrested, the Times editorialized against making a political issue out of his kid-glove treatment during his first sex-crimes prosecution in 2008. The editorial urged congressional Democrats to stay away from Epstein, although the US Attorney who had recommended a token 13-month sentence in 2008—with six days out of seven on work-release to run his financial empire—was Alex Acosta, chosen by Trump as his secretary of labor.

While the Times warned Democrats that they would be making a martyr of Acosta by examining his conduct in the Epstein case, Acosta was actually forced to resign only a week after the publication of the editorial. Far from fearing that targeting Acosta was too ambitious, the Times editorial board seems rather to have feared that Epstein, followed by Acosta, would become the first two dominoes in a chain that would implicate others perhaps too close for comfort.

 

Related Articles:

Why is the media dismissing questions about Jeffrey Epstein’s death as “conspiracy theories”?
[13 August 2019]

The case of Jeffrey Epstein and the depravity of America’s financial elite
[13 July 2019]

Jeffrey Epstein News Roundup

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Some of the best alternative media analysis related to Jeffrey Epstein through the week after his death.

8/17/19

8/16/19

8/15/19

8/14/19

 

8/13/19

8/12/19

8/11/13

Jeffrey Epstein Out in the Open

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By Jon Rappoport

Source: NoMoreFakeNews.com

NOTE: This article concerns the reporting of Vicky Ward. I’m not automatically assuming her key point is factual, especially since it relies on an unnamed source, who is telling her about a private meeting which the source apparently did not attend. If, however, we assume the key point is accurate…

In my previous piece on Epstein, I cited two articles outside the mainstream, which make a case for Epstein acting as an agent for intelligence services—Mossad/CIA. Obviously, his work would have involved gathering blackmail evidence on powerful men, who had sex with his underage girls. The value of this evidence, to Epstein’s handlers, would be enormous as a means of controlling those men…

I realize many people aren’t satisfied unless they see something in print from a more mainstream source. So let’s try the Daily Beast (7/9/19) and writer Vicky Ward, who has had an extensive career as a reporter and editor (Vanity Fair, NY Post, HuffPost, etc.)

In her Daily Beast article, “Jeffrey Epstein’s Sick Story Played Out for Years in Plain Sight,” Ward attempts to shed light on a moment in time when a strange twist occurred in the Epstein saga. It involved Alexander Acosta.

Alexander Acosta served as Trump’s Labor Secretary from April 28, 2017, to July 19, 2019, when he resigned. In his former job, as US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Acosta made the shocking 2007-2008 sweetheart plea deal with Epstein, canceling any effort to convict him for sex trafficking of minors, and reducing the charge to solicitation of a 14-year-old girl. Epstein pled guilty and received a mild slap on the wrist.

Vicky Ward writes: “Epstein’s name, I was told, had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who’d infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary…”

“’Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?’ Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had ‘been told’ to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. ‘I was told Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and to leave it alone,’ he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.)”

If all this is true, the word came down the line: Epstein had protection coming from intelligence agency players; and he, Acosta, dutifully knuckled under and made the phony plea deal with Epstein. In a blockbuster federal case for widespread sex trafficking. A case that was receiving wall to wall press coverage. But none of that mattered to Acosta, the hell with blowback, contrasted against the intelligence agency clout shielding Jeffrey Epstein.

If Vicky Ward’s source on this is correct, it’s quite possible it wasn’t just Acosta who was cowed and played ball with the higher power. The Trump transition team, who blithely accepted Acosta’s astonishing comment, also could have been following the same marching orders. The Trump team purposely chose Acosta for his new shiny job, as Labor Secretary, because they were told to reward him for his “outstanding work” in the Epstein case.

The transition team could have easily made a list of 20 people who could fill the role of Labor Secretary. But they picked out the man who gave astounding cover to Epstein.

 

Politics Jeffrey Epstein Found Dead In Apparent Suicide Hours After Documents Released — FBI Investigation Launched (Updated)

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By Tyler Durden

Source: Activist Post

Update: The FBI is opening an investigation into Epstein’s death according to media reports.

And according to NBC News correspondent Tom Winter, Epstein was not on suicide watch when he was found in his cell.

“He was, however, housed in his own cell without other inmates.”

Jeffrey Epstein has died after having reportedly committed suicide in his jail cell, according to multiple news reports, after a gurney carrying what is believed to be Epstein was seen wheeled out of the Manhattan Correctional Center around 7:30 a.m., according to the New York Post.

The 66-year-old Epstein was was previously placed on suicide watch after he was found “nearly unconscious” inside his cell with ‘marks on his neck,’ according to a Post report from late July. Investigators questioned former Orange County police officer Nicholas Tartaglione, suspected of killing four men in a cocaine distribution conspiracy, in connection with the incident. The former cop claimed to have not seen anything nor touched Epstein.

Needless to say, today’s news is highly suspicious.

As the Wall Street Journal‘s Ted Mann notes, “Even the time of day in this story is shocking. The first check-in on a prisoner who had already attempted suicide once was not until 7:30 a.m.?”

https://twitter.com/QTRResearch/status/1160180202196131842

The apparent suicide comes just hours after a massive trove of documents was unsealed in a case linked to Epstein, in which one of his victims said she was forced to perform sex acts with high-profile individuals, including former Maine Sen. George Mitchell (D), former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D), money manager Glenn Dubin and MIT professor Marvin Minsky.

Virginia Giuffre, now an adult, says she was also sent to modeling executive Jean Luc Brunel and the late MIT scientist Marvin Minsky, according to parts of a 2016 deposition she gave. The testimony by Giuffre, who claims she was a “sex slave” for Epstein from 2000 to 2002, expands on her previous allegations, in court filings and tabloids, that she was forced to have sex with the U.K.’s Prince Andrew and Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz. Both men have strenuously denied those allegations. –Bloomberg

He was arrested on July 6 at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey on charges of sex-trafficking minors and subsequently denied bail.

Meanwhile, Epstein’s personal pilots had been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors in Manhattan last month, which could be used to corroborate accounts from Epstein’s accusers, as well as his travels and associates.

A conveniently timed sale

While prosecutors claimed that Epstein owns two private jets, the registered sex offender’s attorneys said in a court filing earlier this month that he owns one private jet, and “sold the other jet in June 2019.” Considering that he was arrested after returning from Paris in his Gulfstream G550, per Bloomberg, it suggests that Epstein sold his infamous and evidence-rich Boeing 272-200 known as the “Lolita Express” weeks before his arrest.

According to flight logs, former President Bill Clinton flew on the “Lolita Express” a total of 27 times. “Many of those times Clinton had his Secret Service with him and many times he did not,” according to investigative journalist Conchita Sarnoff – who first revealed the former president’s extensive flights on Epstein’s “lolita express” in a 2010 Daily Beast exposé.

Clinton claimed in a July statement that he only took “a total of four trips on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane” in 2002 and 2003, and that Secret Service accompanied him at all times – which Sarnoff told Fox News was a total lie.

“I know from the pilot logs and these are pilot logs that you know were written by different pilots and at different times that Clinton went, he was a guest of Epstein’s 27 times,” said Sarnoff.

“It would not be surprising to find that some of these flight logs…were likely designed to hide evidence of criminal activity—or perhaps later cleansed of such evidence,” wrote the lawyers for some of Epstein’s accusers in a 2015 court filing.

Investigators may be interested in asking Mr. Epstein’s pilots whether they witnessed any efforts by Mr. Epstein to interfere with law enforcement, according to legal experts. In recent court filings, prosecutors have accused Mr. Epstein of tampering with witnesses, an allegation that Mr. Epstein’s lawyers denied in court.

Federal prosecutors in Miami and Mr. Epstein’s lawyers in 2007 negotiated over the possibility of Mr. Epstein pleading guilty to obstruction of justice, including for an incident involving one of his pilots, according to emails that became public in civil lawsuits. –Wall Street Journal

Meanwhile, prosecutors confirmed in filings that there are “uncharged individuals” in Epstein’s case – which has just gone away.

And look what’s trending:

https://twitter.com/H_2_Ohhh/status/1160186977259524096

Just be careful with those assumptions, citizen.