Tag Archives: Oligarchy

A Shaky Foundation

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

And so castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually.
– Jimi Hendrix

There’s a widespread belief out there that the U.S. and the global economy in general is on much sounder footing ever since the financial crisis of a decade ago. Unfortunately, this false assumption has resulted in widespread complacency and elevated levels of systemic risk as we enter the early part of the 2020s.

All it takes is a cursory amount of research to discover nothing was “reset” or fixed by the government and central bank response to that crisis. Rather, the entire response was just a gigantic coverup of the crimes and irresponsible behavior that occurred, coupled with a bailout designed to enrich and empower those who needed and deserved it least.

Everything was papered over in order to resuscitate a failed paradigm without reforming anything. Since it was all about pretending nothing was structurally wrong with the system, the response was to build more castles of sand on top of old ones that had unceremoniously crumbled. The whole event was a huge warning sign and opportunity to change course, but it was completely ignored. Enter novel coronavirus.

I’ve been concerned about the coronavirus outbreak from the start, and have been tweeting about it consistently for well over a month.

This observation proved prescient within just a few weeks, as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) screwed up its early response to the pandemic in the most sloppy and unimaginable way possible. For whatever reason, the CDC instituted ridiculously stringent guidelines for testing potential infections by limiting testing to only those who recently traveled from China or had contact with someone known to be infected. The CDC continued to stick to these insane guidelines as the disease began to spread rapidly all over the world, particularly in South Korea and Italy.

The event that finally prompted the CDC to change its guidelines was the emergence of the first confirmed incidence of community spread coronavirus in the U.S., which occurred in northern California. The health professionals caring for that patient had requested testing days earlier, but the CDC rejected the initial request, putting medical staff and others at risk for no good reason. On top of all that, the limited testing kits the CDC had sent out didn’t work properly. The level of incompetence and failure we’ve seen from the CDC is almost hard to fathom, but given how hollowed out and corrupt our society has become, shouldn’t be surprising.

At this point, nobody knows what the eventual impact of the coronavirus on the planet will be. Anyone who says they know for sure is lying, but I think we should be taking it very seriously given the potential tail risks. A global pandemic is an uncertain and dangerous thing in the most robust and healthy of systems, but the consequences within a fragile house of cards system such as ours can be devastating.

A month ago, stock market valuations were near the highest ever and interest rates were near the lowest they’ve been in recorded human history. A gigantic “everything bubble” of historic proportions had been blown and investors were flying too close to the sun. It was a balloon looking for a pin, and it found one in the coronavirus. Nobody knew what the pin would be, which is exactly why the stock market collapsed so rapidly the moment investors began to appreciate the gravity of the situation. The fragility of the financial markets should be taken as a warning sign with regard to the rest of the system.

Financial assets have been intentionally blown to nonsensical levels in order to coverup the massive rot underneath. They’ve been masking the fact that much of the underlying economy consists of little more than financial engineering scams and war-making enterprises. The imperial oligarchy we live under is an utterly rotten, corrupt, and fragile superstructure that’s been carefully hidden for ten years under a facade of euphoric markets and a mass of debt-based consumption slaves.

The coronavirus itself should be seen in this context. The global system as it exists is simply not prepared for anything like this, but the reality is things like this do occur from time to time. Maybe we’ll get lucky and avoid the worst case scenario with this virus, but that’s not the point. There will always be other pins, and when your entire superstructure is fundamentally fragile and led by mediocre, corrupt sociopaths, it doesn’t take much to bring it down faster than you can imagine.

We stand at a moment where the fragility of our Potemkin Village paradigm will increasingly confront the harsh realities of meatspace. Coronavirus is a warning. It’s exposing a lot already, and will likely expose far more as it continues to spread. It’s exposing our ridiculous financial bubbles, it’s exposing the fact the U.S. can’t even manufacture its own surgical masks or medicines, and it’s exposing the clownish ineptitude of our leaders and institutions.

It’s important we take this warning to heart and do something useful with it. It’s crucial we understand that the current paradigm is long past its useful life and likely won’t be hanging around much longer. Don’t cry or experience nostalgia for what was, rather, get your stuff together so you can help build and usher in the new world to come.

Those too attached to the way things have been will have a particularly hard time adjusting to the turbulent times ahead, so you want to do whatever you can in order to avoid being in that group. Change doesn’t have to be bad, but resistance to change can be deadly. Don’t allow yourself to be a casualty.

‘What More Do You Need to Know?’ Health Insurance Stocks Drive Wall Street Rebound on Biden Super Tuesday Wins

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“Biden is the preferred candidate for the financial markets.”

By Eoin Higgins

Source: CommonDreams

Health insurance industry stocks surged Wednesday morning in the wake of former Vice President Joe Biden’s strong showing in the Democratic presidential primary’s Super Tuesday contests, opening up 600 points after traders appeared to bet the candidate’s resurgence would box out any chance of single-payer universal healthcare.

“What more do you need to know,” tweeted journalist Jack Mirkinson of the market’s spike.

Sanders has made Medicare for All a centerpiece of his campaign. The healthcare industry has poured millions in ad buys against Sanders after the Vermont senator won primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.

“The industry has long seen Biden as their white knight,” said Dr. Adam Gaffney, the president of Physicians for a National Health Program and an outspoken Medicare for All advocate.

Biden on Tuesday won at least nine of the 14 states up for grabs to Sanders’ four. At press time, Maine was yet to be called, with Sanders and Biden locked in a razor-thin contest.

The market surge came after a rough week for the stock market, which at the end of February saw its biggest decline since the 2008 financial crisis after fears of the economic cost of a worldwide coronvirus pandemic increased.

Business commentators also made the connection between Sanders’ victories in the early primary states, particularly in Nevada, and the market’s poor performance last week.

On Fox Business February 28, billionaire Steve Forbes remarked that the weeklong drop was not only about fears of the coronavirus.

“There’s the political side,” Forbes said of the reason for the poor performance. “In the last week, week-and-a-half, the possibility of Bernie Sanders becoming president of the United States has increased, exponentially.”

According to the Washington Post:

Stocks of healthcare companies roared in response to Biden’s performance. Cigna was up more than 10 percent in morning trading, while UnitedHealth Group rose nearly 12 percent. Humana jumped 1.25 percent and Anthem soared nearly 14 percent.

Investor Ed Yardeni told the Post that Wednesday’s spike was a correction to earlier fears of what he called “Bernie Sanders’ socialist program.”

“The market’s sell-off last week on Sanders’ primary victories and rebound on Monday after Biden’s big win in South Carolina and this morning after Super Tuesday suggest that domestic U.S. politics may matter as much as the global health crisis on investors,” said Yardeni.

As Common Dreams reported, the results—which saw billionaire Michael Bloomberg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) coming in far behind the two frontrunners—transformed a once-crowded primary into a two-man race. Though Biden put up a good showing, exit polls from the contests showed a majority of Democratic voters backing the elimination of private insurance in favor of a government-run system guaranteeing healthcare for all.

The Dem Establishment Successfully Cinched a Biden Super Tuesday Victory

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Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a primary election night campaign rally Tuesday, March 3, 2020, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Super Tuesday has raised the stakes and set the stage for a battle for the Democratic Party’s soul; one that will decide if it stays the course with neoliberalism with Biden or moves towards a progressive social-democratic model with Sanders.

By Alan Macleod

Source: Mint Press News

Former Vice-President Joe Biden built on his victory in South Carolina last week to emerge as the only credible “stop Bernie” candidate after Super Tuesday – where voters in 14 states decided on their nominations for president. While results are still not official, it is clear that the former Delaware senator won the popular vote in at least nine states yesterday, including in Texas, Massachusetts and North Carolina, amassing at least 433 delegates. Sanders has currently secured 388, although that number is likely to rise after all of California is counted.

In one of the most remarkable and drastic political turnarounds in American history, Biden – thought of by many as a yesterday’s man – secured a stunning upset victory after a series of key endorsements. His campaign had been flagging, virtually out of money and without organization or many activists on the ground. As of Monday, he had spent just $1.5 million on TV ads in Super Tuesday states, with aides admitting to CNN their goal was merely to “remain competitive;” a remarkable admission for a presidential campaign.

But facing a Sanders nomination, the establishment wing of the party went into overdrive to find a viable alternative to the Vermont senator. Both Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out and immediately endorsed him, as did other figures like former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke. In a matter of mere hours, the Democratic Party higher-ups managed to coalesce around him in a way the Republicans were unable to in 2016 to stop Trump, proving to the world that the party is certainly not incompetent and can organize and carry out operations with military precision when they perceive it is in their interest to do so.

While the establishment pooled its resources (and delegates) in favor of Biden, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren has refrained from dropping out, let alone endorsing Sanders, thus splitting the progressive vote. Warren finished a distant third in her home state and secured only 28 delegates yesterday. In a defeatist message, her campaign managers said they would hold a meeting to “assess the path forward.”

Biden declared victory in Los Angeles last night, presenting himself as an opponent of the wealthy and a champion of the people: “Let’s get something straight. Wall Street didn’t build this country. You built this country. The middle class built this country. And unions built the middle class,” he told the crowd. But his speech was upstaged by anti-dairy industry protestors who stormed the stage. Earlier in the speech he also confused his wife for his sister.

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1235044512918941698

While it is clear that he will now be the establishment’s candidate for better or worse, the former vice-president has a long history of making egregious errors in speaking. Earlier this week at a rally he tried and failed to recite the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self evident. All men and women created by the…you know, the thing” he stuttered. And while he promises the working-class “cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes” under his presidency, he also told his billionaire backers that he believes they are being “demonized” and that “nothing would change” about America if he were chosen. “I need you very badly,” he told a group of extremely wealthy donors last year.

His policy history and positions, too, might be cause for concern for many voters in the presidential election. These include advocating for cuts to social services, fighting against abortion rights, and supporting NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act and the attacks on Iraq and Libya. And while he retains strong support among Southern black voters, he helped write the 1994 Crime Bill and the Anti-Drug Abuse Bill that exploded the prison population, and fought for segregation and against integration. President Trump has already nicknamed him “Handsy Joe” in reference to his inappropriate touching of women and girls.

While Sanders supporters will be disappointed with the results, other candidates had even worse nights. Chief among them was Michael Bloomberg, who spent more than half a billion dollars on his campaign, picking up just 12 delegates, a third of them in American Samoa. Given his poor performance, that works out to nearly $50 million per delegate. The former Mayor of New York dropped out today, endorsing Biden for the nomination. If he is willing to financially aid Biden anything like how he lavishly spent on himself, Sanders will be fighting a seriously uphill battle.

“It really is a class war we’re up against,” said author and progressive journalist Naomi Klein, who has been traveling with the Sanders team.

The vast majority of this campaign are working class people who are daring to hope for the barest decent things in life. It is this amazing process of raising people’s expectations…What we’re seeing with this establishment pushback, this is not against Bernie Sanders, it is against them. It is against people saying ‘I have a right to healthcare. I have a right to a living wage,’ and it is really sad to see.”

Biden has strong support among the wealthy, the elderly and among Southern black voters. But if he is to win outright and beat Trump in November, he will need to address the age gap in voting. Even in Alabama, where he fared worst, Sanders still comfortably won the vote of those under 30. While there is much work to be done, yesterday was a good day for the establishment wing of the Democratic Party.

Next week will see six more states as well as the Democrats Abroad primaries decided. But Super Tuesday has raised the stakes and set the stage for a battle for the Democratic Party’s soul; one that will decide if it stays the course with neoliberalism with Biden or moves towards a progressive social-democratic model with Sanders.

The Looming Financial Nightmare: So Much for Living the American Dream

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

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

Let’s talk numbers, shall we?

The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is $23 trillion and growing.

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

The national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) is projected to surpass $1 trillion every year for the next 10 years.

The United States spends more on foreign aid than any other nation ($50 billion in 2017 alone). More than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance, with most of the funds going to the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Meanwhile, almost 60% of Americans are so financially strapped that they don’t have even $500 in savings and nothing whatsoever put away for retirement, and yet they are being forced to pay for government programs that do little to enhance or advance their lives.

Folks, if you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re not living the American dream.

We’re living a financial nightmare.

The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones who will pay for it.

As financial analyst Kristin Tate explains, “When the government has its debt bill come due, all of us will be on the hook.” It’s happened before: during the European debt crisis, Cypress seized private funds from its citizens’ bank accounts to cover its debts, with those who had been careful to save their pennies forced to relinquish between 40% to 60% of their assets.

Could it happen here? Could the government actually seize private funds for its own gain?

Look around you. It’s already happening.

In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.

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

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

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

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

It wasn’t always this way, of course.

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

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

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

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

It’s all gone downhill from there.

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

Irwin A. Schiff was one of the nation’s most vocal tax protesters. He spent a good portion of his life arguing that the income tax was unconstitutional, and he put his wallet where his conscience was: Schiff stopped paying federal taxes in 1974.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out more than $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.”

That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.

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

That price tag keeps growing, too.

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

As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech:

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

This is still no way of life.

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

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

Are you getting the picture yet?

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

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

This is nothing less than financial tyranny.

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

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

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

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

The powers-that-be want to pit us against one another. They want us to adopt an “us versus them” mindset that keeps us powerless and divided.

Trust me, the only “us versus them” that matters anymore is “we the people” against the police state.

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

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

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

That remains our greatest strength in the face of a governmental elite that continues to ride roughshod over the populace. It remains our greatest defense against a government that has claimed for itself unlimited power over the purse (taxpayer funds) and the sword (military might).

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

While we’re on the subject, do me a favor and don’t let yourself be fooled into believing that the next crop of political saviors will be any different from their predecessors. They all talk big when they’re running for office, and when they get elected, they spend big at our expense.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is how the middle classes, who fuel the nation’s economy and fund the government’s programs, get screwed repeatedly.

George Harrison, who would have been 77 this year, summed up this outrageous state of affairs in his song Taxman:

If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,

If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.

If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,

If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.

Don’t ask me what I want it for

If you don’t want to pay some more

‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman.

Now my advice for those who die

Declare the pennies on your eyes

‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman

And you’re working for no one but me.

Anonymous sources and the guys and gals who made the Iraq war a reality are now claiming that the Kremlin is at it again!

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By Philip Giraldi

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Those hapless individuals who run the United States are again slipping into a fantasy world where Americans are besieged by imaginary threats coming from both inside and outside the country. Of course, it is particularly convenient to warn of foreign threats, as it makes the people in government seem relevant and needed, but one might recommend that the tune be changed as it is getting a bit boring. After all, there are only so many hours in the day and Russian President Vladimir Putin must pause occasionally to eat or sleep, so the plotting to destroy American democracy must be on hold at least some of the time.

Yes, anonymous sources and the guys and gals who made the Iraq war a reality are now claiming that the Kremlin is at it again! Hints over the past year that Putin might try to replay 2016 in 2020 only do it better this time have now been confirmed! Per one news report the enemy is already at the gates: “U.S. intelligence officials told lawmakers last week that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election campaign by aiming to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote and boost President Donald Trump’s re-election.”

And there’s more! In a New York Times article headlined “Same Goal, Different Playbook: Why Russia Would Support Trump and Sanders: Vladimir Putin is eager both to take the sheen off U.S. democracy and for a counterpart who is less likely to challenge his territorial and nuclear ambitions,” it was revealed that the Kremlin is intending to also help Bernie Sanders, so whichever way the election goes they win.

According to the Times Bernie has been “warn[ed]… of evidence that he is the Russian president’s favorite Democrat.” The article then goes on to explain, relying on its anonymous sources, that “…to the intelligence analysts and outside experts who have spent the past three years dissecting Russian motives in the 2016 election, and who tried to limit the effect of Moscow’s meddling in the 2018 midterms, what is unfolding in 2020 makes perfect sense. Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders represent the most divergent ends of their respective parties, and both are backed by supporters known more for their passion than their policy rigor, which makes them ripe for exploitation by Russian trolls, disinformation specialists and hackers for hire seeking to widen divisions in American society.”

The Times article was written by David Sanger, the paper’s venerable national security correspondent. He is reliably wedded to Establishment views of the Russian threat, as is his newspaper, and strikes rock bottom in his assessment when he cites none other than “Victoria Nuland, who in a long diplomatic career had served both Republican and Democratic administrations, and had her phone calls intercepted and broadcast by Russian intelligence services.” Nuland, clearly the victim of a nefarious Russian intelligence operation that recorded her saying “fuck the EU,” opined that “Any figures that radicalize politics and do harm to center views and unity in the United States are good for Putin’s Russia.” Nuland is perhaps best known for her role in spending $5 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to overthrow the legitimate government of Ukraine. She is married to leading neoconservative Robert Kagan, which Sanger fails to mention, and is currently a nonresident fellow at the liberal interventionist Brookings Institution. She also works at former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s consultancy, presumably for the Benjamins. Albright, one might recall, thought that killing 500,000 Iraqi children through U.S. sanctions was “worth it.”

Given the fact that Russia will have very limited resources in their effort to corrupt American democracy, which is, by the way, doing a very good job of self-destruction without any outside help, how exactly will they do it? Sanger explains “As they focus on evading more vigilant government agencies and technology companies trying to identify and counter malicious online activity, the Russians are boring into Iranian cyberoffense units, apparently so that they can initiate attacks that look as if they originate in Iran — which itself has shown interest in messing with the American electoral process… And, in one of the most effective twists, they are feeding disinformation to unsuspecting Americans on Facebook and other social media. By seeding conspiracy theories and baseless claims on the platforms, Russians hope everyday Americans will retransmit those falsehoods from their own accounts. That is an attempt to elude Facebook’s efforts to remove disinformation, which it can do more easily when it flags ‘inauthentic activity,’ like Russians posing as Americans. It is much harder to ban the words of real Americans, who may be parroting a Russian story line, even unintentionally.”

So those wily Russians are making themselves look like Iranians and they are planning on “feeding disinformation” to “unsuspecting Americans” consisting of “conspiracy theories” and “baseless claims.” Sounds like a plan to me as the various occupants of the White House and Congress have been doing exactly that for the past twenty years. That we had a national election in 2016 in which a reality television personality ran against an unindicted criminal would seem to indicate that the effort to brainwash the American people has already been successful.

The usual bottom feeders are also piling on to the Russian interference story. Jane Harman, former congresswoman who once colluded with Israeli intelligence to lobby the Department of Justice to drop criminal charges against two employees of AIPAC in exchange for Israel’s support to make her chair of the House Intelligence Committee, warns “How dangerous it would be if we lose the tip of the spear against those who would destroy us.”

Former CIA Director John Brennan also has something to say. He is “very disturbed” by his conviction that Russia is actively meddling in the 2020 campaign in support of President Trump. He said “We are now in a full-blown national security crisis. By trying to prevent the flow of intelligence to Congress, Trump is abetting a Russian covert operation to keep him in office for Moscow’s interests, not America’s.” Brennan is best known for having orchestrated the illegal campaign to vilify Trump and his associates prior to, during and after the 2016 election. He also participated in a weekly meeting with Barack Obama where he and the president would add and remove names from a “kill list” of U.S. citizens residing overseas. He and his boss should both be in prison, but they are instead fêted as American patriots. Go figure.

Time to take a step back from the developing panic. As usual, the U.S. government intelligence agencies have produced no actual evidence that Moscow is up to anything, and there are already reports that the Office of National Intelligence briefer “overstated” her case against the Kremlin in her briefing of the House Intelligence Committee. Sure, the Russians have an interest in an American election and will favor candidates like Trump and Sanders that are not outright hostile to them, but to claim as the NY Times does that Russia has incompatible “territorial and nuclear interests” is a stretch. And yes, Moscow will definitely use its available intelligence resources to monitor the nomination and election process while also clandestinely doing what it can to improve the chances of those individuals they approve of. That is what intelligence agencies do.

In American Establishment groupthink there is one standard for what Washington does and quite a different standard for everyone else. Does it shock any American to know that the United States has interfered in scores of elections all over the world ever since the Second World War, to include those in places like France and Italy well into the 1980s? And in somewhat more kinetic covert actions, actually removing Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran, Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Mohamed Morsi in Egypt just for starters, not even considering the multiple plots to kill Fidel Castro. And it continues to do so today openly in places like Iran and Venezuela while also claiming hypocritically that the U.S. is “exceptional” and also a “force for good.” That anyone should be genuinely worrying about Russian proxies buying and distributing a couple of hundred thousands of dollars’ worth of ads in an election in which many billions of dollars’ worth of propaganda will be on the table is ridiculous. It is time to stop blaming Russia for the failure of America’s ruling class to provide an honest and accountable government and one that does not go around the world looking for trouble. That is what the 2020 election should really be all about.

Subcomandante Bloomberg

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By CJ Hopkins

Source: Consent Factory, Inc.

Break out the pussyhats and vuvuzelas, folks, because the neoliberal Resistance is back, and this time they’re not playing around. No more impeachments and investigations. It’s time to go mano-a-mano with Trump, and they’ve finally got just the bad hombre to do it. No, not Bernie Sanders, you commies. A battle-hardened Resistance fighter. El Caballo Pequeño! El Jefe Mínimo! Subcomandante Michael Bloomberg!

Yes, that’s right, Michael Bloomberg, multi-billionaire Republicrat oligarch, has mobilized a guerilla army of overpaid PR professionals, Wall Street sociopaths, liberal racists, and anti-outdoor-smoking fanatics, and is steamrolling toward the Democratic convention to buy a brokered nomination and save America from “Putinism.” He’s had it with you sugary-soft-drink-drinking, chain-smoking, gun-toting, Oxy-gobbling, Hitler-loving, Putinist peasants and your infatuation with Donald Trump. So he’s decided to transform the entire country into a sterile, upscale, fascist themepark where you can rent a studio for $3,000 a month and the cops keep “the darkies” in their place, like he successfully did to New York City.

Although his campaign seemed to come out of nowhere (and sort of resembles a desperate attempt to prevent a Bernie Sanders nomination), the Resistance have been planning this corporatist Tet Offensive for quite some time. Apparently, Subcomandante Bloomberg and his inner circle of sub-subcomandantes have been hiding out deep in the mountainous jungles of Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side (or in the Hamptons, or London, or in one of El Jefe’s other multi-million-dollar homes) since Trump and the Russians invaded the country, waiting for the perfect moment to start inundating the American people with television commercials and social media posts informing them of his “electability.”

Clearly, that moment has now arrived.

Bloomberg has spent over $400 million on TV, radio, and digital ads, and it isn’t even Super Tuesday yet. He bought the Democratic National Committee and had them change the rules so he could join the debates (which, based on his poor performance in Las Vegas, might not have been the most brilliant strategy). He has been buying politicians, community organizers, journalists, pundits, his opponents’ campaign staff, Instagram and Facebook influencers, and everyone else he can possibly buy to support his campaign to buy the presidency … which is totally legal, and the American way, and is our only hope of overthrowing the Putin-Nazi Occupation Government and regaining our God-given capitalist freedom!

Sure, to some folks, it looks … well, unseemly (not to mention decidedly undemocratic), this Wall Street oligarch attempting to bribe and bully his way into the White House, but, given the stakes, what choice do we have? As the corporate media and intelligence agencies have been telling us for the last three years, the country is under occupation by an evil conspiracy of Russian-backed Nazis personally controlled by Vladimir Putin! More or less any moment now, Putin is going to order Trump to nullify the U.S. Constitution, declare martial law, appoint himself Führer, and start rounding up and murdering the Jews … or investigating Hunter Biden, or the spooks who have been trying to force him out of office.

This Putin-Nazism cannot continue! Trump must be deposed, no matter the cost. As Robert Reich put it in this piece in The Guardian:

“If the only way we can get rid of the sociopathic tyrant named Trump is with an oligarch named Bloomberg, we will have to choose the oligarch.”

There you have it, folks. We’ll have to choose Bloomberg, or else his golf buddy, Literal Hitler, will destroy the fabric of democracy, or whatever.

Another op-ed in The Washington Post, It Might Be Time to Take Bloomberg Seriously, wondered, if it comes down to Bloomberg versus Bernie:

“Do you choose socialism or capitalism? An ideologue or an executive? Are you really going to ask Americans to trade one extreme for the other, or do you want to offer them a certified, electable moderate?”

Vox, in its “Case for Michael Bloomberg — Mike Bloomberg and His Billions Are What Democrats Need to Beat Trump,” observes that, sure, Bloomberg has drawbacks, like his history of racist remarks and policies, abusing women, oppressing the poor, and just generally being an arrogant little authoritarian corporatist creep, but hey, he’s apologized for all that stuff, and he’ll probably never do it again.

Plus, according to this piece in …uh, Bloomberg Opinion (which “does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Bloomberg LP and its owners”), The 2020 Election Is a Choice Between Democracy and Putinism! At the end of the day, once the dust has settled:

“It will come down to rule of law. In November, Americans will decide whether they will fight for the foundation of liberal democracy and democratic capitalism or whether they will accede to Putinism.”

You’ll be hearing variations of this message over and over, and over again, as we approach election day in November … that is, assuming Bloomberg and the rest of the Resistance can buy, bribe, badger, and bamboozle enough Democratic voters into nominating him. First, they need to deal with Bernie Sanders and his swarm of kill-crazy commie terrorists (who rumor has it are also being remotely controlled by Vladimir Putin). To do this, all they will need to do is deny Sanders a first ballot win in Milwaukee, which shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish. Sure, a brokered convention will be ugly, but, as Robert Reich said, they’ll have to do it, or else … well, you know, end of democracy.

Yes, I’m aware that Subcomandante Bloomberg blew his first debate (prompting Twitter pundits to pronounce him DOA) and that millions of “progressive” Democrats hate him, and that the corporate media are running a lot of “Bloomberg’s Nasty Past” pieces now (in order to maintain the appearance of journalism), but, make no mistake, if he secures the nomination, they’ll be lining up to “reluctantly” endorse him, because the alternative will be Russian Hitler!

Look, it’s easy to get distracted by the day-to-day ups and downs of the horse race (which is the primary purpose of the horse race, after all) and forget that we are in the middle of a global capitalist War on Populism … a war that GloboCap intends to win. Sure, they will survive another four years of Trump (or even four years of Sanders if they have to), but, at some point, in order to restore “normality,” or “democratic capitalism,” or whatever, they are probably going to need to stop dicking around and install a bona fide global capitalist oligarch in the Oval Office. They are going to need to do this in order to crush the hopes of the populist insurgency that erupted in the Spring of 2016, and led to the rise of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, the Brexit, the ongoing protests in France, the downfall of Angela Merkel, etc.

Another Obama is not going to cut it … people aren’t buying that con anymore. No, if the empire is going to reestablish control, it is going to need to take its liberal mask off, and shove a blatant corporatist oligarch like Bloomberg down the public’s throat in order to remind everyone who’s boss. It may not be Michael Bloomberg this time, but it is going to be someone like Bloomberg eventually. Someone powerful, and extremely unpleasant, who will be sold to us as the only one who can save the world from the “Nazis” and the “Russians” … which will necessitate taking some very extreme measures, like the ones we took during the War on Terror. You remember the measures we took back then, don’t you?

Or what, you think that GloboCap has been manufacturing all this mass hysteria over “Russian election interference” and “Nazi terrorism” for their own amusement? Yeah, that’s probably all it is. It’s probably not a prelude to anything.

Financial Feudalism

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

“Happy 18th Birthday! Meet your new Daddy,” read one website advertisement. “Do you have strong oral skills? We’ve got a job for you!” cooed another.

A message on another billboard directed at the “daddies” was more blunt: “The alternative to escorts. Desperate women will do anything”…

SeekingArrangement was founded by Las Vegas tech tycoon Brandon Wade. Wade is apparently worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million. His motto is, “Love is a concept invented by poor people”…

SA also markets itself as an antidote to student debt. In the U.S. and elsewhere, college students are enduring financial instability and hardship. Because of rising college fees and rent, and the lack of time available for work during studies, many women are extremely vulnerable to exploitation. “SeekingArrangement.com has helped facilitate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of arrangements that have helped students graduate debt-free,” Wade boasts on the website. Promotional videos show young, beautiful women enrolled in “Sugar Baby University” — in classrooms, holding wads of cash, driving luxury cars, and discussing the pleasure and ease of being a sugar baby.

When signing up for an account, potential sugar babies are told, “Tip: Using a .edu email address earns you a free upgrade!”

– TruthDig: Sugar-Coated Pimping

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

– Frédéric Bastiat

Watching politics unfold in the post-financial crisis era has been extraordinarily frustrating. While it’s been refreshing to observe the emergence of grassroots populism over the last few years, there’s a problematic lack of depth and clarity embedded in these burgeoning mass movements. Tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans now acknowledge that something’s deeply broken within the current paradigm, but we remain focused on identifying symptoms as opposed to understanding and rectifying the systemic nature of the problem.

Of course, there are numerous complexities when it comes to the administration of an imperial oligarchy, and our system didn’t emerge overnight. Perhaps the most fundamental mutation of the post WW2 era came in 1971 when the international convertibility of U.S. dollars into gold was severed. This is when the country began its long transformation from a largely industrial empire to a financial one. I’ve often highlighted how the purely fiat USD reserve currency is the most powerful weapon ever invented, and how the U.S. control of the global financial system is the true backbone of empire, but it’s equally important to understand how the predatory financial system is also used to subjugate Americans in their own country.

In order to understand how this works we need to dig into the most fundamentally important four letter word in any modern economy: Debt.

When most people consider the debilitating societal effects of excessive debt they tend to see it from one basic level. How the bottom half of the population essentially has no choice but to borrow in order to participate in the economy as constructed. This is because the cost of so many things has been inflated way beyond the capacity of most people to purchase them outright. Specifically, wage growth has failed to keep up with the soaring costs of fundamental things such as shelter, healthcare and higher education.

For instance, home prices have been rising faster than wages in 80% of U.S. markets, which means the higher cost tends to offset historically low mortgage rates. Low interest rates don’t really help such people, it just lets them maybe, barely purchase an intentionally inflated asset to live in by taking on a huge chunk of debt. An asset that could quickly become completely unaffordable should the economy turn down as it did a decade ago.

As such, you have multitudes taking on debt defensively just to keep going and avoid falling further down the socioeconomic scale. Debt doesn’t empower such people, rather, it turns them into modern day indentured servants endlessly stuck on a hamster wheel with little to no hope of getting off. This is not an accident, it’s a tried and tested tool which, when combined with incessant mass media propaganda, is an effective way of creating a submissive, confused and desperate underclass.

Many people understand this by now, but what’s far less understood, yet potentially more significant, is how the wealthy use debt.

When you own your primary home outright and you’ve got enough savings that healthcare premiums and paying for your kids college in cash doesn’t make a dent, debt becomes something else entirely. Debt’s no longer an albatross around your neck, instead it becomes a tool to increase wealth. Debt becomes leverage.

Much of the explosion in wealth inequality over the past several decades can be traced back to this systemic interclass weaponization of debt. If you’re very wealthy and connected, access to extremely cheap debt is virtually unlimited, and this access is used to make leveraged bets on all sorts of stuff, but primarily real estate and financial assets such as stocks and bonds. Hasn’t this always been the case you ask? Aren’t those with capital always extremely advantaged over those without it? Isn’t that the history of capitalism and America since the beginning? My answer would be yes and no.

The main difference between prior periods of history and, let’s say the 21st century, has been the vast increase in power of the financial services sector thanks to the Federal Reserve’s willingness to encourage and enable the insatiable reckless behavior of the speculator class. It’s no secret the Fed has been intentionally boosting assets across the FIRE sector such as real estate, stocks and bonds since the crisis. Those with the capital to ride the coattails of this irresponsible and undemocratic central planning rushed out to take on debt to buy these assets, thus multiplying the return on investment.

While the white-collar cubicle worker with enough extra income to diligently add to their retirement account over the past decade has done fine, bankers or hedge fund managers who took on massive leverage to amplify such bets made generational fortunes while creating nothing of value. It’s the way debt works for the financial services sector versus how it works for the average person in a world dominated by big finance and the central bankers who provide them unlimited welfare.

The same thing occurs within the corporate suite, as executives across industries have used access to extremely cheap debt to buyback stock and reward themselves handsomely despite creating nothing of societal value while doing so. It’s pure financial engineering. Nobody should become generationally wealthy this way, but it’s exactly what’s been happening. So you see, debt’s not just a means to subjugate a desperate bottom half of the population, it’s concurrently an effective tool to expand wealth and power at the top. 

Then there’s this.

When was the last time the bond market paid you to make an acquisition? As Max Keiser so eloquently puts it, this is interest rate apartheid.

But it’s even more pernicious than that. It’s still possible for regular wealthy people to take on too much leverage, make a mistake, and lose their fortunes — unless of course you’re an executive at major financial services firm. In that case you simply can’t lose, which was the primary lesson learned from the response to the financial crisis.

Not only were the titans of this industry not jailed, they walked away with their fortunes intact. The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government made this happen. It wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t to “save the economy;” that’s just nonsense talk for the confused masses. The entire point was to consolidate and further entrench the unaccountable power of those at the very top of the finance feudalism paradigm and signal they’ll also be bailed out for any future catastrophe they create.

Significantly, financial feudalism isn’t just interclass, it’s also intergenerational. The stock market and real estate crash of a decade ago was the market’s attempt to reset those assets more in line with median incomes, but central banks would have none of that. They determined asset prices needed to be re-inflated as much as possible as fast as possible, and these unelected banker stooges went about implementing this major policy decision of central economic planning with zero public debate. Young people entering the workforce had no savings and poor wage growth, so a generation was quickly priced out of homeownership while simultaneously stuck with an enormous pile of student debt. The results of all this are unsurprising.

The crisis facing this country is simmering and metastasizing under the surface of misleading aggregate economic data and record stock markets. While it’s tempting to focus on the symptoms, we’ll never confront and tackle any of this properly unless we understand the structure and how the game is really played. The system you’re living in isn’t capitalism or socialism, it’s financial feudalism. 

Bloomberg Was Stopped, Frisked and Bruised at Debate

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Democratic Debate February 19, 2020 (Left to Right: Michael Bloomberg, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Senator Amy Klobuchar.)

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Source: Wall Street on Parade

Michael Bloomberg reaffirmed for those who have turned off the news since January 20, 2017 that no one, not even his own mock debate team, dares to tell a powerful billionaire what he doesn’t want to hear. And that’s one of the key reasons that billionaires are so dangerous to high public office – they hear only their own voice.

Bloomberg’s performance on the Democratic Debate stage last night was painfully embarrassing. It was like watching an overly-hyped downhill skier, in his first appearance at the U.S. Olympics, trip on his skies getting off the chair lift and slide down the mountain on his belly – making a few awkward groans on the way down.

Voters across the country who had been inundated with Bloomberg’s $409 million in advertisements (ten times what Senator Bernie Sanders has spent) were likely shaking their heads in amazement that such an amateur had made it onto the debate stage with three U.S. Senators and a former Vice President.

To give you a broader assessment of just how lacking in charisma and oratory skills the former Mayor of New York City was last night, Politico Magazine asked 14 political experts for their views on the debate. This is a sampling of what they had to say about Bloomberg:

Alan Schroeder, Professor, School of Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston: “In his ubiquitous TV ads, Bloomberg depicts himself as an Obama-like progressive with the passion and know-how to set the country on a correction course. But in his first debate, Bloomberg came off as something quite different: a bland, clueless billionaire with feet of clay. Despite extensive preparation, Bloomberg was totally unready for the rough-and-tumble of a presidential primary debate, unready even for issues he must certainly have known would come up. Democratic voters hoping that Bloomberg might swoop in and grab the nomination on the basis of charisma and superior performance skills instead ended up with one more name to cross off their list.”

Michelle Bernard, political analyst, lawyer, author, president and CEO of the Bernard Center for Women, Politics & Public Policy: “After 10 weeks of hype, millions of dollars spent on ads, endorsements from highly respected members of the African American community and a double-digit surge in the polls, we learned that Bloomberg does not deserve any of the African American support he has received to date. From stop and frisk to overt and unapologetic sexism, the former mayor appears to be nothing more than Trump bathed in blue.”

Larry J. Sabato, founder and Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics and contributing editor at Politico Magazine. “Bloomberg was the foremost loser. To be blunt, he was terrible. It’s been about a dozen years since his last debate, so I didn’t suppose he’d shine. But I never expected him to look timid and act nervous….”

John Neffinger, speaker coach, lecturer on political communication at Georgetown University and Columbia Business School, and former communications director of the Democratic National Committee: “Bloomberg, who had a case to make but was not prepared to take incoming fire, didn’t make a strong case for his progressive credentials and showed no charisma or spark—suggesting that it might be a dreary four years with him on our screens and radios every day.”

Jennifer Lawless, Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia: “To say that Bloomberg underperformed is to understate how poor the former mayor’s performance really was. He was disengaged, ill-prepared to respond to questions he was sure to be asked—from allegations of sexism to racism to classism—and seemingly unaware that he needed to convince Democrats that he could defeat Trump. He exhibited neither the fiery energy embodied in his recent tweets nor the acumen of a politician who needs to seal a deal.”

Read the full analysis at Politico here.

The worst moment of the night for Bloomberg came from Senator Elizabeth Warren who stunned the audience with this:

“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians.’ And, no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop and frisk. Look, I’ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is, but understand this, Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another. This country has worked for the rich for a long time and left everyone else in the dirt. It is time to have a President who will be on the side of working families and be willing to get out there and fight for them. That is why I am in this race and that is how I will beat Donald Trump.”

Bloomberg has, without exaggeration, been attempting to buy his seat in the Oval Office by funding his own campaign out of his $61.5 billion net worth – the bulk of which came from leasing data terminals to Wall Street banks’ trading floors around the globe. (Curiously, the chat rooms on those Bloomberg terminals were the venue of choice for Wall Street traders engaged in rigging markets.) On Monday we reported on the questionable ways that Bloomberg is using his cash to tip the scales in his favor. (See Bloomberg Has Built a Star Wars Machine to Try to Steal the Democratic Nomination.) On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Bloomberg was paying hundreds of social-media influencers $2500 per month to “post regularly on their personal social-media accounts in support of the candidate and send text messages to their friends about him.”

After last’s night performance, it has become quite clear why Bloomberg needs to pay people to “like” him and call him cool.