https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-equities-soar-economy-weakens/5693639
US Equities Soar While Real Economy Plummets. Deep Recession Ahead?
On Wednesday, the S&P 500 closed at a record high, the Dow and Nasdaq just shy of record territory.
Yet according to economist John Williams, noted for reengineering official data to how it was accurately calculated decades earlier, the “US economy remains in intensifying downturn.”
“Broader unemployment measures and employment stress levels still signal deep recession” ahead.
Year-over-year payroll growth is at a level “last seen going into and coming out of the great recession,” indicating significant economic weakness.
A “confluence of unusual risk factors (are) developing or already in play.”
New and existing home sales are declining. Inflation adjusted durable goods orders are down. Non-annualized Q III GDP growth “was not meaningfully different from zero.”
“September 2019 manufacturing remained 4.8% (-4.8%) shy of ever having recovered its pre-recession peak activity.”
“In the 101-year history of industrial production, that reflects a record 142 consecutive months of economic non-expansion, as measured by the Federal Reserve Board’s monthly surveying.”
The CASS Freight Index declined for 10 consecutive months, “signaling economic contraction.”
So why are US equities at or near record highs?
Money printing madness (quantitative easing – QE) is back with a vengeance, along with three cuts this year in the fed funds rate.
It’s the interest rate banks and other depository institutions charge when lending money to each other, most often on an overnight basis, the lower the rate, the cheaper the borrowing cost.
Interest rate cuts and QE don’t stimulate economic growth or create jobs. Money created flows to bank balance sheets for speculation, high salaries and bonuses for corporate executives, stock buybacks, along with mergers and acquisitions for reducing competition by consolidating to greater size.
Money dropped on Wall Street facilitating all of the above fuels higher asset prices.
From 2006 until December 2015, the fed funds rate was zero. During this decade, QE created $3.5 trillion in virtually free money for corporate America and speculators, fueling the longest bull market in US history.
As much as $23.7 trillion went for bailout funding, according to former Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) administrator Neil Barofsky, the greatest of grand theft.
In October 2018, Project Censored reported that “the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) may have accumulated as much as $21 trillion in undocumented (unaccounted for) expenses between 1998 and 2015.”
All of the above grand theft came and continues to come at the expense of eroding social justice and other vital homeland needs.
The greatest US wealth disparity was created and now exists since the late 19th/early 20th century robber barons age.
According to Wall Street on Parade, the “Fed up(ped) its Wall Street bailout to $690 billion a week” in late October.
The “giant money spigot” began flowing freely in mid-September, “growing exponentially” at present, adding:
“The New York Fed will now be lavishing up to $120 billion a day in cheap overnight loans to Wall Street securities trading firms, a daily increase of $45 billion from its previously announced $75 billion a day.”
Benefitting firms are getting cheap money “continuously rolled over,” effectively making funds “permanent loans…exactly what happened during the 2007-2010 Wall Street collapse…without the authorization or even awareness of Congress or the American people.”
Citigroup alone got over $2.5 trillion in near-free money. What the mother-bank New York Fed is now doing “is unprecedented in US history.”
Yet establishment media aren’t reporting what should be regular headline news.
No Wall Street or economic crisis was declared by the Fed. No congressional hearings were held on what’s going on.
No one authorized what’s happening. Loans are going “to the New York Fed’s primary dealers, which are stock and bond trading houses on Wall Street who count hedge funds among their largest borrowers,” Wall Street on Parade explained.
Dodd-Frank financial reform was supposed to prevent what’s going on. Yet it’s happening with a vengeance, fueling speculative excess and the great wealth disparity.
The Federal Reserve isn’t federal. It’s owned and controlled by major Wall Street banks, serving their interests, not the economy or public welfare.
According to the Economic Collapse Blog (ECB), 14 signs show economic weakness — what money printing madness isn’t addressing.
“Not since the last recession have we seen numbers this bad. The ‘mini-boom’ that we witnessed for several years has now turned into a ‘bust,’ and very tough times are ahead,” said ECB, listing the signs it sees as follows:
“#1 US business hiring has fallen to a 7 year low.
#2 Consumer confidence in the United States has now declined for 3 months in a row.
#3 Defaults on ‘subprime’ auto loans are happening at the fastest pace that we have seen since 2008.
#4 The percentage of ‘subprime’ auto loans that are at least 60 days delinquent is now higher than it was at any point during the last recession.
#5 Vacancies at US shopping malls have hit the highest level since the last recession.
#6 Destination Maternity has announced that they will be closing 183 stores as the worst year for store closings in US history just continues to get worse.
#7 The Cass Freight Index has now fallen for 10 months in a row.
#8 US rail carload volumes have plunged to the lowest level in 3 years.
#9 In September, orders for class 8 heavy duty trucks were down 71 percent.
#10 Tesla’s US sales were down a whopping 39 percent during the third quarter of 2019.
#11 The bad news just keeps rolling in for the real estate industry. Last month, existing home sales in the United States declined by another 2.2 percent.
#12 New home prices have fallen to the lowest level in almost 3 years.
#13 According to one recent report, 44 percent of all Americans don’t make enough money to cover their monthly expenses.
#14 A recent survey found that more than two-thirds of all US households ‘are preparing for a possible recession.’ ”
Small businesses are being hit hardnest by economic weakness. ECB quoted investor Michael Pento saying:
“When this thing implodes, we are all screwed. On a global scale, we have never before created such a magnificent bubble.”
“These central bankers are clueless, and they have proven that beyond a doubt. All they can do is to try to keep the bubble going.”
What can’t go on forever, won’t. An eventual day of reckoning is inevitable. When arrives it won’t be pretty.
Like always before, ordinary people will be hit hardest.
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
SC200-2
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/they_live_we_sleep_beware_the_growing_evil_in_our_midst?utm_source=The+Rutherford+Institute&utm_campaign=5e1053aadb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_28_03_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d7ffde3304-5e1053aadb-42135105
They Live, We Sleep: Beware the Growing Evil in Our Midst
“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live
We’re living in two worlds, you and I.
There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.
Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.
All is not as it seems.
This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released more than 30 years ago, and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.
Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.
Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.
In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.
In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.
In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”
And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.
It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.
When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.
Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”
When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.
This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.
A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.
In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”
We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.
The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers).
They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.
They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates.
Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: the moneyed elite who rule us view us as expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.
In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
Not only do you have to be rich—or beholden to the rich—to get elected these days, but getting elected is also a surefire way to get rich. As CBS News reports, “Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector. And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further.”
In denouncing this blatant corruption of America’s political system, former president Jimmy Carter blasted the process of getting elected—to the White House, governor’s mansion, Congress or state legislatures—as “unlimited political bribery… a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over.”
Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.
Sound familiar?
Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.
We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.
Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary.
But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime?
The answer is the same in every age: fear.
Fear makes people stupid.
Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.
The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.
Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.
As the Bearded Man in They Live warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”
In this regard, we’re not so different from the oppressed citizens in They Live.
From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.
Despite the truth staring us in the face, we have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.
We live in a perpetual state of denial, insulated from the painful reality of the American police state by wall-to-wall entertainment news and screen devices.
Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.
Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screens—that is, television, lap tops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month.
The question, of course, is what effect does such screen consumption have on one’s mind?
Psychologically it is similar to drug addiction. Researchers found that “almost immediately after turning on the TV, subjects reported feeling more relaxed, and because this occurs so quickly and the tension returns so rapidly after the TV is turned off, people are conditioned to associate TV viewing with a lack of tension.” Research also shows that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state.
Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet,” according to Newsweek.
Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega corporations, what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.
If we’re watching, we’re not doing.
The powers-that-be understand this. As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:
We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.
When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”
We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Racial injustice is growing. Human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.
Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.
So where does that leave us?
The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.
Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.
When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hyno-transmitter in They Live, he restores hope by delivering America a wake-up call for freedom.
That’s the key right there: we need to wake up.
Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.
The real battle for control of this nation is not being waged between Republicans and Democrats in the ballot box.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.
The real battle between freedom and tyranny is taking place right in front of our eyes, if we would only open them.
All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.
Wake up, America.
If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.
They Live, We Sleep: Beware the Growing Evil in Our Midst
“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live
We’re living in two worlds, you and I.
There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.
Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.
All is not as it seems.
This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released more than 30 years ago, and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.
Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.
Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.
In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.
In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.
In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”
And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.
It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.
When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.
Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”
When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.
This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.
A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.
In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”
We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.
The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers).
They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.
They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates.
Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: the moneyed elite who rule us view us as expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.
In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
Not only do you have to be rich—or beholden to the rich—to get elected these days, but getting elected is also a surefire way to get rich. As CBS News reports, “Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector. And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further.”
In denouncing this blatant corruption of America’s political system, former president Jimmy Carter blasted the process of getting elected—to the White House, governor’s mansion, Congress or state legislatures—as “unlimited political bribery… a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over.”
Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.
Sound familiar?
Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.
We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.
Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary.
But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime?
The answer is the same in every age: fear.
Fear makes people stupid.
Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.
The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.
Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.
As the Bearded Man in They Live warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”
In this regard, we’re not so different from the oppressed citizens in They Live.
From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.
Despite the truth staring us in the face, we have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.
We live in a perpetual state of denial, insulated from the painful reality of the American police state by wall-to-wall entertainment news and screen devices.
Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.
Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screens—that is, television, lap tops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month.
The question, of course, is what effect does such screen consumption have on one’s mind?
Psychologically it is similar to drug addiction. Researchers found that “almost immediately after turning on the TV, subjects reported feeling more relaxed, and because this occurs so quickly and the tension returns so rapidly after the TV is turned off, people are conditioned to associate TV viewing with a lack of tension.” Research also shows that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state.
Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet,” according to Newsweek.
Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega corporations, what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.
If we’re watching, we’re not doing.
The powers-that-be understand this. As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:
We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.
When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”
We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Racial injustice is growing. Human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.
Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.
So where does that leave us?
The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.
Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.
When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hyno-transmitter in They Live, he restores hope by delivering America a wake-up call for freedom.
That’s the key right there: we need to wake up.
Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.
The real battle for control of this nation is not being waged between Republicans and Democrats in the ballot box.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.
The real battle between freedom and tyranny is taking place right in front of our eyes, if we would only open them.
All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.
Wake up, America.
If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
SC200-1
https://www.globalresearch.ca/endless-occupation-and-plunder-of-syria-u-s-terrorism-in-the-name-of-going-after-the-terrorists/5693399
Endless Occupation and Plunder of Syria: U.S. Terrorism in the Name of “Going After the Terrorists”
Like his predecessors, Trump operates as a frontman for the military, industrial, security complex, Wall Street, and other monied interests.
As commander-in-chief, he continues endless US wars of aggression in multiple theaters, along with economic terrorism on Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, and other nations on the US target list for regime change — including China and Russia.
His vow to bring all US troops home from Syria was a mirage. In March 2011, the US preemptively attacked the country for regime change, wanting pro-Western puppet rule replacing its sovereign independence.
Illegal Pentagon/CIA occupation of northern and southern parts of the country continues with no near-term prospect for conflict resolution because dominant bipartisan hardliners in Washington reject restoration of peace and stability to all US war theaters.
Longstanding US policy aims for dominion over planet earth, its resources and populations.
Nations not controlled by the US are vulnerable to preemptive attacks or war by other means — what the scourge of imperialism is all about, humanity’s greatest curse.
On Monday, US war secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley held a joint press conference.
Esper repeated Trump’s dubious claim about eliminating alleged ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Like DJT, he provided no evidence of Baghdadi’s death. The remains of whoever US forces reportedly killed were buried at sea so no independent DNA testing or other identity checks could be conducted, clear evidence of deception and coverup.
According to forensic pathologists, positive IDing of human remains can take days or weeks to complete. Trump claimed Baghdadi was killed overnight Saturday — in a remote Syrian location nowhere near a forensic lab.
Yet on Monday, US war secretary Mark Esper dubiously claimed DNA testing showed remains tested were Baghdadi’s — suggesting most likely whoever was killed was someone else.
Baghdadi alive or dead matters little. ISIS remains a US creation, its activities orchestrated and controlled by its Pentagon and CIA handlers.
US officials and establishment media pretend Pentagon forces combatted and destroyed the “caliphate.” Washington actively supports it, along with likeminded terrorist groups, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere.
Esper’s remarks were an exercise in mass deception, falsely claiming US operations in Syria “enable(d) the enduring defeat of ISIS,” adding:
“(R)epositioning (US) forces within the country is intended to posture us to continue this mission and give the president options, (including) execut(ion) (of) counterterrorism operations.”
Reality on the ground is polar opposite his above deception. Part of the US mission includes controlling and looting Syrian oil — on the phony pretext of protecting it from ISIS, enabling private interests and the CIA to profit from plundering Syrian resources, along with denying them to Damascus to benefit the nation and its people.
Esper: “(W)e will respond with overwhelming military force against” any threat to US occupation of Syrian territory and control of its resources.
Milley made similar remarks, stressing “counterterrorism operations” in Syria and other US war theaters that don’t exist.
During a Q & A session, reporters failed to challenge US war of aggression and occupation of sovereign Syria threatening no one.
No one questioned Trump’s dubious account of Baghdadi’s alleged elimination or that the remains of whoever was killed were buried at sea to prevent independent DNA checking.
Nothing was asked about the looting of Syrian oil belonging to the nation, not an illegal foreign occupier.
Asked whether Pentagon troops might confront Russian or Syrian forces militarily, Esper curtly responded: “Yes.”
Last week, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov called US plunder of Syrian oil “state-sponsored banditry,” along with denouncing US protection of smugglers involved in looting Syrian resources.
Syria remains an active war theater, its people terrorized by the presence of US forces and jihadist foot soldiers.
As long as total US control of Syria remains unattained, dark forces in Washington rule out restoration of peace and stability to the nation and its long-suffering people.
Endless Occupation and Plunder of Syria: U.S. Terrorism in the Name of “Going After the Terrorists”
Like his predecessors, Trump operates as a frontman for the military, industrial, security complex, Wall Street, and other monied interests.
As commander-in-chief, he continues endless US wars of aggression in multiple theaters, along with economic terrorism on Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, and other nations on the US target list for regime change — including China and Russia.
His vow to bring all US troops home from Syria was a mirage. In March 2011, the US preemptively attacked the country for regime change, wanting pro-Western puppet rule replacing its sovereign independence.
Illegal Pentagon/CIA occupation of northern and southern parts of the country continues with no near-term prospect for conflict resolution because dominant bipartisan hardliners in Washington reject restoration of peace and stability to all US war theaters.
Longstanding US policy aims for dominion over planet earth, its resources and populations.
Nations not controlled by the US are vulnerable to preemptive attacks or war by other means — what the scourge of imperialism is all about, humanity’s greatest curse.
On Monday, US war secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley held a joint press conference.
Esper repeated Trump’s dubious claim about eliminating alleged ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Like DJT, he provided no evidence of Baghdadi’s death. The remains of whoever US forces reportedly killed were buried at sea so no independent DNA testing or other identity checks could be conducted, clear evidence of deception and coverup.
According to forensic pathologists, positive IDing of human remains can take days or weeks to complete. Trump claimed Baghdadi was killed overnight Saturday — in a remote Syrian location nowhere near a forensic lab.
Yet on Monday, US war secretary Mark Esper dubiously claimed DNA testing showed remains tested were Baghdadi’s — suggesting most likely whoever was killed was someone else.
Baghdadi alive or dead matters little. ISIS remains a US creation, its activities orchestrated and controlled by its Pentagon and CIA handlers.
US officials and establishment media pretend Pentagon forces combatted and destroyed the “caliphate.” Washington actively supports it, along with likeminded terrorist groups, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere.
Esper’s remarks were an exercise in mass deception, falsely claiming US operations in Syria “enable(d) the enduring defeat of ISIS,” adding:
“(R)epositioning (US) forces within the country is intended to posture us to continue this mission and give the president options, (including) execut(ion) (of) counterterrorism operations.”
Reality on the ground is polar opposite his above deception. Part of the US mission includes controlling and looting Syrian oil — on the phony pretext of protecting it from ISIS, enabling private interests and the CIA to profit from plundering Syrian resources, along with denying them to Damascus to benefit the nation and its people.
Esper: “(W)e will respond with overwhelming military force against” any threat to US occupation of Syrian territory and control of its resources.
Milley made similar remarks, stressing “counterterrorism operations” in Syria and other US war theaters that don’t exist.
During a Q & A session, reporters failed to challenge US war of aggression and occupation of sovereign Syria threatening no one.
No one questioned Trump’s dubious account of Baghdadi’s alleged elimination or that the remains of whoever was killed were buried at sea to prevent independent DNA checking.
Nothing was asked about the looting of Syrian oil belonging to the nation, not an illegal foreign occupier.
Asked whether Pentagon troops might confront Russian or Syrian forces militarily, Esper curtly responded: “Yes.”
Last week, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov called US plunder of Syrian oil “state-sponsored banditry,” along with denouncing US protection of smugglers involved in looting Syrian resources.
Syria remains an active war theater, its people terrorized by the presence of US forces and jihadist foot soldiers.
As long as total US control of Syria remains unattained, dark forces in Washington rule out restoration of peace and stability to the nation and its long-suffering people.
Monday, October 28, 2019
SC199-15
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/10/18/peace-expert-george-w-bush-says-isolationism-is-dangerous-to-peace/
Peace Expert George W Bush Says ‘Isolationism’ Is Dangerous To Peace
Humanity was treated to an important lecture on peace at a recent event for the NIR School of the Heart by none other than Ellen Degeneres BFF and world-renowned peace expert George W Bush.
“I don’t think the Iranians believe a peaceful Middle East is in their national interest,” said the former president according to The Washington Post‘s Josh Rogin, whose brief Twitter thread on the subject appears to be the only record of Bush’s speech anywhere online.
“An isolationist United States is destabilizing around the world,” Bush said during the speech in what according to Rogin was a shot at the sitting president. “We are becoming isolationist and that’s dangerous for the sake of peace.”
For those who don’t speak fluent neoconservative, “isolationist” here means taking even one small step in any direction other than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and “We are becoming isolationist” here means “We have hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world.”
It is unclear why Bush is choosing to present himself as a more peaceful president than Trump given that by this point in his first term Bush had launched not one but two full-scale ground invasion wars whose effects continue to ravage the Middle East to this very day, especially given the way both presidents appear to be in furious agreement on foreign policy matters like Iran. But here we are.
From a certain point of view it’s hard to say which is stranger: (A) a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is endangering peace with his “isolationism”, or (B) the claim that Trump is “isolationist” at all. As we’ve discussed previously, Trump’s so-called isolationism has thus far consisted of killing tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions in an attempt to effect regime change in the most oil-rich nation on earth, advancing a regime change operation in Iran via starvation sanctions, CIA covert ops, and reckless military escalations, continuing to facilitate the Saudi-led slaughter in Yemen and to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, inflating the already insanely bloated US military budget to enable more worldwide military expansionism, greatly increasing the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians in airstrikes for which he has reduced military accountability, and of course advancing many, many new cold war escalations against the nuclear superpower Russia.
But these bogus warnings about a dangerous, nonexistent threat of isolationism are nothing new for Dubya. In his farewell address to the nation, Bush said the following:
“In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led.”
As we discussed recently, use of the pro-war buzzword “isolationism” has been re-emerging from its post-Bush hibernation as a popular one-word debunk of any opposition to continued US military expansionism in all directions, and it is deceitful in at least three distinct ways. Firstly, the way it is used consistently conflates isolationism with non-interventionism, which are two wildly different things. Secondly, none of the mainstream political figures who are consistently tarred with the “isolationist” pejorative are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists; they all support many interventionist positions which actual non-interventionists object to. Thirdly, calling someone who opposes endless warmongering an “isolationist” makes as much sense as calling someone who opposes rape a man-hating prude; opposing an intrinsically evil act is not the same as withdrawing from the world.
Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness that the opposite of “war” is no longer “peace”, but “isolationism”. By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite. War is weird, freakish and horrific, and peace is of course normal. This is the only healthy way to see things.
It would actually be great if George W Bush could shut the fuck up forever, ideally in a locked cell following a public war tribunal. Failing that, at the very least people should stop looking at him as a cuddly wuddly teddy bear with whom it’s fun to share a sporting arena suite or a piece of hard candy or to hang award medals on for his treatment of veterans. This mass murdering monster has been growing more and more popular with Democrats lately just because he offers mild criticisms of Trump sometimes, as have war pigs like Bill Kristol and Max Boot and even John Bolton for the same reason, and it needs to stop. And in the name of a million dead Iraqis, please don’t start consulting this man on matters of peace.
Peace Expert George W Bush Says ‘Isolationism’ Is Dangerous To Peace
Humanity was treated to an important lecture on peace at a recent event for the NIR School of the Heart by none other than Ellen Degeneres BFF and world-renowned peace expert George W Bush.
“I don’t think the Iranians believe a peaceful Middle East is in their national interest,” said the former president according to The Washington Post‘s Josh Rogin, whose brief Twitter thread on the subject appears to be the only record of Bush’s speech anywhere online.
“An isolationist United States is destabilizing around the world,” Bush said during the speech in what according to Rogin was a shot at the sitting president. “We are becoming isolationist and that’s dangerous for the sake of peace.”
For those who don’t speak fluent neoconservative, “isolationist” here means taking even one small step in any direction other than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and “We are becoming isolationist” here means “We have hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world.”
It is unclear why Bush is choosing to present himself as a more peaceful president than Trump given that by this point in his first term Bush had launched not one but two full-scale ground invasion wars whose effects continue to ravage the Middle East to this very day, especially given the way both presidents appear to be in furious agreement on foreign policy matters like Iran. But here we are.
From a certain point of view it’s hard to say which is stranger: (A) a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is endangering peace with his “isolationism”, or (B) the claim that Trump is “isolationist” at all. As we’ve discussed previously, Trump’s so-called isolationism has thus far consisted of killing tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions in an attempt to effect regime change in the most oil-rich nation on earth, advancing a regime change operation in Iran via starvation sanctions, CIA covert ops, and reckless military escalations, continuing to facilitate the Saudi-led slaughter in Yemen and to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, inflating the already insanely bloated US military budget to enable more worldwide military expansionism, greatly increasing the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians in airstrikes for which he has reduced military accountability, and of course advancing many, many new cold war escalations against the nuclear superpower Russia.
But these bogus warnings about a dangerous, nonexistent threat of isolationism are nothing new for Dubya. In his farewell address to the nation, Bush said the following:
“In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led.”
As we discussed recently, use of the pro-war buzzword “isolationism” has been re-emerging from its post-Bush hibernation as a popular one-word debunk of any opposition to continued US military expansionism in all directions, and it is deceitful in at least three distinct ways. Firstly, the way it is used consistently conflates isolationism with non-interventionism, which are two wildly different things. Secondly, none of the mainstream political figures who are consistently tarred with the “isolationist” pejorative are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists; they all support many interventionist positions which actual non-interventionists object to. Thirdly, calling someone who opposes endless warmongering an “isolationist” makes as much sense as calling someone who opposes rape a man-hating prude; opposing an intrinsically evil act is not the same as withdrawing from the world.
Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness that the opposite of “war” is no longer “peace”, but “isolationism”. By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite. War is weird, freakish and horrific, and peace is of course normal. This is the only healthy way to see things.
It would actually be great if George W Bush could shut the fuck up forever, ideally in a locked cell following a public war tribunal. Failing that, at the very least people should stop looking at him as a cuddly wuddly teddy bear with whom it’s fun to share a sporting arena suite or a piece of hard candy or to hang award medals on for his treatment of veterans. This mass murdering monster has been growing more and more popular with Democrats lately just because he offers mild criticisms of Trump sometimes, as have war pigs like Bill Kristol and Max Boot and even John Bolton for the same reason, and it needs to stop. And in the name of a million dead Iraqis, please don’t start consulting this man on matters of peace.
Sunday, October 27, 2019
SC199-14
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52432.htm
A Call for a Coup Plus a Week Like No Other for Tulsi Gabbard
There was what might be described as an extraordinary amount of nonsense being promoted by last week’s media. Unfortunately, some of it was quite dangerous. Admiral William McRaven, who commanded the Navy Seals when Osama bin Laden was captured and killed and who has been riding that horse ever since, announced that if Donald Trump continues to fail to provide the type of leadership the country needs, he should be replaced by whatever means are necessary. The op-ed entitled “Our Republic is Under Attack by the President” with the subtitle “If President Trump doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office” was featured in the New York Times, suggesting that the Gray Lady was providing its newspaper of record seal of approval for what might well be regarded as a call for a military coup.
McRaven’s exact words, after some ringing praise for the military and all its glorious deeds in past wars, were that the soldiers, sailors and marines now must respond because “The America that they believed in was under attack, not from without, but from within.”
McRaven then elaborated that “These men and women, of all political persuasions, have seen the assaults on our institutions: on the intelligence and law enforcement community, the State Department and the press. They have seen our leaders stand beside despots and strongmen, preferring their government narrative to our own. They have seen us abandon our allies and have heard the shouts of betrayal from the battlefield. As I stood on the parade field at Fort Bragg, one retired four-star general, grabbed my arm, shook me and shouted, ‘I don’t like the Democrats, but Trump is destroying the Republic!’”
It is a call to arms if there ever was one. Too bad Trump can’t strip McRaven of his pension and generous health care benefits for starters and McRaven might also consider that he could be recalled to active duty by Trump and court martialed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And the good admiral, who up until 2018 headed the state university system in Texas, might also receive well merited pushback for his assessment of America’s role in the world over the past two decades, in which he was a major player, at least in terms of dealing out punishment. He wrote ““We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.”
Utter bullshit, of course. The United States has been acting as the embodiment of a rogue nation, lashing out pointlessly and delivering death and destruction.
If McRaven truly believes what he says he is not only violating his oath to defend the constitution while also toying with treason, he is an idiot and should never have been allowed to run anything more demanding than a hot dog stand. Washington has been systematically blowing people up worldwide for no good reasons, killing possibly as many as 4 million mostly Muslims, while systematically stripping Americans of their Bill of Rights at home. “Good guys” and “champions of justice” indeed!
And then there is the Great Hillary Clinton caper. In an interview last week Hillary claimed predictably that Donald Trump is “Vladimir Putin’s dream,” and then went on to assert that there would be other Russian assets emerging, including nestled in the bosom of her own beloved Democratic Party.
She said, clearly suggesting that it would be Tulsi Gabbard, that “They’re also going to do third-party again. I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
Clinton explained how the third-party designation would work, saying of Jill Stein, who ran for president in 2016 as a Green Party candidate, “And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”
Tulsi responded courageously and accurately “Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.”
Tulsi has in fact been attacked relentless by the Establishment since she announced that she would be running for the Democratic nomination. Shortly before last Tuesday’s Democratic candidate debate the New York Times ran an article suggesting that Gabbard was an isolationist, was being promoted by Russia and was an apologist for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. In reality, Gabbard is the only candidate willing to confront America’s warfare-national security state.
The Hillary Clinton attack on Gabbard and on the completely respectable Jill Stein is to a certain extent incomprehensible unless one lives in the gutter that she and Bill have wallowed in ever since they rose to prominence in Arkansas. Hillary, the creator of the private home server for classified information as well as author of the catastrophic war against Libya and the Benghazi debacle has a lot to answer for but will never be held accountable, any more than her husband Bill for his rapes and molestations. And when it comes to foreign interference, Gabbard is being pilloried because the Russian media regards her favorably while the Clinton Foundation has taken tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and billionaires seeking quid pro quos, much of which has gone to line the pockets of Hillary, Bill and Chelsea.
Finally, one comment about the Democratic Party obsession with the Russians. The media was enthusing last Friday over a photo of Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing up across a table from President Trump and pointing at him before walking out of the room. The gushing regarding how a powerful, strong woman was defying the horrible chief executive was both predictable and ridiculous. By her own admission Pelosi’s last words before departing were “All roads lead to Putin.” I will leave it up to the reader to interpret what that was supposed to mean.
A Call for a Coup Plus a Week Like No Other for Tulsi Gabbard
There was what might be described as an extraordinary amount of nonsense being promoted by last week’s media. Unfortunately, some of it was quite dangerous. Admiral William McRaven, who commanded the Navy Seals when Osama bin Laden was captured and killed and who has been riding that horse ever since, announced that if Donald Trump continues to fail to provide the type of leadership the country needs, he should be replaced by whatever means are necessary. The op-ed entitled “Our Republic is Under Attack by the President” with the subtitle “If President Trump doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office” was featured in the New York Times, suggesting that the Gray Lady was providing its newspaper of record seal of approval for what might well be regarded as a call for a military coup.
McRaven’s exact words, after some ringing praise for the military and all its glorious deeds in past wars, were that the soldiers, sailors and marines now must respond because “The America that they believed in was under attack, not from without, but from within.”
McRaven then elaborated that “These men and women, of all political persuasions, have seen the assaults on our institutions: on the intelligence and law enforcement community, the State Department and the press. They have seen our leaders stand beside despots and strongmen, preferring their government narrative to our own. They have seen us abandon our allies and have heard the shouts of betrayal from the battlefield. As I stood on the parade field at Fort Bragg, one retired four-star general, grabbed my arm, shook me and shouted, ‘I don’t like the Democrats, but Trump is destroying the Republic!’”
It is a call to arms if there ever was one. Too bad Trump can’t strip McRaven of his pension and generous health care benefits for starters and McRaven might also consider that he could be recalled to active duty by Trump and court martialed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And the good admiral, who up until 2018 headed the state university system in Texas, might also receive well merited pushback for his assessment of America’s role in the world over the past two decades, in which he was a major player, at least in terms of dealing out punishment. He wrote ““We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.”
Utter bullshit, of course. The United States has been acting as the embodiment of a rogue nation, lashing out pointlessly and delivering death and destruction.
If McRaven truly believes what he says he is not only violating his oath to defend the constitution while also toying with treason, he is an idiot and should never have been allowed to run anything more demanding than a hot dog stand. Washington has been systematically blowing people up worldwide for no good reasons, killing possibly as many as 4 million mostly Muslims, while systematically stripping Americans of their Bill of Rights at home. “Good guys” and “champions of justice” indeed!
And then there is the Great Hillary Clinton caper. In an interview last week Hillary claimed predictably that Donald Trump is “Vladimir Putin’s dream,” and then went on to assert that there would be other Russian assets emerging, including nestled in the bosom of her own beloved Democratic Party.
She said, clearly suggesting that it would be Tulsi Gabbard, that “They’re also going to do third-party again. I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
Clinton explained how the third-party designation would work, saying of Jill Stein, who ran for president in 2016 as a Green Party candidate, “And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”
Tulsi responded courageously and accurately “Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.”
Tulsi has in fact been attacked relentless by the Establishment since she announced that she would be running for the Democratic nomination. Shortly before last Tuesday’s Democratic candidate debate the New York Times ran an article suggesting that Gabbard was an isolationist, was being promoted by Russia and was an apologist for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. In reality, Gabbard is the only candidate willing to confront America’s warfare-national security state.
The Hillary Clinton attack on Gabbard and on the completely respectable Jill Stein is to a certain extent incomprehensible unless one lives in the gutter that she and Bill have wallowed in ever since they rose to prominence in Arkansas. Hillary, the creator of the private home server for classified information as well as author of the catastrophic war against Libya and the Benghazi debacle has a lot to answer for but will never be held accountable, any more than her husband Bill for his rapes and molestations. And when it comes to foreign interference, Gabbard is being pilloried because the Russian media regards her favorably while the Clinton Foundation has taken tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and billionaires seeking quid pro quos, much of which has gone to line the pockets of Hillary, Bill and Chelsea.
Finally, one comment about the Democratic Party obsession with the Russians. The media was enthusing last Friday over a photo of Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing up across a table from President Trump and pointing at him before walking out of the room. The gushing regarding how a powerful, strong woman was defying the horrible chief executive was both predictable and ridiculous. By her own admission Pelosi’s last words before departing were “All roads lead to Putin.” I will leave it up to the reader to interpret what that was supposed to mean.
Saturday, October 26, 2019
SC199-13
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct19/worries10-19.html
This Is What Worries Me
It's practically un-American to confess you're worried. Can-do self-help and cheerfulness are expected, promoted and rewarded. So to say I'm profoundly worried about the state of the nation is to swim against the optimistic zeitgeist.
Nonetheless, I'm worried, because I sense the long-wave/cycle disintegrative phase is gathering momentum. Though the timing and outcome are unknown, these phases end badly when people lose their ability to learn new ideas, experiment, cooperate and adapt.
As I've noted in previous posts, economic decline manifests as social and political decay. People are angry, easily inflamed, seeking scapegoats, hardening their own views, all of which manifest economic decline and insecurity.
People are increasingly demanding that everyone agree with them, rather than seek solutions and common ground. People aren't really seeking solutions or common ground, they seek confirmation that you concur 100% with their views, and if you don't, they are indignant: how dare you disagree with me!
This is not a healthy development. People are increasingly prone to repeat their positions dogmatically, and your refusal to agree 100% increases their dogmatism and their agitation.
After three or four such outbursts--we cannot call them exchanges, because nothing is being exchanged--there's nothing to say.
It's extremely dangerous when people stop being interested in solutions and finding common ground, and are only interested in confirming that everyone agrees with them. This is psychologically akin to seeking scapegoats to blame for all our troubles or projecting our Monster Id onto some "other."
As the social fabric unravels, extremes quickly become normalized: another giant homeless encampment springs up and our ability to consider this extraordinarily troubling dissipates in a haze of normalization.
When everything is unraveling, our herd instinct kicks in, and we become increasingly skittish and uneasy. One manifestation of this group anxiety is conflicts suddenly break out over nothing: riots at ball games, demonstrations that become free-for-alls, family gatherings that suddenly dissolve in extreme acrimony over some trivial event.
I'm witnessing these behaviors in comments and correspondence. The Oftwominds audience has always been genteel. People disagree or correct me with civility, and I respond in kind. One of the motives behind the title "of two minds" is that there are generally several perspectives and I can change my mind as new information or experiences are presented.
But this is not what I'm seeing: I'm seeing once reasonable people harden their views into a seething dogmatism, and expressing indignation or anger if I don't agree with them 100%.
I'm afraid these readers never bothered to understand my work, which is admittedly outside the mainstream; they found something they didn't like and keyed off of that.
The turmoil over "facts" and "fake news" is another manifestation. As financial commentator Ben Hunt recently put it, the "tells" are all being manipulated to support a dominant narrative. So the unemployment rate, consumer inflation and the stock market are all manipulated to support the illusion that all is going swimmingly.
As the distance between these fantasy "facts" and experiential reality widen, trust in these "tells" (i.e. trustworthy indicators) declines.
As trust in these "facts" and the "experts" who gin them up declines, the corporate media and authorities double-down in support of their fictitious "facts": any doubters are "conspiracy theorists," purveyors of "fake news," or dastardly Russian stooges repeating "Kremlin talking points."
There is no middle ground left in such a state, and indeed, no desire for middle ground, as the mere existence of middle ground would mean whomever demands 100% agreement with their position is not going to get it.
In this disintegrative phase, people are increasingly indignant if their magical-thinking "solution" is challenged. Technology, to take a common example, will magically solve all our problems. Challenging this as unrealistic or impossible triggers a great indignation in the true believer: again, how dare you doubt tech innovation will save us! Or Universal Basic Income, Medicare For All, and so on.
As a small-time trader in financial markets, I'm accustomed to contemplating several conflicting points of view: some are bullish, some are bearish, some are neutral. Everyone makes their case, and if you decide to make a trade, you're going to be right or wrong. Once you realize you're wrong about the direction of the market, you can either change your mind and exit the trade, or you can double-down and absorb losses in the belief/hope that the market will eventually do what you're betting it will do.
This doubling-down is a dangerous strategy, because we tend to harden our convictions as the market turns against our bet. This leads us to suffer catastrophic losses, when we could have exited the trade with modest losses early on.
In other words, to reduce our anxiety and uncertainty, we harden our views and become dogmatic, blocking out all evidence that our position is untenable / not a solution.
This is what I fear is taking hold in the U.S. Rather than reinforce the traits of successful adaptation and problem-solving--flexibility, experimentation, developing an appetite for numerous small failures as the necessary foundation of advancement, keeping an open mind--we're embracing the Dark Side of the herd instinct, doubling down on rigid, dogmatic, inflexible, untenable positions, a strategy that leads to catastrophic losses and collapse.
This is why I wrote my book Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic, to explain why the traits of successful adaptation are essential to surviving disintegrative phases. Once we lose interest in actual solutions, with all the sacrifices, experimentation, uncertainties and failures that real solutions require, solutions become impossible.
This Is What Worries Me
It's practically un-American to confess you're worried. Can-do self-help and cheerfulness are expected, promoted and rewarded. So to say I'm profoundly worried about the state of the nation is to swim against the optimistic zeitgeist.
Nonetheless, I'm worried, because I sense the long-wave/cycle disintegrative phase is gathering momentum. Though the timing and outcome are unknown, these phases end badly when people lose their ability to learn new ideas, experiment, cooperate and adapt.
As I've noted in previous posts, economic decline manifests as social and political decay. People are angry, easily inflamed, seeking scapegoats, hardening their own views, all of which manifest economic decline and insecurity.
People are increasingly demanding that everyone agree with them, rather than seek solutions and common ground. People aren't really seeking solutions or common ground, they seek confirmation that you concur 100% with their views, and if you don't, they are indignant: how dare you disagree with me!
This is not a healthy development. People are increasingly prone to repeat their positions dogmatically, and your refusal to agree 100% increases their dogmatism and their agitation.
After three or four such outbursts--we cannot call them exchanges, because nothing is being exchanged--there's nothing to say.
It's extremely dangerous when people stop being interested in solutions and finding common ground, and are only interested in confirming that everyone agrees with them. This is psychologically akin to seeking scapegoats to blame for all our troubles or projecting our Monster Id onto some "other."
As the social fabric unravels, extremes quickly become normalized: another giant homeless encampment springs up and our ability to consider this extraordinarily troubling dissipates in a haze of normalization.
When everything is unraveling, our herd instinct kicks in, and we become increasingly skittish and uneasy. One manifestation of this group anxiety is conflicts suddenly break out over nothing: riots at ball games, demonstrations that become free-for-alls, family gatherings that suddenly dissolve in extreme acrimony over some trivial event.
I'm witnessing these behaviors in comments and correspondence. The Oftwominds audience has always been genteel. People disagree or correct me with civility, and I respond in kind. One of the motives behind the title "of two minds" is that there are generally several perspectives and I can change my mind as new information or experiences are presented.
But this is not what I'm seeing: I'm seeing once reasonable people harden their views into a seething dogmatism, and expressing indignation or anger if I don't agree with them 100%.
I'm afraid these readers never bothered to understand my work, which is admittedly outside the mainstream; they found something they didn't like and keyed off of that.
The turmoil over "facts" and "fake news" is another manifestation. As financial commentator Ben Hunt recently put it, the "tells" are all being manipulated to support a dominant narrative. So the unemployment rate, consumer inflation and the stock market are all manipulated to support the illusion that all is going swimmingly.
As the distance between these fantasy "facts" and experiential reality widen, trust in these "tells" (i.e. trustworthy indicators) declines.
As trust in these "facts" and the "experts" who gin them up declines, the corporate media and authorities double-down in support of their fictitious "facts": any doubters are "conspiracy theorists," purveyors of "fake news," or dastardly Russian stooges repeating "Kremlin talking points."
There is no middle ground left in such a state, and indeed, no desire for middle ground, as the mere existence of middle ground would mean whomever demands 100% agreement with their position is not going to get it.
In this disintegrative phase, people are increasingly indignant if their magical-thinking "solution" is challenged. Technology, to take a common example, will magically solve all our problems. Challenging this as unrealistic or impossible triggers a great indignation in the true believer: again, how dare you doubt tech innovation will save us! Or Universal Basic Income, Medicare For All, and so on.
As a small-time trader in financial markets, I'm accustomed to contemplating several conflicting points of view: some are bullish, some are bearish, some are neutral. Everyone makes their case, and if you decide to make a trade, you're going to be right or wrong. Once you realize you're wrong about the direction of the market, you can either change your mind and exit the trade, or you can double-down and absorb losses in the belief/hope that the market will eventually do what you're betting it will do.
This doubling-down is a dangerous strategy, because we tend to harden our convictions as the market turns against our bet. This leads us to suffer catastrophic losses, when we could have exited the trade with modest losses early on.
In other words, to reduce our anxiety and uncertainty, we harden our views and become dogmatic, blocking out all evidence that our position is untenable / not a solution.
This is what I fear is taking hold in the U.S. Rather than reinforce the traits of successful adaptation and problem-solving--flexibility, experimentation, developing an appetite for numerous small failures as the necessary foundation of advancement, keeping an open mind--we're embracing the Dark Side of the herd instinct, doubling down on rigid, dogmatic, inflexible, untenable positions, a strategy that leads to catastrophic losses and collapse.
This is why I wrote my book Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic, to explain why the traits of successful adaptation are essential to surviving disintegrative phases. Once we lose interest in actual solutions, with all the sacrifices, experimentation, uncertainties and failures that real solutions require, solutions become impossible.
Friday, October 25, 2019
SC199-12
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/10/25/we-want-to-keep-the-oil/
“We Want To Keep The Oil”
“Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand,
workin’ in the dark against your fellow man.
But as sure as God made black and white
what’s down in the dark will be brought to the light.”
~ Johnny Cash/traditional, ‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down’
The Grayzone has an excellent new article out titled “US troops are staying in Syria to ‘keep the oil’ – and have already killed hundreds over it” detailing the many ways the Trump administration has openly admitted that it is keeping US troops in Syria to control the nation’s oil fields so that the Syrian government can’t use it to fund reconstruction efforts.
“We’ve secured the oil, and therefore a small number of US troops will remain in the area where they have the oil,” Trump said in a recent press conference. “And we’re going to be protecting it. And we’ll be deciding what we’re going to do with it in the future.”
“We want to keep the oil,” Trump said in a cabinet meeting a few days earlier. “Maybe we’ll have one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”
“A purpose of those [US] forces, working with the SDF, is to deny access to those oil fields by ISIS and others who may benefit from revenues that could be earned,” said Defense Secretary Mark Esper. As Grayzone‘s Ben Norton accurately explains, “and others” necessarily means the Syrian government; preventing Assad from accessing Syrian oil is standing US military policy.
And that of course is the real reason US armed forces constantly remain in Syria despite all the empty babble about ending wars and bringing home the troops: it’s about control over a nation in a key geostrategic location which refuses to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized empire. Controlling its material wealth is an ideal way to do this.
Whenever I write about oil as a primary motive for US imperialism, I always get a bunch of right-wingers objecting that that makes no sense because the US has plenty of oil, and that it’s really about freedom and democracy or communism or Zionism or pedovore cults or Illuminati or whatever. What they miss, in their squirming attempts to avoid cognitive dissonance, is that it’s not about having and consuming oil, it’s about controlling oil. Control what governments can and cannot access crucial resources, and you can control which governments thrive and which ones don’t.
As Trump said, “We’ll be deciding what we’re going to do with it in the future.” In no other international power dynamic would this be considered a rational thing for anyone to say. The idea of another nation invading Texas and seizing control of its oil fields and then Xi Jinping or whomever saying “We’re controlling their oil and we’ll be deciding what we’re going to do with it in the future” is unthinkable, but a US president can just come right out and say this about a weaker nation and it won’t even be front-page news.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Donald Trump is the most honest US president of all time. By that I don’t mean that he’s an honest person; he of course lies constantly. I simply mean that while his predecessors have always made sure to dress their imperialist military campaigns up as benevolent humanitarian intercessions, Trump just stands there out in the open like “Yeah we grabbed their oil and it’s ours now, blow me.” There was once a time when claiming a war was really about oil got you branded a conspiracy theorist. Now the US president just outright says it.
And this is really the only reason establishment power structures dislike Trump. They don’t feel directly threatened by him, they just dislike the way he’s always saying the quiet part out loud. Status quo power has a vested interest in keeping a smiling mask on things and preventing people from thinking too hard about what’s really going on in the world, and Trump keeps ripping off that mask by telling everyone what he’s doing in plain English.
Revolution (the real kind, the kind that actually changes things) is ultimately a fight against psychological compartmentalization on a mass scale. Compartmentalization is a tool people use to avoid the psychological discomfort (aka cognitive dissonance) that would otherwise be experienced by trying to hold on to two conflicting positions at one time, like, for example, seeing yourself as a good person and simultaneously giving your government your tacit permission to murder strangers on the other side of the world in your name.
Establishment power works to prevent people from looking directly at the ugly aspects of the empire, like the horrific nature of what war is and how much their country spreads it, or the fact that so many have so little while a few others have so very much, or the reason their government doesn’t seem to operate the way they were taught in school. The empire has a vested interest in keeping these things in the dark, while the clear-eyed rebel is always trying to drag them kicking and screaming into the light. This is why truth-tellers and whistleblowers are always made public enemy number one by our rulers.
The true rebel fights to enlighten things, the empire fights to endarken them. This is the struggle from the largest power structures in our world, right down to our own inner lives as individual human beings. This is why I talk so much about the importance of inner work; it’s all one struggle, from the evil secrets hidden behind thick walls of government opacity all the way down to the parts of ourselves we try not to look at. Your efforts to become a more consciously integral and less compartmentalized human being are just as important as your efforts to expose the puppet strings to the audience.
As November 2020 draws nearer the screams to shut up and stop pointing at the truth are going to get louder and louder for political dissidents in America, even louder than the “shut up and fall in line” admonishments that Bernie-or-Busters received constantly in 2016. This will only be the voice of the empire yelling “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” It will only be those who are still plugged into the imperial narrative matrix transforming into a bunch of Agent Smiths and telling you to stop saying things which cause them cognitive dissonance.
But, for someone who has signed the truth-at-all-costs contract within themselves, this simply won’t be an option. Our desire to bring what’s dark into the light will overcome any pressure to keep things endarkened, whether it be in ourselves, in our relationships, in our society, in our government, or in our world. Followed through with in a deep and integral way, it changes the way we think, it changes the way we experience our own consciousness, it alters our behavior, it ruins our experience of news media and Hollywood blockbusters, it ends our marriages, it breaks up longstanding friendships and forges new ones, and it makes the deceptions of the powerful utterly intolerable. Truth come what may means truth come what may, and it’s a lifetime commitment.
We wouldn’t have it any other way.
....
The US does not have " plenty of oil ". Fracking, deep ocean drilling, endless wars overseas in oil rich areas are signs of this reality. The wars and conflicts over hydrocarbon energy access/control will be increasing. The reasons given by the US for staying in Syria to " protect " the oil are lies told to hide these truths.
“We Want To Keep The Oil”
“Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand,
workin’ in the dark against your fellow man.
But as sure as God made black and white
what’s down in the dark will be brought to the light.”
~ Johnny Cash/traditional, ‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down’
The Grayzone has an excellent new article out titled “US troops are staying in Syria to ‘keep the oil’ – and have already killed hundreds over it” detailing the many ways the Trump administration has openly admitted that it is keeping US troops in Syria to control the nation’s oil fields so that the Syrian government can’t use it to fund reconstruction efforts.
“We’ve secured the oil, and therefore a small number of US troops will remain in the area where they have the oil,” Trump said in a recent press conference. “And we’re going to be protecting it. And we’ll be deciding what we’re going to do with it in the future.”
“We want to keep the oil,” Trump said in a cabinet meeting a few days earlier. “Maybe we’ll have one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”
“A purpose of those [US] forces, working with the SDF, is to deny access to those oil fields by ISIS and others who may benefit from revenues that could be earned,” said Defense Secretary Mark Esper. As Grayzone‘s Ben Norton accurately explains, “and others” necessarily means the Syrian government; preventing Assad from accessing Syrian oil is standing US military policy.
And that of course is the real reason US armed forces constantly remain in Syria despite all the empty babble about ending wars and bringing home the troops: it’s about control over a nation in a key geostrategic location which refuses to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized empire. Controlling its material wealth is an ideal way to do this.
Whenever I write about oil as a primary motive for US imperialism, I always get a bunch of right-wingers objecting that that makes no sense because the US has plenty of oil, and that it’s really about freedom and democracy or communism or Zionism or pedovore cults or Illuminati or whatever. What they miss, in their squirming attempts to avoid cognitive dissonance, is that it’s not about having and consuming oil, it’s about controlling oil. Control what governments can and cannot access crucial resources, and you can control which governments thrive and which ones don’t.
As Trump said, “We’ll be deciding what we’re going to do with it in the future.” In no other international power dynamic would this be considered a rational thing for anyone to say. The idea of another nation invading Texas and seizing control of its oil fields and then Xi Jinping or whomever saying “We’re controlling their oil and we’ll be deciding what we’re going to do with it in the future” is unthinkable, but a US president can just come right out and say this about a weaker nation and it won’t even be front-page news.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Donald Trump is the most honest US president of all time. By that I don’t mean that he’s an honest person; he of course lies constantly. I simply mean that while his predecessors have always made sure to dress their imperialist military campaigns up as benevolent humanitarian intercessions, Trump just stands there out in the open like “Yeah we grabbed their oil and it’s ours now, blow me.” There was once a time when claiming a war was really about oil got you branded a conspiracy theorist. Now the US president just outright says it.
And this is really the only reason establishment power structures dislike Trump. They don’t feel directly threatened by him, they just dislike the way he’s always saying the quiet part out loud. Status quo power has a vested interest in keeping a smiling mask on things and preventing people from thinking too hard about what’s really going on in the world, and Trump keeps ripping off that mask by telling everyone what he’s doing in plain English.
Revolution (the real kind, the kind that actually changes things) is ultimately a fight against psychological compartmentalization on a mass scale. Compartmentalization is a tool people use to avoid the psychological discomfort (aka cognitive dissonance) that would otherwise be experienced by trying to hold on to two conflicting positions at one time, like, for example, seeing yourself as a good person and simultaneously giving your government your tacit permission to murder strangers on the other side of the world in your name.
Establishment power works to prevent people from looking directly at the ugly aspects of the empire, like the horrific nature of what war is and how much their country spreads it, or the fact that so many have so little while a few others have so very much, or the reason their government doesn’t seem to operate the way they were taught in school. The empire has a vested interest in keeping these things in the dark, while the clear-eyed rebel is always trying to drag them kicking and screaming into the light. This is why truth-tellers and whistleblowers are always made public enemy number one by our rulers.
The true rebel fights to enlighten things, the empire fights to endarken them. This is the struggle from the largest power structures in our world, right down to our own inner lives as individual human beings. This is why I talk so much about the importance of inner work; it’s all one struggle, from the evil secrets hidden behind thick walls of government opacity all the way down to the parts of ourselves we try not to look at. Your efforts to become a more consciously integral and less compartmentalized human being are just as important as your efforts to expose the puppet strings to the audience.
As November 2020 draws nearer the screams to shut up and stop pointing at the truth are going to get louder and louder for political dissidents in America, even louder than the “shut up and fall in line” admonishments that Bernie-or-Busters received constantly in 2016. This will only be the voice of the empire yelling “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” It will only be those who are still plugged into the imperial narrative matrix transforming into a bunch of Agent Smiths and telling you to stop saying things which cause them cognitive dissonance.
But, for someone who has signed the truth-at-all-costs contract within themselves, this simply won’t be an option. Our desire to bring what’s dark into the light will overcome any pressure to keep things endarkened, whether it be in ourselves, in our relationships, in our society, in our government, or in our world. Followed through with in a deep and integral way, it changes the way we think, it changes the way we experience our own consciousness, it alters our behavior, it ruins our experience of news media and Hollywood blockbusters, it ends our marriages, it breaks up longstanding friendships and forges new ones, and it makes the deceptions of the powerful utterly intolerable. Truth come what may means truth come what may, and it’s a lifetime commitment.
We wouldn’t have it any other way.
....
The US does not have " plenty of oil ". Fracking, deep ocean drilling, endless wars overseas in oil rich areas are signs of this reality. The wars and conflicts over hydrocarbon energy access/control will be increasing. The reasons given by the US for staying in Syria to " protect " the oil are lies told to hide these truths.
Thursday, October 24, 2019
SC199-11
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-uk-killing-julian-assange/5692753
Slow-Motion US/UK Killing of Julian Assange
Establishment media are in cahoots with US/UK ruling regimes against Assange for the “crime” of truth-telling journalism abhorred in the West — totalitarian rule where these societies are heading.
In mid-October, UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer denounced Assange’s judicial lynching and egregious mistreatment, saying the following:
“What has the man done? He has disclosed an enormous amount of information that governments want to remain secret, most infamously the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which, in my view, is evidence for war crimes.”
“What is the scandal in this case is that everyone focuses on Julian Assange. Here is someone who exposes evidence for war crimes, including torture and murder, and he is under this constant pressure.”
“I am absolutely convinced he will not receive a fair trial in Virginia, and he will remain in prison under inhumane conditions for the rest of his life.”
Tulsi Gabbard is the only US presidential aspirant expressing support for journalist Assange, as well as whistleblowers Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and others like them, opposing their “prosecution like criminals.”
If elected president, she’d drop charges against them, she said, calling for greater “protect(ion) (of) our civil liberties,” adding:
Assange’s arrest in Britain “poses a great threat to our freedom of the press and to our freedom of speech” — the same true about how Chelsea Manning, Snowden, and other whistleblowers are mistreated.
What happened to them “could happen to you. It could happen to any of us,” she stressed.
Bipartisan politicians in the US and UK, along with establishment media, refuse to support Assange’s struggle for justice.
On Monday, he appeared in London’s Westminster Magistrates Court. Showing the effects of egregious mistreatment since unlawfully dragged from the city’s Ecuadorian embassy and imprisoned under harsh conditions, he was too physically and emotionally shattered to participate in his defense.
He’s an investigative journalist/whistleblower, publishing material supplied by sources believed to be credible, unidentified for their protection.
WikiLeaks is not an intelligence operation. Nor it it connected to Russia or any other country. Claims otherwise are fabricated.
Assange earlier explained that WikiLeaks has the right “to publish newsworthy content. Consistent with the US Constitution, we publish material that we can confirm to be true,” he stressed.
US charges against him are fabricated and malicious, what no legitimate tribunal would accept.
Justice Department lawyer James Lewis falsely accused him of “spying,” lied saying he’s “not a journalist,” turned truth on its head claiming his actions were “criminal in both the US and UK” — the above Big Lies how all fascist police states operate.
Assange attorney Mark Summers called for dismissal of Washington’s illegitimate extradition request, saying:
According to the 2003 UK/US extradition treaty, it “shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense,” adding:
The unjustifiable persecution of Assange and Chelsea Manning is “part of an avowed war on whistleblowers to include investigative journalists and publishers.”
Summers requested a three-month delay of Assange’s February 25 extradition hearing because “we need more time” to prepare a proper defense, given the “enormity” of issues involved, requiring “evidence gathering that would test most lawyers.”
Operating as an imperial tool, judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the request, saying the extradition hearing will proceed as schedule on February 25 at Woolwich Magistrates Court near Belmarsh Prison.
Its public gallery has three seats, assuring Assange’s judicial lynching will be virtually closed to public scrutiny.
Barely able to stand and speak after months of barbaric mistreatment, when asked if there’s “anything (he) would like to say, he replied barely audibly that he doesn’t “understand how this is equitable,” adding:
Imperial USA “had 10 years to prepare (its judicial lynching). I can’t remember anything. I can’t access any of my written work.”
“It’s very difficult to do anything with such limited resources against a superpower intent on” an illegitimate crucifixion. “I can’t think properly” from the barbaric ordeal he’s endured.
Baraitser dismissively replied that “conditions of your detainment are not the subject of this court.”
Following the hearing, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson called for the case against Assange to “be thrown out immediately,” adding:
“Not only is it illegal on the face of the (extradition) treaty, the US has conducted illegal operations against Assange and his lawyers which are the subject of a major investigation in Spain.”
John Pilger witnessed Monday’s spectacle, saying
“(t)he whole thing is a grotesque absurdity. There is an extradition law between this country and the United States.”
“It states specifically that someone cannot be extradited if the offenses are political.”
“The source of this is a rogue (US) state — a state that ignores its own laws and international laws and the laws of this country.”
Summers called Assange’s crucifixion “a political attempt to signal to journalists the consequences of publishing information” ruling regimes want suppressed.
“It’s legally unprecedented…part of an avowed war on (truth-telling) whistleblowers to include investigative journalists and publishers.”
In cahoots with the Trump regime, police state Britain is killing Assange slowly, wanting him, whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, and other truth-tellers silenced.
What’s going on is the hallmark of totalitarian rule – controlling the message, eliminating what conflicts with it, notably on major geopolitical issues.
Losing the right of free expression endangers all others. When truth-telling and dissent are considered threats to national security, free and open societies no longer exist – the slippery slope America and other Western societies are heading on.
Slow-Motion US/UK Killing of Julian Assange
Establishment media are in cahoots with US/UK ruling regimes against Assange for the “crime” of truth-telling journalism abhorred in the West — totalitarian rule where these societies are heading.
In mid-October, UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer denounced Assange’s judicial lynching and egregious mistreatment, saying the following:
“What has the man done? He has disclosed an enormous amount of information that governments want to remain secret, most infamously the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which, in my view, is evidence for war crimes.”
“What is the scandal in this case is that everyone focuses on Julian Assange. Here is someone who exposes evidence for war crimes, including torture and murder, and he is under this constant pressure.”
“I am absolutely convinced he will not receive a fair trial in Virginia, and he will remain in prison under inhumane conditions for the rest of his life.”
Tulsi Gabbard is the only US presidential aspirant expressing support for journalist Assange, as well as whistleblowers Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and others like them, opposing their “prosecution like criminals.”
If elected president, she’d drop charges against them, she said, calling for greater “protect(ion) (of) our civil liberties,” adding:
Assange’s arrest in Britain “poses a great threat to our freedom of the press and to our freedom of speech” — the same true about how Chelsea Manning, Snowden, and other whistleblowers are mistreated.
What happened to them “could happen to you. It could happen to any of us,” she stressed.
Bipartisan politicians in the US and UK, along with establishment media, refuse to support Assange’s struggle for justice.
On Monday, he appeared in London’s Westminster Magistrates Court. Showing the effects of egregious mistreatment since unlawfully dragged from the city’s Ecuadorian embassy and imprisoned under harsh conditions, he was too physically and emotionally shattered to participate in his defense.
He’s an investigative journalist/whistleblower, publishing material supplied by sources believed to be credible, unidentified for their protection.
WikiLeaks is not an intelligence operation. Nor it it connected to Russia or any other country. Claims otherwise are fabricated.
Assange earlier explained that WikiLeaks has the right “to publish newsworthy content. Consistent with the US Constitution, we publish material that we can confirm to be true,” he stressed.
US charges against him are fabricated and malicious, what no legitimate tribunal would accept.
Justice Department lawyer James Lewis falsely accused him of “spying,” lied saying he’s “not a journalist,” turned truth on its head claiming his actions were “criminal in both the US and UK” — the above Big Lies how all fascist police states operate.
Assange attorney Mark Summers called for dismissal of Washington’s illegitimate extradition request, saying:
According to the 2003 UK/US extradition treaty, it “shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense,” adding:
The unjustifiable persecution of Assange and Chelsea Manning is “part of an avowed war on whistleblowers to include investigative journalists and publishers.”
Summers requested a three-month delay of Assange’s February 25 extradition hearing because “we need more time” to prepare a proper defense, given the “enormity” of issues involved, requiring “evidence gathering that would test most lawyers.”
Operating as an imperial tool, judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the request, saying the extradition hearing will proceed as schedule on February 25 at Woolwich Magistrates Court near Belmarsh Prison.
Its public gallery has three seats, assuring Assange’s judicial lynching will be virtually closed to public scrutiny.
Barely able to stand and speak after months of barbaric mistreatment, when asked if there’s “anything (he) would like to say, he replied barely audibly that he doesn’t “understand how this is equitable,” adding:
Imperial USA “had 10 years to prepare (its judicial lynching). I can’t remember anything. I can’t access any of my written work.”
“It’s very difficult to do anything with such limited resources against a superpower intent on” an illegitimate crucifixion. “I can’t think properly” from the barbaric ordeal he’s endured.
Baraitser dismissively replied that “conditions of your detainment are not the subject of this court.”
Following the hearing, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson called for the case against Assange to “be thrown out immediately,” adding:
“Not only is it illegal on the face of the (extradition) treaty, the US has conducted illegal operations against Assange and his lawyers which are the subject of a major investigation in Spain.”
John Pilger witnessed Monday’s spectacle, saying
“(t)he whole thing is a grotesque absurdity. There is an extradition law between this country and the United States.”
“It states specifically that someone cannot be extradited if the offenses are political.”
“The source of this is a rogue (US) state — a state that ignores its own laws and international laws and the laws of this country.”
Summers called Assange’s crucifixion “a political attempt to signal to journalists the consequences of publishing information” ruling regimes want suppressed.
“It’s legally unprecedented…part of an avowed war on (truth-telling) whistleblowers to include investigative journalists and publishers.”
In cahoots with the Trump regime, police state Britain is killing Assange slowly, wanting him, whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, and other truth-tellers silenced.
What’s going on is the hallmark of totalitarian rule – controlling the message, eliminating what conflicts with it, notably on major geopolitical issues.
Losing the right of free expression endangers all others. When truth-telling and dissent are considered threats to national security, free and open societies no longer exist – the slippery slope America and other Western societies are heading on.
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
SC199-10
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct19/unraveling-quickens10-19.html
The Unraveling Quickens
The central thesis of my new book Will You Be Richer or Poorer? is the financial "wealth" we've supposedly gained (or at least a few of us have gained) in the past 20 years has masked the unraveling of our intangible capital: the resilience of our economy, our social capital, i.e. our ability to find common ground and solve real-world problems, our sense that the playing field, while not entirely level, is not two-tiered, and our sense of economic security--have all been shredded.
The unraveling of everything that actually matters is quickening. While every "news" outlet cheerleads the stock market ("The Dow soared today as investor optimism rose... blah blah blah"), our "leadership" and our media don't even attempt to measure what's unraveling, much less address the underlying causes.
The hope is that if we ignore what's unraveling, it will magically go away. But that's not how reality works.
The unraveling is gathering momentum because prices have been pushing higher while wages lag, feeding the rising precariousness and inequality of our economy. The connection between people losing ground and social disorder/disunity has been well established by historians such as Peter Turchin Ages of Discord and David Hackett Fischer The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History.
In our era, trust in the legitimacy of our institutions is unraveling because the statistics presented as "facts" are so clearly designed to support the status quo narrative that everything's getting better every day in every way rather than the politically unwelcome reality that the bottom 95% are losing ground and whatever they do earn and own is increasingly at risk from forces outside their control.
Economic decay leads to social and political disorder / disunity. The sudden rise of vast homeless encampments is one manifestation of the social fabric unraveling. In the political realm, the insanity of accusing Democratic candidates of being "Russian agents" matches the hysterical destructiveness of the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
It all starts with economic decay, so let's look at some charts. Here's a chart of income inequality which helps drive wealth inequality.
Note that the only group that benefited from the past 20 years of speculative bubbles is the top 1%. The whole idea that inflating bubbles creates a "wealth effect" that "trickles down" is preposterous, as evidenced by the decline of the middle 60% of households while the speculators and owners of bubble-assets skimmed the vast majority of income gains.
Meanwhile, we're told inflation is less than 2% annually while rising costs have outpaced meager wage increases. What's a more realistic measure of real-world inflation--the official Consumer Price Index (CPI) at 18% over ten years or rent and healthcare at 34% and 45%?
According to the Chapwood Index, real-world inflation in urban America is running 9% to 13% annually. This is more in line with reality than the bogus CPI, as evidenced by this chart of wages and healthcare costs:
Even if we don't measure the erosion of intangible capital, the social and political consequences of this impoverishment are manifesting in all sorts of ways: large-scale social disorder is breaking out around the globe, and the political middle ground has completely vanished: no matter which way an issue is decided, one camp will refuse to accept the outcome.
The only way forward with any chance of success is to start by acknowledging the decay of our economy due to rampant financialization, legalized looting, the pathologies of "winner take most" speculation and the realities of a two-tiered system in which entrenched elites are "more equal" than the rest of us, economically, socially and politically. We have to accept the limits of technology to reverse the unraveling and assess the damage that's already been done to our shared capital.
Acting as if the system is working just fine and the problem is perception/optics is accelerating the unraveling.
The Unraveling Quickens
The central thesis of my new book Will You Be Richer or Poorer? is the financial "wealth" we've supposedly gained (or at least a few of us have gained) in the past 20 years has masked the unraveling of our intangible capital: the resilience of our economy, our social capital, i.e. our ability to find common ground and solve real-world problems, our sense that the playing field, while not entirely level, is not two-tiered, and our sense of economic security--have all been shredded.
The unraveling of everything that actually matters is quickening. While every "news" outlet cheerleads the stock market ("The Dow soared today as investor optimism rose... blah blah blah"), our "leadership" and our media don't even attempt to measure what's unraveling, much less address the underlying causes.
The hope is that if we ignore what's unraveling, it will magically go away. But that's not how reality works.
The unraveling is gathering momentum because prices have been pushing higher while wages lag, feeding the rising precariousness and inequality of our economy. The connection between people losing ground and social disorder/disunity has been well established by historians such as Peter Turchin Ages of Discord and David Hackett Fischer The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History.
In our era, trust in the legitimacy of our institutions is unraveling because the statistics presented as "facts" are so clearly designed to support the status quo narrative that everything's getting better every day in every way rather than the politically unwelcome reality that the bottom 95% are losing ground and whatever they do earn and own is increasingly at risk from forces outside their control.
Economic decay leads to social and political disorder / disunity. The sudden rise of vast homeless encampments is one manifestation of the social fabric unraveling. In the political realm, the insanity of accusing Democratic candidates of being "Russian agents" matches the hysterical destructiveness of the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
It all starts with economic decay, so let's look at some charts. Here's a chart of income inequality which helps drive wealth inequality.
Note that the only group that benefited from the past 20 years of speculative bubbles is the top 1%. The whole idea that inflating bubbles creates a "wealth effect" that "trickles down" is preposterous, as evidenced by the decline of the middle 60% of households while the speculators and owners of bubble-assets skimmed the vast majority of income gains.
Meanwhile, we're told inflation is less than 2% annually while rising costs have outpaced meager wage increases. What's a more realistic measure of real-world inflation--the official Consumer Price Index (CPI) at 18% over ten years or rent and healthcare at 34% and 45%?
According to the Chapwood Index, real-world inflation in urban America is running 9% to 13% annually. This is more in line with reality than the bogus CPI, as evidenced by this chart of wages and healthcare costs:
Even if we don't measure the erosion of intangible capital, the social and political consequences of this impoverishment are manifesting in all sorts of ways: large-scale social disorder is breaking out around the globe, and the political middle ground has completely vanished: no matter which way an issue is decided, one camp will refuse to accept the outcome.
The only way forward with any chance of success is to start by acknowledging the decay of our economy due to rampant financialization, legalized looting, the pathologies of "winner take most" speculation and the realities of a two-tiered system in which entrenched elites are "more equal" than the rest of us, economically, socially and politically. We have to accept the limits of technology to reverse the unraveling and assess the damage that's already been done to our shared capital.
Acting as if the system is working just fine and the problem is perception/optics is accelerating the unraveling.
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
SC199-9
https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/10/22/agents-of-empire/
Agents of Empire
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
– Arundhati Roy
Last week, Hillary Clinton called Tulsi Gabbard (and Jill Stein) Russian assets on a podcast. More specifically:
“I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians,” said Clinton, apparently referring to Rep. Gabbard, who’s been accused of receiving support from Russian bots and the Russian news media. “They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.” She added: “That’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset—I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”
Tulsi subsequently responded to this slanderous accusation with a series of devastating blows.
Her tweets set off a firestorm, and even if you’re as disillusioned by presidential politics as myself, you couldn’t help but cheer wildly that someone with a major political platform finally stated without any hint of fear or hesitation exactly what so many Americans across the ideological spectrum feel.
Of course, this has far wider implications than a high profile feud between these two. The “let’s blame Russia for Hillary’s loss” epidemic of calculated stupidity driven by Ellen-Democrats and their mouthpieces across corporate mass media began immediately after the election. I know about it on a personal level because this website was an early target of the neoliberal-led new McCarthyism courtesy of a ridiculous and libelous smear in the Washington Post over Thanksgiving weekend 2016 (see: Liberty Blitzkrieg Included on Washington Post Highlighted Hit List of “Russian Propaganda” Websites).
This is when it became clear it wasn’t just political operatives pushing fake news about Russian influence, but that “respected” mass media would be leading the charge for them. The rest is pretty much history. MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, etc have been spewing outlandish Russiagate nonsense for three years straight, and despite the complete failure of special counsel Robert Mueller to find any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, these agents of empire refuse to stop. The whole charade seems more akin to an intelligence operation than journalism, which shouldn’t be surprising given the proliferation of former intelligence agents throughout mass media in the Trump era.
Here’s a small sampling via Politico’s 2018 article: The Spies Who Came in to the TV Studio
Former CIA Director John Brennan (2013-17) is the latest superspook to be reborn as a TV newsie. He just cashed in at NBC News as a “senior national security and intelligence analyst” and served his first expert views on last Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press. The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN, which employs former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director Michael Hayden in a similar capacity. Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV’s grow lights. Almost too numerous to list, they include Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush, at NBC; and Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser under Bush, at CBS News. CNN’s bulging roster also includes former FBI agent Asha Rangappa; former FBI agent James Gagliano; Obama’s former deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken; former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers; senior adviser to the National Security Council during the Obama administration Samantha Vinograd; retired CIA operations officer Steven L. Hall; and Philip Mudd, also retired from the CIA.
Americans like to sneer at more transparently unfree societies around the world, but when you think about the disturbing implications of former spooks delivering news to the public, one can’t help but conclude that mass media in 2019 looks like a gigantic propaganda campaign targeting U.S. citizens. Moreover, as can be seen by the recent attacks by Clinton and her allies in the media on Gabbard, they aren’t easing up.
Which brings us to the crux of the issue. Why are they doing this? Why is Clinton, with zero evidence whatsoever, falsely calling a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, a veteran with two tours in Iraq, and someone polling at only 2% in the Democratic primary a “Russian asset.” Why are they so afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?
It’s partly personal. Tulsi was one of only a handful of congressional Democrats to set aside fears of the Clintons and their mafia-like network to endorse Bernie Sanders early in 2016. In fact, she stepped down from her position as vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee to do so. This is the sort of thing a petty narcissist like Hillary Clinton could never forgive, but it goes further.
Tulsi’s mere presence on stage during recent debates has proven devastating for the Ellen Degeneres wing of the Democratic party. She effectively ended neoliberal darling Kamala Harris’ chances by simply telling the truth about her horrible record, something no one else in the race had the guts to do.
In other words, Tulsi demolished Kamala Harris and put an end to her primary chances by simply telling the truth about her on national television. This is how powerful the truth can be when somebody’s actually willing to stand up and say it. It’s why the agents of empire — in charge of virtually all major institutions — go out of their way to ensure the American public is exposed to as little truth as possible. It’s also why they lie and scream “Russia” instead of debating the actual issues.
But this goes well beyond Tulsi Gabbard. Empire requires constant meddling abroad as well as periodic regime change wars to ensure compliant puppets are firmly in control of any country with any geopolitical significance. The 21st century has been littered with a series of disastrous U.S. interventions abroad, while the country back home continues to descend deeper into a neo-feudal oligarchy with a hunger games style economy. As such, an increasing number of Americans have begun to question the entire premise of imperial foreign policy.
To the agents of empire, dominant throughout mainstream politics, mega corporations, think-tanks and of course mass media, this sort of thought crime is entirely unacceptable. In case you haven’t noticed, empire is a third-rail of U.S. politics. If you dare touch the issue, you’ll be ruthlessly smeared, without any evidence, as a Russian agent or asset. There’s nothing logical about this, but then again there typically isn’t much logic when it comes to psychological operations. They depend on manipulation and triggering specific emotional responses.
There’s a reason people like Hillary Clinton and her minions just yell “Russia” whenever an individual with a platform criticizes empire and endless war. They know they can’t win an argument if they debate the actual issues, so a conscious choice was made to simply avoid debate entirely. As such, they’ve decided to craft and spread a disingenuous narrative in which anyone critical of establishment neocon/neoliberal foreign policy is a Russia asset/agent/bot. This is literally all they’ve got. These people are telling you 2+2=5 and if you don’t accept it, you’re a traitorous, Putin-loving nazi with a pee pee tape. And these same people call themselves “liberal.”
Importantly, it isn’t just a few trollish kooks doing this. It’s being spread by some of the most powerful people and institutions in the country, including of course mass media.
For example:
This inane verbal vomit is considered “liberal” news in modern America, a word which has now lost all meaning. Above, we witness a collection of television mannequins questioning the loyalty of a U.S. veteran who continues to serve in both Congress and the national guard simply because she dared call out America’s perpetually failing foreign policy establishment.
To conclude, it’s now clear dissent is only permitted so long as it doesn’t become too popular. By polling at 2% in the primary, it appears Gabbard became too popular, but the truth is she’s just a vessel. What’s really got the agents of empire concerned is we may be on the verge of a tipping point within the broader U.S. population regarding regime change wars and empire. This is why debate needs to be shut down and shut down now. A critical mass of citizens openly questioning establishment foreign policy cannot be permitted. Those on the fence need to be bullied and manipulated into thinking dissent is equivalent to being a traitor. The national security state doesn’t want the public to even think about such topics, let alone debate them.
Ultimately, if you give up your capacity for reason, for free-thought and for the courage to say what you think about issues of national significance, you’ve lost everything. This is what these manipulators want you to do. They want you to shut-up, to listen to the “experts” who destroy everything they touch, and to be a compliant subject as opposed to an active, empowered citizen. The answer to such a tactic is to be more bold, more informed and more ethical. They fear truth and empowered individuals more than anything else. Stand up tall and speak your mind. Pandering to bullies never works.
Agents of Empire
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
– Arundhati Roy
Last week, Hillary Clinton called Tulsi Gabbard (and Jill Stein) Russian assets on a podcast. More specifically:
“I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians,” said Clinton, apparently referring to Rep. Gabbard, who’s been accused of receiving support from Russian bots and the Russian news media. “They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.” She added: “That’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset—I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”
Tulsi subsequently responded to this slanderous accusation with a series of devastating blows.
Her tweets set off a firestorm, and even if you’re as disillusioned by presidential politics as myself, you couldn’t help but cheer wildly that someone with a major political platform finally stated without any hint of fear or hesitation exactly what so many Americans across the ideological spectrum feel.
Of course, this has far wider implications than a high profile feud between these two. The “let’s blame Russia for Hillary’s loss” epidemic of calculated stupidity driven by Ellen-Democrats and their mouthpieces across corporate mass media began immediately after the election. I know about it on a personal level because this website was an early target of the neoliberal-led new McCarthyism courtesy of a ridiculous and libelous smear in the Washington Post over Thanksgiving weekend 2016 (see: Liberty Blitzkrieg Included on Washington Post Highlighted Hit List of “Russian Propaganda” Websites).
This is when it became clear it wasn’t just political operatives pushing fake news about Russian influence, but that “respected” mass media would be leading the charge for them. The rest is pretty much history. MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, etc have been spewing outlandish Russiagate nonsense for three years straight, and despite the complete failure of special counsel Robert Mueller to find any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, these agents of empire refuse to stop. The whole charade seems more akin to an intelligence operation than journalism, which shouldn’t be surprising given the proliferation of former intelligence agents throughout mass media in the Trump era.
Here’s a small sampling via Politico’s 2018 article: The Spies Who Came in to the TV Studio
Former CIA Director John Brennan (2013-17) is the latest superspook to be reborn as a TV newsie. He just cashed in at NBC News as a “senior national security and intelligence analyst” and served his first expert views on last Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press. The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN, which employs former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director Michael Hayden in a similar capacity. Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV’s grow lights. Almost too numerous to list, they include Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush, at NBC; and Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser under Bush, at CBS News. CNN’s bulging roster also includes former FBI agent Asha Rangappa; former FBI agent James Gagliano; Obama’s former deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken; former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers; senior adviser to the National Security Council during the Obama administration Samantha Vinograd; retired CIA operations officer Steven L. Hall; and Philip Mudd, also retired from the CIA.
Americans like to sneer at more transparently unfree societies around the world, but when you think about the disturbing implications of former spooks delivering news to the public, one can’t help but conclude that mass media in 2019 looks like a gigantic propaganda campaign targeting U.S. citizens. Moreover, as can be seen by the recent attacks by Clinton and her allies in the media on Gabbard, they aren’t easing up.
Which brings us to the crux of the issue. Why are they doing this? Why is Clinton, with zero evidence whatsoever, falsely calling a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, a veteran with two tours in Iraq, and someone polling at only 2% in the Democratic primary a “Russian asset.” Why are they so afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?
It’s partly personal. Tulsi was one of only a handful of congressional Democrats to set aside fears of the Clintons and their mafia-like network to endorse Bernie Sanders early in 2016. In fact, she stepped down from her position as vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee to do so. This is the sort of thing a petty narcissist like Hillary Clinton could never forgive, but it goes further.
Tulsi’s mere presence on stage during recent debates has proven devastating for the Ellen Degeneres wing of the Democratic party. She effectively ended neoliberal darling Kamala Harris’ chances by simply telling the truth about her horrible record, something no one else in the race had the guts to do.
In other words, Tulsi demolished Kamala Harris and put an end to her primary chances by simply telling the truth about her on national television. This is how powerful the truth can be when somebody’s actually willing to stand up and say it. It’s why the agents of empire — in charge of virtually all major institutions — go out of their way to ensure the American public is exposed to as little truth as possible. It’s also why they lie and scream “Russia” instead of debating the actual issues.
But this goes well beyond Tulsi Gabbard. Empire requires constant meddling abroad as well as periodic regime change wars to ensure compliant puppets are firmly in control of any country with any geopolitical significance. The 21st century has been littered with a series of disastrous U.S. interventions abroad, while the country back home continues to descend deeper into a neo-feudal oligarchy with a hunger games style economy. As such, an increasing number of Americans have begun to question the entire premise of imperial foreign policy.
To the agents of empire, dominant throughout mainstream politics, mega corporations, think-tanks and of course mass media, this sort of thought crime is entirely unacceptable. In case you haven’t noticed, empire is a third-rail of U.S. politics. If you dare touch the issue, you’ll be ruthlessly smeared, without any evidence, as a Russian agent or asset. There’s nothing logical about this, but then again there typically isn’t much logic when it comes to psychological operations. They depend on manipulation and triggering specific emotional responses.
There’s a reason people like Hillary Clinton and her minions just yell “Russia” whenever an individual with a platform criticizes empire and endless war. They know they can’t win an argument if they debate the actual issues, so a conscious choice was made to simply avoid debate entirely. As such, they’ve decided to craft and spread a disingenuous narrative in which anyone critical of establishment neocon/neoliberal foreign policy is a Russia asset/agent/bot. This is literally all they’ve got. These people are telling you 2+2=5 and if you don’t accept it, you’re a traitorous, Putin-loving nazi with a pee pee tape. And these same people call themselves “liberal.”
Importantly, it isn’t just a few trollish kooks doing this. It’s being spread by some of the most powerful people and institutions in the country, including of course mass media.
For example:
This inane verbal vomit is considered “liberal” news in modern America, a word which has now lost all meaning. Above, we witness a collection of television mannequins questioning the loyalty of a U.S. veteran who continues to serve in both Congress and the national guard simply because she dared call out America’s perpetually failing foreign policy establishment.
To conclude, it’s now clear dissent is only permitted so long as it doesn’t become too popular. By polling at 2% in the primary, it appears Gabbard became too popular, but the truth is she’s just a vessel. What’s really got the agents of empire concerned is we may be on the verge of a tipping point within the broader U.S. population regarding regime change wars and empire. This is why debate needs to be shut down and shut down now. A critical mass of citizens openly questioning establishment foreign policy cannot be permitted. Those on the fence need to be bullied and manipulated into thinking dissent is equivalent to being a traitor. The national security state doesn’t want the public to even think about such topics, let alone debate them.
Ultimately, if you give up your capacity for reason, for free-thought and for the courage to say what you think about issues of national significance, you’ve lost everything. This is what these manipulators want you to do. They want you to shut-up, to listen to the “experts” who destroy everything they touch, and to be a compliant subject as opposed to an active, empowered citizen. The answer to such a tactic is to be more bold, more informed and more ethical. They fear truth and empowered individuals more than anything else. Stand up tall and speak your mind. Pandering to bullies never works.
Monday, October 21, 2019
SC199-8
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/civil-unrest-is-erupting-all-over-the-world-but-just-wait-until-the-united-states-joins-the-party
Civil Unrest Is Erupting All Over The World, But Just Wait Until The United States Joins The Party…
All over the globe, the mood is turning sour. Anger and frustration are bubbling over, and protests are becoming violent in major cities all across the planet. In some cases economic pain is driving the protests and in other cases political matters are motivating the protesters, and it has been a very long time since we have seen so many angry protests happening all over the world simultaneously. Unfortunately, many believe that what we have seen so far is just the beginning. Global economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating, and as economic pain intensifies that is only going to make everyone more frustrated. And here in the United States, the drama surrounding the potential impeachment of Donald Trump is going to greatly escalate the political tensions that are already deeply dividing this country. No matter how things turn out, a large percentage of the population is likely to be deeply frustrated with the result, and that could very easily lead to tremendous civil unrest.
But before we get to Trump, let’s take a look at what has been going on around the rest of the world first. In Chile, we are witnessing violent protests unlike anything that we have seen in decades…
Three people died in a fire in a supermarket being ransacked in the Chilean capital early Sunday, as protests sparked by anger over social and economic conditions rocked one of Latin America’s most stable countries.
Santiago’s Mayor Karla Rubilar told reporters two people burned to death in the blaze and another later died in hospital, after the huge store controlled by US retail chain Walmart was looted.
Economic conditions are tough in Chile and rapidly getting tougher, and it is very unusual to hear of “looting” in a country that is normally so stable.
Meanwhile, political corruption appears to be the main motivation for the violent protests in Lebanon…
Thousands of demonstrators poured into downtown Beirut for a third day on Saturday, hours after overnight clashes erupted between security forces and protesters leading to large-scale arrests and several injuries.
Demonstrations have engulfed various parts of Lebanon for three days. Many protesters called for the resignation of the government and demanded the “downfall” of a political class that has ruled the country since the start of its 15-year civil war in 1975.
When people lose hope that things are ever going to get any better, they tend to take to the streets.
Unfortunately, corruption appears to be a way of life over in Lebanon at this point, and there seems to be little hope of major reforms any time soon.
In the UK, the drama surrounding the Brexit saga drew “hundreds of thousands of people” into the streets of London this weekend…
Hundreds of thousands of people have marched in central London to demand a new referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union, as parliament voted to delay a decision on whether to back Prime Minister Boris Johnson‘s revised Brexit withdrawal deal.
The march organised by the People’s Vote campaign is thought to be the largest yet, drawing anti-Brexit supporters from across the country as parliament sat on a Saturday for the first time since the Falklands conflict in the 1980s.
Yet another Brexit agreement appears to have failed, and many are wondering if it will ever be possible to get one through Parliament.
Many of those favoring Brexit are hoping for a “no deal” exit from the European Union at this point, and meanwhile many of the “remainers” are holding out hope that there will somehow be a second referendum.
Over in Spain, violent protests have erupted night after night in the aftermath of the arrest of nine key pro-independence leaders in Catalonia…
Barcelona saw its fifth consecutive night of violence on Friday, in the wake of Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that jailed nine pro-independence leaders for their role in the 2017 secessionist drive. The disturbances last night were particularly virulent, in terms of their duration, intensity and use of violence on the part of protestors, who were very aggressive toward the police.
Violent groups surrounded the central headquarters of the National Police in the Catalan capital, throwing objects, putting up barricades and setting fire to trash containers. As the sun set, the protests moved to the center of the city, where the regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, used an armored vehicle with a water cannon. At least three police officers were injured in the rioting.
These protests may fade after a while, but they are not going away. Those involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia are very passionate, and it has widespread public support.
Of course the protests that have made the biggest splash on the global stage have been the relentless pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Despite the brutality of the police, the protesters just keep coming back again and again, and “tens of thousands” of protesters were in the streets once again on Sunday…
Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters took to Hong Kong’s streets on Sunday, once again defying a police ban on the assembly and undeterred by a brutal attack against a leader of the organization that called for the march.
The huge turnout, which included families, children and the elderly, demonstrated how the movement now in its fifth month continues to have widespread support, despite the increasingly violent tactics used by protesters and escalating use of force by police.
Here in the United States, we don’t have protests like this going on right now.
But we could very soon.
The impeachment process is bringing a focal point to the deep anger that has been building on both sides of the political spectrum for many years. Now that this process has begun, there is no going back, and both sides believe that there is only one result that will bring justice.
For the left, any result that does remove Donald Trump from office will be a bitter disappointment. The Democrats in the House of Representatives are going to draft articles of impeachment, and they believe that they already have the votes they need to send those articles of impeachment to the U.S. Senate.
If the Republican-controlled Senate does not vote to convict Trump and remove him from office, this will greatly upset the left, and could result in an explosion of anger in our city streets.
On the other hand, if the Republican-controlled Senate does vote to convict Trump and remove him from office, tens of millions of hardcore Trump supporters are going to be absolutely livid. There would be an explosion of righteous anger on the right, and it would almost certainly spill into our city streets.
Of course it is likely that both sides will start protesting well before there is a final result, but once the final vote in the Senate happens that is when things are likely to get very interesting.
The Democrats should have never gone down this road, because one way or another this process is going to tear us apart.
If our founders could see us today they would be rolling over in their graves, because this is not what they intended.
....
The increasing inequality between the elites around the world and the drastically declining economic realities for the masses is one of the prominent factors causing a worldwide rise in social unrest. Also the available net energy which is necessary for economic growth is beginning to seriously decline. Oil, coal, and gas usage caused the vast growth of human societies and populations in the last 150 years. All of the other energy systems will only ever provide but a small percentage of the power required for this kind of growth, and what was created all needs massive energy inputs for maintenance. Declining net energy is unstoppable. Growing social unrest is therefore unavoidable.
Civil Unrest Is Erupting All Over The World, But Just Wait Until The United States Joins The Party…
All over the globe, the mood is turning sour. Anger and frustration are bubbling over, and protests are becoming violent in major cities all across the planet. In some cases economic pain is driving the protests and in other cases political matters are motivating the protesters, and it has been a very long time since we have seen so many angry protests happening all over the world simultaneously. Unfortunately, many believe that what we have seen so far is just the beginning. Global economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating, and as economic pain intensifies that is only going to make everyone more frustrated. And here in the United States, the drama surrounding the potential impeachment of Donald Trump is going to greatly escalate the political tensions that are already deeply dividing this country. No matter how things turn out, a large percentage of the population is likely to be deeply frustrated with the result, and that could very easily lead to tremendous civil unrest.
But before we get to Trump, let’s take a look at what has been going on around the rest of the world first. In Chile, we are witnessing violent protests unlike anything that we have seen in decades…
Three people died in a fire in a supermarket being ransacked in the Chilean capital early Sunday, as protests sparked by anger over social and economic conditions rocked one of Latin America’s most stable countries.
Santiago’s Mayor Karla Rubilar told reporters two people burned to death in the blaze and another later died in hospital, after the huge store controlled by US retail chain Walmart was looted.
Economic conditions are tough in Chile and rapidly getting tougher, and it is very unusual to hear of “looting” in a country that is normally so stable.
Meanwhile, political corruption appears to be the main motivation for the violent protests in Lebanon…
Thousands of demonstrators poured into downtown Beirut for a third day on Saturday, hours after overnight clashes erupted between security forces and protesters leading to large-scale arrests and several injuries.
Demonstrations have engulfed various parts of Lebanon for three days. Many protesters called for the resignation of the government and demanded the “downfall” of a political class that has ruled the country since the start of its 15-year civil war in 1975.
When people lose hope that things are ever going to get any better, they tend to take to the streets.
Unfortunately, corruption appears to be a way of life over in Lebanon at this point, and there seems to be little hope of major reforms any time soon.
In the UK, the drama surrounding the Brexit saga drew “hundreds of thousands of people” into the streets of London this weekend…
Hundreds of thousands of people have marched in central London to demand a new referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union, as parliament voted to delay a decision on whether to back Prime Minister Boris Johnson‘s revised Brexit withdrawal deal.
The march organised by the People’s Vote campaign is thought to be the largest yet, drawing anti-Brexit supporters from across the country as parliament sat on a Saturday for the first time since the Falklands conflict in the 1980s.
Yet another Brexit agreement appears to have failed, and many are wondering if it will ever be possible to get one through Parliament.
Many of those favoring Brexit are hoping for a “no deal” exit from the European Union at this point, and meanwhile many of the “remainers” are holding out hope that there will somehow be a second referendum.
Over in Spain, violent protests have erupted night after night in the aftermath of the arrest of nine key pro-independence leaders in Catalonia…
Barcelona saw its fifth consecutive night of violence on Friday, in the wake of Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that jailed nine pro-independence leaders for their role in the 2017 secessionist drive. The disturbances last night were particularly virulent, in terms of their duration, intensity and use of violence on the part of protestors, who were very aggressive toward the police.
Violent groups surrounded the central headquarters of the National Police in the Catalan capital, throwing objects, putting up barricades and setting fire to trash containers. As the sun set, the protests moved to the center of the city, where the regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, used an armored vehicle with a water cannon. At least three police officers were injured in the rioting.
These protests may fade after a while, but they are not going away. Those involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia are very passionate, and it has widespread public support.
Of course the protests that have made the biggest splash on the global stage have been the relentless pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Despite the brutality of the police, the protesters just keep coming back again and again, and “tens of thousands” of protesters were in the streets once again on Sunday…
Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters took to Hong Kong’s streets on Sunday, once again defying a police ban on the assembly and undeterred by a brutal attack against a leader of the organization that called for the march.
The huge turnout, which included families, children and the elderly, demonstrated how the movement now in its fifth month continues to have widespread support, despite the increasingly violent tactics used by protesters and escalating use of force by police.
Here in the United States, we don’t have protests like this going on right now.
But we could very soon.
The impeachment process is bringing a focal point to the deep anger that has been building on both sides of the political spectrum for many years. Now that this process has begun, there is no going back, and both sides believe that there is only one result that will bring justice.
For the left, any result that does remove Donald Trump from office will be a bitter disappointment. The Democrats in the House of Representatives are going to draft articles of impeachment, and they believe that they already have the votes they need to send those articles of impeachment to the U.S. Senate.
If the Republican-controlled Senate does not vote to convict Trump and remove him from office, this will greatly upset the left, and could result in an explosion of anger in our city streets.
On the other hand, if the Republican-controlled Senate does vote to convict Trump and remove him from office, tens of millions of hardcore Trump supporters are going to be absolutely livid. There would be an explosion of righteous anger on the right, and it would almost certainly spill into our city streets.
Of course it is likely that both sides will start protesting well before there is a final result, but once the final vote in the Senate happens that is when things are likely to get very interesting.
The Democrats should have never gone down this road, because one way or another this process is going to tear us apart.
If our founders could see us today they would be rolling over in their graves, because this is not what they intended.
....
The increasing inequality between the elites around the world and the drastically declining economic realities for the masses is one of the prominent factors causing a worldwide rise in social unrest. Also the available net energy which is necessary for economic growth is beginning to seriously decline. Oil, coal, and gas usage caused the vast growth of human societies and populations in the last 150 years. All of the other energy systems will only ever provide but a small percentage of the power required for this kind of growth, and what was created all needs massive energy inputs for maintenance. Declining net energy is unstoppable. Growing social unrest is therefore unavoidable.
Sunday, October 20, 2019
SC199-7
https://www.peakprosperity.com/the-fed-is-lying-to-us/
The Fed Is Lying To Us
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie"
The recent statements from the Federal Reserve and the other major world central banks (the ECB, BoJ, BoE and PBoC) are alarming because their actions are completely out of alignment with what they’re telling us.
Their words seek to soothe us that “everything’s fine” and the global economy is doing quite well. But their behavior reflects a desperate anxiety.
Put more frankly; we’re being lied to.
Case in point: On October 4, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell publicly claimed the US economy is “in a good place”. Yet somehow, despite the US banking system already having approximately $1.5 trillion in reserves, the Fed is suddenly pumping in an additional $60 billion per month to keep things propped up.
Do drastic, urgent measures like this reflect an economy that’s “in a good place”?
The Fed’s Rescue Was Never Real
Remember, after a full decade of providing “emergency stimulus measures” the US Federal Reserve stopped its quantitative easing program (aka, printing money) a few years back.
Mission Accomplished, it declared. We’ve saved the system.
But that cessation was meaningless. Because the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped right in to take over the Fed’s stimulus baton and started aggressively growing its own balance sheet — keeping the global pool of new money growing.
Let’s look at the data. First, we see here how the Fed indeed stopped growing its balance sheet in 2014:
Fed balance sheet chart
And we can note other important insights in this chart.
For starters, you can clearly see how in 2008, the Fed printed up more money in just a few weeks than it had in the nearly 100 years of operations prior.
The flat parts of the curve in this chart are were the Fed paused its printing efforts. And at each of these plateaus, without the tailwind of fresh new hundreds of $billions created from thin air, the equity markets stopped rising and even (gasp!) threatened to decline.
So what did the Fed do in response? It resumed the money printing.
The above chart is really a monument to failure. The initial $trillions of printed money didn’t solve things, and so more printed $trillions followed.
Every trick in the book has been used. QE. Operation Twist. Jawboning by Bernanke, Yellen and now Powell. More jawboning and tweets from the President and his administration. And now, fresh interest rate cuts and a resumption of QE (but don’t call it that!) by the Fed.
Collectively, these efforts have horsewhipped stocks and bonds higher and higher over the past decade — which was the intent. But it seems the higher they go (and thus further distorted from their underlying valuation fundamentals), the Fed becomes ever more frightened of a correction.
So now let’s look at what happened after the Fed passed along the money printing baton to the ECB.
We can clearly see in the chart below that when the Fed stopped its printing in 2014, the ECB stepped right in and carried things on until this year:
ECB balance sheet chart
During the years of ECB printing (and printing by other world central banks) stocks and bonds continued powering higher. That is, until the ECB slowed its efforts in late 2018, as the Federal Reserve was raising its federal funds rate.
You see, 2019 was supposed to be the year when the major central banks were supposed to start unwinding their massive balance sheets in earnest. And, in doing so, start to undo the massive market distortions caused by their prior actions.
And what happened in late 2018? The markets started rolling over fast and hard.
Panicked, the central banks have rushed back to “rescue” the system. And in the process, are showing that they’ll likely never “unwind” the $trillions they’ve been printing from thin air.
Looking again at the Fed’s balance sheet:
Fed balance sheet 2016-2019
We see that, starting in 2017, the Fed began the slow process of trying to remove some of the liquidity it has injected into the system over the past decade.
It didn’t get very far.
Worried about recessionary signs and wobbly stocks (still within a few percentages of their all-time highs, mind you), the Fed’s most recent actions have undone 5 months of ‘tightening’ in just five blistering weeks of panic.
It’s enormously concerning that the stock market is now the sole focus of central banking. The stock market is a terrifically poor instrument by which to try and guide anything (except the growth in apparent wealth of the ultra-rich – it’s very good at that).
Remember, the Fed stopped printing in and began raising rates in order to build up some wiggle room to deal with the next recession when it inevitably arrives.
But that never came to pass.
The last rate hike was in January and the Fed is now back to lowering rates. With the federal funds rate at a measly 2.0% today and likely headed lower from here, the Fed has practically no wiggle room to speak of at this point:
Effective Federal Funds Rate chart
“When it becomes serious, you have to lie”
The above is a quote from Claude Junker, of the EU technocracy, explaining (in 2014) why he believed lying is necessary during financial emergencies.
Fast forward to last week. When Jerome Powell tried to explain why the Fed is suddenly back in the business of printing $60 billion per month (out of thin air) to buy more US Treasury bills, he came off sounding like he’d ripped a page out of Junker’s playbook.
Is he now lying because “It’s serious”?
“I want to emphasize that growth of our balance sheet for reserve management purposes should in no way be confused with the large-scale asset purchase programs that we deployed after the financial crisis,” he said. “Neither the recent technical issues nor the purchases of Treasury bills we are contemplating to resolve them should materially affect the stance of monetary policy.”
“In no sense, is this QE,” Powell said in a moderated discussion after delivering his speech.
Not QE?
Well, what about the fact that the Fed is conjuring $60 billion of new money into existence each month and shoving that into the banking system?
And what about the fact that these new Quantities of money are Easing financial conditions and expanding the Fed’s balance sheet again?
You mean other than those similarities, it’s definitely not QE, Jerome?
Even Wall Street agrees with me:
“I think what the Fed Chairman decides to call it is inconsequential,” Yousef Abbasi, global market strategist for U.S. institutional equities at INTL FCStone told MarketWatch. “From what’s been discussed, it’s exactly what was once called QE. They would be buying securities and increasing liquidity and that is easing. However you want to refer to it, ultimately it’s supportive of equities,” he said.
Mike O’Rourke, chief market strategist at Jones Trading said in an interview that balance-sheet expansion may be different because it will involve the purchasing of short-term government debt rather than long-term debt, but that the effect is to enable private banks to maintain larger balance sheets and take on more risk. “This is very QE-like,” he said.
Yes, this is “very QE-like.” Indistinguishably QE-like.
Further, it has to be noted that the decision to suddenly restart the QE program was made mid-cycle, that is between FOMC meetings. This is a good indicator that things are “serious”, as the Fed typically doesn’t like to appear as if it’s been caught off-guard.
So, from my perch: something BIG and concerning is afoot in the economy, the Fed is secretly panicking, and they’re lying to us about it.
Things Are Now “Serious”
Here in late 2019, both the Federal Reserve and the ECB are now both easing again – or back to ‘fraudulent money printing’ as I prefer to label it.
Perhaps a definition is in order. A fraud is meant to deceive while removing something of value from one or more parties.
When printing money, the central banks say they are doing it to protect the economy, jobs and the financial system.
But what’s actually happening is that wealth is flowing like a raging river towards a select few individuals and corporations.
It’s critical to understand that the central banks cannot print up prosperity. All they can do, being redistributive organizations, is take purchasing power away from one side and hand it to another.
So the key question to be asking now is: Who’s winning and who’s losing?
Well, here in the US, we already know that it’s the tippy-top 0.1% that is doing almost all of the ‘winning.’ The next 0.9% are doing pretty well, too. But by the time we get just slightly below the top 10%, we run out of “winners”.
Ergo, the bottom ~90% of us are the losers:
Distribution of Stocks by Wealth Percentile
This enrages me enormously. It’s such an obvious scam to reveal, but somehow the US press is entirely NOT up to the task.
For some insane reason, it has become normalized for the ultra-wealthy to grab everything for themselves, leaving little left over for today’s lower classes or for future generations.
When did such magnificent greed become normal? How is any of this okay with anybody?
Increasingly, we’re seeing that more and more people are NOT OK with that. The Yellow Vest protests in France, the uprisings in Ecuador and Hong Kong, the climate protests, the Extinction Rebellion movement — all of these are forms of rejection of destructive blind greed.
They are also predictive signs that our social and political systems are becoming badly stressed. When people finally start losing hope, they turn on their “leadership” and revolt.
In other words, It’s now becoming serious.
By now the central banks should have realized that their efforts to perpetually boost asset prices are unraveling the main social contracts upon which our very social stability and relative political peace rest.
But if they have, they aren’t demonstrating any signs of it. Instead, they’re still pretending everything is “in a good place”
The core predicament facing the Fed and its central banking brethren is that reality can be delayed but not dismissed.
The pressures of instability continue to mount exponentially the more the central planners try to contain and (literally) paper over them.
It’s no longer an issue of keeping stock prices attractively high. It’s about accelerating social inequality, the rejection of capitalism and globalization, rising geopolitical divisions, resource scarcity, and the loss of liberty, health and happiness. The central planners’ extractive policies are now manifesting in all of these ills.
How much longer can they keep the system from exploding outside their control?....
The Fed Is Lying To Us
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie"
The recent statements from the Federal Reserve and the other major world central banks (the ECB, BoJ, BoE and PBoC) are alarming because their actions are completely out of alignment with what they’re telling us.
Their words seek to soothe us that “everything’s fine” and the global economy is doing quite well. But their behavior reflects a desperate anxiety.
Put more frankly; we’re being lied to.
Case in point: On October 4, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell publicly claimed the US economy is “in a good place”. Yet somehow, despite the US banking system already having approximately $1.5 trillion in reserves, the Fed is suddenly pumping in an additional $60 billion per month to keep things propped up.
Do drastic, urgent measures like this reflect an economy that’s “in a good place”?
The Fed’s Rescue Was Never Real
Remember, after a full decade of providing “emergency stimulus measures” the US Federal Reserve stopped its quantitative easing program (aka, printing money) a few years back.
Mission Accomplished, it declared. We’ve saved the system.
But that cessation was meaningless. Because the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped right in to take over the Fed’s stimulus baton and started aggressively growing its own balance sheet — keeping the global pool of new money growing.
Let’s look at the data. First, we see here how the Fed indeed stopped growing its balance sheet in 2014:
Fed balance sheet chart
And we can note other important insights in this chart.
For starters, you can clearly see how in 2008, the Fed printed up more money in just a few weeks than it had in the nearly 100 years of operations prior.
The flat parts of the curve in this chart are were the Fed paused its printing efforts. And at each of these plateaus, without the tailwind of fresh new hundreds of $billions created from thin air, the equity markets stopped rising and even (gasp!) threatened to decline.
So what did the Fed do in response? It resumed the money printing.
The above chart is really a monument to failure. The initial $trillions of printed money didn’t solve things, and so more printed $trillions followed.
Every trick in the book has been used. QE. Operation Twist. Jawboning by Bernanke, Yellen and now Powell. More jawboning and tweets from the President and his administration. And now, fresh interest rate cuts and a resumption of QE (but don’t call it that!) by the Fed.
Collectively, these efforts have horsewhipped stocks and bonds higher and higher over the past decade — which was the intent. But it seems the higher they go (and thus further distorted from their underlying valuation fundamentals), the Fed becomes ever more frightened of a correction.
So now let’s look at what happened after the Fed passed along the money printing baton to the ECB.
We can clearly see in the chart below that when the Fed stopped its printing in 2014, the ECB stepped right in and carried things on until this year:
ECB balance sheet chart
During the years of ECB printing (and printing by other world central banks) stocks and bonds continued powering higher. That is, until the ECB slowed its efforts in late 2018, as the Federal Reserve was raising its federal funds rate.
You see, 2019 was supposed to be the year when the major central banks were supposed to start unwinding their massive balance sheets in earnest. And, in doing so, start to undo the massive market distortions caused by their prior actions.
And what happened in late 2018? The markets started rolling over fast and hard.
Panicked, the central banks have rushed back to “rescue” the system. And in the process, are showing that they’ll likely never “unwind” the $trillions they’ve been printing from thin air.
Looking again at the Fed’s balance sheet:
Fed balance sheet 2016-2019
We see that, starting in 2017, the Fed began the slow process of trying to remove some of the liquidity it has injected into the system over the past decade.
It didn’t get very far.
Worried about recessionary signs and wobbly stocks (still within a few percentages of their all-time highs, mind you), the Fed’s most recent actions have undone 5 months of ‘tightening’ in just five blistering weeks of panic.
It’s enormously concerning that the stock market is now the sole focus of central banking. The stock market is a terrifically poor instrument by which to try and guide anything (except the growth in apparent wealth of the ultra-rich – it’s very good at that).
Remember, the Fed stopped printing in and began raising rates in order to build up some wiggle room to deal with the next recession when it inevitably arrives.
But that never came to pass.
The last rate hike was in January and the Fed is now back to lowering rates. With the federal funds rate at a measly 2.0% today and likely headed lower from here, the Fed has practically no wiggle room to speak of at this point:
Effective Federal Funds Rate chart
“When it becomes serious, you have to lie”
The above is a quote from Claude Junker, of the EU technocracy, explaining (in 2014) why he believed lying is necessary during financial emergencies.
Fast forward to last week. When Jerome Powell tried to explain why the Fed is suddenly back in the business of printing $60 billion per month (out of thin air) to buy more US Treasury bills, he came off sounding like he’d ripped a page out of Junker’s playbook.
Is he now lying because “It’s serious”?
“I want to emphasize that growth of our balance sheet for reserve management purposes should in no way be confused with the large-scale asset purchase programs that we deployed after the financial crisis,” he said. “Neither the recent technical issues nor the purchases of Treasury bills we are contemplating to resolve them should materially affect the stance of monetary policy.”
“In no sense, is this QE,” Powell said in a moderated discussion after delivering his speech.
Not QE?
Well, what about the fact that the Fed is conjuring $60 billion of new money into existence each month and shoving that into the banking system?
And what about the fact that these new Quantities of money are Easing financial conditions and expanding the Fed’s balance sheet again?
You mean other than those similarities, it’s definitely not QE, Jerome?
Even Wall Street agrees with me:
“I think what the Fed Chairman decides to call it is inconsequential,” Yousef Abbasi, global market strategist for U.S. institutional equities at INTL FCStone told MarketWatch. “From what’s been discussed, it’s exactly what was once called QE. They would be buying securities and increasing liquidity and that is easing. However you want to refer to it, ultimately it’s supportive of equities,” he said.
Mike O’Rourke, chief market strategist at Jones Trading said in an interview that balance-sheet expansion may be different because it will involve the purchasing of short-term government debt rather than long-term debt, but that the effect is to enable private banks to maintain larger balance sheets and take on more risk. “This is very QE-like,” he said.
Yes, this is “very QE-like.” Indistinguishably QE-like.
Further, it has to be noted that the decision to suddenly restart the QE program was made mid-cycle, that is between FOMC meetings. This is a good indicator that things are “serious”, as the Fed typically doesn’t like to appear as if it’s been caught off-guard.
So, from my perch: something BIG and concerning is afoot in the economy, the Fed is secretly panicking, and they’re lying to us about it.
Things Are Now “Serious”
Here in late 2019, both the Federal Reserve and the ECB are now both easing again – or back to ‘fraudulent money printing’ as I prefer to label it.
Perhaps a definition is in order. A fraud is meant to deceive while removing something of value from one or more parties.
When printing money, the central banks say they are doing it to protect the economy, jobs and the financial system.
But what’s actually happening is that wealth is flowing like a raging river towards a select few individuals and corporations.
It’s critical to understand that the central banks cannot print up prosperity. All they can do, being redistributive organizations, is take purchasing power away from one side and hand it to another.
So the key question to be asking now is: Who’s winning and who’s losing?
Well, here in the US, we already know that it’s the tippy-top 0.1% that is doing almost all of the ‘winning.’ The next 0.9% are doing pretty well, too. But by the time we get just slightly below the top 10%, we run out of “winners”.
Ergo, the bottom ~90% of us are the losers:
Distribution of Stocks by Wealth Percentile
This enrages me enormously. It’s such an obvious scam to reveal, but somehow the US press is entirely NOT up to the task.
For some insane reason, it has become normalized for the ultra-wealthy to grab everything for themselves, leaving little left over for today’s lower classes or for future generations.
When did such magnificent greed become normal? How is any of this okay with anybody?
Increasingly, we’re seeing that more and more people are NOT OK with that. The Yellow Vest protests in France, the uprisings in Ecuador and Hong Kong, the climate protests, the Extinction Rebellion movement — all of these are forms of rejection of destructive blind greed.
They are also predictive signs that our social and political systems are becoming badly stressed. When people finally start losing hope, they turn on their “leadership” and revolt.
In other words, It’s now becoming serious.
By now the central banks should have realized that their efforts to perpetually boost asset prices are unraveling the main social contracts upon which our very social stability and relative political peace rest.
But if they have, they aren’t demonstrating any signs of it. Instead, they’re still pretending everything is “in a good place”
The core predicament facing the Fed and its central banking brethren is that reality can be delayed but not dismissed.
The pressures of instability continue to mount exponentially the more the central planners try to contain and (literally) paper over them.
It’s no longer an issue of keeping stock prices attractively high. It’s about accelerating social inequality, the rejection of capitalism and globalization, rising geopolitical divisions, resource scarcity, and the loss of liberty, health and happiness. The central planners’ extractive policies are now manifesting in all of these ills.
How much longer can they keep the system from exploding outside their control?....
Saturday, October 19, 2019
SC199-6
http://ricefarmer.blogspot.com/
Energy Supply System Requirements
In a few posts I’ve briefly touched upon the three basic requirements (as I see them) for any energy supply system which sustains a society, state, empire, or civilization, but I have always felt the need to describe it in a bit more detail and in a more formal manner. Such is the purpose of this post. The three requirements are:
1. The system must be self-sustaining. That is, it must pay its own day-to-day running costs.
2. The system must be self-replicating. That is, it must provide the energy for building (and rebuilding/replacing) its own physical infrastructure. These costs are capital expenditures, as opposed to running costs.
3. After satisfying requirements #1 and #2, the system must still have surplus energy with which to power the socioeconomic system.
Corollary to #3: The amount of surplus energy supplied to society determines what kind of society/civilization is possible. For example, civilizations based on wood and charcoal will be totally different from, and primitive in comparison with, those based on denser forms of energy such as fossil fuels.
This helps explain why industrial civilization is tanking. Not all fossil fuels are created equal, and we are steadily moving from higher-quality, easy-to-extract fossil fuels to lower-quality, hard-to-extract fossil fuels. This transition gradually decreases surplus energy (#3) because there is progressively less surplus energy left after covering the costs in #1 and #2. The situation gets increasingly desperate, as illustrated by, for example, shale oil, which is not even economically viable. Another example would be biofuels, which — because of their low EROI values — cannot satisfy even requirement #1. In other words, if biofuels produced in the first cycle were used to power the machinery, trucks, and biofuel production facilities in the second cycle, the biofuels would run out during the production process, leaving no energy for requirements #2 and #3.
This also casts a dark cloud over renewables like wind and solar. Intermittency, variability, and the need for storage, overbuilding, and vast tracts of land, as well as other problems, lead me to believe that they cannot satisfy the three requirements, or at least that they cannot supply enough surplus energy to maintain civilization at this level. And if civilization cannot be maintained at this level, that is bad news for renewables because their infrastructure is built by the industrial system.
Another factor is the key difference between fossil fuels and renewables. FFs are actually biofuels created by natural forces. Nature produced the organic materials which served as the feedstock for FFs, gathered them up in colossal quantities, put them in gigantic pressure cookers, and let them stew for millennia. When humans appeared on the Earth, they were already finished. All we have to do is extract them from their underground containers and perform the final processing. Because our energy input is relatively small, the FF energy supply system has yielded a fabulously huge amount of surplus energy. And that is the prodigious power that built our globe-straddling industrial civilization.
On the other hand, to make biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel we must do all that work ourselves. Nature’s only input is sunlight (in the case of FFs, geological forces did the rest), so we have to produce and harvest the feedstock ourselves. As such, our energy inputs are so large that there is much less surplus energy, and in some cases none at all! As I have conceived it, therefore, biofuels are a complete waste of the FF energy used to satisfy requirements #2 and #3. In terms of this energy system, the sensible thing to do is directly use the FFs, and forget about biofuels. The real test of any energy source or combination of sources is not its EROI, but whether it can satisfy the three requirements given above. In other words, it either pulls its own weight (requirements #1 and #2) and supplies surplus energy to society (requirement #3), or it’s simply not an energy source. Many people will say that technological improvements will be made, and they are likely correct. But no matter what improvements are made, they will not cause nature to magically do most of the work for us, as it did with FFs; we still need to supply the inputs ourselves, which means that renewables can never match FFs with regard to requirement #3, i.e., in supplying society with such a large amount of surplus energy.
Many people insist that we can completely stop using fossil fuels, and power civilization as we know it on renewables alone. Think about that for a minute. Renewable-energy hardware is currently made with FFs, but we are supposedly going to operate, build, and replace all those solar and wind farms, hydroelectric dams, and other energy-producing facilities and equipment with their energy alone, and still have plenty of energy left over to live the high life. I propose that if and when we actually try to do this, we shall find that even if all three requirements are met (which I strongly doubt), the amount of surplus energy will not be big enough to maintain what we have already built. In light of the corollary to #3, that is a very serious problem. It means a long downhill slide to a much simpler lifestyle. As Richard Heinberg would say, the party’s over.
Finally, there are several peripheral items I would like to briefly touch upon.
1. I have frequently mentioned “net energy decline.” Net energy is simply a system’s “energy take-home pay” after paying the system’s energy costs. Those costs are requirements #1 and #2. And the “take-home” portion is the surplus energy left to run the economy.
2. Governments and military forces all know that FFs, not renewables, will power the victors. Thus the focus on controlling major oil fields.
3. We often hear that new technologies are going to bless us with new sources of energy, i.e., technology begets energy. I propose that it is actually the other way around. In other words, energy begets technology. Although I concede that technology does aid in obtaining more energy or new sources of energy, it’s important to realize that scientific discovery and technological advances are very highly dependent on the amount of energy we can lavish on research and development. I leave it to readers to imagine how different the world would be if humanity had never gotten beyond the photosynthetic ceiling, and we were still limited to biomass for energy.
4. Hydrogen is not an energy source!
Energy Supply System Requirements
In a few posts I’ve briefly touched upon the three basic requirements (as I see them) for any energy supply system which sustains a society, state, empire, or civilization, but I have always felt the need to describe it in a bit more detail and in a more formal manner. Such is the purpose of this post. The three requirements are:
1. The system must be self-sustaining. That is, it must pay its own day-to-day running costs.
2. The system must be self-replicating. That is, it must provide the energy for building (and rebuilding/replacing) its own physical infrastructure. These costs are capital expenditures, as opposed to running costs.
3. After satisfying requirements #1 and #2, the system must still have surplus energy with which to power the socioeconomic system.
Corollary to #3: The amount of surplus energy supplied to society determines what kind of society/civilization is possible. For example, civilizations based on wood and charcoal will be totally different from, and primitive in comparison with, those based on denser forms of energy such as fossil fuels.
This helps explain why industrial civilization is tanking. Not all fossil fuels are created equal, and we are steadily moving from higher-quality, easy-to-extract fossil fuels to lower-quality, hard-to-extract fossil fuels. This transition gradually decreases surplus energy (#3) because there is progressively less surplus energy left after covering the costs in #1 and #2. The situation gets increasingly desperate, as illustrated by, for example, shale oil, which is not even economically viable. Another example would be biofuels, which — because of their low EROI values — cannot satisfy even requirement #1. In other words, if biofuels produced in the first cycle were used to power the machinery, trucks, and biofuel production facilities in the second cycle, the biofuels would run out during the production process, leaving no energy for requirements #2 and #3.
This also casts a dark cloud over renewables like wind and solar. Intermittency, variability, and the need for storage, overbuilding, and vast tracts of land, as well as other problems, lead me to believe that they cannot satisfy the three requirements, or at least that they cannot supply enough surplus energy to maintain civilization at this level. And if civilization cannot be maintained at this level, that is bad news for renewables because their infrastructure is built by the industrial system.
Another factor is the key difference between fossil fuels and renewables. FFs are actually biofuels created by natural forces. Nature produced the organic materials which served as the feedstock for FFs, gathered them up in colossal quantities, put them in gigantic pressure cookers, and let them stew for millennia. When humans appeared on the Earth, they were already finished. All we have to do is extract them from their underground containers and perform the final processing. Because our energy input is relatively small, the FF energy supply system has yielded a fabulously huge amount of surplus energy. And that is the prodigious power that built our globe-straddling industrial civilization.
On the other hand, to make biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel we must do all that work ourselves. Nature’s only input is sunlight (in the case of FFs, geological forces did the rest), so we have to produce and harvest the feedstock ourselves. As such, our energy inputs are so large that there is much less surplus energy, and in some cases none at all! As I have conceived it, therefore, biofuels are a complete waste of the FF energy used to satisfy requirements #2 and #3. In terms of this energy system, the sensible thing to do is directly use the FFs, and forget about biofuels. The real test of any energy source or combination of sources is not its EROI, but whether it can satisfy the three requirements given above. In other words, it either pulls its own weight (requirements #1 and #2) and supplies surplus energy to society (requirement #3), or it’s simply not an energy source. Many people will say that technological improvements will be made, and they are likely correct. But no matter what improvements are made, they will not cause nature to magically do most of the work for us, as it did with FFs; we still need to supply the inputs ourselves, which means that renewables can never match FFs with regard to requirement #3, i.e., in supplying society with such a large amount of surplus energy.
Many people insist that we can completely stop using fossil fuels, and power civilization as we know it on renewables alone. Think about that for a minute. Renewable-energy hardware is currently made with FFs, but we are supposedly going to operate, build, and replace all those solar and wind farms, hydroelectric dams, and other energy-producing facilities and equipment with their energy alone, and still have plenty of energy left over to live the high life. I propose that if and when we actually try to do this, we shall find that even if all three requirements are met (which I strongly doubt), the amount of surplus energy will not be big enough to maintain what we have already built. In light of the corollary to #3, that is a very serious problem. It means a long downhill slide to a much simpler lifestyle. As Richard Heinberg would say, the party’s over.
Finally, there are several peripheral items I would like to briefly touch upon.
1. I have frequently mentioned “net energy decline.” Net energy is simply a system’s “energy take-home pay” after paying the system’s energy costs. Those costs are requirements #1 and #2. And the “take-home” portion is the surplus energy left to run the economy.
2. Governments and military forces all know that FFs, not renewables, will power the victors. Thus the focus on controlling major oil fields.
3. We often hear that new technologies are going to bless us with new sources of energy, i.e., technology begets energy. I propose that it is actually the other way around. In other words, energy begets technology. Although I concede that technology does aid in obtaining more energy or new sources of energy, it’s important to realize that scientific discovery and technological advances are very highly dependent on the amount of energy we can lavish on research and development. I leave it to readers to imagine how different the world would be if humanity had never gotten beyond the photosynthetic ceiling, and we were still limited to biomass for energy.
4. Hydrogen is not an energy source!
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