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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57443.htm

High Stakes as Uncle Sam’s Days of Impunity Are Finally Over

Russia and China are determined to hold the American perpetrators of the Nord Stream sabotage to account. Uncle Sam’s days – indeed decades – of wanton criminality are over. There’s going to be hell to pay as the imperialist tyranny in Washington hits a wall of reality.

Several weeks have gone by with the United States and its Western lackeys stonewalling at the United Nations Security Council, squirming and resisting calls from Moscow and Beijing for an international criminal investigation into the sabotage of the Baltic Sea pipelines that were blown up in September.

A swathe of independent observers, such as American economics professor Jeffrey Sachs and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, have concurred with the investigative report published on February 8 by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh which claims that U.S. President Joe Biden and his senior White House staff ordered the Pentagon to take out the natural gas pipeline that runs along the Baltic Sea bed from Russia to Germany.

Russia and China are adamant about not letting this vital subject be ignored. They want a proper investigation, international accountability and criminal prosecution. Moscow and Beijing are right to insist on this. Washington and its Western allies’ presumption of impunity has gone on for too many decades. The buck stops here and both Russia and China are strong enough to ensure that the United States cannot threaten, blackmail, or arm-twist its way out of scrutiny.

The Nord Stream project is a major international civilian infrastructure, costing in excess of $20 billion to construct over more than a decade. At 1,200 kilometres in length under the Baltic Sea, it is an impressive feat of engineering, symbolizing the mutual benefits of good neighborliness and cooperative trading.

For the United States to blow this pipeline up in order to knock Russia out of the European energy market so that it could muscle in with its own more expensive gas supplies is a shocking act of state terrorism and criminality. It is also potentially an act of war against Russia and callous sabotage against supposed European allies whose citizens are now suffering economic misery from soaring energy bills. German workers have this week shut down the entire economy from industrial protests over collapsing businesses and unbearable cost of living.

Of course, the Nord Stream sabotage is an urgent matter of basic justice, accountability for an atrocious crime, as well as massive international financial reparations. It’s almost hilarious how the self-proclaimed American protagonist of “rules-based global order” is desperately procrastinating over a glaring incident of dereliction and chaos.

But more than the essential obligation of justice is the legacy of impunity. For the perpetrators of such a wanton terrorist act not to be held accountable sets a perilous precedent. Otherwise, what is stopping the state terrorists from repeating equally brazen acts of sabotage and warmongering? The very concept of international law and the United Nations Charter is demolished, not simply undermined.

The Nord Stream incident potentially opens an era of rampant lawlessness and state banditry – by a nuclear superpower, the United States, using its Western minions for cover. The Western news media, in their reluctance to investigate, are also exposed as nothing more than propaganda channels in the service of imperial masters.

The present is reminiscent of the 1930s during a time of fascist expansionism by Nazi Germany and other imperialist nations, including the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Japan, and others. Nazi Germany was not the unique culprit during that earlier time of barbarism, notwithstanding the official Western revisionism of history to absolve itself.

After the Second World War amid the ashes of international destruction and up to 85 million deaths, the United Nations and its Charter were founded to ostensibly enshrine the stricture that there would be no repetition of the 1930s-style lawlessness and state terrorism.

That lofty aspiration was always a pathetic illusion. The decades after WWII saw no halt to the imperialist warmongering and subterfuges carried out primarily by the United States and its Western allies, in particular Britain. What a mockery that the U.S. and Britain were afforded permanent member states of the UN Security Council given that these two rogue powers have been largely responsible for countless wars post-1945. The decades-long wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are but the most notorious war crimes of the Anglo-American “special relationship”.

During the Cold War decades, the Soviet Union provided a limited check on the worst depredations by Western imperialists. The People’s Republic of China was not strong enough to act as a deterrent force.

For about two decades after the Cold War officially ended in 1991 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States rulers perceived a license for “full-spectrum dominance”. Washington embarked on a frenzy of endless wars that up till recently have prevailed.

The first reality check on the unbridled violence of the U.S. imperialists and their NATO henchmen was Russia’s military intervention in Syria in late 2015 to put an end to the Western machinations for yet another regime-change operation. Washington and its accomplices failed in their nefarious goals in Syria, albeit the Americans persist in illegally occupying part of the Arab country and stealing its oil resources.

Ukraine is the full manifestation of the end to impunity for the United States.

Russia under Vladimir Putin has recovered the military strength that was lost with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In some ways, present-day Russia is even more formidable owing to the development of new forms of weapons, such as hypersonic missiles and S-500 air defenses. Also, Russia’s economy is on a sounder footing than the Soviet Union which relied excessively on militarism. Hence, Moscow has been able to withstand the economic assault that Washington and its allies have tried to mount over the Ukraine conflict.

Just as important, too, China has risen to economic and military superpower status. Together, Russia and China now present an invulnerable countervailing force to the United States and its Western allies.

For nearly eight decades after World War Two, the United States was relatively free to run amok, trashing international law and nations’ sovereignty, racking up death tolls by the millions, and terrorizing the planet with its “benign”, narcissistic tyranny.

The conflict in Ukraine, where Russia has said “enough is enough” to years of U.S.-led NATO aggression, is demonstrating that the days of impunity are finally over for the would-be American hegemon.

Washington has recklessly raised the stakes to an unsustainable height in Ukraine. It has bet the house – and farm – on subjugating Russia for its next insatiable imperial move against China. But Moscow and Beijing are calling Uncle Sam’s bluff. The buck stops here.

The edifice of American imperial power has never been challenged at its foundation. It is now.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/30/patrick-lawrence-french-streets-and-american-sofas/

French Streets and American Sofas

You might be Brazilian or Malian or Singaporean, it is remarkable the world over to watch the French explode into the streets of dozens of cities and towns to protest the imperial president residing in Élysée Palace. It is altogether singular to follow the demonstrations against Emmanuel Macron as an American. The French are still citoyens and take to their streets and public squares. Americans long ago cashed in their citizenship to live as consumers—and take to their sofas no matter how abusively political elites treat them, no matter how many wars they start, no matter how corrupt the financial system, no matter how many people live in poverty, no matter how grotesque the “defense” budget, no matter how poisoned the environment, no matter… let me not go on. 

Please pass the Fritos and turn on the big game. 

They burned city hall in Bordeaux last week. The Place de la Concorde, where the French protested the monarchy in 1789, is again shoulder-to-shoulder every day and night. Video footage records fires, barricades, appalling confrontations with baton-wielding CRS, the French riot police. Uncollected garbage is everywhere in the capital. The luxury shops along the grand boulevards have boarded up their windows. 

This started, of course, as a protest against Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age in France from 62 to 64 as part of a sweeping reform of the pension system. I have heard many Americans ask, “Two years? What’s the big deal?” 

It is telling enough that Americans would pose this question, missing all the reasons why Macron’s plan is a very big deal. The French work to live, as they like to say, while Americans live to work. Pushing up the retirement age had a semiotic meaning from the first, signaling the creeping incursion of American neoliberalism into French society. 

There is the choice Macron had. I don’t think too many people dispute the demographics and fiduciary numbers at issue. More older French are reaching retirement age while fewer younger French are advancing into the workforce. This is a reality in France as in many other developed nations, though not the near-term crisis Macron made it out to be. Macron’s choice lay between raising taxes on the wealthy and the corporations or pushing the problem on the shoulders of the working class. He made the wrong choice. 

Remember, Macron was a merchant banker before going into politics. Early in his first term he was nicknamed “the president of the rich.” He failed to understand that serving as a national leader meant leaving behind the merchant banking in favor of the common good. So he made himself a sort of comprador, an import agent introducing Anglo–American neoliberal orthodoxies into a society that has long, long stood outside the Anglosphere. For the French, the English Channel and the Atlantic are wide. 

On March 16 Macron made his wrongest choice. Unwilling to risk a vote in the National Assembly, he resorted to a provision de Gaulle wrote into the Fifth Republic’s Constitution in 1958, which allows the president to pass legislation without parliamentary approval under certain defined and rare circumstances—emergencies, in a word. 

So has Macron turned a big deal into a big, big deal and now a big, big, big deal.At this point the pension reform crisis has jumped the levee to become something far broader. Now demonstrators tip over into protesting the war in Ukraine, U.S. hegemony, NATO, and, on the domestic side, de Gaulle’s constitution. As Roger Cohen reported in The New York Times the other day:

Those huge protests have shifted in character over the past week. They have become angrier and, in some cities, more violent—especially after nightfall. They have been less about the fury felt over the raising of the retirement age to 64 from 62, and more about Mr. Macron and the way he rammed the law through Parliament without a full vote.

Finally, they have broadened into something approaching a constitutional crisis.

Cohen then quotes Laurent Berger, who heads the 875,000–member, middle-of-the-road CFDT, the French Democratic Confederation of Labor:

We have moved from a social crisis on the subject of retirement to the beginnings of democratic crisis. Anger is rising, and before us we have a president who does not see that reality.

Macron is now behaving like a sequestered monarch such that King Charles III had to cancel a planned visit with Macron last week because “the optics” were so hideously ill-suited to his isolation and the mess he has made. 

Since his interview with Roger Cohen, Berger has proposed a dialogue with Macron to resolve the crisis, but the president has taken no interest in any such idea. There have been large, nationwide demonstrations daily for nearly two weeks, and I discern no flagging of spirit among those in the streets. 

Cole Stangler, an American journalist working in Paris, had a good piece on The Times’s opinion page last week, headlined “France Is Furious.” His mention of the Yellow Vests, les gilets jaune, refers to nationwide protests five years ago that forced Macron to drop a proposal to raise fuel costs to the disproportionate disadvantage of farmers and the rural working class: 

Demonstrators are responding to a government that has repeatedly ignored public opinion, pleas from moderate labor unions and large conventional street protests. And as the French know from their own history, from 1789 and 1968 to the Yellow Vests, direct action with a popular mandate often gets results—even if it’s loud and unruly.

On Tuesday Stangler posted some photographs of the day’s events. One of them features this slogan: Le peuple veut la chute du régime, colloquially translated as “We want this regime to fall.”

Direct action. Loud and unruly direct action. A popular mandate. Bringing down a government: What is it about the French that they are ready to take to the streets in behalf of the society they stand for when the society they stand for is challenged by an imperious figure such as Emmanuel Macron? If you think this a good question, here is another: What is it about Americans that, as the sad record indicates, nothing rouses them from their quite amazing stupor such that they get off their sofas and.. and act, act in behalf of… of anything?

To take these questions in order, the French retain an idea of themselves as members of a community. However frayed this community and however fractured their idea of shared interests, this still has the power to motivate them. Related to this, their civic selves remain alive. The French treasure their private lives, certainly: One way to consider these demonstrations is as a defense of private life. But whether you are a schoolteacher or a steamfitter or a shopkeeper,  if you are French, you also have a public self that extends beyond the private self. 

Not least and maybe most of all, the French share an idea of the present as a passage in history and of themselves as forces in history. I am not at all surprised the French Revolution is so often mentioned in the better media coverage of events these days. The Revolution was an attack on the vestiges of divine right, the notion that a monarch’s authority was God-given. It was about humanity, not the heavens, as the agent of its destiny. And it was class-conscious. There were no illusions in 1789 as to the nature of power. The fate of the French is in the hands of the French: This was the core thought then and it is the core thought now.

As to nous Américains, our differences from the French began early. French political culture is simply of another order than America’s. We had no time for the notion of divine right, obviously, but we believed profoundly the hand of Providence had determined our fate. This remains our prevailing assumption whether or not we are conscious of this. The consequences are two.

One, a people who put their trust in God, as our dollars bills proclaim, also trust in the perfectibility of what God hath given them. In other words, we Americans assume that we have had it right from the first and there is little to do other than janitorial maintenance. When problems arise they are at the margins, they are due to passing human lapses, and can be remedied such that we return again to the state of grace Providence bequeathed to us. 

Two, we have understood since the 17^th century that “the New World,” later named the United States, stands outside history. Escaping the sordidness and decadence of European history was the whole point of crossing the ocean in wooden ships. It was thenceforth as Toynbee put it when he described his childhood in Edwardian England: History is something unpleasant that happens to other people. Such matters as class conflict are things that plague other nations. As every American knows, there is no such things as class in the land where the buffalo roam. We’re all in this together, as every president since I don’t know who has told us. 

Few are the Americans who have a strong sense of their own agency, to put the point simply—an idea of themselves as forces in history. We live by myth, not history. 

The consciousness I describe left Americans ripe for the extreme social atomization neoliberal capitalism was bound to produce over time. “There is no society, there are only individuals” is the perverse assertion of Margaret Thatcher. Reagan ought to have instantly issued her an American passport. To the community consciousness of the French we reply with the privatization of consciousness. To their claim to the power of “direct action” we reply apathetically from our sofas that we are powerless. To their regard for public space and their understanding of their places in it, America has made itself a littered village green where you cannot walk at night.

Not since the civil rights movement and the antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s and early 1970s have Americans addressed the question most urgently in need of address: the question of power. This is the weakness that causes protests such as those prompted by the murders of Michael Brown and George Floyd to come to so little. Those protesting in favor of abortion rights want Roe v. Wade restored without contesting the corrupted political and judicial systems—the power structure—that rescinded the ruling. Occupy Wall Street, impressive as it was, had no staying power because too many occupiers were in it for the acting out. Rebellion is one thing, to put this point plainly. Committed confrontations with power in the cause of the social commons and authentic change are another.

Do we approach an inflection point in these matters? It is a fair question. The degree of disillusion and frustration abroad among Americans is considerable and unmistakable at this point. The predicaments of young people—unfulfilling work, unlivably low wages and salaries, a creeping meltdown in consequence of the climate crisis: All this suggests we may see such a point. But I have to ask: What proportion of Americans are stirred to act in these circumstances, and what, as we used to say, is the program? That antiwar demonstration in Washington last month: Are we counting the turnout in the hundreds, or a few thousand? I will not even get into the spectacle of people saying, “I’m not going because so-and-so are among the organizers and I don’t like so-and-so,” or “So-and-so is speaking and I do not like so-and-so.” It is too reminiscent of the hopelessly unserious sectarianism of the 1960s to bear. 

There is another matter meriting mention. This is the presence of propaganda in American life. The French and the rest of the Europeans have their own problems in this regard, but they are not inundated nearly to the extent Americans are. 

You have noticed, surely, that Americans can no longer bear being with people who disagree with them on any question of consequence. This is because most of us don’t arrive at our judgments after thinking things through. We typically derive our opinions from people who tell us what they should be. In such a circumstance, debate becomes impossible because most of us with strong views have no idea what we are talking about. 

Everyone building a barricade or throwing pavement stones or getting his or her head cracked on the streets of France has thought through the matters at hand and arrived at a conviction of what should be done. If what you purport to think is merely what you are told to think, you don’t in truth think anything. Why on earth would you bother rising from the sofa? 

The French believe in something and in themselves, to wrap all this in a big bundle. Americans no longer believe in anything, even themselves, despite all the motions they go through to persuade themselves otherwise.

I am due shortly to pass through Paris en route to a speaking engagement elsewhere in Europe. I don’t know whether I’ll delight in the last of the season’s oysters or be a witness to history. The latter was not in my plans, but if it turns out this way how good it will be to cross the ocean and see people making some.

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/a_state_of_never_ending_crisis_the_government_is_fomenting_mass_hysteria

A State of Never-Ending Crisis: The Government Is Fomenting Mass Hysteria

“This country has been having a nationwide nervous breakdown since 9/11. A nation of people suddenly broke, the market economy goes to shit, and they’re threatened on every side by an unknown, sinister enemy. But I don't think fear is a very effective way of dealing with things—of responding to reality. Fear is just another word for ignorance.”—Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a spate of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Take this latest shooting in Nashville, Tenn.

The 28-year-old shooter (a clearly troubled transgender individual in possession of several military-style weapons) opened fire in a Christian elementary school, killing three children and three adults.

Already, fingers are being pointed and battle lines are being drawn.

Those who want safety at all costs are clamoring for more gun control measures (if not at an outright ban on assault weapons for non-military, non-police personnel), widespread mental health screening of the general population, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more CCTV cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do random bag searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more surveillance of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.

This is all part of the Deep State’s master plan.

Ask yourselves: why are we being bombarded with crises, distractions, fake news and reality TV politics? We’re being conditioned like lab mice to subsist on a steady diet of bread-and-circus politics and an endless spate of crises.

Caught up in this “crisis of the now,” the average person has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork in order to keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.

As investigative journalist Mike Adams points out:

“This psychological bombardment is waged primarily via the mainstream media which assaults the viewer by the hour with images of violence, war, emotions and conflict. Because the human nervous system is hard wired to focus on immediate threats accompanied by depictions of violence, mainstream media viewers have their attention and mental resources funneled into the never-ending ‘crisis of the NOW’ from which they can never have the mental breathing room to apply logic, reason or historical context.”

Professor Jacques Ellul studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.

All the while, the government continues to amass more power and authority over the citizenry.

When we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this.

Yet as John Lennon reminds us, “nothing is real,” especially not in the world of politics.

In other words, it’s all fake, i.e., manufactured, i.e., manipulated to distort reality.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

The more that is beamed at us, the more inclined we are to settle back in our comfy recliners and become passive viewers rather than active participants as unsettling, frightening events unfold.

Reality and fiction merge as everything around us becomes entertainment fodder.

We don’t even have to change the channel when the subject matter becomes too monotonous. That’s taken care of for us by the programmers (the corporate media).

“Living is easy with eyes closed,” says Lennon, and that’s exactly what reality TV that masquerades as American politics programs the citizenry to do: navigate the world with their eyes shut.

As long as we’re viewers, we’ll never be doers.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day, whether it’s fake news peddled by government agencies or foreign entities.

Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they see as the “norm.” Thus, those who watch shows characterized by lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such behavior as acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the medium.

This holds true whether the reality programming is about the antics of celebrities in the White House, in the board room, or in the bedroom.

It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment.”

A term coined by media scholars Brad Waite and Sara Booker, “humilitainment” refers to the tendency for viewers to take pleasure in someone else’s humiliation, suffering and pain.

“Humilitainment” largely explains not only why American TV watchers are so fixated on reality TV programming but how American citizens, largely insulated from what is really happening in the world around them by layers of technology, entertainment, and other distractions, are being programmed to accept the brutality, surveillance and dehumanizing treatment of the American police state as things happening to other people.

The ramifications for the future of civic engagement, political discourse and self-government are incredibly depressing and demoralizing.

This is what happens when an entire nation—bombarded by reality TV programming, government propaganda and entertainment news—becomes systematically desensitized and acclimated to the trappings of a government that operates by fiat and speaks in a language of force.

Ultimately, the reality shows, the entertainment news, the surveillance society, the militarized police, and the political spectacles have one common objective: to keep us divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable of taking an active role in the business of self-government.

Look behind the political spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.

In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination, infantilism, the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

Labelling something as “fake news” is a masterful way of dismissing truth that may run counter to the ruling power’s own narrative.

As George Orwell recognized, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Orwell understood only too well the power of language to manipulate the masses. In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”

In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of Oldspeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted).

Truth is often lost when we fail to distinguish between opinion and fact, and that is the danger we now face as a society. Anyone who relies exclusively on television/cable news hosts and political commentators for actual knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake.

Unfortunately, since Americans have by and large become non-readers, television has become their prime source of so-called “news.” This reliance on TV news has given rise to such popular news personalities who draw in vast audiences that virtually hang on their every word.

In our media age, these are the new powers-that-be.

Yet while these personalities often dispense the news like preachers used to dispense religion, with power and certainty, they are little more than conduits for propaganda and advertisements delivered in the guise of entertainment and news.

Given the preponderance of news-as-entertainment programming, it’s no wonder that viewers have largely lost the ability to think critically and analytically and differentiate between truth and propaganda, especially when delivered by way of fake news criers and politicians.

The bottom line is simply this: Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

A populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/most-dangerous-international-treaty-ever-proposed/

The Most Dangerous International Treaty Ever Proposed

Human history is a story of forgotten lessons. Despite the catastrophic collapse of European democracy in the 1930s, it appears that the tale of the twentieth century – in which citizens, cowed by existential threats, acquiesced in the rejection of liberty and truth in favour of obedience and propaganda, whilst allowing despotic leaders to seize ever more absolutist powers – is perilously close to being forgotten.

Nowhere is this more evident than in relation to the apparent nonchalance which has greeted two international legal agreements currently working their way through the World Health Organisation: a new pandemic treaty, and amendments to the 2005 International Health Regulations, both due to be put before the governing body of the WHO, the World Health Assembly, in May next year. 

As concerned scholars and jurists have detailed, these agreements threaten to fundamentally reshape the relationship between the WHO, national governments, and individuals.

They would hardwire into international law a top-down supranational approach to public health in which the WHO, acting in some cases via the sole discretion of one individual, its Director General (DG), would be empowered to impose sweeping, legally binding directions on member states and their citizens, ranging from mandating financial contributions by individual states; to requiring the manufacture and international sharing of vaccines and other health products; to requiring the surrender of intellectual property rights; overriding national safety approval processes for vaccines, gene-based therapies, medical devices and diagnostics; and imposing national, regional and global quarantines preventing citizens from traveling and mandating medical examinations and treatments. 

A global system for digital ‘health certificates’ for verification of vaccine status or test results would be routinised, and a bio-surveillance network whose purpose would be to identify viruses and variants of concern – and to monitor national compliance with WHO policy directives in the event of them – would be embedded and expanded.

For any of these sweeping powers to be invoked, there would be no requirement for an “actual” health emergency in which people are suffering measurable harm; instead it would be sufficient for the DG, acting on his or her discretion, to have identified the mere “potential” for such an event.

It is hard to overstate the impact of these proposals on Member States’ sovereignty, individual human rights, foundational principles of medical ethics, and child welfare. As currently drafted, these proposals would deny UK sovereignty and governmental autonomy over health and social policies and, through the indirect impacts of forced lockdowns and quarantines and because each Member State would be required to commit a staggering minimum of 5 percent of national health budgets and an as yet unspecified percentage of GDP towards the WHO’s pandemic prevention and response, also over critical aspects of economic policy.

The proposed new powers would cut across not only the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. They would signal a new watershed in our understanding of cornerstone human rights: an express amendment to the IHR deletes language currently reading “[t]he implementation of these Regulations shall be with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons” to replace it with a nebulous confirmation that “[t]he implementation of these Regulations shall be based on the principles of equity, inclusivity, coherence…”.

Provisions requiring (my emphasis) – in particular – the WHO to develop fast-tracked regulatory guidelines for the “rapid” (aka relaxed) approval of a broad range of health products including vaccines, gene-based therapies, medical devices and diagnostics threatens, in the view of legal jurists, “long fought-for standards of medical law aiming to ensure safety and efficacy of medical products,” and should be of particular concern for parents.

Indeed, nothing in these documents would oblige the WHO to differentiate its binding directions for their impact on children, thus allowing for indiscriminate measures including mass testing, isolation, travel restrictions and vaccination – potentially of investigational and experimental products fast-tracked to accelerated approvals – being mandated for healthy pediatric populations on the basis of a real or “potential” health emergency declared unilaterally by the DG.

As if this weren’t troubling enough, what makes it more so is that, as Thomas Fazi writes, “the WHO has fallen largely under the control of private capital and other vested interests.” As he and others explain, the evolving funding structure of the organisation and in particular the influence of corporate organisations focusing on pandemic response solutions (predominantly, vaccines), has steered the WHO away from its original ethos of promoting a democratic, holistic approach to public health and towards corporatised commodity-based approaches which “generate profit for its private and corporate sponsors” (David Bell). Over 80 percent of the WHO’s budget is now ‘specified’ funding by way of voluntary contributions typically earmarked for specific projects or diseases in a way that the funder specifies.

History lesson

“History can familiarise, and it should warn,” states the prologue to Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. If only we were minded to be taught, there would be lessons to be learned of how far down the path of tyranny pandemic authoritarianism has already taken us and of how, if the WHO’s plans proceed, the Covid pandemic may yet signal just the beginning.

“Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy,” cautions Lesson One, and indeed it now would seem that the voluntary obedience given so heedlessly by global citizens in 2020-22 – to wear masks, to be locked down, to accept novel vaccinations. All of these measures, and more, now embedded in the proposals as potentially mandatory directives, binding on both Member States, and therefore on individual citizens.

“Defend institutions,” advises Lesson Two, for “institutions do not protect themselves,” a sobering reminder in light of the WHO’s self-designation in these proposals as the “guiding and coordinating authority of international public health response[s]:” a designation which would expressly elevate that organisation above national ministries of health and elected, sovereign parliaments.

Lesson Three, “Beware the one-party state,” reminds us that “parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start.” The WHO does not masquerade as a political party but nor will it need to after ordaining itself as the exclusive global controller not just of the identification of pandemics and potential pandemics but of the design and execution of pandemic responses, while also granting itself a vast health surveillance network and a global workforce – funded in part by the taxpayers of the nations over whom it shall tower – commensurate with its new supreme status.

Remembering professional ethics – Lesson Five – would have been sage advice in 2020 but much though we might lament the abandonment of medical ethics from our vantage point of 2023 (“if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent,” rues Synder in relation to the tyranny of the 20th century) the WHO proposals would ensure that such deviations from foundational pillars of medical ethics – informed consent, disregard for human dignity, bodily autonomy, freedom from experimentation, even – can become an accepted norm, rather than an abhorrent exception.

Beware, warns Synder, of the “the sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances; …be alive to the fatal notions of emergency and exception.” Positioned as a necessary next step for achieving global public health coordination and cooperation, the WHO’s proposals would erect a permanent, global surveillance infrastructure and bureaucracy whose raison d’être will be to seek out and suppress health emergencies. 

The funding for this network will originate from the private and corporate interests that stand to gain financially from the vaccine-based responses they envision, so the opportunities for private exploitation of public health crises will be huge. And, by broadening and bringing forward in time the circumstances in which those powers might be triggered – no longer is an ‘actual’ public health emergency required, merely the ‘potential’ for such an event, we can expect the threat of the exceptional state of emergency to become a semi-permanent feature of modern life.

“[B]elieve in truth” says Lesson Ten – for “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom,” apt indeed for our Orwellian era of doublethink, its slogans granted the status of religion and its ideology posing as integrity: “Be safe, be smart, be kind” (Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director General, 2020). What would Orwell make, one wonders, of the UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit and the US’s Ministry of Truth, or of proposals which not only permit but require the WHO to build institutional capacity to prevent the spread of misinformation and disinformation – and so anoint it as the single source of pandemic truth? 

What would Hannah Arendt make of 2020-22’s intrusion of the State into the private lives of individuals and families and the ensuing prolonged periods of isolation and – through adopting forced isolation and segregation as respectful public health tools – the elevation of such destruction of private life to a globally accepted norm? “Take responsibility for the face of the world,” says Snyder in Lesson Four. Could there be any more potent symbol of society’s visible manifestations of loyalty to its new normal than the world’s masked faces of 2020-1?

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” is a quote no less true for being incorrectly attributed to Jefferson, but having lived amongst the debris of failed Covid authoritarianism for three years. Perhaps we are too close now to understand how far from liberal democracy we’ve already fallen. 

Even if one wholeheartedly agreed with the WHO’s focus on pandemic preparedness and the interventionist responses provoked, to grant such sweeping powers to a supranational organisation (let alone one individual within that), would be astonishing. That, as the pandemic response so brutally illustrated, the profit-optimised version of the greater good pursued by the WHO often clashes with child health and welfare, sets us up to commit a grotesque misdeed against our children and young people.

Snyder’s most important lesson might yet be “to stand out – the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken.” The UK has been sufficiently consumed with national sovereignty to pull out of the EU – a poster child for democracy compared to the unelected WHO; it would surely be unthinkable now to wave through proposals which would see the UK cede its sovereignty over key national health, social and economic policies to the WHO.

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https://edwardcurtin.com/facing-clear-evidence-of-peril-in-a-country-of-lies/

“Facing Clear Evidence of Peril” in a Country of Lies

“In my seventy-plus years from 1946 to now, the chorus of fear-mongering bullshit has never ceased – only grown louder. The joke is on us. Ha Ha Ha.”

– Oliver Stone, Chasing the Light

Perhaps silence is the best response to the endless cavalcade of official lies that is United States history. The Internet and digital technology have allowed those lies to increase exponentially in number and frequency with the result that people’s minds have become like 7-Eleven stores, open 24/7 for snack-crap “news.”

But once you become conscious that it’s lies night and day, it sets your head aswirl and plunges your soul into depths of despair.  You are tempted to retreat from such knowledge and talk of trees and trivia.  But you are ashamed of your country.  It’s hard to laugh.  You feel you are drowning.  You flounder and gasp for air.  You look around and wonder why most people are able to go their merry ways believing the lies and whistling in the dark.  Junk news nation, indeed.

Yes, there are alternative voices who tell the truth, but their audiences and monetary support are very small or non-existent compared to the corporate mainstream media and those who shout and scream across the Internet as they take in a lot of money from naive followers. The recent revelations about Alex Jones’s wealth probably don’t bother his diehard fans, but they should.  Likewise, the funding sources for websites and writers of various persuasions are important to know, for they reveal possible biases in their work.  Snake oil salesmen are commonplace, and there are many naive customers lining up for their wares.

Wealth and power are the main drivers of the media chicanery that has captured so many minds. Writers, of course, should be fairly paid for their work, but in this Internet age, most are not.  As with the movies and book publishing, the income gap between the big names – the celebrity stars – and less well-known writers, even if their work is excellent, is huge.

Some sites and writers make a lot of money, but who they are is a guessing game.  No one’s talking.  Some regularly tell their readers that if they don’t receive enough contributions, they will be unable to continue to write or publish, even when the sites do not pay their contributors.  Whether this is good marketing or income-by-threat is up for grabs.  Whichever it is, it seems to work, as far as I can tell, for these writers and websites don’t disappear.

Money is the dirty secret of all news and commentary.  To paraphrase someone: It is very difficult to get truth from writers whose income is dependent on pleasing those who fund them.

You may have noticed how many former military officers, CIA agents, mainstream journalists, pharmaceutical company executives, and sundry other government and corporate bigwigs appear in the mainstream and alternative media to support or oppose government policies.  The mainstream ones doing the propaganda they always did, while the alternative ones appear as converts to the dissident faith.  No one ever explains how and by whom these people are financed or how their lucrative pensions affect their consciences.  “Former” is a funny word.  Ha Ha Ha.

Confidence “men” come in all shapes and sizes with no one talking money.

So let me fess up.  I received about $200 in support last year for edwardcurtin.com, my website.  Nothing before that and not a cent over the last 5-6 years for many hundreds of articles that have appeared very widely across the Internet.  Before the Internet, publications paid for work, mine and others.  Not now, at least for me.  How much money writers are receiving, and who is supporting their sites, is a taboo subject.

So I am thinking about selling mugs at my site with my name and mug shot on them and a line of supplements that will increase one’s testosterone and estrogen in equal measure to make sure no one takes offense in this era of delicate feelings.  Ha Ha Ha.  Yes, the joke is on us.  I identify as a man since I am one.  Don’t be offended.

Jokes aside, as Leonard Cohen sang:

“Oh, like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free”

If you are stubborn enough and have the good fortune to find inspiration from those brave dissidents who have gone before us and those who continue to lead us on, you realize silence is betrayal and that you must speak, even if all seems hopeless at times.  Even when no one is paying you, or maybe more accurately, because no one is paying you.  Even though it is hopeless, even though it isn’t.  This is another secret.  There are many.

It’s been twenty years since the U.S. brutally invaded Iraq.  When George W. Bush, at a staged pseudo-event in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, as he set Americans up for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, said, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” no one laughed him out of the house.  His claim was simply an evil joke that was reported as truth.  It was all predictable, blatant deception.  And the media played along with such an absurdity, which is their job and what they always do.  I pointed it out at the time in a newspaper column, but who listened to a hick writer in a regional newspaper.

Iraq obviously had no nuclear weapons or the slightest capability to deliver even a firecracker on the U.S.  But the mainstream media, Senator Joe Biden, politicians galore, celebrities like Oprah Winfrey with her guest, the eventually disgraced Judith Miller of the New York Times, the despicable Tony Blair, et al., all supported Bush’s blatant lies.  Soon Colin Powell, the “hero” of George H. W. Bush’s 1991 made-for-TV Gulf War of aggression against Iraq, would do his Pinocchio act at the United Nations and the U.S. military was off to get Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden’s evil twin, both the latest Hitlers until Vladimir Putin replaced them.  I guess I skipped some others such as Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar Al-Assad.  New Hitlers proliferate so fast it’s hard to keep track of them.  Ha Ha Ha.  The joke is on us.

As everyone knows, or should, more than a million Iraqis died because of George W. Bush, but how many cared?  How many cared when once Bush was gone, Barack Obama, aided and abetted by the cackling Hilary Clinton, destroyed Libya and ignited the war against Syria?  You want examples?  There are too many to name here.  But let it be said these lies span all American administrations, whether it’s Bill Clinton continuously bombing Iraq and Serbia through Trump bombing Syria and Somalia, up to the present day with Biden attacking Russia via Ukraine, etc.  All these presidents are liars, but their followers treat them otherwise.  Biden says Jimmy Carter asked him to deliver his eulogy.  What does that tell you?  Shall we laugh?  Sing?

On the clear understanding
That this kind of thing can happen
Shall we laugh?
Shall we laugh?
Shall we laugh?

Shall we laugh harder if I mention the Covid-19 propaganda and all those writers who have failed to even address it, as they have failed to question 9/11 and other obvious official lies?  Is it not evident that if they did so, their money flows might dry up?  Here and no further is a widespread rule, for they must adhere to the boundaries imposed by “responsible thought” and the “no go” zones with which they tie their own hands in order to keep their wallets full.

If you are lucky, as I was, when you are young you discover how fearful of free thought and how corrupt our institutional authorities are.  You don’t spend decades feasting off the spoils of those institutions only to “wake up” once you have made your name and secured your fortune, which seems to be the way of so many wise luminaries of the Internet Age who are either trying to ease their consciences as they get ready to kick the bucket or are perhaps putting us on.

When I was twenty-four years-old, I accepted my first teaching job at a small Catholic college where I taught theology.  I had been trained in the latest and best scholarly work of the most renown international theologians.  Rather than indoctrinating my students with rote learning, I taught them to read widely and think deeply in the tradition of a liberal arts education.  To seek out the best scholarship.

But doing so became quickly apparent to the college and Church authorities who were stuck in the inquisitorial age of obedience or else and no thinking allowed.   Although my students loved my courses and felt freed up for the first time to think about their spiritual lives, I was hounded to correct my heretical teaching, which of course I refused to do.

At one point when I was at lunch in the cafeteria, a nun who was a professor, stole my brief case with my notes and left the cafeteria.  One of my students saw her do this and chased her into the ladies’ room where the nun hid in a stall.  The nun kept flushing the toilet to scare the student away, but the student wouldn’t let her out until she returned the briefcase.  Ha Ha Ha.  It sounds funny to recount but was an example of my experience at this college.  Someone vandalized my office door and ripped down anti-war posters that were on it.  I was gone from that college soon thereafter.  It taught me a lot.  Obey or else.

Heresy: The Latin word is from Greek hairesis, a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice.

At another teaching job a year or so later, I had a more chilling experience.  I was known as an anti-war activist, a conscientious objector from the Marines, etc., and one day, a late Friday afternoon when few were around, an administrator asked to meet me on a deserted stairwell where he proceeded in hushed tones to try to convince me to join him in Army Intelligence to spy on others.  He said I would be perfect for the job since I was known as an anti-war dissident.  I told him to fuck off, but I was shocked by his double life and his request.

I have since learned that this guy the spy was not an anomaly, for government confidence men are widespread.

I’ve had many other such early experiences for which I am very grateful, even though when I was fired from jobs and lost income it was traumatic at the time.  By my thirtieth year, I knew the system was corrupt to its core and subsequent experience has only ratified that conclusion.  I got the joke.

I recount these incidents not because my experiences are singular and I’m special, for others have suffered the same youthful fate.  But such good fortune can fortify you for life or break your spirit.  If the former, you don’t wait to retire to push back against all the lies or regret your past.  You find that it’s all good and life has set you on the heretic’s path of freedom and choice. You realize that what you went through is absolutely nothing compared to people around the world who have and continue to suffer at the hands of the U.S. military industrial complex.  You realize your experiences are trivial in the larger scope of things and that your government’s conduct is beyond condemnation.  It is an abomination.  You feel ashamed to live in a land where killing is a game.

The sociologist Peter Berger puts it well in his little classic, Invitation to Sociology, when he discusses experiences that lead to seeing through the play-acting nature of social life:

Experiences such as these may lead to a sudden reversal in one’s view of society – from an awe-inspiring vision of an edifice made of massive granite to the picture of a toy-house precariously put together with papier mâché. While such metamorphosis may be disturbing to people who have hitherto had great confidence in the stability and rightness of society, it can also have a very liberating effect on those more inclined to look upon the latter as a giant sitting on top of them, and not necessarily a friendly giant at that. It is reassuring to discover that the giant is afflicted with a nervous tick.

Notice the giant George W. Bush’s clicking eyes as he delivers his “facing clear evidence of peril” lies for the invasion of Iraq.  He and his presidential good friends are cardboard cartoon characters whose eyes reveal their evil intentions.  “It’s a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be,” but it would all fall to pieces if it weren’t for you and me failing to see through all the bad actors, not just presidents but the whole cast of characters that populate the Spectacle of news and opinion.

The Russians are coming!  Ha Ha Ha.  Yes, Oliver, the joke’s on us.

But it’s not really funny, except in the most sardonic and dark way, for we now do really face clear evidence of peril as a result of Biden and his crazy predecessors who have run U.S. foreign policy for so long. They have brought us to the edge of nuclear war with Russia by surrounding Russia with NATO bases and nuclear weapons, while doing the same to China.

Bertolt Brecht was right in his poem “To Those Born After”:

Truly I live in dark times!

Frank speech is naïve. A smooth forehead

Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs

Has simply not yet heard

The terrible news.

What kind of times are these, when

To talk about trees is almost a crime

Because it implies silence about so many horrors?

When the man over there calmly crossing the street

Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends

Who are in need?

....

https://brownstone.org/articles/technology-tyranny-worse-than-prison/

Technology and a Tyranny Worse than Prison

In an outstanding piece of political-theoretical writing, titled ‘The Threat of Big Other’ (with its play on George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’) Shoshana Zuboff, succinctly addresses the main issues of her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, Hachette, 2019), explicitly linking it to Orwell’s 1984. 

Significantly, at the time she reminded readers that Orwell’s goal with 1984 was to alert British and American societies that democracy is not immune to totalitarianism, and that “Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere” (Orwell, quoted by Zuboff, p. 16). In other words, people are utterly wrong in their belief that totalitarian control of their actions through mass surveillance (as depicted in 1984, captured in the slogan, “Big Brother is watching you”) could only issue from the state, and she does not hesitate to name the source of this threat today (p. 16):

For 19 years, private companies practicing an unprecedented economic logic that I call surveillance capitalism have hijacked the Internet and its digital technologies. Invented at Google in 2000, this new economics covertly claims private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Some data are used to improve services, but the rest are turned into computational products that predict your behaviour. These predictions are traded in a new futures market, where surveillance capitalists sell certainty to businesses determined to know what we will do next. 

By now we know that such mass surveillance does not merely have the purpose – if it ever did – of tracking and predicting consumer behaviour with the aim of maximising profits; far from it. It is generally known among those who prefer to remain informed about global developments, and who do not only rely on the legacy media for this, that in China such mass surveillance has reached the point where citizens are tracked through a myriad of cameras in public places, as well as through smartphones, to the point where their behaviour is virtually completely monitored and controlled. 

Small wonder that Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (WEF) does not let an opportunity pass to praise China as the model to be emulated by other countries in this respect. It should therefore come as no surprise that investigative reporter, Whitney Webb, also alluding to Orwell’s prescience, draws attention to the striking similarities between mass surveillance that was developed in the United States (US) in 2020 and Orwell’s depiction of a dystopian society in 1984, first published in 1949. 

In an article titled “Techno-tyranny: How the US national security state is using coronavirus to fulfil an Orwellian vision,” she wrote:

Last year, a government commission called for the US to adopt an AI-driven mass surveillance system far beyond that used in any other country in order to ensure American hegemony in artificial intelligence. Now, many of the ‘obstacles’ they had cited as preventing its implementation are rapidly being removed under the guise of combating the coronavirus crisis.

Webb proceeds to discuss an American government body that focused on researching ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) could promote national security and defence needs, and which provided details concerning the “structural changes” which American society and economy would have to undertake to be able to maintain a technological advantage in relation to China. According to Webb the relevant governmental body recommended that the US follow China’s example in order to surpass the latter, specifically regarding some aspects of AI-driven technology as it pertains to mass surveillance. 

As she also points out, this stance on the desired development of surveillance technology conflicts with (incongruous) public statements by prominent American politicians and government officials, that Chinese AI-technological surveillance systems instantiate a significant threat for Americans’ way of life), which did not, however, prevent the implementation of several stages of such a surveillance operation in the US in 2020. As one knows in retrospect, such implementation was undertaken and justified as part of the American response to Covid-19. 

None of this is new, of course – by now it is well-known that Covid was the excuse to establish and implement Draconian measures of control, and that AI has been an integral part of it. The point I want to make, however, is that one should not be fooled into thinking that strategies of control will end there, nor that the Covid pseudo-vaccines were the last, or worst, of what the would-be rulers of the world can inflict upon us to exercise the total control they wish to achieve – a level of control that would be the envy of the fictional Big Brother society of Orwell’s 1984. 

For example, several critically thinking people have alerted one to the alarming fact that the widely touted Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are Trojan horses, with which the neo-fascists driving the current attempt at a ‘great reset’ of society and the world economy aim to gain complete control over people’s lives. 

At first blush the proposed switch from a fractional reserve monetary system to a digital currency system may seem reasonable, particularly in so far as it promises the (dehumanising) ‘convenience’ of a cashless society. As Naomi Wolf has pointed out, however, far more than this is at stake. In the course of a discussion of the threat of ‘vaccine passports’ to democracy, she writes (The Bodies of Others, All Seasons Press, 2022, p. 194):

There is now also a global push toward government-managed digital currencies. With a digital currency, if you’re not a ‘good citizen,’ if you pay to see a movie you shouldn’t see, if you go to a play you shouldn’t go to, which the vaccine passport will know because you have to scan it everywhere you go, then your revenue stream can be shut off or your taxes can be boosted or your bank account won’t function. There is no coming back from this.

I was asked by a reporter, ‘What if Americans don’t adopt this?’

And I said, ‘You’re already talking from a world that’s gone if this succeeds in being rolled out.’ Because if we don’t reject the vaccine passports, there won’t be any choice. There will be no such thing as refusing to adopt it. There won’t be capitalism. There won’t be free assembly. There won’t be privacy. There won’t be choice in anything that you want to do in your life.

And there will be no escape.

 In short, this was something from which there was no returning. If indeed there was a ‘hill to die on,’ this was it. 

This kind of digital currency is already in use in China, and it is being rapidly developed in countries like Britain and Australia, to mention only some.

Wolf is not the only one to warn against the decisive implications that accepting digital currencies would have for democracy. 

Financial gurus such as Catherine Austin Fitts and Melissa Cuimmei have both signalled that it is imperative not to yield to the lies, exhortations, threats and whatever other rhetorical strategies the neo-fascists might employ to force one into this digital financial prison. In an interview where she deftly summarises the current situation of being “at war” with the globalists, Cuimmei has warned that the drive towards digital passports explains the attempt to get young children ‘vaccinated’ en masse: unless they can do so on a large scale, they could not draw children into the digital control system, and the latter would therefore not work. She has also stressed that the refusal to comply is the only way to stop this digital prison from becoming a reality. We have to learn to say “No!”

Why a digital prison, and one far more effective that Orwell’s dystopian society of Oceania? The excerpt from Wolf’s book, above, already indicates that the digital ‘currencies’ that would be shown in your Central World Bank account, would not be money, which you could spend as you saw fit; in effect, they would have the status of programmable vouchers that would dictate what you can and cannot do with them. 

They constitute a prison worse than debt, paralysing as the latter may be; if you don’t play the game of spending them on what is permissible, you could literally be forced to live without food or shelter, that is, eventually to die. Simultaneously, the digital passports of which these currencies would be a part, represent a surveillance system that would record everything you do and wherever you go. Which means that a social credit system of the kind that functions in China, and has been explored in the dystopian television series, Black Mirror, would be built into it, which could make or break you.  

In her The Solari Report, Austin Fitts, for her part, elaborates on what one can do to “stop CBDCs,” which includes the use of cash, as far as possible, limiting one’s dependence on digital transaction options in favour of analog, and using good local banks instead of the banking behemoths, in the process decentralising financial power, which is further strengthened by supporting small local businesses instead of large corporations. 

One should be under no illusion that this will prove to be easy, however. As history has taught us, when dictatorial powers attempt to gain power over people’s lives, resistance on the part of the latter is usually met with force, or ways of neutralising resistance.

As Lena Petrova reports, this was recently demonstrated in Nigeria, which was one of the first countries in the world (Ukraine being another), to introduce CBDCs, and where there was initially a very tepid response from the population, where most people prefer using cash (partly because many cannot afford smartphones). 

Not to be outdone, the Nigerian government resorted to dubious shenanigans, such as printing less money and asking people to hand in their ‘old’ banknotes for ‘new’ ones, which have not materialised. The result? People are starving because they lack cash to buy food, and they do not have, or do not want, CBDCs, partly because they lack smartphones and partly because they resist these digital currencies. 

It is difficult to tell whether Nigerians’ doubts about CBDCs is rooted in their awareness that, once embraced, the digital passport of which these currencies will comprise a part, would allow the government complete surveillance and control of the populace. Time will tell whether Nigerians will accept this Orwellian nightmare lying down....

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/27/the-new-york-times-is-a-disgusting-militarist-smut-rag/

The New York Times Is A Disgusting Militarist Smut Rag

I hate The New York Times. Hate it, hate it, hate it, hate it. With every fiber of my being, from the depths of my immortal soul.

The “paper of record” for the most murderous and tyrannical nation on earth, The New York Times has been run by the same family since the late 1800s, during which time it has supported every depraved American war and has reliably dished out propaganda to manufacture consent for the political status quo necessary for the operation of a globe-spanning empire that is fueled by human blood and suffering. It is a plague upon our world, and it should be destroyed, buried, and peed on.

And I am being charitable.

Among the latest items of unforgivable militarist smut churned out by the Times is an article titled “An Anxious Asia Arms for a War It Hopes to Prevent,” which freakishly frames the US as just a passive, innocent witness to the US military encirclement of China.

Times author Damien Cave writes ominously that China’s president Xi Jinping “aims to achieve a ‘national rejuvenation’ that would include displacing the United States as the dominant rule-setter in the region,” as though it makes perfect sense for the US to be the “dominant rule-setter” in the continent of Asia.

(You see lines like this in The New York Times constantly; earlier this month the Times editorial board bemoaned the fact that “the United States had tried with little success to persuade or compel China to abide by American rules,” like that’s a perfectly sane and normal line to write. Other nations make demands, the US makes “rules”. These people really do begin with the premise that the US government owns the entire world, and then write from there.)

Watch how Cave then frames the US military encirclement of China as something “China’s neighbors” are doing as a “response” to Xi’s goal of “displacing the United States as the dominant rule-setter in the region”:

In response, many of China’s neighbors — and the United States — are turning to hard power, accelerating the most significant arms race in Asia since World War II.

On March 13, North Korea launched cruise missiles from a submarine for the first time. The same day, Australia unveiled a $200 billion plan to build nuclear-propelled submarines with America and Britain that would make it only the seventh nation to have them.

Japan, after decades of pacifism, is also gaining offensive capabilities unmatched since the 1940s with U.S. Tomahawk missiles. India has conducted training with Japan and Vietnam. Malaysia is buying South Korean combat aircraft. American officials are trying to amass a giant weapons stockpile in Taiwan to make it a bristling “porcupine” that could head off a Chinese invasion, and the Philippines is planning for expanded runways and ports to host its largest American military presence in decades.

Notice the glaring contradiction between the narrative that the US is “the dominant rule-setter in the region” and the framing of this encirclement operation as something the US is merely supplying to locals who request it of their own free will. If you acknowledge that the US exerts enough control over those nations to be able to “set rules” for them, then it’s probably a bit nonsensical for you to claim they’re stationing US war machinery because it was their own idea that they chose of their own volition.

As we discussed recently with regard to Australia, we’ve all seen what the US does to nations which disobey its “rules”. Australia isn’t arming itself against China to protect itself from China, Australia is arming itself against China to protect itself from the United States. The same is true of all the other US assets listed above.

Just one paragraph after outlining the ways China is being military encircled, Cave then writes that China has “engaged in provocative or dangerous behavior” toward its neighbors:

In flashpoint after flashpoint over the past year, China’s military has also engaged in provocative or dangerous behavior: deploying a record number of military aircraft to threaten Taiwan, and firing missiles into the waters of Japan’s exclusive economic zone for the first time last August; sending soldiers with spiked batons to dislodge an Indian Army outpost in December, escalating battles over the 2,100-mile border between the two countries; and last month, temporarily blinding the crew of a Filipino patrol boat with a laser, and flying dangerously close to a U.S. Navy plane, part of its aggressive push to claim authority in the South China Sea.

The US empire asks us to believe many stupid things on a daily basis, but arguably the very stupidest among them right now is the narrative that the number one geopolitical rival to US power is being surrounded by US war machinery defensively.

The US is surrounding China — a nation on the other side of the planet — with war machinery in a way it would never permit itself to be surrounded for even an instant. One of these nations is the aggressor, and the other is responding defensively to those aggressions. If you can’t tell which is which, it’s because empire propaganda has melted your brain.

Another recent New York Times article titled “From Rockets to Ball Bearings, Pentagon Struggles to Feed War Machine,” author Eric Lipton warns urgently that the US isn’t producing enough weaponry to meet its current needs while preparing for war with China.

“If a large-scale war broke out with China, within about one week the United States would run out of so-called long-range anti-ship missiles, a vital weapon in any engagement with China, according to a series of war-game exercises conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank,” Lipton writes.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is funded by military-industrial complex entities like Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and is also directly funded by the US government and its client states, including Taiwan. Lipton makes no mention of this immense conflict of interest.

The whole article reads like an advertorial for the need to pour more wealth and resources into arms manufacturers, even directly citing statements from war profiteering CSIS funders like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Lipton quotes Lockheed Martin COO Frank St John expressing his deep and solemn concern that the Pentagon might not be meeting its goals in procurement of expensive military equipment, saying, “Any time you see an analysis that says, hey, we might not be prepared to achieve our strategic objectives, that’s concerning.”

Hey thanks for your concern Frank, I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that your company sells the murder machines which meet those strategic objectives. Great journalism, Mr Lipton.

“The surge in spending is likely to translate in the long run into increased profits at military contractors,” Lipton notes.

Yeah, no shit.

One of the most freakish and depraved things happening in our society is the way war machine-funded think tanks shape public opinion through the mass media and government without that conflict of interest being disclosed. Profoundly influential outlets like The New York Times routinely cite them as though they are impartial analysts of national security and foreign affairs and not functional PR firms for war profiteers and government agencies.

If you killed thousands of people and sold their skins for a fortune, the media would correctly call you the worst monster who ever lived. If you kill the same number of people for the same amount of money but do it by lobbying for war and selling the weapons used in that war, the media will call you an industrious job creator.

It is never, ever acceptable, under any circumstances, for news media outlets to cite think tanks funded by governments and the military industrial complex as sources of information or expertise on matters of national security or foreign affairs. As soon as they do this, they’re guilty of journalistic malpractice. As soon as you find yourself writing anything like “According to my source from the Center for Strategic and International Studies,” you have ceased to function as a journalist and are now functioning as a propagandist. It’s insane that this extremely obvious fact isn’t better understood in western journalism, but we can understand why this point is obfuscated by looking at the power structures it serves.

Western media are the marketing department of the US-centralized empire, selling war and militarism to the public in the form of nonstop propaganda. And The New York Times is probably the most destructive offender among all of them.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/26/chris-hedges-the-donald-trump-problem/

The Donald Trump Problem

Donald Trump is not being targeted for the misdemeanors and serious felonies he appears to have committed but for discrediting and undermining the entrenched power of the ruling duopoly.  

Donald Trump — facing four government-run investigations, three criminal and one civil, targeting himself and his business — is not being targeted because of his crimes. Nearly every serious crime he is accused of carrying out has been committed by his political rivals. He is being targeted because he is deemed dangerous for his willingness, at least rhetorically, to reject the Washington Consensus regarding neoliberal free-market and free-trade policies, as well as the idea that the U.S. should oversee a global empire. He has not only belittled the ruling ideology, but urged his supporters to attack the apparatus that maintains the duopoly by declaring the 2020 election illegitimate.

The Donald Trump problem is the same as the Richard Nixon problem. When Nixon was forced to resign under the threat of impeachment, it wasn’t for his involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity, nor was it for his illegal use of the CIA and other federal agencies to spy upon, intimidate, harass and destroy radicals, dissidents and activists. Nixon was brought down because he targeted other members of the ruling political and economic establishment. Once Nixon, like Trump, attacked the centers of power, the media was unleashed to expose abuses and illegalities it had previously minimized or ignored.

Members of Nixon’s re-election campaign illegally bugged the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building. They were caught after they broke back into the offices to fix the listening devices. Nixon was implicated in both the pre-election illegality, including spying on political opponents, as well as attempting to use federal agencies to cover up the crime. His administration maintained an “enemies list” that included well known academics, actors, union leaders, journalists, businessmen and politicians.

One 1971 internal White House memo entitled, “Dealing with our Political Enemies” — drafted by White House Counsel John Dean, whose job it was to advise the president on the law — described a project designed to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”

Nixon’s conduct, and that of his closest aides, was clearly illegal and deserving of prosecution. There were 36 guilty verdicts or guilty pleas associated with the Watergate scandal two years after the break-in. But it was not the crimes Nixon committed abroad or against dissidents that secured his political execution but the crimes he carried out against the Democratic Party and its allies, including in the establishment press.

“The political center was subjected to an attack with techniques that are usually reserved for those who depart from the norms of acceptable political belief,” Noam Chomsky wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1973, a year before Nixon’s resignation.

As Edward Herman and Chomsky point out in their book, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media:” 

The answer is clear and concise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened. By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or dissident victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted and absent altogether. This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.”

What led to the unraveling of Nixon’s government, and what lies at the core of the attacks against Trump, is the fact that, like Nixon, Trump’s targets included “the rich and respectable, spokesmen for official ideology, men who are expected to share power, to design social policy, and to mold popular opinion,” as Chomsky noted about Nixon at the time. “Such people are not fair game for persecution at the hands of the state.”

This is not to minimize Trump’s crimes. Trump — nearly even in the polls with President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race — appears to have committed several misdemeanors and serious felonies.

In November 2022, the Department of Justice appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida and any potential criminal liability resulting from that act, as well as any unlawful interference with the transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election.

Separately, a district attorney in Georgia is working with a special purpose grand jury in relation to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result. A key piece of evidence is the notorious phone call between Trump and Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, in which the president kept insisting he needed more votes to be found. Charges in this case could include conspiracy to commit election fraud, racketeering and pressuring and/or threatening public officials.

The Manhattan district attorney has been investigating the $130,000 Trump used to pay off the porn star Stormy Daniels, with whom Trump allegedly had a sexual relationship. This payment was misreported in the Trump Organization’s records as a legal retainer in violatation of campaign finance laws.

Finally, New York Attorney General Letitia James is bringing a civil lawsuit alleging the Trump Organization lied about its assets in order to secure bank loans. If the attorney general’s lawsuit is successful, Trump and other members of his family may be barred from doing business in New York, including buying property there for five years.

Trump’s alleged offenses should be investigated. Though, the cases involving Daniels and the retention of classified documents seem relatively minor and similar to those committed by Trump’s political opponents.

Last year, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the DNC agreed to pay a fine of $8,000 and $105,000 respectively, for mislabelling a $175,000 expenditure on opposition research, namely the long-discredited “Steele Dossier,” as “legal expenses.” The improper retention of classified documents has typically resulted in a slap on the wrist when other powerful politicians have been investigated. Clinton, for example, used private email servers instead of a government email account when she was secretary of state. The FBI concluded that she sent and received materials classified as top secret on her private server. Ultimately, FBI director James Comey declined to prosecute her. Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence and Biden also had classified documents at their homes, though we are told this may have been “inadvertent.” The discovery of these classified documents, rather than triggering outrage in most of the media, initiated a conversation about “overclassification.” Former CIA director David Petraeus was given two years probation and a $100,000 fine after he admitted to providing highly classified “black books” that contained handwritten classified notes about official meetings, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and the names of covert officers to his lover, Paula Broadwell, who was also writing a fawning biography of Petraeus.

As was the case with Nixon, the most serious charges Trump may face involve his attack on the foundations of the two-party duopoly, especially undermining the peaceable transfer of power from one branch of the duopoly to the other. In Georgia, Trump could face very serious criminal charges with potentially lengthy sentences if convicted, likewise if the federal special prosecutor indicts Trump for unlawful interference in the 2020 election. We won’t know until any indictments are made public.

Yet, the most egregious of Trump’s actions while in office either received minimal media coverage, were downplayed or lauded as acts carried out in defense of democracy and the U.S.-led international order.

Why hasn’t Trump been criminally investigated for the act of war he committed against Iran and Iraq when he assassinated Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani and nine other people with a drone strike in Baghdad airport? Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi condemned the strike and told his parliament that Trump lied in order to get Soleimani exposed in Iraq as part of peace talks between Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iraq’s parliament passed a resolution demanding that all foreign troops leave the country, which the U.S. government proceeded to reject.

Why not prosecute or impeach Trump for pressuring his secretary of state to lie and say that Iran wasn’t complying with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the Iran nuclear deal? Trump ultimately fired him and resumed unilateral, devastating and illegal sanctions against Iran, in violation of international law and quite possibly domestic U.S. law.

Why wasn’t Trump impeached for his role in the ongoing attempts to engineer a coup and overthrow the democratically elected president of Venezuela? Trump declared a previously unknown right-wing politician — and would-be coup leader — Juan Guaido to be the true Venezuelan president and then illegally handed him control of the Latin American country’s U.S. bank accounts. The illegal U.S. sanctions that have facilitated this coup attempt have blocked food, medicine and other goods from entering the country and prevented the government from exploiting and exporting its own oil, devastating the economy. Over 40,000 people died between 2017 and 2019 due to the sanctions, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That figure is certainly higher now.

Nixon, like Trump, was not impeached for his worst crimes. He was never charged for directing the CIA to destroy the Chilean economy and back a far-right military coup that overthrew the democratically elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende. Nixon wasn’t brought to justice for his illegal, secret mass bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and his government’s role in the slaughter of Vietnamese people, resulting in at least 3.8 million killed according to a joint report from Harvard University and the University of Washington and even higher casualties according to investigative journalist Nick Turse. Nixon wasn’t held accountable for what then-President Lyndon Johnson privately blasted as “treason” when he discovered that the yet-to-be-elected Republican candidate for president, and his future National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, were deliberately and illegally sabotaging his peace negotiations in Vietnam, ultimately prolonging the war for another four years. 

Articles of impeachment against Nixon were passed by the House Judiciary Committee. Articles I and III focused on allegations related to Watergate and Nixon’s failure to deal properly with congressional investigations. Article II related to allegations of violations of citizens’ civil liberties and abuse of government power. But they became moot once Nixon resigned, and in the end the disgraced former president didn’t face charges related to Watergate. A month after Nixon left office, President Gerald Ford pardoned him for “all offenses against the United States” that he “committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.” 

This pardon cemented into place the imperial presidency. It entrenched the modern notion of “elite immunity,” as the constitutional lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald notes. Neither Republicans nor Democrats want to set a precedent that might hamstring the unchecked and unaccountable power of a future president.

The most serious crimes are those that are normalized by the power elite, regardless of who initiated them. George W. Bush may have started the wars in the Middle East, but Barack Obama maintained and expanded them. Obama’s crowning achievement may have been the Iran nuclear deal, but Biden, his former vice president, hasn’t reversed Trump’s trashing of it, nor has he reversed the decision by Trump to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in violation of international law. 

Trump, like most of his opponents in the Republican and Democrat parties, serves the interests of the billionaire class. He, too, is hostile to the rights of workers. He, too, is an enemy of the press. He, too, backs the diversion of hundreds of billions of federal dollars to the war industry to maintain the empire. He, too, does not respect the rule of law. He, too, is personally and politically corrupt. But he is also impulsive, bigoted, inept and ignorant. His baseless conspiracy theories, vulgarity and absurd antics are an embarrassment to the established power elite in the two ruling parties. He is difficult, unlike Biden, to control. He has to go, not because he is a criminal, but because he is not trusted by the ruling crime syndicate to manage the firm.