SC222-15

https://www.globalresearch.ca/criminally-responsible-americans-vote-commander-worldwide-genocidal-killing-machine/5728535

The Myth of U.S. Democracy: Americans are Voting for the Commander in Chief of a “Worldwide Killing Machine”

Frightened into voting for what they hope is the lesser of two evils

 

The good people of the Third World should not let themselves be taken in by worldwide satellite beamed CIA-fed media prattling on continuously about American democracy during ongoing presidential elections. Sadly, Americans are duped into participating  in elections that back crimes against humanity ordered by the ruling genocidal Wall St. plutocracy which militarily and financially plunders 3rd World humanity and corrupts American society.

A great many Americans voting believe the lies their criminal corporate media pours out daily, and are therefore gung-ho proud of Americans killing media-designated ‘bad guys” all around the world. These completely fooled Americans are happy to vote for the next commander-in-chief, but a substantial amount of Americans voting know they have been  and are unhappy with what they feel is a mockery of the so called democratic process that has them voting for a choice that is still represents evil.

Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, once the highest law officer of the USA, who helped write both important civil rights laws, speaks to his fellow Americans clearly, and meant that all the world should know this truth.

“We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.”:

One of the most internationally powerful plutocrats in US history, John Pierpont Morgan, in a candid moment admitted, ”Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy”:

The well respected third president of the USA, Thomas Jefferson, saw the plutocracy coming when he said,“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Already in 1922, America’s most famous economist Thorstein Veblen wrote,

 ”The current situation in America is by way of being something of a psychiatrical clinic...Perhaps the commonest and plainest evidence of an unbalanced mentality is to be seen in a certain fearsome and feverish credulity with which a large proportion of Americans are affected…. There is a visible lack of composure and logical coherence, both in what they will believe and in what they are ready to do about it.” 

Veblen assumed depression to  be the normal condition  in a business-enterprise economy, to be relieved in periods of excitation caused by stimuli not intrinsic to the system like war and expansion abroad. Veblen saw the modern business leader as essentially a latter-day predatory warrior. [Thorstein Veblen by Douglas Dowd, 1966]

Veblen’s observation is born out by Americans always having been willing to follow criminal orders and bomb, invade and occupy other people’s lands the world over.

School Shootings and America’s “War Culture”. “Heroic Gun Play” Is The Air Children Breath in USA

Paul Craig Roberts, former editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Undersecretary of the Treasury under President Reagan, in his article, The Looting Machine Called Capitalism, wrote,

“Americans are the least exceptional people in human history. Americans have no rights at all. We hapless insignificant beings have to accept whatever capitalists and their puppet government impose on us. And we are so stupid we call it ‘Freedom and Democracy America.’”

Americans today are wildly mesmerized in avid interest in who will be president for the next four years. However, given the continual American wars in smaller countries and perpetual ramped up fear of nuclear Armageddon, its obviously of some greater significance who will serve as Commander-in-Chief of the American worldwide genocidal killing machine, because whether Americans realize it or not, they, each citizen, has a portion of citizen co-responsibility for the crimes of their fellow Americans ‘serving’ as soldiers following criminal, and therefore illegal, orders.

Those Americans voting, who believe the lies their criminal corporate media pours out daily and are therefore gung-ho proud of Americans killing media-designated ‘bad guys” everywhere and anywhere, believe US democracy makes them and all Americans to be above the law – above all law. On the other hand, that substantial amount of Americans voting, who know they have been frightened into voting for what they hope is the lesser of two evils are well aware of their tacit complicity in the crimes against humanity in other peoples countries. Some more modest amount of Americans voting, or refusing to vote, realize that they have already been prosecuted in the court of public opinion and in the hearts of parents of children blown to pieces or starved to death by the actions of Americans. Hopefully, this is what people overseas, especially in nations under American attack, understand.

At the same time a multitude of Americans vote, other Americans have been fueling, arming and target selecting for the Saudi airstrikes for five years. Already back in November 2017, Save the Children reported that 130 children were dying every day, with 50,000 children already believed to have died in 2017. The U.N. officials said more than 20 million people, including 11 million children, are in need of urgent assistance, with 7 million totally dependent on food assistance. The U.N. has called it the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world.”

US CIA controlled media is so sure of the headlock it has on the American public, its mainstream media can even inform of Yemeni children dying from bombs & starvation knowing its captive audience will not turn against their American killing machine. Even the most eye-rebounding photos  published in wars supporting New York Times Yemen Girl Who Turned World’s Eyes to Famine Is Dead (Published 2018) and seen on PBS television channels did not put a dent in American solidarity with its government’s and military’s genocidal actions in Yemen – prosecutable genocidal crimes against humanity.

During the current presidential election campaign criminal war promoting news and entertainment networks are making no mention of President Trump’s veto of a bipartisan Congressional resolution that would have forced an end to American military involvement in Saudi Arabia’s civil war in Yemen a year and a half ago.

In One American Ear and Out the Other

In 2008, for two weeks the major networks telecasted as humorous, Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s cry, his finger pointed to the sky, “God bless America? No, no, God damn America for her crimes against humanity!”

In 2012, prime times news during the Republican debates of presidential candidates, candidate Rep. Ron Paul was heard denouncing “all US bombings and invasions beginning with those in Korea as illegal, unconstitutional and a horrific loss of human life.”

But nothing seems to effect a change in American dedication to their military and its military’s heritage (of gore, death and destruction).

American film maker Michael Moore’s castigates his fellow Americans as“sick and twisted violent people that we’ve been for hundreds of years, it’s something that’s just in our craw, just in our DNA. Americans kill people, because that’s what we do. We invade countries. We send drones in to kill civilians.”

In one American ear and out the other.

Martin Luther King made bold headlines in newspaper throughout the world with, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my government. In Vietnam we may have killed a million already, mostly children.” King cried out, “Silence is treason!” but at home extremely few Americans spoke out in agreement,  many spoke against him, most were silent, and King was shot to death within the year.

This archival research peoples historian activist is convinced that no change will be coming from anywhere in the American led First World, especially now as it is hard pressed losing its hegemony to a future multipolar world with China’s economy now the largest.

Some of us work to somehow make this Americans killing millions of children come to be a topic of conversation in the Third World for the children’s lives that could be saved once enough people became enraged enough to demand prosecution and justice.

Once USA-EU loses world economic hegemony and can no longer sanction, the many nations that have seen their children murdered by Americans and their European allies will demand justice in the courts of a reconstituted and reorganized democratic United Nations. In the meantime let’s have faith that the astounding intelligence witnessed in the miraculous achievements in outer and inner space will eventually manifest itself in ending the five centuries of European and American genocide for money and power.

SC222-14

https://scheerpost.com/2020/11/05/chris-hedges-american-requiem/

American Requiem

Well, it’s over. Not the election. The capitalist democracy. However biased it was towards the interests of the rich and however hostile it was to the poor and minorities, the capitalist democracy at least offered the possibility of incremental and piecemeal reform. Now it is a corpse. The iconography and rhetoric remain the same. But it is an elaborate and empty reality show funded by the ruling oligarchs — $1.51 billion for the Biden campaign and $1.57 billion for the Trump campaign — to make us think there are choices. There are not. The empty jousting between a bloviating Trump and a verbally impaired Joe Biden is designed to mask the truth. The oligarchs always win. The people always lose. It does not matter who sits in the White House. America is a failed state. 

“The American Dream has run out of gas,” wrote the novelist J.G. Ballard. “The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now.”

There were many actors that killed America’s open society. The corporate oligarchs who bought the electoral process, the courts and the media, and whose lobbyists write the legislation to impoverish us and allow them to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth and unchecked power. The militarists and war industry that drained the national treasury to mount futile and endless wars that have squandered some $7 trillion and turned us into an international pariah. The CEOs, raking in bonuses and compensation packages in the tens of millions of dollars, that shipped jobs overseas and left our cities in ruins and our workers in misery and despair without a sustainable income or hope for the future. The fossil fuel industry that made war on science and chose profits over the looming extinction of the human species. The press that turned news into mindless entertainment and partisan cheerleading. The intellectuals who retreated into the universities to preach the moral absolutism of identity politics and multiculturalism while turning their backs on the economic warfare being waged on the working class and the unrelenting assault on civil liberties. And, of course, the feckless and hypocritical liberal class that does nothing but talk, talk, talk. 

If there is one group that deserves our deepest contempt it is the liberal elites, those who posture as the moral arbiters of society while abandoning every value they purportedly hold the moment they become inconvenient. The liberal class, once again, served as pathetic cheerleaders and censors for a candidate and a political party that in Europe would be considered on the far-right. Even while liberals were being ridiculed and dismissed by Biden and by the Democratic Party hierarchy, which bizarrely invested its political energy in appealing to Republican neocons, liberals were busy marginalizing journalists, including Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who called out Biden and the Democrats. The liberals, whether at The Intercept or The New York Times, ignored or discredited information that could hurt the Democratic Party, including the revelations on Hunter Biden’s laptop. It was a stunning display of craven careerism and self-loathing.

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are, the election has illustrated, oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. Restoring the rule of law, universal health care, banning fracking, a Green New Deal, the protection of civil liberties, the building of unions, the preservation and expansion of social welfare programs, a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, the forgiveness of student debt, stiff environmental controls, a government jobs program and guaranteed income, financial regulation, opposition to endless war and military adventurism were once again forgotten. Championing these issues would have resulted in a Democratic Party landslide. But since the Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate donors, promoting any policy that might foster the common good, diminish corporate profits and restore democracy, including imposing campaign finance laws, was impossible. Biden’s campaign was utterly bereft of ideas and policy issues, as if he and the Democrats could sweep the elections by promising to save the soul of America. At least the neofascists have the courage of their demented convictions. 

The liberal class functions in a traditional democracy as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It ameliorates the worst excesses of capitalism. It proposes gradual steps towards greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with supposed virtues. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements. The liberal class is a vital component within the power elite. In short, it offers hope and the possibility, or at least the illusion, of change. 

The surrender of the liberal elite to despotism creates a power vacuum that speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, often led by charismatic demagogues, fill. It opens the door to fascist movements that rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the absurdities of the liberal class and the values they purport to defend. The promises of the fascists are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth. Once the liberal class ceases to function, it opens a Pandora’s box of evils that are impossible to contain. 

The disease of Trumpism, with or without Trump, is, as the election illustrated, deeply embedded in the body politic. It is an expression among huge segments of the population, taunted by liberal elites as “deplorables,” of a legitimate alienation and rage that the Republicans and the Democrats orchestrated and now refuse to address. This Trumpism is also, as the election showed, not limited to white men, whose support for Trump actually declined.   

Fyodor Dostoevsky saw the behavior of Russia’s useless liberal class, which he satirized and excoriated at the end of the 19^th century, as presaging a period of blood and terror. The failure of liberals to defend the ideals they espoused inevitably led, he wrote, to an age of moral nihilism. In Notes From Underground, he portrayed the sterile, defeated dreamers of the liberal class, those who hold up high ideals but do nothing to defend them. The main character in Notes From Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He accommodates a corrupt and dying power structure in the name of liberal ideals. The hypocrisy of the Underground Man dooms Russia as it now dooms the United States. It is the fatal disconnect between belief and action. 

 “I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure – primarily a limited being.”

The refusal of the liberal class to acknowledge that power has been wrested from the hands of citizens by corporations, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have been revoked by judicial fiat, that elections are nothing more than empty spectacles staged by the ruling elites, that we are on the losing end of the class war, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality. 

The “idea of the intellectual vocation,” as Irving Howe pointed out in his 1954 essay This Age of Conformity, “the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization — has gradually lost its allure. And, it is this, rather than the abandonment of a particular program, which constitutes our rout.” The belief that capitalism is the unassailable engine of human progress, Howe wrote, “is trumpeted through every medium of communication: official propaganda, institutional advertising and scholarly writings of people who, until a few years ago, were its major opponents.” 

“The truly powerless people are those intellectuals — the new realists — who attach themselves to the seats of power, where they surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance as political figures,” Howe wrote. “For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in the past few decades — as well as to the relationship between ‘wealth’ and ‘intellect’ — that whenever they become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.” 

Populations can endure the repression of tyrants, as long as these rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power. But human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are brutally discarded. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia, a conflict I covered for The New York Times. 

The historian Fritz Stern in The Politics of Cultural Despair, his book on the rise of fascism in Germany, wrote of the consequences of the collapse of liberalism. Stern argued that the spiritually and politically alienated, those cast aside by the society, are prime recruits for a politics centered around violence, cultural hatreds and personal resentments. Much of this rage, justifiably, is directed at a liberal elite that, while speaking the “I-feel-your-pain” language of traditional liberalism, sells us out.

“They attacked liberalism,” Stern writes of the fascists emerging at the time in Germany, “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sense in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”

We are in for it. The for-profit health care system, designed to make money — not take care of the sick — is unequipped to handle a national health crisis. The health care corporations have spent the last few decades merging and closing hospitals, and cutting access to health care in communities across the nation to increase revenue — this, as nearly half of all front-line workers remain ineligible for sick pay and some 43 million Americans have lost their employee-sponsored health insurance. The pandemic, without universal health care, which Biden and the Democrats have no intention of establishing, will continue to rage out of control. Three hundred thousand Americans dead by December. Four hundred thousand by January. And by the time the pandemic burns out or a vaccine becomes safely available, hundreds of thousands, maybe a few million, will have died. 

The economic fallout from the pandemic, the chronic underemployment and unemployment — close to 20 percent when those who have stopped looking for work, those furloughed with no prospect of being rehired and those who work part-time but are still below the poverty line are included in the official statistics — will mean a depression unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. Hunger in US households has already tripled since last year. The proportion of US children who are not getting enough to eat is 14 times higher than last year. Food banks are overrun. The moratorium on foreclosures and evictions has been lifted while over 30 million destitute Americans face the prospect of being thrown into the street. 

There is no check left on corporate power. The inevitable social unrest will see the state, no matter who is in the White House, use its three principle instruments of social control — wholesale surveillance, the prisons and militarized police — buttressed by a legal system that routinely revokes habeas corpus and due process, to ruthlessly crush dissent. People of color, immigrants and Muslims will be blamed and targeted by our native fascists for the nation’s decline. The few who continue in defiance of the Democratic Party to call out the crimes of the corporate state and the empire will be silenced. The sterility of the liberal class, serving the interests of a Democratic Party that disdains and ignores them, fuels the widespread feelings of betrayal that saw nearly half the voters support one of the most vulgar, racist, inept and corrupt presidents in American history. An American tyranny, dressed up with the ideological veneer of a Christianized fascism, will, it appears, define the empire’s epochal descent into irrelevance.   

 

SC222-13

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct20/capitalists10-20.html

"Capitalism" Is No Longer Attractive to Capitalists

 Back of the envelope definition of classical capitalism:

1. Transparency in markets, including pricing, information on quality and reliability of products, sellers and buyers, and of rules of conduct and rights governing all participants;

2. Risk is tightly bound to reward, i.e. everyone has skin in the game, those who lose are forced to absorb the entire loss.

2. Open competition, i.e. no monopolies or cartels limiting supply or setting prices;

3. Free flow of capital and labor;

4. Everyone pays the same rates of taxes, duties and fees on every transaction.

Needless to say, what is presented as "capitalism" in America today is not actually capitalism; it is monopoly-state-socialism for the wealthy, a kleptocracy incompetently cloaked by a rigged simulacrum market in which risk and losses are transferred to the debt-serfs and tax donkeys and the "socialism for the rich and powerful" is enforced by a pay-to-play simulacrum democracy and kleptocratic, totalitarian central bank, the Federal Reserve.

In this winner take most, anything goes if you're rich casino, the weaker players are ruthlessly stripmined and exploited and those enterprises without political protection are cannibalized by rapacious, predatory monopolies and cartels.

Parasitic elites take a skim from every table: student loans over here, state junk fees over there; everyone gets clipped by self-serving insiders and entrenched interests.

Transparency is an illusion. Complexity thickets protect monopolies and cartels, and the fine print... try getting a set price for healthcare services. (You must be joking.) Sign the form for the $30 oil change and come back to an $800 bill for "work you authorized." (You didn't read the fine print? Too bad.)

Quality has gone downhill across the board but there's no recourse or competition. All the items regardless of brand come from the same factory in China. So what if your new oven turns on by itself randomly (true story, happened to me); the once-proud American brand's warranty is only one year, so tough luck, bucko, the repair bill for the defective $5 sensor will cost you as much as a new range.

In American "capitalism," the name of the game is scale up with cheap debt supplied by the Federal Reserve, use the "Fed free money" to buy up any potential competitors and then start buying back your own shares, jacking your share price even as sales and profits stagnate. (Charts of Apple below).

Once you're too big to fail or jail, then you can gamble to your heart's content because all the winnings will be yours to keep and if you lose big, the Fed or the Treasury will step in and transfer the losses to the debt-serfs and tax donkeys.

In America, as Warren Buffett jacks up the price of Sees candy, etc. to maximize his profits and add more billions to his net worth, and Amazon uses its quasi-monopoly power to relentlessly jack up the price of Prime membership, nobody asks Warren or Jeff "don't you have enough already?"

The answer is "no". It's never enough, because as long as the Fed and federal government enforce, enable or allow your monopoly, quasi-monopoly or cartel to kill transparency and competition, and offer you limitless "Fed free money" while students pay 8% on their loans, then why not add another $10 billion to your personal wealth?

Go ahead and lie, cheat, embezzle, rig markets, commit fraud, collude--everything is allowed if you're a powerful corporation because all your execs have get out of jail free cards from the Department of Justice. Nobody in Corporate America ever goes to prison no matter how egregious the fraud or theft. And you get to keep all the loot, other than a wrist-slap fine if you're caught. But that's just a modest cost of doing business in American "capitalism."

No Wrongdoing Here, Just 6,300 Corporate Fines and Settlements (May 2015)

If this "capitalism" was actually attractive to capitalists, why would everyone pile into the same six Big Tech monopolies? Is that really the only opportunity left to "create shareholder value," to pour hundreds of billions of dollars in "Fed free money" into a handful of Big Tech monopolies?

Paraphrasing the late Immanuel Wallerstein, "Capitalism" is no longer attractive to capitalists. This "capitalism" is only attractive to parasites, predators, kleptocrats, legalized looters, embezzlers, fraudsters and all those insiders whose palms get greased along the way.

AxisofEasy Salon #28: Today's show is brought to you by the letter K(leptrocracy)

If you think this "capitalism" is sustainable, the future holds a big surprise.

 

SC222-12

https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-man-made-gigantic-collateral-damage-great-reset-call-civil-disobedience/5728407

COVID and Its Man-Made Gigantic Collateral Damage: The Great Reset – A Call for Civil Disobedience

The going narrative in the west is: “Covid is on the Rise – we are entering the second wave – we must protect our people.”

The offered recipe is testing-testing-testing – it is the instrument for increasing “cases”. The more you test, the more cases you have. Is that so difficult to understand? If tomorrow the world stops “testing”, covid is gone. Finito. Back to life. That’s what they don’t want, though. “They”, the higher-ups. Let me call them the diabolical Deep Dark State.

However, testing and the testing results are never analyzed. How many positives are asymptomatic, who are the “positives’, what are their age groups? According to all those doctors around the world who have stepped out of the Matrix and formed associations of medical professionals and related scientists, most of them call themselves Doctors for the Truth, in Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Denmark, Peru, the USA and more – more than 80% of the “positives” are asymptomatic, meaning asymptomatic people feel nothing and never get sick.

About ten to fifteen percent have slight to more serious symptoms, but do not need hospitalization – and the rest who may be hospitalized is above 75 or 80 years of age almost all of them with one to several comorbidities. Of those who die, most die from a medical pre-condition – coronary disease, diabetes, cancer – with “tested” covid-19, but not from covid-19.

According to the various associations of Doctors for the Truth, concluded based on their experience, more than 50% of the so-called RT-PCM (Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) deliver “false positives”. Of course, the labs, hospitals and doctors who perform them are aware. But they are silenced with a carrot or a stick. And the “false positives” conveniently help drive covid statistics through the roof.

But who would have an interest in that?

Curiously, very curiously – in the northern hemisphere – also called the Global North- the hundreds of years-old common flu has literally disappeared. From one year to another. We have just entered the season of the common flu, or “influenza”. Fall and winter are typical for the annual flu and cold. But nobody talks about it. Suddenly the flu has evaporated. – No flu statistics. No mainstream media, no coopted doctors, hospitals or Covid Task Force, and, of course, no government officials, especially not those from the sacrosanct Health Authorities, would ever mention the word flu or “influenza”. – Why? They don’t think that We, the people could get the idea. Or do they?

Is it possible that the flu has been adopted, integrated into covid? This is just an innocent question, of course. One ought not to speculate with things that could put authorities in a corner, or worse, imply that they have been lying to the people who elected them, to the very people who pay their salaries.

And why would they do that? Do they have an obscure reason? Someone, something high-high above them, who tells them, all 193 UN nations at once, they have to cheat their people, because these high-high above them, sinister dark un-people have an agenda to implement? Perhaps Bill Gates’ Agenda ID2020, accompanied by WEF’s Klaus Schwab’s “Covid-19 – The Great Reset” (July 2020, available on Amazon and everywhere)?

It is indeed, possible, that governments around the globe have been coopted, by carrot or by stick (to put it benignly), to drive up covid statistics, covid “cases”; and what’s more convenient in the fall-winter season than converting the common flu which in any case, when tested, will show corona viruses. The flu and covid viruses are very-very similar; they are practically undistinguishable in a test.

Ask the doctors who stepped out of the Matrix, the doctors for the truth, virtually all flu viruses contain a proportion of corona viruses, as high as 17% to 20%. So, telling what is what is almost impossible, and even less so, if the mix-up can be favorable for covid – and help drive the covid statistics up and up and up.

But who would be interested in making the pandemic look worse than it already is? Isn’t it, that everybody wants to “flatten the curve”? At least that’s what they said during the first wave. It justified the first lockdown. Why would it be different in the second wave? And yes, we are suddenly in the midst of the second wave. But nobody dares talking again about flattening the curve.

Virtually all governments have assured their people – frankly, we are more subjects, than people for them, subjects that are manipulated with lies and masks and social distancing, separated from their loved ones through senseless quarantines – these potentially resisting subjects, WE, were assured that there will be no second lockdown, that the countries, the world, could not afford a second lockdown. However, gradually but with giant steps, these dictatorial governments, almost all of whom have quietly and without consultation of the people, adopted “Health Emergency Laws” – a close equivalent to Martial Law – have closed all the windows and doors, so that “bang” another lockdown is on the plate. And again, nowhere to escape.

Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Portugal, Greece, the UK, and so far, partly Switzerland – have just declared within the last 48 hours a lockdown, or a quasi-lockdown, with curfews and “house arrests” – isolation at home, shop closings, work-from-home rules, and more.  Worse may follow. People take it. Benign protests only. But no steadfast and unrelenting resistance yet.

(French second full lockdown protest, initially until end November 2020 – AP Photo, Daniel Cole). Others governments are weighing in, rather “when” than “if” – they want to take this draconian step, eviscerating the last shred of the remaining economy, and causing detrimental damage to humanity, social damage, from isolation, social distancing – not being able getting together with family and friends. In some countries like Canada, the tyrannical Trudeau government has already announced that this year “Christmas may be cancelled” – meaning, no visits with families and friends. Others may follow suit. Can you imagine!

In a recent interview with RT, Stanford University Professor, medical doctor and President Trump’s Covid advisor, Scott Atlas, called the lockdown policies an “epic failure” and argued they are “killing people,”. Atlas added, “The public-health leadership have failed egregiously, and they’re killing people with their fear-inducing shutdown policies.” And further, “The lockdowns will go down as an epic failure of public policy by people who refuse to accept, they were wrong.”

Atlas then pointed to job losses, rising suicides, rising drug abuse and the harm being done to young people, tying the issues to the Covid-19 restrictions put in place. He referred to a study showing that 25 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 thought about killing themselves in June “due to the lockdown,” he said. And what’s maybe worse, “We’re creating a generation of neurotic children, forcing them to wear masks and be six feet apart from their friends, or not even have school in person.”

People do not take it! Resist!

France, under President Macron, is already considering a third wave. RT reports, “France’s minister of solidarity and health, Olivier Veran, has said he cannot rule out a third wave of the coronavirus, as the country enters a second national lockdown.

As they battle a new spike in Covid-19 cases, French officials are already concerned about the threat of a third wave. Discussing the situation on France Info radio, Veran told listeners that, due to the severity of the virus and the speed at which it’s spreading, it’s not possible to rule out a third wave, even if the second peak is brought under control.

Defending the government’s decision to implement a second national lockdown, which comes into effect at midnight on Thursday (29 October), Veran claimed that it’s “nobody’s failure,” but said there are challenges with containing the spread, as they are dealing with an “invisible enemy.”

A second wave, worldwide, was already predicted in May 2020 – because those who call the shots on the “innocent” people knew exactly that the flu season will come, as it does every year.

Now, the flu is blended in with covid, mixed up and adding to the dramatic hike of covid “cases”, covid statistics. This and the media hype will create more FEAR, more – or rather – THE justification for a second lockdown – and obedience, yes, the scared are weak and vulnerable, they are manipulable – especially when threatened at the same time with disproportionately huge fines for disobedience. FEAR is the strongest weapon of these tyrants.

The FEAR factor, makes new parents accept that hospitals impose upon them to wear masks when receiving their newborn. Faceless parents, fearsome world. Their newborn and later toddlers and children will know their parents with masks. Facial expressions are hidden.

The child is being isolated in plain sight from their parents.

That’s what this monstrous dictatorship, to which every government of this world is submissive, wants. Alienated children – a generation that grows up in a faceless society.

This is a sinister form of child abuse that may destroy an entire generation.

But that’s what the eugenists behind this covid cum 5G atrocity want – heartless, emotionless people, who may easily become dispensable. The dispensable people – is not a new term. It has been used regularly in the circles of the current US Administration – to designate people who are in their views worthless for society.

This reminds of an infamous Henry Kissinger saying,

“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world. These words were spoken already in the 1960s, by a eugenist. That’s what Kissinger is, a Rockefeller protégé, sharing his Master’s deepest thoughts, and he is joined, by whom else, Bill Gates, who doesn’t make a secret of wanting to reduce “drastically” the world population. It would therefore not come as a surprise, if the Great Reset also had in mind reducing food supply to certain “lesser populations”.

Even without disrupting food supplies, the poor will have no money to purchase food.

They will enter a painful phase of famine, parents seeing their children starve – and many will succumb to famine, death by famine.

This is the natural consequence of what’s already happening – bankruptcies abound, unemployment rises into unheard dimensions. The International Labor Office (ILO) predicts by end 2020 to mid-2021 that up to half of the world’s workforce may be out of work – most of them in the Global South, where about 70% of labor is “informal”, meaning no social safety nets, no pensions, no unemployment benefits, nothing.

Simultaneously, The World Food Program (WFP) predicts a Famine Pandemic – the consequences of which are far more disastrous than those of the so-called “covid-pandemic”. The WFP reports that today already 821 million people go to bed hungry every night, and an additional 135 million people facing crisis levels of hunger or worse. That means 135 million people on earth are marching towards the brink of starvation.

WFP predicts that Covid-19 will likely add another 130 million, who could be facing starvation by the end of 2020. That’s a total of 265 million people on the brink of death from starvation by the end of 2020. (See this)

The world’s governments – and all 193 UN members participate in one way or another – they are genocidal, since they know exactly what they are doing.

Enter the Great Reset, referred to above. It presents a disaster plan of total destruction – the 4^th Industrial Revolution, based on IT, algorithms, robotism, transferring assets from the bottom to the top, what’s left of them, converting them in an “eco-friendly” way into a new capitalism, painted green, The New Green Deal. Will people fall for it? Propaganda is strong. Propaganda had already started with the 1992 Environmental Conference in Rio (The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), from 3-14 June 1992. This conference set the pace for the climate hype that ensued and to which by now almost the entire world is enslaved, leading to “How Dare You” Greta – and now the New Green Deal.

In this 4^th Industrial age, where robots call the shots, we the surviving people, other than the commanding elite, of course, would become tele-commanded obedient servants, a bit like Aldous Huxley’s futuristic “Brave New World”.

We can resist. Peacefully of course. For example, no more testing. Nobody goes “testing” – and within no time the covid figures would decline. Covid would actually stop. And the common flu, as it does every year, would bother us a bit. But no reason for fear, because there ae plenty of remedies – but NO Vaccines.

We have to peacefully engage in dialogue with the police and military, explain to them what’s at stake – they must understand that they are only the obedient servants of an abject rich elite’s agenda that has nothing to do with protecting public health, that, to the contrary, they are destroying public health and humanity. Police and military are just like us, We, the People. Once this dark sinister elite reached their goal of total control and take-over, police and military will be discarded and replaced by robots. That’s already in the books.

We have to talk to medical personnel in hospitals, clinics and medical practitioners, as well as to teachers from Kindergarten to primary school, all the way to universities – explain to them “sinister plan”- and what it has already done to humanity, to the world’s socioeconomic fabric.

And finally, we have to engage with the numerous country-associations of thousands of medical doctors, virologists, immunologists and other scientists in the bio-medical field, who have stepped out of the matrix and sided with the people, often at the detriment of their careers – and worse.

No more testing – and covid will be gone. And no vaccines.

Only in unison we are strong and can overcome. And overcome we shall.

 

SC222-11

https://www.globalresearch.ca/threat-biden-harris-regime-power/5728383

The Threat of a Biden/Harris Regime in Power

 Since Trump took office in January 2017, I’ve sharply criticized his domestic and geopolitical agenda — with ample supporting evidence to make my case.

I support neither right wing of the US one-party state — nor farcical elections when held that always turn out largely the same way.

The rarest of rare exceptions prove the rule.

The US is a predatory belligerent state, an imperial state, a pariah state, a rogue state, a police state — a nation fostering inequality between haves and have-nots.

Both right wings of the one-party state take turns running things.

While I deplore and oppose both a Trump v. Biden/Harris in power, I fear the latter more than the former over the next four years.

If you loved Obama/Biden’s 8-year record of shame, you’ll be wild about Biden/Harris.

Or will it be the latter alone because of the former’s diminished ability to perform what’s required of a head of state, a real possibility.

Examples are numerous, including twice on the stump confusing Trump with GW Bush as his opponent.

During Obama/Biden’s tenure, seven countries were terror-bombed in eight years: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

None of the above threatened the US. Throughout the post-WW II period, no nations anywhere threatened US security.

Yet since June 1950, Washington has been perpetually at war against one country after another — by hot and/or other means.

The Obama/Biden regime launched preemptive wars on Syria and Libya, smashing and destroying both countries, transforming them into charnel houses.

Massacring hundreds of thousands of their people, displacing countless numbers more, ISIS and likeminded jihadists became US ground forces in both countries and elsewhere.

Obama/Biden staged coups in Honduras, Paraguay, Brazil, and Ukraine.

They supported Israeli wars on Palestine, and tried replacing Venezuelan democracy with fascist rule.

They enforced puppet rule in Haiti and continued Plan Colombia aid that’s been responsible for massacres, disappearances and torture of regime opponents.

They were militantly hostile toward Russia and China, risking confrontation with both countries.

For eight years, they waged war on humanity at home and abroad, along with handing greater wealth to Wall Street, war-profiteers and other corporate predators.

There’s virtually nothing redeeming about Trump’s near-four years in office — with one major exception.

While continuing wars of aggression he inherited and waging it by other means on Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, North Korea, and other countries, he launched no new hot wars on his own.

Since Franklin Roosevelt goaded imperial Japan to attack the US to get the war he wanted, few US presidents served out their time in office without attacking other nations.

Gerald Ford was a rare exception.

Although surrounded by the likes of Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney — who never met an independent country they didn’t want smashed — the only belligerent stain on Ford’s record was permitting Indonesia to rape and destroy East Timor.

Jimmy Carter was another exception, at age-86 in 2011 saying:

During his four years in office from January 1976 to January 1980, “(w)e never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war.”

To his credit as well, he called Bolivarian Venezuela’s election process “the best in the world” — real democracy, what’s banned in the US and other Western countries.

On issues of war and peace, his time in office was blemished by supporting an array of tyrants and drawing Soviet Russia into its Afghan quagmire in the 1980s.

Yet he didn’t preemptively attack another nation during his tenure, how most US presidents operated post-WW II — directly and/or by waging proxy wars to replace independent governments with subservient pro-US ones.

Obama/Biden’s 8-year tenure was pockmarked by endless wars.

Like most US presidents — Trump included — Obama broke every major pledge made, delivering betrayal, not “hope,” “change,” peace, “a new era of openness,” universal healthcare, financial reform, ending torture, illegal spying and detention without trial.

While campaigning in 2007, he said the following:

“I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out (of Afghanistan) by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do.”

“I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this (and the Iraq) war(s). You can take that to the bank.”

Both countries remain illegally occupied by unwanted US forces.

War in Afghanistan continues since October 2001 — against Iraq intermittently since March 2003, first directly, then using ISIS proxy forces, the nation unstable today because of US belligerence, other hostile policies, and presence of its occupying forces.

Obama also promised to close Guantanamo during his first year in office. It remains open, one of many US gulag torture prisons operating globally.

He vowed to “fulfill” the goal of Israel and long-suffering Palestinians “liv(ing) side by side” in two states at “peace.”

He pledged to end torture, illegal spying and detention without trial.

He said he’d observe “democratic values.”

All of the above pledges were systematically breached. Polar opposite policies were pursued throughout his time in office.

Biden partnered in all of the above and much more, a record hostile to peace, equity, justice, and the rule of law.

In earlier articles, I explained his disturbing near-half century of shame as US senator and vice president — that should automatically disqualify him from any public office.

On Tuesday, voting-age Americans will go the polls to elect federal, state and local officials — other than about 90 million who already voted by mail or in-person and many millions more who’ll abstain because change for a nation safe and fit to live in is excluded from ballots.

Whatever the outcome, one thing is certain.

I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it again.

When the dust settles post-election — that may take days or longer to learn if Trump or Biden/Harris won — not a damn thing worth voting for will change.

That’s the disturbing reality of how US fantasy democracy works — for privileged interests exclusively at the expense of ordinary Americans.

SC222-10

https://www.peakprosperity.com/we-are-pawns-in-a-bigger-game-than-we-realize/

We Are Pawns In A Bigger Game Than We Realize 

 

Understanding the coming 'Great Reset'

“I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others…. Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”

 ~ Sherlock Holmes – The Adventures of Silver Blaze

Is it possible to make sense out of nonsense?

So much these days is an incoherent mess.  It’s complete nonsense.

Page 1 excitedly beams about a glorious rebound in GDP.  Yay economic growth!

Page 2 worryingly notes the near complete failure of Siberian arctic ice to reform during October and that hurricane Zeta (so many storms this year we’re now into the Greek alphabet!) has made punishing landfall.

Each is a narrative. Each has its own inner logic.

But they simply do not have any external coherence to each other. It’s nonsensical to be excited about rising economic growth while also concerned that each new unit of growth takes the planet further past a critical red line.

These narratives are incompatible. So which one should we pick?

Well, in the end, reality always has the final say. As Guy McPherson states: Nature bats last.

So better we choose to follow the narrative that hews closest to what reality actually is, vs what we desperately want it to be.

‘They’ Don’t Care About Us

While issues like climate change and economic growth may be difficult to fully grasp and unravel, direct threats to our lives &/or livelihoods are much more concrete and something we can react to and resist.

Such immediate and direct threats are now fully in play and, once again, they’re accompanied by narratives that are completely at odds with each other.  I’m speaking of Covid and the ways in which our national and global managers are choosing to respond (or not).

It’s a truly incoherent mess about which both social media and the increasingly irrelevant media are working quite hard to misinform us.

The mainstream narrative about Covid-19, in the West, is this:

• It’s a quite deadly and novel disease
• There are no effective treatments
• Sadly, no double-blind placebo controlled trials exist to support some of the wild claims out there about various off-patent, cheap and widely available supplements and drugs
• Health authorities care about saving lives
• They care so much, in fact, that along with politicians they’ve decided to entirely shut down economies
• There’s a huge second wave rampaging across the US and Europe and there’s nothing we can do to limit it except shut down businesses and people’s ability to travel and gather
• You need to fear this virus and its associated disease
• All we can do is wait for a vaccine

The alternative narrative, one that I’ve uncovered after 9 months of almost daily research and reporting, is this:

• It’s not an especially dangerous disease and it’s certainly not novel
• There is a huge assortment of very effective, cheap and widely-available preventatives and treatments including (but not limited to)
  • Vitamin D
  • Ivermectin
  • Hydroxychloroquine
  • Zinc
  • Selenium
  • Famotidine (Pepcid)
  • Melatonin
• Use of a combination of these mostly OTC supplements could reasonably be expected to drop the severity of illness and the already low mortality rate by 90% or (probably) more
• Western health authorities have shown either zero interest in the results of studies mainly conducted in poorer nations on these combination therapies or…
• They have actively run studies designed to fail so that these cheap, effective therapies could be dismissed or…
• Set up proper studies but which started late, have immensely long study periods and most likely won’t be done before a vaccine is hastily rushed through development.

By the way – every single one of my assertions and claims is backed by links and supporting documentation from scientific and clinical trials and studies.  I am not conjecturing here; I am recounting the summary of ten months’ worth of inquiry.

The conclusion I draw from my narrative (vs. theirs) is that we can no longer assume that the public health or saving lives has anything to do with explaining or understanding the actions of these health “managers” (I cannot bring myself to use the word authorities).

After we eliminate the impossible – which is that somehow these massive, well-funded bodies have missed month after month of accumulating evidence in support of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, NAC, zinc, selenium and doxycycline/azithromycin – what remains must be the truth.

As improbable as it seems, the only conclusion we’re left with is that the machinery of politics, money and corporate psychopathy is suppressing life saving treatments because these managers have other priorities besides public health and saving lives.

This is a terribly difficult conclusion, because it means suspending so much that we hold dear.  Things like the notion that people are basically good. The idea that the government generally means well. The thought that somehow when the chips are down and a crisis is afoot, good will emerge and triumph over evil.

I’m sorry to say, the exact opposite of all of that has emerged as true.

Medical doctors in the UK NHS system purposely used toxic doses of hydroxychloroquine far too late in the disease cycle to be of any help simply to ‘make a point’ about hydroxychloroquine.  They rather desperately wanted that drug to fail, so they made it fail.

After deliberately setting their trial up for failure, they concluded: “Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help, and it even makes things worse.”

Note that in order to be able to make this claim, they had to be willing to cause harm — even to let people die.  What kind of health official does that?

Not one who actually has compassion, a heart, or functioning level of sympathy.  It’s an awful conclusion but it’s what remains after we eliminate the impossible.

Getting Past The Emotional Toll

Science has proven that cheap, safe and significantly protective compounds exist to limit both Covid-related death and disease severity.

Yet all of the main so-called health authorities in the major western countries are nearly completely ignoring, if not outright banning, these safe, cheap and effective compounds.

This is crazy-making for independent observers like me (and you) because the data is so clear. It’s irrefutable at this point.  These medicines and treatments not only work, but work really, really well.

However most people will be unable to absorb the data, let alone move beyond it to wrestle with the implications.  Why? Because such data is belief-shattering.  Absorbing this information is not an intellectual process; it’s an emotional one.

I don’t know why human nature decided to invest so much in developing a tight wall around the belief systems that control our actions and thoughts. But it has.

I’m sure there was some powerful evolutionary advantage. One that’s now being hijacked daily by social media AI programs to nudge us in desired directions. One that’s being leveraged by shabby politicians, hucksters, fake gurus, and con men to steer advantage away from the populace and towards themselves.

The neural wiring of beliefs is what it is. We have to recognize that and move on.

Some people will be much faster in their adjustment process than others.  (Notably, the Peak Prosperity tribe is populated with many fast-adjusters, which is unsurprising given the topics we cover…tough topics tend to attract fast adjusters and repel the rest)

To move past the deeply troubling information laid out before us requires us to be willing to endure a bit of turbulence.  It’s the only way.

For you to navigate these troubling times safely and successfully, you’ll need to see as clearly as possible the true nature of the game actually being played.  To see what the rules really are – not what you’ve been told they are, or what you wish or hope they are.

The Manipulation Underway

The data above strongly supports the conclusion that our national health managers don’t actually care about public health generally or your health specifically.

If indeed true, then the beliefs preventing most people from accepting this likely include:

• Wanting to believe that people are good (a biggie for most people)
• Trust and faith in the medical system (really big)
• Faith in authority (ginormous)

There are many other operative belief systems I could also list. But this is sufficient to get the ball rolling.

Picking just one, how hard would it be for someone to let go of, say, trust in the medical system?

That would be pretty hard in most cases.

First not trusting the medical system might mean having to wonder if a loved one might have died unnecessarily while being treated.  Or realizing that you’re now going to have to research the living daylights out of every medical decision before agreeing to it.  Or worrying that your medications might be more harmful to you over the long haul than helpful (which is true in many more cases than most appreciate).  It might mean having your personal heroes dinged by suspicion — perhaps even your father or mother who worked in the medical profession.  It would definitely require a complete reorientation away from being able to trust anything you read in a newspaper, or see on TV, about new pharmaceutical “breakthroughs”.

Trust, which is safe and warm and comforting, then turns into skepticism; which is lonelier and insists upon active mental involvement.

But, as always, hard work comes with benefits — with a healthy level of skepticism and involvement, the families of those recruited into the deadly UK RECOVERY trial could have looked at the proposed doses of HCQ (2,400 mg on day one! Toxic!) and said, “Not now, not ever!” and maybe have saved the life of their loved one.

Look at that tangled mess of undesirables that comes with unpacking that one belief: regret, uncertainty, shame, doubt, fallen idols, and vastly more additional effort. Are all up for grabs when we decide to look carefully at the actions of our national health managers during Covid.

Which is why most people simply choose not to look.  It’s too hard.

I get it. I have a lot of compassion for why people choose not to go down that path.  It can get unpleasant in a hurry.

But, just like choosing to ignore a nagging chest pain, turning away in denial has its own consequences.

The Coming ‘Great Reset’

My coverage of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) and Covid-19 (the associated disease) has led me to uncover some things that have made me deeply uncomfortable about our global and national ‘managers’.  Shameful things, really.  Scary things in their implications for what we might reasonably expect (or not expect, more accurately) from the future.

Once we get past the shock of seeing just how patently corrupt they’ve been, we have to ask both What’s next? and What should I do?

After all, you live in a system whose managers either are too dumb to understand the Vitamin D data (very unlikely) or have decided that they’d rather not promote it to the general populace for some reason.  It’s a ridiculously safe vitamin with almost zero downside and virtually unlimited upside.

Either they’re colossally dumb, or this is a calculated decision.  They’re not dumb.  So we have to ask: What’s the calculation being performed here?  It’s not public safety. It’s not your personal health. So… What is it?

This is our line of questioning and observation. It’s like the short story by Arthur Conan Doyle in Silver Blaze that many of us informally know as “the case of the dog that didn’t bark”.  As the story goes, because of a missing clue – a dog who remained silent as a murder was committed – this conclusion could be drawn: the dog was already familiar with the killer!

The silence around Vitamin D alone is extremely telling. It is the pharmacological dog that did not bark.

One true inference suggests others.  Here, too, we can deduce from the near total silence around Vitamin D that the health managers would prefer not to talk about it. They don’t want people to know. That much is painfully clear.

Such lack of promotion (let alone appropriate study) of safe, effective treatments is a thread that, if tugged, can unravel the whole rug.  The silence tells us everything we need to know.

Do they want people to suffer and die?  I don’t know. My belief systems certainly hope not. Perhaps the death and suffering are merely collateral damage as they pursue a different goal — money, power, politics?  Simply the depressing result of a contentious election year?  More than that?

We’ve now reached the jumping off point where we may well find out just how far down the rabbit hole goes.

A massive grab for tighter control over the global populace is now being fast-tracked at the highest levels. Have you heard of the Great Reset yet?

If not, you soon will.

In Part 2: The Coming ‘Great Reset’ we lay out everything we know so far about the multinational proposal to transform nearly every aspect of global industry, commerce, trade, and social structure.

If you read on, be ready and willing to let go of cherished beliefs and to suspend what you know to be true. Because none of us has that in hand.  It’s going to be a wild ride from here.

Something very big is afoot and I suspect that Covid-19 is merely an excuse providing cover for a much bigger power grab over the world’s wealth and peoples.

SC222-9

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/10/30/greenwalds-intercept-resignation-exposes-the-rot-in-all-mass-media/

Greenwald’s Intercept Resignation Exposes The Rot In All Mass Media

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has made major waves throughout mainstream and alternative media by resigning from The Intercept, an outlet he co-founded in 2014 with the stated mission of holding power to account with the power of unrestricted journalism.

Greenwald says he resigned because Intercept editors refused to let him publish an article he’d been working on about the mass media’s role in covering up the Hunter Biden October surprise and obfuscating its nature, which he says is a violation of the conditions in his contract for editorial freedom. He also published part of the email exchanges he’d been having with the editors in the lead-up to submitting his notice of resignation.

The email exchanges make it fairly clear that Intercept editors were holding Greenwald’s analysis of the allegations against Joe Biden and his family to a much higher evidentiary standard than they hold any journalist who wants to criticize Trump or promote flimsy Russia conspiracy theories on the platform, and generally creating pressure and inertia to remove anything in the article that might hurt Biden’s election chances. Journalist Matt Taibbi has his own article out on Greenwald’s resignation which contains more information on the email exchanges, and which is very much worth reading.

More revealing than the emails is the information which Greenwald shares in his Substack article about his resignation, saying The Intercept has been deliberately opaque about those who were responsible for the Reality Winner debacle and the actions they took which led to her arrest when leaking NSA documents to the outlet. Greenwald claims editors rushed the publication of the leaks “because they was eager to prove to mainstream media outlets and prominent liberals that The Intercept was willing to get on board the Russiagate train,” and says their silence has allowed the blame to fall on him for Winner’s imprisonment despite his having nothing to do with the ordeal.

Greenwald also reveals that The Intercept refused to report on the daily proceedings of the Julian Assange extradition hearing “because the freelance reporter doing an outstanding job was politically distasteful”. It’s unclear exactly what was meant by this; Greenwald has praised the excellent Assange trial coverage by Shadowproof‘s Kevin Gosztola and Richard Medhurst now of Press TV in the past, both of whom say they don’t at this time know who he was referring to. Regardless of what he meant, refusal of a media outlet whose motto is “Fearless, adversarial journalism” to cover the single most important journalistic freedom case in the world is outrageous on its face.

https://twitter.com/richimedhurst/status/1321895247333543938?s=20

The Intercept editors called Greenwald’s criticisms “a grown person throwing a tantrum” in a remarkably snarky statement on their website, claiming on what appears to be no basis that their co-founder was “attempting to recycle the dubious claims of a political campaign — the Trump campaign.”

“We have the greatest respect for the journalist Glenn Greenwald used to be, and we remain proud of much of the work we did with him over the past six years,” the editors wrote. “It is Glenn who has strayed from his original journalistic roots, not The Intercept.”

These accusations are fully in line with the smears you can read from the blue-checkmarked commentariat by typing in Greenwald’s name into the Twitter search bar on every given day. Establishment spinmeisters have been painting Greenwald as a closet Trump supporter who stumbled his way into useful idiocy for the Kremlin ever since the award-winning journalist began questioning the establishment Russia narrative, and this statement is plainly both informed by and designed to appeal to acolytes of that smear campaign.

Contrary to its claims of adhering to its “journalistic roots”, The Intercept has in fact been going down the tubes for as long as I’ve been at this commentary gig. Its coverage on Syria has been blatant security state stenography, it’s published hit pieces on Assange, its sources keep getting arrested, and it has been promoting Russiagate with all the fervor of any garden variety corporate liberal rag. So the fact that it has joined with the freakishly unified narrative management campaign on the Hunter Biden story, and is now citing unsubstantiated assertions by US spooks to do so, is not terribly surprising.

The Intercept has fallen victim to the same decay as all other outlets past a certain size and funding level. Matt Taibbi, who says he’s spoken to “multiple well-known journalists” who are encountering similar pressures as those Greenwald encountered in the lead-up to the US election, wrote the following in his aforementioned article:

The traditional method of controlling the press — as described by legendary independent journalists like I.F. Stone — was the quiet aside by the boss, “a little private talk,” where a “hint that the reporter seems irresponsible, a little bit radical” would be dropped. Getting the message, and fearing for his or her job, the reporter backs off. Or, in cases like the Iraq war runup, the strategic dismissal or un-hiring of a big name with the wrong views — Phil Donahue, Jesse Ventura — makes sure the rest of the employees get the message.

Greenwald co-founded the Intercept with this exact scenario in mind, building a structure where “little private talks” with bosses would never happen, and there couldn’t be high-profile dismissals for ideological reasons.

What he didn’t guess at was that even in an atmosphere where managerial interference is near zero, a collective of independent journalists can themselves become censors and enforcers of official orthodoxies. In some cases, journalists will become more aggressive propagandists and suppressors of speech than the officials from whom they supposedly need to be protected. This is what happened with The Intercept.

People will cite all sorts of reasons for The Intercept running cover for intelligence agencies and powerful politicians, including its Omidyar funding and the possibility of government infiltration. But I think the primary source of the decay of The Intercept is much more basic: having large, well-funded news media outlets simply is not conducive to good reporting.

Powerful people pour so very much energy into manipulating how the masses think, act and vote, and news reporters are constantly interfacing with that severely polluted stream of information. For this reason the most heavily propagandized people in the world are those who are responsible for distributing propaganda, namely the news media. As the final guardians of society’s incredible shrinking Overton window, reporters are necessarily the group who will be most aggressively pushed within that window.

If as Upton Sinclair says it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it, then surely that is especially true of those who’ve spent their working lives learning what frameworks of understanding help them ascend to prominence in the sphere of journalism. This would have shaped them long before they arrived at any outlet which purports to promote “fearless adversarial journalism”, and it would continue shaping them as they interact with fellow journalists.

This combined with a dominant plutocrat-funded media system designed to streamline journalistic thought into mainstream establishment orthodoxies creates a kind of conformity conveyor belt that journos get processed through like the schoolchildren in the video for Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”.

The dominant worldview in any collective of journalists is statistically likely to be a mainstream worldview, simply because it’s more common by its very nature. Mainstream worldviews are only mainstream because vast amounts of wealth and effort went into shoving them into the mainstream by sheer force for the benefit of the rich and powerful, whose kingdoms are built upon the capitalist imperialist status quo. If you set out to just hire a bunch of journalists who seem good to you, you’re necessarily going to get a lot of people unwittingly promoting the interests of the rich and powerful just by sheer statistical probability.

When you take all these factors together and throw them into a large media outlet full of journalists, our primitive impulses to conform with the pack kick in and the consensus worldview has a much easier time overtaking critical thought even further than it already has.

Additionally, when you gather news reporters together in a large outlet you’re going to attract the attention of powerful forces who have a vested interest in controlling how the news is reported. If you can use your leverage and/or resources to manipulate how that entire outlet reports, then that’s energy well spent.

All this to say, decentralization is going to have to be the way forward for good critical journalism. There are so few reporters who haven’t been digested by the conformity conveyor belt, and if you stick them with the groupthink herd they’re going to be squeezed until they either fall in line or leave. Stop trying to throw the few alive ones in with the zombies and let them go out on their own or in small groups; they’ll be much harder to influence and they can do a lot more damage to the lie factory.

I don’t know if the best way to make a living doing that is with paid Substack subscriptions like Greenwald and Taibbi or more like my own Patreon-based model, or with some other approach we haven’t thought of yet. I just know that every time we cluster up in groups we bog ourselves down and make ourselves an easy target for the machine. It’s clear with the decay of The Intercept that we’re better off finding ways to let our own skills and insight guide us down our own paths toward this journalism thing while the conformity drones rot in their well-funded outlets. The audiences will be there. Truth is attractive to people, serving power is not.

I don’t know that the Hunter Biden October surprise shows anything more scandalous than you’d expect for any major US presidential nominee. I do know that the uniform conspiracy of silence and obfuscation from the mass media about it is uniquely scandalous and says bad things about the future of journalism in western news media. We can’t keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. Drastic changes are desperately needed.