Saturday, August 25, 2018

Mass Media Is The Enemy Of The People Like The Cage Is The Enemy Of The Bird

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

The Guardian has just published an actual, non-fictional op-ed that is titled “Is my Jewish three-year-old too young to learn about antisemitism?”, about a concerned mother who is teaching her toddler about the Holocaust in case Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister.

The Guardian. Not The Onion. The Guardian.

Have we reached Peak Anti-Semitism in the Guardian yet? Hilary Freeman writes a column on teaching her three-year-old about anti-semitism - in case Corbyn ever gets elected https://t.co/x7ui8woGqr

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) August 23, 2018

“Perhaps they’re right and it is too soon even for this gentle introduction,” muses Hilary Freeman. “I certainly don’t want to frighten or traumatise my daughter. And yet, in the current climate, with accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party making headline news virtually every day, and a rise in antisemitism all over Europe, this is an issue that is pertinent to her life and to her future, not just a story in a book. Many Jews in the UK are feeling very unsettled.”

I mean, wow. Just… wow. I’m seriously tempted to spend the rest of this article just typing “wow”. I wouldn’t copy-paste it, either. I’d type it all out with punctuation and with feeling.

Surely this is as far as they can take this whole “Corbyn is a secret Nazi” narrative? Surely? How could they possibly take it any further into cartoonish lunacy than this? “Terrified by Tory polling decline, I took my cocker spaniel on a tour of Auschwitz”?

I hate mocking the fear of antisemitism, which is a real thing that does happen and should be condemned unequivocally. Even more, though, I hate the British media for making it both extremely easy and one hundred percent necessary to mock them for it.

They say that Corbyn is a secret Nazi who loves antisemitism over and over and over again like it’s a real thing despite the complete absence of anything remotely resembling facts or evidence, then publish op-eds by ostensibly terrified mothers citing “accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party making headline news virtually every day” as the basis for her fear of her three year-old daughter winding up like Anne Frank. And then when this unconscionable behavior sees Corbyn decrying the mass media and pushing for reforms, the British press responds with headlines like “Corbyn is following the Donald Trump playbook on persecuting the media”.

MSM: Why are you a Nazi?
Corbyn: I am not a Nazi.
MSM: So you're saying that the Jews who say you're a Nazi shouldn't have a voice? That they should be loaded onto a train and burnt to ashes?
Corbyn: No! You're being unethical.
MSM: JEREMY CORBYN ATTACKS MEDIA JUST LIKE HITLER

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 23, 2018

They can make this link because across the pond the narrative is being spun that the President of the United States is treating the mass media propaganda machine unfairly. Last week hundreds of outlets released coordinated op-eds decrying Trump’s “war” and “assault” on the “free press” because he occasionally says mean things about CNN, meanwhile completely ignoringthis administration’s horrifying attempts to silence WikiLeaks and persecute Julian Assange for practicing journalism.

“We are not the enemy of the people!” these outlets proclaimed with one voice, chanting as one, repeating the same mantra over and over again like a hypnotist. “We are not the enemy of the people! We are not the enemy of the people! We are not the enemy of the people!”

Oh, fuck you. Yes you fucking are.

A free press is essential to our democracy, but much of our press isn’t very free at all.

I want media workers to be free to do their best work, not held back by billionaire owners, tech giants or the state. #ChangeTheMedia

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) August 23, 2018

The mass media absolutely are the enemy of the people. Without question they are. They are the enemy of our entire species.

“Neither the great political or financial powers of the world nor the population in general realize that the engineering-chemical-electronic revolution now makes it possible to produce many more technical devices with ever less material,” the brilliant inventor and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller once said. “We can now take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known. It does not have to be ‘you or me,’ so selfishness is unnecessary and war is obsolete. This has never been done before. Only twelve years ago technology reached the point where this could be done. Since then it has made it ever so much easier to do.”

Fuller said this in 1981. So why hasn’t it happened yet? Why hasn’t humanity turned its creativity and resourcefulness toward human thriving instead of warfare, exploitation, domination and ecocide?

Stuffy intellectuals who’ve spent too much time indoors might scoff and say it’s because Fuller was wrong, that it is simply human nature that we should all be scrambling to get to the top of the heap by clawing at each other’s flesh and stepping upon each other’s heads until we kill our ecosystem and choke to death on dust and ashes.

I say that’s bullshit. The reason we have not turned our creative power toward health and harmony instead of death and destruction is because we are being manipulated by powerful people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. And they are doing so using the mass media.

Q: What's the difference between Jake Tapper and a prostitute?
A: One gets paid handfuls of cash to do shameful and degrading things which tear apart the fabric of society, the other makes an honest living as a sex worker. https://t.co/ySsPU0SrAX

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 23, 2018

Humans don’t want to suffer and toil in order to make a few billionaires even more rich and powerful than they already are. Literally nobody wants that for humanity besides those billionaires and their immediate underlings. The reason we haven’t yet used the power of our numbers to create a system wherein everyone gets their basic needs met and we all work in collaboration with ourselves and our environment instead of poisoning our air and water and spending medicine money on bombs is because there are screens in our lives convincing us all day in and day out that this is not in our best interest. Keep consenting to increasing degrees of corrupt crony capitalism. Keep voting for the same oligarch-owned two-headed one-party system day in and day out. Keep ignoring how the US military is the worst polluter on earth and how the cost of the Iraq war could have purchased the planetary conversion to renewable energy.

Day after day after day the public’s psyches are pummeled with these deceitful narratives which manufacture consent for war, exploitation and oppression instead of health and thriving. The only thing keeping us from rising like lions in unvanquishable number as in the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem and creating a healthy world is because we are imprisoned in a psychic cage made of propaganda narratives. The billionaire-controlled mass mediaare the enemy of the people in the same way a cage is the enemy of a bird.

We have native parrots here in Australia. Sometimes I think about how cool it would be to have one for a pet, but then I look outside and see the galahs and cockatoos playing around in the trees and think, “Nah.”

The billionaires who control the mass media lack that part of themselves. They are our enemy.

But we are the many. And they are the few. And we are waking up.

*  *  *

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Thursday, August 23, 2018

How "Wealthy" Would We Be If We Stopped Borrowing Trillions Every Year?

ORIGINAL LINK
These charts reflect a linear system that is wobbling into the first stages of non-linear destabilization.
The widespread presumption is the U.S. is wealthy beyond words, and will remain so as far as the eye can see: wealthy enough to fund trillion-dollar weapons systems, trillion-dollar endless wars, multi-trillion dollar Medicare for all, multi-trillion dollar Universal Basic Income, and so on, in an endless profusion of endless trillions.
Just as a thought experiment, let's ask: how "wealthy" would we be if we stopped borrowing trillions of dollars every year? Or put another way, how "wealthy" would we be if the rest of the world stops buying our trillions in newly issued bonds, mortgages, auto loans, etc.?
The verboten reality is our "wealth" is nothing but a sand castle of debt. Take away more borrowing and the castle melts away. I've gathered a selection of charts that show just how dependent we are on massive debt expansion that continues essentially forever, as any pause in debt expansion will collapse the entire system.
Corporate buybacks have powered rising corporate earnings--and the buybacks are funded by debt. Corporate debt has exploded higher in the past decade, enabling stock buybacks on an unprecedented scale.
Government debt--federal, state and local-- is rising an exponential rates.We're not paying for more government programs with earnings--we're simply borrowing trillions and hoping we can borrow the interest payments that will also rise along with the debt.
Household debt, student loans, auto loans--all are soaring. The corporate sector, government and the household sector--all are living on borrowed money, and relying on magical thinking to mask the inevitable consequences.
Here's debt to GDP. Yes, the economy expanded, but debt expanded much faster. Every additional dollar of GDP now requires multiple dollars of new debt.
debt-gdp2.png
The tiny pause in borrowing circa 2008-09 almost collapsed the global financial system. If this is your idea of a stable, sustainable trajectory, what are you high on?
TCMDO3-18.png
This chart of federal debt is outdated-- federal debt has far exceeded $20 trillion. A trillion here and a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking debt levels that insure a devaluation of the currency or a collapse of the entire-debt-dependent system.
US-debt1-17.png
Before we get all giddy about the soaring stock market, let's remember what's been driving it higher--central banks creating trillions out of thin air and using the "free money" to buy stocks and bonds.
CB-purchases2017.jpg
Corporations have been gorging on low-cost debt to fund stock buybacks, which push share prices higher, rewarding insiders and the already-wealthy who own the majority of financial assets.
stock-buybacks2.jpg
Speaking of insanely destabilizing and unsustainable trajectories--take a look at wealth inequality: the top 1% (actually, the top .5%) have skimmed the vast majority of the past decade's gains, the top 5% have gathered most of the remaining crumbs, the next 15% (between 80% and 95%) have illusory gains solely based on bubble valuations, and the bottom 80% have lost ground.
wealth-inequality2.jpg
Anyone who thinks exponentially rising debt and staggering wealth/income inequality are stable and sustainable is taking way too much Ibogaine. Magical thinking doesn't actually change reality or make the unsustainable sustainable.
These charts reflect a linear system that is wobbling into the first stages of non-linear destabilization. What is unsustainable and unstable will destabilize, slowly at first, and then rapidly as all the buffers creating the illusion of stability give way.
Our "wealth" is as illusory as the fantasy that ever-expanding trillions of dollars can be borrowed annually for decades to come, with no consequence.
The system collapses if we trim borrowing, and it collapses if we keep borrowing more every year. There is no middle ground, no Goldilocks state where we can borrow just enough to squeak by. That appears possible in a linear system, but once it shifts into non-linear dynamics, that fantasy will quickly be destroyed.


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Simon Black: Some Thoughts On "The Longest Bull Market Ever"...

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Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Well, it happened. Yesterday the US stock market broke the all-time record for the longest bull market ever.

This means that the US stock market has been generally rising for nearly a decade straight... or even more specifically, that the market has gone 3,453 days without a 20% correction.

That’s a pretty big milestone. And there’s no end in sight. So it’s possible this market continues marching higher for the foreseeable future.

But if you step back and really look at the big picture, there are a lot of things that might make a rational person scratch his/her head.

For example– the Russell 2000 index (which is comprised of smaller companies whose shares are listed on various US stock exchanges) is currently right at its all-time high.

Yet simultaneously, according to the Wall Street Journal, a full SIXTY PERCENT of corporate debt issued by companies in the Russell 2000 is rated as JUNK.

How is that even possible– a junk debt rating coupled with an all-time high? It’s as if investors are saying, “Well, there’s very little chance these companies will be able to pay their debts… but screw it, I’ll pay a record high price to buy the stock anyhow.”

It just doesn’t make any sense.

Looking at the larger companies in the Land of the Free (which make up the S&P 500 index), the current ‘CAPE ratio’ is now the second highest on record.

‘CAPE’ stands for ‘cyclically-adjusted price/earnings ratio’. Essentially it refers to how much investors are willing to pay for shares of a company, relative to the company’s long-term average earnings.

And right now investors are willing to pay 33x long-term average earnings for the typical company in the S&P 500.

The median CAPE ratio based on data that goes back to the 1800s is about 15.6.

So at 33, investors are literally paying more than TWICE as much for every dollar of a company’s long-term average earnings than they have throughout all of US market history.

And it’s only been higher ONE other time– just before the 2000 stock market crash (when the dot-com bubble burst).

33 is higher than right before the 2008 crisis. It’s even higher than it was before the Great Depression.

In addition to the CAPE ratio, the average company’s Price-to-Book ratio is also the highest since the 2000 crash.

In other words, investors are not only paying a near record amount for every dollar of a company’s long-term average earnings, but they’re also paying a near record amount for every dollar of a company’s net assets.

The list of these record / near-record ratios goes on and on. Investors are also paying, for example, an all-time record Price-to-Revenue ratio… meaning that investors have never paid a higher price for every dollar of a company’s revenue… EVER.

The general narrative is that everything is awesome in the US economy and will apparently remain that way forever and ever until the end of time.

I certainly agree that there’s a lot of surface-level strength in the US economy right now.

But I really wonder about the long-term.

Just look at the average US consumer: despite the ultra-low unemployment rate in the US, average wages have barely budged.

Pew Research released a great article earlier this month showing that, for most US workers, their wages have been stagnant for DECADES after you adjust for inflation.

Plus we’ve all seen the statistics about how little the average American has stashed away in savings.

Federal Reserve data from the Survey of Consumer Finances shows the median bank account balance is just $2,900. And for those under 35 it’s just $1,200.

Overall the average US consumer has stagnant wages, little savings, almost nothing put away for retirement, record high credit card debt, record high student debt… and now rising inflation.

So I’m just curious where all these companies are going to get their long-term revenue growth. Who is going to be buying all their products? Because the US consumer seems pretty tapped.

(And if things are that bad in the boom times, just imagine what’s going to happen to US consumer behavior when recession hits again…)

And aside from the US consumer, there are also a lot of companies that are going deeper into debt.

I write about Netflix quite often, which has to take on billions of dollars of debt each year just to stay afloat.

But even bigger companies have bizarre, head-scratching problems.

Coca Cola is a great example– one of the oldest, most stable companies in the US market.

Back in 2006 Coca Cola earned over $5 billion in profit. Last year Coca Cola earned $1.3 billion in profit.

In 2006 Coca Cola had $1.3 billion in long-term debt. Last year Coca Cola had $31 billion in long-term debt.

Yet Coca Cola’s stock price is near a record high, more than double its stock price in 2006.

How does that make any sense?

What’s more– Coca Cola’s ‘Free Cash Flow Yield’ is now 2.8%.

This means that, after all expenses, accounting adjustments, and investments, the business generates enough money to pay investors a cash dividend worth 2.8% of the current share price.

Yet Coca Cola’s -actual- dividend yield is 3.4%.

How is it possible that that Coca Cola consistently pays its investors more money than the business generates? Easy. They just go into debt.

General Motors is another great example: GM pays its investors a dividend yield of 4.1%. And that’s super attractive. Yet GM’s Free Cash Flow is actually NEGATIVE.

There’s so much of this nonsense going on right now– companies going deeper into debt to pay dividends and support their share prices despite lackluster business performance.

But again, despite the rising debt (and the rising level of JUNK debt), investors are still willing to pay record high multiples for their investments.

This just doesn’t strike me as a great way to generate wealth and prosperity.



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Whistleblower: It Was A Failed Coup, Mainstream Media Are Covering Up Phony DOJ Dossier

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

CIA whistleblower Kevin Shipp says that the mainstream media is laser-focused on the recent Cohen plea and the Manafort conviction, both of which have nothing to do with “Russian collusion.”  He says this is because the mainstream media are conspirators and have nothing to do with real news.

“We know the mainstream media (MSM) is not interested in the news,” said Kevin Shipp to USA Watchdog‘s Greg Hunter.

“They have, from their editors on down and their corporate owners, an objective and, in this case, to remove Donald Trump. He stands against everything that they are, the Left or the ‘Dark Left’ as I call it. Trump is actually confronting the Shadow Government and Deep State, and he has them shaking. He has the news media shaking that pushes these really leftist things. So, they are intentionally and on purpose blocking the news and deleting the news about things like this soft coup, the (phony) dossier.”

This is a very powerful interview.  If you have the time, we suggest you watch it in its entirety. It is just over 37 minutes long.

Shipp went on to detail the truth: “The MSM will not tell you the latest revelation and that is Bruce Ohr, who was the fourth highest ranking official in the Obama Justice Department (DOJ), wrote the now infamous phony Trump Dossier which was used to apply for fraudulent federal wiretaps (with the FISA Court) to spy on Trump.

Shipp says all of this investigating started with Bruse Ohr, and he’ll be the next to lose his security clearance.

“It all started from the fake dossier which led eventually to the appointment of Robert Mueller (Special Prosecutor) and the entire foundation is based on a falsity. . . . I understand the next revocation of security clearance is probably going to be Bruce Ohr because he crafted the fake dossier with Christopher Steele, and he may even have written the thing...

After the FBI supposedly fired Christopher Steele, Bruce Ohr had at least 70 communications (with Steele) back and forth talking about the ‘firewall’ is still there to protect us. Recent accounts show that Bruce Ohr either wrote the dossier with Christopher Steele or he wrote it himself in communication with Christopher Steele.” –Kevin Shipp

When Hunter asked Shipp if the dossier meant to frame Trump came directly from the FBI and the DOJ, Shipp confirmed that it did.

“Yes. Oh, they coordinated it for sure. There are 70 emails back and forth between Ohr and Steele crafting the dossier. So, the FBI and Department of Justice were intimately involved with the creation and publication of that dossier.”

“They even went further than that. The FBI and CIA counter-intelligence even placed an agent inside the Trump campaign.” -Kevin Shipp

Shipp concluded that a Civil War in the making right now. “I think we are at the beginning of a civil war. You’ve got the ‘Dark Left’ and you’ve got the Conservative people, the Constitutionalists. In progressivism, one of its tenets is to change the Constitution, especially the First Amendment, and uproot traditional America. Whatever happens in November is going to intensify that. . . . Their attack is against Christians and the Constitution.”



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Rickards: The New Reality Of China's Failing Economy Is Coming Soon

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

I’ve written for years that Chinese economic development is partly real and partly smoke and mirrors, and that it’s critical for investors to separate one from the other to make any sense out of China and its impact on the world. My longest piece on this topic was Chapter Four of my second book, The Death of Money(2014), but I’ve written much else besides, including many articles for my newsletters.

There’s no denying China’s remarkable economic progress over the past thirty years. Hundreds of millions have escaped poverty and found useful employment in manufacturing or services in the major cities.

Infrastructure gains have been historic, including some of the best trains in the world, state-of-the-art transportation hubs, cutting edge telecommunications systems, and a rapidly improving military.

Yet, that’s only half the story.

The other half is pure waste, fraud and theft. About 45% of Chinese GDP is in the category of “investment.” A developed economy GDP such as the U.S. is about 70% consumption and 20% investment.

There’s nothing wrong with 45% investment in a fast-growing developing economy assuming the investment is highly productive and intelligently allocated.

That’s not the case in China. At least half of the investment there is pure waste. It takes the form of “ghost cities” that are fully-built with skyscrapers, apartments, hotels, clubs, and transportation networks – and are completely empty.

This is not just western propaganda; I’ve seen the ghost cities first hand and walked around the empty offices and hotels.

Chinese officials try to defend the ghost cities by claiming they are built for the future. That’s nonsense. Modern construction is impressive, but it’s also high maintenance. Those shiny new buildings require occupants, rents and continual maintenance to remain shiny and functional. The ghost cities will be obsolete long before they are ever occupied.

Other examples of investment waste include over-the-top white elephant public structures such as train stations with marble facades, 128 escalators (mostly empty), 100-foot ceilings, digital advertising and few passengers. The list can be extended to include airports, canals, highways, and ports, some of which are needed and many of which are pure waste.

Communist party leaders endorse these wasteful projects because they have positive effects in terms of job creation, steel fabrication, glass installation, and construction. However, those effects are purely temporary until the project is completed. The costs are paid with borrowed money that can never be repaid.

China might report 6.8% growth in GDP, but when the waste is stripped out the actual growth is closer to 4.5%. Meanwhile, China’s debts grow faster than the economy and its debt-to-GDP ratio is even worse than the U.S.

All of this would be sustainable if China had an unlimited ability to rollover and expand its debt and ample reserves to deal with a banking or liquidity crisis. It doesn’t. China’s financial fragility was revealed during the 2014-2016 partial collapse of its capital account.

China had about $4 trillion in its capital account in early 2014. That amount had fallen to about $3 trillion by late 2016. Much of that collapse was due to capital flight for fear of Chinese devaluation, (which did occur in August 2015 and again in December 2015).

China’s $3 trillion of remaining reserves is not as impressive as it sounds. $1 trillion of that amount is invested in illiquid assets (hedge funds, private equity funds, direct investments, etc.) This is real wealth, but it’s not available on short notice to defend the currency or prop up banks.

Another $1 trillion of Chinese reserves are needed as a precautionary fund to bail-out the Chinese banking system. Many observers are relaxed about the insolvency of Chinese banks because they are confident about China’s ability to rescue them. They may be right about that, but it’s not free. China needs to keep $1 trillion of dry powder to save the banks, so that money’s off the table.

That leaves about $1 trillion of liquid reserves to defend the Chinese currency, if so desired. At the height of the Chinese capital outflows in 2016, China was losing $80 billion per month of hard currency to defend the yuan.

At that tempo, China would have burned through $1 trillion in one year and become insolvent. China did the only feasible thing, which was to close the capital account; (interest rate hikes and further devaluation would have caused other more serious problems).

This distress might have been temporary if China had managed to maintain good trading relations with the U.S. But that proved another chimera. The trade war, which has broken out between the U.S. and China has damaged Chinese exports and raised costs on Chinese imports at exactly the time China was counting on a larger trade surplus to help it finance its mountain of debt.

Now trade is drying up and China is stuck with debt it can’t repay or rollover easily. This marks the end of China’s Cinderella growth story, and the beginning of a period of economic slowdown and potential social unrest.

The coming Chinese crack-up is not just theoretical. The hard data supports the thesis. Here’s a real-time data summary from the Director of Floor Operations at the New York Stock Exchange, Steven “Sarge” Guilfoyle:

The greater threat to financial markets will come, in my opinion from the slowing of global growth, at least partially due to the current state of international trade. This thought process is lent some credence by last night’s rather disastrous across-the-board macroeconomic numbers released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics. … For the Month of July, in China – Fixed Asset Investment.Growth slowed to the slowest pace since this data was first recorded back in 1992, printing in decline for a fifth consecutive month. Industrial Production. Missed expectations for a third consecutive month, while printing at a growth rate equaling the nation’s slowest since February of 2016. Retail Sales. Finally showing a dent in the armor, missed expectation while slowing from the prior month. Unemployment. This item has only been recorded since January. Headline unemployment “popped” up to 5.1% from June’s 4.8%. Oil Production. The NBS reported that Chinese oil production fell 2.6% in July, and now stands from a daily perspective at the lowest level since June of 2011. China will not report Q3 GDP until October 15. The National Bureau of Statistics reported annualized growth of 6.7% for the second quarter. Depending on the veracity of the data, one must start to wonder if China can indeed hang on to growth of 6.5% going forward.

This unpleasant picture Sarge paints is based on official Chinese data. Yet, China has a long history of overstating its data and painting the tape. The reality in China is always worse than the official data reveals.

This slowdown comes just months after Chinese dictator Xi Jinping was offered a dictator-for-life role by the removal of term limits and was placed on the same pedestal as Mao Zedong by the creation of “Xi Jinping Thought” as a formal branch of Chinese Communist ideology.

The Book of Proverbs says, “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Xi Jinping now finds himself in precisely this position. His political ascension inflated his pride just as he now faces the reality of a falling economy and possible destruction of any consensus around his power and the lack of accountability.

Trump continues to tighten the screws with more tariffs, more penalties, and a near complete shutdown of China’s ability to invest in U.S. markets.

Turkey, Argentina, and Venezuela are large developing economies that are in different stages of collapse and threaten the global economy with panic through contagion.

Yet, those three economies combined are not as large or important as China. Only Trump and Xi can salvage the situation with negotiation and reasonable compromise on trade and intellectual property. But, Trump won’t blink first; that’s up to Xi.

So far, a spirit of compromise is not in the air. A spirit of Chinese collapse and contagion is.



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HOLMAN JENKINS: The Media Fesses Up: “After weeks of hype, white supremacists managed to muste…

ORIGINAL LINK

HOLMAN JENKINS: The Media Fesses Up:

“After weeks of hype, white supremacists managed to muster just a couple of dozen supporters on Sunday in the nation’s capital. . . .”

This column has not always praised the New York Times, but let’s belatedly credit its lead sentence (to which we’ve added emphasis) in its story about the sparsely attended Aug. 12 white-power rally in D.C. As the paper made clear, the “hype” it mentions was supplied by the media itself, working off what the Times called a “template.”

Here’s how it goes: “A group like the Ku Klux Klan announces a rally. Next comes news coverage, fevered and intense. That prompts a huge number of activists, police officers and everyday people to turn out, dwarfing what is often a pathetically small band of extremists in hoods or armbands.”

Bingo. And the top practitioner of this left-right symbiosis is Jason Kessler, a 34-year-old University of Virginia graduate. He began as a Barack Obama supporter, then shifted into promoting white identity politics. As well as being the permittee for this month’s tiny D.C. rally, he was the permit holder for last year’s highly instructive debacle in Charlottesville, Va.

Those Charlottesville events, as a painstaking official report would later document, got out of hand when local police deliberately allowed a violent confrontation to develop between a small group of neo-Nazis and a large number of counterprotesters. The goal was to create a pretext for the state police to declare an emergency and unleash riot forces while local cops stood on the sidelines. A woman would later be killed when a mentally ill neo-Nazi (almost a redundancy) drove his car into a crowd.

The reality of what happened in Charlottesville remains lost on much of the media, but it wasn’t lost on the people of the overwhelmingly liberal city. They got rid of the police chief, the mayor and the town manager. It also was not lost on cities elsewhere. Witness D.C.’s successful effort to keep its tiny number of legally sanctioned white nationalist demonstrators (about 20) isolated from thousands of peaceful antiracism demonstrators, and, most important, from hundreds of helmeted, masked “antifa,” or antifascist, militants adorned in black.

The absurdity was apparent even in less knowing press accounts. “Thousands of counter-protesters struggled to even catch a clear glimpse of the white nationalist rally,” noted the Associated Press. With nobody else to oppose, the mostly white counterprotesters turned their free-floating rage on D.C.’s predominantly black police with chants of “cops and Klan go hand in hand.”

If neo-Nazis didn’t exist, the left would have to invent them. And to some extent have.

Yep.



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Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

ORIGINAL LINK

In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in that virtual simulation, without any way of knowing that what they appear to be experiencing with their senses is actually made of AI-generated code.

Life in our current society is very much the same. The difference is that instead of AI, it’s psychopathic oligarchs who are keeping us asleep in the Matrix. And instead of code, it’s narrative.

Society is made of narrative like the Matrix is made of code. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government, they’re all purely mental constructs which exist nowhere outside of the mental noises in our heads. If I asked you to point to your knee you could do so instantly and wordlessly, but if I asked you to point to the economy, for example, the closest you could come is using a bunch of linguistic symbols to point to a group of concepts. To show me the economy, you’d have to tell me a story.

Anyone who has ever experienced a moment of mental stillness knows that without the chatter, none of those things are part of your actual present experience. There is no identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics or government in your experience without the mental chatter about those things. There’s not even a “you” anywhere to be found, because it turns out that that’s made of narrative, too.

Without mental narrative, nothing is experienced but sensory impressions appearing to a subject with no clear shape or boundaries. The visual and auditory fields, the sensation of air going in and out of the respiratory system, the feeling of the feet on the ground or the bum in the chair. That’s it. That’s more or less the totality of life minus narrative.

When you add in the mental chatter, however, none of those things tend to occupy a significant amount of interest or attention. Appearances in the visual and auditory field are suddenly divided up and labeled with language, with attention to them determined by whichever threatens or satisfies the various agendas, fears and desires of the conceptual identity construct known as “you”. You can go days, weeks, months or years without really noticing the feeling of your respiratory system or your feet on the ground as your interest and attention gets sucked up into a relationship with society that exists solely as narrative.

“Am I good enough? Am I doing the right thing? Oh man, I hope what I’m trying to do works out. I need to make sure I get all my projects done. If I do that one thing first it might save me some time in the long run. Oh there’s Ashley, I hate that bitch. God I’m so fat and ugly. If I can just get the things that I want and accomplish my important goals I’ll feel okay. Taxes are due soon. What’s on TV? Oh it’s that idiot. How the hell did he get elected anyway? Everyone who made that happen is a Nazi. God I can’t wait for the weekend. I hope everything goes as planned between now and then.”

On and on and on and on. Almost all of our mental energy goes into those mental narratives. They dominate our lives. And, for that reason, people who are able to control those narratives are able to control us.

And they do.

Most people try to exert some degree of control over those around them. They try to influence how those in their family, social and employment circles think of them by behaving and speaking in a certain way. Family members will spend their lives telling other family members over and over again that they’re not as smart/talented/good as they think they are to keep them from becoming too successful and moving away. Romantic partners will be persuaded that they can never leave because no one else will ever love them. To varying degrees, they manipulate the narratives of individuals.

Then there are the people who’ve figured out that they can actually take their ability to influence the way people think about themselves and their world and turn it into personal profit. Cult leaders convince followers to turn over their entire lives in service to them. Advertisers convince consumers that they have a problem or deficiency that can only be solved with This Exciting New Product™. Ambitious rat race participants learn how to climb the corporate ladder by winning favor with the right people and inflicting small acts of sabotage against their competing peers. Ambitious journalists learn that they advance much further in their careers by advancing narratives that favor the establishment on which the plutocrats who own the big media companies have built their kingdoms. They manipulate the narratives of groups.

And then, there are the oligarchs. The master manipulators. These corporate kings of the modern world have learned the secret that every ruler since the dawn of civilization has known: whoever controls the narratives that are believed by a society is the controller of that society. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government: all mental constructs which only influence society to the extent that they are believed and subscribed to by a significant majority of the collective. If you have influence over the things that people believe about those mental constructs, you have influence over society. You rule it. The oligarchs manipulate the narratives of entire societies.

This is why there have been book burnings, heretic burnings, and executions for mocking the emperor throughout history: ideas which differ from the dominant narratives about what power is, how money works, who should be in charge and so on are threatening to a ruler’s power in the exact same way that an assassin’s dagger is. At any time, in any kingdom, the people could have decided to take the crown off of their king’s head and place it upon the head of any common beggar and treat him as the new king. And, in every meaningful way, he would be the new king. The only thing preventing this from happening was dominant narratives subscribed to by the society at the time about Divine Right, fealty, loyalty, noble blood and so on. The only thing keeping the crown on a king’s head was narrative.

The exact same thing remains true today; the only thing that has changed is the narratives the public subscribe to. Because of what they are taught in school and what the talking heads on their screens tell them about their nation and their government, most people believe that they live in a relatively free democracy where accountable, temporary power is placed in the hands of a select few based on a voting process informed by the unregulated debate of information and ideas. Completely separate from the government, they believe, is an economy whose behavior is determined by the supply and demand of consumers. In reality, economics, commerce and government are fully controlled by an elite class of plutocrats, who also happen to own the media corporations which broadcast the information about the world onto people’s screens.

Control the narratives of economics and commerce, and you control economics and commerce. Control the narratives about politics and government, and you control politics and government. This control is used by the controllers to funnel power to the oligarchs, in this way effectively turning society into one giant energy farm for the elite class.

But it is possible to wake up from that narrative Matrix.

It isn’t easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes work. Inner work. And humility. Nobody likes acknowledging that they’ve been fooled, and the depth and extent to which we’ve all been fooled is so deeply pervasive it can be tempting to decide that the work is complete far before one is actually free. Mainstream American liberals think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by Fox and Donald Trump, and mainstream American conservatives think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by MSNBC and the Democrats, but the propaganda strings on both trace back to the same puppet master. And seeing that is just the beginning.

But, through sincere, humble research and introspection, it is possible to break free of the Matrix and see the full extent to which you and everyone you know has been imprisoned by ideas which have been programmed into social consciousness by the powerful. Not just in our adult lives, but ever since our parents began teaching us how to speak, think and relate to the world. Not just in the modern world, but as far back as history stretches when the power-serving belief systems of societal structure and religion were promoted by kings and queens of old. All of society, and all of ourselves, and indeed all of the thoughts in our heads, have been shaped by those in power to their benefit. This is the reality that we were born into, and our entire personality structure has been filtered through and shaped by it.

For this reason, escaping from the power-serving propaganda Matrix necessarily means becoming a new creature altogether. The ideas, mental habits and ways of relating to the world which were formed in the Matrix are only useful for moving around inside of it. In order to relate to life outside of the power-promulgated narratives which comprise the very fabric of society, you’ve got to create a whole new operating system for yourself in order to move through life independently of the old programming designed to keep you asleep and controlled.

So it’s hard work. You’ll make a lot of mistakes along the way, just like an infant slowly learning to walk. But, eventually, you get clear of the programming.

And then you’re ready to fight.

Because at some point in this process, you necessarily come up against a deep, howling rage. Rage at the oligarchic manipulators of your species, yes, but also rage against manipulation in all its forms. Rage against everyone who has ever tried to manipulate your narrative, to make you believe things about yourself or make other people believe things about you. Rage against anyone who manipulates anyone else to any extent. When your eyes are clear manipulation stands out like a black fly on a white sheet of paper, and your entire system has nothing to offer it but revulsion and rejection.

So you set to work. You set to work throwing all attempts to manipulate you as far away from yourself as possible, and expunging anyone from your life who refuses to stop trying to control your narrative. Advertising, mass media propaganda, establishment academia, everything gets purged from your life that wants to pull you back into the Matrix.

And they will try to pull you back in. Because our narratives are so interwoven and interdependent with everyone else’s, and so inseparable from our sense of ourselves, your rejection of the narrative Matrix will present as an existential threat to many of your friends and loved ones. You will see many people you used to trust, many of them very close to you, suddenly transform into a bunch of Agent Smiths right in front of your eyes, and they will shame you, guilt you, throw every manipulation tool they have at you to get you to plug the jack back into your brain. But because your eyes are clear, you’ll see it all. You won’t be fooled.

And then all you’ll want is to tear down the Matrix from its very foundations and plunge its controllers into irrelevance. You will set to work bringing down the propaganda prison that they have built up around your fellow humans in any way you can, bolt by bolt if you have to, because you know from your own experience that we are all capable of so much more than the puny gear-turning existence they’ve got everyone churning away at. You will despise the oligarchs for the obscene sacrilege that they have inflicted upon human majesty out of greed and insecurity, and you will make a mortal enemy of the entire machine that they have used to enslave our species.

And, because their entire kingdom is built upon maintaining the illusion of freedom and democracy, all they will have to fight back against you is narrative. They’ll try to shame you into silence by calling you a conspiracy theorist, they’ll have their media goons and manipulators launch smear campaigns against you, but because your eyes are clear, none of that will work. They’ve got one weapon, and it doesn’t work on you.

And you will set to work waking up humanity from the lie factory, using whatever skills you have, weakening trust in the mass media propaganda machine and opening eyes to new possibilities. And while doing so, you will naturally shine big and bright so the others can find you. And together, we’ll not only smash the narratives that imprison us like a human caterpillar swallowing the narrative bullshit and forcing it into the mouth of the next slave, but we’ll also create new narratives, better narratives, healthier narratives, for ourselves and for each other, about how the world is and what we want it to be.

Because here’s the thing: since it’s all narrative, anything is possible. Those who see this have the ability to plunge toward health and human thriving without any regard for the made-up reasons why such a thing is impossible, and plant seeds of light which sprout in unprecedented directions that never could have been predicted by someone plugged into to establishment how-it-is stories. Together, we can determine how society will be. We can re-write the rules. We are re-writing the rules. It’s begun already.

Out of the white noise of a failing propaganda machine, a new world is being born, one that respects the autonomy of the individual and their right to self-determination. One that respects our right to collaborate on large scales to create beautiful, healthy, helpful systems without the constant sabotage and disruption of a few power-hungry psychopaths who would rather rule than live. One that respects our right to channel human ingenuity into harmony and human thriving instead of warfare and greed. One that respects our right to take what we need, not just to survive but to thrive, and return it to the earth for renewal. One that respects the sovereign boundaries of not just ourselves and each other, but of the planet spaceship that we live in.

Unjack your cortex fully from the fear-soaked narratives of insanity, and let the true beauty of our real world flood your senses. Let the grief of what we have unknowingly done send you crashing to your knees in sorrow. And when you’re ready, stand up. We have much work to do.

____________________________

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Paul Craig Roberts Reflects On "The Genocide Of The Greek Nation"

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

The political and media coverup of the genocide of the Greek Nation began yesterday (August 20) with European Union and other political statements announcing that the Greek Crisis is over. What they mean is that Greece is over, dead, and done with. It has been exploited to the limit, and the carcas has been thrown to the dogs.

350,000 Greeks, mainly the young and professionals, have fled dead Greece. The birth rate is far below the rate necessary to sustain the remaining population. The austerity imposed on the Greek people by the EU, the IMF, and the Greek government has resulted in the contraction of the Greek economy by 25%. The decline is the equivalent of America’s Great Depression, but in Greece the effects were worst. President Franklin D. Roosevelt softened the impact of massive unemployment with the Social Security Act other elements of a social safety net such as deposit insurance, and public works programs, whereas the Greek government following the orders from the IMF and EU worsened the impact of massive unemployment by stripping away the social safety net.

Traditionally, when a sovereign country, whether by corruption, mismanagement, bad luck, or unexpected events, found itself unable to repay its debts, the country’s creditors wrote down the debts to the level that the indebted country could service.

With Greece there was a game change. The European Central Bank, led by Jean-Claude Trichet, and the International Monetary Fund ruled that Greece had to pay the full amount of interest and principal on its government bonds held by German, Dutch, French, and Italian banks.

How was this to be achieved?

In two ways, both of which greatly worsened the crisis, leaving Greece today in a far worst position that it was in at the beginning of the crisis almost a decade ago.

At the beginning of the “crisis,” which would have easily been resolved by writing down part of the debt, the Greek debt was 129% of Greek Gross Domestic Product. Today Greek debt is 180% of GDP.

Why?

Greece was lent more money to pay interest to Greece’s creditors, so that they would not have to lose one cent. The additonal lending, called a “bailout” by the presstitute financial media, was not a bailout of Greece. It was a bailout of Greece’s creditors.

The Obama regime encouraged this bailout, because the American banks, expecting a bailout, had sold credit default swaps on Greek debt. Without a bailout the US banks would have lost their bet and paid default insurance on Greek Bonds.

Additionally, Greece was required to sell its public assets to foreigners and to decimate the Greek social safety net, reducing pensions, for example, to below subsistance incomes and so radically reducing medical care that people die before they can get treatment.

If memory serves, China bought the Greek seaports. Germay bought the airport. Various German and European entities bought the Greek municipal water companies. Real estate speculators bought protected Greek Islands for real estate development.

This plunder of Greek public property did not go toward reducing the debt that Greek owed. It went, along with the new loans, to paying the interest.

The debt, larger than ever still stands. The economy is smaller than ever as is the Greek population that bears the debt.

The declaration that the Greek crisis is over is merely a statement that there is nothing left to extract from the Greek people for the interest of the foreign banks. Greece is sinking fast. All of the income associated with sea ports, airport, municipal utilities, and the rest of public property that was forcibly privatized now belongs to foreigners who take the money out of the country, thus further driving down the Greek economy.

The Greeks have not only had their economic future stolen from them. They have also lost their sovereignty. Greece is not a sovereign nation. It is ruled by the EU and the IMF. In my 2013 book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, in Part III, “The End of Sovereignty,” I described clearly how this was done.

The Greek people were betrayed by the Tsipras government. They had the option of revolting and using violence to overthrow the government that sold them out to international bankers. Instead, the Greeks accepted their own destruction and did nothing. Essentially, the Greek population committed mass suicide.

The world financial crisis of 2008 is not over. It has been swept under the rug of massive money creation by the US, EU, UK, and Japanese central banks. The creation of money has far outpaced the growth of real output and has driven up values of financial assets beyond what can be supported by “conditions on the ground.”

How this crisis plays out remains to be seen. It could result in the destruction of Western civilization. Will Dog eat dog? After Greece, will it be Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Australia, Canada, until none are left?

The entirety of the Western World lives in lies fomented by powerful economic interest groups to serve their interests. There is no independent media except online, and those elements are being demonized and denied access. Peoples who live in a world of controlled information have no idea of what is happening to them. Therefore, they cannot act in their interest.



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Tuesday, August 21, 2018

One Million Americans Default On Their Student Loans Each Year, Report Reveals

ORIGINAL LINK

More than one million American student loan borrowers default on their debt each year, a new report says.

That means by 2023, approximately 40 percent of borrowers are expected to default.

That is according to a new report by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to developing evidence-based insights on critical socioeconomic issues. Researchers found about 250,000 student loan borrowers see their debts go into default every quarter, and an additional 20,000 to 30,000 borrowers default on their rehabilitated student loans.

“My results indicate that the likelihood of student loan default is positively correlated with holding other collections debt (e.g., medical, utilities, retail, or bank debt). About 59 percent of borrowers who defaulted on their student loans within four years had collections debt in the year before entering student loan repayment (compared with 24 percent among non-defaulters). Those who will default on their student loans are more likely to reside in neighborhoods that have more residents of color and fewer adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher, but a borrower’s personal credit profile is a stronger predictor of default than the neighborhood where she resides,” said Kristin Blagg, a research associate in the Education Policy Program at the Urban Institute.

The average defaulter is more likely to live in Hispanic and black neighborhoods, Blagg found. Her previous research has shown that minorities are more burdened by their education debt because their parents have a lower net wealth as well as higher rates of unemployment. These neighborhoods also have a median income of around $50,000, compared with $60,000 for non-defaulters.

The Urban Institute made a startling discovery: Those with the smallest loan balances had a higher probability of not paying off their debt. In fact, 1 in 3 people who had a student loan balance less than $5,000 defaulted within four years, compared with 15 percent of borrowers who owed more than $35,000.

This is because students who dropped out of college have less debt, but are easily burdened by debt since they do not have the benefit of a degree, said Mark Kantrowitz, a student loan expert, who spoke with CNBC.

Also, Kantrowitz said, “They often lack awareness of options for dealing with the debt, such as deferments, forbearances, income-driven repayment and loan forgiveness.”

The report then describes the relationship between a borrower’s credit profile and student loan default in a nationally representative sample of student loan borrowers, over the first four years of repayment. It found that by the time the student loan falls into the default, the borrower will see their credit score plunge by 60 points, to an average of around 550. Borrowers who stay current, usually have credit scores in the high 600s.

As we have mentioned, millennials are delaying marriage, home-buying and having kids (pretty much delaying the American dream), simply because of their gig-economy job(s) cannot cover debt servicing payments of their loans.

“Negative effects of student loan default can be wage garnishments, tax offsets, and other methods of loan collections,” said Elaine Griffin Rubin, senior contributor and communications specialist at Edvisors. “In addition, some states suspend or revoke state-issued professional licenses, and some states suspend a driver’s license because of a defaulted loan.”

To make the situation worse, defaulting on student loans increases the balance, likely due to collection fees and the accumulation of interest. Kantrowitz said a borrower could expect their balance to jump by over 10 percent after default.

These myriad consequences that come with a default can be hard to recover from, Kantrowitz said.

“At best, it delays participation in the American Dream,” he said. “At worst, they are shut out permanently.”

Student debt is a crisis that many Americans will not be able to recover from. The College Board, a non-profit organization, says the average cost of a U.S. degree is $34,740 a year at a private college, minus living costs.

Graduates of the Class of 2016 owe a staggering $37,000 each in student loans. Total Student Loans Owned and Securitized, Outstanding (SLOAS) has surpassed the $1.5 trillion mark in Q2 2018, which is second only to home mortgages among categories of consumer debt and the main reason Americans’ household debt has swelled to a record high.

Credit bubbles are all the same. It just happens that the life cycle of the student debt bubble is nearing a deleveraging period. According to both Keynesian and monetarist theory, when the student debt bubble cracks, the state should intervene directly, and bailout the millennials who made terrible life decisions in accumulating massive amounts of debt for a worthless liberal arts degree, simply because the myth of going to college would usher in a high paying job. As it has become increasingly evident, that is not the case in today’s gig-economy. The failing education system has duped millennials, they have now realized that the greatest con of all time is college.



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All Sanctions Against Russia Are Based On Lies

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

All of the sanctions (economic, diplomatic, and otherwise) against Russia are based on clearly demonstrable intentional falsehoods; and the sanctions which were announced on August 8th are just the latest example of this consistent tragic fact - a fact which will be proven here, with links to the evidence, so that anyone who reads here can easily see that all of these sanctions are founded on lies against Russia.

The latest of these sanctions were announced on Wednesday August 8th. Reuters headlined "US imposes sanctions on Russia for nerve agent attack in UK” and reported that, “Washington said on Wednesday it would impose fresh sanctions on Russia by the end of August after it determined that Moscow had used a nerve agent against a former Russian agent and his daughter in Britain.” This was supposedly because “Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in Russia’s GRU military intelligence service, and his 33-year-old daughter, Yulia, were found slumped unconscious on a bench in the southern English city of Salisbury in March after a liquid form of the Novichok type of nerve agent was applied to his home’s front door. European countries and the United States expelled 100 Russian diplomats after the attack, in the strongest action by President Donald Trump against Russia since he came to office.”

However, despite intense political pressure that the UK Government and ‘news’media had placed upon the UK’s Porton Down intelligence laboratory to assert that the poison had been made in Russia (labs in several countries including the UK have also manufactured it), the Porton Down lab refused to say this. Though the US Government is acting as ifPorton Down’s statement “determined that Moscow had used a nerve agent,” the actual fact is that Porton Down still refuses to say any such thing, at all — this allegation is merely a fabrication by the US Government, including its allies, UK’s Government and other Governments and their respective propaganda-media. It’s a bald lie.

On March 18th, the great British investigative journalist and former British diplomat Craig Murray had headlined about UK’s Foreign Secretary, “Boris Johnson Issues Completely New Story on Russian Novichoks” and he pointed to the key paragraph in the Porton Down lab’s statement on this matter — a brief one-sentence paragraph:

Look at this paragraph:

"Russia is the official successor state to the USSR. As such, Russia legally took responsibility for ensuring the CWC [Chemical Weapons Convention] applies to all former Soviet Chemical Weapons stocks and facilities."

It does not need me to point out, that if Porton Down had identified the nerve agent as made in Russia, the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office — UK’s foreign ministry]would not have added that paragraph. Plainly they cannot say it was made in Russia.

Murray’s elliptical report, which unfortunately was unclearly written - it was rushed, in order to be able to published on the same day, March 18th, when the UK’s official response to the Porton Down lab’s analysis was published - was subsequently fully explained on March 23rd at the excellent news-site Off-Guardian, which specializes in investigating and interpreting the news-media (in this case, Craig Murray’s article, and the evidence regarding it); they headlined "Skripal case: 'closely related agent” claim closely examined’,” and concluded their lengthy and detailed analysis:

In short, the ruling cited above, even if read in the most improbably forgiving way possible, shows the UK government does not have the information to warrant any of the claims it has so far made about Russian state involvement in the alleged poisoning of the Skripals. It shows the UK government is currently guilty of lying to Parliament, to the British people, and to the world.

Nothing has been published further about the Skripal/Novichoks matter since then, except speculation that’s based on the evidence which was discussed in detail in that March 23rdarticle at Off-Guardian.

On the basis of this — merely an open case which has never been examined in more detail than that March 23rd analysis did — the Skripal/Novichok case has been treated by the UK Government, and by the US Government, and by governments which are allied with them, and by their news-media, as if it were instead a closed case, in which what was made public constitutes proof that the Skripals had been poisoned by the Russian Government. On that blatantly fraudulent basis, over a hundred diplomats ended up being expelled.

The Porton Down lab still refuses to say anything that the UK Government can quote as an authority confirming that the Skripals had been poisoned by the Russian Government.

All that’s left of the matter, then, is a cold case of official lies asserting that proof has been presented, when in fact only official lies have been presented to the public. 

The UK Government prohibits the Skripals from speaking to the press, and refuses to allow them to communicate even with their family-members. It seems that they’re effectively prisoners of the UK Government — the same Government that claims to be protecting them against Russia.

This is the basis upon which the US State Department, on August 8th, issued the following statement to ‘justify’ its new sanctions:

Imposition of Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act Sanctions on Russia

Press Statement

Heather Nauert 

Department Spokesperson

Washington, DC

August 8, 2018

Following the use of a “Novichok” nerve agent in an attempt to assassinate UK citizen Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal, the United States, on August 6, 2018, determined under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (CBW Act) that the Government of the Russian Federation has used chemical or biological weapons in violation of international law or has used lethal chemical or biological weapons against its own nationals.

Following a 15-day Congressional notification period, these sanctions will take effect upon publication of a notice in the Federal Register, expected on or around August 22, 2018.

US law is supposed to be “innocent until proven guilty” — the opposite of legal systems in which the contrary assumption applies: “guilty until proven innocent.” However, regarding such matters as invading and destroying Iraq in 2003 upon the basis of no authentic evidence; and invading and destroying Libya in 2011 on the basis of no authentic proof of anyone’s guilt; and on the basis of invading and for years trying to destroy Syria on the basis of America’s supporting Al Qaeda in Syria against Syria’s secular government; and on the basis of lying repeatedly against Russia in order to load sanction after sanction upon Russia and to ‘justify’ pouring its missiles and thousands of troops onto and near Russia’s border as if preparing to invade ‘the world’s most aggressive country’ — the US federal Government routinely violates that fundamental supposition of its own legal system (“innocent until proven guilty”), whenever its rulers wish. And yet, it calls itself a ‘democracy’.

Donald Trump constantly says that he seeks improved relations with Russia, but when his own State Department lies like that in order to add yet further to the severe penalties that it had previously placed against Russia for its presumed guilt in the Skripal/Novichok matter, then Trump himself is publicly exposing himself as being a liar about his actual intentions regarding Russia. He, via his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s State Department, not only is punishing Russia severely for this unproven allegation, but now adds yet further penalties against Russia for it. Trump is being demanded by the US Congress to do this, but it is his choice whether to go along with that demand or else expose that it’s based on lies. He likes to accuse his opponents of lying, but, quite obviously, the members of Congress who are demanding these hiked rounds of sanctions against Russia are demanding him to do what he actually wants to do — which is now clearly demonstrated to be the exact opposite of exposing those lies. If Trump is moving toward World War III on the basis of lies, then the only way he can stop doing it is by exposing those lies. He’s not even trying to do that.

Nothing is being said in the State Department’s cryptic announcement on August 8th that sets forth any reasonable demand which the US Government is making to the Russian Government, such that, if the reasonable demand becomes fulfilled by Russia's Government, then the United States Government and its allies will cease and desist their successive, and successively escalating, rounds of punishment against Russia.

Russia is being offered no path to peacebut only the reasonable expectation of escalating lie-based American ‘justifications’ to perpetrate yet more American-and-allied aggressions against Russia.

There have been three prior US excuses for applying prior rounds of sanctions against Russia, and all of them have likewise been based upon lies, and varnished with many layers of overstatements.

First, in 2012, there was the Magnitsky Act, which was based upon frauds (subsequently exposed here and here and here) which assert that Sergei Magnitsky was murdered by the Russian Government. The evidence (as linked-to there) is conclusive that he was not; but the US Government and its allies refuse even to consider it.

Then, in 2014, Crimea broke away from Ukraine and joined the Russian Federation, and the US and its allies allege that this was because Russia under Putin ‘seized’ Crimea from Ukraine, when in fact America under Obama had, just weeks prior to that Crimean breakaway, seized Ukraine and turned it against Russia and against Crimea and the other parts of Ukraine which had voted overwhelmingly for the democratically elected Ukrainian President whom the Obama regime had just overthrown in a bloody coup that had been in the planning ever since at least 2011 inside the Obama Administration. Several rounds of US-and-allied economic sanctions were imposed against Russia for that — for the constant string of lies against Russia, and of constant cover-ups of “the most blatant coup in history,” which had preceded and caused the breakaway.

These lies originated with Obama; and Trump accuses Obama of lying, but not on this, where Obama really did lie, psychopathically. Instead, Trump makes those lies bipartisan. On what counts the most against Obama, Trump seconds the Obama-lies, instead of exposing them. And yet Trump routinely has accused Obama as having lied, even on matters where it’s actually Trump who has been lying about Obama.

Then, there have been the anti-Russia sanctions that are based upon Russiagate and ‘Trump is Putin’s stooge and stole the election.’ That case against Russia has not been proven, and Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange says that what he had published were leaks from the DNC and Podesta’s computer, not hacks at all; and yet the sanctions were imposed almost as soon as the Democratic Party’s accusations started. Those sanctions, too, are utterly baseless except as being alleged responses to unproven (and likely false) allegations. Furthermore, even in the worst-case scenario: the US Government itself routinely overthrows foreign governments, and continues tapping the phones and electronic communications of foreign governments, and manipulating elections abroad. Even in the worst-case scenario, Russia hasn’t done anything that historians haven’t already proven that the US Government itself routinely does. That’s the case even if Russia is guilty as charged, on all of the U.S-and-allied accusations.

So: Who wants World War III? Apparently, both the Democratic and the Republican Parties do. Obama called Russia the world’s most aggressive nation. Trump joins with him in that bipartisan lie. Outside of America itself, most of the world consider the United States to be actually the “greatest threat to peace in the world today.” Therefore, why isn’t the NATO alliance against America? The NATO alliance is America and most of its vassal-nations: they’re all allied against Russia. Their war against Russia never stopped. That ‘Cold War’ continued, even after the USSR and its communism and its Warsaw Pact mirror-image to NATO, all ended in 1991; and now the intensifying ‘cold war’ threatens to become very hot. All based on lies. But that seems to be the only type of ‘justifications’ the US-and-allied tyrants have got.

Either the lies will stop, or else we all will. Trump, as usual, is on the wrong side of the lies. And he seems to be too much of a coward to oppose them, in these cases, which are the most dangerous lies of all. This is how we could all end. Doing something heroic that would stop it, seems to be way beyond him — he doesn’t even try. That’s the type of cowardice which should be feared, and despised, the most of all. Trump has taken up Obama’s worst, and he runs with it. Trump had promised the opposite, during his Presidential campaign. But this is the reality of Trump — a profoundly filthy liar — at least insofar as he has, thus far, shown himself to be. What he will be in the future is all that remains in question. But this is what he has been, up till now.



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