Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Keeping up appearances is about to get a lot harder for the central planners trying to manage perceptions of the U.S. (and global) economy. The coronavirus is going to have a meaningful impact on global supply chains, even if stock market cheerleaders haven’t fully realized it yet.
This might be because the corporate media and ruling elites are burning a lot of what is left of their fading credibility trying to ignore or downplay the problem.
Some things can’t be ignored, however. Capital Economics published some telling charts last week showing conditions on the ground in China. Below are two which detail the Chinese economy all but grinding to a halt.
Bloomberg reported a 92% drop in Chinese car sales during the first half of February.
And Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping company, warned that the coronavirus will have a big impact on earnings. The company reported Chinese factories are operating at 50-60% of capacity.
That is very bad news to pile on top of the company’s already dismal performance. Maersk reported a loss in the 4th quarter, before the impact of the virus.
CNBC pundits can talk all they want, but what is happening in China will soon be felt around the world. Americans will find out what is real when many of the shelves in the local Walmart start looking a little bare.
If the virus is not contained quickly and factories remain closed, the supply chain could completely break down for merchants selling Chinese goods.
Managing perceptions may get harder, but that doesn’t mean the Federal Reserve won’t try. Christopher Irons of Quoth the Raven Research summed it up nicely on Twitter:
The year is 2023…
The coronavirus has wiped out humankind…
A lone server in the basement of the NY Fed building continues to bid the Dow Jones to new all-time highs.
Shares of Walmart are up about 1.5% since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus to be a “public health emergency of international concern” on January 30th. The broader S&P 500 index enjoyed a similar bump following the news, until today that is.
Could it be that investors think central banks will look at the coronavirus news as an excuse to ramp up stimulus?
They may be right, but no amount of printed money can put merchandise on store shelves.
Clint Siegner is a Director at Money Metals Exchange, a precious metals dealer recently named “Best in the USA” by an independent global ratings group. A graduate of Linfield College in Oregon, Siegner puts his experience in business management along with his passion for personal liberty, limited government, and honest money into the development of Money Metals’ brand and reach. This includes writing extensively on the bullion markets and their intersection with policy and world affairs.
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Fake Markets Are on Collision Course with Reality
Woolwich Crown Court is designed to impose the power of the state. Normal courts in this country are public buildings, deliberately placed by our ancestors right in the centre of towns, almost always just up a few steps from a main street. The major purpose of their positioning and of their architecture was to facilitate public access in the belief that it is vital that justice can be seen by the public.
Woolwich Crown Court, which hosts Belmarsh Magistrates Court, is built on totally the opposite principle. It is designed with no other purpose than to exclude the public. Attached to a prison on a windswept marsh far from any normal social centre, an island accessible only through navigating a maze of dual carriageways, the entire location and architecture of the building is predicated on preventing public access. It is surrounded by a continuation of the same extremely heavy duty steel paling barrier that surrounds the prison. It is the most extraordinary thing, a courthouse which is a part of the prison system itself, a place where you are already considered guilty and in jail on arrival. Woolwich Crown Court is nothing but the physical negation of the presumption of innocence, the very incarnation of injustice in unyielding steel, concrete and armoured glass. It has precisely the same relationship to the administration of justice as Guantanamo Bay or the Lubyanka. It is in truth just the sentencing wing of Belmarsh prison.
When enquiring about facilities for the public to attend the hearing, an Assange activist was told by a member of court staff that we should realise that Woolwich is a “counter-terrorism court”. That is true de facto, but in truth a “counter-terrorism court” is an institution unknown to the UK constitution. Indeed, if a single day at Woolwich Crown Court does not convince you the existence of liberal democracy is now a lie, then your mind must be very closed indeed.
Extradition hearings are not held at Belmarsh Magistrates Court inside Woolwich Crown Court. They are always held at Westminster Magistrates Court as the application is deemed to be delivered to the government at Westminster. Now get your head around this. This hearing is at Westminster Magistrates Court. It is being held by the Westminster magistrates and Westminster court staff, but located at Belmarsh Magistrates Court inside Woolwich Crown Court. All of which weird convolution is precisely so they can use the “counter-terrorist court” to limit public access and to impose the fear of the power of the state.
One consequence is that, in the courtroom itself, Julian Assange is confined at the back of the court behind a bulletproof glass screen. He made the point several times during proceedings that this makes it very difficult for him to see and hear the proceedings. The magistrate, Vanessa Baraitser, chose to interpret this with studied dishonesty as a problem caused by the very faint noise of demonstrators outside, as opposed to a problem caused by Assange being locked away from the court in a massive bulletproof glass box.
Now there is no reason at all for Assange to be in that box, designed to restrain extremely physically violent terrorists. He could sit, as a defendant at a hearing normally would, in the body of the court with his lawyers. But the cowardly and vicious Baraitser has refused repeated and persistent requests from the defence for Assange to be allowed to sit with his lawyers. Baraitser of course is but a puppet, being supervised by Chief Magistrate Lady Arbuthnot, a woman so enmeshed in the defence and security service establishment I can conceive of no way in which her involvement in this case could be more corrupt.
It does not matter to Baraitser or Arbuthnot if there is any genuine need for Assange to be incarcerated in a bulletproof box, or whether it stops him from following proceedings in court. Baraitser’s intention is to humiliate Assange, and to instill in the rest of us horror at the vast crushing power of the state. The inexorable strength of the sentencing wing of the nightmarish Belmarsh Prison must be maintained. If you are here, you are guilty.
It’s the Lubyanka. You may only be a remand prisoner. This may only be a hearing not a trial. You may have no history of violence and not be accused of any violence. You may have three of the country’s most eminent psychiatrists submitting reports of your history of severe clinical depression and warning of suicide. But I, Vanessa Baraitser, am still going to lock you up in a box designed for the most violent of terrorists. To show what we can do to dissidents. And if you can’t then follow court proceedings, all the better.
You will perhaps better accept what I say about the Court when I tell you that, for a hearing being followed all round the world, they have brought it to a courtroom which had a total number of sixteen seats available to members of the public. 16. To make sure I got one of those 16 and could be your man in the gallery, I was outside that great locked iron fence queuing in the cold, wet and wind from 6am. At 8am the gate was unlocked, and I was able to walk inside the fence to another queue before the doors of the courtroom, where despite the fact notices clearly state the court opens to the public at 8am, I had to queue outside the building again for another hour and forty minutes. Then I was processed through armoured airlock doors, through airport type security, and had to queue behind two further locked doors, before finally getting to my seat just as the court started at 10am. By which stage the intention was we should have been thoroughly cowed and intimidated, not to mention drenched and potentially hypothermic.
There was a separate media entrance and a media room with live transmission from the courtroom, and there were so many scores of media I thought I could relax and not worry as the basic facts would be widely reported. In fact, I could not have been more wrong. I followed the arguments very clearly every minute of the day, and not a single one of the most important facts and arguments today has been reported anywhere in the mainstream media. That is a bold claim, but I fear it is perfectly true. So I have much work to do to let the world know what actually happened. The mere act of being an honest witness is suddenly extremely important, when the entire media has abandoned that role.
James Lewis QC made the opening statement for the prosecution. It consisted of two parts, both equally extraordinary. The first and longest part was truly remarkable for containing no legal argument, and for being addressed not to the magistrate but to the media. It is not just that it was obvious that is where his remarks were aimed, he actually stated on two occasions during his opening statement that he was addressing the media, once repeating a sentence and saying specifically that he was repeating it again because it was important that the media got it.
I am frankly astonished that Baraitser allowed this. It is completely out of order for a counsel to address remarks not to the court but to the media, and there simply could not be any clearer evidence that this is a political show trial and that Baraitser is complicit in that. I have not the slightest doubt that the defence would have been pulled up extremely quickly had they started addressing remarks to the media. Baraitser makes zero pretence of being anything other than in thrall to the Crown, and by extension to the US Government.
The points which Lewis wished the media to know were these: it is not true that mainstream outlets like the Guardian and New York Times are also threatened by the charges against Assange, because Assange was not charged with publishing the cables but only with publishing the names of informants, and with cultivating Manning and assisting him to attempt computer hacking. Only Assange had done these things, not mainstream outlets.
Lewis then proceeded to read out a series of articles from the mainstream media attacking Assange, as evidence that the media and Assange were not in the same boat. The entire opening hour consisted of the prosecution addressing the media, attempting to drive a clear wedge between the media and Wikileaks and thus aimed at reducing media support for Assange. It was a political address, not remotely a legal submission. At the same time, the prosecution had prepared reams of copies of this section of Lewis’ address, which were handed out to the media and given them electronically so they could cut and paste.
Following an adjournment, magistrate Baraitser questioned the prosecution on the veracity of some of these claims. In particular, the claim that newspapers were not in the same position because Assange was charged not with publication, but with “aiding and abetting” Chelsea Manning in getting the material, did not seem consistent with Lewis’ reading of the 1989 Official Secrets Act, which said that merely obtaining and publishing any government secret was an offence. Surely, Baraitser suggested, that meant that newspapers just publishing the Manning leaks would be guilty of an offence?
This appeared to catch Lewis entirely off guard. The last thing he had expected was any perspicacity from Baraitser, whose job was just to do what he said. Lewis hummed and hawed, put his glasses on and off several times, adjusted his microphone repeatedly and picked up a succession of pieces of paper from his brief, each of which appeared to surprise him by its contents, as he waved them haplessly in the air and said he really should have cited the Shayler case but couldn’t find it. It was liking watching Columbo with none of the charm and without the killer question at the end of the process.
Suddenly Lewis appeared to come to a decision. Yes, he said much more firmly. The 1989 Official Secrets Act had been introduced by the Thatcher Government after the Ponting Case, specifically to remove the public interest defence and to make unauthorised possession of an official secret a crime of strict liability – meaning no matter how you got it, publishing and even possessing made you guilty. Therefore, under the principle of dual criminality, Assange was liable for extradition whether or not he had aided and abetted Manning. Lewis then went on to add that any journalist and any publication that printed the official secret would therefore also be committing an offence, no matter how they had obtained it, and no matter if it did or did not name informants.
Lewis had thus just flat out contradicted his entire opening statement to the media stating that they need not worry as the Assange charges could never be applied to them. And he did so straight after the adjournment, immediately after his team had handed out copies of the argument he had now just completely contradicted. I cannot think it has often happened in court that a senior lawyer has proven himself so absolutely and so immediately to be an unmitigated and ill-motivated liar. This was undoubtedly the most breathtaking moment in today’s court hearing.
Yet remarkably I cannot find any mention anywhere in the mainstream media that this happened at all. What I can find, everywhere, is the mainstream media reporting, via cut and paste, Lewis’s first part of his statement on why the prosecution of Assange is not a threat to press freedom; but nobody seems to have reported that he totally abandoned his own argument five minutes later. Were the journalists too stupid to understand the exchanges?
The explanation is very simple. The clarification coming from a question Baraitser asked Lewis, there is no printed or electronic record of Lewis’ reply. His original statement was provided in cut and paste format to the media. His contradiction of it would require a journalist to listen to what was said in court, understand it and write it down. There is no significant percentage of mainstream media journalists who command that elementary ability nowadays. “Journalism” consists of cut and paste of approved sources only. Lewis could have stabbed Assange to death in the courtroom, and it would not be reported unless contained in a government press release.
I was left uncertain of Baraitser’s purpose in this. Plainly she discomfited Lewis very badly on this point, and appeared rather to enjoy doing so. On the other hand the point she made is not necessarily helpful to the defence. What she was saying was essentially that Julian could be extradited under dual criminality, from the UK point of view, just for publishing, whether or not he conspired with Chelsea Manning, and that all the journalists who published could be charged too. But surely this is a point so extreme that it would be bound to be invalid under the Human Rights Act? Was she pushing Lewis to articulate a position so extreme as to be untenable – giving him enough rope to hang himself – or was she slavering at the prospect of not just extraditing Assange, but of mass prosecutions of journalists?
The reaction of one group was very interesting. The four US government lawyers seated immediately behind Lewis had the grace to look very uncomfortable indeed as Lewis baldly declared that any journalist and any newspaper or broadcast media publishing or even possessing any government secret was committing a serious offence. Their entire strategy had been to pretend not to be saying that.
Lewis then moved on to conclude the prosecution’s arguments. The court had no decision to make, he stated. Assange must be extradited. The offence met the test of dual criminality as it was an offence both in the USA and UK. UK extradition law specifically barred the court from testing whether there was any evidence to back up the charges. If there had been, as the defence argued, abuse of process, the court must still extradite and then the court must pursue the abuse of process as a separate matter against the abusers. (This is a particularly specious argument as it is not possible for the court to take action against the US government due to sovereign immunity, as Lewis well knows). Finally, Lewis stated that the Human Rights Act and freedom of speech were completely irrelevant in extradition proceedings.
Edward Fitzgerald then arose to make the opening statement for the defence. He started by stating that the motive for the prosecution was entirely political, and that political offences were specifically excluded under article 4.1 of the UK/US extradition treaty. He pointed out that at the time of the Chelsea Manning Trial and again in 2013 the Obama administration had taken specific decisions not to prosecute Assange for the Manning leaks. This had been reversed by the Trump administration for reasons that were entirely political.
On abuse of process, Fitzgerald referred to evidence presented to the Spanish criminal courts that the CIA had commissioned a Spanish security company to spy on Julian Assange in the Embassy, and that this spying specifically included surveillance of Assange’s privileged meetings with his lawyers to discuss extradition. For the state trying to extradite to spy on the defendant’s client-lawyer consultations is in itself grounds to dismiss the case. (This point is undoubtedly true. Any decent judge would throw the case out summarily for the outrageous spying on the defence lawyers).
Fitzgerald went on to say the defence would produce evidence the CIA not only spied on Assange and his lawyers, but actively considered kidnapping or poisoning him, and that this showed there was no commitment to proper rule of law in this case.
Fitzgerald said that the prosecution’s framing of the case contained deliberate misrepresentation of the facts that also amounted to abuse of process. It was not true that there was any evidence of harm to informants, and the US government had confirmed this in other fora, eg in Chelsea Manning’s trial. There had been no conspiracy to hack computers, and Chelsea Manning had been acquitted on that charge at court martial. Lastly it was untrue that Wikileaks had initiated publication of unredacted names of informants, as other media organisations had been responsible for this first.
Again, so far as I can see, while the US allegation of harm to informants is widely reported, the defence’s total refutation on the facts and claim that the fabrication of facts amounts to abuse of process is not much reported at all. Fitzgerald finally referred to US prison conditions, the impossibility of a fair trial in the US, and the fact the Trump Administration has stated foreign nationals will not receive First Amendment protections, as reasons that extradition must be barred. You can read the whole defence statement, but in my view the strongest passage was on why this is a political prosecution, and thus precluded from extradition.
For the purposes of section 81(a), I next have to deal with the question of how
this politically motivated prosecution satisfies the test of being directed against
Julian Assange because of his political opinions. The essence of his political
opinions which have provoked this prosecution are summarised in the reports
of Professor Feldstein [tab 18], Professor Rogers [tab 40], Professor Noam
Chomsky [tab 39] and Professor Kopelman:-
i. He is a leading proponent of an open society and of freedom of expression.
ii. He is anti-war and anti-imperialism.
iii. He is a world-renowned champion of political transparency and of the
public’s right to access information on issues of importance – issues such
as political corruption, war crimes, torture and the mistreatment of
Guantanamo detainees.
5.4.Those beliefs and those actions inevitably bring him into conflict with powerful
states including the current US administration, for political reasons. Which
explains why he has been denounced as a terrorist and why President Trump
has in the past called for the death penalty.
5.5.But I should add his revelations are far from confined to the wrongdoings of
the US. He has exposed surveillance by Russia; and published exposes of Mr
Assad in Syria; and it is said that WikiLeaks revelations about corruption in
Tunisia and torture in Egypt were the catalyst for the Arab Spring itself.
5.6.The US say he is no journalist. But you will see a full record of his work in
Bundle M. He has been a member of the Australian journalists union since
2009, he is a member of the NUJ and the European Federation of Journalists.
He has won numerous media awards including being honoured with the
highest award for Australian journalists. His work has been recognised by the
Economist, Amnesty International and the Council of Europe. He is the winner
of the Martha Gelhorn prize and has been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize, including both last year and this year. You can see from the
materials that he has written books, articles and documentaries. He has had
articles published in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post
and the New Statesman, just to name a few. Some of the very publications for
which his extradition is being sought have been refereed to and relied upon in
Courts throughout the world, including the UK Supreme Court and the
European Court of Human Rights. In short, he has championed the cause of
transparency and freedom of information throughout the world.
5.7.Professor Noam Chomsky puts it like this: – ‘in courageously upholding
political beliefs that most of profess to share he has performed an
enormous service to all those in the world who treasure the values of
freedom and democracy and who therefore demand the right to know
what their elected representatives are doing’ [see tab 39, paragraph 14].
So Julian Assange’s positive impact on the world is undeniable. The hostility
it has provoked from the Trump administration is equally undeniable.
The legal test for ‘political opinions’
5.8.I am sure you are aware of the legal authorities on this issue: namely whether
a request is made because of the defendant’s political opinions. A broad
approach has to be adopted when applying the test. In support of this we rely
on the case of Re Asliturk [2002] EWHC 2326 (abuse authorities, tab 11, at
paras 25 – 26) which clearly establishes that such a wide approach should be
adopted to the concept of political opinions. And that will clearly cover Julian
Assange’s ideological positions. Moreover, we also rely on cases such as
Emilia Gomez v SSHD [2000] INLR 549 at tab 43 of the political offence
authorities bundle. These show that the concept of “political opinions” extends
to the political opinions imputed to the individual citizen by the state which
prosecutes him. For that reason the characterisation of Julian Assange and
WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence agency” by Mr Pompeo makes
clear that he has been targeted for his imputed political opinions. All the
experts whose reports you have show that Julian Assange has been targeted
because of the political position imputed to him by the Trump administration –
as an enemy of America who must be brought down.
Tomorrow the defence continue. I am genuinely uncertain what will happen as I feel at the moment far too exhausted to be there at 6am to queue to get in. But I hope somehow I will contrive another report tomorrow evening.
With grateful thanks to those who donated or subscribed to make this reporting possible.
This article is entirely free to reproduce and publish, including in translation, and I very much hope people will do so actively. Truth shall set us free.
——————————————
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The post Your Man in the Public Gallery – Assange Hearing Day 1 appeared first on Craig Murray.
Guest Post by Ron Paul
One thing we’ve learned from the Trump Presidency is that the “deep state” is not just some crazy conspiracy theory. For the past three years we’ve seen that deep state launch plot after plot to overturn the election.
It all started with former CIA director John Brennan’s phony “Intelligence Assessment” of Russian involvement in the 2016 election. It was claimed that all 17 US intelligence agencies agreed that Putin put Trump in office, but we found out later that the report was cooked up by a handful of Brennan’s hand-picked agents.
Donald Trump upset the Washington apple cart as presidential candidate and in so doing he set elements of the deep state in motion against him.
One of the things candidate Donald Trump did to paint a deep state target on his back was his repeated praise of Wikileaks, the pro-transparency media organization headed up by Australian journalist Julian Assange. More than 100 times candidate Trump said “I love Wikileaks” on the campaign trail.
Trump loved it when Wikileaks exposed the criminality of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, as it cheated to deprive Bernie Sanders of the Democratic Party nomination. Wikileaks’ release of the DNC emails exposed the deep corruption at the heart of US politics, and as a candidate Trump loved the transparency.
Then Trump got elected.
The real tragedy of the Trump presidency is nowhere better demonstrated than in Trump’s 180 degree turn away from Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. “I know nothing about Wikileaks,” he said as president. “It’s really not my thing.”
US pressure and bribes to the Ecuadorian government ended Assange’s asylum and his seven years in a room at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. After his dramatic arrest by London’s Metropolitan Police last April, he has been effectively tortured in British jails at the behest of the US deep state.
The Trump Administration argues that the Australian Assange should be tried and convicted of espionage against a country of which he is not a citizen. At the same time the Trump Administration argues that the First Amendment does not apply to Assange because he is not an American citizen! So Assange is subject to US law when it comes to publishing information embarrassing to the US deep state but he is not subject to the law of the land – the US Constitution – which protects all journalists and is the backbone of our system of government.
It is ironic that a President Trump who has been victim of so much deep state meddling has done the deep state’s bidding when it comes to Assange and Wikileaks. President Trump should preempt the inevitable US show trial of Assange by granting the journalist blanket pardon under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
The deep state Trump is serving by persecuting Assange is the same deep state that continues to plot Trump’s own ouster. Free Assange!
Clusterfuck Nation
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The metaphysical question, what does Russia want, is sounding a lot like the cosmic conundrum posed by Sigmund Freud: what do women want? Is Vladimir Putin transitioning to “become” a woman? It seems like the hormones are getting to him. One day he’s got a crush on Donald Trump, the next day he’s mashed on Bernie Sanders. At least according to America’s Intel Community. Or was that just Rep. Adam Schiff’s spin on the sigint served up to his House Intel Committee by one Shelby Pierson, “a senior intelligence official responsible for overseeing the issues of election interference,” as The New York Times described her. It looked, for a moment, like Mr. Schiff was trying to tee up a new killer-diller impeachment shot. But as usual with Mr. Schiff, the ploy went all Acme on him and blew up in his face.
Amazing how quickly the narrative flip-flopped, though, by whatever supernatural means the news media employs these days — Ouija boards, astral vision, virtual warping, metapotence, psionic equilibrium distortion, consort with the ghost of Allen Dulles…. One might deduce that the Democratic Party nomenklatura realized in a flash of insight that Russia’s affections were far more useful applied to Mr. Sanders than Mr. Trump, whose status among the Dems these days ranks as “worse than Satan.” Not much to work with there.
They’ve been struggling to find some means to stuff Bernie into the memory hole. They tried hauling Michael Bloomberg onstage to call Bernie a communist. That bombed (along with Mr. Bloomberg altogether). Everybody already knows Bernie spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union waiting on line with the new missus for tin plates of kohlrabi soup. Sunday night, they duped Bernie onto a 60-Minutes workout, with Anderson Cooper playing inquisitor. Andy put the screws to him on the question as to how America will pay for all the free stuff Bernie proffers. The answers were embarrassingly inconclusive and nobody cared, perhaps because nobody believes it anyway, not even the most righteous Bernie Bros.
If nothing else, Bernie’s timing on free this-and-that couldn’t be worse from the vantage of history. Government health care and tuition-free college worked in some nations in the decades after the Second World War because of a steadily rising global GDP, which itself was pegged to a reliable and affordable fossil fuel supply. That’s over. The shale oil “miracle” has bamboozled the public for ten years. It was a great stunt, but that’s all it was, and it’s going to wither now for a lack of available capital, and there isn’t any combo of alt energy thingies to take its place. Neither the Woke half of America nor the MAGA half groks this situation. The money’s not there. And a lot of things that pretend to be money are figments of the banking-and-finance industry, soon to melt away.
And now the Corona virus steps onstage to ramify that situation, beginning with a virtual shut-down of the excessively complex, over-engineered, just-in-time global economy. Things are not being produced and supply lines are shutting down. Car-makers outside China have a couple of weeks before their production lines halt for a lack of parts. But, of course, every other industry will have similar problems and stoppages. Many working Americans are barely getting by from one paycheck to the next. How many missed paychecks will it take for genuine hunger to kick in and desperation with it? We don’t know because the US news media has been busy conjuring the many loves of Vlad Putin.
This is getting serious now. Some of you may have noticed this morning that the stock indexes are heading into the worst open in years. Today, Mr. Market woke up, like Rip Van Winkle, and discovered that the world changed while he was sleeping. There’s a fair chance that the conditions of daily life in America will deteriorate sharply in the months ahead. We’ve been remote-viewing the empty streets of Wuhan and other Chinese cities since January, thinking it was like one of our cable-network horror shows. It’s not inconceivable that an American City, or more than one, will be subject to quarantine, or that a whole lot of people just won’t leave their houses for a period of time. Will the truckers still truck things that people need? We don’t know. How do you hold a political convention in a situation like that, or even an election?
The situation in China may be too far gone already. The country’s finances were a gigantic game of pretend. In the old Soviet Union, beloved by Bernie, the joke was, “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work” — not a great formula for enduring prosperity. In China, the updated joke was “we pretend to make loans, and you pretend to pay them back.” The China boom was a lot like the shale oil “miracle.” They were both great stunts. They produced a lot of stuff by borrowing from the future. Now we have all that stuff and we have to maintain it, keep if running, borrow more money to make that happen… and suddenly, that’s no longer plausible. The entire industrialized world has fallen for the debt stunt. Observers have been waiting to see what would finally provoke the unwinding of massive false promises. Looks like the wait is over.
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Filmmaker and war correspondent Scott Kesterson of the Bards of War podcast is joined by Nate Cain, FBI whistleblower, who leaked incriminating documents about Hillary Clinton’s dealings with Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation.
In 2016, Cain was hired as a cybersecurity contractor by the FBI to provide vulnerability assessments for the FBI’s field offices.
As someone who’d had a security clearance for a couple of decades, he avoided sticking his nose where it didn’t belong but this changed after he overheard his supervisor’s conversation, while at work.
When he confronted his supervisor, “He admitted to me that [he knew of] transcripts of an internal FBI discussion about Hillary Clinton and her case…There was some big discovery.
“Words like ‘treason’ were being thrown around and they were fearful and they didn’t know what to do, so there were discussions about potentially burying this because, the other phrase that really sticks out in my memory was that, ‘This could bring the government down.’ That was one the the fears.
“For me, that was unacceptable. But at that point, I didn’t know if it was true, it was just a rumor. So, I had access to the FBI Net, which is their internal network. It’s classified and I did some simple searches and I came across a trove of information that, at first glance, I was shocked. I was totally blown away.
“There were numerous documents that were evidentiary, that pointed to – and these were documents that had analysts’ notes on them, they had case files assigned to them – and it appeared that there was a major investigation that was going on.
“It involved four basic categories. It involved 1. money-laundering, 2. securities and exchange fraud, 3. public corruption and 4. terrorism financing.
“At that point, I was pretty upset by it but there were case numbers assigned, so I figured that, ‘The FBI’s investigating this, so I don’t have anything to worry about.’
“So I sat on it. And I sat on it for probably several months…
“The whole email scandal thing was a problem, in and of itself and these files that I found had nothing to do with the email scandal…A lot of people have talked about the Uranium One thing but this was so much bigger than that! This involved a lot of countries, which I won’t name, let’s just say that some of them, you don’t want to see money coming into our system from.
“There’s a lot of money running through different shell corporations and shell NGOs and 501 (c) 3s…it was clear that something big was going on, it involved hundreds of millions of dollars, so it was pretty serious.
“Going back to the Hillary email situation, because that plays a part in the story, I was following that pretty intently because in the 22 years that I’d worked with government, I’d had 3 or 4 cases, where I had received an…[interdepartmental] email saying, ‘Don’t delete your emails,” it was basically a subpoena order, saying there were penalties if we deleted our emails and that we couldn’t delete them because there was an ongoing investigation. None of these cases had anything to do with me but they were making everybody in the Command or everybody in that unit hold their emails, as part of a subpoena.
“So, I was very familiar with the subpoena process and understood that if you get a subpoena, you don’t delete those emails – you just don’t. That is Obstruction of Justice.
“I was pretty convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to get charged with something. All the evidence was there. What shocked me was when Comey went out – and this was right after a meeting with Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac – and then, shortly thereafter, Comey goes out and exonerates Hillary Clinton, saying that, ‘No reasonable prosecutor would go after her for that.’
“And I just – I was completely shocked. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Especially, because somebody in her position would’ve been trained in classification handling…classification authority. They have the right to, at that level, make things classified and certainly they’re derivative classifiers; they know how to do these things, they know how to handle these things and I saw her give testimony up on Capitol Hill, I’ll never forget, one of the questions that she was asked about wiping her computer and she said, ‘Oh, what, with a cloth?’
“So, she was playing dumb and trying to pretend like she didn’t know what she was talking about and then, Comey, he supported that, talking about how she was unsophisticated with technology and whatever. And so I wasn’t buying it.
“I was pretty upset at that point. I realized at that point, that the highest levels of the FBI – specifically, Comey and McCabe – and I didn’t know who Peter Strzok was at that time…but I knew at that point that there was a cover-up going on and that they had no intention of following through with any of this.
“So, at the time, I decided that I needed to blow the whistle. I thought long and hard about it. I prayed about it. To be honest with you, I was pretty frightened about it, because this was not a trivial matter. I wasn’t blowing the whistle on an EO complaint or something like that, I was blowing the whistle on the very people who could then, turn right around and put me in prison for the rest of my life…
“I was blowing the whistle on information that was related to Hillary Clinton and the reality is, whether it’s a conspiracy or not, there’s an awful lot of people who have been scheduled to testify against the Clinton Foundation or knew information about the Clintons that have mysteriously died, ‘committed suicide’ or had an ‘accident’.
“So, I ain’t gonna lie but the thought did cross my mind, ‘Am I insane?’ because this is gonna put me at serious risk…
Cain then tells the gripping story of how he obtained official whistleblower status with IG Michael Horowitz under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act and he legally transmitted the files to the Senate and House Intelligence committees.
This did nothing to stop 16 FBI agents from raiding his home for six hours on the morning of November 19, 2018 via an illegally-issued court order signed on November 15, 2018 by federal magistrate judge Stephanie A. Gallagher in the US District Court for Baltimore and falsely charged with illegal possession of stolen federal property.
For weeks, the FBI proceeded to harass Cain and his neighbors, straight out of the Khmer Rouge or the purges of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, determined to get his community to rat on him. His children’s friends’ parents were told they shouldn’t allow their kids to come to Cain’s house, as he was not a “safe” person. These parents were surveilled and had their emails read.
Cain says, “They insinuated that I was part of some international conspiracy against the US Government and they specifically brought up Q and asked if they had ever me talking about Q…So now, not only do I feel violated, but all these people who the FBI is visiting and intimidating, they feel violated too. They tried to ostracize me from my own community, they tried to destroy my family…I had done this thing that was extremely scary to do; what I believed was the right thing to do and I was treated like a terrorist, treated like an anti-government extremist.
“Mind you, I’ve never been charged with anything to this day. I still have my clearance, it’s never been suspended, not even a flag – because I didn’t do anything wrong, yet these people destroyed my life. I ended up in debt, all of my credit cards racked up and in debt to my eyeballs, all of my savings.
“And it doesn’t even compare to what has happened to Flynn. This is what they do. They force you into a position, to where you can’t even afford to keep fighting them anymore.
“If we as Americans don’t have a right to question our government, then we really are in a police state.”
The one positive to come out of all this, he says his his increased faith in God.
by Jon Rappoport
February 24, 2020
(To join our email list, click here.)
In today’s episode of Numbskulls and Deceivers in Medical Science, I ask the question: Are Chinese researchers copying an old CDC scam, or have they independently come up with their own lies which happen to mirror CDC hype?
In my series on the China epidemic (archive here), I’ve pointed out that pneumonia—the key indicator of the “coronavirus”—can be caused by many other factors:
Other microbes, fungi, toxic pollution, etc.
And Chinese authorities no longer require direct testing for the coronavirus. Instead, CT scans of the chest are employed. If these scans show signs of pneumonia, the “coronavirus epidemic” label is absurdly applied to the patient.
I’ve also pointed out that, historically, pneumonia has been a major disease in China. Long before “the emergence of the new human coronavirus,” people in China have been dying of pneumonia at the rate of about 300,000 a year. Now those people, passing away from the disease in 2020, can be falsely called “deadly epidemic cases.” How convenient.
Well, it turns out the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has been running its own pneumonia scam for a long time.
Some years ago, when I was writing about the flu, I received emails from Peter Doshi and Martin Maloney. They fed me data from the CDC’s own charts detailing flu deaths in the US. And they pointed out the lies.
Doshi went on to write an analysis for the journal BMJ Online (December 2005). Here is a key quote from his report:
“[According to CDC statistics], ‘influenza and pneumonia’ took 62,034 lives in 2001—61,777 of which were attributable to pneumonia and 257 to flu, and in only 18 cases was the flu virus positively identified.”
You might want to chew on that sentence for a while.
You see, the CDC has created one overall category that combines both flu and pneumonia deaths. THEY CALL THIS CATEGORY “FLU.” Why do they do this? Why do they deceptively assert the pneumonia deaths are complications stemming from the flu? Because they want to sell doctors and the public on the “dangers of the flu.”
Pneumonia has a number of non-flu causes.
But even worse, in all the 2001 flu and pneumonia deaths, only 18 revealed the presence of an influenza virus.
Therefore, the CDC couldn’t truthfully say that more than 18 people died of influenza in 2001. Not 36,000 deaths, the old CDC PR statistic. 18 deaths.
Doshi continued his assessment of published CDC flu-death statistics: “Between 1979 and 2001, [CDC] data show an average of 1348 [flu] deaths per year (range 257 to 3006).” These figures refer to flu separated out from pneumonia.
This low death toll would drop MUCH lower, if you added the need to confirm the presence of a flu virus in those cases.
Clearly, the CDC combines flu and pneumonia in one category, and calls it “flu,” in order to lie about the number of flu deaths in the US, and thus push the flu vaccine.
So we have two fake hustles, years apart, in the US and China, both based on the deceptive use of pneumonia.
Liars tend to tell the same kinds of lies, over and over. Medical liars often import diseases which have nothing to do with their claims, in order to build up case numbers and pump up threats and fears.
And then sell toxic drugs and vaccines, as solutions.
I’d be quite happy to offer this article and its blunt facts to the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or CBS, NBC, or ABC, providing they assure me they’ll print it and then force their hungriest hounds to track down and indict the high-level deceivers, by name, who are pushing these criminal falsehoods. Ordinarily, I would charge $10000000000000 for the article, but in this case I’ll settle for a six-hour, face to face, live streaming interview with the head of the CDC, in prime time.
(To read about Jon’s collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
Now that the coronavirus pandemic has started to spread across the globe at an alarming speed and is accelerating every day, with infected clusters emerging in South Korea, Japan, Italy and Iran...
