Civilization

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Liberty: The Last Casualty of the Pandemic | The Epoch Times

electoral-college-founding-documents-webJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: Finally, somebody’s writing about the overreaching power of the federal, state and local governments during this COVID-19 crisis. After 911 the USA Patriot Act was passed and never repealed. It was just up for renewal a few weeks ago. Will there ever be a return to this new normal?

By Dustin Bass

In December, the outbreak in the City of Wuhan, located in China’s Hubei province, was officially detected. On Jan. 31, Health and Human Services declared a public health emergency. On March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus a pandemic. On March 13, President Trump declared a national emergency.

In the span of that following week, gatherings of 250 or more were discouraged and then banned by numerous states. That number immediately dropped to 50, and now it has dropped to 10. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, banned all gatherings for the largest state in the Union. It was unprecedented. No matter. Eleven other states quickly followed suit. More are to follow, as 17 other states have banned gatherings of 10 or more.

The rapidly escalated reactions prove that the threat to our national health is very high. The threat to our individual freedoms? Higher. From the Declaration of Independence to the Amendments, recent government action flies directly in the face of the nation’s founding documents.

The Declaration of Independence

The founding document of our nation stated that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The biological threat against the former has ushered in an existential threat to the latter two. One may argue that without the first, the other two cannot exist. True. But without the latter two, what is the point of the first?

Unless Americans merely perceive this moment in our history as “light and transient,” then there should be no need to clamor. Americans have grown accustomed to the subtle threats to our freedoms since John Adams and the Fifth Congress; and as long as citizens are still free to determine the course of the country every two, four, or six years, then these “evils are sufferable.”

This is unless, of course, we perceive those threats to be a “long train of abuses and usurpations.” The federal government has rarely felt a restriction on its massive powers, like the constant wars in far off places, spying on citizens, dislodging citizens without habeas corpus, or creating unelected government agencies armed with the three branches of power.

State governments now have become fearless in exercising their might by forcing people into their homes under the threat of penalty of law. It is for this reason the Founding Fathers created our extended republic so instead of overthrowing a king, voters would be able to “throw off such government” every two, four, or six years. Citizens need not look solely at the federal government, but at their local and state governments as well.

The Constitution of the United States of America

There are 50 States and 50 Constitutions, which all fall under the supreme law of the land: the Constitution of the United States of America. Our national Constitution was ordained and established to provide six services to the People. One of those is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

With state governments seamlessly conducting the aforementioned gathering bans; the shutting down of non-essential businesses in 18 states, along with three other states shutting down non-essential retail; the mandatory quarantines of 13 states; and the forced closure of bars and restaurants, except for take-out and delivery, in nearly every state in the Union, it may prove difficult for the blessings of liberty to reach our posterity.

In a state of national emergency and pandemic, however, there are no solutions—there are only trade-offs. The trade-off for a dramatically decreased risk of contracting the coronavirus and having it spread further is the surrender of several rights listed in the Constitution.

The Amendments

The right that has been most obviously violated is “the right to peacefully assemble.” Of course that ends with “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Some may argue that people are not conducting a redress of grievances against the government; therefore, the First Amendment doesn’t apply. But a redress of grievances is not truly possible without the threat of assembly. Petitions on Change.org are easy ways to obtain signatures, but they don’t assume the power of a physical redress.

This violation of the right to assembly causes a direct violation of the free exercise of religion. Churches have been forced to close, and groups have been dispelled throughout the nation due to their size. Congregating is the most common form of Americans’ ability to exercise their religion; it’s the tradition of religious practitioners going back millennia. In fact, as a majority of religious people in the United States practice Christianity, Hebrews 10:25 states to not forsake assembling together.

Some government officials have taken the opportunity to target religious groups. In Indiana, Allen County Health Commissioner Dr. Deborah McMahan issued a recommendation against gatherings of more than 10, but prohibited churches from gathering together, even in non-church venues. The state’s attorney general, Curtis Hill, contested McMahan’s order as “unconstitutional religious discrimination.” The order was rescinded.

In Houston, bars and restaurants are under threat of a $1,000 fine or 180 days in jail for not maintaining social distancing in their place of business. This penalty is on par with a first-time drug offense. Houston’s Harris County, one of the nation’s largest counties, has even gone so far as to create a hotline for people to report businesses not in compliance.

In this economic crisis, business owners have more to worry about than the precise spacing between customers, which has created a possible violation of the Fourth Amendment of being secure in their person.

Comparable to the case in Indiana, businesses are not treated equally, as places such as WalMart, Target, and grocery chains are free of these threats. Considering the dire economic situation the country is in, this could qualify as a violation of the Eighth Amendment, as a $1,000 fine in many cases would be excessive. These two examples definitely do not exemplify equal protection, a violation of the 14th Amendment.

The nation, in this time of crisis, does feel on fire. Alarmingly, our founding documents are being used to put out the flames. When this crisis passes, and it will as all do, the search will inevitably begin for what remains among the ashes.

Dustin Bass is the co-founder of The Sons of History, a YouTube seriesand weekly podcast about all things history. He is a former-journalist-turned-entrepreneur. He is also an author.

Source: The Epoch Times

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Italians Take to the Streets to Protest New Mandatory Vaccination Law | Vaccine Impact

Vaccine-protests-ItalyBrian Shilhavy
Health Impact News Editor

Readers from Italy have been contacting Health Impact News this past week (June, 2017), asking us to cover the massive demonstrations happening throughout Italy to protest a new mandatory vaccine law. This news has been censored from the U.S. corporate media.

Francesca Alesse, who worked with the VAXXED film team to get the film shown in Italy last year, writes:

In an unprecedented way, the decree-law proposed by the Minister of Health has been signed by the sitting Italian president Sergio Mattarella. Only four vaccines were mandatory in Italy, now that number triples to 12.

No other decree-law has moved so fast in the Italian legislative system, the reasons of such hurry are incomprehensible considering that the Istituto Superiore Di Sanità (the local version of the CDC) has declared that contrary to what stated in the decree itself there is no objective urgency. There are no epidemics, the number of cases of measles or meningitis in the current year have been substantially lower than the previous year.

Thousands of parents have protested the new law this past June 3rd,  protests and marches have taken place in 21 Italian cities spread across the nation. A national protest is scheduled for this Sunday June 11th.

The translated full text of the decree-law is found here.

Florence Protest

The new law apparently has severe consequences for parents who fail to comply, including the possibility of having their children taken away from them. In addition to public outcry, there appears to be strong political opposition to the law as well.

Elisabetta Bressan, an Italian commenting on Facebook writes:

Protests are going to increase here, as our Government has announced…  a law to introduce 12 mandatory vaccines. The law…. was announced by our Health Ministry to be as follows: 12 mandatory vaccination needed to have access to pre-school system (age 0-6): no vaccination, no enrollment, no exceptions; for mandatory school (age 0-16) if kids were not vaccinated parents should pay a penalty between 500€ and 7.500€ per year, if you cannot afford it, you’ll be refer to Jouvanile Court, that could suspend your parents rights to get your children vaccinated. A national protest is envisaged in Rome on June 11.

This will start within the next school year (September 2017); it has been calculated that more then 800,000 kids will need to receive a massive vaccination in a very little time.

As you know, Italy had been chosen in 2014 as leading Country for the WHO world vaccination campaign co-financed by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, therefore what happen here can affect also other countries.

In other comments posted on Facebook, Elisabetta Bressan suggests that the new mandatory vaccine law has strong financial connections to the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, which could benefit from over 1 billion euros invested in Italy over the next four years. She writes:

This is the press conference of Health Minister, Ms. Lorenzin explaining the DL https://www.facebook.com/mauriziolupi.it/videos/10155541295653694/

At the opening of the conference, all guests are presented to the press, including Dr. Ranieri Guerra, presented as Director General of Health Prevention of the Ministry of Health. (Man sitting on Ms. Lorenzin right)

His curriculum vitae is regularly published in the Government’s website:
http://www.salute.gov.it/…/CV…/CV_pubblicazioni_Guerra_n.pdf at page 6 you can see he is a member of Glaxo Smith-Kline Foundation board.

On the Foundation website http://www.fsk.it/la-fondazione/storia-della-fondazione/ you are provided with additional information:

In 1987, it was recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the ‘Center for Collaboration in the Training of Health Personnel’ and in 1997 as a ‘Hospitality Management Collaboration Center’ in Italy.

The Fsk.it website belongs To Smith Kline Foundation which is maintained thanks to the non-binding annual liberal loan of the founding partner GLAXOSMITHKLINE SpA, as well as the incomes of its own projects.

The members of the Board of Directors, as indicated here, are nominated by the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of University and Research, the Ministry of the Economy, ISS, the State State Conference and GlaxoSmithKline SpA and they approve the FSK Activity Plan annually.

The members of the Board of Directors (including Mr. Ranieri Guerra) are appointed, among others, by:
– Ministry of Health, represented in the press conference by Minister Beatrice Lorenzin
– ISS,
– Higher Institute of Health, present in the person of Dr. Walter Ricciardi,
– the same GlaxoSmithKline S.p.A. Vaccines and drugs, Glaxo bets 1 billion on Italy
http://www.sanita24.ilsole24ore.com/…/vaccini-e-farmaci-gla…

Here we talk about an investment of 1 billion euros in Italy for the next 4 years, including 2016 and the years relating to the new National Vaccine Plan 2017/2019 so promoted by the Ministry of Health.

Source: Vaccine Impact

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Edward Snowden says COVID-19 could give governments invasive new data-collection powers that could last long after the pandemic | Business Insider

5e7de83b487c224a1c2a56b7Edward Snowden, the man who exposed the breadth of spying at the US’s National Security Agency, has warned that an uptick in surveillance amid the coronavirus crisis could lead to long-lasting effects on civil liberties.

During a video-conference interview for the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival, Snowden said that, theoretically, new powers introduced by states to combat the coronavirus outbreak could remain in place after the crisis has subsided.

Fear of the virus and its spread could mean governments “send an order to every fitness tracker that can get something like pulse or heart rate” and demand access to that data, Snowden said.

“Five years later the coronavirus is gone, this data’s still available to them — they start looking for new things,” Snowden said. “They already know what you’re looking at on the internet, they already know where your phone is moving, now they know what your heart rate is. What happens when they start to intermix these and apply artificial intelligence to them?”

While no reports appear to have surfaced so far of states demanding access to health data from wearables like the Apple Watch, many countries are fast introducing new methods of surveillance to better understand and curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Numerous European countries, including Italy, the UK, and Germany, have struck deals with telecoms companies to use anonymous aggregated data to create virtual heat maps of people’s movements.

Israel granted its spy services emergency powers to hack citizens’ phones without a warrant. South Korea has been sending text alertsto warn people when they may have been in contact with a coronavirus patient, including personal details like age and gender. Singapore is using a smartphone app to monitor the spread of the coronavirus by tracking people who may have been exposed.

In Poland, citizens under quarantine have to download a government app that mandates they respond to periodic requests for selfies. Taiwan has introduced an “electronic fence” system that alerts the police if quarantined patients move outside their homes.

Source: Business Insider

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The Truth Behind Coronavirus Pandemic: COVID-19 Lockdown & The Economic Crash | London Real

 

Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Notes: Why Destroy the Global Economic System During the Coronavirus Crisis (and replace it with another that better serves the Global Power Structure)?

  • Global Bankers will pull trillions of dollars of equity out of the economic system (stocks, real estate values, business values) to rollback the debt obligations of the international bankers (because of the nature of the debt-based monetary system)
  • Total Economic Shutdown will destroy millions of family businesses, small businesses and medium sized businesses leaving a larger share to the big, corporate players.
  • Total Economic Shutdown will drop millions of people in countries around the world to the very bottom of the economic ladder. This is economic suicide for We the People and a few thousand dollars of government subsidies will not restore even a fraction of the losses.
  • Don’t believe what you’re being told because somebody in a suit said so. Question authority and do your own independent research.
  • The Coronavirus crisis is not about public health or caring for the elderly.
  • The Global Power Structure doesn’t care one iota about the health and welfare of the elderly. Protecting the elderly is a convenient excuse to destroy the existing economic order and impose a New World Order run by an elite few at the top of the pyramid.
  • Who benefits? The Global Power Structure, or 1%, will be the one who will benefit.
  • What is the result? To impose a Global Technocracy run by experts, scientists, technocrats, politicians and artificial intelligence under their total control. Your every move will be watched and tracked. You will be plugged into “The Matrix”.
  • For this you can thank the Coronavirus panic and overreaction.

Source: London Real & YouTube

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The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is “Agenda ID2020” | Global Research

Screen-Shot-2020-03-12-at-12.06.03

Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: If the author of this article hadn’t worked for the World Bank and World Health Organization for decades I might have hesitated in publishing this article. But the premise for forced vaccinations are now more believable than ever as an objective of the Coronavirus crisis (engineered by the overreaction of global, national, state and local governments.

By Peter Koenig

What is the infamous ID2020? It is an alliance of public-private partners, including UN agencies and civil society. It’s an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity.

“It seems, the more there is written about the causes of the Coronavirus – the more the written analyses are overshadowed by a propaganda and fear-mongering hype. Questions for the truth and arguments for where to look for the origins and how the virus may have spread and how to combat it, are lost in the noise of wanton chaos. But isn’t that what the “Black Men” behind this intended pandemic want – chaos, panic, hopelessness, leading to human vulnerability – a people becoming easy prey for manipulation?”

Today WHO declared the coronavirus COVID-19 a “pandemic” – when there is not the slightest trace of a pandemic. A pandemic might be the condition, when the death to infection rate reaches more than 12%. In Europe, the death rate is about 0.4%, or less. Except for Italy which is a special case, where the peak of the death rate was 6% (see below for further analysis).

China, where the death rate peaked only a few weeks ago at about 3%, is back to 0.7% – and rapidly declining, while China is taking full control of the disease – and that with the help of a not-spoken-about medication developed 39 years ago by Cuba, called “Interferon Alpha 2B (IFNrec)”, very effective for fighting viruses and other diseases, but is not known and used in the world, because the US under the illegal embargo of Cuba does not allow the medication to be marketed internationally.

WHO has most likely received orders from “above”, from those people who also manage Trump and the “leaders” (sic) of the European Union and her member countries, those who aim to control the world with force – the One World Order.

This has been on the drawing board for years. The final decision to go ahead NOW, was taken in January 2020 at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos – behind very much closed doors, of course. The Gates, GAVI (an association of vaccination-promoting pharmaceuticals), Rockefellers, Rothschilds et al, they are all behind this decision – the implementation of Agenda ID2020.

After the pandemic has been officially declared, the next step may be – also at the recommendation either by WHO, or individual countries, “force vaccination”, under police and/or military surveillance. Those who refuse may be penalized (fines and / or jail – and force-vaccinated all the same).

If indeed force-vaccination will happen, another bonanza for Big Pharma, people really don’t know what type of cocktail will be put into the vaccine, maybe a slow killer, that acts-up only in a few years – or a disease that hits only the next generation – or a brain debilitating agent, or a gene that renders women infertile …. all is possible – always with the aim of full population control and population reduction. In a few years’ time, one doesn’t know, of course, where the disease comes from. That’s the level of technology our bio-war labs have reached (US, UK, Israel, Canada, Australia…).

Another hypothesis, at this point only a hypothesis, but a realistic one, is that along with the vaccination – if not with this one, then possibly with a later one, a nano-chip may be injected, unknown to the person being vaccinated. The chip may be remotely charged with all your personal data, including bank accounts – digital money. Yes, digital money that’s what “they” are aiming at, so you really have no control any more over your health and other intimate data, but also over your earnings and spending. Your money could be blocked, or taken away – as a ‘sanction’ for misbehavior, for swimming against the stream. You may become a mere slave of the masters. Comparatively, feudalism may appear like a walk in the park.

It’s not for nothing that Dr. Tedros, DG of WHO, said a few days ago, we must move towards digital money, because physical paper and coin money can spread diseases, especially endemic diseases, like the coronavirus. A precursor for things to come? – Or for things already here? – In many Scandinavian countries cash is largely banned and even a bar of chocalate can be paid only electronically.

We are moving towards a totalitarian state of the world. This is part of Agenda ID2020 – and these steps to be implemented now – prepared since long, including by the coronavirus computer simulation at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore on 18 October 2019, sponsored by the WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates, one of the chief advocates of vaccinations for everybody, especially in Africa – is also a huge advocate of population reduction. Population reduction is among the goals of the elite within the WEF, the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Morgens – and a few more. The objective: fewer people (a small elite) can live longer and better with the reduced and limited resources Mother Earth is generously offering.

This had openly been propagated already in the 1960s and 70s by Henry Kissinger, Foreign Secretary in de Nixon Administration, a co-engineer of the Vietnam war, and main responsible for the semi-clandestine bombing of Cambodia, a genocide of millions of unarmed Cambodian civilians. Along with the CIA-Kissinger engineered coup on 9/11, 1973, in Chile, killing the democratically elected Salvador Allende and putting the military dictator Pinochet in power, Kissinger has committed war crimes. Today, he is a spokesman (so to speak) for Rockefeller and their  “Bilderberger Society”.

Two weeks after the computer simulation at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, that “produced” (aka simulated) 65 million deaths (!), the COVID-19 virus first appeared in Wuhan. By now it is almost certain that the virus was brought to Wuhan from outside, most likely from a bio-war lab in the US. See also this and this.

What is the infamous ID2020? It is an alliance of public-private partners, including UN agencies and civil society. It’s an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity. The program harnesses existing birth registration and vaccination operations to provide newborns with a portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity. GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, identifies itself on its website as a global health partnership of public and private sector organizations dedicated to “immunization for all”. GAVI is supported by WHO, and needless to say, its main partners and sponsors are the pharma-industry.

The ID2020 Alliance at their 2019 Summit, entitled “Rising to the Good ID Challenge”, in September 2019 in New York, decided to roll out their program in 2020, a decision confirmed by the WEF in January 2020 in Davos. Their digital identity program will be tested with the government of Bangladesh. GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, and “partners from academia and humanitarian relief” (as they call it), are part of the pioneer party.

Is it just a coincidence that ID2020 is being rolled out at the onset of what WHO calls a Pandemic? – Or is a pandemic needed to ‘roll out’ the multiple devastating programs of ID2020?

Here is what Anir Chowdhury, policy advisor of the Bangladesh government program, has to say:

“We are implementing a forward-looking approach to digital identity that gives individuals control over their own personal information, while still building off existing systems and programs. The Government of Bangladesh recognizes that the design of digital identity systems carries far-reaching implications for individuals’ access to services and livelihoods, and we are eager to pioneer this approach.”

Wow! Does Mr. Anir Chowdhury know what he is getting into?

Back to the Pandemic and the panic. Geneva, the European seat of the United Nations, including the headquarters of WHO, is basically shot down. Not unlike the lock-down that started in Venice and later expanded to northern Italy until a few days ago – and now the lock-down covers all of Italy. Similar lock-down may soon also be adopted by France – and other European vassal states to the Anglo-Zionist empire.

Numerous memoranda with similar panic-mongering contents from different UN agencies in Geneva are circulating. Their key message is – cancel all mission travel, all events in Geneva, visits to the Palais des Nations, the Geneva Cathedral, other monuments and museums. The latest directives, many agencies instruct their staff to work from home, not to risk contamination from public transportation.

This ambiance of panic and fear – outstrips any sense of reality, when the truth doesn’t matter. People can’t even think any more about the causes and what may be behind it. Nobody believes you (anymore), when you refer to Event 201, the coronavirus simulation, the Wuhan Military Games, the closing last August 7, of the high-security biological war lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland…. what could have at one point been an eye opener for many, today is sheer conspiracy theory. The power of propaganda. A destabilizing power – destabilizing countries and people, destroying economies, creating hardship for people who may lose their jobs, usually the ones who can least afford it.

Also, at this time it becomes increasingly important to remind people that the outbreak in China was targeting the Chinese genome. Did it later mutate to transgress the ‘borders’ of Chinese DNA? When did that happen, if it happened? Because at the beginning it was clear that even the infected victims in other parts of the world, were to 99.9% of Chinese descent.

What happened later, when the virus spread to Italy and Iran, is another issue, and opens the way to a number of speculations.

(i) There were various strains of the virus circulated in sequence – so as to destabilize countries around the world and to confound the populace and media, so that especially nobody of the mainstream may come to the conclusion that the first strain was targeting China in a bio-war.

(ii) In Iran, I have a strong suspicion that the virus was an enhanced form of MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, man-made, broke out first in Saudi Arabia in 2012 , directed to the Arabic genome) – which was somehow introduced into government circles (by aerosol spray?) – with the goal of “Regime Change” by COVID19-caused death. Its Washington’s wishful thinking for at least the last 30 years.

(iii) In Italy – why Italy? – Maybe because Washington / Brussels wanted to hit Italy hard for having been officially the first country to sign a Belt and Road (BRI) accord with China (actually the first was Greece, but nobody is supposed to know that China came to the rescue of Greece, destroyed by Greece’s brothers, the EU members, mainly Germany and France).

(iv) The hype about the high death to infection rate in Italy, as of the time of this writing: 10,149 infections vs. 631 deaths = death rate of 6.2 (comparatively Iran: 8042 infections vs. 291 deaths = 3.6 death rate). The death rate of Italy is almost double that of Iran and almost ten-fold that of average Europe. (Are these discrepancies the result of failures in the establishing reliable data pertaining to “infections”, see our observations pertaining to Italy below).

Why? – Was is Italy being affected with virus panic? Was there a much stronger strain introduced to Italy?

The common flu in Europe in the 2019 / 2020 season, has apparently so far killed about 16,000 (in the US the death toll is, according to CDC between 14,000 and 32,000, depending on which CDC website you look at).

Could it be that among the Italian coronavirus deaths there were also common flu victims, as the affected victims are mostly elderly with respiratory preconditions? Also, symptoms are very similar between coronavirus and the common flu, and nobody questions and checks the official authorities’ narrative?

Maybe not all the coronavirus strains come from the same laboratory. A journalist from Berlin of Ukrainian origin, told me this morning that Ukraine is host to some 5 high security US bio-war labs. They test regularly new viruses on the population – yet, when strange diseases break out in the surroundings of the labs, nobody is allowed to talk about it. Something similar, she says, is happening in Georgia, where there are even more Pentagon / CIA bio-war labs – and where also new and strange diseases break out.

All of this makes the composite picture even more complicated. Overarching all is this super hype is profit driven, the quest for instant profit, instant benefits from the suffering of the people. This panic making is a hundred-fold of what it’s worth. What these kingpins of the underworld, who pretend to run the upper world, perhaps miscalculated, is that in today’s globalized and vastly outsourced world the west depends massively on China’s supply chain, for consumer goods, and for intermediary merchandise – and, foremost for medication and medical equipment. At least 80% of medication or ingredients for medication, as well as for medical equipment comes from China. The western China dependence for antibiotics is even higher, some 90%.  The potential impacts on health are devastating.

During the height of the COVID-19 epidemic China’s production apparatus for everything was almost shut-down. For deliveries that were still made, merchandise vessels were regularly and categorically turned back from many harbors all around the world. So, the west has tricked itself into a shortage-of-everything mode by waging a  de facto “economic war” on China. How long will it last? – Nobody knows, but China’s economy which was down by about half, has rapidly recovered to above 80% of what it was before the coronavirus hit. How long will it last to catch up with the backlog?

What is behind it all? – A total crackdown with artificially induced panic to the point where people are screaming “help, give us vaccinations, display police and military for our security” – or even if the public despair doesn’t go that far, it would be easy for the EU and US authorities to impose a military stage of siege for “health protection of the people”. In fact, CDC (Center for Disease Control in Atlanta), has already designed harshly dictatorial directives for a “health emergency”.

Along with forced vaccination, who knows what would be contained in the cocktail of ‘’mini-diseases” injected, and what their long-term effects might be. Similar to those of GMOs, where all sorts of germs could be inserted without us, the commons, knowing?

We may indeed be just at the beginning of the implementation of ID2020 – which includes, forced vaccination, population reduction and total digital control of everybody – on the way to One World Order – and global financial hegemony – Full Spectrum Dominance, as the PNAC (Plan for a New American Century) likes to call it.

A windfall for China. China has been purposely targeted for “economic destruction”, because of her rapidly advancing economy, an economy soon to overtake that of the now hegemon, the US of A, and because of China’s strong currency, the Yuan, also potentially overtaking the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency.

Both occurrences would mean the end of US dominance over the world. The coronavirus disease, now in more than 80 countries, has crashed the stock markets, a decline of at least 20% over the last few weeks – and rising; the feared consequences from the virus of an economic slow-down, if not recession, has slashed petrol prices within about two weeks almost in half. However, without China’s central bank interference, the Yuan’s value vis-à-vis the dollar has been rather stable, at around 7 Yuan to the dollar. That means, the Chinese economy, despite COVID-19, is receiving still much trust around the globe.

Advice to China – buy all the US and European corporate shares you can at current rock-bottom prices from the stock markets that collapsed by a fifth or more, plus buy lots of oil futures. When the prices recover, you have not only made billions, probably trillions from the west, but you also may own or hold significant and influence-yielding amounts of shares in most of the largest US and European corporations – and will be able to help call the shots of their future endeavors.

There is however, one little silver lining oscillating at the horizon full of dark clouds. It could miraculously be an awakening of consciousness of a critical mass that could put an end to it all. Although, we seem to be far from such a miracle, somewhere in a hidden corner of our brain, we all have a spark of consciousness left. We have the spiritual capacity to abandon the disaster path of western neoliberal capitalism, and instead espouse solidarity, compassion and love for each other and for our society. That may be the only way to break the gridlock and doom of western egocentric greed.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world, including in Palestine, in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press, TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Source: Global Research

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Coronavirus will bankrupt more people than it kills — and that’s the real global emergency | MSN

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By Omar Hassan

Coronavirus’s economic danger is exponentially greater than its health risks to the public. If the virus does directly affect your life, it is most likely to be through stopping you going to work, forcing your employer to make you redundant, or bankrupting your business.

The trillions of dollars wiped from financial markets this week will be just the beginning, if our governments do not step in. And if President Trump continues to stumble in his handling of the situation, it may well affect his chances of re-election. Joe Biden in particular has identified Covid-19 as a weakness for Trump, promising “steady, reassuring” leadership during America’s hour of need.

Provided by The IndependentWorldwide, Covid-19 has killed 4,389 with 31 US deaths as of today. But it will economically cripple millions, especially since the epidemic has formed a perfect storm with stock market crashes, an oil war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, and the spilling over of an actual war in Syria into another potential migrant crisis.

We may look back on coronavirus as the moment when the threads that hold the global economy together came unstuck; and startups and growing businesses like mine could end up paying the price.

Just as important as fighting the virus — if not more important — is vaccinating our economies against the incoming pandemic of panic. Human suffering can come in the form of illness and death. But it can also be experienced as not being able to pay the bills or losing your home.

Small businesses in particular are struggling as supply chains dry up, leaving them without products or essential materials. Factory closures in China have led to a record low in the country’s Purchasing Manager’s Index which measures manufacturing output. China is the world’s largest exporter and is responsible for a third of global manufacturing, so China’s problem is everyone’s problem — even in the midst of a trade war between the White House and Beijing.

All this makes it even more worrying that governments continue to see this as a health crisis, not an economic one. It is time the economists took over from the doctors, before the real pandemic spreads.

It is difficult to imagine Italy not entering a recession (the world’s ninth-largest economy is now on lockdown). It is also difficult to imagine that failing to affect Europe and its largest trading partner, the United States. And it is impossible to see how any of this will not add up to a global downturn, unless governments step in faster and harder than they did 12 years ago during the last financial crisis.

The stakes are higher this time, because there seems to be a coordinated effort to economically hurt many Western countries, and warn them away from the aggressive trade policies that Trump has so enthusiastically adopted.

Although China bore the brunt of the virus’s economic and human cost, many in Beijing will see a silver lining in the weakening of the US economy, and a distraction from Trump’s trade wars that appeared to be escalating with no end in sight.

Almost perfectly synchronized with the coronavirus, a Russia-Saudi oil war has erupted. In the short-term, both Moscow and Riyadh can afford the 30 per cent overnight drop in the oil price. But America’s shale gas business cannot: The more expensive process of fracking means that much of the US oil sector will simply not exist if oil prices stay at historic lows, leading to shut downs, job losses and perhaps even state-level recessions.

President Trump has pushed through overdue payroll tax cuts and help for hourly workers — measures that will help both employers and employees survive. In the UK, Chancellor Rishi Sunak yesterday unveiled a ‘Coronavirus Budget’. But everyone needs to think bigger if they want to properly deal with how this new factor changes the status quo.

This is about much more than coronavirus, oil prices, or even the global economy. This is about the balance of power between East and West. The epicenter of this has been, for the last 10 years, Syria. After a decade of conflict on the ground, the face-off seems to have now escalated from proxy war to economic conflict.The emerging superpowers of Russia and China witnessed what many saw as American irrelevance in Syria. And they are now trying to cement their vision of a truly multi-polar world. Rather than allowing US ally Saudi Arabia to lead the oil markets through the OPEC cartel, Russia and China want to reshape global markets — and power balances — to their advantage.

To survive these shifts, the US, UK and others will need to protect the future of their businesses, large and small, and look for opportunities to benefit from the new economic world order, not deny it. Ignoring these changes will be even more damaging than any flu pandemic.

Source: MSN

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The Game is Rigged | Counterpunch

32917978597_d9f4330dd6_cJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: We publish controversial articles to inspire critical thinking. This is written from an eco-marxist perspective and is a cogent analysis of the Democratic Party and power structures in general. We do not agree with their analysis of Trump, the Republican Party or the impeachment trial.

By Paul Street

Let’s not beat around the bush. The game is rigged. The fix is in.

I’m not just talking about Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the Republican-controlled United States Senate and the fake-impeachment trial that body just concluded. I’m talking about their neoliberal enablers, the Democrats too.

Certain Depressing Things Explained

The deeply conservative corporate and imperialist Democratic Party politics and media complex is determined to deny the progressive neo-New Deal Democrat Bernie Sanders the presidential nomination.

So what if Sanders is the Democratic presidential candidate most likely to organize the working- and lower-class the corporate Democrats – the nation’s Inauthentic Opposition Party of Fake Resistance (IOPFR)– have been betraying demobilizing for decades?

So what if this makes Sanders the most electable candidate against an incumbent president and a party that pose existential fascistic and ecocidal threats to what’s left of democracy, the republic, and life itself?

So what if Sanders’ key policy proposals, including Single Payer health insurance (health care as a human right) and a Green New Deal (to put millions to work trying to roll back the soulless capitalist destruction of livable ecology) are urgently required for the common good and human survival?

So what if Sanders’ proposals are conservative in relation to the savage scale of the inequality and environmental destruction neoliberal class rule has been inflicting for several decades on Americans and livable ecology?

So what if nearly half (47%) of Sanders supporters will not commit to voting for the Democratic presidential candidate in November if it isn’t Bernie, making it likely that any other candidate is likely to usher in the tragedy of a second Trump term?

The Democratic establishment is determined to stop Sanders at all costs. As I’ve been saying for years, the corporate Democrats prefer to lose to the ever more viciously right-wing Republicans and the demented fascist oligarch Trump than to the moderately left wing of their own party.

This is why the establishment Democrats and their many media allies (at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, CNN, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and elsewhere) have issued repeated dire warnings over the supposed “radical Leftism” and “extremism” of the mildly social-democratic Sanders.

It’s why Democratic Party-affiliated funders and media opened the campaign season by touting the clownish center-right dementia victim Joe Biden as their “front-runner.”

It’s why those funders and media shifted to the slimy Wall Street plaything Pete Butiggieg after Biden re-exposed himself and pseudo-liberal Kamala Harris proved unable to stand strong in the “pragmatic” center-right Clinton-Obama-Tony Blair-Emanuel Macron lane.

It’s why the establishment “liberal” media harps constantly on Sanders’ supposed un-electability even as polls show him solidly beating Trump.

It’s why former Barack Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, former global derivatives trader and right-wing MSDNC (I mean MSNBC) host Stephanie (class-) Ruhle, and the noxious neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol recently joined forces on MSNBC to viciously denounce Sanders as “the worst candidate” to run against Trump.

It’s why the Democratic National Committee is working to reinstate the authoritarian veto power of unelected establishment “superdelegates” on the first ballot of the Democratic National Convention – a move clearly driven by establishment fears that Sanders could accumulate enough delegates to sweep to a first ballot victory under current rules.

It’s the reason for the Elizabeth Warren-CNN hit job in the last Iowa Democratic presidential debate – the one where Warren and the cable network conspired to falsely smear Sanders as a sexist.

It’s why MSNBC and CNN went into overdrive trying to portray Sanders’ campaign as “divisive” after Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib responded to Hillary Clinton’s malicious personal attacks on Sanders with an ill-timed reaction MSNBC blew up into “the boo heard around the world.”

It’s why MSNBC and CNN have played along with Hillary Clinton’s despicable and false claim thar Sanders didn’t work hard to help Mrs. Clinton’s (horrific and depressing) campaign during the 2016 general election.

It’s why the Democratic Party has changed its presidential debate qualification rules so that mega-billionaire and center-right Republocrat Mike Bloomberg can ascend to the top candidate stage on a magic carpet of money after skipping the campaign process in the early caucus and primary states.

It’s why the insufferable MSNBC bully Chris Matthews (the Ted Baxter of cable news) lost what little composure he has when Sanders’ campaign co-chair Nina Turner accurately called Bloomberg “an oligarch” (more on this amusing and revealing episode below).

It’s why the New York Times has been running deceptive commentaries warning falsely about the supposed “radical extremism,” “fiscal irresponsibility,” “rudeness” and “nonviability” of Sanders and his backers.

It’s why the California Democratic Party’s centrist managers are doing their best to make it difficult for independents to vote for Sanders, the state’s leading presidential candidate.

It’s probably why the Des Moines Register Star (which endorsed Elizabeth “Capitalist in my Bones” Warren) strangely decided not to release its usual “gold standard” Iowa poll of the state’s first-in-the-national caucus-goers prior to the big (and shockingly wrecked) event last Monday.

It’s why the Times, CNN, and MSNBC (the last outfit is broadcast media’s ground-zero for fake-progressive Wall Street centrism ) tout Butiggieg as the winner of Iowa’s spoiled caucus even though Sanders won the same number of state delegates and triumphed decisively in the popular vote (please see and disseminate Fairness and Accuracy in Media’s reflection on “How Corporate Media Makes Pete Look Like He’s Winning”).

It’s why CNN anchors smirkingly opine that Sanders “under-performed” and “failed to meet expectations” even after he won the Caucus.

Iowa Black-Apped

And it’s likely why the Iowa Caucus got app-f*#^ed, with the contest’s results rendered unavailable to the public for days. The deadly Shadow app’s “failure” and the mind-boggling dysfunction and confusion of the error-ridden count that followed (so extreme that we’ll probably never know the real numbers) robbed Sanders of a momentum-building election night victory speech – and gave Trump another reason to gloat about the pathetic nature of the Democratic Party.

It turns out that the Shadow app that crashed the Iowa Caucus and threw Sanders’ Iowa victory down the media memory hole was less than politically neutral. Hardly known for leftist conspiracy theorizing, USA Today offered some chilling reflections the morning after:

‘What’s this about Shadow and where did the app come from? The app was created by a company called Shadow Inc., and issued by Jimmy Hickey of Shadow Inc., metadata of the program that the Des Moines Register analyzed Tuesday shows. A LinkedIn profile for James Hickey lists him as COO of Shadow and an engineering manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Two other former Clinton campaign workers, former Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, co-founded Shadow…The New York Times has reported that ACRONYM – a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 “to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,” according to its website – supported Shadow. Its founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, The Los Angeles Times reported….Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price, who also worked as Clinton’s 2016 Iowa political director, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday about the relationship between the party and Shadow, which it paid $63,184 for website development and travel expenses…’

It gets worse. According to the Los Angeles Times, in an article titled “Tech Firm Started by Clinton Campaign Veterans Linked to Iowa Caucus Debacle”: “Among Shadow’s clients is Pete Buttegieg’s presidential campaign, which paid $42,500 to the firm in July 2019 for ‘software rights and subscriptions,’ according to disclosures to the FEC.”

So, Shadow, Inc. got money from Wall Street Pete (from the financial sector via Butiggieg, that is), a former consultant with the infamously dark and globalist McKinsey Company and a onetime U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer.

Further feeding the sense of the Iowa Caucus Debacle as a CIA/military intelligence Black Op, Butiggieg proclaimed himself the Iowa victor with zero precincts reporting last Monday night! How Juan Guaido was that?

It worked. The fact that Sanders won Iowa was turned into a public non-fact. The confusion bought Mayor Pete a couple of days to take some undeserved victory laps across the “liberal” media, boosting him in New Hampshire.

The Democrats Did “More to Undermine Faith in Our Elections than Russia Ever Could”

No talking head has captured the evil of it all more effectively and bitingly than The Hill’s Krystal Ball yesterday morning. Her comments merit transcription and lengthy quotation:

“Let [this sink in]: Twitter is doing a better, more accurate job of tabulating the results than the Democratic Party. What else might be wrong through incompetence, malice, or a combination of both, God only knows. But as if that’s not enough, after Pete claimed a fake victory thanks to the complicity of the Iowa Democratic Party and the media, it turns out that, surprise, surprise, they saved the best precincts for Bernie Sanders to be counted and included last, because of course they did. I’m sure it was all just a coincidence, though, guys. And meanwhile, a new tracking poll shows that Pete’s fake win in Iowa has given him a big boost in New Hampshire, lifting him 9 points in 3 days.”

“What is truly criminal to me, though, is this: the people who gave Bernie Sanders this hard-fought and well-deserved win are people like this: immigrant workers at a pork-processing plant, who had to fight to even be able to cast their ballots in a caucus that conflicted with their work schedule. They were the very first to vote and among the last to be counted. For four days, their voice and their vote were completely erased, as were the Latinos who participated in satellite caucuses and went overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders. It is absolutely outrageous.”

“Do you remember the endless, three-year rant at RussiaGate and over how a foreign power spending a million or two over a month on lousy, ungrammatical Facebook ads inside a billion dollar election was the biggest threat to our constitutional republic and was material to Hillary’s loss in 2016? Let’s be completely clear here. The Democratic Party in Iowa has done more to undermine faith in our elections than Russia ever could. Period. But don’t expect a Democratic House to hold months-long hearings into the Iowa Caucus debacle. Don’t expect any degree of self-reflection on the part of the party bosses and consultant grifters who deserve to be fired en masse. Instead, the same folks who think they should be able to take the nomination from Bernie with their Superdelegates, the same folks who tweak the process so it suits them, the same folks who are now leaking out partial wrong results in a mockery of manipulation masquerading as transparency…these people will continue to run the Democratic Party in Iowa and elsewhere until and unless an anti-establishment candidate like Bernie throws them all out. ….”

“… Single moms arranged babysitters to participate in this caucus. Nurses gave up shifts, lost 12 hours of pay to participate in this caucus. People rolled in with their wheelchairs. They weren’t with their kids or doing their college homework…Volunteers donated hundreds of thousands of hours of time. Banging on doors, hosting house parties, managing selfie lines, and all for what? So that all that time, all that energy could be turned into a giant joke that makes everyone who participated in the process feel like a fool….”

“People that we invite into this process are made a sacred promise that this activity s meaningful and necessary. And then to watch such manifest incompetence, cronyism, obfuscation, and selective disclosure in what is supposed to be the most critical election of our lifetime makes a joke out of democracy and spread cynicism like the Coranavirus of the civic soul…This whole democracy looks like a Potemkin Village farce where the GOP and Democratic Party insiders seem to almost laugh at the rubes who take this whole thing as serious and sacred.”

I’ve never had the same degree of faith n U.S. electoral politics that Ms. Ball (who would likely and wrongly consider me a victim and purveyor of cynicism) seems to have had in the past, but that is an extremely powerful denunciation of what happened to Sanders and his backers – and the democratic ideal – in Iowa this week.

(At least we know for certain that voters are ready to pull the rusty chain on Joe Pool Chain Biden. Too bad for the companies who were gearing up to mass produce record players for the poor in response to Joe “Record Players for the Poor” Biden’s promise of Vinyl New Deal.)

This is Who the Democrats Are

Butiggieg knows he’s never going to be president. “Alfred E. Neuman’s” role is to muddle public perceptions, screwing Warren and Sanders in the early states to help set up “Mini-Mike” Bloomberg (I am borrowing Trump’s frankly clever nicknames for these right-wing candidate), who is Wall Street’s next Great Stop Sanders Hope in the wake of “Sleepy Joe’s” predictable (and widely predicted) collapse.

MSNBC is cable news central for the IOPFR’s Campaign to Stop Sanders and Re-Elect the Neofascist Trump with Yet Another Centrist Neoliberal Creep. Two days ago, the network’s “Morning Joe” hosts used the very Iowa fiasco that their on-the-ground ideological comrades created to promote Bloomberg and Super Tuesday as the alternatives to “radical” Bernie and the early caucus and primaries. The “progressive” Kissingerian network (I’ve heard MSNBC hosts praise the blood-drenched war criminal Henry Kissinger on numerous occasions) didn’t try hide its corporatist agenda to any serious degree.

“Democrats,” a popular Internet meme featuring pictures of Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi runs, “are afraid that American voters are going to interfere in the 2020 election.”

Thank you. Exactly right.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. The Democratic Party isn’t about social justice, democracy, and/or environmental sanity. It isn’t even primarily about winning elections. “History’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party” (as former Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips once accurately described the Democrats) is about serving “elite” corporate and financial sponsors above all, and those sponsors prefer a second fascistic Trump term to a mildly progressive first Sanders one.

Oligarchs “Take Advantage of a Broken and Dysfunctional System”

In an amusing and telling episode on MSNBC prior to the Caucus, Nina Turner told Chris Matthews that voters worry about “the oligarchs” who buy American elections. “Do you think Mike Bloomberg is an oligarch?!” an outraged Matthews asked. “He is,” Turner retorted. “He skipped Iowa. Iowans should be insulted. Buying his way into this race, period. The DNC changed the rules. They didn’t change it for Senator Harris. They didn’t change it for Senator Booker. They didn’t change it for Secretary Castro.”

Thank you. Exactly right.

Matthews then incredulously asked Turner is she really believed Bloomberg purchased his way into the presidential debates – as if there is the slightest hint of a scintilla of an iota of a sliver of a wisp of a rumor of a scent of doubt about.

After Matthews finished idiotically interrogating Turner, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams turned to MSNBC pundit Jason Johnson. Johnson also disapproved of Ms. Turner’s description of the oligarch Bloomberg as an oligarch.

“Oligarchy, in our particular terminology,” Johnson intoned, “makes you think of a rich person who got their money off of oil in Russia, who is taking advantage of a broken and dysfunctional system.”

You can’t make shit like that up! No, Jason Johnson: imperialist, Russophobic, and American Exceptionalist doctrine and bad reporting make you think that way. Merriam-Webster defines “oligarchy” as: “government by the few; a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” There’s an abundance of solid academic research showing that the United States today fits the definition very well. Here are four for Johnson to start with: Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What we Can Do About It (University of Chicago, 2018), Ron Formisano, American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class (University of Illinois, 2017); Jeffrey Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge University Press, 2011, with the United States as a leading case study); Paul Street, They Rule: They 1% v. Democracy (Routledge, 2014).

Concerned about rich people “taking advantage of a broken and dysfunctional system”? Look no further than the world’s self-proclaimed “greatest democracy”! No other “democracy” in the so-called developed world remotely matches the United States of Dark Money when it comes to giving big donors unregulated power in their national electoral processes. Along with other and related characteristics of its election and party system — winner-take-all contests with no proportional representation, rampant partisan gerrymandering of election districts, voter registration problems, corporate media bias and the “federalist” decentralization and partisan control of U.S. election process — this plutocratic campaign finance free-for-all is why the Electoral Integrity Project (a research undertaking funded by the Australian Research Council with a team of researchers based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University) ranks the democratic election integrity of U.S. elections below that of all 19 North and Western European democracies and also below that of 10 other nations in the Americas (Costa Rica, Uruguay, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Jamaica, Grenada, Argentina, Barbados and Peru), 10 nations in Central and Eastern Europe, 9 Asian-Pacific countries, 2 countries in the Middle East (Israel and Tunisia) and 6 African nations. The U.S. ranks dead last among “Western democracies.”

Don’t take it from a radical eco-Marxist like me. As the distinguished liberal political scientists Page (Northwestern) and Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched 2017 book mentioned above:

“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.  Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout.  When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless… Majorities of Americans favor…programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes.  Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs] (emphasis added).”

The Table is Tilted: Beyond the Cynical Brilliance of George Carlin

It was nice of the professors to quantify and document what working-class Americans have always known: money talks, bullshit walks. My old Finish socialist Aunt Mary (a high school graduate who worked for decades as a department store clerk in downtown Elgin, Illinois) understood Page and Gilens’ point very well. In the famous words of George Carlin:

“There’s a reason education sucks and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the REAL owners, now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions — forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations; they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State houses, the City Halls; they’ve got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.”

“They gotcha by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying — lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want — they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting f***ed by the system that threw them overboard 30 f***ing years ago. They don’t want that.”

“You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. …All day long, beating you over the in their media telling you what to believe — what to think — and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.”

“…They don’t give a fuck about you, they don’t…They don’t care about you – at all. At all, At all. At all. At all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care … that’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue d**k that’s being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth — it’s called the American Dream … ‘cuz you have to be asleep to believe it.”

The problem with Carlin’s brilliant rant is of course it’s extreme, well, cynicism. Millions upon millions of Americans do notice and do care. They aren’t asleep. They are capable of critical thinking. They very much want to un-rig the game, level the table, and change the system – make a people’s democratic revolution and save humanity. I run into and talk to and try to energize and learn and get energy from these people regularly. They haven’t surrendered to the American authoritarian-sexist-racist-nativist-nationalist-fascist nightmare yet.

I share with many of these people a basic underlying spiritual sense that giving up and letting the owners – our financial and political owners, yes – win is irrational and indeed morally corrupt. Let’s say the chances of collapsing the nation’s un-elected and interrelated dictatorships of money, empire, white-supremacism, and patriarchy are just 3 or 2 or even 1 in 10 (I think the real odds may be much higher). Why bring them down to zero by giving in to fatalism – to “it’s never going to change?” It makes no sense to give up: you lose nothing by believing in the possibility of democratic transformation and revolutionary change; you lose everything by not believing. Try some radical existentialism!

Tactical Support

Should people caucus and vote for Bernie in the rigged Democratic Party nomination process? Sure, for three reasons. First, there’s a(n admittedly slim) chance Sanders could prevail and lead the enactment of changes that would make a very positive difference in peoples’ lives and capacity to fight back against American Oligarchy, which is now taking significant steps towards openly authoritarian rule.

Second, doing some work with the Sanders campaign puts you in contact with masses of people who are changing all the time (like all phenomena), people-in-process who are capable of engaging on the critical topics of how and why we must move beyond the rigged games and systems that capture and depress our energies and how and why we must begin to organize for a real revolution.

Third, even if he doesn’t win, it’s good to make the screwing over of Sanders as transparent and instructive as possible. This could help motivate millions of Americans to break in revolutionary fashion from a “broken and dysfunctional [American] system” of class rule. It could help spark millions to join a people’s movement that works beneath and beyond the rigged elections cycle and system to heroically reclaim the commons and save humanity.

There’s a lot of good and potentially radical energy out there. It needs to go somewhere positive once the “coffin of class consciousness” (in the words of the radical historian Alan Dawley) that is the American ballot box fails to deliver yes…yet once again. The capitalists hardly restrict their political pressure to the electoral process – just wait to see what happens if Sanders (somewhat miraculously) makes it into the White House. We must and can develop an anti-capitalist (and now anti-fascist) politics that fights back in ways that transcend those savagely time-staggered moments when our owners permit us to make marks next to the names of politicians who can generally be trusted to put their own interests above ours and those of the common good.

“Except for the rare few,” Howard Zinn once wrote, “our representatives are politicians, and will surrender their integrity, claiming to be ‘realistic.’ We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth.”

Source: Counterpunch

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‘No Confidence!’ Pelosi Opens Door For Parliamentary System | The Epoch Times

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) speaks to media at the Capitol in Washington on Dec. 19, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

By Roger L. Simon

With some justification, for years we have heard trumpeted the superiority of the American (with minor exceptions) two-party system as opposed to the typically unstable multi-party parliamentary system used by the Europeans and others.

For that reason, among others, we have often been the envy of the world. Our so-called Big Tent parties have held the country together. Legislation can be passed, progress made, without having to appeal to and compromise with a half-dozen or more warring constituencies.

That is now in danger. Due to the Speaker Nancy Pelosi-inspired impeachment of Donald Trump because they don’t like him and his policies (actually the policies are a minor part of it—it’s almost entirely him) we have our own version of the parliamentary system.

This evidence-free impeachment was virtually the American equivalent of the “confidence or no confidence vote” employed by parliaments, a vote that happens or is threatened so often in that system it is head-spinning (cf. the U. K., Israel, and Italy, which sometimes approaches the daily).

By dialing impeachment down in this manner, they have actually dialed it down and out and into something different and almost always self-defeating. From now on, our presidents will be effectively prime ministers.

Whether this was inadvertent or not, that has been the result. That the impeachment is now stalled because Pelosi refuses to pass the articles to the Senate only underscores that it was never real in the first place and was indeed, as in Europe, a vote of “no confidence.”

So does this mean we are about to fly apart? It’s almost a rhetorical question. To a great degree we already have.

Who knows what will occur in the aftermath of presidential election 2020?

The Democrats are already two relatively-equal parties, one center-left and the other almost purely socialist. On the Republican side, the Never Trumpers may want a party of their own. That makes four that actually already exist ideologically. Will they split? Where do we go from there? How many more possible parties are lurking in the political underbrush?

Don’t we have enough gridlock already?

Thanks, Madame Speaker.

Author and screenwriter Roger L. Simon is the Senior Political Analyst of The Epoch Times. His new novel is “The GOAT.”

Source: The Epoch Times

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Impeachment Professors: Welcome to My World | American Crossroads

Editor’s Note: Take special note of the fourth academic Professor Jonathan Turley who cared to differ with his colleagues regarding impeachment and the grounds thereof. As a result he may suffer the consequences of stepping “out of line” from the other hard core socialist academia who testified before the House Judiciary Committee.

Commentary by Mary Grabar

Welcome to my world all you people appalled by the testimony of professors presenting Constitutional grounds for impeaching President Donald Trump.

Are you disgusted by the display of feminist rage, graduate student earnestness, and droning about the “framers” by tenured elites who have built careers presenting the Constitution as a “living document”?

Ha! Welcome to my world where I spent 20 years until 2013 studying and teaching college English.

I would still be in that world, having to listen to morning-after faculty lounge debates about the relative merits of these three scholars, were it not for the fact that a department chair, and then a college president, did not like op-eds I wrote, because the First Amendment applied only to people with their views. Then the privately funded program under which I was teaching at Emory University ended.

It’s not that I could get beyond the low-paying year-to-year contracts. My thesis and dissertation focused on dead white male cis-gendered (with no “homosexual,” or even “homo-social” tendencies) Christian writers. So I never had a chance.

During my years of struggle, I would try to convey what it was like to those on the outside—family members, friends, and people I met. I described the witchy cackling at meetings, screams about oppression from lecterns, inquisitorial stares from colleagues passing by in hallways, and examples of “scholarship”—like the poster with the giant phallus (and more that I can’t describe in this forum) adorning the office door of the head of “Sexuality Studies,” which was within the English department at Emory. Every day I trudged past that looming phallus, above the poster of Shakespeare in drag advertising a “Shakesqueer” conference.

Oh, that’s just those crazy English professors, said people in the business world and in the sciences. They looked at me slant-eyed after I stammered, “but, but … the giant phallus, and …”

Today, the standards of academe have infiltrated the business world. My former skeptics on the political right no longer post political comments on Facebook. Techies such as James Damore and CEOs are fired for their words and actions that have nothing to do with their job performance. Math and science professors are required to sign statements pledging allegiance to diversity, which means admitting less-qualified women and minorities. They’re required to believe their magical diverse powers will ensure that bridges do not collapse and patients, with their skulls cut open on the operating table, do not die. They must embrace Afrocentric math, “women’s ways of knowing” anatomy, and the path-breaking theory of Lysenkoism.

My world was the faculty lounge (the office with broken-down furniture where several instructors at one time held “office hours”). It’s a world where even such poorly paid hacks thought they were better, smarter, and holier than the majority of Americans and 100 percent of Republicans.

These people need not even look at evidence or consider scholarly shoddiness because they know that if it comes from the wrong source, it is wrong, as an Amazon review respondent who agreed with commentator “Prof. JayG” that I had not cited “any evidence” in my book “Debunking Howard Zinn,” affirmed. My book is simply “right-wing trash.” No doubt, philosophy professor David Detmer still believes I suffer from “Zinnophobia.”

Such “profs” do not need to read entire books and review footnotes because of their superior abilities to “deconstruct” texts. The deconstructionist theorists I had to read in graduate school saw the real meaning of an author’s words. While mere mortals may attach the signifier (the word) to the signified (the thing or concept), the deconstructionists could see beyond. They used this ability to also discern the motives of outsiders: white people, heterosexuals, men, Republicans—and those inside and outside these groups (excluding Republicans) who did not adhere to their ever-evolving standards of what today is called “wokeness.”

These people, unlike mortals, do not need facts. This was true about Donald Trump’s election. They knew there was cause to impeach him immediately after the election, and they said so to their students. I saw this here in Clinton, New York. Mere days after the election, professors chaperoned students from Hamilton College on the “hill” to the village square, where they marched and yelled “Impeach!” before they got on the luxury buses for the mile-and-a-half ride back to campus.

This ability to see beyond evidence has been honed for a long time. Back when a few middle-class Americans dared to form a “tea party” movement to protest with speeches, bunting, and prayer against the newly elected “global citizen” President Barack Obama’s agenda of “transforming” this country, the Ph.D.s and other super-intellects discerned that this was not really the desire of law-abiding, hard-working Americans to prevent their country from turning into Cuba. They knew, just knew, that this was racism.

So were the questions about Obama’s longtime “god-damning America” pastor, Weatherman friend Bill Ayers, brobuddy Hugo Chavez, and Communist Party USA mentor Frank Marshall Davis. Obama’s fundraising party comments about “bitter” Bible- and gun-toting Americans were simple truth. His declaration of being able to rule with his pen and phone was not any threat to the Constitutional separation of powers at all. The Obama Youth Brigade Formation’s chants of “because of Obama I’m inspired to be the next” architect, engineer, lawyer, etc., repeating points of Obama’s platform, and shouts of “Yes, we can!” were signs of rejuvenated youthful optimism.

Whereas professors had proudly sported bumper stickers proclaiming “Somewhere in Texas a village has lost its idiot” during the George W. Bush administration, they recognized Obama’s words as poetic genius.

Michelle Obama, a broad-shouldered statuesque woman was treated like the most beautiful and fashionable woman in the world—even when she dressed up like a giant banana. But a supermodel married to a Republican can have no fashion sense. Melania Trump’s white coat in a Christmas video among white-themed Christmas decorations, “exude[d] cold, dismissive aloofness”—so unlike the Santa Clausy Mao Christmas tree decorations in the Obama White House!

The fact that such reactionary outlets such as Fox News reported this as if there was something wrong with having the author of the famous Little Red Book on the tree alongside a drag queen and Obama etched into Mount Rushmore proves how close-minded they are. They’re incapable of seeing the brilliance of a theory developed by the natural genius Karl Marx whose social justice work was supported by the wealthy industrialist Friedrich Engels. (And isn’t it nice that George Soros and other billionaires support similar scholarship these days?)

Marx understood history so well because he had deconstructed it and could see the patterns. Therefore, he was able to predict the future. And he could tell what would usher in a paradise.

When everyday people, like peasants, or reporters doing reporting instead of going to the Kremlin’s fancy parties, presented counter-evidence (in the case of peasants by dropping dead from starvation), the professors shot back. They accused the few reporters jotting down the numbers of beggars and dead bodies (like William Henry Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons) of being reactionaries. They accused the peasants of bringing on their own starvation by not working enthusiastically enough on the collective farms the government had so generously provided them.

Even after Kruschev had denounced Stalin for errors, the professors did not lose faith. They knew socialism could work—if only the “right” people were in charge.

The professors in the 1960s kept teaching about the superiority of socialism, hoping as Bill Ayers and company did, that through the reeducation of their charges they would usher in and rule over a socialistic utopia. And even though the Vietnamese fled North Vietnam, the people there really wanted a communist government. These thinkers knew that Ho Chi Minh was more of a democrat than the slave-owning writer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.

So, when I recently watched the testimony by the Constitutional scholars Pamela Karlan (Stanford), Noah Feldman (Harvard), and Michael Gerhardt (University of North Carolina), I thought, welcome to my world.

Welcome to my world where someone like Karlan, who at a 2017conference claimed she had to cross the street from Donald Trump’s hotel (the building apparently shoots cootie rays onto the sidewalk) and to know that Trump did not “believe in” democracy, “the rule of law,” or a “free press.” The legal scholar had denounced “voter suppression” (no, no, not about New Black Panthers outside the Philadelphia polling station in 2008; those were civil rights activists) and claimed that Trump’s sexual assault record was higher than “99.99% of all of the people who have entered this country illegally.” (Let us hope the FBI takes note of this inside information.)

In addition to being an ace legal mind, she was able to go beyond Freud and diagnosed Trump as not being able to tell the difference between truth and falsity. She claimed that he was trying to “destabilize the courts” and predicted that he would blame a Muslim on a future terroristic attack like the one in Oklahoma City in 1995.

At the hearing, she explained that “one of the most important provisions of our original Constitution is the guarantee of periodic elections for the presidency.” Therefore, this president needed to be removed. There are so many reasons—like the president’s reference to “Russia, if you’re listening,” i.e., to get on it about Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. All smart people know that this is not a joke, for Republicans are incapable of making jokes.

But those with Ph.D.s learn all the clever inside jokes at conferences. It was too bad that the rubes didn’t understand Karlan’s witty reference to the president’s 13-year-old son. She told Americans that “Trump is not a king” and that he could “name his son Barron” but could not “make him a baron.” But they just didn’t get it. So she magnanimously gave a “qualified apology,” pointing out that Trump had much to apologize for himself—like being born. And like all those feminists attacking phallologocentrism in “Paradise Lost” and “Huckleberry Finn,” she was applauded for “schooling” a “Trump crony,” Congressman Doug Collins (R-Ga.).

In my world, earnest graduate students presented comparison/contrast papers at conferences knowing, just knowing, that someone would recognize their genius. Noah Feldman may have known that his “insights” had been discussed thousands of times before at such insider events, but for the benefit of the folks he spelled it out, explaining that the “framers provided for the impeachment of the president because they feared the president might abuse his power of his office.”

“Let me begin now,” he continued, “of why the framers provided for impeachment in the first place. The framers borrowed the concept of impeachment from England, but with one enormous difference. The House of Commons and the House of Lords could use impeachment in order to limit the ministers of the king, but they could not impeach the king. And in that sense, the king was above the law.”

He then asked his enthralled audience, “I would like you to think now about a specific date in the Constitutional Convention, July 20, 1787. It was the middle of a long hot summer. …”

Feldman had been cogitating on impeachment for a while. Back in 2017, Feldman and Jacob Weisberg compared and contrasted “the collusion of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia” to Watergate, likening “Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and warnings to Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller” to “President Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.”

Feldman also contributed to a collection edited by Cass Sunstein, who served in the Obama White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Titled quite originally “Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America,” the book delved, naturally, into Trump’s authoritarianism. (Sunstein’s earlier book, “Nudge,” spelled out how the government could “nudge” citizens to do what it knew was good for them.) Sunstein, in his introduction, took some creative Sinclair Lewis-like liberties, presenting a future as Lewis did in his novel, even though it was fiction and did not come true then—even under a president who tried to pack the Supreme Court so he could fully take over the economy and who let in British spies to encourage war fervor.

Gerhardt (who has evolved on the Constitution since the Obama presidency) also lectured about the difference between the British system under monarchy and “in our constitution” where “no one, not even the president is above the law” and where there is “a separation of powers.” He concluded “from the public evidence” that the president had attacked the Constitution’s “safeguards against establishing a monarchy in this country.”

With all this talk of kings and monarchy I was reminded of the June 18, 2018, issue of Time Magazine, which on the cover presented Trump looking into a mirror and seeing his reflection with a crown and a king’s regalia—not that I’m doubting that the three professors came to their opinions after a careful review of the evidence—even over a pre-cooked mail-order turkey on Thanksgiving.

Then there was Jonathan Turley, an independent who has always voted Democrat, but who just didn’t get it. He blasphemed in stating that he didn’t believe that there was enough credible evidence to impeach and that Democrats were offering “passion” instead of “proof.” He dared to write about it, along with describing receiving “threatening messages and demands” that he be “fired from George Washington University”—even before he had finished his testimony. I fear that he may fall victim to the kind of purge to which others have succumbed, like Trotsky, and like the more recent one attempted on feminist professor Laura Kipnis.

Over 500 legal scholars after the testimony affixed their names to an open letter to Congress, stating their agreement with Karlan, Feldman, and Gerhardt. Turley had better see the light—that the king must be impeached—soon!

Whoever let him teach at George Washington Law School anyway?

The American people do not appreciate the wisdom of their betters, but President Bernie Sanders will be sure to remind them of how lucky they are to live in a country where the government provides all the food they need and where all they need do is stand in line for it, and not even worry their little brains about what to eat because the Director of the Department of Nutritional Guidance, Provision, and Distribution, Michelle Obama, will see to it that every American gets as much as he, she, they, or it truly needs. Now let’s move! Hop on that tractor! You have a quota to fill.

Mary Grabar holds a doctorate in English from the University of Georgia and is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Grabar is the author of “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation against America,” recently published by Regnery History.

Source: American Crossroads

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Four lessons from the biggest riots in decades | Sovereign Man

Editor’s Note: When stupid people take to the streets and cause reckless destruction everybody pays the price. Don’t let these radical fools destroy well-being for the rest of us because they’re angry, because they don’t like something, because they are do-nothing complainers. It’s everybody’s responsibility to cool down the flames of discontent and find meaningful ways to solve social, economic and political problems without resorting to violence. Martin Luther King would be ashamed of such violence!

If you’re been following the news, you might have seen reports about civil unrest in Chile– the worst in decades.

I lived in Chile for more than seven years before moving to Puerto Rico; I still have business interests there, along with hundreds of employees (both foreign and local), many of whom I’ve been speaking to over the last few days.

First things first, Chile is ordinarily a quiet, stable, peaceful country.

The last time Chile went to war was 140 years ago back in 1879. They even skipped both world wars.

And while there are occasional protests, Chile is quite tame by Latin American standards.

It’s also the most modern and advanced nation in the region– this is not a destitute, impoverished country.

Chile has thriving industries and a large middle class that’s in better shape than just about anywhere else in the region.

But just like every other country in the world, there are countless imperfections.

Inflation has eaten away at the purchasing power of workers’ incomes, and a lot of people are struggling to make ends meet.

The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back was a 3% increase in metro fares.

It’s nothing. But it was enough to make thousands of people become completely unglued, resulting in riots, looting, arson, and all-out mayhem.

Let’s talk about some of the key lessons from this:

1) It can happen anywhere.

It’s not just Chile. Looking around the world right now we can see major demonstrations and even violence in places like Hong Kong, Spain, Haiti, Lebanon, etc.

The ‘yellow vest’ movement in France in late 2018/early 2019 brought hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets to torch cars and destroy property, all apparently in protest of rising fuel prices.

Political tensions, social tensions, economic tensions… they exist everywhere, in rich countries and poor countries alike.

People everywhere are tightly wound, and it doesn’t take much for them to become unhinged. If you think this can’t happen where you live, think again.

2) It can happen faster than anyone realizes.

The weather in central Chile is one of the great benefits of living there; it’s warm, sunny, and dry… southern California climate.

And this past Friday was a particularly beautiful day. By lunchtime, people were out in the parks enjoying the weather. It was calm, peaceful, and joyful.

Within a matter of hours the city had turned into a war zone. Hours.

One of my team members told me on the phone yesterday, “If you had said on Friday afternoon that Santiago would be in chaos by nightfall, I would have laughed… And then it happened.”

3) It only takes a few idiots.

There are roughly 18 million people living in Chile. And there may even be a few million people nationwide who are deeply frustrated about the rising cost of living.

But only a few thousand have been stupid enough to cause such chaos and devastation; they’ve destroyed dozens of metro stations, buses, and even lit office buildings and grocery stores on fire.

Innocent people have died. And almost everyone else has had their lives heavily disrupted.

They can’t get to work. Schools are closed. Grocery store lines are crazy. There’s a curfew. Tanks are in the streets.

Most people are rational and peaceful. They might be angry about certain issues, but they know that torching property and killing innocents won’t solve anything.
Only a trivial fraction of a percent of the population are acting like cowards– the ones who steal a bunch of flat-screen televisions from the neighborhood electronics store before setting it on fire.

And they’re selfish and delusional enough to believe in their own righteousness– that their actions are justified as payback because of some economic injustice.

Yeah. Because nothing proves your moral superiority more than looting flat-screen TVs.

4) They often think Socialism is the answer.

Human beings seem hardwired to think that they can solve any economic injustice with Socialism.

More often than not, people don’t even think through the issues. They feel symptoms– difficulty making ends meet, difficulty getting ahead in life, etc. and they get angry.

And that’s where the analysis stops. There is no analysis actually. It’s just anger.

A rational person thinks things through– why is my cost of living increasing? Why aren’t I getting ahead? What’s the root cause of these problems? How can I fix it?

Again, Chile isn’t perfect. Not by a long shot.

But think about the 18-year old kid taking selfie videos while lighting a grocery store on fire because he’s angry… angry that his education was sub-par, angry that he can’t find a good paying job.

And he’s partially right. Public education in Chile is pretty bad, and he doesn’t have the skills for a high-paying career.

But I wonder how many books he’s read this year? How many free online courses has he taken? What has he done to solve his own problem?

Instead of torching buildings, he could have been at home watching countless videos on YouTube learning how to code in Python. For free.

And in developing real, marketable skills, he would become much more valuable and able to command a substantial wage and work remotely for prospective clients and employers worldwide.

But the Socialist mentality is not about solving your own problems.

Socialism means that you don’t have to lift a finger (except to light a match).

You just have to throw a temper tantrum until someone else solves your problems… even if you can’t even define your problem or present a reasonable solution.

I don’t want to make light of the issues; there are several problems that protesters have bought up which I agree with. But neither Socialism nor burning buildings ever solved any problems.

It may take time, but Chile is undoubtedly going to recover from this nightmare and move on. The ‘sane’ population (i.e. the vast majority) is already fighting back and defending their neighborhoods.

Source: Sovereign Man