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

 

https://youtu.be/gMTZu6_TjU8

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

Facebook Censoring Former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul Based on Bogus Politifact ‘Fact-Check’ | Ron Paul Institute

FalseinformationfoundonJohnnyLibertySocial media behemoth Facebook has just acted to censor and suppress Ron Paul’s latest weekly column, “The Coronavirus Hoax,” based on a hatchet job “fact check” by the notoriously biased “Politifact” organization.

At issue is Dr. Paul’s statement that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci’s claim that the coronavirus is “ten times more deadly” than the seasonal influenza virus is “without any scientific basis.” Fauci made the claim recently in testimony before the US Congress in a move that significantly ramped up the fear factor in the US over the virus.

The Politifact “fact check” is literally drenched in sarcasm and bias, with Ron Paul being described as “a sometimes conspiracy-minded Texas doctor” and Fauci described as a “universally trusted person.”

For a “just the facts” analysis, that’s a lot of editorializing.

The Politifact hit piece admits that, “It’s not yet known what the death rate from the current coronavirus, COVID-19, will be,” but concludes nevertheless that, “early data indicate it is more than 10 times higher than the death rate for the flu.”

So if you don’t know how can you know?

One reason to question the “scientific basis” of Fauci’s claim is that Fauci contradicted his own statement before Congress in a recent article he co-authored in the New England Journal of Medicine.

If a scientist writes one thing in a scholarly journal and testifies very differently before Congress, does it not raise questions as to the “scientific basis” of the divergent claims?

Here are the two Anthony Faucis. Which one is scientifically based? Both can’t be:

fa

Founded by the Poynter Institute, Politifact is an outfit with a clear political agenda and it is not to promote truth and accuracy in the media. Rather, it is all about suppressing media outlets with which they disagree. It is all about creating blacklists in a McCarthyite push to control the flow of information.

Interestingly enough, major funders of the Poynter Institute include “open society” advocate George Soros along with Charles Koch (both founders and major funders of the “Quincy Institute“).

Soros loves an “open society” as long as it does not in any way challenge his own political biases. If anyone holds different views, he’ll spend millions to shut down debate.

The Poynter Institute is also funded by the United States government itself, via major grants from the National Endowment for Democracy. So here is what happens when you scratch below the surface a bit: The suppression of views like those of Ron Paul which are unpopular among those who control the foreign policy narrative are actually financed by the US government itself.

Do any of our dear readers support the US government taking our tax money and using it to shut Ron Paul up?

How is it that Facebook tries to sell itself as politically neutral, just making sure only facts are allowed through, while at the same time partnering with such a politically biased and unethical organization as Politifact and the Poynter Institute? Is Facebook really about fostering a lively debate or is it about controlling the narrative favored by the Washington elites?

We have fact-checked Politifact’s fact checkers and we find them to be biased, sloppy, and inimical to the values we should share as Americans in favor of open debate.

And Facebook? End your suppression of Dr. Ron Paul’s op-ed on the coronavirus!

Source: Ron Paul Institute

The U.S. Wants Smartphone Location Data to Fight Coronavirus. Privacy advocates are worried | NBC News

200318-coronavirus-new-york-oculus-se-1039p_e7dd421e936d5d4b551425cf3f86fb44.fit-1240wJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: As Edward Snowden was correct to reveal to the international press (at the sacrifice of his own well-being and freedom) that the NSA had abused their power and broke the law in gathering metadata on every American citizen, giving more power to the government is not a wise move regardless of the reason. Once they have that power, they’ll always have it (and will eventually abuse it). For example, the USA Patriot Act continues to be in force today without a tangible terrorist threat. Your civil liberties and sovereign rights continue to be compromised daily.

By Dylan Byers

Federal health officials say they could use anonymous, aggregated user data collected by the tech companies to map the spread of the virus.

The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are asking Facebook, Google and other tech giants to give them greater access to Americans’ smartphone location data in order to help them combat the spread of the coronavirus, according to four people at companies involved in the discussions who are not authorized to speak about them publicly.

Federal health officials say they could use anonymous, aggregated user data collected by the tech companies to map the spread of the virus — a practice known as “syndromic surveillance” — and prevent further infections. They could also use the data to see whether people were practicing “social distancing.”

Some sources stressed that the effort would be anonymized and that government would not have access to specific individuals’ locations. They noted that users would be required to opt-in to the effort.

The federal effort, first reported by The Washington Post, will force the tech giants to weigh their commitments to user privacy against their desire to help combat a disease that has cost thousands of human lives and upended the global economy.

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

The government officials have held at least two calls in recent days with representatives from the companies, the sources said. Those officials are “very serious” about making this happen, a person at one of the tech companies said.

Similar and more aggressive surveillance practices have already been put to use in China, South Korea and Israel. The moves have set off alarm bells among privacy advocates who fear what the government may do with users’ data.

Facebook already provides health researchers and nongovernmental organizations in some countries with anonymized data to help disease prevention efforts. Laura McGorman, policy lead of Facebook’s “Data for Good” program, said a similar effort could be used “to understand and help combat the spread of the virus.”

But other sources warned that providing the government with greater access to anonymized location data now could lead to the erosion of individual privacy down the line, especially if the government starts to ask for non-anonymized data.

Representatives from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco all took part in the call with White House and federal health officials. Spokespeople for the companies declined to comment on the discussions.

Source: NBC News

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

“The True Story of the Bilderberg Group” and What They May Be Planning Now: A Review of Daniel Estulin’s Book | Global Research

500px-Bilderberg_-_OosterbeekJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: The Bilderberg Group met this year on March 3rd, 2020.

By Stephen Lendman

The Bilderberg Group will be meeting behind closed doors at the Hotel Montreux Palace, Montreux from the 30th of May to the 2nd of June, 2019.

Henry Kissinger, Jared Kushner, Jens Stoltenberg, Mark Carney (Governor of the Bank of England) among others will be attending. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will also be present.
The list of guests and personalities can be consulted on the Bildberg website. The names of many of the prominent personalities including Pompeo are not on the list.

The yearly Bilderberg talk-fest, which dates back to 1954, features a guest list of around 130 people from Europe and North America including everyone from royals to business tycoons and academics. … According to the official Bilderberg website, discussions are held under the Chatham House Rule, which means participants can use any information they receive during the meeting but cannot reveal its source. (Thelocal.ch)

The topics announced by the organizers for the 2019 Bilderberg meeting are:

1. A Stable Strategic Order
2. What Next for Europe?
3. Climate Change and Sustainability
4. China
5. Russia
6. The Future of Capitalism
7. Brexit
8. The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
9. The Weaponisation of Social Media
10. The Importance of Space
11. Cyber Threats

***

The following review article by Stephen Lendman was originally published on Global Research in June 2009.

***

Daniel Estulin has investigated and researched the Bilderberg Group’s far-reaching influence on business and finance, global politics, war and peace, and control of the world’s resources and its money.

His book, “The True Story of the Bilderberg Group,” was published in 2005 and is now updated in a new 2009 edition. He states that in 1954, “the most powerful men in the world met for the first time” in Oosterbeek, Netherlands, “debated the future of the world,” and decided to meet annually in secret. They called themselves the Bilderberg Group with a membership representing a who’s who of world power elites, mostly from America, Canada, and Western Europe with familiar names like David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Lloyd Blankfein, George Soros, Donald Rumsfeld, Rupert Murdoch, other heads of state, influential senators, congressmen and parliamentarians, Pentagon and NATO brass, members of European royalty, selected media figures, and invited others – some quietly by some accounts like Barack Obama and many of his top officials.

Always well represented are top figures from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), IMF, World Bank, Trilateral Commission, EU, and powerful central bankers from the Federal Reserve, the ECB’s Jean-Claude Trichet, and Bank of England’s Mervyn King.

For over half a century, no agenda or discussion topics became public nor is any press coverage allowed. The few invited fourth estate attendees and their bosses are sworn to secrecy. Nonetheless, Estulin undertook “an investigative journey” that became his life’s work. He states:

“Slowly, one by one, I have penetrated the layers of secrecy surrounding the Bilderberg Group, but I could not have done this withot help of ‘conscientious objectors’ from inside, as well as outside, the Group’s membership.” As a result, he keeps their names confidential.

Whatever its early mission, the Group is now “a shadow world government….threaten(ing) to take away our right to direct our own destinies (by creating) a disturbing reality” very much harming the public’s welfare. In short, Bilderbergers want to supplant individual nation-state sovereignty with an all-powerful global government, corporate controlled, and check-mated by militarized enforcement.

“Imagine a private club where presidents, prime ministers, international bankers and generals rub shoulders, where gracious royal chaperones ensure everyone gets along, and where the people running the wars, markets, and Europe (and America) say what they never dare say in public.”

Early in its history, Bilderbergers decided “to create an ‘Aristocracy of purpose’ between Europe and the United States (to reach consensus to rule the world on matters of) policy, economics, and (overall) strategy.” NATO was essential for their plans – to ensure “perpetual war (and) nuclear blackmail” to be used as necessary. Then proceed to loot the planet, achieve fabulous wealth and power, and crush all challengers to keep it.

Along with military dominance, controlling the world’s money is crucial for with it comes absolute control as the powerful 19th century Rothschild family understood. As the patriarch Amschel Rothschild once said: “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.”

Bilderbergers comprise the world’s most exclusive club. No one buys their way in. Only the Group’s Steering Committee decides whom to invite, and in all cases participants are adherents to One World Order governance run by top power elites.

According to Steering Committee rules:

“the invited guests must come alone; no wives, girlfriends, husbands or boyfriends. Personal assistants (meaning security, bodyguards, CIA or other secret service protectors) cannot attend the conference and must eat in a separate hall. (Also) The guests are explicitly forbidden from giving interviews to journalists” or divulge anything that goes on in meetings.

Host governments provide overall security to keep away outsiders. One-third of attendees are political figures. The others are from industry, finance, academia, labor and communications.

Meeting procedure is by Chatham House Rules letting attendees freely express their views in a relaxed atmosphere knowing nothing said will be quoted or revealed to the public. Meetings “are always frank, but do not always conclude with consensus.”

Membership consists of annual attendees (around 80 of the world’s most powerful) and others only invited occasionally because of their knowledge or involvement in relevant topics. Those most valued are asked back, and some first-timers are chosen for their possible later usefulness.

Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, for example, who attended in 1991. “There, David Rockefeller told (him) why the North American Free Trade Agreement….was a Bilderberg priority and that the group needed him to support it. The next year, Clinton was elected president,” and on January 1, 1994 NAFTA took effect. Numerous other examples are similar, including who gets chosen for powerful government, military and other key positions.

Bilderberg Objectives

The Group’s grand design is for “a One World Government (World Company) with a single, global marketplace, policed by one world army, and financially regulated by one ‘World (Central) Bank’ using one global currency.” Their “wish list” includes:

— “one international identify (observing) one set of universal values;”

— centralized control of world populations by “mind control;” in other words, controlling world public opinion;

— a New World Order with no middle class, only “rulers and servants (serfs),” and, of course, no democracy;

— “a zero-growth society” without prosperity or progress, only greater wealth and power for the rulers;

— manufactured crises and perpetual wars;

— absolute control of education to program the public mind and train those chosen for various roles;

— “centralized control of all foreign and domestic policies;” one size fits all globally;

— using the UN as a de facto world government imposing a UN tax on “world citizens;”

— expanding NAFTA and WTO globally;

— making NATO a world military;

— imposing a universal legal system; and

— a global “welfare state where obedient slaves will be rewarded and non-conformists targeted for extermination.”

Secret Bilderberg Partners

In the US, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is dominant. One of its 1921 founders, Edward Mandell House, was Woodrow Wilson’s chief advisor and rumored at the time to be the nation’s real power from 1913 – 1921. On his watch, the Federal Reserve Act passed in December 1913 giving money creation power to bankers, and the 16th Amendment was ratified in February creating the federal income tax to provide a revenue stream to pay for government debt service.

From its beginnings, CFR was committed to “a one-world government based on a centralized global financing system….” Today, CFR has thousands of influential members (including important ones in the corporate media) but keeps a low public profile, especially regarding its real agenda.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called it a “front organization (for) the heart of the American Establishment.” It meets privately and only publishes what it wishes the public to know. Its members are only Americans.

The Trilateral Commission (discussed below) is a similar group that “brings together global power brokers.” Founded by David Rockefeller, he’s also a leading Bilderberger and CFR Chairman Emeritus, organizations he continues to finance and support.

Their past and current members reflect their power:

— nearly all presidential candidates of both parties;

— leading senators and congressmen;

— key members of the fourth estate and their bosses; and

— top officials of the FBI, CIA, NSA, defense establishment, and other leading government agencies, including state, commerce, the judiciary and treasury.

For its part, “CFR has served as a virtual employment agency for the federal government under both Democrats and Republicans.” Whoever occupies the White House, “CFR’s power and agenda” have been unchanged since its 1921 founding.

It advocates a global superstate with America and other nations sacrificing their sovereignty to a central power. CFR founder Paul Warburg was a member of Roosevelt’s “brain trust.” In 1950, his son, James, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “We shall have world government whether or not you like it – by conquest or consent.”

Later at the 1992 Bilderberg Group meeting, Henry Kissinger said:

“Today, Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow, they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all people of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil….individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by their world government.”

CFR planned a New World Order before 1942, and the “UN began with a group of CFR members called the Informal Agenda Group.” They drafted the original UN proposal, presented it to Franklin Roosevelt who announced it publicly the next day. At its 1945 founding, CFR members comprised over 40 of the US delegates.

According to Professor G. William Domhoff, author of Who Rules America, the CFR operates in “small groups of about twenty-five, who bring together leaders from the six conspirator categories (industrialists, financiers, ideologues, military, professional specialists – lawyers, medical doctors, etc. – and organized labor) for detailed discussions of specific topics in the area of foreign affairs.” Domhoff added:

“The Council on Foreign Relations, while not financed by government, works so closely with it that it is difficult to distinguish Council action stimulated by government from autonomous actions. (Its) most important sources of income are leading corporations and major foundations.” The Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations to name three, and they’re directed by key corporate officials.

Dominant Media Partners

Former CBS News president Richard Salant (1961 – 64 and 1966 – 79) explained the major media’s role: “Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.”

CBS and other media giants control everything we see, hear and read – through television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, films, and large portions of the Internet. Their top officials and some journalists attend Bilderberg meetings – on condition they report nothing.

The Rockefeller family wields enormous power, even though its reigning patriarch, David, will be 94 on June 12 and surely near the end of his dominance. However, for years “the Rockefellers (led by David) gained great influence over the media. (With it) the family gained sway over public opinion. With the pulse of public opinion, they gained deep influence in politics. And with this politics of subtle corruption, they are taking control of the nation” and now aim for total world domination.

The Bilderberger-Rockefeller scheme is to make their views “so appealing (by camouflaging them) that they become public policy (and can) pressure world leaders into submitting to the ‘needs of the Masters of the Universe.’ ” The “free world press” is their instrument to disseminate “agreed-upon propaganda.”

CFR Cabinet Control

“The National Security Act of 1947 established the office of Secretary of Defense.” Since then, 14 DOD secretaries have been CFR members.

Since 1940, every Secretary of State, except James Byrnes, has been a CFR member and/or Trilateral Commission (TC) one.

For the past 80 years, “Virtually every key US National Security and Foreign Policy Advisor has been a CFR member.

Nearly all top generals and admirals have been CFR members.

Many presidential candidates were/are CFR members, including Herbert Hoover, Adlai Stevenson, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter (also a charter TC member), George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and John McCain.

Numerous CIA directors were/are CFR members, including Richard Helmes, James Schlesinger, William Casey, William Webster, Robert Gates, James Woolsey, John Deutsch, George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and Leon Panetta.

Many Treasury Secretaries were/are CFR members, including Douglas Dillon, George Schultz, William Simon, James Baker, Nicholas Brady, Lloyd Bentsen, Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson, and Tim Geithner.

When presidents nominate Supreme Court candidates, the CFR’s “Special Group, Secret Team” or advisors vet them for acceptability. Presidents, in fact, are told who to appoint, including designees to the High Court and most lower ones.

Programming the Public Mind

According to sociologist Hadley Cantril in his 1967 book, The Human Dimension – Experiences in Policy Research:

Government “Psycho-political operations are propaganda campaigns designed to create perpetual tension and to manipulate different groups of people to accept the particular climate of opinion the CFR seeks to achieve in the world.”

Canadian writer Ken Adachi (1929 – 1989) added:

“What most Americans believe to be ‘Public Opinion’ is in reality carefully crafted and scripted propaganda designed to elicit a desired behavioral response from the public.”

And noted Australian academic and activist Alex Carey (1922 – 1988) explained the three most important 20th century developments – “The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

Web of Control

Numerous think tanks, foundations, the major media, and other key organizations are staffed with CFR members. Most of its life-members also belong to the TC and Bilderberg Group, operate secretly, and wield enormous power over US and world affairs.

The Rockefeller-Founded Trilateral Commission (TC)

On page 405 of his Memoirs, David Rockfeller wrote:

“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

In alliance with Bilderbergers, the TC also “plays a vital role in the New World Order’s scheme to use wealth, concentrated in the hands of the few, to exert world control.” TC members share common views and all relate to total unchallengeable global dominance.

Founded in 1973 and headquartered in Washington, its powerful US, EU and East Asian members seek its operative founding goal – a “New International Economic Order,” now simply a “New World Order” run by global elites from these three parts of the world with lesser members admitted from other countries.

According to TC’s web site, “each regional group has a chairman and deputy chairman, who all together constitute the leadership of the Committee. The Executive Committee draws together a further 36 individuals from the wider membership,” proportionately representing the US, EU, and East Asia in its early years, now enlarged to be broadly global.

Committee members meet several times annually to discuss and coordinate their work. The Executive Committee chooses members, and at any time around 350 belong for a three-year renewable period. Everyone is a consummate insider with expertise in business, finance, politics, the military, or the media, including past presidents, secretaries of state, international bankers, think tank and foundation executives, university presidents and selected academics, and former senators and congressmen, among others.

Although its annual reports are available for purchase, its inner workings, current goals, and operations are secret – with good reason. Its objectives harm the public so mustn’t be revealed. Trilaterals over Washington author Antony Sutton wrote:

“this group of private citizens is precisely organized in a manner that ensures its collective views have significant impact on public policy.”

In her book, Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, Holly Sklar wrote:

Powerful figures in America, Europe, and East Asia let “the rich….safeguard the interests of Western capitalism in an explosive world – probably by discouraging protectionism, nationalism, or any response that would pit the elites of one against the elites of another,” in their common quest for global dominance.

Trilateralist Zbigniew Brzezinski (TC’s co-founder) wrote in his Between Two Ages – America’s Role in the Technotronic Era:

“people, governments and economies of all nations must serve the needs of multinational banks and corporations. (The Constitution is) inadequate….the old framework of international politics, with their sphere of influence….the fiction of sovereignty….is clearly no longer compatible with reality….”

TC today is now global with members from countries as diverse as Argentina, Ukraine, Israel, Jordan, Brazil, Turkey, China and Russia. In his Trilaterals Over America, Antony Sutton believes that TC’s aim is to collaborate with Bilderbergers and CFR in “establishing public policy objectives to be implemented by governments worldwide.” He added that “Trilateralists have rejected the US Constitution and the democratic political process.” In fact, TC was established to counter a “crisis in democracy” – too much of it that had to be contained.

An official TC report was fearful about “the increased popular participation in and control over established social, political, and economic institutions and especially a reaction against the concentration of power of Congress and of state and local government.”

To address this, media control was essential to exert “restraint on what newspapers may publish (and TV and radio broadcast).” Then according to Richard Gardner in the July 1974 issue of Foreign Affairs (a CFR publication):

CFR’s leadership must make “an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece,” until the very notion disappears from public discourse.

Bilderberg/CFR/Trilateralist success depends on finding “a way to get us to surrender our liberties in the name of some common threat or crisis. The foundations, educational institutions, and research think tanks supported by (these organizations) oblige by financing so-called ‘studies’ which are then used to justify their every excess. The excuses vary, but the target is always individual liberty. Our liberty” and much more.

Bilderbergers, Trilateralists and CFR members want “an all-encompassing monopoly” – over government, money, industry, and property that’s “self-perpetuating and eternal.” In Confessions of a Monopolist (1906), Frederick C. Howe explained its workings in practice:

“The rules of big business: Get a monopoly; let Society work for you. So long as we see all international revolutionaries and all international capitalists as implacable enemies of one another, then we miss a crucial point….a partnership between international monopoly capitalism and international revolutionary socialism is for their mutual benefit.”

In the Rockefeller File, Gary Allen wrote:

“By the late nineteenth century, the inner sanctums of Wall Street understood that the most efficient way to gain a monopoly was to say it was for the ‘public good’ and ‘public interest.’ “

David Rockefeller learned the same thing from his father, John D., Jr. who learned it from his father, John D. Sr. They hated competition and relentlessly strove to eliminate it – for David on a global scale through a New World Order.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Trilateralists and CFR members collaborated on the latter’s “1980 Project,” the largest ever CFR initiative to steer world events “toward a particular desirable future outcome (involving) the utter disintegration of the economy.” Why so is the question?

Because by the 1950s and 1960s, worldwide industrial growth meant more competition. It was also a model to be followed, and “had to be strangled in the cradle” or at least greatly contained. In America as well beginning in the 1980s. The result has been a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, shrinkage of the middle class, and plan for its eventual demise.

The North American Union (NAU)

The idea emerged during the Reagan administration in the early 1980s. David Rockefeller, George Schultz and Paul Volker told the president that Canada and America could be politically and economically merged over the next 15 years except for one problem – French-speaking Quebec. Their solution – elect a Bilderberg-friendly prime minister, separate Quebec from the other provinces, then make Canada America’s 51st state. It almost worked, but not quite when a 1995 secession referendum was defeated – 50.56% to 49.44%, but not the idea of merger.

At a March 23, 2005 Waco, Texas meeting, attended by George Bush, Mexico’s Vincente Fox, and Canada’s Paul Martin, the Security and and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) was launched, also known as the North American Union (NAU). It was a secretive Independent Task Force of North America agreement – a group organized by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, and CFR with the following aims:

— circumventing the legislatures of three countries and their constitutions;

— suppressing public knowledge or consideration; and

— proposing greater US, Canadian and Mexican economic, political, social, and security integration with secretive working groups formed to devise non-debatable, not voted on agreements to be binding and unchangeable.

In short – a corporate coup d’etat against the sovereignty of three nations enforced by hard line militarization to suppress opposition.

If enacted, it will create a borderless North America, corporate controlled, without barriers to trade or capital flows for business giants, mainly US ones and much more – America’s access to vital resources, especially oil and Canada’s fresh water.

Secretly, over 300 SPP initiatives were crafted to harmonize the continent’s policies on energy, food, drugs, security, immigration, manufacturing, the environment, and public health along with militarizing three nations for enforcement.

SPP represents another step toward the Bilderberg/Trilateralist/CFR goal for World Government, taking it one step at a time. A “United Europe” was another, the result of various treaties and economic agreements:

— the December 1951 six-nation European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC);

— the March 1957 six-nation Treaty of Rome establishing the European Economic Community (EEC);

also the European Atomic Energy Commission (EAEC) by a second Treaty of Rome;

— the October 1957 European Court of Justice to settle regional trade disputes;

— the May 1960 seven-nation European Free Trade Association (EFTA);

— the July 1967 European Economic Community (EEC) merging the ECSC, EAEC and EEC together in one organization;

— the 1968 European Customs Union to abolish duties and establish uniform imports taxing among EEC nations;

— the 1978 European Currency Unit (ECU);

— the February 1986 Single European Act revision of the 1957 Treaty of Rome; it established the objective of forming a Common Market by December 31, 1992;

— the February 1992 Maastricht Treaty creating the EU on November 1, 1993; and

— the name euro was adopted in December 1995; it was introduced in January 1999 replacing the European Currency Unit (ECU); euros began circulating on January 2002; they’re now the official currency of 16 of the 27 EU states.

Over half a century, the above steps cost EU members their sovereignty “as some 70 to 80 per cent of the laws passed in Europe involve just rubber stamping of regulations already written by nameless bureaucrats in ‘working groups’ in Brussels or Luxembourg.”

The EU and NAU share common features:

— advocacy from a influential spokesperson;

— an economic and later political union;

— hard line security, and for Europe, ending wars on the continent between EU member states;

— establishment of a collective consciousness in place of nationalism;

— the blurring of borders and creation of a “supra-government,” a superstate;

— secretive arrangements to mask real objectives; and

— the creation of a common currency and eventual global one.

Steps Toward a North American Union

— the October 4, 1988 Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the US and Canada, finalized the previous year;

— at the 1991 Bilderberg meeting, David Rockefeller got governor Bill Clinton’s support for NAFTA if he became president;

— on January 1, 1994, with no debate under “fast-track” rules, Congress approved WTO legislation;

— in December 1994 at the first Summit of the Americas, 34 Hemispheric leaders committed their nations to a Free Trade of the Americas agreement (FTAA) by 2005 – so far unachieved;

— on July 4, 2000, Mexican president Vincente Fox called for a North American common market in 20 years;

— on February 2001, the White House published a joint statement from George Bush and Vincente Fox called the “Guanajuato Proposal;” it was for a US-Canada-Mexico prosperity partnership (aka North American Union);

— in September 2001, Bush and Fox agreed to a “Partnership for Prosperity Initiative;”

— the September 11, 2001 attack gave cover to including “security” as part of a future partnership;

— on October 7, 2001, a CFA meeting highlighted “The Future of North American Integration in the Wake of Terrorist Attacks; for the first time, “security” became part of a future “partnership for prosperity;” also, Canada was to be included in a “North American” agreement;

— in 2002, the North American Forum on Integration (NAFI) was established in Montreal “to address the issues raised by North American integration as well as identify new ideas and strategies to reinforce the North American region;”

— in January 2003, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE – composed of 150 top CEOs) launched the “North American Security and Prosperity Initiative” calling for continental integration;

— in April 2004, Canadian prime minister Paul Martin announced the nation’s first ever national security policy called Securing an Open Society;

— on October 15, 2004, CFR established an Independent Task Force on the Future of North America – for a future continental union;

— in March 2005, a CFR report titled Creating a North American Community called for continental integration by 2010 “to enhance, prosperity, and opportunity for all North Americans;” and

— on March 23, 2005 in Waco, Texas, America, Canada and Mexico leaders launched the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) – aka North American Union (NAU).

Secretive negotiations continue. Legislative debate is excluded, and public inclusion and debate are off the table. In May 2005, the CFR Independent Task Force on the Future of North America published a follow-up report titled Building a North American Community – proposing a borderless three-nation union by 2010.

In June and July 2005, the Dominican Republic – Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) passed the Senate and House establishing corporate-approved trade rules to further impoverish the region and move a step closer to continental integration.

In March 2006, the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC) was created at the second SPP summit in Cancun, Mexico. Composed of 30 top North American CEOs, it serves as an official trilateral SPP working group.

Secret business and government meetings continue so there’s no way to confirm SPP’s current status or if Barack Obama is seamlessly continuing George Bush’s agenda. In an earlier article, this writer said:

SPP efforts paused during the Bush to Obama transition, but “deep integration” plans remain. Canada’s Fraser Institute proposed renaming the initiative the North American Standards and Regulatory Area (NASRA) to disguise its real purpose. It said the “SPP brand” is tarnished so re-branding is essential – to fool the public until it’s too late to matter.

Bilderbergers, Trilaterists, and CFR leaders back it as another step toward global integration and won’t “stop until the entire world is unified under the auspices and the political umbrella of a One World Company, a nightmarish borderless world run by the world’s most powerful clique” – comprised of key elitist members of these dominant organizations.

In April 2007, the Transatlantic Economic Council was established between America and the EU to:

— create an “official international governmental body – by executive fiat;

— harmonize economic and regulatory objectives;

— move toward a Transatlantic Common Market; and

— a step closer to One World Government run by the world’s most powerful corporate interests.

Insights into the 2009 Bilderberg Group Meeting

From May 14 – 17, Bilderbergers held their annual meeting in Vouliagmeni, Greece, and according to Daniel Estulin have dire plans for global economies.

According to his pre-meeting sources, they’re divided on two alternatives:

“Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty (or) an intense but shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”

Other agenda items included:

— “the future of the US dollar and US economy;”

— continued deception about green shoots signaling an end to recession and improving economy later in the year;

— suppressing the fact that bank stress tests were a sham and were designed for deception, not an accurate assessment of major banks’ health;

— projecting headlined US unemployment to hit 14% by year end – way above current forecasts and meaning the true number will be double, at minimum, with all uncounted categories included; and

— a final push to get the Lisbon Treaty passed for pan-European (EU) adoption of neoliberal rules, including greater privatizations, fewer worker rights and social benefits, open border trade favoring developed over emerging states, and greater militarization to suppress civil liberties and human rights.

After the meeting, Estulin got a 73-page report on what was discussed. He noted that “One of Bilderberg’s primary concerns….is the danger that their zeal to reshape the world by engineering chaos (toward) their long term agenda could cause the situation to spiral out of control and eventually lead to a scenario where Bilderberg and the global elite in general are overwhelmed by events and end up losing their control over the planet.”

Estulin also noted some considerable disagreement between “hardliners” wanting a “dramatic decline and a severe, short-term depression (versus others) who think that things have gone too far” so that “the fallout from the global economic cataclysm” can’t be known, may be greater than anticipated, and may harm Bilderberger interests. Also, “some European bankers (expressed great alarm over their own fate and called the current) high wire act ‘unsustainable.’ ”

There was a combination of agreement and fear that the situation remains dire and the worst of the crisis lies ahead, mainly because of America’s extreme debt level that must be resolved to produce a healthy, sustainable recovery.

Topics also included:

— establishing a Global Treasury Department and Global Central Bank, possibly partnered with or as part of the IMF;

— a global currency;

— destruction of the dollar through what longtime market analyst Bob Chapman calls “a stealth default on (US) debt by continuing to issue massive amounts of money and credit and in the process devaluing the dollar,” a process he calls “fraud;”

— a global legal system;

— exploiting the Swine Flu scare to create a WHO global department of health; and

— the overall goal of a global government and the end of national sovereignty.

In the past, Estulin’s sources proved accurate. Earlier, he predicted the housing crash and 2007 – 2008 financial market decline, preceded by the kind of financial crisis triggered by the Lehman Brothers collapse. Watch for further updates from him as new information leaks out on what the world’s power elites have planned going forward.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre of Research for Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday – Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.

James Woods Gives Interesting Prediction for Who Will Win the 2020 Dem Primary | Trending Politics

5e3f0f6bcbc90james-woodsJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: Watching the Democratic candidates wrestle with each other at the numerous debates we’ve come to the conclusion that none of them are qualified to be President. Also we often thought, as James Woods does, that Hillary is still orchestrating the Democratic Party behind the scenes and might just jump into the fray to “save the day” at the Convention. 

Conservative actor James Woods is back on Twitter and has a lot to say. Woods took a break from the social media platform after he was suspended multiple times by the liberal leaders at Twitter.

On Friday, Woods gave an interesting theory for who he thinks will win the Democratic primary race.

“Just for giggles, imagine this: the #IowaCauscuses were not a snafu, but an engineered ‘cluster muck’ to keep the #Democrat field wide open. The #ImpeachmentSham was a way to air Biden’s corruption. The chaos leads to a brokered convention. Guess which drunken hag saves the day?” Woods tweeted.

According to Woods, Hillary Clinton will swoop in and win the election.

“The #Clintons are like nuclear cockroaches. They can survive anything. Remember you read it here: #HillaryClinton has a solid chance at being the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee in a brokered convention. She’s the Terminator of American politics,” Woods tweeted.

Iowa was a disaster to say the least. So much so that the Associated Press couldn’t even declare a winner. “There is evidence the party has not accurately tabulated some of its results, including those released late Thursday that the party reported as complete. The AP’s tabulation of the party’s results are at 99% of precincts reporting, with data missing from one of 1,765 precincts, among other issues,” they reported.

Check out what the Daily Wire reported:

The results as they stand now show a virtual tie between former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pett Buttigieg and Vermont Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, 26.2% to 26.1%. Sen. Elizabeth Warren came in third at 18% and former vice president Joe Biden fourth at 15.8%.

Woods’ theory — that Iowa was no accident and intended to keep the field “wide open” — has been voiced by others, especially Sanders’ supporters. They think the entire process is slanted against their candidate, who got aced out of the 2016 nomination by a biased system set up to ensure a Clinton win.

And on Biden, it’s not the first time speculation has swirled that the whole Ukraine-impeachment fiasco was really intended to take out Biden, not President Trump.

After the smoke cleared about Trump’s July 25 phone call to the Ukrainian president asking for a “favor,” it emerged that Biden’s son Hunter made hundreds of thousands of dollars through his employment with Burisma, the largest private gas company in Ukraine — despite having no known qualifications for the job. And when word spread that a prosecutor was looking into the matter, Biden demanded that the prosecutor be fired.

Biden is on tape discussing his push for the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, bragging he had threatened to withhold $1 billion until Shokin was canned. “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” he says he told Ukrainian leaders. “Well son of a bitch, he got fired,” Biden says with a smile in the video clip.

Even though Team Trump and GOP lawmakers never called Biden or his son to testify in the Senate trial, their shady business dealings were front and center. And while Trump’s approval rating went up over the course of the trial, Biden’s plummeted, leading to his dismal fourth-place finish in Iowa.

What’s more, Woods’ theory about a brokered convention could well play out. Even though Clinton is not even in the race, there’s no clear front runner and few in the party are jazzed about their choices. Along the path to the nomination, delegates are distributed proportionally, meaning a candidate who wins 14% of the vote gets 14% of the delegates, and so on. With eight candidates still in the race, it may come down to no candidate winning a majority of the delegates, which means no one would be picked until the Democratic National Committee’s convention in July.

So Woods just might really be on to something here.

Source: Trending Politics

Gems amid garbage: What’s in the Senate Intelligence report on Obama’s response to 2016 ‘Russian meddling’ | RT

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Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: Excellent source material on the origins of the Russian interference in the 2016 elections and the presumptions underlying the impeachment of Trump. Turns out the CIA Director was behind the whole affair and the Democrats were his foot soldiers.

By Nebojsa Malic

Much of the new Senate report about ‘Russian meddling’ in the 2016 election consists of Obama administration officials covering their posteriors – but is also unwittingly revealing about its (false) premises, sources and methods.

A day after its members voted along party lines in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee joined forces to publish yet another fan-fiction in the ‘Russian meddling in 2016 US presidential election’ saga, this time focusing on the Obama administration’s responses.
The problem obvious right from the start is that the committee presupposes the existence of said meddling, citing the intelligence community assessment commissioned by Obama and Mueller indictments as evidence rather than unproven assertions. The “geopolitical context” of events in the report is a perfect example of how rotten assumptions and circular reasoning lead to garbage conclusions.That said, there are a few revelations in the report that deserve attention. First of all, even while the entire section on page 11 is redacted, a footnote left up reveals that the first to raise the alarm about “Russian meddling” was John Brennan, CIA director at the time. In what must be a remarkable coincidence, he has since become an outspoken TV and Twitter pundit, specializing in accusing President Trump and Republican senators of treason.

Brennan is the one that briefed the congressional “Gang of Eight” over the course of August 2016 – starting with House Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. The Republicans were all briefed “individually” on September 6, along with Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) who sat on the Intel Committee. No notes about any of the meetings exist, of course.

Three weeks later, on September 22, Feinstein and Schiff issued a statement that they both “concluded that Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the US election” (p. 33). The report does not record the administration’s reaction to Schiff and Feinstein getting ahead of the White House, which was supposedly still hoping to address the whole thing with a bipartisan statement.

Schiff then went on to become the leading figure in the Democrats’ efforts to impeach Trump – first citing “Russian collusion” then latching on to the Ukraine phone call.

The report also reveals that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) colluded with the Washington Post to publish the story on June 14, 2016 about the “hacking” of their network (p.5). That is supposedly the first time anyone in the Obama administration found out about the DNC “hack.” This DNC behavior – running to the media before informing the government, which was run by Democrats! – ought to raise eyebrows, but the committee just moves on.

Here is another gem: The official ODNI-DHS statement about “Russian interference” was published at 3:30 PM on October 7, 2016 – a Friday, when news tends to get buried. Exactly 33 minutes later, the Post (them again!) publishes the Access Hollywood tape, intended to be the “October surprise” that sinks Trump’s candidacy. About half an hour later, WikiLeaks drops the first batch of emails from Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta. The rest is history.

Speaking of WikiLeaks, the section pertaining to them is entirely redacted in the Senate report. Earlier, the committee concluded that WikiLeaks was a “Russian cutout” – again, an assertion without evidence.

Keep in mind that this is the same committee whose understanding of “Russia’s social media-predicated attack against our democracy” was “significantly informed” by, among others, New Knowledge – the very outfit that masterminded an entirely fake ‘Russian meddling’ disinformation campaign during the 2017 special election for the US Senate in Alabama.

Another thing that stands out in the report is how the Obama administration perceived the whole affair. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and UN Ambassador Samantha Power both compared it to secret meetings prior to the raid on Osama bin Laden, while Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates described it as “very cloak and dagger” (p.13).

Secretary of State John Kerry even wrote a memo proposing a sequel to the Warren Commission (which investigated the JFK assassination) to tackle Russian “attempts” at interference (p.42). Instead, Obama chose to create the handpicked working group that would produce the infamous Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).

Curiously, the report does not mention at all the FBI’s efforts to spy on the Trump campaign, using FISA warrants predicated on the Clinton-commissioned dossier compiled by British spy Christopher Steele. One would think it ought to, given that it’s a very specific “response” to alleged Russian meddling. Perhaps that’s somewhere in the redacted parts? 

In all seriousness, by now it should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer that “Russian meddling” has been a lie all along, foisted on the American people by political operatives and hyper-partisan spies, and that its use in an attempt to de-legitimize a presidency may have done more actual harm to US institutions and political system than anything any external actor could have hoped to achieve. 

That the Senate Intel Committee insists on flogging this particular dead horse even after the impeachment hoax fell on its face suggests that the phantom “Russian” menace is still being used to pursue some other sinister political objective.

Source: RT

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 showsA 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 ShadowThe 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 campaignThe 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

Term limits will drain the swamp and stop career politicians | The Washington Times

CapitalClockBy Conner Drigotas

One of the ironies of the impeachment of President Trump is just how similar the cast of characters is to those in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. By the time the trial was over, Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Nadler, Maxine Waters, Lindsay Graham, and 80 other members of Congress had cast a vote. And what is obvious is that the same players have been acting out for decades. When will things change?

Let’s face the facts: Washington politicians and bureaucrats arrive in the swamp and become entrenched. The longest-serving members of Congress have served for more than 45 years, and there are 44 congressional districts in which the age of the representative is more than double the median age of their constituents.

Incumbents, of course, have a defined advantage in this: In 2016, 97 percent of representatives were reelected. So if Americans want solutions at the highest levels of government, we should be demanding fresh leadership on a regular basis: Politicians and government officials should be subject to a short tenure before returning to civilian life through term limits.

Modern problems demand modern solutions. Aging seniors grilling tech gurus about privacy, emerging technologies and consumer rights have become a national joke. More concerning, tech illiteracy is yielding bad legislation that puts American security at risk.

Yet, the only thing the opposition party can offer judging by the Democratic presidential candidate lineup is more of the same, with candidates claiming long careers contributing to the swamp. Elizabeth Warren is in her eighth year in Washington, and she’s competing for the Oval Office against Bernie Sanders, who’s been an elected official since 1981.

Both are looking to extend their stay in Washington, whether as president or through a continued Senate tenure. Joe Biden, another candidate, first took public office 50 years ago, in 1970. Fresh names and fresh ideas, on both the right, with Donald Trump, and the left, with Pete Buttigieg, have already won the first caucus of 2020. Americans are clearly hungry for something new.

Term limits could be one viable measure to prevent career politicians. It’s an idea that has been promoted by Mr. Trump with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The struggle, of course, lies in the fact that members of Congresswould have to be willing to vote themselves out of a job.

Removing career politicians, regardless of their success or good will, ensures that the job is in the service of the people rather than in pursuit of greater net worth. But term limits would only solve a part of the problem. Beyond elected officials, there are more than 2.1 million federal employees propping up the status quo.

The vast web of bureaucrats who staff the federal government’s many administrative branches have an even longer tenure than Congress. The most tenured Washington bureaucrat has been working for the government since 1942. No matter how perfect a civil servant’s record on the job, longevity itself must be addressed.The administrative state enables bureaucrats to write rules, direct policy and impact the lives of everyday Americans. Yet, voters can’t vote this vast workforce out of office. Federal employees are difficult to remove, and often the will to remove them isn’t there. A 2013 study by the office for governmental accountability found that only 0.18 percent of employees were terminated in 2013, roughly 10 percent the rate of the private sector.

Mr. Trump has often pledged to “drain the swamp,” but he has yet to follow through on that campaign promise. The number of federal employees has remained relatively consistent since the 1950s and held steady through the Trump presidency. Federal tenure rules make it increasingly difficult to remove low performers. It doesn’t seem to matter who’s in office, or from what party — these career bureaucrats continue to exert power.This unchecked control is especially troubling when it involves sensitive information concerning national security. In 2017, officials with anonymity confessed that intelligence agencies routinely withheld information from the commander-in-chief, asserting authority as independent actors not beholden to elected officials or the American people.

That some longtime politicians and bureaucrats may be acting in the best interests of the people doesn’t negate the larger point: Those who contribute to the swamp far outnumber honest civil servants. Simply put, governance should not be a career; it should be temporary and in service to the public. Short tenures are the way to do just that, since they’ve historically served to keep the size of government power in check.

Whoever wins in November, though, is unlikely to make a difference in that regard. For Congress and the Washington Machine, history has shown that the White House won’t impact business as usual.

But things need to change — from term limits to an end to federal tenure. Abbreviated careers in government would ensure the will of the people informs the highest levels of government.

Let’s show swamp dwellers the door.

• Conner Drigotas is the director of communications at a national law firm and a Young Voices contributor.

Source: Washington Times

Tucker Carlson: The New Way Forward Act | YouTube

Sponsored by 44 House Democrats insuring that criminals can move to the USA with impunity at U.S. taxpayer expense. This is the most horrendous piece of legislation ever proposed by the radical left/liberal cabal in the House of Representatives. This is  treason and should be reckoned with. None or these sponsors have any business staying in the U.S. Congress for one more term. 

Source: YouTube