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American Tax Payers Spend At Least $23 Billion On Israel Every Year

By Eric Striker – National Justice – January 1, 2021

Last September, Donald Trump accidentally upended an entire generation of myths invented by the left and right that purport to explain America’s costly and unpopular military adventures in the Middle East:

“The fact is, we don’t have to be in the Middle East, other than we want to protect Israel. We’ve been very good to Israel. Other than that, we don’t have to be in the Middle East. You know there was a time we needed desperately oil, we don’t need that anymore.”

As Mondoweiss pointed out at the time, the explosive admission went completely unmentioned in the mainstream media, which traditionally hangs on every one of Trump’s words and reacts hysterically.

Categorizing America’s foreign policy catastrophes as done in the service to Israel has until the Trump era always been dismissed by media tastemakers and political gatekeepers as rank anti-Semitism driven by reductionist, simplistic and conspiratorial thinking, even when intelligence officials like Michael Scheuer and foreign policy experts affirm the view.

Trump’s lack of subtlety when remarking on using American blood and treasure to incrementally advance the interests of the Jewish state is one reason why the Israel lobby, which is perpetually paranoid about the public noticing their activities, is not keen on reciprocating his often suffocating love.

Their paranoia is justified. This year Congress made the mistake of combining its $900 billion dollar coronavirus stimulus bill, which suffering people are closely following the development of, with the yearly $1.4 trillion dollar fiscal budget, which is typically ignored.

A deluge of popular anger was provoked by news that we would only be receiving a $600 dollar check under the guise of budget austerity. At the same time, buried deep in the 5,600 monstrosity was a provision setting aside supposed budget constraints to give Israel the equivalent of $5,000 dollars for each of its citizens.

Jews in the media responded to the controversy by calling indignant American tax payers, including actress Alyssa Milano and various left-wing journalists, “fools” and “anti-Semites.” They doubled down by stating that the $500 million dollars provided to Israel was a drop in a $2.3 trillion dollar bucket. They pointed out that other countries, such as Jordan, were receiving foreign aid as well.

But even critics of Israel do not properly calculate the true price Americans pay for a state that — unlike South Korea or Germany — does not provide any economic or military benefits to the homeland. America does not have military bases in Israel, nor does Israel have anything to trade.

The general figure provided for annual US aid to Israel is $3.8 billion, but as former CIA intelligence officer Philip Giraldi has written, this figure excludes our completely artificial $9 billion dollar trade deficit with that country, as well as the $8 billion provided in “loan guarantees” that are basically giveaways since the US Treasury pays interest and principal on these loans.

The Black Budget

Covert “black budget” funding to the Jewish state is another topic shrouded in mystery.

In 2015 a public interest group, the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, sued the CIA for its refusal to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding records on how much is spent in service of Israel, including in respect to intelligence gathering efforts on American citizens that is then sent to the Mossad.

The Department of Justice fought a ferocious, four year long legal battle to keep this information secret and ultimately won.

Based on publicly available pre-1990 black budget expenses, the CIA is dedicating between $13.2 billion to Israeli interests every year if spending has been tacked to inflation. The number may be even higher under the Trump administration, especially since it has escalated the conflict with Iran.

US Spending To Advance Israel

Rarely discussed is how US foreign aid to Muslim countries is, as Trump has constantly reminded us, nothing more than bribing them into cooperating with Israel. US aid to Israel, by contrast, is unconditional.

All of the nations that share a border with Israel (Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and even to certain players in Palestinians and Syria) receive payments from the United States. Were it not for the peculiar, thankless relationship America has with Israel, US tax dollars would not be bankrolling the entire Egyptian military, nor would we be propping up the basket case monarchy in Jordan by handing them 4% of their GDP every year.

The following is a list of expenses — financial, geopolitical, and human — that the American people must shoulder to guarantee the security, stability and geopolitical expansion of 9 million Israelis.

1) Egypt — $2.2 billion a year

The United States’ foreign aid to Egypt, about $1.3 billion which goes to its military and the rest to its economy, is entirely predicated on the country’s military dictators maintaining a close intelligence and diplomatic relationship with Israel. The country’s current leader, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, took power in 2014 in an Israeli-backed coup that deposed the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt, which was once a regional superpower that fought the Israelis during the Six Days War, restored diplomatic ties with Israel in 1979 under a US brokered deal.

The single-issue relationship was put on display when Senator Rand Paul attempted to cut aid to Egypt during a 2017 Congressional fight. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), five US Senators and Benjamin Netanyahu himself all intervened to block Paul’s amendment, which was crushed in the Senate by a large majority after Jewish groups penned a letter demanding the aid continue as usual. According to both Netanyahu and AIPAC, America’s payoff to the Egyptian military establishment is the only thing keeping Israel’s formidable neighbor from attacking them.

2) Jordan — $1.5 billion a year

In 1994, Jordan became the second Arab state after Egypt to restore formal ties with Israel.

Prior to 1994, Jordan received a smaller sum of aid from the US, but the country retained relative geopolitical independence, including support for Saddam Hussein during the first Persian Gulf War.

As a state bordering Palestine that for years retained its claim to the West Bank, the Jordanian monarchs have been a useful asset for Israel. The country’s establishment is widely despised by Palestinians, even though the Jordanian public is broadly sympathetic to their plight.

In exchange for breaking solidarity with the Arab world’s boycott of Israel, the United States signed a generous free trade agreement with Jordan, where we prop up their economy by buying 25% of their exports and hand them $1.5 billion a year (close to 4% of their GDP) via USAID.

3) Iraq — $1.1 Billion (Excluding cost of the Iraq war)

The Iraq war, and our continued presence in the country 17 years later, is the product of Jews in Washington primarily loyal to the state of Israel.

This is the opinion of the man who went before the United Nations and went down in history as having sold the weapons of mass destruction lie, former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

In Karen DeYoung’s 2007 biography of Powell, Soldier, he singles out Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz as the real architects of war. In one interview with DeYoung, Powell even refers to Donald Rumsfeld — the Gentile who is usually blamed alongside Dick Cheney for the Iraq debacle — as a man controlled by the “JINSA crowd” in the Defense Department. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is an Israel lobbying firm similar to AIPAC.

If JINSA and the “card-carrying Likud members,” as Powell is reported to have remarked once, were not making foreign policy calls in Washington the war would’ve never happened.

It could be argued that the trillions spent on perhaps the most wasteful military conflict in American history was a subsidy to Israel.

4) Saudi Arabia – $1.1 Billion a year

Saudi Arabia, the nation which 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, also lobbies the United States government through AIPAC.

The Trump administration was able to secure public Saudi support for Israel by promising $100 billion dollars in modern weapons, including F-35s, to the Gulf state. AIPAC and the Israeli government are both considered to have been the kingmakers in the deal.

The Saudi government, along with another nation that recently established official ties to Israel the, United Arab Emirates, are both state-sponsors of terrorism, including sending American weapons to Al-Qaeda.

The official sect of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia is Wahhabism, which is the puritanical and violent dogma that inspires both the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Qaeda.

To understand how deep terrorist ideology is penetrated in Saudi society, a Saudi Royal Air Force pilot being trained in a $740 million dollar US-funded Pentagon program to learn how to fly the F-35s killed three American servicemen and injured eight others at the Pensacola Air Station in Florida in a quickly memory holed terrorist attack last year. A study from 2014 found that citizens of Saudi Arabia were the largest private donors to ISIS in Syria and beyond.

5) Afghanistan – $5.4 Billion a year

As with Iraq, the 2001 war in Afghanistan and our ongoing presence there, is part of a containment strategy of Iran done in the interest of Israel.

According to former National Security Agency analyst Karen Kwiatkowski, the Pentagon’s logic behind the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq was to create a military pincer that would surround Iran. In a 2009 interview, Kwiatkowski stressed that Iran was not a threat to the United States or its interests, but rather only to Israeli regional hegemony,

The Israelis have been using Afghanistan to spy on the Iranian military and engage in various black ops against their country. The Iranians appear to be fighting back, including by restoring ties for their historical nemesis, the Taliban. Israel fears that an unconditional US withdrawal could end up working to the advantage of Iran.

When earlier this year Donald Trump said he wanted to withdraw troops from Afghanistan — a move supported by the overwhelming majority of the American people — JINSA and AIPAC were the sole interest groups to vocalize opposition and began pressuring the Senate to ensure it didn’t happen. The Jewish lobby succeeded, and Rand Paul’s bill last July that would’ve brought our soldiers home was defeated by a bipartisan vote of 60 to 33.

6) Palestine, Lebanon, Syria — Fluctuates

The three nations bordering or occupied by Israel receive aid from the United States in an attempt to present carrots and sticks that prevent factions from fully uniting, but the spigot is turned off and on regularly at the behest of Israel.

Last year, the US State Department cut aid to Lebanon’s military in half after a direct appeal to do so by the Netanyahu government. The complaint was that the Lebanese military was not doing “enough” to undermine Shi’ite military and political power. The US typically funds the Lebanese military as a counter-force to Hezbollah, but after the Shi’ite militia successfully defended Lebanon’s territory from an Israeli invasion in the 2006 war, the group has enjoyed nationalist support across the diverse religious groups in the country.

Hezbollah’s work in defending Christians from ISIS in recent years has also been a political game changer, as traditionally grievances from Christian organizations have been exploited by Israel to leverage against the Palestinian cause.

In Palestine itself, the Palestinian Authority under Mohammad Abbas has enjoyed about half a billion US dollars in aid, both to politically divide him from Hamas controlled Gaza, as well as subsidize the humanitarian costs of Israel’s occupation in the West Bank.

Abbas’ strategy of “negotiating” with Israel through America is in retrospect an abject failure. Illegal settlements in the West Bank have continued uninhibited, and the Palestinians in the territory narrowly avoided the full annexation of their land by Israel. While the annexation project appears to have been put off, experts believe Israel will attempt to do so once Israel has a better foothold in the region.

In Syria, which Wikileaks of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exposed as nothing more than a regime change operation on behalf of Israel, the United States continues to spend close to a billion dollars every year in “humanitarian” relief.

While the coalition of the Syrian Army, Russia and Iran have largely defeated the ISIS and Al Qaeda rebels, the US is combining its humanitarian aid to anti-Assad areas while attempting to starve the country with crippling sanctions. By providing support to certain regions through USAID, Washington and Israel are artificially extending the conflict between Assad and the anti-government fighters, the latter which would’ve totally surrendered otherwise.

Future Expenses Under Trump’s “Israel-First” Agenda

Donald Trump and Jared Kushner have been able to secure support from multiple Muslim nations for Israel by directly offering big payments and controversial favors as a trade.

Here is what this “diplomacy” will cost Americans.

1) Morocco –$3 Billion and the Western Sahara

Under Trump’s deal with Morocco, its king Mohammed VI will receive $3 billion dollars in investments courtesy of the US taxpayer through the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a government entity created by Donald Trump, in exchange for recognizing Israel.

The more concerning aspect of the deal is Trump’s recognition of the disputed Western Sahara as Moroccan, as well as a deal to sell the Moroccan military billions in American arms to give them a strategic edge over Algeria and Western Saharan natives.

The interests of the Western Saharans are represented by the Polisario Front, a nationalist group seeking independence and self-governance. The Moroccans and Polisario Front have been engaging in intensifying armed battles since November, a month before Trump’s outreach to Mohammed VI. With American recognition of the Western Sahara, the Polisario Fronto will have lost diplomatic leverage and potentially have no choice but to fight the Moroccans — thus initiating a potential conflagration in North Africa if Algeria maintains its pro-Saharan position.

2) Indonesia — $2 Billion

Trump’s DFC is reaching out to Indonesia — the world’s largest Muslim nation — to provide $2 billion in US aid in exchange for normalizing relations with Israel.

The offer appears to have been rejected, with Jakarta announcing that it stands firmly behind the Palestinian cause.

Unlike Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, Indonesia is a parliamentary democracy. Supporting Israel remains highly taboo among the vast majority of Muslims worldwide, so it remains to be seen if the Indonesian state will end up accepting America’s money.

3) Sudan — $1 Billion and Taken Off State-Supporter of Terrorism List

Sudan is an important flashpoint in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. Iran uses Sudan as a transit point for smuggling arms to the Palestinian resistance.

The Israelis and the United States have exploited racial strife between blacks and Arabs in Sudan — funding the black side in Darfur (South Sudan) — during the country’s bloody civil war. The conflict has been winding down, but the Sudanese state and economy remains in dire straits largely due to sanctions over being a state-sponsor of terrorism.

During the 1990s, Sudan was blamed for housing Osama Bin Laden following the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Under Trump’s deal, Sudan will be absolved of all blame after paying a fine and receive a billion dollars in debt forgiveness and economic aid in exchange for establishing formal relations with Israel.

4) Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Oman, etc — Unknown

The Saudis have been sinking billions of dollars into fellow Gulf States to encourage them to support Israel since 2018, according to leaks to Arab media.

According to the documents, the Saudis were working on behalf of the US government in this endeavor, promising their neighbors a “generous aid package” from America just for collaborating with the Jewish state.

As written before, the Saudis and UAE are receiving over $120 billion in US weapons — an idea that previously would’ve been a non-starter in Washington due to potentially undermining Israel’s qualitative military edge over Arabs.

By showing loyalty to Israel, Saudi Arabia has been able to secure support in Washington for its barbaric war in Yemen. When the US Congress passed a resolution to end US support for the Saudi war effort, Donald Trump vetoed the bill and, unlike the NDAA, no attempt was made to override this decision.

The full extent of what the US plans to provide Gulf States for their internally unpopular backing for Israel is not yet possible to know.

The Real Cost of Israel

While previous packages of US foreign aid to Muslim countries on behalf of Israel were presented as an objective pursuit for “peace in the Middle East,” the Trump administration’s efforts have directly led to new and bloody conflicts (the Yemen war), and opened up the floodgates for new ones around the world.

All that is certain is that Trump’s concessions and arm’s deals pursuit of recognition for Israel is objectively making the world more dangerous and unstable.

A perfect dollar estimate of how much Israel is costing our country is impossible due to the opaque nature of Washington’s servility to the Zionist state.

In spite of this, we can arrive at a range. The on paper cost of Israel, when we include the “loan guarantee” scam and payments to neighboring countries to advance Israel’s interests, is at least $23.1 billion a year.

This figure excludes speculative figures on the black budget in service to Israel, which if correct, would bring that number to $36.3 billion. It also excludes aid to Palestine and Lebanon (which may return next year), as well as costs related to the proxy conflict with Iran, which almost all foreign policy experts agree is entirely motivated by Israeli — not American — interests.

This number will balloon under Donald Trump’s plan, which is expected to be continued uninhibited under a Joe Biden presidency. Trump’s outreach to the Arab world will put us on the hook for at least an extra $6 billion, which again, is an extremely conservative estimate since we are excluding the shady deals with the Saudis and other Gulf States.

Thus, the $3.8 billion figure that already outrages much of the American public is at the bare minimum about $23 billion per year, but could potentially be closer to $50 billion.

This price of this luxury item in the Middle East is almost half of all American foreign aid, and does not serve any humanitarian purpose (often times, the other way around), much less the interests of the American people. Understanding the outrage this sum would provoke among US voters and taxpayers, groups like JINSA and AIPAC, along with the disproportionately Jewish owned media, ensure that it is never accurately reported.

January 3, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Police Keep Secret List of Kids with Bad Grades Labeling Them “Potential Criminals”

By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | January 2, 2021

Pasco County, FL — In the ostensible land of the free, we are told that all people are presumed innocent until proven guilty by their peers. To those who’ve been paying attention, however, we know that “innocent until proven guilty” is a farce into today’s police state. If you doubt this assertion, you need only look at the data to see that a whopping 74% of people in jails across the country — have not been convicted of a crime. 

While it is true that many of these folks are awaiting trial for crimes they did commit, there are innocent people behind bars for the sole reason that they cannot afford bail. A free country — who claims to protect the rights of citizens — should not be keeping hundreds of thousands of presumed innocent people in cages, yet this is the status quo.

A recent report from the Tampa Bay Times shows just how determined the American police state is to guarantee an assembly line of otherwise entirely innocent people to continue this process. Police in Florida are targeting children in an attempt to label them as criminals at a young age — despite the children being entirely innocent.

The Pasco sheriff’s office has a secret list of students it believes could “fall into a life of crime” based on ridiculous standards like their grades.

By these standards, people like Thomas Edison, one of the most successful inventors in human history, could’ve been labeled a criminal after he was kicked out of school at age 12 for being poor at math and unable to concentrate.

Steven Spielberg, the famous movie producer, may have been labeled a criminal as well after he temporarily dropped out of high school only to return to be put in a “special ed” class.

Kids often make poor choices when they are younger and these choices should never put them on some police watch list or criminal database. This is nothing short of “pre-crime” tactics that ultimately lead to segregation of dystopian societies based on ratings from the state.

Nevertheless, the Pasco Sheriff’s Office uses data from the Pasco County Schools district and the state Department of Children and Families to compile this very list from middle and high schools who they think will turn out to be criminals.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, the sheriff’s office defended the tactics and said its data-sharing practices with the school district goes back 20 years and are intended to keeping school campuses safe. Only a juvenile intelligence analyst and the school resource officers have access to the information, it said.

The department says they use this information to help troubled kids, but the parents of these kids have no idea that police are surveilling their children to potentially label them as future criminals.

“These programs, in conjunction with the School District’s Early Warning System, provides recommendations to community or school based programs or resources, and mentorship to those who have experienced adverse childhood experiences, something academically proven to lead the possibility of increased victimization, mental health concerns and other aspects,” a sheriff’s spokeswoman said.

School officials explained that they didn’t even realize this child surveillance was happening.

School District Superintendent Kurt Browning and the principals of two high schools told the newspaper they were unaware the sheriff’s office was using school data to identify kids who might become criminals.

“We have an agreement with the Sheriff’s Office,” Browning said in a statement. “That relationship has been strengthened in the wake of the tragedy at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, and that includes processes for a two-way sharing of information that could save lives and result in timely interventions with students who are at risk.”

The program, called the Early Warning System tracks students’ grades, attendance and behavior. If a student was a victim of abuse or witnessed abuse, this increases their chances of police labeling them a criminal.

What qualifies for an “at risk” designation could be anything from getting a “D” on a report card to missing school more than three times in a quarter, according to the program’s manual. Other factors include witnessing domestic violence, having a parent in prison and being the victim of abuse or neglect.

The sheriff’s office then compiles this information — combined with grades and other data sets — and puts it into a system that scores children in 16 categories. The unwitting children are then each assigned a label: On Track, At Risk, Off-Track or Critical.

Hundreds of children are on this list.

The sheriff’s office denies that the list is used to label kids as criminals, and claims it is instead used to identify kids at risk for victimization, truancy, self-harm and substance abuse. As the Times reports, however, future criminal behavior is the only designation on the list and the office had a hard time proving anything else:

But the intelligence manual — an 82-page document that school resource officers and other deputies are required to read — doesn’t mention those other risks. Instead, in five separate places, it describes efforts to pinpoint kids who are likely to become criminals.

The office could not provide any documents instructing school resource officers to interpret the list another way.

The idea of cops spying on children in an effort to predict future criminal behavior is chilling. Thankfully, the Tampa Bay Times’ report has shed some much-needed light on the practice.

“Can you imagine having your kid in that county and they might be on a list that says they may become a criminal?’ Linnette Attai, a consultant works with student privacy laws,” told the Times. “And you have no way of finding out if they are on that list? This is a district that is sending millions of dollars to the sheriff of Pasco County to target its students as criminals.”

Indeed, this is worse than Minority Report.

January 3, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

Civil war, medical discrimination, spy satellites and cyborgs! How 2021 could make us yearn for 2020

By Helen Buyniski | RT | January 1, 2021

People everywhere are eager to bid farewell to 2020, a year in which our lives were turned upside down by power-mad elites who seized the Covid-19 pandemic as a chance to go full police state. But be careful what you wish for.

The year 2020 has proven things can always get worse, delivering a worldwide economic depression, a coronavirus pandemic, riots across the US, and unprecedented political division. It’s safe to say most of humanity is eager to close the book on it. But merely putting up a new calendar does nothing to address these issues, which seem certain to reach a breaking point. Humanity has been pushed to the limit with arbitrary rules, enforced poverty, and mandated isolation — it will only take a spark or two for things to explode.

It’s clear from the media establishment’s non-stop fear-porn broadcasts that Covid-19 isn’t going anywhere next year. Even as a growing body of evidence suggests lockdowns and mask-wearing have little if any effect on the spread of the novel coronavirus, governments will maintain these stringent behavioral controls, keeping the public terrified enough to beg for authoritarianism. But as vaccines are rolled out to the general public, the divide between those obeying the rules and the dissidents will only grow.

News outlets around the world have been pushing the narrative that ‘health passports’ outfitted with the bearer’s Covid-19 vaccination status will be required to travel, enter public spaces, and even get a job in the near future. These certificates are already being presented as the only possible route out of lockdown, even as the heads of both Pfizer and Moderna have admitted their vaccines probably won’t stop the spread of the coronavirus. Accordingly, those who decline to get the jab will be treated as pariahs, banned from some public spaces and told it’s their fault life hasn’t gone back to normal, just as so-called “anti-maskers” have been.

The same army of Karens that scream and point at anyone who dares leave home without their face covered will gleefully rise to the occasion of doxxing, outing, and tormenting vaccine skeptics. Anyone who isn’t thrilled by the idea of ingesting an experimental compound whose makers have been indemnified from any lawsuits will be deemed an enemy of the state, even separated from their children or removed from their home as a “health risk.” Neighbors will gleefully rat each other out for the equivalent of an extra chocolate ration, meaning even the most slavishly obedient individuals could end up in “quarncentration camps” for upsetting the wrong person.

Even those who’ve remained silent about masks and lockdowns, afraid of “making waves,” are unlikely to take involuntary inoculation lying down. Almost two thirds of Americans aren’t interested in taking the vaccine, meaning the Karens and the kapos may run into unexpected resistance.

In the US, the increasingly certain reality of a Biden presidency is also likely to push some people over the edge, though the [purported] president-elect seems to have realized that shoving his whole program down American throats at once will make the country choke. Even so, Biden and his vice president Kamala Harris have made enough statements on gutting the First and Second Amendments, turning the suburbs into mini-cities packed with government-subsidized housing, and adopting Green New Deal carbon controls that half the electorate sees their inauguration as a threat to their way of life.

Rumors of militia groups, veterans, and even active-duty military rising up against the supposed communist takeover may seem far-fetched, given such groups’ willingness over the last year to allow government to trample over such fundamental freedoms as the right to earn a living or even leave one’s house, but seeing Trump leave the White House could be the straw that broke the camel’s back. These groups are well-armed and will easily wipe out whatever Antifa cannon-fodder the neoliberal centrists can throw at them. Nor can the establishment necessarily count on police to save them, having spent the last several months calling for defunding law enforcement. Trump’s call for “wild protests” in January, coupled with his former national security adviser Mike Flynn cheering for martial law, have been interpreted as a green light to do whatever it takes to keep the White House out of Democrat hands.

The centrist establishment isn’t helping matters by declaring Trump supporters to be essentially subhuman and not worth conversing with. Worse, by promoting doxxing anyone who’s ever expressed the “wrong” ideas on social media, they’re only stirring up conservative resentment. The longer economic shutdowns last, the more likely disaffected Americans are to decide they have nothing left to lose and attempt to take a few establishment types out with them.

Not that all in opposition to Biden believe the sundowning centrist plans to install a dictatorship of the proletariat, of course. Many fear his use of the “Build Back Better” slogan popularized by proponents of humanity’s soulless “new normal” suggests his administration will be responsible for the US implementation of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset, a much more terrifying prospect than some milquetoast Marxism. This disturbing plan, devised by WEF CEO Klaus Schwab and a coterie of wealthy financiers and businessmen, aims to do away with private property, bodily integrity, familial bonds, and other pillars of western civilization, while shifting the world’s finances to blockchain-based Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and doing away with cash.

Coming off like a Bond villain straight out of central casting, Schwab has enthused about the coming merger of humans with technology, which will enable whole new spheres of individual and social control. From Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ plan to blanket the earth with spy satellites, to DARPA’s efforts to bring surveillance under the skin with “hydrogel” sensors that monitor vital signs and transmit the data to the cloud, the global technocracy these oligarchs seek will change what it means to be human – a feature, not a bug, in their eyes. And while the vast majority of western society seems utterly supine now, it’s unlikely they’ll sit idly by while the rich and powerful strip them of their humanity. The WEF’s smiley-faced propaganda (“Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, I have no privacy, and I couldn’t be happier”) may well be its epitaph.

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23

January 3, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Five Times this Year the New York Times Accidentally Told the Truth

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | American Institute for Economic Research | December 29, 2020

The paper of record in 2020 shifted dramatically to the most illiberal stance possible on the virus, pushing for full lockdowns, and ignoring or burying any information that might contradict the case for this unprecedented experiment in social and economic control. This article highlights the exceptions.

The first shocking sign of the placing of a persistent bias was a podcast with reporter Donald McNeil on February 27. This was the beginning. It was grossly irresponsible. He asserted that half the American public would get this disease and that it would have a case fatality rate of 2.5%, or 25 times as deadly as flu, hence 4.8 million dead people. No consideration of demographic gradients in risk and no knowledge of viral basics such as the tradeoff between severity and prevalence. Even if you leave aside the fog of fatality misclassification, he exaggerated the risk by 12 times but still spoke with a sense of certainty designed to create panic.

Host Michael Barbaro himself seemed shocked: “I thought you were here to bring calm, Donald.”

“I’m trying to bring a sense that if things don’t change, a lot of us might die,” he said. “If you have 300 relatively close friends and acquaintances, six of them would die.”

The primal fear of disease is thus thrown into massive overdrive, following 100 years in which public health tried to bring rationality to the topic.

That podcast was followed by an op-ed by the same journalist/pundit: “To Take On the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It.” It seemed incredible that such a responsible outlet would advocate the overthrow of a century of public-health wisdom and even immunological basics, but that’s what they did. At this point, the New York Times was fully committed to the narrative that we must dismantle society to save it. And there it has been for nearly a year of unbearably biased coverage.

Even within the blatant and aggressive pro-lockdown bias, and consistent with the way the New York Times does its work, the paper has not been entirely barren of truth about Covid and lockdowns. Below I list five times that the news section of the paper, however inadvertently and however buried deep within the paper, actually told the truth.

1. Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be. Byline: Apoorva Mandavilli

I’m still stunned that the paper did a study that confirmed what people have suspected, namely that a high cycle threshold used on PCR testing was creating the appearance of a pandemic that might have long receded. The testing mania was generating wild illusions of millions of “asymptomatic” carriers and spreaders. How severe was the problem? Read this and weep:

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.

The implications of this revelation are incredible. A major reason for the ongoing lockdowns are due to the pouring in of positive case numbers from massive testing. If 90% of these positive tests are false, we have a major problem. The whole basis of the panic disappears. All credit to the Times for running the article but why no follow up and why no change in its editorial stance?

2. Scientists See Signs of Lasting Immunity to Covid-19, Even After Mild Infections. Byline By Katherine J. Wu

Gone missing this year in public commentary has been much at all about naturally acquired immunities from the virus, even though the immune system deserves credit for why human kind has lasted this long even in the presence of pathogens. That the Times ran this piece was another exception in otherwise exceptionally bad coverage. It said in part:

Scientists who have been monitoring immune responses to the virus are now starting to see encouraging signs of strong, lasting immunity, even in people who developed only mild symptoms of Covid-19, a flurry of new studies suggests. Disease-fighting antibodies, as well as immune cells called B cells and T cells that are capable of recognizing the virus, appear to persist months after infections have resolved — an encouraging echo of the body’s enduring response to other viruses….

Researchers have yet to find unambiguous evidence that coronavirus reinfections are occurring, especially within the few months that the virus has been rippling through the human population. The prospect of immune memory “helps to explain that,” Dr. Pepper said.

3. Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Studies Showing Waning Coronavirus Antibodies. Byline Apoorva Mandavilli

Reinforcing the solid point above:

Data from monkeys suggests that even low levels of antibodies can prevent serious illness from the virus, if not a re-infection. Even if circulating antibody levels are undetectable, the body retains the memory of the pathogen. If it crosses paths with the virus again, balloon-like cells that live in the bone marrow can mass-produce antibodies within hours.

4. Schoolchildren Seem Unlikely to Fuel Coronavirus Surges, Scientists Say. Byline: Apoorva Mandavilli

It’s still a shock that so many schools closed their doors this year, partly from disease panic but also from compliance with orders from public health officials. Nothing like this has happened, and the kids have been brutalized as a result, not to mention the families who found themselves unable to cope at home. For millions of students, a whole year of schooling is gone. And they have been taught to treat their fellow human beings as nothing more than disease vectors. So it was amazing to read this story in the Times:

So far, schools do not seem to be stoking community transmission of the coronavirus, according to data emerging from random testing in the United States and Britain. Elementary schools especially seem to seed remarkably few infections.

5. One-Third of All U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Are Nursing Home Residents or Workers. Byline Karen Yourish, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Danielle Ivory and Mitch Smith

Another strangely missing part of mainstream coverage has been honesty about the risk gradient in the population. It is admitted even by the World Health Organization that the case fatality rate for Covid-19 from people under the age of 70 is 0.05%. The serious danger is for people with low life expectancy and broken immune systems. Knowing that, as we have since February, we should have expected the need for special protection for nursing homes. It was incredibly obvious. Instead of doing that, some governors shoved Covid patients into nursing homes. Astonishing. In any case, the above article (and this one too) was one of the few times this year that the Times actually spelled out the many thousands times risk to the aged and sick as versus the young and healthy.

Notable Opinion columns 

The op-ed page of the paper mirrored the news coverage, with only a handful of exceptions. Those are noted below.

Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease? Op-ed by David Katz

I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself. The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.

Worse, I fear our efforts will do little to contain the virus, because we have a resource-constrained, fragmented, perennially underfunded public health system. Distributing such limited resources so widely, so shallowly and so haphazardly is a formula for failure. How certain are you of the best ways to protect your most vulnerable loved ones? How readily can you get tested?

Quarantine May Negatively Affect Kids’ Immune Systems. Op-ed by Donna L. Farber and Thomas Connors

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the world is unwittingly conducting what amounts to the largest immunological experiment in history on our own children. We have been keeping children inside, relentlessly sanitizing their living spaces and their hands and largely isolating them. In doing so, we have prevented large numbers of them from becoming infected or transmitting the virus. But in the course of social distancing to mitigate the spread, we may also be unintentionally inhibiting the proper development of children’s immune systems.

What Has Lockdown Done to Us?. Op-ed by By Drew Holden

Our mental health suffers, too. The psychological effects of loneliness are a health risk comparable with risk obesity or smoking. Anxiety and depression have spiked since lockdown orders went into effect. The weeks immediately following them saw nearly an 18 percent jump in overdose deaths and, as of last month, more than 40 states had reported increases. One in four young adults age 18 to 25 reported seriously considering suicide within the 30-day window of a recent study. Experts fear that suicides may increase; for young Americans, these concerns are even more acute. Calls to domestic violence hotlines have soared. America’s elderly are dying from the isolation that was meant to keep them safe.

December 31, 2020 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

The US money tree: The untold story of American aid to Israel

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | December 29, 2020

On December 21, the United States Congress passed the COVID-19 Relief Package, as part of a larger $2.3 trillion bill meant to cover spending for the rest of the fiscal year. As usual, US representatives allocated a massive sum of money for Israel.

While unemployment, thus poverty, in the US is skyrocketing as a result of repeated lockdowns, the US found it essential to provide Israel with $3.3 billion in ‘security assistance’ and $500 million for US-Israel missile defence cooperation.

Although a meager $600 dollar payment to help struggling American families was the subject of several months of intense debate, there was little discussion among American politicians over the large funds handed out to Israel, for which there are no returns.

Support for Israel is considered a bipartisan priority and has, for decades, been perceived as the most stable item in the US foreign policy agenda. The mere questioning of how Israel uses the funds – whether the military aid is being actively used to sustain Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, finance Jewish settlements, fund annexation of Palestinian land or violate Palestinian human rights – is a major taboo.

One of the few members of Congress to demand that aid to Israel be conditioned on the latter’s respect for human rights is Democratic Senator, Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, who was also a leading presidential nominee for the Democratic Party. “We cannot give it carte blanche to the Israeli government … We have the right to demand respect for human rights and democracy”, Sanders had said in October 2019.

His Democratic rival, now [claimed to be] President-elect, Joe Biden, soon countered: “The idea that I’d withdraw military aid, as others have suggested, from Israel, is bizarre,” he said.

It is no secret that Israel is the world’s leading recipient of US aid since World War II. According to data provided by the US Congressional Research Service, Israel has received $146 billion of US taxpayers’ money as of November 2020.

From 1971 up to 2007, a bulk of these funds proved fundamental in helping Israel establish a strong economic base. Since then, most of the money has been allotted for military purposes, including the security of Israel’s illegal Jewish settlement enterprise.

Despite the US financial crisis of 2008, American money continued to be channeled to Israel, whose economy survived the global recession, largely unscathed.

In 2016, the US promised even more money. The Democratic Barack Obama Administration, which is often – although mistakenly – seen as hostile to Israel, increased US funding to Israel by a significant margin. In a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding, Washington and Tel Aviv reached a deal whereby the US agreed to give Israel $38 billion in military aid covering the financial years 2019-2028. This is a whopping increase of $8 billion compared with the previous 10-year agreement, which concluded at the end of 2018.

The new American funds are divided into two categories: $33 billion in foreign military grants and an additional $5 billion in missile defence.

American generosity has long been attributed to the unmatched influence of pro-Israeli groups, lead among them American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The last four years, however, required little lobbying by these groups, as powerful agents within the administration itself became Israel’s top advocates.

Aside from the seemingly endless ‘political freebies’ that the Donald Trump Administration has given Israel in recent years, it is now considering ways to accelerate the timetable of delivering the remainder of US funds as determined by the last MOU, an amount that currently stands at $26.4 billion. According to official congressional documents, the US “also may approve additional sales of the F-35 to Israel and accelerate the delivery of KC-46A refuelling and transport aircraft to Israel.”

December 29, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

The Nashville Bombing vs. The Oklahoma City Bombing

By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | December 29, 2020

The Nashville bombing raises questions about the Oklahoma City bombing. In 1995 the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was blown up. Allegedly, the building was destroyed by a fertilizer bomb in a Ryder rental truck parked on the street. The Murrah building had massive reinforced concrete columns, some being 3 feet thick if memory serves. The front third of the building was destroyed with columns turned to dust.

The guilty parties were allegedly Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. According to reports, the blast killed 168 people, injured 680 others, and destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a 16-block radius along with 86 cars and caused $652 million of damage in 1995 dollars.

At the time US Air Force General Partin, who had high level responsibilities for ordinance and weapons development, distributed an expert report to 75 members of the House and Senate. The report proved that the Murrah building blew up from the inside out. Many Americans concluded that the truck bomb was cover for an inside job. McVeigh and Nichols were regarded as patsies who thought they blew up the building, but their role was to direct attention away from those responsible.

General Partin’s report was quickly tossed into the Memory Hole. To get rid of the evidence the Murrah building was hauled away and buried just as the steel in the World Trade Center buildings in 2001 was sent abroad to be melted down, and an official bogus report was issued like the 9/11 official reports. Instead of a real investigation, we got a controlled explanation.

Twenty-five years after the Oklahoma City Bombing we have another bomb in a vehicle parked in the street in front of a building. This time the building is an AT&T building. The parked vehicle is a RV which could hold as much explosives as a rental truck. An interesting difference is that the RV is much closer to the building, seperated only by a sidewalk, whereas if memory serves, the Murrah building was set back from the street.

When the RV bomb went off, 3 people were injured, and building damage seems to be limited to blowing out windows. Clearly, there is no comparable structural damage to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Why? Was the RV bomb just an oversized firecracker? Or was General Partin, clearly an expert, correct when he concluded that the Murrah Federal building was blown up from the inside out?

December 29, 2020 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism | | Leave a comment

The Kurds have Once Again been Abandoned by their “American Brothers”

By Valery Kulikov – New Eastern Outlook – 28.12.2020

Yet again thrown by their “older American brothers” to the winds of fate, the Kurds in the Levant nowadays are not living through the best of times. On the border running between Syria and Iraq, a new armed conflict entailing human casualties is unfolding, one which demonstrates, among other things, a clear lack of unity among the Kurds, and that so-called Kurdistan is divided into parts ruled by various leaders, many of whom are competitors, and often almost irreconcilable enemies. Against this backdrop in the past few years, fierce battles between Kurdish formations have begun to occur more and more frequently, with the warring parties, while losing their fighters, the warring parties, concentrating their forces along the border in anticipation of new clashes.

The Syrian Kurds blame their Iraqi compatriots from the Peshmerga group for causing this conflict, including preparing for war in the Syrian Arab Republic. So, according to the position announced in ANF News by the Syrian Kurds, since October the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) has been organizing provocations in South Kurdistan. The KDP, controlled by the family of Iraqi Kurdish leader Barzani, has been accused of both working closely with Turkey in various areas, including intelligence gathering, spreading propaganda, and logistics, and fueling domestic conflicts that could lead to civil war.

In October, Peshmerga proclaimed that an attack had been committed by Syrian Kurds on an oil pipeline, which resulted in oil exports from Kurdistan to Turkey being suspended.

On November 4, local media outlets reported that armed clashes broke out between Peshmerga forces and Kurdistan Workers’ Party militants in the area of Duhok, which resulted in the death of one Iraqi Kurdish fighter and injuries for three others.

On December 15, General Mazloum Abdi, who is the commander-in-chief of the Kurdish-Arab “Syrian Democratic Forces”, which was created by the United States, accused Iraqi Kurds of attacking and wounding three SDF members.

On December 16, the Iraqi Kurdistan regional authorities announced that Syrian armed groups from the YPG (which forms the backbone of the SDF) attacked bases and positions held by the Iraqi Peshmerga near the border. Syrian Kurdish leaders denied these accusations, calling them false, and leveled similar accusations toward Iraqi tribesmen themselves.

Local observers note that Iraqi Kurds are being transferred to the Syrian front with support provided by Turkish combat drones. It is worth noting that Ankara considers the YPG to be the Syrian wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which is labeled as a terrorist group in Turkey; this was used as the rationale for it to invade Rojava last October, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Selahattin Demirtas, the co-chairman of Turkey’s largest Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, has been behind bars for the fourth year on charges of “supporting terrorism”. To mitigate the influence of this Kurdish movement, which is represented in the Turkish parliament, and to sow more discord in the Kurdish community, Turkey is preparing to organize a new Kurdish party with support from the country’s ruling Justice and Development Party.

Regarding the military potential possessed by Kurdish groups in Syria and Iraq, it should be specified that both sides have virtually full-fledged armed forces that have been equipped with help from “foreign players”. Washington and Ankara are the ones helping the Iraqi Kurds. The Syrian Kurdish groups were financed, armed, and trained by the United States and its allies in the anti-terrorist coalition. At the same time, it is evident that both sides have been lent support by Washington, as well as used by it in the struggle for influence, power, and oil – both in Syria and Iraq. On top of that, the United States essentially put its seal of approval on the defeat of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party – a party recognized by them as terrorists in the European Union – in the Syrian Arab Republic and Iraq, where the main bases that the PKK has are located since their forces were defeated in Turkey.

In recent years, Trump has effectively lost interest in supporting the Kurds in the region, and even announced in October 2019 that American troops would be withdrawn from the area, and this time would not defend the Kurds. After that, Turkish aircraft started to attack the region and the positions that were held by the Kurds.

Donald Trump stated his position on the Kurds and the reason why the United States is abandoning them yet again on his Twitter page a year ago, noting in particular that the Kurds, an Iranian ethnic group, did not help the United States during WWII – including during the invasion of Normandy. It seems that the US president clearly drew on this kind of “extensive expertise” in WWII history from an article by Kurt Schlichter in the publication Townhall – which praises Trump’s policies – that stated: “The Kurds helped destroy DAESH (a terrorist group banned in the Russian Federation) … But let’s be honest: the Kurds did not come to help us in Normandy, Incheon, Khe Sanh, and Kandahar”. Well, what else can be expected for the Kurds from their “elder American brothers”?

The processes among the Kurds, which began in 2019 after another episode involving betrayal by the United States, were described in sufficient detail by The New York Times. Today, these processes have intensified, as have Turkey’s operations against the Kurds in Syria. One of the very hot spots in this regard was the city of Ain Issa in the northern part of the Raqqa Governorate, where Turkey has stepped up its shelling of Kurdish positions. For example, on the evening of December 17, the Turkish army and militants allied with it struck a powerful blow to the positions held by the predominantly Kurdish “Syrian Democratic Forces” in the area of the city of Ain Issa, attacking two nearby villages, and this forced SDF groups to abandon these positions and regroup their forces to keep the enemy from advancing any further. On the night of December 22, pro-Turkish forces ratcheted up the intensity of their strikes on the city of Ain Issa and its environs, and the Turkish military itself switched to using heavy artillery to strike the northern part of the Raqqa Governorate.

Under these conditions, representatives of the Russian and Syria military held talks on December 22 with representatives of Kurdish autonomous organizations – with participation on the part of Turkish officers – to try to ease tensions, but the parties did not reach any agreement. Representatives from the Turkish military demanded the withdrawal of all militants from the SDF, promising to stop the attacks by pro-Turkish criminal groups on Ain Issa if this occurs, although Ankara had previously denied that the militants were acting on its instruction.

The situation remains filled with tension, despite the measures taken by Russia to help foster stabilization.

December 28, 2020 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

While giving Americans $600, Congress sets aside $600 MILLION to fight Russia & China

RT | December 28, 2020

The omnibus spending bill US President Donald Trump eventually agreed to sign gives Americans a pittance, but over $600 million to “counter the influence” of Russia and China and “promote democracy” in Europe and Asia.

The 5,593-page legislation bundled the coronavirus “stimulus” with general 2021 spending. It faced heavy criticism from across the US political spectrum last week, for funding all sorts of pet projects while giving Americans only a $600 individual payment. That’s half of what they got in April, and the only direct assistance to mitigate the economic damage of state-imposed lockdowns.

A million times that much was earmarked for US propaganda and diplomatic efforts aimed against Beijing and Moscow, however. According to Congress, “not less than $290 million” is to be made available for the “Countering Russian Influence Fund.” The funds shall be used to, among other things, “support democracy programs in the Russian Federation and other countries in Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia.”

One activity specifically listed is the promotion of “internet freedom” – coming from a country where Silicon Valley companies ruthlessly censor what one can think and say online.

No less than $20 million will go “to strengthen democracy and civil society in Central Europe,” including “transparency, independent media, rule of law, minority rights, and programs to combat anti-Semitism.”

Another $300 million was earmarked for the “Countering Chinese Influence Fund” to be used against the “malign influence of the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party and entities acting on their behalf globally.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo may well have written those provisions himself. In a major speech in July, he denounced Beijing as a threat to “our people and our prosperity” and called for a generational struggle against the CCP. Just a week before Congress voted on the bill, he also claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin was “a real risk to those of us who love freedom.”

“We have lots of folks that want to undermine our way of life, our republic, our basic democratic principles. Russia is certainly on that list,” Pompeo told Fox News host Mark Levin on December 18.

Trump had initially refused to sign the bill, demanding that Congress cut back on the programs called out by critics and increase the individual payment to $2,000 per person. He then signed it on Sunday, saying he expected Congress to approve the increase as well as respond to several other priorities he raised.

Democrats have already said they will reject any cuts to the omnibus, however, while there is no indication the Republican-led Senate will actually do anything Trump asked.

December 28, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

12,000 NYC Students Banned From School For Not Consenting To Random Covid Testing

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | December 28, 2020

About 12,000 New York City students are being prevented from attending in-person learning because their parents “failed to sign consent forms for weekly random testing”, Bloomberg reported last week. The students are part of a larger group of 190,000 pre-school through elementary students who returned to classrooms in December.

While about 60,000 pre-school and kindergarten students are exempt from testing, there are still about 130,000 students who are required to participate in random testing.

Nathaniel Styer, a spokesman for the city Department of Education, said: “Due to the extensive efforts of our staff, 91% of students who need a consent form have one on file. Students without consent forms, and who do not have approved exemptions, are transitioned to remote instruction.”

Random testing is conducted on 20% of everyone in each school building, every week. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza are responsible for implementing the standards that went into place after NYC schools had previously shut down.

Meanwhile, high school and middle school students that are part of NYC’s 1 million plus student body are all receiving remote instruction. “Tens of thousands” of elementary school parents have voluntarily opted out of the random testing in favor of remote learning as well, Bloomberg concluded.

December 28, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump

The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom

By Glenn Greenwald | December 28, 2020

Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.

In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.

But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.

A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.

Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was for more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.

The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.

The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.

The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).

The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.

Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.

Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political and legal equality illusory.

But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.

The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:

The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.

Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” AP notes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”

Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S., which are thriving. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”

These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.

Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”

What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.

Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.

That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared before the Senate: “The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they’re taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.”

As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.

These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency. Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.

The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.

The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.

All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.

December 28, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Economics, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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