People Ignore Facts That Contradict Their False Beliefs

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The more people there are who ignore facts that contradict their beliefs, the likelier a dictatorship will emerge within a given country.

Here is how aristocracies, throughout the Ages, have controlled the masses, by taking advantage of this widespread tendency people have, to ignore contrary facts:

What social scientists call “confirmation bias” and have repeatedly found to be rampant, is causing the public to be easily manipulated, and has thus destroyed democracy by replacing news-reporting, by propaganda - ‘news" that’s false - in a culture where lies which pump the agendas of the powerful (including lies pumped by the billionaire owners of top ‘news’media and of the media they own) are almost never punished (and are often not even denied to be true). Thus, lies by those powerful liars almost always succeed at enslaving the minds of the millions, to believe what the top economic-and-power class want those millions of people to believe — no matter how false it might happen actually to be. 

Recently, a particularly stark example of this came to my attention. On 15 September 2017, an article that I wrote for the Strategic Culture Foundation, and which was titled by a true statement that I had only recently discovered to be true, was republished at a news-site that I consider one of the best around, “Signs of the Times” or “SOTT” for short, and a reader-comment there, simply rejected that title-statement and the entire article, because it contradicted what the person believes. This commenter entirely ignored the evidence that I had provided in the article, which proved the statement to be true. 

No matter how irrefutable the evidence is, most people reject anything which contradicts their deeply entrenched false beliefs, and this reader-comment crystallized for me, this phenomenon of “confirmation bias” — the phenomenon of ignoring evidence that contradicts what one believes.

The article was titled “Liberalism doesn’t respect a nation’s sovereignty.” I never knew that fact until I researched it, but I found, after looking through (and my article quoting key documents from) the history of the matter, that it’s actually the case: that liberalism (as it’s understood and defined by the scholars of the subject, and as it’s based upon the key formative documents of the historical tradition, “liberalism”) rejects a nation’s sovereignty. This fact shocked me to discover; so, I wrote an article documenting it, and SCF accepted it, and it then became republished at a few other sites, including SOTT.

The reader-comment at SOTT which for me personified confirmation-bias, was (in its entirety): “This is a rather new twist blaming liberals for invading countries. I"ve always associated liberalism with the left wing and democratic, progressive politics. I"ve always associated conservatism with the right wing, big business, militarism and invading other countries. Trying to move the goal posts, are we?”

That person never clicked onto my article’s links documenting the case, nor even read the quotations given in the article itself from John Locke and from Adam Smith, who were key founders of “liberalism” as that tradition has come down to us. He instead ignored all of that evidence, and stated — entirely without evidence of any sort — that I (and SOTT, and SCF, for publishing it) were “Trying to move the goal posts.”

I (a Bernie Sanders voter, and a lifelong progressive and opponent of conservatism) am “Trying to move the goal posts” — how? By pointing out the manufactured phoniness of ‘liberalism’? By pointing out a key way in which liberalism was designed by its aristocratic sponsors (in this case by the aristocrats who sponsored Locke and Smith), to be an ideology that would encourage conquest, empire, and discourage democracy (which is based upon the sanctity of national sovereignty — based upon the lack of imposition of government by or on behalf of anyone who isn’t a resident on the land). Liberalism, I show there, was designed for Empire, not for democracy. That reader simply refused to consider the evidence.

People who insist upon deceiving themselves disgust me. Anyone who blocks out the key relevant facts and persists in believing the lies they were raised with, or became fooled into believing, doesn’t harm only themselves by the lies they believe; they vote on the basis of the lies they believe, and thus these people who refuse to be open-minded destroy democracy, and invite control of the nation by the aristocracy (who sponsor the proponents of those lies). People who refuse to question their own beliefs, become increasingly putrid pools of their own false beliefs, which have been created and nurtured and sustained and become larger and larger pools of lies, by constant repetition from the media and lobbyists of the rich and powerful, so as to enable the exploiters to enslave the masses, via those constantly repeated and embellished lies. 

Such self-‘justifying’ fools, who refuse to clean-up their conceptual pool that’s been increasingly polluted by lies, are enemies of democracy, no matter how much they may consider themselves to be ‘liberals’. They don’t even know the reality of what liberalism is. One thing that it definitely is not (as my article documented) is progressivism (which is utterly opposed to foreign conquest and to the entire imperial project of imposed rule, regardless whether by outright invasions or else by coups).

Thus, we have two dominant ideologies against progressivism: One is conservatism, which everyone recognizes to be against progressivism and for Empire and constant conquest, profitable war for the arms-merchants and for the ‘news’media owners who also benefit from stirring up invasion-fever, not only like William Randolph Hearst did but today like they all do. The other is liberalism, which hides that it’s actually conservative — hides this, by being ever-so-sweet toward certain ethnicities or other groups that are being oppressed domestically, and by vociferously condemning conservatives for what is actually nothing more than the blatancy of conservatism’s favoritism toward the aristocracy.

An authentic democracy cannot be based upon a “demos” (a public) that is overwhelmingly composed of suckers - manipulated fools. Only by means of the tiny aristocracy plus the huge mass of their suckers, does a democracy degenerate into a fascism. (For example, something like this can be supported overwhelmingly by the political Party that dominates the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, state capitals, state legislatures, and runs the U.S. White House, in this ‘democratic’ nation — ‘democratic’ according to the propaganda; but if this were really a democracy, then none of those politicians would be able to win public office.)

*  *  *

A well-established central finding of psychological research, concerning “confirmation bias” or “motivated reasoning” (which are two phrases referring to people’s tendency to believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of any contrary facts), is that individuals evaluate whatever they read or hear according to their pre-existing ideas about the given subject. Specifically, psychologists have found that people tend to pay attention to whatever confirms their existing ideas, and tend to ignore whatever contradicts those pre-established beliefs.

For examples, the following studies are available online:

“Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs,” in the July 2006 American Journal of Political Science, reported: “We find a confirmation bias – the seeking out of confirmatory evidence – when [people] are free to self-select the source of arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization ... especially among those with the strongest priors [prior beliefs] and highest level of political sophistication [the highest degree of exposure to, and involvement in, the given subject-matter that the study was dealing with].” Prejudices were stronger among supposed experts than among non-“experts”: The more indoctrinated a person was, the more prejudiced. “People actively denigrate the information with which they disagree, while accepting compatible information almost at face value.” Moreover, “Those with weak and uninformed attitudes show less bias” (and this is actually one reason why the best jurors at trials are generally people who are not personally or professionally involved in any aspect of the given case – they are “non-experts”).

Sharon Begley’s article in the 25 August 2009 Newsweek titled “Lies of Mass Destruction: The same skewed thinking that supports a Saddam-9/11 link explains the power of health-care myths [such as that Obama’s health plan had ‘death panels’]” summarized the study in the May 2009 Sociological Inquiry, “‘There Must Be a Reason’: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification,” which had surveyed, during October 2004, 49 conservative Republicans who admitted they believed that Saddam Hussein had caused the 9/11 attacks. This study found that 48 of these 49 extreme conservatives were utterly impervious to the overwhelming factual evidence which was provided to them by the presenters that contradicted this false belief they held.

A study concerning not political conservatism but merely resistance to new technologies is James N. Druckman’s “Framing, Motivated Reasoning, and Opinions about Emergent Technologies,” which was presented at a technological conference in 2009. He reported that, “factual information ... is perceived in biased ways ... (e.g., there is motivated reasoning).” “Facts have limited impact on initial opinions.” Moreover, “Individuals do not privilege the facts. ... Individuals process new factual information in a biased manner. ... Specifically, they view information consistent with their prior opinions as relatively stronger, and they view neutral facts as consistent with their existing” views.

“Motivated Reasoning With Stereotypes,” in the January 1999 Psychological Inquiry, found that, “When an applicable stereotype supports their desired impression of an individual, motivation can lead people to activate this stereotype, if they have not already activated it. ... People pick and choose among the many stereotypes applicable to an individual, activating those that support their desired impression of this individual and inhibiting those that interfere with it.” Similarly, another research report, “The Undeserving Rich: ‘Moral Values’ and the White Working Class,” in the June 2009 Sociological Forum, found that John Kerry had probably lost the 2004 U.S. Presidential election to George W. Bush at least partly because white working class voters overwhelmingly believed that Bush was like themselves because he behaved like themselves, and that Kerry was not like themselves because his manner seemed “snooty.”

The Sandcastle: Decline From Democracy To Tyranny Is Inevitable

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

The decline from democracy to tyranny is both a natural and inevitable one.

That’s not a pleasant thought to have to consider, but it’s a fact, nonetheless. In every case, a democracy will deteriorate as the result of the electorate accepting the loss of freedom in trade for largesse from their government. This process may be fascism, socialism, communism, or a basket of “isms,” but tyranny is the inevitable endgame of democracy. Like the destruction of a sandcastle by the incoming tide, it requires time to transpire, but in time, the democracy, like the sandcastle, will be washed away in its entirety.

Why should this be so? Well, as I commented some years ago,

The concept of government is that the people grant to a small group of individuals the ability to establish and maintain controls over them. The inherent flaw in such a concept is that any government will invariably and continually expand upon its controls, resulting in the ever-diminishing freedom of those who granted them the power.

Unfortunately, there will always be those who wish to rule, and there will always be a majority of voters who are complacent enough and naïve enough to allow their freedoms to be slowly removed. This adverb “slowly” is the key by which the removal of freedoms is achieved.

The old adage of “boiling a frog” is that the frog will jump out of the pot if it’s filled with hot water, but if the water is lukewarm and the temperature is slowly raised, he’ll grow accustomed to the temperature change and will inadvertently allow himself to be boiled.

Let’s have a look at Thomas Jefferson’s assessment of this technique:

Even under the best forms of Government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Mister Jefferson was a true visionary. He knew, even as he was penning the Declaration of Independence and portions of the Constitution, that his proclamations, even if they were accepted by his fellow founding fathers, would not last. He recommended repeated revolutions to counter the inevitable tendency by political leaders to continually vie for the removal of the freedoms from their constituents.

Around the same time that Mister Jefferson made the above comment, Alexander Tytler, a Scottish economist and historian, commented on the new American experiment in democracy. He’s credited as saying,

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

So, was each of the above gentlemen throwing a dart at a board, or did they each have some kind of crystal ball? Well, actually, neither. Each was a keen student of history. Each knew that the pattern, by the end of the 18th century, had already repeated itself time and time again. In fact, as early as the fourth century BC, Plato had quoted Socrates as having stated to Adeimantus, 

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery comes out of the most extreme form of liberty.

Today, much of what was called the “free world” only half a century ago has deteriorated into a combination of residual capitalism, which has been largely and increasingly buried by socialism and fascism. (It should be mentioned that the oft-misinterpreted definition of “fascism” is the joint rule by corporate and state—a condition that’s now manifestly in place in much of the former “free” world.)

Today, many people perceive fascism as a tyrannical condition that’s suddenly imposed by a dictator, but this is rarely the case. Fascism is in fact a logical step. Just as voters succumb over time to the promises of socialism, so a parallel decline occurs as fascism slowly replaces capitalism. Fascism may appear to be capitalism, but it’s the antithesis of a free market. As Vladimir Lenin rightly stated,

Fascism is capitalism in decline.

Comrade Lenin understood the value of fascism for political leaders. Whilst he retained a close relationship with New York and London bankers, and a healthy capitalist market was tapped into for Soviet-era imports, he was aware that his power base depended largely on denying capitalism to his minions.

So, from the above quotations, we may see that there’s been a fairly erudite group of folks out there who have commented on this topic over the last 2,500 years. They agree that democracies, like sandcastles, never last. They generally begin promisingly, but, given enough time, any government will erode democracy as quickly as the political leaders can get away with it, and the progression always ends in tyranny.

We’re presently at a major historical juncture—a time in which much of the former free world is in the final stages of decay and approaching the tyranny stage.

At this point, the process tends to speed up. We can observe this as we see an increase in the laws being passed to control the population—increased taxation, increased regulation, and increased promises of largesse from the government that they don’t have the funding to deliver.

When any government reaches this stage, it knows only too well that it will not deliver and that, when the lie is exposed, the populace will be hopping mad. Therefore, just before the endgame, any government can be expected to ramp up its police state. The demonstrations by governments that they’re doing so are now seen regularly—raids by SWAT teams in situations where just a small number of authorities could handle the situation just as well. Displays of armed forces in the street, including armoured vehicles, in instances of disruption.

In London, Ferguson, Paris, Boston, etc., the authoritarian displays have become ever-more frequent. All that’s now necessary is a series of events (whether staged or real) to suggest domestic terrorism in several locations at roughly the same time. A state of national emergency may then be declared “for the safety of the people.”

It’s this justification that will assure the success of tyranny. Historically, the majority of people in any county, in any era, choose the illusion of safety over freedom. As John Adams was fond of saying,  

Those who would trade freedom for safety will have neither.

From this point on, it would be wise for anyone who lives in the EU, US, UK, etc. to watch events closely. If a rash of “domestic terrorism” appears suddenly, it could well be the harbinger that the government has reached the tipping point—when tyranny under the guise of “protecting the safety of the people” is inaugurated.

The most essential takeaway here is that, although some may object (even violently), the majority of the people will trade their freedom for the promise of safety.

*  *  *

We’re much closer to the tipping point of tyranny than most people would ever admit. That’s why we just released a PDF guide to show you how to safeguard your freedom. Click here to download it now.

How to Get Saudi Women Rights, and Make Your Neighbor Paint his House

Via The Daily Bell

If you get government wrong, you get everything wrong.

New York City has a lot of wealth. There is infrastructure, skyscrapers, smart people, transportation, and so on.

But what would happen if North Korea took over the city tomorrow? Would all that wealth simply remain in place? Would everyone just go on with their lives?

Of course not. People would flee in droves, the city would crumble.

Tom Bell says that 44% of the wealth in the world is the rule of law. Clearly, there are plenty of gripes to be had with the governments of New York City, New York State, and the United States. But even governments which mix statutory and common law can provide a decent arena where businesses and individuals can flourish.

Of course, we should always want to improve our circumstances. Since 44% of the wealth of the world comes down to how good the government is, this is the most important area to improve.

We could continue voting, volunteering on political campaigns, and calling our representatives. But speaking from personal experience, this doesn’t seem to make much difference.

But we have another choice right under our noses. It is already in practice in homeowners associations. Some people choose to voluntarily submit to a neighborhood wide private governing structure.

Maybe you can’t bear the thought of living next to a neighbor with chipping paint on his house. You, therefore, agree that you will keep your home’s paint fresh, knowing that your neighbor signed the same agreement. The consequences for failing to hold up your side of the bargain are clearly stated in the contract you sign.

This same privatized rule of law is expanding beyond neighborhoods.

Improving Terrible Governments

Tom Bell is a law professor who spoke at the Startup Societies and D10e conference this past weekend in San Francisco.

Tom has a book coming out called Your Next Government? From the Nation State to Stateless Nations. Here’s what he has said in the past about what your next government might look like:

Your next government might thus resemble a city-sized corporation, with you and other residents buying shares, electing the board of directors, and so forth. Think of it as residential co-op, upgraded for the big leagues…

In double democracy, owners manage the community on a one share/vote basis while residents enjoy the power to veto select laws or officers on a one person/vote basis. Owners construct; residents correct. Double democracy provides a structural safeguard against offensive governments without opening the door to mob rule. Both shareholders’ property rights and residents’ individual rights get represented in double democracy.

By privatizing the rule of law, you can get a much better product. Remember that the rule of law accounts for 44% of the wealth of the world, according to Bell.

Even places as repressive as Saudi Arabia, therefore, have some incentive to let go, in order to create more wealth in their jurisdictions. The country set up a special economic zone called KAEC City (King Abdullah Economic City). The city is administered by a publicly traded private company called Emaar Economic City.

And if you are a woman in Saudi Arabia, this is where you want to be. The oppressive police forces of the Saudi government are not present.

The city was designed with tourists and young Saudi’s in mind. The majority of the hundreds of thousands of Saudi’s studying abroad are women. Neither they nor tourists have an appetite for the oppressive laws against women which stain the rest of the country.

So there is a continuum here on what can be accomplished by neighborhood associations and private cities. Some people want to make sure their neighbor cuts his grass, and some people want to not be whipped for driving cars and showing their face.

When governing is done by consent, this is all possible, and everything in between.

Why Would Governments Allow it?

You would think governments would feel vulnerable at the thought of private governing structures competing with their power. And surely many do. But there are also incentives to letting go of control.

Cash strapped governments are happy to let private companies pay for the infrastructure which would otherwise have to come out of the public coffer. So a government can preside over a beautiful new city or neighborhood, reap the economic benefits, and not have to pay a dime.

And then there is the proper strategy for anyone attempting to start a special economic zone or private city. To get a law passed–or repealed–across an entire country, you need to appeal to countless politicians, bureaucrats, and special interest groups.

It sounds less scary to politicians and voters when you can say, “Look, we don’t want to change things everywhere. We just want this one little piece of land to have different rules.”

From my perspective, this is the camel’s nose under the tent strategy. Before governments know what hit them, the whole world will be privatized. People will see the success of private governance, special economic zones, and government by consent. Then they will clamor to create their own mini society, or move to their favorite one.

That 44% of the Earth’s wealth, the rule of law, cannot be stolen. But it can be created. And under those conditions, a new world is forming.

Google Is The Biggest Lobbying Spender In Tech

The fact that many major tech companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley doesn’t mean they don’t have a voice in Washington as well. As Statista"s Feliz Richer notes, according to documents filed in accordance with the Lobbying Disclosure Act, companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon spend millions every year trying to legally influence D.C. lawmakers.

The following chart shows how the lobbying expenditure of Google,
Apple, Facebook and Amazon has developed over the past few years. For
additional information please refer to the official database.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Interestingly, the quarterly filings not only reveal how much the companies spend on their lobbying efforts, they also provide us with information on which issues these efforts are related to.

Take Google for example: in the second quarter of 2017, the search giant spent $5.9 million on lobbying with respect to issues ranging from more obvious ones such as regulation of online advertising and immigration of highly skilled individuals to more surprising ones such as wind power and unmanned aerial systems technology.

America 2017 = France 1789

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

We are looking more and more like France on the eve of its revolution in 1789. Our classes are distributed differently, but the inequity is just as sharp. America’s “aristocracy,” once based strictly on bank accounts, acts increasingly hereditary as the vapid offspring and relations of “stars” (in politics, showbiz, business, and the arts) assert their prerogatives to fame, power, and riches - think the voters didn’t grok the sinister import of Hillary’s “it’s my turn” message?

What’s especially striking in similarity to the court of the Bourbons is the utter cluelessness of America’s entitled power elite to the agony of the moiling masses below them and mainly away from the coastal cities. Just about everything meaningful has been taken away from them, even though many of the material trappings of existence remain: a roof, stuff that resembles food, cars, and screens of various sizes.

But the places they are supposed to call home are either wrecked — the original small towns and cities of America — or replaced by new “developments” so devoid of artistry, history, thought, care, and charm that they don’t add up to communities, and are so obviously unworthy of affection, that the very idea of “home” becomes a cruel joke.

These places were bad enough in the 1960s and 70s, when the people who lived in them at least were able to report to paying jobs assembling products and managing their distribution. Now those people don’t have that to give a little meaning to their existence, or cover the costs of it. Public space was never designed into the automobile suburbs, and the sad remnants of it were replaced by ersatz substitutes, like the now-dying malls. Everything else of a public and human associational nature has been shoved into some kind of computerized box with a screen on it.

The floundering non-elite masses have not learned the harsh lesson of our time that the virtual is not an adequate substitute for the authentic, while the elites who create all this vicious crap spend millions to consort face-to-face in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard telling each other how wonderful they are for providing all the artificial social programming and glitzy hardware for their paying customers.

The effect of this dynamic relationship so far has been powerfully soporific. You can deprive people of a true home for a while, and give them virtual friends on TV to project their emotions onto, and arrange to give them cars via some financing scam or other to keep them moving mindlessly around an utterly desecrated landscape under the false impression that they’re going somewhere — but we’re now at the point where ordinary people can’t even carry the costs of keeping themselves hostage to these degrading conditions.

The next big entertainment for them will be the financial implosion of the elites themselves as the governing forces of physics finally overcome all the ruses and stratagems of the elites who have been playing games with money. Professional observers never tires of saying that the government can’t run out of money (because they can always print more of it) but they can certainly destroy the value of that money and shred the consensual confidence that allows it to operate as money.

That’s exactly what is about to commence at the end of the summer when the government runs out of cash-on-hand and congress finds itself utterly paralyzed by party animus to patch the debt ceiling problem that disables new borrowing. The elites may be home from the Hamptons and the Vineyard by then, but summers may never be the same for them again.

The Deep State may win its war against the pathetic President Trump, but it won’t win any war against the imperatives of the universe and the way that expresses itself in the true valuation of things. And when the moment of clarification arrives — the instant of cosmic price discovery — the clueless elites will have to really and truly worry about the value of their heads.

Only 2% Of US Politicians Actually Want To Stop Arming Terrorists - Here's Why

Authored by Alice Salles via TheAntiMedia.org,

One of the few elected Democratic lawmakers with an extensive anti-war record, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), has combined forces with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) to push legislation through both the House and the Senate that would bar federal agencies from using taxpayer-backed funds to provide weapons, training, intelligence, or any other type of support to terrorist cells such as al-Qaeda, ISIS, or any other group that is associated with them in any way.

The Stop Arming Terrorists Act is so unique that it’s also the only bill of its kind that would also bar the government from funneling money and weapons through other countries that support (directly or indirectly) terrorists such as Saudi Arabia.

To our surprise — or should we say shame? — only 13 other lawmakers out of hundreds have co-sponsored Gabbard’s House bill. Paul’s Senate version of the bill, on the other hand, has zero cosponsors.

While both pieces of legislation were introduced in early 2017, no real action has been taken as of yet. This proves that Washington refuses to support bills that would actually provoke positive chain reactions not only abroad but also at home. Why? Well, let’s look at the groups that would lose a great deal in case this bill is signed into law.

Military & Homeland Security Companies, Lobbyists, And Lawmakers All Profit From War

With trillions of tax dollars flowing to companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and even IBM, among others, companies that invest heavily in weapons, cyber security systems, and other technologies that are widely used in times of war would stand to lose a lot — if not everything — if all of a sudden, the United States chose to become a nation that stands for peace and free market principles.

For one, these companies have a heavy lobbying presence, ensuring that lawmakers sympathetic to their plight are elected every two years. When the possibility of a new conflict appears on the horizon, these companies are the first to lobby heavily for action.

But this dynamic isn’t a secret. We all know that the crony capitalist system that thrives in Washington, D.C., is the very bread and butter of politics in America. After all, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation in his farewell address in 1961 that “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” were becoming the great powers behind U.S. politics, and that if we weren’t weary of this influence, we would risk living in a perpetual state of war.

Still, we allowed it to take over. And there isn’t one industry powerful enough to counter this destructive authority.

With the support of an army of well-established and connected millionaire lobbyists, the war machine operating in Washington is so powerful that anything can be turned into an existential threat.

Any conflict abroad that has absolutely no importance or that poses literally no threat to the common American is inflated to become a threat to the American way of life. They hate us “for our freedom.” Therefore, we must show them what democracy looks like.

Without the same kind of powerful and wealthy team behind the cause for sanity and peace, this army of big money and big lobbyists has single-handedly put us and many generations to come in debt over Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and now Syria. And as the marketing machine behind this kind of lobbying effort taps into the social justice trend that has infiltrated every aspect of our culture in recent years, these organizations have learned that they will get even broader support from the public if they add feminist, anti-poverty, and pro-equality messages to their pro-war efforts.

Take the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, for instance, which, as NBC has reported, originated with “Obiageli Ezekwesili, a former vice president of the World Bank for the Africa region and a senior advisor on Africa Economic Development Policy for the Open Society Foundations”  —  a George Soros-backed foundation. In no time, the social media “effort” had become the most effective lobbying force behind the expansion of the never-ending war on terror. And whether it was meant to promote this outcome or not, it helped the United States easily invest more tax dollars into an unwinnable war.

As you can see, even if Gabbard and Paul managed to use all of their time to force the Stop Arming Terrorists Act through Congress so it could get to President Donald Trump’s desk, the powers at play in Washington would do their best to sweep this effort under the rug. Not because individuals involved in pro-war lobbying are, perhaps, thirsty for war per se, but because the system under which they operate allows for bad incentives to produce a great deal of wealth and influence, tilting the balance toward evil.

Without a state that can be bribed, companies would be left to fend for themselves and stay afloat by making customers… happy. And you can’t make customers happy if all you have to offer is war.

What's Triggering The Left Now? Soon You Won't Be Allowed To Say "Patriot"

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

There was a time when liberals and conservatives both agreed on one thing. They both used to love their country. Though they differed on what values and policies would be best for their homeland, they still had that shred of common ground.

That’s clearly no longer the case. Across the Western world, you’ll find that even moderate liberals are often uncomfortable with terms like “patriotism” and “nationalism.” As for the far-left, they now view these terms as poisonous and archaic. That’s because they want the whole world to be one big happy family, where borders are meaningless, people can freely move from one country to the next, and no society is inherently better than another. They preach diversity, but they want the world to be blended into one drab monoculture that falls in line with their beliefs.

So it was only a matter of time before leftists would start being triggered by patriotic rhetoric. It’s happening in Australia, where Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull recently stated that he wants the government to tighten citizenship and visa requirements.

“There is no more important title in our democracy than “Australian Citizen”. And we should make no apology for asking those who seek to join our Australian family to join us as Australian patriots – committed to the values that define us, committed to the values that unite us. Our success as a multicultural society is built on strong foundations which include the confidence of the Australian people that their government, and it alone, determines who comes to Australia.”

Sounds pretty inoffensive right? Not to many Australians, who have taken umbrage with his use of the word “patriot.”

Demanding loyalty to the state... don"t fascists like Trump keep spraying that bile?

— Agent Arioch [Umbra] (@the_LoungeFly) June 13, 2017

It"s UN-Australian to use that right-wing American term. Didn"t need it for Italians,British, Greeks, Chinese,Vietnamese, etc. etc.#false

— RODH2 (@2hdor) June 14, 2017

"I resent the word "patriot", its use & application to immigrants. It feels Trumpesque, someone who"s either a zealot/ extremist" #TheDrum pic.twitter.com/YXlcuGwh2o

— ABC The Drum (@ABCthedrum) June 13, 2017

That of course, is so typical of the Left. They care more about how they feel regarding an issue, rather than the objective truth. And the truth of the matter, is that these people don’t seem to know what patriotism means. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it simply means “love for or devotion to one’s country.” According to thefreedictionary.com, a patriot is “a person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests.”

What’s so bad about that?

Make no mistake, people are increasingly being offended by patriotism across the Western world. It’s even ramping up in America, which is considered one of the most patriotic nations on the planet. Here we have leftists melting down over sports fans wearing red, white and blue clothing. Even in Germany, a country that is notorious for frowning upon most patriotic displays, it’s not taboo to wave the German flag at a sports game.

This trend has to be fought at every turn, because there’s nothing shameful about loving where you come from.

To everyone in the Western world, take note. What happens in you culture, will eventually influence government policies. So if this derision of patriotism ever goes mainstream, you can say goodbye to our borders. And when our nations are flooded with migrants who come face to face with a self-loathing culture, they’ll have no motivation to assimilate. Then you can say goodbye to your values and way of life as well.

Welcome To The Corporatocracy

Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

The interests of Washington and large corporations have merged so completely they are now inseparable.

America’s large corporations and its government have merged. Or was it an acquisition? If the latter, who acquired whom? Unfortunately, the labels affixed to purely corporate combinations lose their analytical usefulness here. While the two retain their own distinct legal structures and managements, so to speak, such a close community of interest has evolved that it’s no longer possible to separate them or delineate their individual contours. Political labels are no help; the ones most often used have become hopelessly imprecise. The Wikipedia definition of “fascism” is over 8,000 words, with 43 notes and 16 references.

However, the conjoined blob is so big, rapacious, and intrusive that akin to Justice Potter Stewart’s famous non-definition of obscenity, everybody knows it when they see or otherwise come into contact with it. This article will use the term “corporatocracy.” It’s less letters, dashes, and words to type than “the corporate-government-combination.” No serviceable understanding of either US history or current events is possible without close study of the corporatocracy. Unfortunately, such study, like entomology or cleaning septic tanks, requires a stout constitution. But take heart, entomologists grow to love their creepy crawly things, and septic tank cleaners say that after a few minutes you don’t even notice the smell.

A cherished delusion of naive liberals holds that big government is a counterweight, not a partner, to big business. Such a rationale is touted when the righteous demand new regulation, the public and media endorse it, the legislators pass it, and the president signs it into law. However, there are always unpaved stretches on the road to hell—once regulation is law, the righteous, public, media, legislators, and president, and their ostensibly good intentions, are on to the next cause.

In the quiet obscurity they relish, regulators and regulated get down to doing what they do best: bending the law to their joint benefit. Business, whose P&L’s can be powerfully affected by regulations, hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers in a never ending effort to tilt the playing field in their direction, and improve bottom lines, stock prices, and executive bonuses. The return on such investment is far higher than on old fashioned expenditures like research and development, plant and equipment, and job-creating expansion.

Not-so-naive liberals, professed conservatives, and apolitical opportunists work both sides of the street. The revolving door ensures that all concerned do well. Playing this game isn’t cheap, which serves as a barrier to entry to scrappy competitors who compete those old fashioned ways: innovation, hustle, and better products and services at lower prices. Regulation cartelizes industries; look, for instance, at banking and medicine. No surprise that regulatory barriers are one of Warren Buffett’s favorite “moats”: deep and hard-to-cross waterways that protect durable commercial advantages.

Washington doesn’t just fortify favored corporations’ business plans. A $4-plus-trillion-a-year enterprise, the government is the world’s largest purchaser of goods and services. Procuring those contracts employs more armies of lobbyists and lawyers, and has a powerful effect on policy. The shoddy premises supporting the welfare and warfare states, and their epic waste, are obvious to many of the taxpayers forced to underwrite them. They’ve decried them for decades, and voted for candidates promising to cut welfare, waste, war, and taxes. However, beyond voting, taxpayers can devote little time to stopping or slowing the gravy train. Their resources are infinitesimal compared to the resources its passengers expend to keep it running.

The modus operandi for Washington and big business have converged. Debt, its issuance and marketing, is the pillar of the financial nexus and revolving door between Washington and Wall Street. The government and its central bank artificially pump up the economy and hide its deterioration with debt and machinations: ultra low interest rates, quantitative easing, and debt monetization. Big businesses lever their balance sheets to pump up their stock prices or make acquisitions, machinations that do nothing to improve core businesses but often hide ongoing deterioration.

The history of any long-running government program is a catalogue of failures and expanding budgets. Washington cherishes failure, the fountainhead of larger appropriations and more power. Success would put bureaucrats out of work and give politicians less influence to peddle. Likewise in business, failure has become much more acceptable than it was during those bad old days of cutthroat capitalism. Marissa Mayer’s undistinguished five-year tenure at Yahoo, while perhaps not a complete failure, certainly can’t be termed a success. Nevertheless, she’s walking away from the company with at least $186 million for her middling endeavors. Given all that discrimination out there against women, one can only imagine what she would have made if she were a man.

Silicon Valley puts billions into companies like Uber, AirBnb, Snapchat, and Lyft that lose those billions and will continue to do so for the foreseeable—and probably the unforeseeable—future. Private equity shops load up companies with debt that gets paid out as special dividends to the private equity shops, leaving the indebted and enfeebled companies unable to compete and the rest of us wondering how such rape is legal in our rape-conscious age. This recipe for inevitable failure is now playing out in the beleaguered retail sector, which would be nowhere near as beleaguered if it wasn’t so beset with debt.

Tesla, a stock market darling and the quintessence of companies in which failure is the business plan, milks Wall Street for financing and Washington (and a bunch of state and local jurisdictions) for subsidies. It has lost billions during its ten years of existence, but its many admirers sing the praises of CEO Elon Musk, always using the term “consummate salesman”—perhaps it’s on his business card. Musk and fan club dream of “the next big thing” and engage in mutual masturbatory fantasies of transforming the world…and Mars. All this is harmless enough as fodder for dazzling audiovisual presentations and slick speeches, but downright dangerous when real billions, private and public, gets sucked in.

Meanwhile, the corporatocracy crucifies an old-line, profitable corporation, Volkswagen, that cheated on one of its hundreds of thousands of regulations. It undoubtedly wasn’t the cheating that got VW in trouble. Regulations are made to be cheated—it’s impossible to run a business without doing so—but the proper offerings must be made to the corporatocracy. If that were not the case, there would be Wall Street, Pharma, and Defense Contractor wings at federal penitentiaries. VW didn’t kowtow low enough or pay high enough to the bureaucrats and politicians, who retaliated, probably “nudged” by a VW competitor.

As a successful businessman, President Trump knows many of the corporatocracy’s skims, scams, and schemes. Perhaps that will enable him to keep his pledge and drain the swamp. However, it’s extensive, fetid, and teems with loathsome creatures, so a bet he’ll succeed involves exceedingly long odds. You’re probably better off buying Tesla stock.

50,000 Police Monitor As 47 Million French Voters Decide The Fate Of Europe

After months of anticipatory build up, voting is underway in France on Sunday in the first round of a bitterly fought presidential election that is seen as crucial to the future of the Eurozone, and a closely-watched test of voters" anger with the political establishment.

Local polling stations opened at 0600 GMT and will close at 1800 GMT, with about 47 million voters expected to cast their ballots in around 67,000 polling stations amid a high terror alert.

Voters, on edge after Thursday"s latest ISIS terrorist attack, will be monitored by more than 50,000 police officers backed by elite units of the French security services patrolled the streets less than three days after a suspected Islamist gunman shot dead a policeman and wounded two others on the central Champs Elysees avenue.

A voté ????#JeVote pic.twitter.com/ZZTw1ZAe7F

— Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) April 23, 2017

A voté. pic.twitter.com/E2DVMIHak8

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) April 23, 2017

By noon (6.00 a.m. ET), turnout amid perfect weather conditions across much of France was 28.54%, according to official figures, roughly the same as in the 2012 first round, in which almost 80% eventually took part.

Finally Inside the Lycée in London to vote in French president elex after 2 hours of lines outside And now, more lines. #Presidentielle2017 pic.twitter.com/0UZyzz4EUJ

— Yann Tessier (@Y_Tessier) April 23, 2017

Some polls had been predicting a much lower turnout, closer to the 70% that took the then National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen into the second round in 2002. Pollsters are unclear about what a low or high turnout could mean in 2017.

Long queues of French nationals in London waiting to vote in today"s presidential election #frenchelection pic.twitter.com/C4cKFNtp0S

— MarieLouiseGumuchian (@MLGumuchian) April 23, 2017

While we have previewed today"s event extensively (most recently here), Reuters summarized it best: today "voters will decide whether to back a pro-EU centrist newcomer [and a former Rothschild banker], a scandal-ridden veteran conservative who wants to slash public spending, a far-left eurosceptic admirer of Fidel Castro or to appoint France"s first woman president who would shut borders and ditch the euro."

The outcome of today"s election will show whether the populist tide that led to Brexit and Donald Trump"s victory is still rising, or starting to ebb.

The biggest wildcard ahead of today"s outcome is the high level of indecision among the population, with nearly a third of potential voters undecided until the last minute. Hanan Fanidi, a 33-year-old financial project manager, was still unsure as she arrived at a polling station in Paris" 18th arrondissement.

"I don"t believe in anyone, actually. I haven"t arrived at a candidate in particular who could advance things. I"m very, very pessimistic," she said.

Looking at the outcome of today"s vote, while the possibility of a Le Pen-Melenchon run-off is not the most likely scenario, it is the one which alarms bankers and investors.

Putting the performance of Marin Le Pen - as well as that of her father Jean-Marie - in election context:

• Jean-Marie Le Pen, 2002: 16.8%


• Jean-Marie Le Pen, 2007: 10.4%


• Marine Le Pen, 2012: 17.9%

Le Pen has told supporters "the EU will die", while Macron, 39, a former Rothschild banker wants to further beef up the euro zone. Le Pen further wants to return to the Franc, re-denominate the country"s debt stock, tax imports and reject international treaties. Melenchon also wants to radically overhaul the European Union and hold a referendum on whether to leave the bloc.

Le Pen or Melenchon would struggle, in parliamentary elections in June, to win a majority to carry out such radical moves, but their growing popularity also worries France"s EU partners.

Germany"s position on today"s election is hardly a surprise: "It is no secret that we will not be cheering madly should Sunday"s result produce a second round between Le Pen and Melenchon," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said. If either Macron or Fillon were victorious, each would face challenges. For Macron, a big question would be whether he could win a majority in parliament in June. Fillon, though likely to struggle less to get a majority, would likely be dogged by an embezzlement scandal, in which he denies wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, polls opened on Saturday in France’s overseas territories, allowing citizens to cast their ballots a day ahead of voters on the French mainland. According to unconfirmed twitter reports, based on preliminary offshore results, support for Melenchon is far greater than for any of his competitors.

.@BFMTV ????????????#Élysée2017 : La #RTBF publie les résultats définitifs en #Guyane : #Mélenchon 24,72%#LePen 24,29%#Macron 18,75%#Fillon 14,66% pic.twitter.com/5CVZyGmDtn

— ????Le Globe (@LeGlobe_info) April 23, 2017

Occasional live feed from Paris courtesy of Reuters:

When Will The Left Come For You?

Via JC Collins of Philosophy of Metrics.com,

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—
And there was no one left to speak for me.

– From the Postwar War Anti-Nazi Lectures of Protestant Pastor Martin Niemöller.

From a philosophical perspective I dislike breaking topics down into left and right ideologies. It minimizes and degenerates meaningful conversation into well rehearsed diametrical talking points which do little but entrench and promote ongoing political and social conflict. There have been some articles published which both use and explore these opposing positions, but the focus remains on the semi-engineered outcomes which are expected from such a left vs right political and socioeconomic paradigm.

The term semi-engineered is used for the first time here and is reflective of an allowable and flexible margin related to an unpredictable human quality which exerts itself on all events and situations. The intent is to ensure that the actions and reactions of the electoral body remain predictable. The semi-engineered aspects take these human nature qualities into account and prepares strategies which flow to “natural” and “organic” outcomes. These join other terms such as “grassroots” to make up the talking points of the modern political lexicon.

The Western systems of governance and education hammer the left and right ideologies through the use of mainstream media and alternative media, while using the bricks and mortar institutions of wisdom and learning as a degenerative weapon meant to promote and perpetuate the continued fragmentation and division of the electoral demographic composition.

The argument can be made that this semi-engineering is a product of both extensive conspiratorial planning as well as the human predisposition to avoid change and stick with the known. Conspiratorial planning is not as difficult to define and accept as we have been conditioned to believe. The socioeconomic and geopolitical strategy of “divide and conquer” has been a part of the worlds history as much as anything else. It is more probable that conspiratorial groups of likeminded individuals have directed and shaped the course of human history than it is that all has simply been a result of chance or happenstance.

In the book The Anglo-American Establishment by Georgetown University Professor Carrol Quigley we find that such groups have been defined and have in fact shaped the Western world through its use of the British Empire and subsequently the American hegemonic empire.

Professor Quigley states the following in Chapter 9 titled The Creation of the Commonwealth:

“The evolution of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations is to a very great extent a result of the activities of the Milner Group. To be sure, the ultimate goal of the Group was quite different from the present system, since they wanted a federation of the Empire, but this was a long-run goal, and en route they accepted the present system as a temporary way station. However, the strength of colonial and Dominion feeling, which made the ideal of federation admittedly remote at all times, has succeeded in making this way-station a permanent terminal and thus had eliminated, apparently forever, the hope for federation. With the exception of a few diehards, the Group has accepted the solution of imperial cooperation and “parallelism” as an alternative to federation.”

This paragraph defines for us the function of conspiratorial planning as well as its response to the unpredictable human quality, which in this case, supported Dominion over federation. The plan and strategy of the Group was adjusted and the engineering of the Western governance structures continued. These historical realities are indisputable and provide conclusive evidence of the existence of such conspiratorial groups and sub-groups.

Subsequent groups from that defined above, which have continued the engineering of Western civilization and governance frameworks, have further developed the political left and political right ideologies as fine tuned “weapons of the weak”, which are meant to further erode civil liberties and consolidate power. This is the same objective and scope of work which the Milner Group was tasked with in its attempts to implement a federation but settled on the Dominion for the integration of sovereign regions under the Commonwealth of Nations.

The left position has been established as existing in the progressive spectrum, while the right has been established as existing in the regressive spectrum. The natural and historical tendencies of the electoral population have been positioned on the traditional right. The political left has been attempting to push and pull the mass population and its demographic ideals towards the left spectrum. This is considered progressive and resistance to this program of engineering is labeled as regressive.

From this basic setup the political tension we are experiencing today has developed. Those wanting to remain in the past, or the place from which we have been pushed and pulled, or any attempt to go back to that place, is regressive, while everything which is transforming the past and pulling our civilization further from that past is progressive.

The consideration that everything progressive is not necessarily productive and aligned with the natural demands of homo-protoculture traditions is never considered. Everything left-progressive is positive and everything right-regressive is negative.

The case is now being made by the disorganized mass of the electoral demographic that the left has become regressive while the right is now expressing the qualities of a progressive society. The core argument that the left is now regressive is best expressed in the spread and abuse of political correctness and social justice.

The left-liberal ideology promotes so-called equality and human rights for all. On the face this would appear to be extremely reasonable and honourable. In the first years of this agenda no one could argue with its mandates and goals. It started with equal rights for women, which included voting and other legal alignments which had not before been in demand or expected.

Those few who disagreed with these social objectives were rightly labeled as “chauvinist pigs” and promoters of misogyny. It was the first real movement from the traditional spectrum of the right. It is only in hindsight that we can see this, a rational social movement, as the first step towards a “progressive tyranny” and at the time it was only looked upon and considered a change for the betterment of Western civilization.

The next phase of this progressive social justice built on the ending of slavery which re-manifested as the civil rights war. Like the origins of the feminist movement, the arguments were rational and no ethical and honourable citizen could disagree with equal rights for African-Americans.

It was in the 1970’s that we first began to experience the open social expressions of the marginal segment of the population which represented homosexuality. Television programming such as Three’s Company began to condition and engineer the acceptance of the electoral demographic “right”majority.

In the show Jack, played by the late John Ritter, pretended to be gay so he could live with two women in an apartment. The “homophobic” and “regressive” landlord Mr. Roper would only let Jack live there if he was gay and not straight, as his old school traditional ethics considered a man living in sin with two women as immoral. Hilarity ensued as Jack went through a series of challenges and obstacles to live a normal heterosexual life while maintaining the illusion of homosexuality to fool the simple and backwards Mr. Roper.

Evenings as a child was spent watching Three’s Company and the humour of John Ritter with my family and laughing. It was considered good quality time and I remember laying on the carpet in front of the television with feelings of guilt as I knew late homework waited elsewhere.

It is only now that I look back and see that the show was an early weapon used to marginalize a majority into accepting a social mandate which wasn’t very popular. Nobody wanted to be a fool like Mr. Roper, so we laughed and shut up about our own personal opinions and went about our business of school and work.

The progression of the regressive-left continued through the decades with similar tactics and methods of social engineering. Everything from movies, music, and additional television programming pushed the mass population further away from the traditional roots where Western civilization began. The pendulum swing has gone so far to the left that equal rights for all has now morphed into anti-Christian, anti-white, anti-traditional, anti-male, and anti-Capitalism.

For decades already movies have imagined every mastermind criminal as an evil Capitalist who wants to enslave and control the world. This social engineering is now so rampant that discussions supporting the Capitalist system turn into serious arguments with the liberal-left making accusations of identity politics for the purpose of demeaning and minimizing both the position and character of those promoting Capitalism.

The same methods and techniques are now used on anyone who disagrees with the left ideology and its stated goals and mandates. The mass immigration which has been happening for decades already has taken on a new sense of urgency and panic as migrants and refugees from Islamic nations flood into the West. The differences in culture and beliefs between the West and Islamic cultures is obvious to most but open discussions and analysis are not permitted.

It is beginning to appear that this so-called “Islamophobia”, which has built on the resentment surrounding the labels of Homophobia and Xenophobia, among others, is being established as a benchmark on hate and hate speech. Members of Academia, which have hijacked and used our Western educational institutions to promote the liberal-left agenda, are coming in force to condemn anyone who disagrees with mass Islamic migration and open borders.

It was evenly recently stated that a database, or register, of those charged with hate crimes should be kept so the rights of those individuals can be restricted. The comparison is made to the databases which keep track of sexual offenders. The difference between hate crimes, which often, like Islamophobia, is not clearly defined and can be used to demonize unwanted behaviour from the right, and the actions of sexual offenders such as pedophiles and rapists , are massive. To marginalize a majority as Islamophobic and hateful because it does not want to lose its cultural identity to the onslaught of a culture who, by its very expressed purpose, wants to spread and take over the host culture, is one of the greatest travesties of our modern world.

Creating and maintaining a database of such “offenders of the left” is a horrible suggestion and is reminiscent of the registries which Nazi Germany utilized to track and manage the “undesirables” such as Jews.

There is a concerted effort to criminalize the behaviour and opinions which the liberal-left find undesirable. This is a serious threat to our civilization and the methods by which we ensure the continuation of freedom of speech, electoral voting, and the perpetuation of cultural segregation and division.

A man who recently burned a copy of the Koran was charged with blasphemy. How is this even possible? Our governance system which has become dominated by the left, is using that very same system to restrict the rights of varying demographics. It is ironic that the liberal-left mandates, which were born in seeking equal rights for all, like women having the right to vote, is now attempting to restrict the rights of those who do not agree with its transformed goals and objectives.

First they came for the traditionalists. Few said anything. Then they came for the Christians. Still, few said anything. Eventually they started coming for the males. Nothing. After males they started coming for the whites. Even this couldn’t get everyone to stand united against the tyranny. Now they are using a regressive ideology to take rights away from anyone who disagrees. Finally, some are speaking louder and beginning to be heard. But is it too late? When will the left come for you? Will you now speak out?

The Protected, Privileged Establishment Versus The Working Class

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Meanwhile, back in reality, household income for the bottom 95% has declined while the owners of capital and their privileged, protected servants in the Establishment have gorged themselves on private wealth.

As noted yesterday in The Collapse of the Left, the working class has finally awakened to the Left"s betrayal and abandonment of labor in favor of the protected privileges of the elitist Establishment. I also described the Left"s Great Con:

To mask the collapse of the Left"s economic defense of labor, the Left has substituted social justice movements for economic opportunities and security. This has succeeded brilliantly, as tens of millions of self-described "progressives" now parrot the Great Con that "social justice" campaigns on behalf of marginalized social groups are now the defining feature of Progressive Social Democratic movements.

This diversionary sleight-of-hand embrace of economically neutered "social justice" campaigns masked the fact that social democratic parties everywhere have thrown labor into the churning propellers of globalization, open immigration and neoliberal financial policies--all of which benefit mobile capital, which has engorged itself on the abandonment of labor by the Left.

Meanwhile, the fat-cats of the Left have engorged themselves on capital"s largesse in exchange for their treachery. Bill and Hillary Clinton"s $200 million in "earnings" come to mind, as do countless other examples of personal aggrandizement by self-proclaimed "defenders" of labor.

But it isn"t just the Left"s fat-cats who have feathered their own nests while denigrating the Working Class with arrogantly contemptuous scorn: the entire protected, privileged "liberal" elitist Establishment has responded with a very illiberal outrage that their protected, privileged skims and scams might be endangered by an uprising of the loathed and ridiculed Working Class that they reckoned would remain safely cowed and conned.

As noted yesterday, the only moment in recent history in which the Wall Street-cartel-state strongholds of privilege, wealth and power (i.e. owners of capital) felt threatened by political insurrection by disenfranchised labor was The Great Depression of the 1930s.

With the first iteration of global debt-based capitalism in near-collapse (systemic bad debt was not written off, lest the big banks" insolvency be recognized), owners of capital and the political class reluctantly swallowed modest social-democratic reforms that gave labor enough of the pie to stave off revolt / revolution (as noted by Arshad A. on my Facebook thread).

Just as Marx had predicted, this crisis of global-debt-cartel-state capitalism was the result of internal contradictions built into all forms capitalism dominated by capital and the state that protects and serves capital.

Now we face another crisis of the current iteration of global-debt-cartel-state capitalism, also the result of internal contradictions--not just financial, but cultural, energy-based and political contradictions.

The privileged, protected elitist Establishment reckoned the social-welfare programs of the 1930s and the Left"s Great Cons would keep the disenfranchised Working Class permanently cowed and conned. If welfare (now called "disability," "crazy money", etc.) and the distractions of "social justice" campaigns didn"t keep the Working Class fragmented and powerless, then the ceaseless drumbeat of arrogant dismissal and disdain aimed at any Working Class resistance would do the trick.

Any Working Class individual who recognized that globalization, open immigration and neoliberal financial policies were the propellers dismembering the Working Class economically and disenfranchising the Working Class politically was immediately labeled with the worst that "liberal" privileged, protected elites could spew: you"re racist, Luddite, backward, etc.--in other words, you"re not a rootless Cosmopolitan who loves your servitude to capital and the state like us.

Since the Left has masked its abandonment and betrayal of the Working Class with "social justice" speech acts, the worst insults the Left can dish out are those that suggest opposition to the Left"s social justice campaigns.

Self-identified "Progressives" are fine with the destruction and disenfranchisement of the Working Class, as long as the politically correct speech acts praising the Left"s Great Con are being uttered.

The self-serving, privileged, protected "liberal" Establishment is enraged that the Working Class is no longer following the script, i.e. remaining cowed, conned and fragmented. Like every other disenfranchised group, the Working Class has essentially zero choice of representational leadership, as the machinery of governance, finance and the mainstream media are all controlled by the privileged, protected elites of the Establishment.

So it boiled down to: choose more disenfranchisement and cowed servitude to "liberal" Elites, or vote for Trump. There was no other choice, so the Working Class voted for Trump as their only option other than surrender and servitude.

This rejection of their "betters" script has enraged their "betters," who now demand the destruction of their proxy voice (Trump) and their rebellion. The Establishment"s war on Trump is beneath the surface also a war against a Working Class that has finally had enough of its arrogant, hubris-soaked, self-serving, privileged, elitist "betters" of the Establishment.

If the Establishment had deigned to offer a radical-Left leader who correctly called out the American carnage that is the Working Class experience of the globalized, open-immigration neoliberalism that has so enriched the owners of capital and their "liberal" apparatchiks, then the Working Class may well have voted for the radical-Left truth-teller.

Alas, the Left ground down any opposition to "we "earned" $200 million" Hillary Clinton and her corrupt coterie of self-serving elites. Having beaten down, stripmined, insulted, denigrated, scorned and exploited the Working Class (whose "proper role" is to provide cannon fodder for the Elites" neocon Permanent War), the privileged, protected Establishment (like every other elite that suddenly finds its entitled dominance challenged) is in a full-blown fury: how dare the Working Class not accept our self-serving rule! We are entitled to rule! How dare they!

Meanwhile, back in reality, household income for the bottom 95% has declined while the owners of capital and their privileged, protected servants in the Establishment have gorged themselves on private wealth.

Here"s what"s happened as the Left and its armies of privileged fake-Progressives threw the Working Class overboard in favor of serving capital on the First Class deck:

What will it take to shift the balance of power decisively in favor of labor? My guess is the downward mobility of another 10 or 20 million people who currently reckon themselves "middle class" into the unprotected, disenfranchised ranks of the Working Class will do it.

Trump Aims To Cut The Neocon Deep State Off At The Knees

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The Neocon-Neoliberals must be fired and put out to pasture before they do any more harm.

I have long held that America"s Deep State--the unelected National Security State often referred to as the Shadow Government--is not a unified monolith but a deeply divided ecosystem in which the dominant Neocon-Neoliberal Oligarchy is being challenged by elements which view the Neocon-Neoliberal agenda as a threat to national security and the interests of the United States.

I call these anti-Neocon-Neoliberal elements the progressive Deep State.

If you want a working definition of the Neocon-Neoliberal Deep State, Hillary Clinton"s quip--we came, we saw, he died--is a good summary: a bullying, arrogance-soaked state-within-a-state pursuing an agenda of ceaseless intervention while operating a global Murder, Inc., supremely confident that no one in the elected government can touch them.

Until Trump unexpectedly wrenched the presidency from the Neocon"s candidate. The Neocon Deep State"s response was to manufacture a mass-media hysteria that Russia had wrongfully deprived the Neocon"s candidate (Hillary Clinton) of what was rightfully hers: the presidency. (The Neocons operate their own version of the divine right of Political Nobility.)

The Neocon-Neoliberals" strategy was to delegitimize Trump"s victory by ascribing it to "Russian Hacking," a claim that remains entirely unsubstantiated. Now that this grasping-at-straws Hail Mary coup attempt by a politicized C.I.A. and its corporate media mouthpiece has failed, the Neocon Deep State is about to find out the Progressive Deep State finally has a president who is willing and able to cut the Neocon-Neoliberals off at the knees.

Trump Is Working On A Plan To Restructure, Pare Back The CIA And America"s Top Spy Agency.

If you want documented evidence of this split in the Deep State--sorry, it doesn"t work that way. Nobody in the higher echelons of the Deep State is going to leak anything about the low-intensity war being waged because the one thing everyone agrees on is the Deep State"s dirty laundry must be kept private.

As a result, the split is visible only by carefully reading between the lines, by examining who is being placed in positions of control in the Trump Administration, and reading the tea leaves of who is "retiring" (i.e. being fired) or quitting, which agencies are suddenly being reorganized, and the appearance of dissenting views in journals that serve as public conduits for Deep State narratives.

I have also long held that Wall Street"s political dominance is part and parcel of the Neocon-Neoliberal ideology, and the progressive elements in the Deep State also want to (finally) limit the power of the big banks and the rest of the Wall Street crowd.

Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)

The split in the Deep State is a reflection of the profound political disunity that is occurring in the U.S. In other words, it isn"t just disunity in the masses or the political elites--it"s a division in all levels of our society.

The cause is not difficult to discern: the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of the few is generating levels of inequality that threaten democracy, the social order and the vitality of the economy:

As someone who has studied the Deep State for 40 years, I find it ironic that so many self-identified "progressives" do not understand that the U.S. military is now the Progressive element and it"s the civilian leadership--the Neocon-Neoliberals-- who are responsible for leading the nation into quagmires and handing the keys to the chicken coop to the wolves of Wall Street.

When military leaders such as Eric Shinseki questioned the Neocon"s insane "strategy" in Iraq--essentially a civilian fantasy of magical-thinking--the Neocons quickly cashiered him (Shinseki was a wounded combat veteran of Vietnam who rose through the ranks--the exact opposite of the coddled never-get-my-hands-dirty Elites in the civilian Neocon-Neoliberal leadership.)

To the degree that the U.S. has become a Third World Oligarchy owned and controlled by a financial-political Elite, then the U.S. military is one of the few national institutions that hasn"t been corrupted by top-down politicization and worship of Wall Street.

Shinseki et al. did not amass a fortune from Wall Street like Bill and Hillary Clinton. The simple dictum--follow the money--maps the lay of the land rather neatly.

The Neocon-Neoliberals have run the nation into the ground. They must be fired and put out to pasture before they do any more harm. That includes the Fake-"Progressives" and the fake-"Conservatives" alike who have enriched themselves within the Neocon-Neoliberal Oligarchy.

If you are surprised that the Democratic Party, the C.I.A. and Wall Street are all hugging each other in the same cozy Neocon-Neoliberal Oligarchic embrace, you shouldn"t be. Open your eyes.

Could the Deep State Be Sabotaging Hillary? (August 8, 2016)

Are You A Deplorable?

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Regardless of your ethnicity, class or religion, if you perceive the institutions that govern American life as corrupted, riddled with favoritism and spin or as broken, you"re a Deplorable.

Are you a Deplorable? The answer might surprise you. Take this short quiz to find out.

1. If you agree with this characterization of American Elites: "The self-satisfied cosmopolitan culture that sprang up among the affluent 20% or so of the industrial world’s population, who became convinced that the temporary ascendancy of policies that favored their interests was not only permanent but self-evidently right and just." (The Fifth Side of the Triangle The Archdruid Report)

You"re a Deplorable.

2. If you question whether globalization is actually in the national interest: You"re a Deplorable.

3. If you question whether endless wars of choice, drone strikes and foreign interventions that cost the lives of countless civilians are actually in the national interest: You"re a Deplorable.

4. If you see the major institutions of American life as corrupt, ineffective, and blatantly favoring the financial/social elites: You"re a Deplorable.

5. If you think it"s wrong that some immigrants (the illegal ones) get to "jump the queue" ahead of the millions of legal immigrants who have waited patiently for years and paid the costs of following the rules: You"re a Deplorable.

6. If you see the concentration of media ownership as a threat to democracy:

You"re a Deplorable.

7. If you think the War on Drugs that"s imprisoned millions of young men is actually a War on the American People, a war that was prosecuted for the entire 24 long years of the presidencies of Bill Clinton, G.W. Bush and Barack Obama: You"re a Deplorable.

The US population has increased about 40% since the War on Drugs started in earnest in 1980, while the prison/Gulag population has increased over 400% since 1980.

8. If you see the informal quotas on Asian-American students in America"s Ivy League universities as wrong and blatantly racist: You"re a Deplorable.

9. If you favor kicking over the tables of the money-lenders at the temple--those wonderful money-lenders who fund the campaigns of our political elites-- You"re a Deplorable.

10. In summary: if you question the self-serving, self-congratulatory, hubris-soaked dominance of the neoliberal Elites, You"re a Deplorable.

If you think being Caucasian is a requirement to qualify as a Deplorable, think again: anyone can be a Deplorable. If you"re a Hispanic-American or African-American who has seen your community gutted by the War on Drugs, and you"re against the American gulag, then you"re questioning the status quo: Bingo, you"re a Deplorable.

If you"re an Asian-American who is tired of accepting blatantly racist limits on Asian students in top-tier U.S. universities--the same sort of insidiously informal quotas that limited Jewish-American students in the early 20th century--you"re a Deplorable.

Regardless of your ethnicity, class or religion, if you perceive the institutions that govern American life as corrupted, riddled with favoritism and spin or as broken, you"re a Deplorable. If you question or resist the dominance of self-serving neoliberal elites, you"re a Deplorable.

This isn"t the elites" definition, of course, because resistance to their dominance can"t be identified as the defining factor. If this truth were revealed, the various tribes of Deplorables might realize they have more in common than the corporate media will let on.

Though it was Hillary Clinton who made the Deplorables public, the elites of both parties share the same fear and loathing of anyone who questions or resists their control.

BONUS DEPLORABLE POINTS if you answer "yes": do you think being corralled into a remote holding pen reserved for "expressing free speech" (i.e. resisting the elites) is a mockery of the Bill of Rights? Bingo, you"re a Deplorable.