Another Step Towards The Sovietization Of American Media

Authored by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

This week the US Department of Justice Criminal Division forced the Russian-funded television network RT (formerly Russia Today) to register as a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Failure to comply would have risked arrest of RT’s management and seizure of its assets. The move comes on the heels of Senators’ recent demands that terrified tech giants Twitter, Facebook, and Google act as ideological filters.

With no discernable defenders among America’s media establishment, RT rightly denounced the selective FARA mandate as an attack on media freedom – which it is. But more ominous is what the move against RT says about America’s rulers’ further intention to limit the sources of information available to its subjects.

As Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute writes:

“RT America is a news organization operating in the United States that is funded at least partly by a foreign government. So is the BBC. So is Deutsche Welle, France24, Al-Jazeera, and numerous other foreign media organizations. It is assumed that they all to a degree reflect the editorial interests of those who pay the bills.

 

“The same is true with other, non-state funded media outlets, of course. It’s up to us to factor these things in when we consume media. That’s what it means to be a free people.

 

“A core value in a free society is that our own government has zero power over what we read, what we watch, how we think, how we come to interpret current events, the conclusions we draw based on these inputs, and so on. These are private matters over which any government that is not tyrannical should have no sway.

 

“The real insidiousness of tyrannical systems is that the government most lasciviously seeks control over most private spaces — including the most private space called our brain, our intellect, our conscience. We must be free to follow our interests down whatever path they may lead us so that we may reach our own conclusions and then perhaps test them ourselves in the marketplace of ideas.”

The attack on RT (and another Russian network, Sputnik, which evidently has not yet been given a deadline for registration) is a milestone in the degeneration of the American official (call them what you want – corporate, legacy, mainstream) media into PR agencies for the governing establishment and its ideological imperatives. We’ve been moving along this path for a while now, and it’s going to get worse.

Long gone are those halcyon days of yore when Americans could just sit back and watch CBS’s Walter Cronkite with total confidence they were getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. (For youngsters who have no idea who the hell Cronkite was, just Google “most trusted man in America.”) Back in the naïve infancy of the TV age, from about the 1950s until the beginning of the 1990s, there was a common national media culture that reflected the established, generally liberal, mainly Democratic tilt of the American inteligentsiya that was almost uniform among the (then only) three networks and a handful of major newspapers and magazines. To be sure, that was also a ruling class media of a sort, but it reflected a broad and deep social consensus.

Those days are no more. Perhaps the unraveling of media trust and social consensus alike started in earnest with Vietnam. But still, for decades afterwards there still seemed to be plenty of empty cranial receptacles for government and corporate propaganda of the first Gulf War under Bush 41, Bill Clinton’s phony humanitarian wars in the Balkans, Bush 43’s Iraq War, and Obama’s Libyan and Syrian imbroglios. Sadly, there are many such cranial receptacles even today.

By its attack on RT, the US government is officially telling us that only the mainstream media (MSM) can be regarded as are purveyors of Truth (with a capital T) and that anybody not on the approved list is fake. How do we know? Why, the MSM themselves tell us! The Washington Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” CNN’s “Facts First.” The New York Times’ “The Truth is Hard.” (The fact that certifiably authoritative and truthful media are militantly hostile to Russia, not to mention to Donald Trump, is purely coincidental.)

A lot of Americans don’t buy it anymore, though. Some of the skepticism falls along purely partisan lines reflecting increasing moral and political polarization: our media (which I exclusively consult) tells the truth, but your media (which I don’t consult) are liars. About one-third of Americans get their talking points from, say, Michael Moore, and from Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, with their related internet echoes, while another third gets theirs from Rush Limbaugh, and from Sean Hannity on Fox News, and their internet echo chambers. Increasingly, there is nothing like a national dialogue on anything, but rather two entirely separate, diametrically opposed ideological cultures – and alternate realities – each demonizing “them.” This is why when after Barack Obama’s election the Tea Party appeared, the GOP fell over itself trying to co-opt them, while the Democrats denounced them as a mob of racists and subversives. When later the “Occupy” and Black Lives Matter movements broke out on the Left, the Democrats tried to figure out how to channel it while top Republicans denounced it as gang of commie anarchists and losers.

With the election of Donald Trump the divide intensified further to one of latent civil war.

At some point the false picture of pseudo-reality (as Alain Besançon called it in the late Soviet propaganda context) diverges so far from real reality that the official media narrative becomes useless and even counterproductive. While a majority of Americans probably are still glued to the partisan outlets of “their” side of the political divide, there is a growing sense across the spectrum that not only the MSM but even partisan media like Fox News and MSNBC are untrustworthy.

In the past, notably in the totalitarian societies of the 20^th century, maintaining the credibility of official media required the physical repression of alternatives. Today, such a crude approach is unnecessary and almost technologically unfeasible, even for such undemocratic countries as Iran, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia (though North Korea may be successful through the sheer unavailability of modern communications technology to most of the population). Instead of suppressing dissent, is it sufficient to maintain major media’s role as gatekeeper and certifier of reliability.

Which brings us back to the impact of foreign media like RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation, Al-Jazeera, CGTN, Press TV, often in parallel with alternative media like Zero Hedge, Lew Rockwell, Antiwar.com, Ron Paul Institute, and others, to break through the information firewall but arguably then being influenced by the agenda of the sponsoring foreign governments. In any case, a growing segment of the American public is discovering a skill once well-honed by the citizens of the former communist countries: reading between the lines of the official media (which is assumed to be full of lies) and making informed comparisons to samizdat alternative media, foreign sources, and the rumor-mill to guess what the truth might be.

Make no mistake – what has started with RT won’t end with RT. Our betters have decided they need to protect our minds from “propaganda” penetration that might cause us to doubt the truth of what CNN and the Washington Post tell us.

Citizens! Be grateful for such wise leaders and dedicated information workers! Smash the enemy voices that seek to undermine our democracy as we march boldly into the radiant future!

China Unveils Emergency Drill To "Shut Down Harmful Websites"

China"s 19th National Congress of the Communist Party - the quinquennial confab where the party selects new members of the Politburo, its ruling council - is expected to begin this fall (official dates have not yet been publicly announced). And in an effort to guarantee that the leadership reshuffle goes off without a hitch, President Xi Jinping is tightening the government’s grip on the internet to help protect the official narrative that Xi"s "Chinese Dream" remains intact.

According to Reuters, China held a drill on Thursday with internet service providers to practice taking down websites deemed harmful.

“Internet data centers (IDC) and cloud companies - which host website servers - were ordered to participate in a three-hour drill to hone their "emergency response" skills, according to at least four participants that included the operator of Microsoft"s cloud service in China.

China"s Ministry of Public Security called for the drill "in order to step up online security for the 19th Party Congress and tackle the problem of smaller websites illegally disseminating harmful information", according to a document circulating online attributed to a cyber police unit in Guangzhou.”

The Communist Party “protects” China’s 1.4 billion citizens from the influence of subversive foreign using nationwide system of internet censorship known as the “Great Firewall.” But as the country’s financial regulators grow increasingly concerned about the country’s dangerously overleveraged economy, which is threatening to sink the country’s fragile stock market, it’s likely that the government sees local business media as a threat. Two years ago, following the spectacular runup and collapse of the Shanghai Composite, authorities arrested one of China’s most respected financial journalist and forced him to make an on air “apology” after the government blamed his reporting for triggering the crash.

Earlier this year, authorities began a crackdown on VPNs like the Tor network which can allow mainland residents to circumvent the “great firewall.”

“China has been tightening its grip on the internet, including a recent drive to crack down on the usage of VPNs to bypass internet censorship, enlisting the help of state-owned telecommunication service providers to upgrade the so-called Great Firewall.

Apple last week removed VPN apps from its app store, while Amazon"s China partner warned users not to use VPNs.”

During the drill, the country’s internet data centers were asked to practice shutting down target web pages and report relevant details to the police, including the affected websites" contact details, IP address and server location, according to Reuters. With five of the seven Politburo members retiring, this year’s National Congress presents President Xi with his best opportunity yet to consolidate power. And as tensions escalate between China and several of its geopolitical rivals (notably the US, which is theatening a trade war, and India, which could instigate a real war), expect the crackdown to continue.

THE REPUBLIC OF EMOTION – Bill Whittle

OATH KEEPERS:
ORDERS WE WILL NOT OBEY

Click here to read full length version.

1. We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people.


2. We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people
.

3. We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to military tribunal.


4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state.


5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.


6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.


7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.


8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to “keep the peace” or to “maintain control."


9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.


10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

Click here to read full length version.

---

Georgia Sec. Of State Blasts "Fake News"; Says Media Biggest Threat To Democracy Not Russian Hackers

Back in December, the Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, publicly blasted the Obama administration and the Department of Homeland Security for repeated attempts to hack into his state"s election system.  Kemp figured the attempts were nothing more than an effort to expose security flaws in state election systems so that Homeland Security could designate all election systems as "Critical Infrastructure" and seize control in a massive "federal power grab."  Here is a recap from our previous post:

Last week we noted a letter from Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, to the Department of Homeland Security questioning why someone with a DHS IP address (216.81.81.80) had attempted to hack into his state"s election database on November 15, 2016 at 8:43AM.  Now, according to WSB-TV in Atlanta, we learn that Georgia"s election systems were actually the target of hacking by DHS on 10 separate occasions. 

The Georgia Secretary of State"s Office now confirms 10 separate cyberattacks on its network were all traced back to U.S. Department of Homeland Security addresses.

In an exclusive interview, a visibly frustrated Secretary of State Brian Kemp confirmed the attacks of different levels on his agency"s network over the last 10 months. He says they all traced back to DHS internet provider addresses.

"We"re being told something that they think they have it figured out, yet nobody"s really showed us how this happened,” Kemp said. "We need to know."

Kemp told Channel 2’s Aaron Diamant his office"s cybersecurity vendor discovered the additional so-called vulnerability scans to his network"s firewall after a massive mid-November cyberattack triggered an internal investigation.

Meanwhile, Kemp pointed out that all of the attempted hackings occurred around critical registration and voting deadlines calling into question whether "somebody was trying to prove a point."

But while the election, and the Obama administration, are now long gone, Kemp"s fight to protect his state"s election infrastructure from being taken over by the feds is still going full steam.  That said, it"s not the Obama administration"s hacking efforts that has Kemp worried these days, it"s "misinformation from the media" which he now says is the biggest threat to Democracy.  Below is an excerpt from an opinion piece that Kemp published in the USA Today:

Misinformation from the media or disgruntled partisans not only fuels conspiracy theorists but also erodes the first safeguard we have in our elections — the public’s trust. Failing to respect this process with accurate reporting is a disservice to the American people.

To be candid, the most plausible and potentially effective attack on our elections is not by hacking the vote — it is through the manipulation of the American media machine. With “breaking news” that generates voter confusion, these baseless attacks and inaccurate stories enhance voter apathy and erode our confidence in the cornerstone of our democracy. That’s the real story.

Kemp goes on to lament about the number of calls he"s now forced to field on a daily basis from "misinformed" reporters that have no interest in learning the facts about his state"s election infrastructure but rather seek to "dilute facts and develop false narratives about Russian hacking and potential vulnerabilities in the system."

For years, we have run our elections with little interest from the press. But during last year’s presidential election, everything changed with the news media’s obsession with Russian meddling.

Now, we are bombarded with questions about election security from reporters on tight deadlines. Their questions often reflect a complete misunderstanding of voting systems and what safeguards are in place to keep them secure.

As reporters chase stories to feed the 24-hour news cycle, they dilute facts and develop false narratives about Russian hacking and potential vulnerabilities in the system. The prevailing plot line is that states like Georgia can’t provide suitable security for elections.

Many news media elite think federal oversight is the answer. Republican and Democratic secretaries of state disagree. A “critical infrastructure” designation is simply a big government power grab.

Of course, while we can"t argue with the logic, we somehow doubt Kemp"s opinion will sway CNN"s wall-to-wall coverage of "Russian hacking."

* * *

Below is Kemp"s full opinion piece from the USA Today:

As Georgia’s secretary of state, I have worked tirelessly to ensure our state’s elections are secure, accessible and fair.

For years, we have run our elections with little interest from the press. But during last year’s presidential election, everything changed with the news media’s obsession with Russian meddling.

Now, we are bombarded with questions about election security from reporters on tight deadlines. Their questions often reflect a complete misunderstanding of voting systems and what safeguards are in place to keep them secure.

As reporters chase stories to feed the 24-hour news cycle, they dilute facts and develop false narratives about Russian hacking and potential vulnerabilities in the system. The prevailing plot line is that states like Georgia can’t provide suitable security for elections.

Many news media elite think federal oversight is the answer. Republican and Democratic secretaries of state disagree. A “critical infrastructure” designation is simply a big government power grab.

Informed, non-partisan experts agree that manipulating a presidential election makes a good TV storyline but lacks real-world standing. State voting systems are diverse, highly scrutinized and not connected to the Internet. Web-based attacks on voter registration do not affect the vote count. The thing that matters most — your vote — is secure.

Misinformation from the media or disgruntled partisans not only fuels conspiracy theorists but also erodes the first safeguard we have in our elections — the public’s trust. Failing to respect this process with accurate reporting is a disservice to the American people.

To be candid, the most plausible and potentially effective attack on our elections is not by hacking the vote — it is through the manipulation of the American media machine. With “breaking news” that generates voter confusion, these baseless attacks and inaccurate stories enhance voter apathy and erode our confidence in the cornerstone of our democracy. That’s the real story.

Are states doing enough to keep our elections secure? Yes.

Anything to the contrary is fake news.

Warren Buffett Now Selling US Houses To Chinese Oligarchs

While extolling the virtues of American consumers and praising the US economy, Warren Buffett has started seeking the help - and funds - of Chinese oligarchs to sell houses from his real estate brokerage HomeServices. According to Bloomberg"s Berkshire"s real estate brokerage, HomeServices - currently the second-largest U.S. residential real estate brokerage - acquired as part of Buffett acquisition of an energy business, "is expanding its global reach with a push to attract wealthy Chinese citizens to purchase homes in the U.S", in the process diverting "hot" Chinese money to the US (see Vancouver and Toronto for the outcome).

As Bloomberg reports, HomeServices has been expanding under Buffett by opening new locations, forming a 2012 venture to expand licensing operations and then working to capitalize on demand from non-U.S. buyers. The unit hired Realogy’s Peter Turtzo in 2015 to push into international markets and recruited Mitchell Lewis from Christie’s International Real Estate in September to build operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

As a result, on April 17 Buffett"s HomeServices announced an agreement to advertise its U.S. homes on Juwai.com, which attracts about 2 million visitors a month. The portal hosts sites on both sides of China’s “great firewall,” meaning consumers can access the information inside the nation from more than 400 cities and also from more than 160 other countries, according to a statement Monday.

“The Chinese have overtaken all nationalities besides Americans as the leading buyers of property in the U.S.,” Gino Blefari, chief executive officer of Irvine, California-based Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, said in the statement. The Juwai.com accord and other efforts overseas “make it much easier for Chinese real estate buyers to find and shop our property listings.”

It stands to reason that when one runs out of prospective domestic buyers, the next logical step is to approach those who have been engaging in unprecedented money laundering on a global scale in the form of "real estate purchases" which are nothing more than parking funds offshore (and far away from China"s banks) while leaving the newly purchased house unoccupied.

HomeServices owns 38 realty companies with more than 29,000 agents, according to Berkshire’s most recent annual report. It also has a network of more than 375 franchisees with over 46,000 agents.

In an amusing twist, Buffett acknowledged in 2013 that when Berkshire bought the energy business in 2000, he “barely noticed HomeServices, which then owned only a few real estate brokerage companies.” Since then, the energy unit’s profit from the operation has climbed, rising 22% last year to $127 million.

Predictably, the billionaire Berkshire Chairman has been eager to capitalize on the Berkshire brand and Buffett name, which are both popular in China. Coca-Cola Co., which counts the billionaire as its top shareholder, recently announced a plan for his face to appear on cans of Cherry Coke in the country.

Kerry Donovan, vice president of marketing for Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, is counting on new sales from listings and banner ads on Juwai.com. “This is a huge differentiator for us,” Donovan said in the statement.

It was not immediately clear if and how Berkshire assures that the funds used by wealthy Chinese buyers are not of the "hot money" variety, meant to be parked away from China"s perilous financial system and in the process raising prevailing prices to nosebleed levels in any given MSA, as has been the case in recent years with both the Vancouver and, more recently, Toronto housing markets. As a reminder, the US National Association of Realtors remains exempt from Anti Money-Laundering provisions, quite happy to take the money of any and every global buyer, regardless of where the funding came from.

It was also not clear if inviting Chinese capital to compete with far more humble domestic sources of funds is what the US economy needs at this moment, at a time when even the NAR admits the average home is becoming increasingly unaffordable for the typical American.

How Obama's White House Weaponized Media Against Trump

Authored op-ed by Michael Doran via The Hill,

Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Adam Schiff have both castigated Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, for his handling of the inquiry into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.  They should think twice.  The issue that has recently seized Nunes is of vital importance to anyone who cares about fundamental civil liberties.

The trail that Nunes is following will inevitably lead back to a particularly significant leak.  On Jan. 12, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that “according to a senior U.S. government official, (General Mike) Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29.”

From Nunes’s statements, it’s clear that he suspects that this information came from NSA intercepts of Kislyak’s phone.  An Obama official, probably in the White House, “unmasked” Flynn’s name and passed it on to Ignatius.

Regardless of how the government collected on Flynn, the leak was a felony and a violation of his civil rights.  But it was also a severe breach of the public trust. When I worked as an NSC staffer in the White House, 2005-2007, I read dozens of NSA surveillance reports every day. On the basis of my familiarity with this system, I strongly suspect that someone in the Obama White House blew a hole in the thin wall that prevents the government from using information collected from surveillance to destroy the lives of the citizens whose privacy it is pledged to protect.  

The leaking of Flynn’s name was part of what can only be described as a White House campaign to hype the Russian threat and, at the same time, to depict Trump as Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate.  On Dec. 29, Obama announced sanctions against Russia as retribution for its hacking activities.  From that date until Trump’s inauguration, the White House aggressively pumped into the media two streams of information: one about Russian hacking; the other about Trump’s Russia connection. In the hands of sympathetic reporters, the two streams blended into one.  

A report that appeared the day after Obama announced the sanctions shows how.  On Dec. 30, the Washington Post reported on a Russian effort to penetrate the electricity grid by hacking into a Vermont utility, Burlington Electric Department.  After noting the breach, the reporters offered a senior administration official to speculate on the Russians’ motives.  Did they seek to crash the system, or just to probe it?  

This infrastructure hack, the story continued, was part of a broader hacking campaign that included intervention in the election.  The story then moved to Trump: “He…has spoken highly of Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite President Obama’s suggestion that the approval for hacking came from the highest levels of the Kremlin.”

The national media mimicked the Post’s reporting.  But there was a problem: the hack never happened.  It was a false alarm — triggered, it eventually became clear, by Obama’s hype.

On Dec. 29, the DHS and FBI published a report on Russian hacking, which showed the telltale signs of having been rushed to publication.  “At every level this report is a failure,” said cyber security expert Robert M. Lee. “It didn’t do what it set out to do, and it didn’t provide useful data. They’re handing out bad information.”

Especially damaging were the hundreds of Internet addresses, supposedly linked to Russian hacking, that the report contained.  The FBI and DHS urged network administrators to load the addresses into their system defenses.  Some of the addresses, however, belong to platforms that are widely used by the public, including Yahoo servers.  At Burlington Electric, an unsuspecting network administrator dutifully loaded the addresses into the monitoring system of the utility’s network.  When an employee checked his email, it registered on the system as if Russian hackers were trying to break in.

While the White House was hyping the Russia threat, elements of the press showed a sudden interest in the infamous Steele dossier, which claimed that Russian intelligence services had caught Trump in Moscow in highly compromising situations.  The dossier was opposition research paid for by Trump’s political opponents, and it had circulated for months among reporters covering the election.  Because it was based on anonymous sources and entirely unverifiable, however, no reputable news organization had dared to touch it.  

With a little help from the Obama White House, the dossier became fair game for reporters.  A government leak let it be known that the intelligence community had briefed Trump on the dossier.  If the president-elect was discussing it with his intelligence briefers, so the reasoning went, perhaps there was something to it after all.

By turning the dossier into hard news, that leak weaponized malicious gossip. The same is true of the Flynn-Kislyak leak.  Ignatius used the leak to deepen speculation about collusion between Putin and Trump: “What did Flynn say (to Kislyak),” Ignatius asked, “and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions?” The mere fact that Flynn’s conversations were being monitored deepened his appearance of guilt.  If he was innocent, why was the government monitoring him?

It should not have been.  He had the right to talk to in private — even to a Russian ambassador.  Regardless of what one thinks about him or Trump or Putin, this leak should concern anyone who believes that we must erect a firewall between the national security state and our domestic politics.  The system that allowed it to happen must be reformed.  At stake is a core principle of our democracy: that elected representatives control the government, and not vice versa.

Is The Tyranny Of A Cashless Society Coming?

Via Capt. William E Simpson of WesternJournalism.com,

Like many people, I am a careful person when it comes to digital commerce, yet nonetheless I had two of my credit cards hacked (twice in the last four years) — one time by a supposedly reliable online retail company, another time when I rented a trailer. And both times, it required an incredible amount of time, police reports, phone calls, etc., just to get back to square one and get my money back.

But my experience was not unusual. Nearly 18 million Americans suffered from some form of identity theft in 2014 alone.

Digital commerce and credit cards are very problematic and are not the panacea that companies and the government want the public to believe.

Looking to a future in which governments abolish cash in useful denominations, it follows that they will then focus on eliminating personal and commercial commerce through the use of compact high-value commodities such as gold and silver, a natural progression if $100 bills are taken out of circulation in the United States.

People today who are living in the legacy of the Barack Obama economy already need a fistful of $20 bills just to buy a week’s supply of groceries. And it’s easy to spend $400 a week on fresh groceries for two people, especially if you buy premium products and organic.

If we consider the increasing trend where banks, institutions and big retailers are regularly hacked, combined with identity theft, digital commerce and credit cards aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and in reality are posing an ever-increasing level of liability on all levels through their use.

The relatively few people who may ultimately control all of the digital wealth of Americans will virtually have control of all the people in a cashless society. This results in a definite loss of freedom and liberty.

There are many, many other ways for law enforcement to hammer criminals and curtail their enterprises, if that is truly the goal. But any method that inhibits or erodes the freedoms of Americans in any way, including limiting or infringing upon person-to-person commerce and personal privacy in any manner, is to be shunned and runs counter to the intents and spirit of our beloved U.S. Constitution.

Digital currency transactions in lieu of cash would allow virtually 100 percent tracking of all Americans, including law-abiding citizens and all that we do.

We have already learned over the past eight years of the Obama-led government that governments don’t necessarily work for or even represent the will of the people. So how can anyone justify giving the government this much power over Americans? There is no such justification.

The vast majority of Americans are not criminals, and therefore any action by government that affects or targets the vast majority of people in order to deal with a small factional percentage of criminals in the population is manifestly unfair. Politicians simply need to do the jobs they are being paid to do, and come up with anti-criminal tactics that strictly focus upon the bad actors, not the majority of law-abiding Americans.

If the minds behind a cashless society are allowed to have their way, America would become little more a monumental ant farm, where the elitist class studies Americans to a much greater extent than ever before — how we move around and what we do, use, eat, watch and listen to — and then uses this deeply insightful personal information, potentially to plot how to control everyone. Things like if we’re allowed to be born (abortions already control this to some extent), how long we get to live, and what we are allowed to do in between. Orwellian, yes, but possible nonetheless.

Brazil played around in past decades on many occasions with reissuing, devaluing and recalling currency to limit amounts in circulation. And the Marxists paid close attention to that exercise.

However, India’s currency games are more immediate and could have a sinister effect, since it is already a socialist state and we know how fond socialists and communists are of controlling all aspects of their populations.

Here’s a video that should be alarming.

Is India executing a plan similar to what may soon be in the works for Americans?

I have to say, it’s looking like living in the countryside on a piece of land that provides sustainable sustenance and a firewall from a population that may recoil and strike out in anger sometime soon is the only viable path to surviving past what may be an ugly and austere future. Anyone who cares to look at the news these days will see riots, murders and unrest all around inside the United States, a result of numerous factors.

Even as much as many Americans admire and respect President Donald Trump, the Marxist-socialist momentum that has already metastasized in America might be too much for him and his team to overcome. Our new president definitely needs our continued strong support more than ever.

Smile and pray for the best, but adequately prepare for the worst.

China Orders No Market Selloffs During President's Davos Trip

As we observed in yesterday morning"s market wrap, while US traders took the day off for the MLK holiday, China was busy defending an accelerating selloff across its stock markets.

During Monday trading, having traded quietly lower for the past few days, Chinese stocks tumbled in early trading on the mainland and in Hong Kong’s offshore market amid weakness in Asian equities. The Shanghai Composite Index dropped as much as 2.2% to head for its fifth loss in as many days, its longest losing streak since Aug. 2015.However a sudden bout of late afternoon buying sent the loss down to just -0.3%, on speculation China"s national team was once again back in the markets.

The exact same pattern emerged overnight as well:

Very much like the previous day, China"s CSI 300 Index climbed 0.2% on Tuesday, after earlier losing as much as 0.8%. On Monday, the index recovered from an intraday drop of 1.7% to close little changed, with some traders speculating the afternoon rally was caused by state buying.

We now have confirmation that, indeed, after a long hiatus, it was precisely the "national team" that had made an appearance, and was propping up stocks with an explicit directive: don"t let stocks drop during Xi Jinping"s trip to Davos. It is almost as if it is a rite of passage for Davos participants to demonstrate how effective they are at manipulating their stock market.

As Bloomberg reports today, China has taken "steps" to support its stock market this week - by which it means ordered various central bank conduits to buy stocks during selloffs - "according to people familiar with the matter, as President Xi Jinping’s appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos puts Asia’s largest economy in the global spotlight."

Apparently China did not question what it would look like once it emerged that it is manipulating its market to give the false impression of stability at a time when Xi was addressing Davos, and expounding on the glorious benefits of globalization and liberalization... if not so much for asset price discovery or the yuan, of course.

State-owned investors bought shares to steady the market on Monday, while some funds were guided on Tuesday not to sell holdings with big weightings in benchmark indexes, the people said, asking not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly. China’s securities regulators asked funds and brokerages to trade prudently this week and directed exchanges to report any abnormal transactions, the people said.

To be sure, Chinese authorities have traditionally intervened in markets before and during events of political significance, with government funds stepping in to boost stocks before a key meeting of the National People’s Congress last year and before a 2015 military parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the World War II victory over Japan.

"China is doing this probably because it wants to paint an image of positivity as President Xi attends Davos," said Tommy Xie, an economist at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. in Singapore. Stocks will continue to be volatile as the nation’s monetary conditions tighten, Xie said.

Earlier today, taking the role of the world"s globalist savior and free trade savior, and the "free world"s" foil to the protectionist Trump, Xi - in the first visit by a Chinese leader to the World Economic Forum - told a Davos audience that “protectionism is like locking yourself in a dark room, which would seem to escape wind and rain, but also block out the sunshine. No one is a winner in a trade war.”

His audience was delighted to lap it up, despite the glaring contradictions of China"s firewall, pervasive government subsidies of exporters, and constant WTO regime violations. Oh, and zero freedom of speech or human rights, of course.

Which may explain why China is engaging in outright market manipulation merely to show how "strong" its market (and thus economy) is. After all, such interventions are nothing more than a sleight of hand and an indication of how little the Communist Party thinks of the intelligence of its counterparties: surely one has to be very obtuse to be fooled by such a glaring intervention that "all is well." Yet the message sent by Xi to the world"s "smartest and most powerful" people is that according to the Chinese president, they are on the same intellectual level as a few dozen million daytrading housewives.

We are confident all of this will be lost on the "Davos elite."

"Fake News", Censorship, Darwin, And Democracy

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Censorship is not helpful to democracy--rather, it is the death of democracy.

The mainstream media is awash with hyper-active headlines about "fake news." How can we make sense of this sudden obsession?

Perhaps we can start by separating "news" from "analysis" from "commentary." "News" is "he said this, she did that, this happened." Analysis tries to make sense of trends that are apparent in the news longer-term--for example, why did Trump win? Is the economy actually healthy or not? "Commentary" is opinion that establishes a point of view and defends it while attacking other POVs.

All three of these news flows are constantly being spun /manipulated to support specific agendas and narratives. Now we are being told some of these news flows are false/ misleading and their intent is to disrupt democracy.

I would counter that censorship is not helpful to democracy--rather, it is the death of democracy. It"s all too obvious in the MSM hysteria over "fake news" that the narrative being pushed is: any criticism of Hillary or questions about her health, foundation, etc., were BY DEFINITION Russian propaganda.

Never mind that few if any voters changed their mind as a result of the "Russian hacking" (the Podesta emails); voters were already so polarized that the content of the the emails did not influence their decision, which was based on deeper foundations than "news."

The fear of those who want to preserve democracy is that under the excuse of "eliminating Russian propaganda" the status quo will restrict everyone who is inconveniently challenging the status quo narratives with data-based analysis.

One of the underlying issues in the "fake news" narrative is: the Internet is a new medium. It enables seamless surfing over an endless range of topics and images, it enriches those who design click-bait headlines that grab our attention, it enables access to "forbidden" material such as pornography, and it enables participation in content creation: posting text and photos on Facebook, Twitter, etc., adding comments to others" posts, and establishing feeds, websites and blogs.

Media philosopher Marshall McCluhan proposed asking four questions of any new medium--with "medium" meaning the type of media: film, TV, print, comics, etc.

What does the medium enhance?

What does the medium make obsolete?

What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?

What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

If we ask these questions of the World Wide Web/Internet, how do we answer?

What does the medium enhance? One possible answer is attention deficit disorder, as the web enables and even encourages a prosess of surfing that deranges our attention and our ability to think critically about the flood of content we"re leapfrogging.

But a second potential answer is that the web enhances accessing the truly vast array of human knowledge and a taggering trove of information.

What does the medium make obsolete? One answer is "the conventional centralized corporate media" which curates, edits and massages the news flow to support specific narratives.

Another possible answer is "deep learning" as the temptation to jump to the next lilly pad overwhlems the discipline and focus needed to master difficult and nuanced material.

What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier? One answer might be "decentralized content creation and opinion." As the new mediums of newspapers, radio and TV expanded into every nook and cranny of the nation/world, the creation, curation, editing and massaging of content and opinion became intensely centralized.

This centralization led to a homogenization of content: no matter which of the three networks you were watching as the Vietnam war raged, the "news", content and opinion were basically the same.

Centralization of "news" and opinion enabled the central state to push a narrative that made its vested interests appear as inevitable elites rather than total fabrications that were dependent on the consent of the governed--a consent that was manufactured, in Noam Chomsky"s phrase, to support the status quo narratives and thus the status quo"s wealth and power.

But there was a problem with this centralization of content/opinion creation and curation: it no longer explained the events or trends that were visible in the "news."

If the federal government and the mainstream media were correct that we were "winning the war in Vietnam" and there was "light at the end of the tunnel," how could we explain what looked like a quagmire?

When the only medium available to dissenters and those challenging the status quo narratives was print (mimeographs, web offset printers, etc.) and physical gatherings (meetings, demostrations, lectures, etc.) then the central state could limit or disrupt dissenting narratives fairly easily.

This was the impetus behind the CIA"s CHAOS surveillance/disruption program and the FBI"s COINTELPRO programs to infiltrate and disrupt dissenting groups.

Limiting dissent in the age of decentralized content creation and curation is far more problematic. The Chinese central state supposedly pays hundreds of thousands of people to maintain its Great Firewall, but despite this gargantuan expenditure of treasure and effort, non-approved ideas are still leaking into China via the web/Internet.

200 years ago people printed pamphlets and spoke to small gatherings on street corners. That decentralized chaos was replaced by homogenized, centralized "news" and content curation.

Now the web has enabled millions of pamphlets and small gatherings, and the Powers That Be rightly feel their ability to control the "news" and narratives to support the rulign elites is irrevocably eroding--and hence their panicked demands to be given the power to eradicate "fake news," i.e. the baby of dissent will conveniently be tossed out with the dirty bathwater of click-bait and "foreign propoaganda."

What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes? That is the question of the moment. Does the Internet flip into centralized censorship a la China"s Great Firewall, where only ruling-elite approved "news" is distributed as "truth," or does the Internet descend further into a Wild West where anything goes, and the worst impulses of the human Id run amok.

This chaos has been described as a "failed state," and this choice of words is quite interesting. For it suggests that the Internet should be an orderly, centrally managed "digitally state" much like the central states that govern physical nations.

Perhaps what has failed here is the narrative that everything fails and falls apart if it isn"t centrally managed and curated, a narrative that inevitably leads to censorship under the guise of "protecting you, the easily confused sheep, from these nasty wolves."

Censorship then enables another, much more well-organized and centralized pack of wolves (the ruling elites) to prey on the obedient sheep at their leasure, without fear of any disruptive dissenting narratives.

What the ruling political elites and their mainstream media shills fear is a wide-open, chaotic and very Darwinian competition of concepts and ideas.

they fear this so profoundly because they all know, somewhere in their hearts and minds, that their narrative is bankrupt, and that it no longer explains the world around us. It has failed, and this failure is now self-evident.

The mainstream media has faithfully promoted a neoliberal, neoconservative, Keynesian narrative that has failed to produce the expected results. No wonder trust in the mainstream media has declined sharply in the past few years. Why should we trust a centralized institution that has parroted policies and narratives that haven’t produced the widespread security and prosperity that its proponents promised?

The mainstream media’s “experts” who decry populism would rather blame "foreign propaganda" than examine why populism is on the rise: the mainstream political, financial and social institutions have failed to deliver what they promised, implicitly or explicitly.

This failure is powering a search for new ways to understand our world, and this is a positive dynamic. The process is messy and fraught with bad ideas, fake news, hidden agendas, propaganda, and here and there, powerful new ideas and narratives.

The ruling elites and their mainstream corporate media desperately want to shore up their failing narrative by censoring the creation, curation and distribution of competing ideas and narratives.

Censorship is not helpful to democracy--rather, it is the death of democracy. We should ponder that as the mainstream media"s increasingly frantic cries for censorship fill the airwaves and print media.

Unfortunately for the ruling elites and their mainstream media shills, you can"t put the Internet genie back in the bottle without destroying the economy and democracy.