Project Lucifer: Two Different Viewpoints on the Current World Crisis

Source: Project Lucifer: Two Different Viewpoints on the Current World Crisis – Darkmoon

With permission from

http://www.darkmoon.me

By LOBRO and ARCH STANTON  

Aug 17, 2017

LD:  Two diametrically opposite viewpoints are presented here. Both writers agree that the Jews are our main problem, but on most other matters they disagree. The first writer, Lobro, has a great admiration for Donald Trump and hopes that Trump will one day teach the Jews a good lesson. He sees Trump as the “New Stalin” and assumes without question that Stalin was one of the good guys, a heroic figure cruelly misunderstood and much maligned — just like Donald Trump.

The second writer, Arch Stanton, questions these assumptions. He has no time for Donald Trump whatsoever and even less time for Stalin. He regards Stalin as one of the world’s most brutal psychopaths. “Stalin,” he tells us elsewhere, “was clearly a megalomaniac. A bloodthirsty murderer.”

Both writers present their respective cases very well, with considerable verve and panache, and therefore both require a respectful hearing — even though both of them cannot be right. [LD] 

PROJECT  LUCIFER

LOBRO :  Let me talk about something a bit off-side, yet important in that it helps to fix the mind on the big picture, allowing us to fill in the in-depth details later.

Note that Russia’s military budget is about $60 billion, roughly 10 percent of the US military budget,  yet in terms of overall field effectiveness there is no comparison. For every dollar the Russians spend on armaments, they are getting ten dollars worth.

So what is going on? This: Russia’s military ambitions are limited and highly focused. The Russians are not interested in global dominance. They are primarily interested in defending Russia and its territorial integrity. That makes their task easier, because their aims are more modest. Their first job is to make sure they can defend their own land so as to ensure that they cannot be easily threatened by hostile outsiders. This they have achieved.

They have achieved the ability to strike quickly and intelligently, to set up a strictly defined operation, and to get out after completing it successfully. In Syria, for example, having taken the requisite action, they leave behind a skeleton crew to monitor the outcome of their meticulously planned strategy, ensuring that everything goes according to plan.

What about the US?

Here we encounter an entirely different situation.

The US sees itself as an “Empire”, Pax Americana, treading in the noble footsteps of Pax Britannica and Pax Romana, two empires that once bestraddled much of the known world and are now dust and ashes. In reality, there is no such thing as an American empire. There is simply a rabbinical golem designed for one reason only: to bring about the Jew’s kingdom on earth.

That’s what the American Empire is all about; it’s a tool to bring about Jewish world domination. America has never been anything but that: a giant slave plantation where the slaves think they run the world, when in reality they must beg for every washroom break without realizing it.

Americans are happy to think of themselves as being Jew-lite but this is wishful thinking. I don’t need to belabor this point, many top Jews having bragged about it publicly — in the Knesset, in Hollywood, in academic treatises, in the mass media. The very title of Yuri Slezkine’s famous book, The Jewish Century, tells its own tale.

So, in order to conquer and run the world, the American military needs to project massive, intimidating power to every corner of the globe simultaneously. They need to meddle in the affairs of far flung countries, crushing the various people they invade with all the most evil mass murdering weapons ever imagined. From Dresden onwards, they do this in order to bring about Deuteronomy to the shocked and awed goyim and grind them into unthinking obedience.

All this takes big bucks. Mass murder doesn’t come cheap. So the ordinary American, not noted for his superlative brilliance, puts his nose to the grindstone and lends his support to Project Lucifer. He makes himself an unwitting agent of his Jewish Overlord. With the sweat and blood of their brothers, their sons, their doggedly toiling neighbors, these simple-minded Americans put their shoulders to the wheel and play their parts in the great drama of global genocide. They kill their own goy brethren to appease the bloodlust of their Jewish masters.

Meanwhile, the Jew must keep the wretched charade up: the state of mental debility and incomprehension, which is why Americans cannot remember where Mexico is relative to Canada. This is why Americans, and to a large extent NATO countries too, must be taught to hate Muslims and other Third Worlders, it being necessary to whip them up into a killing frenzy over places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, so they don’t feel too bad when their noble armed forces rain down death and destructions on wedding parties, hospitals and schools in backward countries where blood comes cheap.

The daily butcher’s bill drawn up by the Jew requires manufactured hate, manufactured ignorance, manufactured lunacy.

I never tire of pointing out that at the turn of the 20th century, there were 7 million Jews in Russia and a negligible number of Jews in North America. And yet a hundred years later, you see the exact reverse. It’s now over six million Jews in America, roughly 40 per cent of total world Jewry, and barely  200,000 Jews left in Russia. This huge relocation bears thinking about. What is going on?

This is how I see it.

Khazars, Huns, Mongols, the steppe robbers and marauders of Central Asia would at one time ride along to suddenly overwhelm some unsuspecting community in Russia: killing, raping, pillaging and making off with the loot, and then on to the next settlement in search of further victims. They kept a spare herd of horses, so that when one of the horses tired, they swapped it for another. In this way they kept moving, without a break.

These frightening Asiatic hordes, what became of them? They didn’t die out. They evolved, their underwent a subtle metamorphosis, they changed their camouflage and their clothing. And here they are now — in America! They swapped Russia for America, moving over en masse from the 1880s onward in a series of migrations allegedly caused by pogroms and persecutions in their Asiatic backyard.

Having destroyed Russia, they found a new home in America. The rest is history. And a new history begins now.

—   §   —

Next comes something that puzzles me to no end.

The time now approached when they were all set to grab the whole world by the throat. They had at their disposal the brain dead rambo underlings of their new country, armed to the teeth, to do their bidding and fight their wars for them. They succeeded spectacularly in overthrowing the Soviet Union. If all had gone according to plan, the Jewish oligarch agents for Rothschild would have turned Russia into a satrapy of the United States. Russia would have been Zog 2  to America’s Zog 1. If they had succeeded, it would truly have been game, set and match to them.

But no, it was not to be! Fate decreed otherwise.

As the coronation moment approached, the Jews stumbled and collapsed, like a chain of valets crashing down the castle staircase.

—   §   —

Something went badly wrong at the last moment, almost like some sort of miraculous Fatima intervention. It seemed too unlikely to be accidental.

The moment of big triumph could have occurred after the Bolshevik Revolution, but Stalin threw a monkey wrench into that scheme. So the next big push had to be put off until later. In 1990 that time of triumph seemed to have come, with the demise of the Soviet Union. But again something happened that helped to snatch victory away from the world destroyers: the rise of Vladimir Putin.

Under Putin, Russia awoke from its coma. New life was breathed into the corpse, much to the rage of those who had sought Russia’s ruin.

And now, we have Donald Trump, when the world destroyers are desperate to throw the kitchen sink at Russia and get the job done. And Trump isn’t doing it for them. Which makes them angry. I understand their pain – and I am enjoying it quite a bit.

There is still quite a bit of work left to do before we can dismantle Project Lucifer. If the world destroyers succeed in getting rid of Trump – this is where the bouncing ball is at right now – things will heat up mighty fast.

What does the future hold?

We’ll have to wait and see, as the Devil plays chess with God.

“As the Devil plays chess with God . . . “

ARCH STANTON :  Here are a few facts as I see them.

(1) Trump is the Jew’s front man for WWIII. I wrote this six months before the election and events are now bearing out this prediction.

(2) Jews intentionally put Trump into office, making it look like “the people” elected him by pitting him against the lowest form of political scum that ever slimed its way into Washington DC.

(3) Despite all their moaning and kvetching, Jews did nothing about Trump other than whine and kvetch to a point where they worked up the “left’s” violent insanity. This violence is now going viral. Considering the fact Jews had a sitting president, JFK, murdered in 1963, it is impossible to believe all they could do about Trump prior to the 2016 election is whine and kvetch.

(4) Through auspices of organization like the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center, Jews have called off the police in stopping the violence of the “left,” allowing matters to become more violently insane by the day. Given the “hands off” attitude by the legal authorities, members of the radical “left” are now pushing matters to their limits.

(5) Jews have are putting more pressure on the so-called “alt-right” by having police step on their legal, constitutional right to protest while maintaining a “hands off” policy towards the left’s obvious violent criminal actions. This is creating increasing pressure on the so-called “alt-right,” the very people that elected Trump.

(6) Knowing this is the case, the left is ramping up their violence, egged on by media Jews who remain in the shadows as usual.

(7) Trump has now denounced many of his own supporters using the Jew media’s “hot button” terms, leaving them more disorganized by his lack of support.

(8) True white opposition is rapidly being pushed to the point where only the following choices remain:

(a) Fully submit to the Jew’s agenda.

(b) Fight the Jews and their violent sycophants to the death or,

(c) Die violently at the hands of a murderous “left” while trying to peacefully protest the hypocritical outrage to their opposition. None of these options bother Jews in the least.

Should a civil war ensue, it will allow Jews to obliterate what remains of any real opposition to their agenda. Draconian legal measures will be called on to quell the uprising, providing Jews the needed reason for confiscating private firearms. This is the standard Jewish, no-win checkmate i.e. fight to the death or lay down and die. Either way, any opposition to the Jew’s agenda will most assuredly result in death. A Jewish wet-nightmare come true, it’z! Jews carried out this same form of terror with great success in their former Soviet Union, so why would they not do it again in a collectivized America?

Present events mirror the manner in which Jews orchestrated the “sixties revolution,” a “revolution” that brought America “civil rights,” “gun control” legislation, unrestricted immigration and “feminism” while tearing the country apart with its “left-wing” anti-war platform. Now the situation has been turned upside down. It will now be a new “coalition” of “left” and “right” pushing for war, with Iran in the lead for total destruction.

The old “left” and “right” will morph into a new collective, a “coalition of the willing” led by so-called “conservatives” who have openly rejected the alleged “radical” ideas of the “extreme right.” These “conservative” “right-wingers,” are comprised of the same violent psychopaths the media labeled “neo-conservatives” of a few years ago. However, because they were primarily Jews, these “neo-cons” never had the “right wing” label applied to them, as Jews did not want the stupid masses to associate this carefully cultivated hot button term with them at that point. These are the same “neo-cons” that led America into a series of recent major wars in the Near East.

Iran will be the culmination of Israel’s plan to take over the Near East. North Korea is simply a minor diversion so people will not pay attention to what Jews are doing in the Near East. However, the bluster over North Korea is effectively priming the idiot goyim masses for the idea of unrestricted warfare. The people being oppressed in these present confrontations are the people who will undoubtedly protest and fight the Jew’s insane plan to start WWIII. This is the attempt to remove the white “right” so there will be no opposition, only unified support for the coming war will remain.

This is likely the Jew’s final push to destroy what remains of white American resistance. There will be no resistance from the masses of low IQ minorities. Coming events may well lead to civil war. Of course, given their control of the media, Jews control the minds of the gullible, ignorant masses. Therefore, they feel they will be able to favorably manipulate any situation that arises. Given the historical record, Jews have every reason to believe this.

One thing is certain, Judaized American culture has been dumbed down to a point where the gullible goyim cannot think their way out of a paper bag. In turn, Jews capitalize on the mass confusion they created. Thus, the stupid goyim are ripe for the Jew’s next Purim/Holocaust festival slaughter.

It’s Time to Stop “Supporting Our Troops”

The next eejit that utters the “support our troops” nonsense shall be sent to the front lines to fight for his-her beliefs.

“For several years running on average twenty-two veterans have been killing themselves each and every day in the United States. The overloaded Veterans Administration has been caught grossly ill-prepared to adequately deal with the sheer enormity of the problem with so many severely damaged ex-soldiers in dire need of long term assistance and care. One study predicts that up to nearly a half million veterans will end up with criminal cases in the court system.”

Source: It’s Time to Stop “Supporting Our Troops” | Covert Geopolitics

geopolitics.co

Covert Geopolitics

by Joachim Hagopian

West Point graduate and former US Army officer.

Aug 17, 2017

With the 115 year old tradition of the annual Army-Navy football classic on Saturday [December 2015], the so called “America’s game” and “rivalry for the ages” is now once again upon us. This occasion never fails to pay reverent homage to America’s so called “cream of the crop” elitist military academies and always from the president to celebrities Americans give tribute to our armed forces.

At this time we hear that familiar patriotic mantra “support our troops” mindlessly repeated. So it seems appropriate now to take a cold hard look to examine what it actually means to “support our troops.”

As both a West Point graduate and critic of the American Empire, to me the “support our troops” sentiment has long outworn its propagandized welcome. US Empire has been using that contrite expression to brainwash Americans and justify its wars and violence for far too long. It sprang up during this last decade’s protracted war losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never was it ever heard during the Vietnam War when our combat veterans returned home feeling defeated and suffering from untreated PTSD symptoms, shunned by a nation that had bitterly turned against them and their war, particularly by their own peer group. Fast forward to four decades and three war defeats later, and our government is still sending Americans off to fight and die in Afghanistan (9800 currently) and Iraq (3500 with another 100 on the way), and now in Syria (50 just proposed with more on the way while war-hawk Bobbsy twins McCain and Graham are calling for 20,000 more troops in Syria). But this century’s wars we keep hearing red, white and blue, flag waving Americans urging us to “support our troops.”

US Army retirement plan for vets: Backpacks, socks, prescription pills, and possibly a ribbon.

Over the long haul, supporting our troops has resulted in the United States being the most warring, aggressive nation on earth, bar none. As we’re about to enter 2016, our ultraviolent country will be killing other human beings somewhere on this planet for 223 out of the last 240 total years the US has been in existence. That’s 93% of our time as a nation-turned-Empire we’ve been destroying human life. That’s certainly nothing to be proud of. Yet it’s “our troops” who’ve been the murdering culprit. No compassionate, rational person could possibly place blindly obedient support behind such rampantly wanton disregard and contempt for fellow human life.

Another fact that Americans can’t be proud of is knowing that the most warring nation on earth just since World War II alone has murdered up to 30 million people around the globe with an estimated 90% of them being civilians. Having initiated 201 out of the total of 240 armed conflicts from the end of WWII to 2001, it then follows that between those years the US Empire of Chaos and Destruction has murdered 27 million innocent people whose lives have tragically been cut short through no fault of their own for simply living in the wrong place at the wrong time belonging to the wrong ethnic nationality targeted by America’s full spectrum dominance and global superpower hegemony. And that was before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Protecting opium fields in Afghanistan

And what does it take to be targeted as a US foreign enemy? Any country whose leaders choose to support their own citizens’ well-being, independence and quality of life over US Empire’s fascist transnational corporate interests is attacked economically through sanctions and embargos, politically through propaganda lies and threats, or militarily though unnatural disasters/weather warfare, occupied invasions involving long term bloody conflict or acts of terrorism, coups and assassinations. Just ask Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, Panama, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Congo North Korea, Donbas, Palestine or Russia just to name more than a dozen.

People around the world have been victimized for well over a century by American Empire’s willful rape and pillage of their lands in the name of stolen natural resources and inhumane forced slave labor, and those are the nations whose puppet dictators willingly succumbed and acquiesced to US demands and pressures. In fact in the tradition of the British Empire, North America’s entire domestic and foreign history has been made of genocidal killing, enslaving, stealing and subjugating other darker-skinned races into death and submission. Given this context with the bigger picture perspective, “supporting our troops” is really supporting mass murder around the world. So bearing that sobering, grim reality in mind, it’s time for Americans to cease and desist with their jingoistic rah-rah that only adds insult to injury to the rest of the victimized world.

 

“Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”

― Henry Kissinger

In 2008 the US spent more money every 5 seconds to wage an immoral, unlawful war in Iraq than the average working American earned all year long. 80% of America’s taxes are earmarked towards funding the annual Pentagon budget to wage war around the world. When that kind of war investment misappropriating US citizenry’s hard-earned tax dollars places such lopsided priority over the well-being of its own people, with over a decade of wearing down an overextended military forced into fighting three, four and even five consecutive combat tours on two simultaneous warfronts, it also overburdened and decimated America’s middle class. And now for the first time in nearly a half century, the US middle class is no longer a majority in the United States. A large chunk of it died when sinking into an expanding lower class of impoverished, poverty-stricken Americans barely making ends meet.

But considering the costs of war to victim nations where since 2003 the US has killed over a million people in Iraq alone, this figure released from a study earlier this year is admittedly a conservative estimate. The study concludes that up to two million in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been killed by America’s wars. These colossal crimes against humanity constitute supporting the US federal government as well as its military troops a moral crime. America’s complete and utter destruction of the world’s second and third largest oil producers in Iraq and Libya, turning them into failed states because their one time US allied leaders moved away from the US petrodollaris unconscionable, yet that’s the tragic outcome of blindly supporting our troops. More than any other single country, the US today is responsible for allowing ISIS to make billions in profit from stolen oil from Iraq and Syria financing the biggest terrorist group on the planet. And US partners-in-crime Turkey and Israel are the two biggest buyers of terrorist oil. So in effect supporting our troops is also supporting both crimes against humanity as well as worldwide terrorism.

Supporting our troops has contributed to the world becoming far more armed and dangerous today than at any prior time in our recorded human history. Our nation is also responsible for spearheading the biggest arms race in history where it’s not just the US Empire spending so many billions on weapons of mass destruction but due to Empire aggression it has forced Russia and China to answer by also significantly increasing their military spending. A dozen years ago the US defense budget nearly equaled the rest of the world combined. But during this century’s two protracted US wars plus smaller secret ones around the world, America’s military expenditures have soared to $682 billion in 2012 from $417.4 in 2003.

DoD makes prescription drugs easy for beneficiaries

The exponential rise of American aggression likewise has pressured the unilaterally declared US enemies Russia and China to significantly increase their military spending as well. The US has gone from spending near half (46%) of the world’s military amount in 2003 to just 35% in 2014due to Russia and China dramatically expanding their military budgets. In fact following America’s lead, both the world’s annual arms sales as well as its military budgets have exponentially skyrocketed amongst dozens of countries all seemingly gearing up for “the big one.” Not surprisingly, at 31% the US is also the biggest arms dealer on the planet followed by Russia’s 27% with China accounting for 5% during the period from 2010-2014 that totaled a 16% increase from arms sold from 2005-2009.

Events and developments have escalated tensions and confrontations between the US and Russia and China in recent weeks. With the US backing NATO member Turkey recklessly shooting down a Russian fighter jet resulting in a Russian rescue helicopter also brought down last month, in addition to the probable ISIS bomb taking down the Russian airliner killing all 224 onboard a month and a half ago, the US Navy destroyer skirting inside the twelve nautical mile range of built up Chinese islands in the South China Sea, the United States and the West appear to be baiting Putin and the East into World War III. And with nuclear powers going directly head-to-head in Syria, Ukraine and Asia, self-annihilation of the human race becomes a very real and grave risk culminating after a quarter century of US Empire belligerently operating as the sole global superpower and “global village” bully.

Out of nearly 200 countries no other nation on earth has more than a few military bases outside its own country except the United States. In contrast to the rest of the world, the US sends 1.5 million military occupiers on active duty to over a thousand military installations on every continent throughout the globe. Just this week the Pentagon announced a worldwide expansion of military bases without specifying a total number under the auspices of secrecy. West Africa, East Africa and Afghanistan are slotted for full scale bases. Meanwhile US Special Forces that covertly operate by stealth surprise often at night in guerilla-type, fast strike operations are busily secretly committing acts of terror in over 135 nations globally, that’s about 75% of the all world’s nations.

Let’s look at the way our federal government supports our troops. After sending over 6800 US soldiers (along with 7000 civilian contractors) to their early graves fighting in America’s two longest running wars in the nation’s history, leaving one million wounded personnel filing VA claims ranging from life threatening physical injuries to emotionally crippling PTSD traumas and scars, the feds have betrayed our patriots serving our country by treasonously targeting all returning combat veterans as the biggest enemy threat on American soil. Indeed veterans, gun owners and dissidents are deemed to pose a greater danger than even the feds’ own created terrorist monster ISIS that Obama’s open border policy facilitates easy access to establishing terrorist cells inside America.

Those veterans seeking help are customarily snowed under by lethal Big Pharma poison, fast becoming addicted and even more unstable. Many are haplessly waiting and dying on lists for medical services that often don’t come soon enough. Exposing forty veterans who died awaiting services on invisible lists at the Phoenix VA hospital alone triggered a major scandal last year. For several years running on average twenty-two veterans have been killing themselves each and every day in the United States. The overloaded Veterans Administration has been caught grossly ill-prepared to adequately deal with the sheer enormity of the problem with so many severely damaged ex-soldiers in dire need of long term assistance and care. One study predicts that up to nearly a half million veterans will end up with criminal cases in the court system.

With nearly half (44%) of Congress millionaires and so few (19%) ever serving in uniform now, the DC warmongers are ever-at-the-ready to send young men and women from America’s lower class into harm’s way fighting Obama’s dirty little secret wars in multiple combat zones around the world that the public never even hears about. Yet you’ll see next to none of their own sons or daughters fighting in some far off war. The way our own government has used, abused and not supported our troops is despicable.

And then a sizeable percentage of those Americans who are so vocal in their claims of “supporting our troops,” are too frequently disingenuous. Often hypocrites merely mouth the same banal platitudes year after year from their ivory-towered, pretend world, living so far removed and disaffected from actual war conditions or even knowing anyone who wears a military uniform. Never fathoming the tragic insanity or bloody lifelong consequences that US wars ravage on millions worldwide, permanently damaging all involved, Americans who haven’t a clue will glibly pay lip service, “We owe so much to our soldiers who fight to keep us safe and free.” What bubble, planet or century are they living on or in?

Since the inside coup of 9/11 was perpetrated, US citizens have become the murderous neocons’ war on terror victims as well, terrorized by their own international crime cabal government and militarized police state that’s effectively stolen their freedom and civil liberties while the guilty treasonously continue violating sworn oaths to uphold and protect both the Constitution and American people. Yet too many brainwashed, dumbed down and clueless in America don’t seem to get it. Maybe it’s because they’re bombarded 24/7 by MSM lies and disinformation that never expose the ugliness of war as it really is. The ruling elite controls all aspects of mass media, engaging in widespread censorship of films, television and video games where violence and war are only glorified. Military, CIA and FBI liaisons control every aspect of what comes out of Hollywood these days.

But over four decades of a volunteer army comprised of less than half of one percent of the total US population also contributes greatly to the widening disconnect between the 99+% civilian population and the less than 1% Americans in uniform. The atrocities and horror that the imperialistic Empire’s killing machine has inflicted on Third World nations half a world away may as well be billions of miles away on another planet or galaxy. Out of sight, out of mind goes many civilians’ insulated, tunnel version reality.

Those currently in uniform need to be reminded that they have a sworn duty to protect America from domestic and foreign enemies. As citizens who no longer live in a democratic republic but now a totalitarian police state, they need to recognize that their federal government has a diabolical agenda to enslave and eliminate fellow Americans. Instead of criminalizing dissent, the real domestic enemy has become the federal government and all Americans need to accept this tragic development. Therefore, both those already in uniform as well as those ready to sign up and allow themselves to become their crime cabal’s latest cannon fodder in the elite’s wars need to stand up and be counted as patriots loyal to their nation and fellow citizens rather than adhere to blind obedience to their psychopathic masters. It’s no longer okay to support the troops when they’re misdirected into committing treason against their own citizenry. Military personnel need to take responsibility for their actions and do what’s right by both their Constitution as well as humanity.

2015 has been a tumultuous year when by globalist design terrorism has expanded to all corners of the earth, spreading death, war and destruction in its wake. Meanwhile, feeling its economic prowess slipping away in the face of the emerging power of Eastern rivals China and Russia, the United States government has already conceded losing its war to retain the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

So this late in the power elite’s endgame when we’re still hearing “support the troops,” in actuality it’s time to fight for our lives in support of humanity’s struggle for survival and good ultimately triumphing over evil.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/.

NATO ‘s War Crimes: The Crime of Propaganda

“For NATO is first and foremost the armed fist not only of the United States and its allies as nations, but is the armed fist of the capitalists of those nations who are prepared to strike against any nation, capitalist or socialist, that stands in their way of obtaining profit.”

 On Propaganda: “It turns us into salivating monsters calling for death of the other and cheering when the bombs explode; turns us all into the Hilary Clinton lunatic who cackled like some satanic demon as she watched a great man cut to pieces before her eyes.”

Source: NATO ‘s War Crimes: The Crime of Propaganda | New Eastern Outlook

journal-neo.org

Author: Christopher Black

Aug 14, 2017 

The NATO military alliance is a world encompassing threat. It is now conducting various forms of hybrid warfare against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and most of Africa. They have destroyed directly or are largely responsible for the destruction of the socialist nations of the USSR, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and too many to name in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Destruction is the fate that each nation on earth can expect unless it pays homage and obeisance to these neo-feudal overlords who promise protection in return for national servitude, in return for the complete surrender of their people and natural resources to increase the rate of profit for the capital that controls the NATO military machine. For NATO is first and foremost the armed fist not only of the United States and its allies as nations, but is the armed fist of the capitalists of those nations who are prepared to strike against any nation, capitalist or socialist, that stands in their way of obtaining profit.

The primary concern they have, in order to preserve their control, is for the preservation of the new feudal mythology that they have created; that the world is a dangerous place, that they are the protectors, that the danger is omnipresent, eternal, and omnidirectional, comes from without, and comes from within. The mythology is constructed and presented through all media; journals, films, television, radio, music, advertising, books, the internet in all its variety; all the information systems available are used to create and maintain scenarios and dramas to convince the people that they, the protectors, are the good and all others are the bad. We are bombarded with this message incessantly. They have succeeded into luring us to all their communication platforms, so that no one is able to ignore the constant flow of information into their consciousness and their subconscious. They have us locked to our screens. The have our attention. They have us hypnotised and under this state of hypnosis we are fed so many images we cannot take any of them in and so we drown in the river of information washing over us, barely able to breathe, unable to think, blind from looking.

The use of propaganda, and by propaganda I mean here the use of lies, inventions, fabrications, distortions and misrepresentations of reality in order to evoke an emotional response in the receiver of the desired type and desired action to follow, is a primary pillar of the mythology they create. The immediate means of delivery is through the news media. To turn on the television these days to watch the political, national and world “news” is a surreal experience. You have a dissociative experience as the presenters present not “news” but carefully crafted scripts inventing scenarios out of whole cloth that have nothing to do with what is really happening in any given situation. Even the weather “news” is moulded to keep mention of abrupt climate change to a minimum and sports “news” seems like a rehearsal for war news to come as our team smashes their team with our catastrophic weapons, erases them from the earth, never to play again.

But whatever form the propaganda takes it is a crime against the people, a crime against the republic, a crime against democracy, and since it is a part of the hybrid warfare campaign being conducted and because it is used to provoke a large aggressive general war, it is a war crime.

It is a crime against the people because the people are in essence the state, the nation. The leaders of our nations are merely our representatives placed in positions of power through various, more or less “democratic” mechanisms to act for our benefit, on our behalf. But when these leaders instead represent secret cabals of financiers and industrialists who want to use the government machinery for their private benefit against the interests of their people then they have betrayed the people, have sold them out to the highest bidder. Their lies flow from this betrayal for if their wars were just they would not need to use propaganda. But their wars are not just, they are the actions of gangsters writ large and so to get the people to go along, to fool them, they, by necessity, have to lie to the people.

It is a crime against democracy for the same reason, for democracy means that representatives of the people put in positions of power have a duty to inform the people honestly on all issues, to present all the facts and arguments, and most importantly, fulfill their duty to preserve the peace and to seek peaceful resolutions of differences between nations. But again, their wars for the profit of a few are always against the interests of the people and so the lies become part of the system of control, and with each lie the grave of democracy is dug deeper and deeper.

It is a crime against the republic because the republic is the people ruling themselves, in the name of the people, not the people ruled by a monarch or emperor, who rule in their own name. So when the leaders of a republic lie to the people of the republic they repudiate the republic and act against its interests and for the private interests of those who control them. They subvert the republic and destroy it.

It is a war crime because propaganda is used to provoke war, to sustain war, to turn other people, declared to be the enemy, into beings that need to be killed. It robs them of their humanity, of their kinship with us, their desires and dreams, and makes them into vermin to be destroyed with ease and even joy in the killing. It turns us into salivating monsters calling for death of the other and cheering when the bombs explode; turns us all into the Hilary Clinton lunatic who cackled like some satanic demon as she watched a great man cut to pieces before her eyes.

I could give dozens, hundreds, thousands of examples of how the propaganda is being used. The New York Times, BBC, CNN, CBC and the rest of the western media are full of it every day and every day worse than the day before, against Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria Venezuela, all the known targets. We all sense that the intensity if it is increasing, the vitriol becoming more hysterical and absurd with every headline.

The journalists who write these propaganda pieces and the presenters who read them on television are among the worst of criminals as they sit there looking attractive, with their fake smiles and fake concern, while taking lots of money to lie to our faces every day. It takes a very low person to sit there and lie to their fellow citizens so easily. It takes someone who has no sense of morality whatsoever. One could say they are sociopaths. But criminals they are and they deserve to be in the dock with the leaders that hand them the scripts they read so willingly.

For propaganda is a threat to peace itself. It is not only necessary to eliminate nuclear weapons and armies, it is also necessary to eliminate the psychological weapons that are used to justify, provoke and prolong war. Lenin once said that “disarmament is an ideal of socialism” and it was, we must not forget, the USSR that developed ideals of international peace and responsibility for wars of aggression. The successor state of Russia still relies on these principles.

On the second day of the creation of Soviet power the Decree on Peace was issued that made it a matter of state policy that aggressive war is a crime. Up until then it was assumed that nation states had an inherent right to go to war for their own interests. War propaganda is a way of preparing for aggressive war and consequently is a war crime. This was confirmed at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946.

This was echoed in the Resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations of November 3, 1947 that denounced war propaganda;

“The General Assembly condemns all forms of propaganda, in whatsoever country conducted, which is either designed or likely to provoke or encourage any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.”

A Soviet draft definition of aggression presented to the General Assembly in 1957 defined war propaganda as ideological aggression. Their draft stated that a state has committed ideological aggression when it “encourages war propaganda, encourages propaganda for the use of atomic or other weapons of mass extermination and stimulates Nazi-fascist views, racial or national superiority, or hatred and disdain for other peoples.”

But before that the Supreme Soviet on March 12, 1950 passed a law on the defense of peace that stated:

“The Supreme Soviet of the USSR is guided by the high principles of the Soviet peace policy, which seeks to strengthen peace and friendly relations between the peoples, recognizes that human conscience and the concept of right of the peoples, who, during one generation suffered the calamities of two wars, cannot accept that the conduct of war propaganda remain unpunished, and approves the proclamation of the Second World Congress of the Partisans of Peace, who expressed the will of the entire progressive mankind concerning the prohibition and condemnation of criminal war propaganda.

“The Supreme Soviet decrees,

1. To recognize that war propaganda under whatever form it is made, undermines the cause of peace, creates the threat of new war and is the graves crime against humanity.

2. To bring to court person guilty of war propaganda and to try them as having committed a most grave criminal offense.”

The western powers blocked a Russian UN resolution at that time to denounce war propaganda even though it was in accord with the principles of the United Nations Charter which makes it a duty of all member states to preserve the peace. The west relied on arguments of “free speech” arguments that do not hold water since war propaganda is not designed to enlighten people but to twist their minds into thoughts of hatred and war.

The Rome Statute today contains a clause that arguably encompasses these principles in Article 5, dealing with aggression, though this clause is not yet in effect. It is one of the grave problems with the International Criminal Court, that aside from being controlled effectively by the US and European Union for their purposes, its statute does not include a specific section on war propaganda. But then the United States and its allies prevented the inclusion of such a clause just as they prevented the adoption of the resolution at the UN in the 1950’s so that they could continue using war propaganda as part of their arsenal of world control.

So, the criminal dossier against NATO grows with the crimes committed. One day we can hope that those responsible for the war propaganda used against us will face the peoples’ justice but in the meantime we have to be aware that when we are confronted with it, when we open a newspaper, turn on the television, or radio, click that link on the internet, we are the victims of a war crime, the use of war propaganda as part of the crime of aggression, each and every one of us. And if that does not make you angry then what hope is there for peace in this world?

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Our Fight Against Fascism

Source: Our Fight Against Fascism 

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by Mateo Pimentel

August 16, 2017

Photo by Dave Hosford | CC BY 2.0

When editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg asserted that “the struggle in Charlottesville is a struggle within our own civilization, within Trump’s own civilization,” and that in the wake of such events “an American president should speak up directly on behalf of the American creed, on behalf of Americans who reject tribalism and seek pluralism, on behalf of the idea that blood-and-soil nationalism is antithetical to the American idea itself,” who, exactly, can place his logic?

It reads nicely, and it seems a conscionable thought to have after a woman dies fighting Nazis on American soil. But, really, what history books has Mr. Goldberg been reading?

“Our civilization’s” ongoing genocide against indigenous groups and the violently enforced systematic oppression of Black Americans notwithstanding, the US government – of which Trump is now Commander-in-Chief – has a storied and bloody history of assassinating foreign heads of state precisely because, democratically, a body of citizens or voters “seeking pluralism” elsewhere in the world had commenced down an antifascist political path that did not suit Washington’s interests.

Ariel Dorfman, for instance, reminisces of the 1970s presidential inauguration of Salvador Allende in Chile: “[A]lmost three years later, a few days after the Hawker Hunter planes under the control of General Pinochet attacked the palace on September 11, 1973. Their bombs left a black yawning gap where the balcony stood. Where the president once waved his handkerchief, there is nothing. Allende is dead. And we can sense that outside the frame, below where the balcony jutted out, there is only emptiness…”

Oh, were it so easy to condemn Trump for failing to say the “right thing” at the “right time” and to have that be the end of it. Is this what the Liberal pluribus desires from America’s much-detested Caesar? It may be enough to keep Rachel Maddow employed, but, unfortunately, the reason for the president’s neutrality on fascism is much more serious than this—and let there be no doubt that he, especially, is unaware of the profound impetus for his proven Nazi-sympathizing.

As we are thoroughly living in an oligarchy, we should turn to Deleuze to elucidate a root cause of the Oval Office’s reigning fascist bent: “The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control…”

Clearly, the rightward-leaning have shown a distinct susceptibility to every brand of hate-driven politics—and we should recall that the colonial residence of bigoted pilgrims did not predate the arrival of slave ships on American shores but followed one year later (1620 and 1619, respectively). Nevertheless, Liberals have their work cut out for them if they expect to right the ship of American democracy simply writing lukewarm editorials about “the American idea” and babyishly debating whether it is “ok” to punch Nazis in the face. In fact, our democracy is a ship that has always been listing! It has hardly been a democracy! And those who cry wolf because they think our political vessel is only now foundering really must have little-or-no experience with political organizing beyond the soothing environs of the yoga studio. Luckily for them, there is a very toothsome radical history they can get on board with.

Nearly a century ago, Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti offered very valuable advice during an interview he gave with the Toronto Star: “No government in the world fights Fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to Fascism to maintain itself. The Liberal Government of Spain could have rendered the Fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it compromised and dallied. Even now at this moment, there are men in this Government who want to go easy on the rebels… We want revolution here in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war. We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more worry with our revolution than the whole Red Army of Russia. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class on how to deal with Fascism.”

Our fight against fascism requires that we also set an example for the world. Huffing and puffing about what Trump says or fails to say is superficial. Of course, it is much easier than mounting a revolution to fight fascism to the death. And just how many bourgeois liberals are willing to pony-up?

More articles by:Mateo Pimentel

Mateo Pimentel lives on the Mexican-US border. You can follow him on Twitter @mateo_pimentel.

The USA Is Rigged in 1,000 Directions to Protect the Wealthiest—Including the Idea That Most People ‘Earned’ Their Way to the Top

Source: This Country Is Rigged in 1,000 Directions to Protect the Wealthiest—Including the Idea That Most People ‘Earned’ Their Way to the Top | Alternet

http://www.alternet.org

By Donald Jeffries / Skyhorse Publishing

August 10, 2017

 

Unprecedented wealth disparity in America is driven by corrupt corporate practices and the myth of earned wealth.

Photo Credit: The Tyee

The following is an excerpt from the new book Survival of the Richest: How the Corruption of the Marketplace and the Disparity of Wealth Created the Greatest Conspiracy of All by Donald Jeffries (Skyhorse Publishing, July 2017), available for purchase from Amazon, Indiebound and Skyhorse:

“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all. … The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor.” —Helen Keller

Most people shy away from the simple question; do those who are paid the most in our society deserve to be compensated like that? If a particular individual was the driving force behind a cure for all cancer, or instrumental in significantly increasing the human life span, I think most everyone would agree that their value to society would be such that they’d be entitled to millions, even billions of dollars. But the world’s wealthiest individuals do not, in fact, seem to have contributed in such a way that they have earned a distinction placing them above the masses, garnering more money in less than a year than what virtually everyone else earns in a lifetime. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which ranks the world’s richest three hundred people, these incredibly wealthy elite saw their net worth jump by $52.4 billion in 2013. On July 21, 2016, Bloomberg would recount how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had surpassed Warren Buffet as the third richest person in the world, thanks to a tidy increase of $5.4 billion in his personal fortune in 2016. Meanwhile, the vast majority of workers, who desperately need a significant pay raise, are simply not getting one.

The wealthiest people in our society don’t appear to be improving any lives but their own, and they don’t seem to have special qualities or skills that explain why they’re being compensated so much more extravagantly than the rest of us. Warren Buffet, like so many very wealthy people, made his fortune with investments. Multi-billionaire Mexican Carlos Slim Helú is another whose occupation is investor. When we examine any list of the richest Americans, we find names such as notorious corporate raider Carl Icahn, whose more polite title is investor, George Soros, who is yet another investor, hedge fund managers John Paulson and James Simons, and plenty of financiers, bond mavens, chairmen, and others with predictable titles that assure us, whatever they do, they aren’t positively impacting the lives of the bulk of humanity. The very wealthy, in all reality, can generally be defined as those who are abnormally good at making money.

Bill Gates’s Microsoft was primarily known for creating an operating system with numerous flaws, charging excessive prices for all the unnecessary upgrades and new versions, and engaging in monopolistic practices. Apple founder Steve Jobs would declare that Gates had “shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.” Jobs had a right to feel that way; most people think that Microsoft stole many essential features from Apple. Of course, many believe that Jobs himself stole from Xerox. Gates acknowledges that advances in technology, including robotics, “will reduce demand for jobs particularly at the lower end of the skill set.” Senator Jeff Sessions, now President Trump’s attorney general, was a fierce critic of Gates’s call for increased foreign visa workers at the same time Microsoft announced plans to lay off eighteen thousand workers in 2015. The Heritage Foundation has estimated that the disastrous June 2013 immigration “reform” bill, which Gates and every other pillar of the establishment supported, would cost taxpayers some $6.3 trillion over the next few decades.

Like almost all modern corporate leaders, Jobs used cheap, if not slave, labor in foreign countries to build his beloved iPhones. Both Herbert Hovenkamp, a law professor at the University of Iowa, and Bill Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, referred succinctly to Jobs as “a walking antitrust violation.” Walter Isaacson, author of a biography on Jobs, declared that the founder of Apple “always believed that the rules that applied to ordinary people didn’t apply to him.” Bill Gates is about as pedestrian a personality as one can imagine; in an interview with Christine Amanpour, he declared that “Clearly, you can’t raise the taxes we need just by going after that 1 percent.” In his 2014 annual Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation letter, Gates expounded upon his delusional misinformation, writing, “By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been.” Well, it’s certainly become a better place for him. If it could be demonstrated that either Gates or Jobs had single-­handedly invented the personal computer, they might indeed be worth their fortunes. By any definition, that clearly isn’t the case.

We hear regular, nonsensical references in the mainstream media about the difficulty of finding suitable executive talent and thus the need to compensate them extravagantly in order to beat the competition. It is never explained just what talent one requires to be an executive in a large corporation. One can’t quantify this kind of talent in any measurable way, the way one can assess the skills of an athlete, a musician, or an artist. Many powerful corporate leaders attain their positions in the most traditional manner, through simple nepotism. Sam Walton’s children, for example, exhibited no talent whatsoever in inheriting their father’s fortune. The Koch brothers inherited an oil refinery firm from their father. Fidelity’s Abigail Johnson is merely continuing the family tradition of running the company her grandfather established. Donald Trump began life as the son of a multimillionaire, which made the arduous climb to billionaire a bit easier. Bill Gates did not come from a “middle-class” family; his parents were quite wealthy, and his father was on the board of Planned Parenthood. Warren Buffet’s climb up the corporate ladder was undoubtedly aided by the fact he was the son of a United States congressman. Nike founder and chairman Philip Knight’s father was a newspaper publisher. Hedge fund magnate James H. Simons grew up the son of a factory owner. Any present-day Rockefeller, Rothschild, Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan, etc. invariably succeeded because of their names and their inherited wealth, while Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduaro Salverin, Chris Hughes, and Justin Rosenstein all came from wealthy families and met at the ultimate breeding ground for the elite, Harvard University. Horatio Alger stories, if they ever existed to any great degree, are clearly a thing of the past.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spent much of his childhood on a 25,000-acre Texas ranch with his maternal grandfather, who was a regional director of the US Atomic Energy Commission. Liliane Bettencourt, presently estimated to be worth more than $33 billion, earned her riches by inheriting L’Oreal, one of the world’s biggest companies, from her father. Google founder Larry Page’s father Carl was a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence. Forest Mars Jr., worth some $21 billion, achieved his success through inheriting the giant candy company from his father, who had inherited it from his grandfather. His siblings, John and Jacqueline, are also worth $21 billion each. They mirror the work ethic of Sam Walton’s children, yet undoubtedly many Americans, from all income levels, would argue that they earned this incredible wealth. When he uttered the statement, “You didn’t build that,” Barack Obama inadvertently tapped into the strong personal belief most Americans possess, that they have attained whatever success they’ve achieved solely through hard work or their own brilliance. Those who make it almost always have been fortunate in different ways. They might have been born into a supportive, financially stable family. They might have known someone who opened the right doors for them. They might have been blessed with a set of genes that made them physically attractive enough that others want to help them. They might simply have been in the right place at the right time. For whatever reason, human beings seem to blanch at the notion that they’ve been lucky. Senator Elizabeth Warren echoed Obama’s comments, saying, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.”

Author Chrystia Freeland, in her 2012 book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, explored the attitudes of these unfathomably wealthy people. She found that each of them felt strongly that they’d earned their great wealth. Just as unanimously, though, they all thought that at least some of their billionaire brethren hadn’t earned theirs. Oddly, this attitude seems just as prevalent among the upper middle class, the middle class, and even many in the lower middle class. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard working-class people moan that “I worked hard for what I got,” or “nobody helped me.” When talking about redistributing the wealth, I’ve often been met with fierce opposition from those who have no wealth to share, and thus would benefit in some way from such a proposition. They love to counter with statements such as, “How do you define rich?” or “I guess rich means anyone who has more than you.” Another perennial favorite, from those who’ve made it as well as those who haven’t, is, “If you divided up all the money in the world evenly, in a few years, the same people would have it all again.” This is, of course, a very convenient defense for those who have hoarded all the wealth. Why should society even bother to distribute the wealth more fairly, when everyone knows the money would just magically gravitate back to them?

Slightly below this lofty top level of multibillionaire investors and the like are entertainers and athletes. By 2016, the average salary for a Major League Baseball player had risen to $4.4 million a year. In the NBA, it was an even more incomprehensible $5.2 million annually. NHL players average $2.5 million, and NFL players “only” $2.1 million each year. The biggest movie stars are in the “$20 million club,” indicating they command that kind of salary per picture. Tom Hanks hauled in as much as $49 million from The Da Vinci Code. Often these figures don’t factor in the consider­able residuals that can result from a huge box office hit. Tom Cruise made $290 million from his four Mission: Impossible films alone. Keanu Reeves, meanwhile, piled up $262 million from the three Matrix movies. Reeves is an unusually generous sort and gave up some profits from his back-end points in order to help finance the special-effects team and costume designers for the sequels. By the end of the long-running Friends television show, each of the six cast members was garnering a million dollars per episode. Even if one accepts categorically that these athletes and entertainers are that exceptional and wildly talented, can anyone maintain they deserve to be so lavishly compensated?

By the end of 2013, the distribution of wealth in America had become so unequal that we no longer could be classed among the First World, developed nations in this category. According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook, 75.4 percent of all wealth in the United States belongs to the richest 10 percent of the people. Comparable nations (none of them as bad as the United States) in terms of wealth disparity include Chile, Indonesia, and South Africa. The bottom 90 percent of American citizens own only 24.6 percent of the aggregate wealth, while the norm for developed countries is around 40 percent. Meanwhile, under Obama, who was often accused of being a socialist, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans received 95 percent of the income gains during the alleged economic “recovery.” During his 2016 presidential run, Bernie Sanders would embrace this issue with statements such as “something is profoundly wrong when the twenty richest people in our country own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population—150 million people.” FactCheck.org claimed that the situation for the 40 percent at the bottom of the ladder has grown even more dismal, declaring that by early 2016, they actually had a combined negative financial worth. Every statistic on income and wealth disparity supports the notions of Ferdinand Lundberg, who postulated in his 1937 book America’s Sixty Families that, “The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of the richest families, buttressed by no more than 90 families of lesser wealth.”

While millions of Americans have lost their homes and were financially devastated by this undeclared Depression, the wealthy continue to be rescued from their own mistakes, time and time again. The 2008 Banker Bailout was one of America’s most disgraceful acts. With foreclosures and bankruptcies at all-time highs, the criminal banks who orchestrated it all were given the kind of security net denied to those suffering individuals across America. When individual Americans experience a terrible financial setback, they are told it’s their own fault and to try harder and pull up their bootstraps. Helping them somehow is a handout most Americans resent giving. But when the wealthiest groups in our society—the big banks, General Motors, etc.—make bad decisions and should ostensibly suffer the consequences, they aren’t penalized at all. They don’t feel the wrath of the vaunted marketplace, as powerless individual citizens do.

The liberal political advocacy group Common Cause would report that the banks bailed out by the taxpayers certainly didn’t stop lavishing excessive benefits on their top executives. Lloyd C. Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, was given over $70 million in total compensation in 2008, despite his company having been gifted $10 billion in the bailout. J. P. Morgan Chase’s James S. Dimon earned nearly $28 million, while his company had taken $25 billion from the taxpayers. The list goes on, as huge conglomerates such as American Express, Bank of America, and Capital One bestowed millions on their CEOs, only months after begging for handouts from the unwashed masses who were struggling to make ends meet, and to whom were still being told to sacrifice for the good of the country. All told, nine banks that begged the struggling taxpayers to bail them out awarded cumulative bonuses of nearly $33 billion in that same year of 2008, including $1 million each to some five thousand employees. Exposing the lie that these economic excesses are connected to the ironclad manifestations of an all-knowing marketplace, six of the nine banks paid out more in bonuses than they earned in profit. The Obama administration reacted to these shameful figures with a statement by Robert Gibbs, “The president continues to believe that the American people don’t begrudge people making money for what they do.” Citigroup, which received about 25 percent of the bailout money going to the nine banks, bestowed an incredible $98.9 million in compensation on Andrew Hall, head of their energy-trading unit Phibro LLC, which dwarfed the $38 million they paid CEO Vikram Pandit in 2008.

As has been widely reported, only a few relatively small fry—loan officers and the like—were ever prosecuted for crimes related to the 2008 financial crash. By comparison, the much smaller Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s resulted in over thirty thousand criminal referrals and one thousand felony convictions by the Department of Justice. In contrast, only one banker—the Egyptian-born Kareem Serageldin—was ever sent to jail for the 2008 financial crisis. Despite that even the judge admitted that others at Credit Suisse were guiltier and that Serageldin was merely “a small piece of an overall evil climate within the bank and with many other banks,” he nevertheless sentenced him to thirty months behind bars. The overall lack of prosecutions related to the worst banking crisis in American history reflected a disturbing trend. From 1995–1997, the percentage of federal white-collar prosecutions was 17.6 percent. In the period from 2010–2012 however, this figure dipped to only 9.4 percent. As multiple sources within the banking industry told the New York Times, federal authorities appeared to lack the courage to go after powerful corporate figures, part of an overall change within the Justice Department of seeking settlements in lieu of prison sentences.

CEOs are not only given wildly excessive salaries and “performance” bonuses; they are often given parting “gifts” that boggle the mind. ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva, for example, was gifted an unbelievable $260 million from the company when he left them in June 2012. Evidently the $141 million total compensation package he’d accrued in 2011 wasn’t enough. Mulva’s package paled in comparison to the more than $417 million doled out to John Welch, in honor of his twenty-year tenure at General Electric. But perhaps Welch was deserving of such an honor, considering General Electric paid no taxes at all in 2010, according to the New York Times and numerous other mainstream media outlets. In 2015, Citizens for Tax Justice claimed that GE had again paid no taxes, along with fourteen other Fortune 500 companies. These lucrative deals, often called golden parachutes, are extended to overpaid executives even when they fail miserably at their jobs. The magazine Mother Jones calculated that the average golden parachute for these CEOs was an amount equal to forty-nine lifetimes’ worth of work for a median income employee. In the case of Welch, this would rise to 203 lifetimes’ worth of work.

Some executive pay rates are so astronomical that they defy belief. John Hammergren, CEO of drug giant McKesson, made $54.4 million in 2010. This works out to $210,000 a day, and that daily salary would be more than nearly 99 percent of Americans make annually ($250,000 a year is generally considered the basement level for the top One Percent). Health Care pays its executives extremely well, too, which goes a long way toward explaining the spiraling, out of control medical costs in this country. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield paid CEO Larry Glasscock a $42.5 million bonus in 2004, which nicely dwarfed his $3.6 million compensation for the year. As an anonymous wit on a conspiracy forum noted in outrage over this, “At my former salary, I would have to work 1,214 years to make $42.5 million. That’s over twelve centuries.” To show just how rapidly, and drastically, the gap between upper management and workers is growing, during the 1980s, executives made about forty times what average workers did. By 2015, the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 204 to 1. During the Clinton years, the average pay for CEOs increased more than 400 percent.

While paying no tax at all in 2010, GE, citing merely one example of corporate tax “fairness,” paid an average of just one-eighth of a percent in taxes between 2002 and 2011. In response to these astonishing statistics, GE CEO Jeff Immelt termed the US tax system, “old, complex, and uncompetitive.” Uncompetitive with what, one wonders. Immelt exemplifies everything wrong about present-day America; since he took over as GE’s CEO, the company’s stock lost 50 percent of its value, and GE had closed thirty-one factories and laid off nineteen thousand workers. For this dazzling performance, Immelt earned over $12 million a year. Forbes magazine ranked Immelt as the fourth worst CEO in America in its May 2012 issue. Perhaps Immelt possesses that indistinguishable executive talent we’ve heard so much about.

One could fill a good-sized book with the excesses of CEO compensation alone. The figures are mind-boggling. Angelo Mozilo was the cofounder and longtime CEO of Countrywide Financial. During one eight-year period alone, Mozilo earned $521.5 million from his company, according to compensation research firm Equilar. Mozilo became the first executive to be penalized for the losses incurred by millions of investors during the mortgage collapse when he agreed to settle with the Securities and Exchange Commission in a civil fraud case. Of the $67.5 million Mozilo was assessed, Countrywide agreed to pay $20 million as part of the indemnification agreement he had with the company. Mozilo, like many of the highest-paid corporate leaders, received innumerable, valuable perks along with his millions. For instance, his compensation package covered annual country club and golf course dues. Mozilo knew how to take care of his influential friends, too; Senator Christopher Dodd, for example, was given a $75,000 reduction in mortgage payments at below-­market interest rates, that in real terms worked out to be a sweetheart deal worth over a million dollars. Other luminaries who benefited financially from being “friends of Angelo” included members of Congress Kent Conrad and Barbara Boxer, as well as Nancy Pelosi’s son, Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson, and Democratic Party figures Richard Holbrooke and Donna Shalala.

The unfathomable salaries CEOs regularly give themselves are, for all intents and purposes, tax subsidies from the government. Congress, in 1993, capped the tax deductibility for executive pay at $1 million but still allowed US corporations to profit from deducting so-called performance-based pay, including stock options. Thanks to this provision, corporations regularly use these stock options to lower their taxes, making large executive bonuses in effect tax free. The total yearly cost to taxpayers from all these shenanigans is some $7 billion, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The fast-food industry has been especially noteworthy in this regard; the Institute for Policy Studies found that fast-food CEOs had deducted about $183 million of this performance pay, which decreased their tax liability by $64 million over two years. These are the same folks who are claiming no one will be able to afford their putrid food if they were forced to pay their employees a living wage. McDonald’s CEO James Skinner, for example, received a performance bonus of $23 million in 2012, while David Novak, CEO of Yum! Brands (which includes Taco Bell and KFC), was given more than twice that amount, with a $48 million “performance” bonus.

While these CEOs are earning unconscionable amounts of money, their workers are often forced to make ends meet on $20,000 annually or less, with decreasing benefits every year. Walmart has become notorious in this regard; their employees are even given instructions on how to apply for welfare and food stamps during their orientation. The fact that some of these companies are paying their workers so little that they qualify for government subsidies seems to have largely escaped the attention of the public, who have been trained to focus their anger on the poorest individuals, benefiting from some nominal form of government assistance. In the minds of many Americans, it’s fraud for a decidedly poor person to be on government assistance and still have what appears to be too good of an automobile or television for someone of their lowly lot in life, but it’s okay for huge corporations to be given unlimited handouts from taxpayers to subsidize the shameful pittances they pay their employees.

During the 2013 holiday season, Walmart launched a canned-food drive for its own employees. Somehow, I don’t expect Sam Walton’s children to reexamine their priorities, despite all the attention and criticism this campaign received. No less ironic was the incredible boast from Walmart’s CEO Bill Simon, the month before, during a presentation about the opportunities at his corporation, that 475,000 Walmart associates earned salaries of at least $25,000. There are about a million Walmart employees, so this means that less than half of them are paid even this kind of paltry salary. The Committee for Better Banks surveyed bank tellers in New York and found that 39 percent of them were on some form of public assistance, because their salaries were so low. By the end of 2012, the top ten CEOs each were making over $100 million a year. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg led the way, with $2.28 billion. Almost all of Zuckerberg’s earnings came through stock options, which meant a very low tax bill.

The results of a study published in the New York Times on July 22, 2013, confirmed that whether you’re born poor or born rich you tend overwhelmingly to stay that way. Nationally, a Pew poll found that 43 percent of Americans born in the bottom fifth of the economic ladder never move up at all, while 70 percent never reach the middle rung. Even students from wealthy families with lower test scores are more likely to graduate from college than poor students with higher test scores. So few people control the marketplace that, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, the top One Percent own half of all the stocks in this country, while the bottom 50 percent own only .5 percent of them. Sociologist and author G. William Domhoff revealed, in an illuminating report on his Who Rules America? website, that the One Percent has only 5 percent of the collective personal debt, while the bottom 90 percent has 73 percent. When we contrast the distribution of income and debt, it becomes obvious just how difficult economic upper mobility is in present-day America. Joseph Stiglitz went over much of this material in an excellent article in the May 2011 Vanity Fair, titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.” There is probably no truer saying than the chestnut, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

As Ambrose Bierce once defined it, a corporation is an ingenious device whereby individual profit is obtained without individual responsibility. Those who suggest that top executives are indispensible and crucial to the success of the company should try a simple experiment; allow a week to go by without any executives reporting to work (or even telecommuting, one of their countless perks). Then go a week without the janitorial staff. It will be crystal clear to everyone just who is doing the important work.

Excerpted from the new book Survival of the Richest: How the Corruption of the Marketplace and the Disparity of Wealth Created the Greatest Conspiracy of All by Donald Jeffries (Skyhorse Publishing, July 2017), available for purchase from Amazon, Indiebound and Skyhorse.

 

 

Donald Jeffries is the author of The Unreals, a novel lauded by the likes of multi-award-winning author Alexander Theroux and Night at the Museum screenwriter R. Ben Garant, and the nonfiction book Hidden History. Jeffries lives in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Who are the US police really protecting?

Source: Who are the US police really protecting? | USA | Al Jazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com

By Kim Kelly

Kim Kelly is an editor at Noisey, VICE’s music and culture channel, and is based in New York City.

July 21, 2017

Anti-fascist protesters and bystanders hold their hands in the air while law enforcement officers detain them during competing demonstrations in Portland [David Ryder/Reuters]

 On June 12, 2017, New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (OHSP) added a new name to its list of “domestic terrorist” threats: Antifa.

The report characterises “Antifa” as a group of “anarchist extremists” who “focus on issues involving racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, as well as other perceived injustices,” a half-baked definition, while technically accurate, is far from comprehensive. Unlike the other American entities that have earned this dubious distinction (and despite what hysterical FOX News hosts like to shrill), Antifa isn’t an organised group, a gang, or even a society.

Antifa – shorthand for anti-fascist – isn’t an organisation at all; it’s an idea, one that’s been knocking around since the 1930s and that has found newfound relevance on our shores since the rise of Trumpism and the current administration’s sharp pivot towards the far right. It’s also one of the few bulwarks left against the rapid growth of America’s white supremacist movement, a development that seems to leave the state, the authorities, and the police wholly unconcerned.

Given the simmering threat of violence, police are a constant fixture at the now routine public clashes where the far left meets alt-right in the drawn-out battle for the soul of Trump’s America. During these rowdy protests and counterprotests, there’s often nothing but a thin blue line in riot gear separating the twain, armed to the teeth and bearing pepper spray, sound cannons, and L-RADs alongside their firearms. 

That line holds when it’s escorting Ku Klux Klan members or acting as a barrier between alt-right attention-seekers and black-clad Antifa protesters, but becomes awfully porous when it wants to be. I’ve witnessed many instances in which non-violent, masked protesters find themselves beaten or behind bars while Trump devotees and white nationalists brandishing Confederate flags and wearing flag bandanas (do those masks not count?) are herded into safe spaces and given police protection at protests. 

While both sides have been known to employ violent tactics, there’s a double standard at work; for example, critics of the black bloc have been oddly silent about the gun-toting Klansmen in Charlottesville and the National Rifle Association’s bloodthirsty threats masquerading as advertisements. The police seem to know who they want to target, and somehow it’s never the old white men wrapped in American flags or spotty teenagers in Roman warrior cosplay.

‘Moderate threat’

One of the more interesting tidbits in an accompanying NJ OHSP report, titled The Face of White Supremacy in 2017, noted that, “NJ OHSP assesses white supremacist extremists remain a moderate threat to New Jersey. Since January, white supremacist extremists conducted four attacks, one plot, and three stockpiling incidents across the United States”. The write-up mentions several white supremacist groups like Identity Evropa and Vanguard America, noting their campaigns to intimidate and recruit at New Jersey universities; curiously, militia groups like the Oathkeepers, 3 Percenters, and Patriot Prayer and gangs like 211 and the Proud Boys are not mentioned, despite their violent track records and penchant for harassment. 

With all of this tension and violence percolating throughout the country, placing Antifa in the same category as hatemongers like ISIS, the KKK, and Identity Evropa is not only disingenuous, it’s patently absurd.

In the report on Antifa, though, there are no such warnings; instead, the report seems to grasp at straws to justify its own existence. It cites out-of-state incidents in Berkeley and Sacramento to illustrate the perceived threat, while a “small fight” on March 28 serves as the sole example of Antifa allegedly causing problems in New Jersey.

If anything, the OHSP’s efforts show that Antifa’s more disruptive tactics are a direct response to the danger posed by white supremacists, et al: “Violent confrontations between Antifa members and white supremacists – as well as militia groups – will likely continue because of ideological differences and Antifa’s ability to organise on social media. In the past year, Antifa groups have become active across the United States, employing a variety of methods to disrupt demonstrations.”

Why, then, has Governor Chris Christie and his cohorts decided to brand a loose group of anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-Trump protesters as “domestic terrorists”? As he’s made quite clear over the course of his fitful eight-year term, Christie is not overly concerned with the well-being of the people of New Jersey, and certainly doesn’t give a fig about how the state’s marginalised communities are coping under the Trump administration’s draconian policies.

He does, however, care about currying favour with the boss, glumly playing lapdog to the petty tyrant who inadvertently launched one of 2017’s most delightful oxymorons by whining about “professional anarchists” ruining his paltry inauguration party. Demonising resistance wins Christie a few of those coveted “law and order” points, and makes him look like he’s actually doing something besides wasting taxpayer money and worming his way into the sports radio circuit.

Here, Christie is indulging in a perverse kind of “virtue signalling”, that favourite alt-right insult. By taking a specific stand against “Antifa” and using state resources to do it, Christie and his pals are saying, “Any enemy of Trump’s is an enemy of mine” and working to tamp down any signs of rebellion against their guy – even if it means tacitly turning a blind eye to the white supremacist organising that bears a far, far greater threat to the American people than the actions of ultimately utopian anarchist anti-fascists.

A win for the right wing

It’s telling that right-wing conspiracy theory site InfoWars and other alt-right blogs celebrated the NJ OHSP report; it was a definite win for them since they view any effort to delegitimise those they oppose as an endorsement for their own rancid ideologies.

It’s no surprise that conservative politicians are pulling out all the stops to quash dissent. They benefit the most from America’s ingrained white supremacist heteropatriarchy, and any challenge to their place at the top of the totem pole isn’t going to be met with open arms. Silence against the white supremacist threat signals complicity and is especially dangerous given the power that racist white nationalists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller wield in the White House and the explosion of hate crimes that have rocked marginalised communities since Trump came to power.

In May, the Trump administration slashed funding for 30 organisations – including six police departments – that work to counter white supremacist extremism; anti-Muslim hate crimes have risen 91 percent since he took office, while anti-Semitic hate crimes have surged 86 percent; this year has seen the murders of 15 trans women of colour, while 54 unarmed black people have been killed by police since January 2017.

With all of this tension and violence percolating throughout the country, placing Antifa in the same category as hatemongers like ISIL, the KKK, and Identity Evropa is not only disingenuous, it’s patently absurd. The whole situation sounds like a rejected Sean Hannity bit, and yet, here we are.

An ongoing pattern

This cockamamie “domestic terrorist” ploy is part of an ongoing pattern. The mass arrests that took centre stage at Trump’s inauguration have set a worrisome precedent for his administration’s treatment of dissenters, as does the fact that over 200 protesters are still facing a bevy of felony charges that could land some in prison for 70 to 80 years.

In a throwback to the way lawmakers attempted to hobble labour organising in the 19th and 20th centuries, Republican politicians in 18 states have introduced legislation aimed at curtailing the ability to protest, and the president himself often lashes out publicly at anyone who dares to question him or his policies.

Even worse is the growing sense that, despite the expectation of impartiality that the adage “protect and serve” might inspire, as agents of the state – especially this incarnation of the state – the police cannot be trusted to protect protesters on both the left and the right.

Whether they’re turning a blind eye to violence (as I saw first-hand at a recent “March Against Sharia” counterprotest and myriad other protests in New York City), treating neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the KKK with kid gloves, arresting Antifa and left-wing protesters on trumped-up charges, or reacting with seemingly arbitrary excessive force, it’s become exceedingly apparent to those on the left that the cops do not have our best interests in mind. Whether that’s because they’re following orders from up top or acting on their own prejudices remains to be seen, but it paints an ugly picture no matter what the impetus.

“Cops and Klan go hand in hand,” goes the sing-songy old protest chant that’s long been a staple at political demonstrations and protests – a battle cry that aims to infuriate its targets while galvanising those who stand in opposition.

Like any good slogan, it boils down a complicated belief system into a short, sharp shock of verbal ammunition that neatly encapsulates the anarchist viewpoint that the police are a jackbooted instrument of state repression, equating the men and women in blue with Klansman’s white hoods.

While this viewpoint may be difficult for many to stomach in a world where “Blue Lives Matter” is a popular T-shirt design, I implore you: watch the footage of Charlottesville police officers forming a protective phalanx around a small group of unapologetically sieg-heiling Klansmen to keep them away from crowds of angry protesters, and tell me just who the cops – and their bosses – are really trying to protect and serve.

Kim Kelly’s writings on music, culture, and politics have appeared in the Guardian, NPR, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, VICE, and Pitchfork, among others. She’s currently an editor at Noisey, VICE’s music and culture channel, and is based in New York City. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

NATO: Instrument of US imperial power masquerading as freedom-loving military alliance

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”

“The American Empire has become the world’s greatest threat, not only to peace but – thanks to its military-industrial-Wall Street-complex – to prosperity, and to the environment as well. The empire has become the world’s greatest weapon of mass destruction.”

William Blum

Source: NATO: Instrument of US imperial power masquerading as freedom-loving military alliance — RT Op-Edge

RT Op-Edge

John Wight

July 15, 2017

John Wight has written for newspapers and websites across the world, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal. He is also a regular commentator on RT and BBC Radio. John is currently working on a book exploring the role of the West in the Arab Spring. You can follow him on Twitter @JohnWight1

DATE IMPORTED:March 29, 2015A soldier of the U.S. Army waves as he arrives in the Czech Republic during the “Dragoon Ride” military exercise in Harrachov March 29, 2015 © David W Cerny / Reuters

NATO is not an organization committed to promoting democratic values, as claimed, but to promoting Western hegemony, domination and, wherever the writ of the West is resisted or contested, regime change.

The scale of human suffering wrought by Western imperialism is of such magnitude that it cannot possibly be quantified. In more recent times, since the end of the Second World War, words such as ‘progress,’ ‘civilization,’ and ‘democracy’ have been used to justify what has been a perennial state of conflict and instability. In every part of the world this imperialist juggernaut, led by Washington, has made its oppressive presence felt, undermining and destabilizing governments in the cause of an empire that wears the garb of democracy but which, just like every empire there has been, is rooted in power and greed.

When NATO was established in 1949, it was in the context of a Cold War that pitted the Soviet bloc against a Western alliance in a struggle defined by two antagonistic economic systems and their accompanying ideologies – capitalism and communism. It was a global struggle which lasted over four decades. One that brought the planet close to nuclear Armageddon in the early 1960s and spawned a series of proxy conflicts throughout the developing world, as countries such as Korea, Vietnam, Angola and Nicaragua emerged from decades of Western/US colonial and imperialist domination to assert their right to self-determination.

The Western, or capitalist, bloc was and remains dominated by the United States, which, despite unleashing an ocean of propaganda designed to associate itself with words and concepts such as ‘liberty’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights,’ is a nation that has extended itself in destroying liberty, undermining democracy and violating human rights in every corner of the globe.

As the author William Blum puts it in the preface of the 2014 edition of his bestselling and classic work, Rogue State: A Guide To The World’s Only Superpower, “The American Empire has become the world’s greatest threat, not only to peace but – thanks to its military-industrial-Wall Street-complex – to prosperity, and to the environment as well. The empire has become the world’s greatest weapon of mass destruction.”

The real motive behind Washington’s drive for global dominance was provided by George Kennan, the US State Department mandarin credited with devising the policy of containment vis-à-vis the Soviet Union after the Second World War, which he laid out in an internal memo in 1948: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth,” Kennan writes, “but only 6.3 percent of its population…Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.”

Maintaining the enormous but contracting disparity of wealth that Washington still enjoys today underlays its foreign policy in our time. NATO’s role in this regard is a sword to advance US foreign policy and economic interests around the world rather than the shield designed to protect and uphold democracy its adherents assert. It is less an alliance of equals, and more a network of client states prepared to do Washington’s bidding in return for a few crumbs from its table. In the process, it allows nations such as the UK and France to present themselves as strategic heavyweights when in truth they are strategic lightweights, former colonial powers that have attached themselves to Washington’s coattails in what counts as a shameful exercise in vassalage.

The latest US vassal to allow its territory to be used as a base for US military assets is Romania, which has just been cleared to proceed with the purchase of a Patriot missile defense system from Washington in a deal worth $3.9 billion. Announcing the deal the euphemistically named Defense Security Cooperation Agency said, “The proposed sale of the Patriot system will support Romania’s needs for its own self-defense and support NATO defense goals.”

This latest deployment of a US missile defense system in Eastern Europe comes as part of an ongoing strategy to place a military cordon sanitaire around Russia, which, in conjunction with economic sanctions, is designed to punish it for refusing to accept its preordained place as a defeated power. How dare you, Moscow, assert the right to follow an independent foreign policy? How dare you resist and contest our hegemony in Europe and the Middle East? And how dare you deign to consider itself an equal of the Empire?

Only the most naïve and gullible could accept that Russia is being subjected to the kind of military pressure it has been in recent years for any reason other than its emergence as a strategic counterweight to NATO/Western hegemony. This is the same NATO responsible for the murder of Yugoslavia and Libya, countries and societies that have been on the receiving end of NATO’s ‘democracy bombs’ and suffered catastrophic consequences.

The very existence of NATO is an affront to justice. It is an instrument of US imperial power masquerading as a military alliance committed to upholding and defending democracy. Its entire purpose is to help maintain a status quo that is underpinned by a lack of democracy ‘between’ states, doing so in the cause of a US superpower whose decline is evident in the upsurge of military aggression and saber rattling which the world has witnessed of late, buttressed by a political process in Washington that is currently in meltdown.

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.