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.

Carl Sagan’s Eerily Accurate Prediction About the Demise of America

Sagan was a man of reason and his predictions or the future of America were shockingly accurate.

Source: Carl Sagan’s Eerily Accurate Prediction About the Demise of America – Waking Times

Waking Times

Buck Rogers, Staff Writer

August 10, 2017

 

Far from being a mystic or a prophet, Carl Sagan was a man of science, a man of analytical reasoning, with a penchant for wonder and appreciation for the mystery of the cosmos. He’s well-known for his statement that ‘we are made of starstuff,’ just beings composed of atomic matter and held together by physics.

Published in 1995 shortly before Sagan’s death in 1996, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark was Sagan’s attempt to explain the scientific method to laypeople. He took it as his mission in life to alert the world that the intellectual foundation of our society and culture was in jeopardy of being overthrown in a new era of returning superstition, pseudoscience and anti-intellectualism.

It was the dumbing down of America that worried Sagan at the end of his life, and in The Demon-Haunted World he offered a rationally prophetic examination of where America was heading. Now, some 20 years later, his words are resonating with those who are paying attention to the changing cultural climate today.

He writes:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” ~Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

He’s right, of course, for this country is now in serious economic dire straits. Manufacturing has been off shored, and millions are indeed dependent on the service economy. Our understanding of the scientific and engineering principles which create the devices and conveniences we depend on are widely misunderstood. At the same time, we are becoming a technocracy, a nation governed by technology which has become so advanced and complex that even our regulatory agencies do not understand what they’re up against.

Politically, we are ruled not by elected officials whom we can trust, but by an unelected deep state and super-international organizations which govern by treaty and economic brute force. The result is a sort of abandonment of hope in the system of democracy and a willful ignorance of the issues that genuinely impact our lives. We really don’t know how to redress our grievances, who to blame, or how to intelligently frame the issues facing us today. And so we ignore them.

In recent decades, peaking with the hype of the 2012 fantasy, we’ve seen a rise in new age belief systems which serves to turn people away from, reality, rationality and common sense, and encourages them to pursue meaningless wild-goose chases in the fields of light working, ascension, and the hype of quantum leaping. This distraction has made it impossible for many to recognize and acknowledge the real threats to our livelihood and survival, causing many to choose hope and faith over education and action.

Sagan continues:

“The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number one video cassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. Beavis and Butthead remains popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning – not just of science, but of anything – are avoidable, even undesirable.” ~Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Here, Sagan chides mainstream media for their role in social engineering. The media has the greatest influence on our society, and it is in the ivory towers of media executives where the direction is set for our national intellect. They are the captains of our collective rational and emotional destiny, and Sagan’s comment condemns their fruitful efforts to turn young minds away from reason and towards stupidity. This was 20 years ago, and the effect has since been exacerbated by an order of magnitude. Now we have reality TV and a reality show president.

Final Thoughts

The problems we face today are concrete, albeit subtle and complex. Technology is increasingly enslaving us because we simply do not understand how it works or how to reign in those who control it. We’ve come to depend on its conveniences while simultaneously ignoring its intrusions into our private lives. In the absence of understanding we’ve become complacent and happy with such ignorance, and in this climate, Sagan’s darkly prophetic vision of our future is coming to fruition.

Read more articles by Buck Rogers.

About the Author

Buck Rogers is the earth-bound incarnation of that familiar part of our timeless cosmic selves, the rebel within. He is a surfer of ideals and meditates often on the promise of happiness in a world battered by the angry seas of human thoughtlessness. He is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com.

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.

The Myth of American Exceptionalism

Source: The Myth of American Exceptionalism

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by Melvin Goodman

July 27, 2017

Photo by August Kelm | CC BY 2.0

Like too many nations, the United States likes to think of itself as a chosen nation and a chosen people.  Presidential inauguration statements are typically an exercise in proclaiming American exceptionalism, and this mentality has far too much influence in the United States.  It’s particularly regrettable when individuals who should no better indulge the kind of hubris and triumphalism associated with American exceptionalism.

An excellent example of our exceptionalism appeared in Sunday’s Washington Post in the form of an op-ed by Tom Malinowski, the former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor in the Obama administration.  In a fatuous display of ignorance, Malinowski lambasted Russian President Vladimir Putin for stating that the United States frequently meddles in the politics and elections of other countries.  Malinowski argued that it is Russia that interferes in democratic elections, such as the U.S. presidential race in 2016, but that the United States consistently “promotes democracy in other countries.”

One of the reasons why the United States has so little credibility in making the case against Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election is the sordid record of the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency in conducting regime change and even political assassination to influence political conditions around the world.  In 1953, the United States and Great Britain conspired to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran; the following year, the Eisenhower administration backed a coup in Guatemala that led to the introduction of Central America’s most brutal regime in history.  Similarly, Eisenhower’s willingness to pursue the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo led to the installation of the worst tyrant in the history of Africa, Sese Seku Mobutu.

The Bay of Pigs is the “poster child” for American operational failure, and the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General put the blame squarely on what it described as “arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence” within the CIA.  Ten years later, however, another American administration and the CIA tried to prevent the election of Salvador Allende, a leftist, as president of Chile.  After Allende’s election, the CIA moved to subvert his government.  CIA director Richard Helms was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for lying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the operation in Chile.  But it was national security adviser Henry Kissinger who ordered the operation and explained that he couldn’t “see why the United States should stand by and let Chile go communist merely due to the stupidity of its own people.”

The revelation of assassination plots in Cuba, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam finally led to a ban on CIA political assassination in the mid-1970s.  Nevertheless, when Libyan leader Muammar Qadafi was killed, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton boasted that “we came, we saw, he died.”  In an incredible turn of events, the United States invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, although it was a CIA-sponsored coup against Colonel Abdul Kassem that led to the emergence of Saddam Hussein in the first place.

Vladimir Putin is certainly aware of CIA intervention of behalf of the Solidarity movement in Poland to destabilize the communist government there in the early 1980s; to bolster the regime of former president Eduard Shevardnadze in the Republic of Georgia in the 1990s; and more recently to undermine the regime of former president Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine.

Putin’s intervention in Syria in 2015 was designed in part to make sure that the U.S. history of regime change didn’t included another chapter in the Middle East.

Before former U.S. officials such as Tom Malinowski decide to lambaste Putin for cynicism and treachery, it would be a good idea to become familiar with U.S. crimes and calumny. Forty years ago, former senator Frank Church said the United States “must never adopt the tactics of the enemy. Each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong; our inner strength, the strength that makes us free, is lessened.” Malinowski should ponder William Faulkner’s admonition about the land of his birth: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

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More articles by:Melvin Goodman

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. His latest book is A Whistleblower at the CIA. (City Lights Publi

‘Don’t get shot by police’ is goal of new advice in Arizona driver’s manual

Record shows that victims of police shootings during traffic stops are more likely to be black or Hispanic, lawmaker says.

Source: ‘Don’t get shot by police’ is goal of new advice in Arizona driver’s manual | Local news | tucson.com

tucson.com

By Howard Fischer

Capitol Media Services

Jul 24, 2017

Dashcam footage showed Minnesota officer Jeronimo Yanez fatally shooting motorist Philando Castile in 2016.

 PHOENIX — If the new language in Arizona’s driver’s license manual sounds like something written by Black Lives Matter, there’s a good reason for it.

The provisions tell motorists what to do if they’re pulled over by a police officer. They also provide specific warnings about what not to do, like reaching around in the vehicle or getting out.

The goal is pretty simple, said state Rep. Reginald Bolding, a Laveen Democrat who helped write the section.

It’s designed to keep drivers from getting shot by police.

Bolding, who is black, said the record shows that victims of police shootings during traffic stops are more likely to be black or Hispanic.

“When you look at what’s taken place across the country, you have seen a majority of individuals who are people of color that have had higher incidence of interactions with law-enforcement officers, particularly in shootings,” he said. “Hopefully we can get to a place where that’s not the reality.”

It was one such shooting of a black man — the 2016 killing of Philando Castile by a Minnesota police officer — that prompted Bolding to seek a rewrite of Arizona’s driving manual.

Officer Jeronimo Yanez pulled Castile over because a brake light was out. Castile told the officer he had a firearm on him, to which the officer said, “Don’t reach for it then.” Castile said he wasn’t pulling it out, but the officer fired seven rapid shots into the vehicle, striking Castile five times.

The incident was captured on the dash camera of the patrol car. Prosecutors charged the officer with one count of second-degree manslaughter and two counts of intentional discharge of a firearm that endangers safety. Yanez, who testified he feared for his life, was acquitted earlier this month.

In the wake of that incident, Bolding said he reached out to eight different police departments, asking them what motorists should do to avoid becoming victims.

“I got eight different recommendations,” he said.

Continue:

‘Don’t get shot by police’ is goal of new advice in Arizona driver’s manual | Local news | tucson.com

 

Judge grants absolute discharge for marijuana dispensary operators

Give it up ye pathetic wankers! All you prosecutors and politicians behind this are a disgrace to Canada.  (The coppers had no choice but to enforce these laws). What part of Canadians want marijuana legalized don’t you troglodytes understand? All you are doing is inflicting unnecessary pain and wasting moneys that could be better used. Pathetic wankers.

This case is important as it sets a precedent. And what did the judiciary do ye pathetic wankers (Crown and politicians behind this)? It ignored your feeble argument and gave an absolute discharge, which in law is the equivalent of fuck you Crown. 

“The rule of law protects us from chaos and anarchy. I have yet to hear about any anarchy created by medicinal dispensaries,” he said.”

Source: Judge grants absolute discharge for marijuana dispensary operators | TheRecord.com

http://www.therecord.com

by Liz Monteiro

Jul 21, 2017

KITCHENER — A provincial court judge granted an absolute discharge to a young Kitchener couple who were running an illegal marijuana dispensary in Waterloo.

Justice Colin Westman said Nour and Shady Louka committed “an offence of compassion” when they operated a medical marijuana dispensary in uptown Waterloo and sold pot to adults with medical marijuana licences.

Westman described the couple as “activists in favour of their fellow human beings” and running a marijuana dispensary was “essentially civil disobedience.”

Westman agreed the couple broke the law and a finding of guilt was issued, but the pair will not have a criminal record.

“You are not going to be compromised in my court, not for circumstances like this,” Westman said in his judgment Friday.

Nour Louka, 30, owned and operated the Waterloo Dispensary, which sold marijuana out of a second-floor business on King Street. Her husband, Shady Louka, 32, was a part-time, temporary employee.

The Loukas opened their dispensary in April 2015 and four months later they were busted by Waterloo Regional Police. Both pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking.

Shady Louka also pleaded guilty to careless storage of a 9 mm Glock handgun in their home. That charge will be dealt with at a later date.

Shady Louka was arrested with more than $10,000 cash in the trunk of his car. Another $4,400 in Canadian money and $1,829 in U.S. cash was found at their house, plus a money counter.

The Crown was seeking convictions and $10,000 fines.

 Defence lawyer Sean Safa, representing Shady Louka, said the judge was fair to the accused and ruled that running the dispensary was an act of compassion.

“They were helping other people,” he said after the judgment. “The community wasn’t harmed here.”

Safa said it was the first time an absolute discharge had been issued in a case like this in the region and could be precedent-setting for other jurisdictions.

Court heard the couple started the business after a serious car crash in 2015. Both suffered from chronic pain because of their injuries. Shady has been unable to work.

Westman described the couple as intelligent, happily married and not needing rehabilitation because of the offense.

Westman said the pair started the business for others who were suffering in pain like them but couldn’t access marijuana.

“They are proud Canadians who did not want to be associated with criminality,” Westman said.

Continue:

Judge grants absolute discharge for marijuana dispensary operators | TheRecord.com

Nation “Too Broke” for Universal Healthcare to Spend $406 Billion More on F-35

Source: Nation “Too Broke” for Universal Healthcare to Spend $406 Billion More on F-35 | Common Dreams

http://www.commondreams.org

by Jon Queally, staff writer

July 1o, 2017

There is always another $27 billion lying around, it seems, when Lockheed Martin needs more money for expensive weapons system

Whereas some argue, for example, that single-payer healthcare is impossible, those same voices remain “pretty quiet on the F-35 being a money pit.” (Photo: Forsvarsdepartementet/flickr/cc)

The nation’s most expensive weapons program isn’t done showing U.S. taxpayers how much it will ultimately cost them, with Bloomberg reporting Monday that the F-35 fighter jet budget is now predicted to jump by a cool $27 billion.

“Think about [F-35’s] $405 billion price tag when a family member dies of a preventable disease. Get angry.”

Though the estimated future cost of the program had previously hovered at a mind-boggling $379 billion, an updated draft that could be submitted to Congress as early as today will reportedly exceed $406 billion—a nearly 7 percent increase.

The new cost increases may come as a hit to President Donald Trump, who has bragged about his ability to get weapons manufacturers to offer the Pentagon “better deals.”

Rob Garver, national correspondent for the Fiscal Times, made the point this way:

Others simply pointed out how ridiculous it is that a weapons program so fraught with failures is allowed to receive such outlandish funding when lawmakers—mostly Republicans, but also many Democrats—continue to argue that the nation is “too broke” to increase spending on social programs that improve education or healthcare.