News Items

Video of the Day – Ron Paul Speaks to Julian Assange

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Last month, Donald’s Trump choice to head the CIA, Mike Pompeo, dedicated much of his first speech toward a hysterical and disturbing rant against Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange (I covered this in detail in the post: The American Empire Under Donald Trump Has Become Increasingly Desperate, Dangerous & Insecure).

Although the entire episode was an absurd and embarrassing spectacle, what really caught people off guard was Pompeo’s assertion that Assange cannot claim a First Amendment defense within the U.S. legal system because he is not an American citizen. Although the fact that the head of the CIA would harbor such an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution isn’t surprising, it’s alarming nonetheless. The following excellent interview addresses this claim and expounds on many other important topics.

Enjoy.

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The Real Barack Obama is Finally Exposed to Everyone

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There is no reason for the Democratic Party to exist.
– Jimmy Dore

I’ve been surprised by the number of people who lived in total denial about who Barack Obama actually was throughout his entire administration, suddenly pointing out the ethical and demoralizing implications of his recent decision to accept $400,000 for a speech to Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

For myself and countless others, the writing was on the wall from virtually day one when he appointed Wall Street sycophants Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to senior positions within his administration. Then came the policies, which were even more generous to Wall Street than any cynic could imagine. I posted countless pieces on Obama’s cronyism throughout his Presidency, constantly referring to him as an oligarch-coddling fraud, which his record unquestionably confirms.

It wasn’t just Wall Street either. Although his protection and empowerment of that industry was particularly shameless, he coddled and elevated corporatism and cronyism generally throughout his eight years. As I observed in the 2015 post, Cronyism Pays – Eric “Too Big to Jail” Holder Triumphantly Returns to His Prior Corporate Law Firm Job:

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U.S. and UK Both Drop in Latest ‘World Press Freedom Index’ Rankings

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Reporters without Borders just published its annual World Press Freedom Index rankings, and the results for both the U.S. and UK are not impressive. Both countries declined two spots from last year, with the UK at 41, and the greatest and most free nation on earth, America, down to 43.

Here’s The Guardian reporting on the UK’s decline:

Journalists in the UK are less free to hold power to account than those working in South Africa, Chile or Lithuania, according to an index of press freedom around the world.

Laws permitting generalised surveillance, as well as a proposal for a new espionage act that could criminalise journalists and whistleblowers as spies, were cited by Reporters Without Borders as it knocked the UK down two places from last year, to 40th out of 180 countries in its World Press Freedom Index.

In the past five years, the UK has slipped 12 places down the index. Rebecca Vincent, RSF’s UK bureau director, said this year’s ranking would have been worse were it not for a general decline in press freedom around the world, making journalists in Britain comparatively better off than those in countries such as Turkey and Syria.

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Iraq War Architect, Paul Wolfowitz, is Becoming Optimistic on Trump

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So we tried that thing called regime change in Iraq, and failed miserably. We tried it in Libya, and now there are now active slave markets in the place. But we satisfied the objective of “removing a dictator”. By the exact same reasoning, a doctor would inject a patient with “moderate” cancer cells “to improve his cholesterol numbers”, and claim victory after the patient is dead, particularly if the post-mortem shows remarkable cholesterol readings. But we know that doctors don’t do that, or, don’t do it in such a crude format, and that there is a clear reason for it. Doctors usually have some skin in the game.

And when a blow up happens, they invoke uncertainty, something called a Black Swan, after some book by a (very) stubborn fellow, not realizing that one should not mess with a system if the results are fraught with uncertainty, or, more generally, avoid engaging in an action if you have no idea of the outcomes. Imagine people with similar mental handicaps, who don’t understand asymmetry, piloting planes. Incompetent pilots, those who cannot learn from experience, or don’t mind taking risks they don’t understand, may kill many, but they will themselves end up at the bottom of, say, the Atlantic, and cease to represent a threat to others and mankind.

So we end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating modernist slogans stripped of all depth. In general, when you hear someone invoking abstract modernistic notions, you can assume that they got some education (but not enough, or in the wrong discipline) and too little accountability.

From Nassim Taleb’s recent post: On Interventionistas and their Mental Defects

I spent the last 50 minutes listening to an interview of neocon Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz, a truly unfortunate experience which felt like a tomahawk missile attack against my cerebrum. Regrettably, we still live in a world where you have to listen to the musings of such war criminals, as they continue to have considerable influence in certain circles of American power, and quite possibly within the Trump administration itself.

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Meet Emmanuel Macron – The Consummate Banker Puppet, Bizarre Elitist Creation

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The last thing I ever wanted to do was write about France’s likely next president, Emmanuel Macron, but here we are. This post was inspired by a very telling Financial Times article sent to me by a reader, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Most Americans paying attention to global affairs have some conception of his opponent, nationalist firebrand Marine Le Pen, but Macron is likely to be very much a black box. I hope today’s post changes that.

Any knowledge you may have about Macron probably comes from mainstream news outlets, which have been uniformly gushing about the socialist-centrist Rothschild protege.

As an example, just take a look at the following title from a January article published at Foreign Policy.

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Does America Have a Technology Platform Monopoly Problem?

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Last week, I wrote a post titled, What Can an Overhyped Silicon Valley Juice Company Tell Us About the U.S. Economy. Here’s how I ended the piece:

Finally, and perhaps most concerning, look at a couple of the entities that helped fund Juciero to the tune of $120 million: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Alphabet Inc. (the parent company of Google). These are large, sophisticated players and they bought into this thing. From what I can tell, they were mesmerized by the fact the machine looked like and iPhone, connects to the internet, and was headquartered in San Francisco. Either that, or they knew the whole thing was a marketing scheme designed to trick morons into spending an enormous sum of money for the right to buy expensive juice packets that could probably be emptied just fine using a $20 machine.

Neither of the above conclusions is comforting. Either high-profile VCs were tricked by this ridiculous product, or they willingly went along with a what appears to be a sleazy scheme. Unfortunately, the bottom-line here seems to be that Silicon Valley is rapidly running out of ideas. That, or perhaps something far more perverse and systemic might be going on.

Tomorrow’s post will attempt to address the above question, but for now it’s safe to say that this Juicero episode bodes very poorly for the one area of the U.S. that had heretofore been one of the last remaining hubs of innovation.

If this is the state of Silicon Valley, the American economy is in even worse shape than I thought.

Today’s post should be seen as the promised followup to the piece above, and will focus on the related question increasingly pondered by a wide variety of people as relates to America’s modern day technology platform monopolies, specifically: Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Matt Stoller is a policy thinker currently focused on the concepts of monopoly and competition, something which he believes is an under appreciated factor in the current sluggish, rent-seeking orientated U.S. economy. I share many of his concerns and find his work extremely useful and timely.

In that regard, I want to highlight some excerpts from a recent post he wrote on the topic, titled, The Evidence is Piling Up — Silicon Valley is Being Destroyed.

From Business Insider:

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The American Empire Under Donald Trump Has Become Increasingly Desperate, Dangerous & Insecure

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My current working hypothesis is that the U.S. is a late-stage empire about to enter a more serious and dangerous period of collapse. In case you missed it, I outlined my broad brush view in the very popular recent post, Prepare for Impact – This is the Beginning of the End for U.S. Empire. Here’s a brief excerpt:

I believe last night’s strike represents the beginning of the end for U.S. empire. Although the U.S. has been declining domestically for this entire century, America has still been calling all the shots on the international front. This makes sense in late-stage empire, as the focus of the fat and happy “elite” becomes singularly obsessed with domination and power, while the situation back home festers and rots.

Trump won on an “America first” platform that promised to emphasize the well-being of American citizens over geopolitical adventurism. We now know for certain he’s been manipulated into the imperial mindset, and his recklessness will merely accelerate U.S. decline on the world stage, and in turn, back home.

When I came across reports yesterday that the U.S. Justice Department is trying to figure out a way to prosecute the world’s most courageous and effective news publisher, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, I immediately saw it to be further evidence of the incredible insecurity and desperation of the American establishment.

The CIA is particularly enraged at Assange as a result of last month’s initial Vault 7 release. Rather than apologize for allowing zero day exploits in large tech companies to remain open and therefore vulnerable to hacking from anyone with the skills to do so (see: CIA Hacking Tools Allow for an Unaccountable Intelligence Agency Dictatorship), CIA director Mike Pompeo decided to respond with an unhinged nervous breakdown during a recent speech to the Saudi funded Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Here are a few excerpts from his deranged, incoherent, and unconstitutional remarks courtesy of the CIA:

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What Can an Overhyped Silicon Valley Juice Company Tell Us About the U.S. Economy

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The primary driver behind my decision to walk away from a lucrative Wall Street career was my coming to terms with the fact that our financial system is largely a rent-seeking scheme designed to enrich parasitical, unethical behavior at the expense of the nation as a whole. As soon as I recognized this, I could no longer feel proud of my work and certainly couldn’t justify my large paycheck for being a compliant, highly productive cog in this machine.

In the nearly decade since, I’ve come to understand that the financial system, while absolutely core to the propagation of the declining U.S. empire, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our problems. Not only is the financial system broken; the American political system is broken, healthcare is broken, policing is broken, intelligence agencies are broken, rules for engagement in warfare are broken. Pretty much everything is captured and broken, systematically designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

In contrast, one of the few things that seemed to be working, at least relatively well, was the technology sector. Silicon Valley is the poster child for this industry, and while the “innovative” nature of products coming out that celebrated tech hub have been declining for years, it still seemed vibrant and dynamic compared to the rest of the U.S. economy. I’m increasingly starting to wonder whether much of that was just an elaborate illusion.

Most of you probably haven’t heard of the company Juicero, but you should be paying attention to it.

What follows are choice excerpts from a recent Bloomberg article, Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze:

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More War – U.S. ‘Boots on the Ground’ Headed to Somalia

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The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.

– George Orwell, 1984

Although the U.S. already has special forces operating in Somalia (of course), Mr. “America First,” Donald Trump, figured it’d be a swell idea to add some more.

The Independent reports:

U.S. regular troops are returning to Somalia for the first time since 1993 when 18 special forces died fighting militias in Mogadishu, a battle dramatised in the film Black Hawk Down

A US military spokeswoman yesterday(SAT) said several dozen soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division would train and equip Somalia’s army to better fight al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda linked extremist group.

She offered no further details.

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The Trump Administration’s Syria Gas Attack Narrative Continues to Unravel

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Pretty much every official statement emanating from the U.S. government these days is a deception, fabrication, or outright lie. I understand that this is a hard thing for a U.S. citizen to admit, but as James Baldwin so accurately stated:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

So let’s go ahead and face the facts. Governments lie. Governments have always lied. Extremely corrupt, imperial governments overseeing societies in deep economic and cultural decline lie even more. This isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s what obviously happens when you combine tremendous power with human nature.

Although I’ve been questioning the Trump administration’s fairytale narrative about the recent Syria gas attack from day one, I don’t have the expertise to sufficiently examine the evidence and put some meat on the bones. In contrast, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at MIT, Theodore A. Postol does, and he’s published a series of reports over the past week calling out what he believes is a deliberate deception by members of the Trump team.

As Yahoo reported:

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