News Items

Foreign Government Lobbying is an Abomination and Should Be Eradicated Immediately – Part 1

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If you don’t think that the endgame to all of this lunacy is a world where every America-critical movement from Black Lives Matter to Our Revolution to the Green Party is ultimately swept up in the collusion narrative along with Donald Trump and his alt-right minions, you haven’t been paying attention.

That’s because #Russiagate, from the start, was framed as an indictment not just of one potentially traitorous Trump, but all alternative politics in general. The story has evolved to seem less like a single focused investigation and more like the broad institutional response to a spate of shocking election results, targeting the beliefs of discontented Americans across the political spectrum.

– Matt Taibbi in RollingStone: The New Blacklist

If we lived in a somewhat sane civilization, the all encompassing mass media obsession with the intel agency narrative that Russian meddling in the 2016 election (and apparently every other non-establishment American political movement) represents a serious threat to democracy, journalists and thought leaders might take a step back and look at the overall nefarious influence of foreign money throughout our incredibly corrupt society. But since we don’t live in a sane civilization, we’ll just continue to scapegoat Russia for everything while letting predatory homegrown oligarchs and their political couriers off the hook. After all, that seems to be the point.

I for one will not allow this nonsense to proceed without strenuous objection. It’s ridiculous to the point of comical that we’re turning a Russian troll farm spending $100,000 on clownish Facebook ads (like the one below) into a national security issue, while the Trump and Clinton campaigns spent a combined $81 million on Facebook ads. Moreover, 56% of the so-called sophisticated Russian ads were run after the election was over. We’re being told with a straight face that a Russian troll farm helped swing the U.S. election by spending a grand total of $44,000 on ridiculous Facebook memes.

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What’s Going Down in China is Very Dangerous – Part 2

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One of the more concerning ramifications of China’s recent turn toward a more totalitarian stance at home is what it means for the geopolitical environment in the years ahead. Several people asked in the comment section of Part 1 why I care about what’s going on in China when we have so many serious problems in the U.S. The reason is because a major shift in the polices of the second largest economy in the world, populated with over a billion people and run by leadership intent on establishing a far more dominant position on the world scale militarily and politically, will affect everyone.

Government propaganda is one of the most insidious and dangerous things that regularly occurs within human society, and it’s been pervasive in essentially all civilizations to-date. The media’s always a key ally in the dissemination of propaganda, something much of the American public has finally come to understand. The election of Donald Trump despite the U.S media’s unanimous support of Hillary Clinton was the real wakeup call, and has led to incessant calls for platform monopolies like Google and Facebook to censor speech that questions the dominant intelligence agency narratives. There’s nothing more terrifying to an entrenched power structure than a loss of the narrative, and the election of Trump proved to them that they lost it. The American establishment isn’t really afraid of Trump, it’s far more concerned that his election signified a loss of narrative control.

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What’s Going Down in China is Very Dangerous – Part 1

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I’m sure all of you are aware of the dramatic power play pulled off over the weekend by China’s Communist Party to eliminate term limits for both the president and vice president. Prior to the move, Chinese leaders have stuck to two five-year terms since the presidency of Jiang Zemin (1993-2003), but that’s about to change as wannabe emperor Xi Jinping positions himself as indefinite ruler of the increasingly totalitarian superstate.

While the weekend announcement was illuminating enough, I found the panicked reactions by Chinese authorities in the immediate aftermath far more telling. The country’s propagandists took censorship to such an embarrassing level in attempts to portray the decision as widely popular amongst the masses, it merely served to betray that opposite might be true.

China Digital Times compiled a fascinating list of words and terms banned from being posted or searched on Weibo. Here’s just a sample of some I found particularly interesting.

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New York Times Writer Calls for Financial Firms to Block Gun Sales

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What Sorkin is suggesting is more of the same, although perhaps with worse consequences. If banks take action where policymakers do not or cannot, they are essentially putting themselves above the law. And if banks start playing that role, where does it end?

What if, for example, banks and credit card companies decided to stop processing payments for any retail purchase of cigarettes? After all, cigarettes are demonstrably bad for all consumers, and secondhand smoke can harm innocent people. Should banks step in to help protect society at large?

Or what if banks decided to stop processing payments for abortion clinics because they believed the practice was immoral? Is it fair for financial institutions to make abortion effectively illegal? What if President Trump called on financial firms to cut off access to environmental groups he believed were delaying projects that could bring jobs to local economies? Maybe banks should freeze Colin Kaepernick’s checking account until he stops kneeling during the national anthem?

Many of these examples are extreme, but you get my point. Just because banks can be used to have a dramatic impact on our society doesn’t mean they should be.

– From the American Banker piece: Call for Bank Crackdown on Gun Sales Is Deeply Misguided

Even in today’s world replete with plutocrat public relations masquerading as journalism, it’s rare to encounter an article simultaneously pandering, authoritarian, childish and dumb. Nevertheless, I found one, and it was unsurprisingly published in The New York Times.

The title of the piece more or less says it all, How Banks Could Control Gun Sales if Washington Won’t, but let’s go ahead and examine some of the author’s suggestions in greater detail.

For instance:

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The Real Reason Establishment Frauds Hate Trump and Obsess About Russia

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PVE, then, is first and foremost a narrative device: a tool used, largely unconsciously, to inject fresh legitimacy into a war on terror that by 2008 had fallen into disrepute. More specifically, PVE appears to dampen the queasiness felt at pursuing a course of action that quite obviously conflicts with Western liberal values, wrapping hard-edged counterterrorism in gentle language. In that sense, it renovates a long-held tradition.

Indeed, the roots of PVE and the broader war on terror date back to a centuries-old tendency among most societies—Western and non-Western alike—to forge their identities in an almost perpetual state of conflict, aiming to control resources or counter rivals. Such war footing demands a positive, legitimating narrative—an understanding that we fight to reclaim, defend, pacify, stabilise, illuminate and liberate. Rarely do eradication and predation announce themselves unabashedly. Rather, virtually all forms of conquest and colonisation hinge on the notion of an enemy to defeat and, alongside it, a population begging for deliverance…

Today, it is difficult to pin down even the healthy pretense of moral standards in Western foreign policy. Barack Obama, his motto of restraint notwithstanding, presided over not only the vast expansion of borderless warfare via killer drones, but also the redeployment of all-out aerial campaigns that have destroyed entire cities in Syria and Iraq. In the meantime, America and its allies have lied shamelessly about civilian casualties, thus denying victims even meager compensation; slammed shut their borders to refugees, and been complicit in the latter’s forced return to warzones; and broadcast almost satirically poisonous, jingoistic narratives regarding the “enemy.” In other words, Western societies have not only ceased to exert meaningful pressure on abusive regimes abroad—they have also, increasingly, emulated some of these regimes’ worst practices.

– From: The West’s War on Itself

The political space I inhabit isn’t very popular because it fails to make anyone particularly happy. Although I’m stridently against the U.S. status quo and its predatory and corrupt paradigm, I do not embrace Donald Trump’s vision. At the same time, I won’t allow my distaste for him to propel me into the duplicitous and toxic arms of a dishonest resistance movement manufactured and led by the corporate media, intelligence agencies and hack politicians.

There are all sorts of important critiques of the Trump administration that aren’t seeing the light of day because “the resistance” insists on diverting all our collective energy to Russiagate. While the hordes of people buying into this nonsense are being ruthlessly manipulated, the manipulators know exactly what they’e doing.

Blaming Russia for all the nation’s problems serves several key purposes for various defenders of the status quo. For discredited neocons and neoliberals who never met a failed war based on lies they didn’t support, it provides an opportunity to rehabilitate their torched reputations by masquerading as fierce patriots against the latest existential enemy. Similarly, for those who lived in denial about who Obama really was for eight years, latching on to the Russia narrative allows them to reassure themselves that everything really was fine before Trump and Russia came along and ruined the party.

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Insanity Fatigue

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Oligarchs, though they speak of deconstructing the administrative state, actually increase deficits and the size and power of law enforcement and the military to protect their global business interests and ensure domestic social control. The parts of the state that serve the common good wither in the name of deregulation and austerity. The parts that promote the oligarchs’ power expand in the name of national security, economic growth and law and order.

– Chris Hedges, The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs

If you’ve been checking in with this site in recent days, you may have wondered if I was on vacation. I’m not. Rather, I’ve been suffering from a bit of sluggishness and writers block, and it wasn’t until I took some time to think about why earlier this morning that I was able to determine the cause of my affliction. The best way to describe what I’ve been dealing with in recent days is insanity fatigue.

It’s not as if there’s been a lack of news or things to talk about. There’s plenty. The problem is I’ve once again become exhausted and overwhelmed by the superficial stupidity and narcissism of our national political dialogue. I first expressed this sentiment about a year ago in the piece, Lost in the Political Wilderness, and the feeling came back in spades in recent days.

It’s been a year since I wrote that post and not much has changed. The political conversation, if you can call it that, remains largely polarized between two groups primarily focused on whether they support Trump or swear he’s Putin’s devilish puppet. One side insists he’s going to Make America Great Again, while the other thinks everything was perfectly fine before his election, and all will be well as long as we can rid ourselves of his presence. Meanwhile, the oligarch class continues to loot and pillage at will.

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Donald Trump’s Superficial Patriotism at the Twilight of U.S. Empire

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Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

– Juvenal

Despite the title, I don’t want this post to be all about Donald Trump. The truth of the matter is all politicians love superficial patriotism. It’s why they all claim to care deeply about the troops, yet allow veterans to wait weeks or months to see a doctor after sending them to fight pointless imperial overseas wars based on fabrications. All these disingenuous politicians are total frauds, but they tend sell the same destructive policies in different ways. As such, it’s important to understand how they manipulate and divide us.

First and foremost, standing for the National Anthem, saluting the flag or cheering a military parade is not “supporting the troops.” If you think such trivial and superficial acts represent anything beyond lazy surface level virtue signaling you’re a huge part of the problem. Your thoughtlessness and fake patriotism is exactly why our young kids are being sent off to die and murder other young kids halfway across the world to pad the coffers of plutocrats and the egos of empire obsessed sociopaths in D.C. Not only are such acts not patriotism, your phony gestures help grease the wheels of global death and destruction.

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Chairman of the CFTC Made Surprisingly Thoughtful Comments About Bitcoin Today

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It’s not often you’ll hear me say positive things about a U.S. government regulator, but I nearly fell out of my seat when I heard what the Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Christopher Giancarlo, said at today’s hearing with the Congressional Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

In case you missed it, here’s his opening statement:

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‘Release the Memo’ Is a Political Stunt, but I Want It Out Anyway

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Before I get started, I want to put my cards on the table. I don’t trust Republicans like Devin Nunes for a moment. He doesn’t care about the civil liberties of Americans, and it’s become clear to me the whole “release the memo” thing is largely a political stunt. I’m not claiming there isn’t anything important in there, but rather that they don’t have the best interests of the U.S. citizenry in mind.  Nevertheless, I’m very much in favor of it being released for a variety of reasons.

First, I want to offer a little advice. It’s always tempting to immediately take a side on whatever issue happens to be dominating the news cycle at any given moment, but this is typically a poor decision. One thing I’ve learned over the years is you should always wait at least a few days before coming to any sort of conclusion on most big stories being aggressively hyped by partisan pundits in the media.

From my seat, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are being dishonest about the memo, which makes perfect sense because the vast majority of politicians in Washington D.C. are corrupt liars who pretend to hate each other while consistently passing bipartisan legislation to abuse the American public. If that’s not obvious to you by now, I don’t know what it’ll take.

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Mapping The Swamp – A Study of the Administrative State

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Back in December, fiscal transparency organization Open the Books published a massive study of federal government spending which contains a wealth of information and some very disturbing statistics.

Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and Founder of the organization, highlighted some of their key findings in an important Forbes article.

Key excerpts are republished below:

Today’s federal bureaucrats are paid $1.1 million a minute, $66 million an hour, and over $524 million a day – and that’s just the cash compensation cost. Taxpayers also pay for lucrative perks like weeks of paid time-off, performance bonuses and padded retirement pensions.

Using our interactive mapping tool, quickly review the 2 million federal employee salaries and bonuses by ZIP code across America. Just click a pin and scroll down to see the results rendered in the chart beneath the map. See your local piece of the swamp: how much are the federal employees in your backyard earning? Which agency employs them, and what is their job title?

Here are a few of our key findings:

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