‘There Are No Moderate Rebels’ – Tulsi Gabbard Destroys the Deep State’s Syria Narrative

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Tulsi Gabbard has continued to impress ever since she came on the national scene last year with her courageous and very public support for Bernie Sanders in the rigged Democratic primary.

Most recently, she continued to demonstrate her knowledge of geopolitics and willingness to stand up to America’s unelected government, aka the Deep State, in a recent interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Note, the clip is about a month old, but important to watch if you haven’t. 

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Must Read of the Day – Energy, Money, and the Destruction of Equilibrium

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I see many economists and entrepreneurs as opponents even if that is not the intention of the economists. Academic economists are most needed by those who have power and want to keep it. Multinational corporations, banks, and governments. The last thing those entities want is disruption, their principal and interlocking goals are stabilization and optimization of the existing order. They have an incentive to “optimize” the current system and extract rents.

I would argue that hyper focus on optimization is the enemy of creative beings such as ourselves and makes us very unhappy and leads to blow-back from human beings. And rightfully so. But that blow back can get ugly.

– From the piece: Energy, Money, and the Destruction of Equilibrium

Earlier today, a reader named Brett Maverick Musser, who works in Operations at Airbitz sent me an article he published on Medium, which I thought was excellent.

With permission, I have reposted the entire piece below:

Energy flux is the driver of change in our galaxy. Nothing happens without a flow of energy. And what is energy? Energy is the ability to perform useful work. And in physics, what is useful work? Work is useful if it overcomes inertia or resistance in order to generate motion.

Energy not money makes the world go round. Energy is destiny.

A Failed Paradigm and Fake Prices

To paraphrase Paul Romer author of the scathing paper “The Trouble With Macro”, economics has had a ‘considerable observed regression since the 1970s’ yet hides behind mathematical elegance and authority that the public at large is not sophisticated enough to rebuke nor powerful enough to eschew. Never ending zero interest rate policies, negative interest rates and other forms of financial alchemy perpetuated by central banks all over the world are intellectual concessions that the existing paradigm of economic thought and authority is just flat wrong. No matter what the economic leaders say, these actions prove to me and many others that their mental models of the world have failed. The status quo has ventured into the shallow sea of un-reason just to keep the global socio-economic system afloat. They’re able to hide behind authority and academic vocabulary which if put in plain terms for the lay person could be described as theft, ponzi, tyrannical and moronic.

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Protest is Increasingly Becoming Criminalized in America

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The historical space available for Americans to engage in public protest has been declining for many years, and is a topic I covered on several occasions during the Obama administration. For instance in the post,  The War on Free Speech – U.S. Department of Justice Subpoenas Reason.com Over Comment Section, I noted:

Readers of Liberty Blitzkrieg will be well aware of the gradual erosion by the state of the civil liberties of the American public. Such attacks are typically sufficiently under the radar, so that the average citizen has no idea what is happening until it’s too late. I have written about such calculated assaults on many occasions, but the holy grail target of the status quo is the First Amendment of the Constitution, which enshrines a right to the freedom of religion, speech, the press, and the right to peaceably assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances. 

Many aspects of the First Amendment have been neutered in practice. For example, the right to assemble peacefully and effectively is often prevented in practice by the need to secure permits and other hindrances (see “free speech cages” and “protest zones”) . Meanwhile, on college campuses, where activism is historically most vibrant, many schools have embraced the Orwellian concept of “free speech zones” in order to prevent free speech.

Unfortunately, it appears this trend is about to get a lot worse following the DAPL protests and increased activism we’ve seen since Trump’s election. As The Hill reports:

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Liberty Links 2/25/17

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If you appreciate our work, and want to contribute to genuine, independent media, consider visiting our Support Page. Must Reads Michael Hudson: Why Failing to Solve Personal Debt and Polarization Will Usher in a New Dark Age (Lengthy, but fascinating article, Naked Capitalism) The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook (The Intercept) What JPMorgan and Citigroup Have in … Read more

Trump’s Policies Are Authoritarian, Not Populist

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I’m not new to writing about political issues. I spent pretty much the entirety of the Obama administration pointing out his disdain of transparency, his refusal to challenge the rich and powerful even after they inflicted significant harm on the American public, and his dangerous expansion of militarism across the globe. Over the course of those eight years, I solidified and refined my views on a wide variety of issues that are important to me. Though I’ve been extremely troubled by the people Trump has decided to surround himself with, and the fact he’s essentially outsourced his economic policy to the boys at vampire squid Goldman Sachs, I’ve held off on my harshest criticism while waiting to see where he comes down on a wider variety of issues. At this point, I think I’ve seen enough.

Trump and his spokespeople recently have made their opinions known on a variety of issues on which I hold strong beliefs. The three I will focus on today are: 1) Civil Asset Forfeiture. 2) Private Prisons. 3) Legalization of Recreational Marijuana. On all three of these issues, Trump has taken an authoritarian, unethical and quite unpopular position. Rather than challenge the oligarchs who’ve run this country into the ground, he’s appointed them to be his top advisors. Now he wants to make life increasingly unfree and miserable for average Americans. Not a very populist agenda.

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Video of the Day – Jimmy Dore Dismantles Tom Brokaw and the Corporate Media in 12 Minutes

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Very entertaining video. Make sure to watch the whole thing.

If you enjoyed this post, and want to contribute to genuine, independent media, consider visiting our Support Page.

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The Road to Hell Was Paved With Obama Cronyism

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President Donald Trump’s naïve (or willfully blind) notion that Wall Street will work better at raising capital if it is unleashed from strident Federal regulation is unhinged from the facts on the ground. Those facts, as illustrated above, are that the Boards of two of the largest banks in the U.S. are utterly spineless when it comes to holding their CEOs and employees accountable in the face of a tsunami of crimes.

– From the Wall Street on Parade article: What JPMorgan and Citigroup Have in Common When It Comes to Crime

Opposition to Trump is extremely important, particularly when it comes to someone like me who sees his Wall Street love affair and disregard for civil liberties as serious threats to the nation. That said, it is absolutely imperative to see Trump as a symptom of a sick and broken system as opposed to the root cause of anything. The corporate media and legions of mourning Hillary cultists continue to present the Trump threat in extraordinarily simplistic and unhelpful terms. They act as if he’s the head of some evil snake, and that disposing of him as an individual will get America back on track. This couldn’t be more wrong.

I spent most of the Obama years warning about the dangers of his policies. I didn’t do this for kicks, or because I thought he would try to stay in power forever, but because I knew his monumental cronyism would only pave the way for major problems down the road. Well the backlash to Obama came quick, and we the people won’t do the country any good if we focus on Trump the man, as opposed to the entirely corrupt, billionaire/special interest-controlled cesspool of a society we inhabit. We need to focus on Trump’s policies, not Trump the man.

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How the Corporate Media Continues to Use the Russia Scapegoat as a Distraction from Status Quo Failure

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Countless observers have noted the obvious fact that the corporate media’s all-encompassing obsession with anti-Russia hysteria is partly just a shameless campaign to prevent change within the Democratic Party by blaming its loss on an outside enemy as opposed to the oligarch-coddling, corrupt disaster it nominated. While true, the strategy is far bigger than that. So called Western elites have failed miserably across the globe, and the only way to retain their undeserved positions of power (many should be in jail), is to create and promote a mindless, highly emotional, non-domenstic distraction. Enter Russia.

Ken Wilber perfectly articulated the failure of our discredited status quo in his recent ebook, which I quoted extensively from in my recent post, How a Breakdown in Liberal Ideology Created Trump – Part 1. He noted:

The problem very quickly became what Integral Metatheory calls a “legitimation crisis,” which it defines as a mismatch between Lower-Left (or cultural) beliefs and the Lower-Right systems (or actual background realities, such as the techno-economic base). The cultural belief was that everybody is created equal, that all people have a perfect and equal right to full personal empowerment, that nobody is intrinsically superior to others (beliefs that flourished with green). Yet the overwhelming reality was increasingly one of a stark and rapidly growing unequality—in terms of income and overall worth, property ownership, employment opportunity, healthcare access, life satisfaction issues. The culture was constantly telling us one thing, and the realities of society were consistently failing to deliver it—the culture was lying. This was a deep and serious legitimation crisis— a culture that is lying to its members simply cannot move forward for long. And if a culture has “no truth,” it has no idea when it’s lying—and thus it naturally lies as many times as it accidentally tells the truth, and hence faster than you can say “deconstruction,” it’s in the midst of a legitimation crisis.

Naturally, those in power can never admit their historically epic failure on all fronts, so they’re increasingly rallying around the Russia meme in order to distract the public and hopefully hang on to their plum positions within society.

In that regard, Robert Parry has written an excellent article published in Consortium News titled, NYT’s Fake News about Fake News. Here are some key excerpts:

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U.S. Colleges Continue to Get Ripped Off by Hedge Funds

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This post covers a theme I’ve discussed on many occasions over the past several years, namely how “alternative asset managers” are making enormous sums of money by ripping off public pensions as well as college endowments. Send this to anyone who naively tells you we live in a meritocracy. The sad truth of the matter, is we operate within an economy which incentivizes all of the worst types of behavior, where people can earn millions of dollars a year while failing.

Don’t believe me? Read the following excerpts from a recently published piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, How Colleges Lost Billions to Hedge Funds in 2016:

A peculiar thing happened in 2016. While the Dow Jones industrial average grew by more than 13 percent, college endowments saw nearly a negative 2 percent rate of return. The worst endowment performance took place at the nation’s wealthiest private institutions. Harvard’s endowment alone shrank by $2 billion, a 5-percent decline. Out of the 40 biggest endowments, 35 declined in value.

What’s going on here?

A key factor is poor performance by the hedge-fund gurus that institutions have increasingly paid to manage their investment portfolios. Colleges have reason to be angry because hedge funds charge high fees even when they lose money. Colleges and universities spent an estimated $2.5 billion on fees for hedge funds in 2015 alone. They paid an estimated 60 cents to hedge funds for every dollar in investment returns between 2009 and 2015, according to a report by the Strong Economy for All Coalition. These fees helped each of the top five U.S. hedge-fund managers earn more than $1 billion in 2015 despite mixed performance.

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The Billionaire-Owned, Corporate Media is as Worthless as Ever

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I think the U.S. citizenry is being afflicted by a sort of mass insanity at the moment. There are no good outcomes if this continues. As a result, I feel compelled to provide a voice for those of us lost in the political wilderness. We must persevere and not be manipulated into the obvious and nefarious divide and conquer tactics being aggressively unleashed across the societal spectrum. If we lose our grounding and our fortitude, who will be left to speak for those of us who simply don’t fit into any of the currently ascendant political ideologies?

From the post: Lost in the Political Wilderness

Rather than focus its journalistic energy on chronicling the economic insecurity plaguing so many of our fellow Americans, the billionaire-owned corporate media appears entirely obsessed with chattering endlessly about Russia conspiracy theories and domestic coup plots. Instead of looking in the mirror and admitting how its countless errors and propaganda pushing led to multiple humanitarian disasters over the last couple of decades, the oligarch-owned mainstream media insists upon a narrative that Trump the individual is at the root of our problems, as opposed to an entrenched executive branch with excessive power. This is because the mainstream media isn’t actually concerned about our cancerous, systemic metastasizing statism, it merely doesn’t want Trump in charge of it. I, on the other hand, want to dismantle that unconstitutional state entirely and transfer power to the American people where it belongs — self-government. Does anyone actually think for a second the media would be this adversarial if Hillary won?

This weekend’s article by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times represents a sort of coming out party for the billionaire-owned, corporate media. More than anything else I’ve seen, it perfectly demonstrates how completely disconnected and worthless billionaire-owned media truly is. It’s the height of absurdity that these media organizations, owned by billionaires or giant corporate conglomerates, are playing the victim in all this when they’ve been the world’s primary abuser for the entire 21st century.

You can be a staunch defender of the free press and the 1st Amendment, and at the same time point out that the billionaire-owned media has failed us. This is my position, and Trump’s election hasn’t changed that. The handful of corporations and billionaires who control the mainstream press do not = “the press.” They (and the deep state) are currently trying to convince the public that they’re the only ones standing between you and fascism. This is complete stupidity, and if we fall for it, we will get what we deserve.

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