Engineering Martial Law in the US

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

There has been a lot of talk about “coups” the past two years, not just in the U.S. but around the globe. As I have noted in recent articles, failed coups in particular have been very popular as a way for certain governments to solidify power and assert dictatorial changes. In some cases, there has been no concrete evidence presented that the coup ever really existed.

In Turkey in 2016, Recep Erdogan claimed “success” in stopping a potential coup involving numerous government employees and military personnel which included active combat around major government sites such as the presidential palace and Turkish parliament. Erdogan argues that the coup was a part of the “Gulen Movement,” a political opposition movement surrounding Fethullah Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan who has resided in the U.S. since 1999 and had a falling out with the Turkish president in 2013 after criticisms of Erdogen’s corruption.

So far, evidence of actual “combat” with coup forces is thin to the point that it is questionable whether a coup ever really happened. Most reports cite fire from tanks and planes, as well as nearly 300 people killed. Video footage shows random firing, some explosions in civilian areas as well as Turkish citizens mobbing aimlessly around tanks. With tens of thousands of government employees imprisoned or dismissed after the event, the amount of kinetic conflict seems rather limited and tame.

Two years later, Turkey has yet to produce any hard proof of a coup, let alone proof that the “Gulen Movement” was involved. In July of this year, Erdogan submitted “evidence” which he says is grounds for extradition of Fethullah Gulen. This evidence appears to revolve around alleged visits made to Gulen’s FETO compound in Pennsylvania by accused members of the coup, but does not provide any clarification on evidence of the coup itself.

The chaotic event lasted mere hours and smells of a “wag the dog” scenario; a completely fabricated “Reichstag Fire” attack which could have been easily scripted by Erdogan himself as an excuse to assert totalitarian controls in Turkey and to remove pesky political critics and people within government and the military that held contrary views to Erdogan. Erdogan pointed a finger at the Gulen Movement before the smoke even cleared on the coup attempt, which suggests a predetermined scapegoat. Erdogan controls the Turkish media (including access to social media) and the judiciary, which means he also controls the narrative leaving the country in terms of facts and evidence.

The only things that the coup seems to have accomplished are cementing Erdogen as the center of political dominance for years to come, and causing considerable division between the U.S. and Turkey, threatening the breakup of NATO. Turkey is now moving toward bilateral agreements with Russia, which may have been the plan all along.

As I have noted in my articles on the false East/West paradigm, financial elites are getting ready to initiate what they call the “global economic reset,” and this reset will shift economic power (and thus geopolitical power) away from the U.S. and parts of the West into the hands of Eastern nations as well as institutions like the IMF and BIS. Turkey is a key component of geostrategic dominance for the U.S. and NATO. The nation’s realignment to the East will change the center of power for the globe.

A “failed coup” or what some analysts might call a “self-coup” also took place this year for another key U.S. ally — Saudi Arabia. Rumors of attempts on the life of Saudi Prince Mohammad Bin Salman as well as calls for a coup by exiled crown prince Khaled bin Farhan culminated in the arrest and detainment of numerous Saudi officials by MBS. No evidence of an actual coup against the Prince has been presented so far.

Salman proceeded in the wake of the crisis to consolidate his power as the successor to the king, as well as extorting billions of dollars from his captives in exchange for their freedom. He has retained the most vital positions in the Saudi government for himself, including the positions of Defense Minister, Interior Minister and head of the National Guard. His only obstacle now is to wait for the king to officially abdicate or die.

MBS is best known in the economic world for his “Vision For 2030,” which is designed to end Saudi reliance on oil revenues, but also appears to seek alternatives to the petrodollar in terms of trade as the nation strengthens ties to China and Russia. If Saudi Arabia breaks from the U.S. dollar as the primary means of oil trade, this will inevitably kill the dollar’s world reserve currency status. The Vision For 2030 also appears to align exactly with the “sustainable development goals” of the IMF’s 2030 Agenda.

Salman is supported in his 2030 endeavor through his Public Investment Fund (which in ironic globalist style is not actually a public fund). The fund is heavily financed by major globalist donors including The Carlyle Group, Goldman Sachs, as well as Blackstone and Blackrock. This support for a decoupled Saudi Arabia by international corporations suggests yet again that the globalist goal is to kill the dollar’s world reserve status, rather than protect it.

As the “failed coup” narrative continues to escalate, I have noticed a disturbing trend in America which matches certain elements of the coups in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. That is to say, it is possible that another “failed coup” is pending for the U.S, opening the path for Donald Trump to initiate martial law-like measures.

I warned of this possibility months before the election in my article ‘Clinton Versus Trump And The Co-Option Of The Liberty Movement‘, which partially explains the reasons why I predicted that Trump would win and ascend to the Oval Office.

At that time I was certain that the globalists would find great use for a Trump presidency, more so in fact than a Clinton presidency. However, I was not sure whether Trump was controlled opposition or simply a useful scapegoat for the economic crisis that globalists are clearly engineering. Now it appears that he is both.

Trump’s history was already suspicious. He was bailed out of his considerable debts surrounding his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City in the early 1990s by Rothschild banking agent Wilber Ross, which saved him from embarrassment and possibly saved his entire fortune. This alone was not necessarily enough to deny Trump the benefit of the doubt in my view.

Many businessmen end up dealing with elitist controlled banks at some point in their careers. But when Trump entered office and proceeded to load his cabinet with ghouls from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, the Council on Foreign Relations and give Wilber Ross the position of Commerce Secretary, it became obvious that Trump is in fact a puppet for the banks.

Some liberty movement activists ignore this reality and attempt to argue around the facts of Trump’s associations. “What about all the media opposition to Trump? Doesn’t this indicate he’s not controlled?” they say. I say, not really.

If one examines the history of fake coups, there is ALWAYS an element of orchestrated division, sometimes between the globalists and their own puppets. This is called 4th Generation warfare, in which almost all divisions are an illusion and the real target is the public psyche.

This is not to say that leftist opposition to Trump and conservatives is not real. It absolutely is. The left has gone off the ideological deep end into an abyss of rabid frothing insanity, but the overall picture is not as simple as “Left vs. Right.” Instead, we need to look at the situation more like a chess board, and above that chess board looms the globalists, attempting to control all the necessary pieces on BOTH sides. Every provocation by leftists is designed to elicit a predictable response from conservatives to the point that we become whatever the globalists want us to become.

Meaning the globalists are hoping that through the exploitation of useful idiots on the left they can infuriate conservatives to the point of abandoning their constitutional principles. For example, the use of social media censorship of conservative views is clearly designed to lure conservatives into turning to big government to force companies like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube into the role of “public utilities.” In other words, conservatives would be abandoning their principles on private property by nationalizing social media much like communists would do.

Of course, a simpler solution would be for conservatives to launch their OWN social media platforms and offer a better alternative. We should be reducing government influence in these sectors and ending protections for corporations, not increasing the influence of government even further. But this solution is never offered within the narrative, thus, the public discourse is completely controlled.

As this is taking place, conservatives are growing more sensitive to the notion of a leftist coup, from silencing of conservative voices to an impeachment of Trump based on fraudulent ideas of “Russian collusion.”

To be clear, the extreme left has no regard for individual liberties or constitutional law. They use the Constitution when it suits them, then try to tear it down when it doesn’t suit them. However, the far-left is also a paper tiger; it is not a true threat to conservative values because its membership marginal, it is weak, immature and irrational. Their only power resides in their influence within the mainstream media, but with the MSM fading in the face of the alternative media, their social influence is limited. It is perhaps enough to organize a “coup,” but it would inevitably be a failed coup.

Therefore it is not leftists that present the greatest threat to individual liberty, but the globalist influenced Trump administration. A failed coup on the part of the left could be used as a rationale for incremental and unconstitutional “safeguards.” And conservatives may be fooled into supporting these measures as the threat is overblown.

I have always said that the only people that can destroy conservative principles are conservatives. Conservatives diminish their own principles every time they abandon their conscience and become exactly like the monsters they hope to defeat. And make no mistake, the globalists are well aware of this strategy.

Carroll Quigley, a pro-globalist professor and the author of Tragedy and Hope, a book published decades ago which outlined the plan for a one world economic and political system, is quoted in his address ‘Dissent: Do We Need It‘:

“They say, “The Congress is corrupt.” I ask them, “What do you know about the Congress? Do you know your own Congressman’s name?” Usually they don’t. It’s almost a reflex with them, like seeing a fascist pig in a policeman. To them, all Congressmen are crooks. I tell them they must spend a lot of time learning the American political system and how it functions, and then work within the system. But most of them just won’t buy that. They insist the system is totally corrupt. I insist that the system, the establishment, whatever you call it, is so balanced by diverse forces that very slight pressures can produce perceptible results.

For example, I’ve talked about the lower middle class as the backbone of fascism in the future. I think this may happen. The party members of the Nazi Party in Germany were consistently lower middle class. I think that the right-wing movements in this country are pretty generally in this group.”

Is a “failed coup” being staged in order to influence conservatives to become the very “fascists” the left accuses us of being? The continuing narrative certainly suggests that this is the game plan.

US teen – Reading Books Drops from 60 percent to 16

Researchers are sounding the alarm over US teenagers’ mental health and abilities, as a new study finds they’ve almost completely dropped books for social media. In the 1970s, 60 percent read books and in 2016 – just 16 percent.

One in three US teens fell short of picking up a book or magazine of their own choice in 2016, while spending an average of six hours online, texting and on social media. Smartphones trump not only books, but TV or going to the movies, according to the research, published in the American Journal of Psychology.

The study collected data from the University of Michigan-run survey project ‘Monitoring the Future’, which has been surveying high school students’ trends since 1975. The study also found a staggering increase in social media use among 12-year-olds. In 2008, 52 percent of them said they visited social media sites such as Facebook or Instagram “almost every day.” In 2016, it increased to 82 percent.

Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor and one of the authors of the study, raised concerns over the impact of digital technology on kids.

“Reading long-form texts like books and magazine articles is really important for understanding complex ideas and for developing critical thinking skills,” Twenge said, according the Sydney Morning Herald.

Twenge also wrote a book, the title of which amply explains her feelings on the matter, ‘iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood – and What That Means for the Rest of Us.’

But it’s not just about kids’ mental abilities, but their mental health as well. Research published last year in the American Journal of Epidemiology collected data from 5,208 individuals and found that Facebook has an overall negative influence on users’ mental health.

However Andrew Przybylski, from the Oxford Internet Institute, who took part in a study published last year in the British Medical Journal, cautioned: “People see that unhappiness in teenagers and adolescents is going up, by some measures, and that the use of technologies is going up. The inference that’s drawn is that A is a result of B.”

He did, however, note in an episode of the BBC’s ‘Trust Me I’m a Doctor’ that while spending up to two hours on smartphones every week day and four on weekend days may have a generally positive impact on one’s wellbeing, more than that could be harmful.

The Trump administration and Iran

Like President Reagan, President Trump seems to be anti-Iranian. But perhaps this is only in appearance. While the former drew up a secret alliance with Imam Khomeiny, the latter may be dealing with ex-President Ahmadinejad in the same way. This is Thierry Meyssan’s heterodox theory.
JPEG - 69.5 kbMike Pompeo announces the creation of the « Iran Action Group »

On 16 August 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the creation of the « Iran Action Group » tasked with coordinating US policies after their withdrawal from the 5+1 nuclear agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) [1].

This announcement was made as President Trump decided to postpone sine die the implementation of his plan for the Middle East (The Deal of the Century). But nothing can change in Palestine without the support of Iran.

Let’s remember, by the way, that Barack Obama’s JCPoA Treaty was not conceived only to guarantee that Iran is not making nuclear weapons. This was only the pretext. Its true aim was to prevent Iran from having access to high-level scientists and developing state of the art techniques [2]. Incidentally, the agreement forced Iran to close several faculties.

According to the US Democratic opposition, the Trump administration is reprising the neo-conservative policy of régime change, as indicated by the choice of the date of the announcement – the 65th anniversary of the Anglo -US coup d’etat against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. However, although « Operation Ajax » of 1953 did indeed inspire the neo-conservatives, it occurred years before their movement was born, and has no connection with them. Besides which, the neo-conservatives served not only the Republican Party, but also the Democrats.

During his electoral campaign and for his first few days in the White House, Donald Trump continually stigmatised the globalist thinking of the neo-conservatives, and swore that the United States would no longer seek to change the régimes of foreign countries by force. As for the Secretary of State, he claimed that the coincidence of dates was simply fortuitous.

The people known as « neo-conservatives » form a group of Trotskyist intellectuals (thus opposed to the concept of nation-states), militants of Social Democrats USA, which worked with the CIA and MI6 to fight the Soviet Union. They were associated with Ronald Reagan’s power structure, then followed through all the US political mutations, remaining in power under Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama. Today they conserve the control of a common Intelligence agency connected with the « Five Eyes » (Australia, Canada, New-Zealand, UK, USA) – the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) [3]. Partisans of the « World Revolution », they have popularised the idea of « democratising » régimes by way of « Colour Revolutions », or directly by means of war.

In 2006, they created the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group within the Bush Junior administration. It was directed by Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of Vice-President Dick Cheney. At first, they were housed with the Secretariat of Defense, then transferred to the Vice-President’s offices. The group had five sections.
- The transfer of weapons to Iran and Syria from Bahreïn, the United Arab Emirates and Oman ;
- The support for the Trotskyists and their allies, in Iran (the Peoples’ Mujaheddin) and Syria (Riad al-Türk, Georges Sabra and Michel Kilo) ;
- The surveillance of Iranian and Syrian bank networks ;
- The infiltration of pro-Iranian and pro-Syrian groups in the « Greater Middle East » ;
- The penetration of the medias in the region in order to broadcast US propaganda.

In 2007, this group was officially disbanded. In reality, it was absorbed by an even more secret structure tasked with the strategy for global democracy (Global Democracy Strategy). This unit, under the command of neo-conservative Elliott Abrams (who was involved in the « Iran-Contras affair »), and James Jeffrey, spread this sort of work to other regions of the world.

It is this Group which supervised the planning for the war against Syria.

When the new President had a long meeting with Abrams at the White House, the US Press, which is violently anti-Trump, presented him as the first possible Secretary of State for the Trump administration. It obviously came to nothing.

However, the fact that ambassador James Jeffrey has just been nominated as a special representative for Syria makes the accusation that the Trump administration was attempting to resuscitate this strategy more credible.

JPEG - 31.3 kbSpecial representative for Syria, James Jeffrey, takes the oath before Mike Pompeo

Jeffrey is a career « diplomat ». He organised the application of the Dayton agreements in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was on post in Kuwaït during the Iraqi invasion. In 2004, under the orders of John Negroponte, he supervised the transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority (which was a private company [4]) to the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi government. Then he joined Condolleezza Rice’s cabinet in Washington, and participated in the Coalition Provisional Authority. He was one of the theorists for US military redeployment in Iraq (the Surge), implemented by General Petraeus. He was also the assistant of National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley during the war in Georgia, then Bush Junior’s ambassador in Turkey and Obama’s ambassador in Iraq.

If we look a little closer, we may note that his entire career since the collapse of the USSR has been centred around Iran, but not necessarily in opposition to it. For example, during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iran fought alongside Saudi Arabia under the orders of the Pentagon. On the other hand, in Iraq, Jeffrey opposed the influence of Teheran. But when Georgia attacked South Ossetia and Abkhasia, he did not defend President Saakachvili, since he knew that he had rented two airports to Israël to facilitate an attack on Iran.

JPEG - 51.7 kbBrian Hook

Mike Pompeo named Brian Hook as the head of the Iran Action Group. He is an interventionist who was the assistant for Condoleezza Rice, working with international organisations. Until now, he was tasked with elaborating strategies for the State Department.

According to Pompeo, the aim of this new group is not to change the régime, but to force Iran to change its politics. This strategy appears while the Islamic Republic is navigating a major economic and political crisis. While the clergy (doubly represented by the Cheikh President and by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution) is clinging to power, there are demonstrations against it all over the country. Contrary to the image we were presented in the West, Ayatollah Khomeiny’s revolution was not clerical, but anti-imperialist. The protests can therefore either lead to a change of the régime, or to the continuation of the Khomeinist Revolution, but without the clergy. It is this second option which is represented by ex-President Ahmadinejad (today under house arrest) and his ex-Vice-Ppresident Baghaie (imprisoned for 15 years and held incommunicado).

On 21 May last, before the Heritage Foundation, Mike Pompeo presented his 12 objectives for Iran [5]. At first glance, this seemed to be a long list of demands which are impossible to satisfy. However, when we look closer, points 1 to 3 relative to the nuclear question do not go as far as the JCPoA. Point 4 concerning ballistic missiles is unacceptable. Points 5 to 12 aim to convince Iran to give up the idea of exporting its revolution by force of arms.

On 15 August, in other words, on the day before Pompeo’s announcement, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recognised that he had been in error when he allowed Cheikh Hassan Rohani’s team to negotiate the JCPoA agreement with the Obama administration [6]. Note that the Supreme Leader had authorised these negotiations before Rohani’s election, and that he – and the eviction of Ahmadinejad’s movement – had been part of the preparatory discussions.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who makes a distinction between the policies of Presidents Obama and Trump, wrote to the new President just after his election [7]. He demonstrated that he shared Donald Trump’s analysis of the Obama-Clinton global system and its painful consequences for the rest of the world and also for the citizens of the United States.

When the demonstrations began in December 2017, the Rohani government accused Ahmadinejad of being responsible. In March 2018, the ex-President clinched his break with the Supreme Leader by revealing that Khamenei’s office had misappropriated 80 billion rials belonging to humanitarian and religious foundations [8]. Two weeks before Pompeo’s announcement, although he was under house arrest, he called for the resignation of President Rohani [9].

Everything therefore points to the idea that although the Obama administration supported Rohani, Trump’s administration supports Ahmadinejad’s party. Just as when President Carter and his advisor Brzeziński launched «Operation Eagle Claw » against the Revolution, while President Reagan supported Imam Khomeiny (October Surprise).

In other words, the White House could be quite comfortable with a return to power of Ahmadinejad’s party, on the condition that Iran agrees to export its Revolution only by the debate of ideas.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation
Pete Kimberley

The author lived in Iran for six months. He advised President Ahmadinejad during his speech before the UNO in 2010.

[1] “Remarks on the Creation of the Iran Action Group”, by Michael R. Pompeo; “Briefing on the Creation of the Iran Action Group”, by Brian Hooks, State Department, August 16, 2018.
[
2] “Who’s afraid of Iran’s civilian nuclear programme?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 27 July 2010.
[
3] “The networks of “democratic” interference”, “NED, the Legal Window of the CIA”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Оdnako (Russia) , Voltaire Network, 22 January 2004 and 16 August 2016.
[
4] “Who Rules Iraq?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 13 May 2004.
[
5] “Mike Pompeo at The Heritage Foundation”, by Mike Pompeo, Voltaire Network, 21 May 2018.
[
6] “The Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution Rectifies his Views”, Voltaire Network, 18 August 2018.
[
7] “Letter by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Donald Trump”, by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Voltaire Network, 26 February 2017.
[
8] “Ahmadinejad accuses Ayatollah Khamenei of embezzling funds”, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 24 March 2018.
[
9] “Iran: Former President Ahmadineyad exhorts President Rohani to resign”, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 10 August 2018.

Facebook Kills “Inauthentic” Foreign News Accounts – U.S. Propaganda Stays Alive

The creation of digital content led to the re-establishment of claqueurs:

By 1830 the claque had become an institution. The manager of a theatre or opera house was able to send an order for any number of claqueurs. These were usually under a chef de claque (leader of applause), who judged where the efforts of the claqueurs were needed and to initiate the demonstration of approval. This could take several forms. There would be commissaires (“officers/commissioner”) who learned the piece by heart and called the attention of their neighbors to its good points between the acts. Rieurs (laughers) laughed loudly at the jokes. Pleureurs (criers), generally women, feigned tears, by holding their handkerchiefs to their eyes. Chatouilleurs (ticklers) kept the audience in a good humor, while bisseurs (encore-ers) simply clapped and cried “Bis! Bis!” to request encores.

Today anyone can create content and rent or buy virtual claqueurs in from of “likes” on Facebook or “followers” on Twitter to increase its distribution.

An alternative is to create artificial social media personas who then promote ones content. That is what the Internet Research Agency, the Russian “troll factory” from St. Petersburg, did. The fake personas it established on Facebookpromoted IRA created clickbait content like puppy picture pages that was then marketed to sell advertisements.

The profit orientated social media giants do not like such third party promotions. They prefer that people pay THEM to promote their content. Selling advertisements is Facebook’s business. Promotional accounts on its own platform are competition.

The anti-Russian mania in U.S. politics gives social media companies a welcome excuse to clamp down on promotional schemes for sites like Liberty Front Press by claiming that these are disinformation campaigns run by the U.S. enemy of the day.

Yesterday Facebook announced that it deleted a number of user accounts for “inauthentic behavior”:

We’ve removed 652 Pages, groups and accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran and targeted people across multiple internet services in the Middle East, Latin America, UK and US. FireEye, a cybersecurity firm, gave us a tip in July about “Liberty Front Press,” a network of Facebook Pages as well as accounts on other online services.

We are able to link this network to Iranian state media through publicly available website registration information, as well as the use of related IP addresses and Facebook Pages sharing the same admins. For example, one part of the network, “Quest 4 Truth,” claims to be an independent Iranian media organization, but is in fact linked to Press TV, an English-language news network affiliated with Iranian state media.

Cont. reading: Facebook Kills “Inauthentic” Foreign News Accounts – U.S. Propaganda Stays Alive

Beijing’s Bid for Global Power in the Age of Trump

“America First” Versus China’s Strategy of the Four Continents
ALFRED MCCOY

shutterstock_654683479

As the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency and sixth of Xi Jinping’s draws to a close, the world seems to be witnessing one of those epochal clashes that can change the contours of global power. Just as conflicts between American President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George produced a failed peace after World War I, competition between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and American President Harry Truman sparked the Cold War, and the rivalry between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, so the empowered presidents of the United States and China are now pursuing bold, intensely personal visions of new global orders that could potentially reshape the trajectory of the twenty-first century — or bring it all down.

The countries, like their leaders, are a study in contrasts. China is an ascending superpower, riding a wave of rapid economic expansion with a burgeoning industrial and technological infrastructure, a growing share of world trade, and surging self-confidence. The United States is a declining hegemon, with a crumbling infrastructure, a failing educational system, a shrinking slice of the global economy, and a deeply polarized, divided citizenry. After a lifetime as the ultimate political insider, Xi Jinping became China’s president in 2013, bringing with him a bold internationalist vision for the economic integration of Asia, Africa, and Europe through monumental investment in infrastructure that could ultimately expand and extend the current global economy. After a short political apprenticeship as a conspiracy advocate, Donald Trump took office in 2017 as an ardent America First nationalist determined to disrupt or even dismantle an American-built-and-dominated international order he disdained for supposedly constraining his country’s strength.

Although they started this century on generally amicable terms, China and the U.S. have, in recent years, moved toward military competition and open economic conflict. When China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, Washington was confident that Beijing would play by the established rules and become a compliant member of an American-led international community. There was almost no awareness of what might happen when a fifth of humanity joined the world system as an economic equal for the first time in five centuries.

By the time Xi Jinping became China’s seventh president, a decade of rapid economic growth averaging 11% annually and currency reserves surging toward an unprecedented $4 trillion had created the economic potential for a rapid, radical shift in the global balance of power. After just a few months in office, Xi began tapping those vast reserves to launch a bold geopolitical gambit, a genuine challenge to U.S. dominion over Eurasia and the world beyond. Aglow in its status as the world’s sole superpower after “winning” the Cold War, Washington had difficulty at first even grasping such newly developing global realities and was slow to react.

China’s bid couldn’t have been more fortuitous in its timing. After nearly 70 years as the globe’s hegemon, Washington’s dominance over the world economy had begun to wither and its once-superior work force to lose its competitive edge. By 2016, in fact, the dislocations brought on by the economic globalization that had gone with American dominion sparked a revolt of the dispossessed in democracies worldwide and in the American heartland, bringing the self-proclaimed “populist” Donald Trump to power. Determined to check his country’s decline, he has adopted an aggressive and divisive foreign policy that has roiled long-established alliances in both Asia and Europe and is undoubtedly giving that decline new impetus.

Within months of Trump’s entry into the Oval Office, the world was already witnessing a sharp rivalry between Xi’s advocacy of a new form of global collaboration and Trump’s version of economic nationalism. In the process, humanity seems to be entering a rare historical moment when national leadership and global circumstances have coincided to create an opening for a major shift in the nature of the world order.

Trump’s Disruptive Foreign Policy

Despite their constant criticism of Donald Trump’s leadership, few among Washington’s corps of foreign policy experts have grasped his full impact on the historic foundations of American global power. The world order that Washington built after World War II rested upon what I’ve called a “delicate duality”: an American imperium of raw military and economic power married to a community of sovereign nations, equal under the rule of law and governed through international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization.

On the realpolitik side of that duality, Washington constructed a four-tier apparatus — military, diplomatic, economic, and clandestine — to advance a global dominion of unprecedented wealth and power. This apparatus rested on hundreds of military bases in Europe and Asia that made the U.S. the first power in history to dominate (if not control) the Eurasian continent.

Even after the Cold War ended, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that Washington would remain the world’s preeminent power only as long as it maintained its geopolitical dominion over Eurasia. In the decade before Trump’s election, there were, however, already signs that America’s hegemony was on a downward trajectory as its share of global economic power fell from 50% in 1950 to just 15% in 2017. Many financial forecasts now project that China will surpass the U.S. as the world’s number one economy by 2030, if not before.

In this era of decline, there has emerged from President Trump’s torrent of tweets and off-the-cuff remarks a surprisingly coherent and grim vision of America’s place in the present world order. Instead of reigning confidently over international organizations, multilateral alliances, and a globalized economy, Trump evidently sees America standing alone and beleaguered in an increasingly troubled world — exploited by self-aggrandizing allies, battered by unequal trade terms, threatened by tides of undocumented immigrants, and betrayed by self-serving elites too timid or compromised to defend the nation’s interests.

Instead of multilateral trade pacts like NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or even the WTO, Trump favors bilateral deals rewritten to the (supposed) advantage of the United States. In place of the usual democratic allies like Canada and Germany, he is trying to weave a web of personal ties to avowedly nationalist and autocratic leaders of a sort he clearly admires: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Adel Fatah el-Sisi in Egypt, and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

Instead of old alliances like NATO, Trump favors loose coalitions of like-minded countries. As he sees it, a resurgent America will carry the world along, while crushing terrorists and dealing in uniquely personal ways with rogue states like Iran and North Korea.

His version of a foreign policy has found its fullest statement in his administration’s December 2017 National Security Strategy. As he took office, the nation, it claimed, faced “an extraordinarily dangerous world, filled with a wide range of threats.” But in less than a year of his leadership, it insisted, “We have renewed our friendships in the Middle East… to help drive out terrorists and extremists… America’s allies are now contributing more to our common defense, strengthening even our strongest alliances.” Humankind will benefit from the president’s “beautiful vision” that “puts America First” and promotes “a balance of power that favors the United States.” The whole world will, in short, be “lifted by America’s renewal.”

Despite such grandiose claims, each of President Trump’s overseas trips has been a mission of destruction in terms of American global power. Each, seemingly by design, disrupted and possibly damaged alliances that have been the foundation for Washington’s global power since the 1950s. During the president’s first foreign trip in May 2017, he promptly voiced withering complaints about the supposed refusal of Washington’s European allies to pay their “fair share” of NATO’s military costs, leaving the U.S. stuck with the bill and, in a fashion unknown to American presidents, refused even to endorse the alliance’s core principle of collective defense. It was a position so extreme in terms of the global politics of the previous half-century that he was later forced to formally back down. (By then, however, he had registered his contempt for those allies in an unforgettable fashion.)

During a second, no-less-divisive NATO visit in July, he charged that Germany was “a captive of Russia” and pressed the allies to immediately double their share of defense spending to a staggering 4% of gross domestic product (a level even Washington, with its monumental Pentagon budget, hasn’t reached) — a demand they all ignored. Just days later, he again questioned the very idea of a common defense, remarking that if “tiny” NATO ally Montenegro decided to “get aggressive,” then “congratulations, you’re in World War III.”

Moving on to England, he promptly kneecapped close ally Theresa May, telling a British tabloid that the prime minister had bungled her country’s Brexit withdrawal from the European Union and “killed off any chance of a vital U.S. trade deal.” He then went on to Helsinki for a summit with Vladimir Putin, where he visibly abased himself before NATO’s nominal nemesis, completely enough that there were even brief, angry protests from leaders of his own party.

During Trump’s major Asia tour in November 2017, he addressed the Asian-Pacific Economic Council (APEC) in Vietnam, offering an extended “tirade” against multilateral trade agreements, particularly the WTO. To counter intolerable “trade abuses,” such as “product dumping, subsidized goods, currency manipulation, and predatory industrial policies,” he swore that he would always “put America first” and not let it “be taken advantage of anymore.” Having denounced a litany of trade violations that he termed nothing less than “economic aggression” against America, he invited everyone there to share his “Indo-Pacific dream” of the world as a “beautiful constellation” of “strong, sovereign, and independent nations,” each working like the United States to build “wealth and freedom.”

Responding to such a display of narrow economic nationalism from the globe’s leading power, Xi Jinping had a perfect opportunity to play the world statesman and he took it, calling upon APEC to support an economic order that is “more open, inclusive, and balanced.” He spoke of China’s future economic plans as an historic bid for “interconnected development to achieve common prosperity… on the Asian, European, and African continents.”

As China has lifted 60 million of its own people out of poverty in just a few years and was committed to its complete eradication by 2020, so he urged a more equitable world order “to bring the benefits of development to countries across the globe.” For its part, China, he assured his listeners, was ready to make “$2 trillion of outbound investment” — much of it for the development of Eurasia and Africa (in ways, of course, that would link that vast region more closely to China). In other words, he sounded like a twenty-first century Chinese version of a twentieth-century American president, while Donald Trump acted more like Argentina’s former presidente Juan Perón, minus the medals. As if to put another nail in the coffin of American global dominion, the remaining 11 Trans-Pacific trade pact partners, led by Japan and Canada, announced major progress in finalizing that agreement — without the United States.

In addition to undermining NATO, America’s Pacific alliances, long its historic fulcrum for the defense of North America and the dominance of Asia, are eroding, too. Even after 10 personal meetings and frequent phone calls between Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump during his first 18 months in office, the president’s America First trade policy has placed a “major strain” on Washington’s most crucial alliance in the region. First, he ignored Abe’s pleas and cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact and then, as if his message hadn’t been strong enough, he promptly imposed heavy tariffs on Japanese steel imports. Similarly, he’s denounced the Canadian prime minister as “dishonest” and mimicked Indian Prime Minister Modi’s accent, even as he made chummy with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and then claimed, inaccurately, that his country was “no longer a nuclear threat.”

It all adds up to a formula for further decline at a faster pace.

Beijing’s Grand Strategy

While Washington’s influence in Asia recedes, Beijing’s grows ever stronger. As China’s currency reserves climbed rapidly from $200 billion in 2001 to a peak of $4 trillion in 2014, President Xi launched a new initiative of historic import. In September 2013, speaking in Kazakhstan, the heart of Asia’s ancient Silk Road caravan route, he proclaimed a “one belt, one road initiative” aimed at economically integrating the enormous Eurasian land mass around Beijing’s leadership. Through “unimpeded trade” and infrastructure investment, he suggested, it would be possible to connect “the Pacific and the Baltic Sea” in a proposed “economic belt along the Silk Road,” a region “inhabited by close to 3 billion people.” It could become, he predicted, “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”

Within a year, Beijing had established a Chinese-dominated Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank with 56 member nations and an impressive $100 billion in capital, while launching its own $40 billion Silk Road Fund for private equity projects. When China convened what it called a “belt and road summit” of 28 world leaders in Beijing in May 2017, Xi could, with good reason, hail his initiative as the “project of the century.”

Although the U.S. media has often described the individual projects involved in his “one belt, one road” project as wasteful, sybaritic, exploitative, or even neo-colonial, its sheer scale and scope merits closer consideration. Beijing is expected to put a mind-boggling $1.3 trillion into the initiative by 2027, the largest investment in human history, more than 10 times the famed American Marshall Plan, the only comparable program, which spent a more modest $110 billion (when adjusted for inflation) to rebuild a ravaged Europe after World War II.

Beijing’s low-cost infrastructure loans for 70 countries from the Baltic to the Pacific are already funding construction of the Mediterranean’s busiest port at Piraeus, Greece, a major nuclear power plant in England, a $6 billion railroad through rugged Laos, and a $46 billion transport corridor across Pakistan. If successful, such infrastructure investments could help knit two dynamic continents, Europe and Asia — home to a full 70% percent of the world’s population and its resources — into a unified market without peer on the planet.

Underlying this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, the Chinese leadership seems to have a design for transcending the vast distances that have historically separated Asia from Europe. As a start, Beijing is building a comprehensive network of trans-continental gas and oil pipelines to import fuels from Siberia and Central Asia for its own population centers. When the system is complete, there will be an integrated inland energy grid (including Russia’s extensive network of pipelines) that will extend 6,000 miles across Eurasia, from the North Atlantic to the South China Sea. Next, Beijing is working to link Europe’s extensive rail network with its own expanded high-speed rail system via transcontinental lines through Central Asia, supplemented by spur lines running due south to Singapore and southwest through Pakistan.

Finally, to facilitate sea transport around the sprawling continent’s southern rim, China has already bought into or is in the process of building more than 30 major port facilities, stretching from the Straits of Malacca across the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and along Europe’s extended coastline. In January, to take advantage of Arctic waters opened by global warming, Beijing began planning for a “Polar Silk Road,” a scheme that fits well with ambitious Russian and Scandinavian projects to establish a shorter shipping route around the continent’s northern coast to Europe.

Though Eurasia is its prime focus, China is also pursuing economic expansion in Africa and Latin America to create what might be dubbed the strategy of the four continents. To tie Africa into its projected Eurasian network, Beijing already had doubled its annual trade there by 2015 to $222 billion, three times that of the United States, thanks to a massive infusion of capital expected to reach a trillion dollars by 2025. Much of it is financing the sort of commodities extraction that has already made the continent China’s second largest source of crude oil. Similarly, Beijing has investedheavily in Latin America, acquiring, for instance, control over 90% of Ecuador’s oil reserves. As a result, its commerce with that continent doubled in a decade, reaching $244 billion in 2017, topping U.S. trade with what once was known as its own “backyard.”

A Conflict with Consequences

This contest between Xi’s globalism and Trump’s nationalism has not been safely confined to an innocuous marketplace of ideas. Over the past four years, the two powers have engaged in an escalating military rivalry and a cutthroat commercial competition. Apart from a shadowy struggle for dominance in space and cyberspace, there has also been a visible, potentially volatile naval arms race to control the sea lanes surrounding Asia, specifically in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In a 2015 white paper, Beijing stated that “it is necessary for China to develop a modern maritime military force structure commensurate with its national security.” Backed by lethal land-based missiles, jet fighters, and a global satellite system, China has built just such a modernized fleet of 320 ships, including nuclear submarines and its first aircraft carriers.

Within two years, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson reportedthat China’s “growing and modernized fleet” was “shrinking” the traditional American advantage in the Pacific, and warned that “we must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency.” Under Trump’s latest $700-billion-plus defense budget, Washington has responded to this challenge with a crash program to build 46 new ships, which will raise its total to 326 by 2023. As China builds new naval bases bristling with armaments in the Arabian and South China seas, the U.S. Navy has begun conducting assertive “freedom-of-navigation” patrols near many of those same installations, heightening the potential for conflict.

It is in the commercial realm of trade and tariffs, however, where competition has segued into overt conflict. Acting on his belief that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” President Trump slapped heavy tariffs, targeted above all at China, on steel imports in March and, just a few weeks later, punished that country’s intellectual property theft by promising tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports. When those tariffs finally hit in July, China immediately retaliated against what it called “typical trade bullying” with similar tariffs on U.S. goods. The Financial Times warned that this “tit-for-tat” can escalate into a “full bore trade war… that will be very bad for the global economy.” As Trump threatened to tax $500 billion more in Chinese imports and issued confusing, even contradictory demands that made it unlikely Beijing could ever comply, observers became concerned that a long-lasting trade war could destabilize what the New York Times called the “mountain of debt” that sustains much of China’s economy. In Washington, the usually taciturn Federal Reserve chairman issued an uncommon warning that “trade tensions… could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global economy.”

China as Global Hegemon?

Although a withering of Washington’s global reach, abetted and possibly accelerated by the Trump presidency, is already underway, the shape of any future world order is still anything but clear. At present, China is the sole state with the obvious requisites for becoming the planet’s new hegemon. Its phenomenal economic rise, coupled with its expanding military and growing technological prowess, provide that country with the obvious fundamentals for superpower status.

Yet neither China nor any other state seems to have the full imperial complement of attributes to replace the United States as the dominant world leader. Apart from its rising economic and military clout, China, like its sometime ally Russia, has a self-referential culture, non-democratic political structures, and a developing legal system that could deny it some of the key instruments for global leadership.

In addition to the fundamentals of military and economic power, “every successful empire,” observes Cambridge University historian Joya Chatterji, “had to elaborate a universalist and inclusive discourse” to win support from the world’s subordinate states and their leaders. Successful imperial transitions driven by the hard power of guns and money also require the soft-power salve of cultural suasion for sustained and successful global dominion. Spain espoused Catholicism and Hispanism, the Ottomans Islam, the Soviets communism, France a cultural francophonie, and Britain an Anglophone culture. Indeed, during its century of global dominion from 1850 to 1940, Britain was the exemplar par excellence of such soft power, evincing an enticing cultural ethos of fair play and free markets that it propagated through the Anglican church, the English language and its literature, and the virtual invention of modern athletics (cricket, soccer, tennis, rugby, and rowing). Similarly, at the dawn of its global dominion, the United States courted allies worldwide through soft-power programs promoting democracy and development. These were made all the more palatable by the appeal of such things as Hollywood films, civic organizations like Rotary International, and popular sports like basketball and baseball.

China has nothing comparable. Its writing system has some 7,000 characters, not 26 letters. Its communist ideology and popular culture are remarkably, even avowedly, particularistic. And you don’t have to look far for another Asian power that attempted Pacific dominion without the salve of soft power. During Japan’s occupation of Southeast Asia in World War II, its troops went from being hailed as liberators to facing open revolt across the region after they failed to propagate their similarly particularistic culture.

As command-economy states for much of the past century, neither China nor Russia developed an independent judiciary or the autonomous rules-based order that undergirds the modern international system. From the foundation of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in 1899 through the formation of the International Court of Justice under the U.N.’s 1945 charter, the world’s nations have aspired to the resolution of conflicts via arbitration or litigation rather than armed conflict. More broadly, the modern globalized economy is held together by a web of conventions, treaties, patents, and contracts grounded in law.

From its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China gave primacy to the party and state, slowing the growth of an autonomous legal system and the rule of law. A test of its attitude toward this system of global governance came in 2016 when the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled unanimously that China’s claims to sovereignty in the South China Sea “are contrary to the Convention [on the Law of the Sea] and without lawful effect.” Beijing’s Foreign Ministry simply dismissed the adverse decision as “invalid” and without “binding force.” President Xi insistedChina’s “territorial sovereignty and maritime rights” were unchanged, while the state Xinhua news agency called the ruling “naturally null and void.” Although China might be well placed to supplant Washington’s economic and military power, its capacity to assume leadership via that other aspect of the delicate duality of global power, a network of international organizations grounded in the rule of law, is still open to question.

If Donald Trump’s vision of world disorder is a sign of the American future and if Beijing’s projected $2 trillion in infrastructure investments, history’s largest by far, succeed in unifying the commerce and transport of Asia, Africa, and Europe, then perhaps the currents of financial power and global leadership will indeed transcend all barriers and flow inexorably toward Beijing, as if by natural law. But if that bold initiative ultimately fails, then for the first time in five centuries the world may face an imperial transition without a clear successor as global hegemon. Moreover, it will do so on a planet where the “new normal” of climate change — the heating of the atmosphere and the oceans, the intensification of flood, drought, and fire, the rising seas that will devastate coastal cities, and the cascading damage to a densely populated world — could mean that the very idea of a global hegemon is fast becoming a thing of the past.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade , the now-classic book which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the recently published In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books).

The End of News Media in the West

Authored by Jake Johnson via Common Dreams,

During a closed-door and off-the-record meeting last week, top Facebook executive Campbell Brown reportedly warned news publishers that refusal to cooperate with the tech behemoth’s efforts to “revitalize journalism” will leave media outlets dying “like in a hospice.”

Reported first by The Australian under a headline which read Work With Facebook or Die: Zuckerberg,” the social media giant has insisted the comments were taken out of context, even as five individuals who attended the four-hour meeting corroborated what Brown had stated.

“Mark doesn’t care about publishers but is giving me a lot of leeway and concessions to make these changes,” Brown reportedly said, referring to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “We will help you revitalize journalism… in a few years the reverse looks like I’ll be holding hands with your dying business like in a hospice.”

As The Guardian reported on Monday, Facebook is “vehemently” denying the veracity of the comments as reported by The Australian, referring to its own transcript of the meeting. However, Facebook is refusing to release its transcript and tape of the gathering.

Brown’s warning about the dire prospects for news outlets that don’t get on board with a future in which corporate giants like Facebook are the arbiters of what is and isn’t trustworthy news comes as progressives are raising alarm that Facebook’s entrance into the world of journalism poses a major threat to non-corporate and left-wing news outlets.

As Common Dreams reported in July, progressives’ fears were partly confirmed after Facebook unveiled its first slate of news “segments” as part of its Facebook Watch initiative.

While Facebook claims its initiative is part of an effort to combat “misinformation,” its first series of segments were dominated by such corporate outlets as Fox News and CNN.

Reacting to Brown’s reported assertion that Zuckerberg “doesn’t care about publishers,” Judd Legum, who writes the Popular Information newsletter, argued, “Anyone who does care about news needs to understand Facebook as a fundamental threat.”

“In addition to disputed quote, there are also Facebook’s actions, which are fully consistent with the quote,” Legum added.

“We desperately need to develop alternative delivery mechanisms to Facebook.”

The End of Free Speech in the West

Authored by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,

Senate Democrats are circulating a proposal based upon their claim of Russian hacking that will completely takeover the internet and social media which has been leaked.

They are adopting the EU approach to silence political criticism. They claim it is necessary, just as the EU argued, that they must act to prevent Russian hackers and “restore” the people’s trust in our institutions, democracy, and the free press. They are proposing comprehensive GDPR-like data protection legislation following the EU.

They are calling it a proposal for “Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms,” and the draft was created by Sen. Mark Warner.

The entire regulation is based upon Russians and it claims they are deliberately spreading disinformation. To justify this act, they also point back to the old Soviet Union stating they attempted to spread “fake news” denigrating Martin Luther King. Despite the Democrats and their campaign to start World War III over Hillary’s emails, of which nobody denied were fake just hacked, their proposal is effectively to shut down anything they can call “hate speech” targeted at them, not Trump of course.

Warner’s paper suggests outlawing companies who fail to label bots and impose Draconian criminal penalties and huge fines.

Effectively, they want people to pay for everything. The Democrats want full disclosure regarding ANY online political speech. They even want the Federal Trade Commission to have unbelievable power and require all companies’ algorithms to be audited by the feds as if they even have qualified staff to conduct such audits. On top of that, they have proposed tech platforms above a certain size MUST turn over internal data and processes to “independent public interest researchers” so they can identify potential “public health/addiction effects, anticompetitive behavior, radicalization,” scams, “user propagated misinformation,” and harassment—data that could be used to “inform actions by regulators or Congress.” This is a complete violation of both the First and Fourth Amendment. They want the same mechanisms in Europe where anyone can complain and demand the content be taken down or subject to fines that can confiscate all assets. Sounds to me like retirement is on the horizon.

This bill would effectively end all our freedoms. This is what is wrong with career politicians. They look at the world ONLY through the eyes of government – NEVER the people.

America in Irreversible Decline

by Fred Gibbon
FRED REED

shutterstock_226614211

I am not sure why people write columns. Partly from boredom, I suppose, or lack of anything better to do. Partly from exasperation. Yet partly from the hope that if enough people collectively become aware of problems, they might, just maybe, do something about them. I can’t believe this any longer. Today’s crimes, lunacies, and decays are too many, profitable, and intractable. We are racing out of control toward some as yet dimly limned catastrophe. Hang on and take the ride.

To begin with, America is no longer a country. It is a set of special interests occupying the same place: Corporations, races, ethnicities, faiths, ideologies, foreign agents pretending to be Americans, all at each other’s throats. No cure is possible.

Racial relations are a disaster. Blacks, fourteen percent of the country, are congenitally furious at whites. They neither assimilate nor want to. Whether they should doesn’t matter since it will not happen.

They give their children strange names to differentiate them from whites, maintain a separate language sometimes called Ebonics–blacks in other countries learn to speak normally–and concentrate in huge all-black Sowetos: Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Newark, Trenton, Camden, Atlanta, Milwaukee, East St. Louis, New Orleans. And many others. Horrific crime and horrific schools produce each year a large cohort who, barely literate, will for fifty years be unable to fit into the economy or into white (or Hispanic) society. This will not change. If it were going to, it would have.

Hispanics, seventeen percent of the population, have a much higher likelihood of assimilating, and are doing so, but it will not happen overnight and will never be complete. They face intense hostility from much of the white population. Add Somalis, North Africans, Jews, Asians, and various Muslims and you have more than a third of the country. Their interests are their own interests. This cannot be changed.

Americans no longer have a shared identity, a common culture to hold them together. In 1950 America was overwhelmingly white, European, and Christian. How deeply one believed was not the point. Christianity was a matrix binding all, as Catholicism is in Latin America. Today Christianity is like marijuana–tolerated, barely legal, but better not to get caught. Whites are reviled by those of lesser capacity and, weirdly, by themselves. What do we now have in common? Almost nothing. This will not change before some strange looming denouement befalls us.

Government has changed irrevocably, and changes yet. It no longer consists of executive, judicial, and legislative branches. In practice the branches are now the Presidency, Wall Street, the corporations, AIPAC, and the media, with overlap and interlocking directors. Elections are play toys to occupy the public. The levers of governance are no longer accessible to the populace. Governments gain power. They do not give it up. This will not change.

“American” corporations no longer are. When Charlie Wilson said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA,” it was. Today’s corporations are free-floating entities spread over the globe, putting down tentacles in countries of convenience and loyal only to their profits. They are too powerful to be reined in. The prime examples are offshoring and encouraged immigration from Latin America, but many others exist. This cannot be remedied: the corporations needing change own those who might change them.

Wild thought: Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are owned by the government. Ours is a system in which the means of production own the government. Congressmen are commodities and Washington a Coke machine: insert your coins, choose your law, and pull the lever. Voila.

Demographics have consequences. Only whites and East Asians, mostly men, display talent for engineering, mathematics, scientific research, or organization on a large scale. Affirmative action does not put landers on Mars nor program computers. By now it must be obvious that racial gaps in achievement are intractable. Argument over causes changes nothing. The country depends increasingly on a declining number of white brains. The attacks on both whites and brains will continue.

The country crumbles politically. The Constitution has been interpreted into near impotence, a trend that continues. Congress has abdicated most of its important powers and become a passive bribery receptacle. Trump is close to being our first real dictator. At best you could say that America is an oligarchy with Hulk Trump fronting for the corporations in general, the military industry in particular, and the Israelis. At will he imposes sanctions, threatens war, turns much of the world into enemies, sends troops to Africa–Africa?–breaks treaties, discards environmental protections. None dare tell him no, in America or, as yet, abroad. America cannot be brought back.

Democracy, to the extent that it ever existed, doesn’t. Americans have no influence over what their children are taught, where Christmas carols can be sung, over war and peace, whether they can legally choose their neighbors, who they must hire. All of these things are dictated from far away. This cannot be changed. If you disagree, tell me how.

Social control intensifies. Saying the wrong things about blacks, Jews, feminists or homosexuals has in many places become a firing offense–very Soviet, this. The mainstream media, utterly dishonest, are committed mouthpieces for those who rule. This will not change. Who could change it?

The social media, also organs of government, censor us. The CEOs of Google and Facebook, unelected, both of them Jewish, control what almost the entire world is permitted to see. Is this not astonishing? Twitter is now in the same category, and all are censoring both covertly and actively. The silenced may win an occasional lawsuit, but the censoring will not stop., It will grow.

The times approach the oozing last years of Rome. We have mixed martial arts, football, boxing, and now legal bare-knuckle. The country throws national tantrums over who can use what bathrooms. Drug use is high from middle school up. A child who can use a keyboard can watch any conceivable sort of pornography. Twenty percent of America thinks the sun moves around the earth. In rotting societies sexual curiosities come forth. Northwestern University, I think it was, offers a course in sadomasochism. paralleling the dominance of a known torturess heading the CIA.

Schooling has declined badly. Genuine education is now regarded as an elitist imposition by dead white men. The young do not recognize the extent of the deterioration as they have known nothing else. Over twenty years ago I went into a middle school in Arlington, Virginia, an upscale white suburb of Washington, and saw a student’s project honoring Italian contributions to science. Below a photo of Fermi it spoke of his work in “Nucler Phisicts.” In letters six inches high. Uncorrected. The academic content, if so it can be called, of instruction is heavy, heavy, heavy, on social-justice propaganda. This cannot be changed.

Would you dare say anything racially incorrect to your daughter who might tell her teacher? We are approaching what might be called the Soviet Union by Disney.

Universities for the most part are no better. We suffer from an odd sort of civilizational autoimmune disease, eating ourselves. Shakespeare is racist, Mozart elitist, grammar a means of oppression. Two and a half millennia of Western civilization, forgotten by a sea of gilded peasants with no retirement plans. Monkeys chattering over the ruins of a forgotten society. Once the chain of culture is broken, it cannot easily be restored. Anyway, a literate population might cause trouble. We will not have one.

As culture and cultivation die, we equally erase our history. It is rewritten, enstupidated, lied about to children in grade school and up, shouted down by racial mobs who cannot spell it. Statues must be razed, names of historical men removed from buildings and cities. We have a President who cannot pronounce Namibia, Nepal, or Bhutan. Soon we will be a nation of purest Bandar-log, chuckling and pecking at telephones, knowing not when, nor what, nor where, nor why.

Corruption is rife. It is seldom the Mexican briefcase-of-money kind, being legal, hidden, and far more profitable. Student loans are a crafted way of getting the young deeply in debt for many years, very profitable for banks and universities. Most of the students–I want to write “students”–have no business in college, but they are persuaded to take out loans and thus enrich administrators and banks. It is legal. Big Pharma bribes Congress to pass a law requiring the government–e.g., VA hospitals–to pay retail. It is legal, and a goldmine for the pharmaceutical corporations. Military industry bribes Congress to buy hugely expensive and unneeded weapons (my beat for years: I know whereof I speak). It is legal. It cannot be changed. Only those could change it who profit by it.

Overall, America declines into the Third World. The one percent own most of the country while the middle class declines. Retirement plans and health insurance evanesce. The police become more brutal and less accountable. Censorship intensifies. Impunity grows: Nobody went to jail for the subprime scam. Politicians pose in front of The Flag, trumpet democracy but do not practice it. Surveillance quietly grows: TSA, tracking by cell-phone location records, NSA’s internal spying, social media recording everything we do, and now Alexa and voice-controlled televisions constantly listen in our homes. Civil unrest grows with street gangs of Antifa and BLM fighting white nationalists and defying police.

We know the foregoing, many of us. The takeaway is that none of it is preventable. We careen toward whatever epochal demise awaits us. Slow motion or all at once, it will be a doozy.

(Republished from Fred on Everything by permission of author or representative)

What’s Wrong with the West?

Male, pale and stale university professors to be given ‘reverse mentors’ | 09 Aug 2018 | Male, pale and stale university professors are to be given "reverse mentors" to teach them about unconscious bias, under a new Government funded scheme. Under the project, white men in senior academic posts will be assigned a junior female colleague from an ethnic minority as a mentor. Prof John Rowe, who is overseeing the project at Birmingham University, said he hoped the scheme will allow eminent professors to confront their own biases and leave them "feeling quite uncomfortable”.

Primary school children in Scotland will be told ‘your gender is what you decide’ –Guidelines set to come into effect in 2019 | 06 Aug 2018 | Children from the age of five could be taught in school that they should "decide" their gender. Teachers across Scotland will tell children it’s up to them to decide if they are a boy a girl or if they "don’t like to decide that" from as early as primary one. Under the draft guidelines created by Education Scotland, NHS boards and the Scottish Government, children will be told in classrooms that "Your gender is what you decide." But politicians and experts have warned that the plans risk confusing young children before they are ready to understand gender and identity.

Jewish Christianity

It only makes sense when you look at what their religion says. They see themselves as “missionaries to the gentiles”. Jews are colonizers of Whites.

Just as Whites colonized the primitive races with the intention of spreading Christianity internationally; Jews colonized Whites by exporting their Christianity to Europe and replacing all the gentiles Gods with their own- a prophecy laid out in their religious texts.

Jews believe their actions influence the divine. They believe they must destroy the gentiles in order to create a gentile free world, allowing Jews to inherit the world.

It is pretty simple. Dont go complicating it with made up notions about Jews having a minority complex.