You Are NOT Who You Think You Are

By Alan Watts

August 16, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  We have an absolutely extraordinary attitude in our culture, and in various other cultures, high civilizations, to the new member of human society. Instead of saying frankly to children, "How do you do? Welcome to the human race!" we are playing a game and we are playing by the following rules: we want to tell you what the rules are so that you know your way around, and when you understood what rules we are playing by, when you get older, you may be able to invent better ones.

But instead of that, we still retain an attitude to the child that he is on probation; he is not really a human being, he is a candidate for humanity. And in just this way, we have a whole system of preparation of the child for life which always is preparation and never actually gets there. In other words, we have a system of schooling which starts with grades. And we get it always preparing for something that’s going to happen.

Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher who interpreted and popularised Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York.So you go into nursery school as preparation for kindergarten. You are going to kindergarten for preparation for first grade and then you go up the grades 'til you get to high school, and then comes a time when maybe if we can get you fascinated enough with this system, you go to college. And then when you go to college, if you are smart, you get in the graduate school and stay a perpetual student and go back to be a professor and just go round and round in the system.

But in the ordinary way, they do not encourage quite that, they want you, after graduate school or after graduation, commencement as it’s called, beginning to get out into the world with a capital W. And so you know, you’ve been trained for this and now you’ve arrived. But when you get out into the world, at your first sales meeting, they’ve got the same thing going again, because they want you to make that quota and if you do make it, they give a higher quota.

And come along about 45 years of age, maybe you are a Vice President. And it suddenly dawns on you that you’ve arrived with a certain sense of having been cheated, because it is just the same life as it always felt. And you are conditioned to be in desperate need of a future. So the final goal that this culture prepares for us is called retirement – when you will be a senior citizen and you will have the wealth and the leisure to do what you always wanted, but you will at the same time impotence, rotten prostate and false teeth and no energy. So the whole thing from beginning to end is a hoax.

You are involved by and large in a very strange business system which divides your day into work and play. Work is something that everybody does and you get paid to do it because nobody could care less about doing it. In other words, it is so abominable and boring that you can get paid for doing it. And the object of doing this is to make money. And the object of making money, is to go home and enjoy the money that you’ve made. When you got it, you see, “you can buy pleasure."

And in myriads of ways, you see, you go home, you are with the wealthiest people in the world and you would think that having earned your money and go home, you will have an orgy and great banquet and so on, but nobody does. They eat TV dinner which is just a warmed over airline food and then they spend the evening looking at an electronic reproduction of life which is divided from you by a glass screen. You can’t touch it, you can’t smell it, it has no color, except maybe for very wealthy it has color. But by and large, it doesn’t. And you look at this thing and you have a strange feeling, you see, that the whole procession of grades that was leading to something in the future, to that goody, that gorgeous voluptuous goody that was lying at the end of the line never quite turns up.

And this is because from the beginning, we condition our children to a defective sense of identity. We condition the child in a way that sets the child a life problem which is insoluble. And therefore attended by constant frustration, and as a result of this problem being insoluble, it is perpetually postponed to the future. So that one lives, one is educated to live in the future and one is not ever educated to live today.

Now I am not saying that, you know, the philosophy of carpe diem, “Let us drink today, for tomorrow we die” and not make any plans. What I am saying is that making plans for the future is of use only to people who are capable of living completely in the present.


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What Am I Fighting For

By Andre Vltchek

August 02, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  I am Russian. That’s how I feel and therefore, that’s what I am. I was born in Russia, in the Soviet Union – in what was and still is a stunningly beautiful city on the Neva River called Leningrad.

For some reason, out of the almost 20 books that I have written, only 2 (if I am not mistaken) have been translated into the Russian language and published in Russia. How come? My books are available in about 40 languages. Even in Turkey, in the Turkish language, five have been printed.

Perhaps during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin era, Russia and I drifted apart. Not fully, but to a great extent.

I am an internationalist, an anti-colonialist fighter. I have worked in about 160 countries, writing about the horrors that are being spread by Western imperialism. I was screwed many times, battered and injured, tortured and even condemned to death. My Russia is a Russia of principles, of justice and courage. My grandparents fought for such a nation, and half of my relatives died, defending it. In the past, during those few terrible years when Russia was enchanted with the North American and European cheap glitter and lies, we found ourselves, unfortunately, far apart.

Of course, Russia’s obsession with the West did not last long. The country is too educated, too independent-minded. It cannot be fooled for decades. ‘My country’, my abstract, imaginary but nevertheless beloved homeland, got humiliated, robbed and almost destroyed by political and market fundamentalists in Washington, London, Paris. After the demolition of the Soviet Union, the life expectancy of Russian people dropped to sub-Saharan African levels. In those days, during one of my visits, I saw scientists from akademgorodog selling their libraries in the Novosibirsk subway underpass, in the bitter winter cold. Russia was shaken, stripped of its essence, and stepped on. The West gave nothing, it only took. And once the Soviet internationalism was out of the way, the United States, U.K. and France began the unbridled plunder of the world: Iraq, Serbia, Libya…

For several years, I looked in despair at how Russia was collapsing, losing its dignity, selling its great tangible and intangible achievements for a pittance. And how the West was laughing at it; grinning with its muzzle, expressing profound cynicism and scorn.

Yes, this is when Russia and I parted, for a short period of time. I did not want Russia to kneel – I wanted it to fight: for itself and for the world, as it always had done. Like most of the Russian people, I wanted the Soviet Union back; I felt embarrassed to see how cheap and sleazy capitalism was replacing Communist and Internationalist ideals. I felt deep scorn for the naiveté of Gorbachev, and right after that, for the perverted destructive servility of Yeltsin. For the sake of its own people and the world, Russia had no right to be weak; so much depended on it.

I wrote about it, about what I was witnessing, but Russia was not ready for me then. Many people there were searching for shortcuts. Countless honest people were spat at, degraded.

Eventually, majority of people understood. The government changed. Pride returned. The dark days of humiliation did not last long. Russia, indignant and righteous, once again got up from its knees, and confronted the Western usurpers and imperialism. It regained its soul, its compassion, and its great culture.

From that very moment, I regained my Motherland. This was the Russia that I knew, respected and loved. The Russia for which I was willing to, wanted to, fight for.

And a big, tough ideological fight it has been, since the moment that Russia began defending its interests and its people, as well as billions of oppressed human beings all around the world! 

I speak the Russian language fluently. It is my ‘mother tongue’. But English is my ‘working language’. I have written some 15 books in English. It has become the tongue of ‘ideological combat’, and I feel comfortable using it for this purpose. The English language is my weapon of choice.

As I said earlier, for some reason, not much of my work is known ‘back home’, in my mental and emotional home, in Russia; a country where I was born and which I love, but where I have almost never managed to live.

The translation of dozens of my essays by the great Russian translator Andrey Maysov may change all this, very soon. I hope it will. I am grateful to him, for his determined labor; more grateful than he knows.

For many years, I have travelled all over the world, making documentary films and writing books. All this was “for the front” – for that intellectual, ideological front; for “my” countries: for Russia and China, Venezuela and Cuba, Syria, as well as many other ones.

I do not believe in ‘objectivity’. Objectivity is yet another British colonialist invention; a cover up for crimes committed all over the globe, and for propaganda with which billions of brains had been infected. In the name of objectivity, the most outrageous and devastating lies have been thrown around.

I fight Western propaganda with my essays, books and films. And by fighting it, I am trying to protect both Russia and all those colonized people of the world.

My work is designed as a detox to Western indoctrination. It is a tough counter dose to the mainstream media lies, to entire institutes and NGOs in North America and Europe, whose only purpose is to turn both victims and victimizers into nihilist intellectual zombies.I do all this because I believe that Western imperialism is the only real danger that our planet is facing right now. If it is not defeated, humanity will not be able to survive.

I do not expect Russia or China to be ‘perfect’. I do not believe in perfection. I only want them to be human. And human they are. And they behave as such. The other side is not: for centuries it has been plundering, murdering and deceiving entire continents.

I don’t know whether this book will make my writing popular in Russia. I hope it will. Not for my own sake, of course, but simply because I think I now clearly understand how the global dictatorship functions, and I want “my countries” to know, too; to be ready, prepared and alert.

I want to ‘go home’, which for a writer means only this: to be able to share thoughts and feelings, fears and hopes with the people from his, no matter how distant, motherland. 

[My book in Russian: “What you are not supposed to read”]

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

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Hubris Before the Fall

By Finian Cunningham

July 20, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Hubris is usually a forewarning of impending calamity. Extreme arrogance blinds the hubristic person to the limits of their power. So, blindly, they push on with reckless excess, leading to potentially disastrous results.The US and Britain are exemplars of this kind of mad hubris in the present mounting tensions with Iran.
After Iran seized a British cargo ship this week in the Persian Gulf, Britain’s foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt condemned the Iranian action as “unacceptable” and warned that Tehran is “choosing a dangerous path”.

American President Donald Trump also rebuked Iran. “We have the greatest ships – the most deadly ships, we don’t want to have to use them,” he said to reporters Friday at the White House. “We hope for their [Iran’s] sake they don’t do anything foolish. If they do, they will pay a price like nobody’s ever paid.”

Britain is claiming that Iran’s impounding of a British-operated ship is unlawful and violates “freedom of navigation”. Iran said it seized the vessel after it collided with an Iranian fishing boat and disobeyed safety regulations for passing through the narrow Strait of Hormuz.
Whatever the exact circumstance are, London has very little legal or moral authority to remonstrate with Iran. Tehran says it is carrying out an investigation into the alleged infringement by the British ship. Iran has the sovereign right to do so.
As for the official British reaction, it smacks of downright hypocrisy. An Iranian oil tanker is currently detained in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar after Royal Marines boarded the vessel on July 4 and took it into custody over claims it was transporting oil to Syria – allegedly in breach of European Union sanctions on Damascus.

Iran slammed that British seizure as “piracy” and disputes the legality of Britain’s motives. There are good grounds to believe that Britain’s actions were conducted in league with Washington to deliberately aggravate Iran.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If the British apply “laws” on alleged shipping transgressions by Iran, then Tehran has every right to do likewise on suspected British ships in or near its territorial waters in the Persian Gulf.

The arrogance of Britain and the US is astounding. Hypocrisy and double standards are tumbling over themselves.
Washington and London’s accusations that Iran is “escalating” tensions are an absurd inversion of reality. Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif just this week requested the US to enter negotiations to resolve the stand-off – if Trump reciprocated by lifting harsh sanctions off Iran. You can’t get fairer than that.
Let’s recall the bigger picture. The dangerous situation has been created by Washington’s reprehensible tearing up last year of the international nuclear accord with Iran. Then in April, Trump reimposed crippling sanctions on Tehran driving the Iranian economy into even further turmoil. Such economic warfare is illegal under international law. It’s “economic terrorism”, as Iranian-American writer Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich aptly puts it.
In May, the Trump administration shifted gear and embarked on a policy of what can only be called military aggression by sending warships and B-52 nuclear-capable bombers to the Persian Gulf, purportedly to “defend” against alleged – though unsubstantiated – Iranian security threats.
For the past two months there have been a series of sabotage incidents against commercial shipping which the US has blamed on Iran. Iran denies any involvement and has instead speculated that the incidents are being orchestrated by malign forces to incriminate Tehran.
The seizure of the Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar earlier this month by British commandoes fits into the same pattern of deliberate provocation.
So when Britain’s Jeremy Hunt gets on his high horse of legal probity and righteousness, the hubris is way too much to stomach.
Washington and London have said in public that they don’t want a war with Iran. But all other signs suggest that war is something they are prepared to wage. Maybe they expect that the display of military power and bragging about it will be enough to make Iran cower and beg for mercy. That, in short, is state terrorism.

But Iran is nobody’s fool nor play thing, as its leaders have time and again warned. Tehran says that the US and Britain may start a war, but it will be Iran that “finishes it”.

There is no doubt Iran’s military defenses are formidable and its missiles could dispatch American and British warships to a watery grave.
Then we are in extremely red-alert geopolitical territory where military conflict could explode into a regional war and even world war. With the Americans and their British bulldog getting a bloody nose, the truly worrying thing is that their extreme arrogance will tempt them to salvage their disaster with the unthinkable – nuclear weapons.
Hubris before the fall could be a fall involving just the corrupt American and British rogue regimes. But awful to contemplate is the fall might also include vast numbers of innocent people, or even the planet as we know it.
One things seems irrefutable, however. The American and British criminal bullying towards Iran and the rest of the world has to stop. The world can no longer afford to tolerate their extreme lawlessness.
Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.
This article was originally published by "Sputnik News" -

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What the Right Gets Wrong About Socialism

As Scandinavia shows, it does feature plenty of public ownership—but also a thriving economy.
By Erlend Kvitrud
July 11, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Global inequality is surging at an unprecedented pace. According to Oxfam, the world’s 26 richest people currently have the same amount of wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion—down from 61 people in 2016. As the rich get richer, sea levels are rising, tribalism is flourishing, and liberal democracies are regressing. Even some of the wealthiest nations are plagued by job insecurity, debt, and stagnant wages. Ordinary people across the political spectrum are increasingly concerned that the system is rigged against them. Trust in public institutions is near an all-time low.
In response to these conditions, democratic socialism is enjoying a revival in the United States. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist, is currently polling ahead of and raising more money than all the other Democratic presidential candidates except former Vice President Joe Biden. His town hall appearance on Fox News was the most watched such event of the campaign season so far. With this surge of interest has come a renewed debate, often centered on historical and international comparisons, about what socialism actually means and whether it can succeed. Sanders’s efforts to distinguish himself from Sen. Elizabeth Warren—a progressive, policy-oriented candidate who has emerged as a close competitor, and who advocates for “responsible capitalism” rather than democratic socialism—has only deepened that interest. Earlier this month, he delivered a speech presenting his vision of democratic socialism, and during Thursday night’s Democratic primary debate, he sparred with former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper over the viability of a socialist in the race against incumbent President Donald Trump.
In U.S. politics, “socialist” has long been a smear used to discredit progressives—a rhetorical battle-ax honed during the Cold War and wielded by Republicans against Democrats, however centrist their politics. Conservatives have applied the label to presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Democratic socialists in the United States often point to Scandinavian countries for prime examples of their ideas in action. Scandinavia, broadly speaking, combines stable growth and prosperity with big governments that readily interfere in markets. The region regularly scores high marks on international rankings such as the Legatum Prosperity Index and the United Nations’ World Happiness Report.Progressives, forced to adapt to this framework, have long tried to distance themselves from the term, even when advocating for policies that clearly lean toward it. Fear of being labeled socialist has narrowed their repertoire of policy options. Right-wing politicians tend to make full use of this leverage. That’s why many Republicans have so vociferously seized on the newfound popularity of politicians who describe themselves as socialists, including Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
The share of total U.S. income owned by the richest 1 percent of the population has been surging since the 1980s. It has now reached 20 percent. Scandinavia’s 1 percent bags less than half this share, ranging from 6 percent in Denmark to about 9 percent in Sweden. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks each Scandinavian nation among the top 10 with regards to both economic equality and absence of poverty. The United States is on the opposite end of both spectrums.
Take Norway for example. According to the World Bank, Norway and the United States have nearly identical GDP per capita. Yet Norway, unlike the United States, enjoys universal health care, child care, and elder care, as well as tuition-free universities, around 12 months of paid parental leave, and a robust social safety net.
Norway’s success is inconvenient for critics of progressive, big-government economic and social policies; they’d prefer that the public associate socialism with basket cases such as North Korea and Venezuela. Norway’s and more broadly Scandinavia’s record leaves naysayers with two main lines of argument. They can dispute the region’s economic success, as Nima Sanandaji did in a 2015 report for the Institute of Economic Affairs. Or they can question whether Scandinavia really is socialist after all, as Anthony B. Kim and Julia Howe of the Heritage Foundation did last year.
In an essay that was published last year, Jeffrey Dorfman, an economist at the University of Georgia, argued that leftists who promote the Scandinavia model tend to conflate socialism with a generous welfare state. “Socialism can take the form of government controlling or interfering with free markets, nationalizing industries, and subsidizing favored ones,” he wrote. “The Nordic countries don’t actually do much of those things.”
Yet controlling or interfering with free markets, nationalizing industries, and subsidizing favored ones is precisely how the Norwegian government operates—and explains why it now owns about 60 percent of the country’s net wealth, twice the share the government owns in China.
Like all viable economic systems, Norway’s and other Scandinavian countries’ are mixed. A fully socialized economy would be just as unfeasible as a fully privatized one. Socialism, as the term has evolved in mainstream usage, does not mean a total absence of markets, just as capitalism does not imply a total absence of public ownership and regulations.

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How Evil Wins: The Hypocritical Double Standards of Political Outrage

By John W. Whitehead

“She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.”—Kurt Vonnegut

June 28, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  Please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.
Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to the Trump Administration has not been paying attention.
No matter what the team colors might be at any given moment, the playbook remains the same. The leopard has not changed its spots. Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that the American police state that is continuing to wreak havoc on the rights of the people under the Trump Administration is the same police state that wreaked havoc on the rights of the people under every previous administration.
Brace yourselves.
While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle, a tsunami approaches.
Case in point: in Charlottesville, Va.—home of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, champion of the Bill of Rights, and the nation’s third president—city councilors in a quest for so-called “equity” have proposed eliminating Jefferson’s birthday as a city holiday (which has been on the books since 1945) and replacing it with a day that commemorates the liberation of area slaves following the arrival of Union troops under Gen. Philip Sheridan.
In this way, while the populace wages war over past injustices, injustice in the here and now continues to trample innocent lives underfoot. In Charlottesville, as in the rest of the country, little is being done to stem the tide of the institutional racism that has resulted in disproportionate numbers of black Americans being stopped, frisked, shot at, arrested and jailed.

Tell me again why it’s more important to spend valuable political capital debating the birthdays of dead presidents rather than proactively working to put a stop to a government mindset that teaches cops it’s okay to treat citizens of any color with brutality and a blatant disregard for their rights?Just recently, in fact, Phoenix police drew their guns, shouted profanities, assaulted and threatened to shoot a black couple whose 4-year-old daughter allegedly stole a doll from a dollar store. The footage of the incident—in which the cops threaten to shoot the pregnant, young mother in the head in the presence of the couple’s 1- and 4-year-old daughters—is horrifying in every way.
It doesn’t matter that Phoenix and Charlottesville are 2100 miles apart. The lethal practices of the American police state are the same all over.
No amount of dissembling can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.
We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America. As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.
So stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other. Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.
This is how evil wins.
This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.
This is how good, generally decent people—having allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.
Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware. Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware. And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.
The world has been down this road before.
As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free:

Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national enemies', without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.

We are no longer living the American Dream. We’re living the American Lie.
Indeed, Americans have been lied to so sincerely, so incessantly, and for so long by politicians of all stripes—who lie compulsively and without any seeming remorse—that they’ve almost come to prefer the lies trotted out by those in government over less-palatable truths.
The American people have become compulsive believers: left-leaning Americans are determined to believe that the world has become a far more dangerous place under Trump, while right-leaning Americans are equally convinced that Trump has set us on a path to prosperity and security.
Nothing has changed.
The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.
In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).
Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip, shoot and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials are no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace. Indeed, they continue to keep the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies and slaves rather than citizens.
SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families. Nationwide, SWAT teams continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activities or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own heavily armed law enforcement divisions, theincidence of botched raids and related casualties continue to rise.
The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police. Police forces continue to be transformed into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. In training police to look and act like the military and use the weapons and tactics of war against American citizens, the government continues to turn the United States into a battlefield and “we the people” into enemy combatants.
Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners. School districts continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment for childish infractions: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. In this way, the paradigm of abject compliance to the state continues to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior.
For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense. States continue to outsource prison management to private corporations out to make a profit at taxpayer expense. And how do you make a profit in the prison industry? Have the legislatures pass laws that impose harsh penalties for the slightest noncompliance in order keep the prison cells full and corporate investors happy.
Censorship hasn’t stopped. First Amendment activities continue to be pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”
The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state. The courts continue to be dominated by technicians and statists who are deferential to authority, whether government or business. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s decisions in recent years have most often been characterized by an abject deference to government authority, military and corporate interests.
Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal, while reinforcing the power of the police state and its corporate allies.
The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements. On any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether it’s your local police, a fusion center, the National Security Agency or one of the government’s many corporate partners, is still monitoring and tracking your every move.
The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers. Under the pretext of protecting the nation’s infrastructure (roads, mass transit systems, water and power supplies, telecommunications systems and so on) against criminal or terrorist attacks, TSA task forces (comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams) continue to do random security sweeps of nexuses of transportation, including ports, railway and bus stations, airports, ferries and subways, as well as political conventions, baseball games and music concerts. Sweep tactics include the use of x-ray technology, pat-downs and drug-sniffing dogs, among other things.
Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the NDAA. These laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional rights of American citizens, continue to re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law, our U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.” Indeed, this is the agency that is notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.
The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad. America’s expanding military empire continues to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.
The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government continues to be the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our so-called representatives. It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.
And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep. In fact, many Americans have been so carried away by their blind rank-and-file partisan devotion to their respective political gods that they have lost sight of the one thing that has remained constant in recent years: our freedoms are steadily declining. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm, because the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government.
So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past 50 years, it will be just another lie.
The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.
They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. As historian Robert Gellately points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who wanted to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the campaigns of discrimination and persecutions need only read the newspapers.”
The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.
“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . . [T]here is no getting away from the fact that at that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German people backed him.’”
Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian, neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined: “[O]n the whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . . . We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”
In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor, life was good.
Life is good in America, too.
Life is good in America as long as you’re not one of the hundreds of migrant children (including infants, toddlers, preschoolers) being detained in unsanitary conditions by U.S. Border Patrol without proper access to food and water, made to sleep on concrete floors, go without a shower for weeks on end, and only allowed to brush your teeth once every 10 days.
Life is good in America as long as you don’t have to come face to face with a trigger-happy cop hyped up on the power of the badge, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and disposed to view people of color as a suspect class.
Life is good in America as long as you’re able to keep sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.
Life is good in America as long as you’ve got enough money to spare that you don’t mind being made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the 99%.
Life is good in America for the privileged few, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51837.htm


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You Are Being Trolled

By Dmitry Orlov

In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people,[1] by posting inflammatory,[2] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers ...

June 25, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -    The world is on the brink of war, again. And again. And, yes, yet again. And then it’s not on the brink of war any more… but wait, there’s more! Of course there’s more, there always is. US aircraft carrier battle groups are steaming toward North Korea… or not. They are steaming about aimlessly, nowhere near North Korea, but in a very threatening manner. Then Trump and Kim Jong Un meet, get on great, sign a piece of paper that means nothing and part friends. Now the aircraft carriers are steaming about far less menacingly. Then Trump and Un meet again, to sign some other meaningless piece of paper, but then John Bolton shoots his mouth off and the deal is off. But Trump and Un continue to exchange love letters, so the bromance isn’t dead. In any case, war between the US and North Korea is not just unwinnable but unthinkable: South Korea’s capitol is within striking range of North Korean artillery and all US military bases in the region are within range of North Korean rockets. War with North Korea is definitely off. Executive summary: nothing happens. So, what was that all about?

Now it’s about Venezuela. Its democratically elected leader is declared to be a usurper and a suitable replacement is found by the name of Random Guy-doh. American vassal states around the world are bullied into granting him diplomatic recognition as Venezuela’s president even though he’s just a random guy in an apartment in Caracas. Some trucks get torched on a bridge between Columbia and Venezuela. They were carrying humanitarian goods such as spools of wire. There is talk of military intervention, but it’s just talk. The Bank of England confiscates Venezuela’s gold, the US freezes Venezuela’s oil company’s bank accounts in the US and hands them off to a bunch of shady Venezuelans who steal it. That part makes sense; the rest of it? Meh! In any case, a US military incursion into Venezuela is not within the realm of possibility: Venezuela has Russian air defense systems which make it a no-fly zone for the US air force; also, fighting guerrilla action in Venezuelan selva is not something the US military is capable of. Executive summary: nothing happens, again.

Dmitry Orlov was born in Leningrad and immigrated to the United States in the 1970’s. He is the author of Reinventing Collapse, Hold Your Applause! and Absolutely Positive, and publishes weekly at the phenomenally popular blog www.ClubOrlov.com .

Now it’s about Iran. Trump pulls out of the carefully negotiated international deal with Iran and says he wants to negotiate another one. If you notice, that’s a truly idiotic move, along the lines of “I am never paying you back, so lend me more money.” If a country is not honoring the deals it has already signed, why bother negotiate any more deals with it? (That’s a rhetorical question.) Iran announces that since the US isn’t honoring the deal, Iran won’t either. A bunch of oil tankers get damaged and the US tries to blame Iran for it, but nobody believes the US. And so a couple more oil tankers get damaged and the US tries to blame Iran for it again, but nobody believes the US again. And so the US flies a drone into Iranian airspace shadowed by a reconnaissance plane with an international crew on board, hoping that Iran makes a mistake and shoots down the reconnaissance plane. But Iran shoots down the drone and it falls in the shallows, in Iran’s territorial waters, rather than in international waters 100 feet deep, which is what the US claims to have happened, but nobody believes it. Iran swiftly fishes out and proudly displays the wreckage of the no longer top secret drone. The Americans spin a tale about wanting to attack Iran but calling the attack off at the last minute. Oil prices go up a bit. The US oil patch is producing flat out but hemorrhaging red ink like crazy. It needs higher oil prices in order to avoid a huge wave of bankruptcies. That part makes sense; the rest of it? Meh again! In any case, a military attack against Iran is unthinkable: Iran has the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping, cutting off a third of all of the world’s oil exports and blowing up the global economy, US included. Executive summary: nothing happens, yet again.

There are various other non-events in other parts of the world. NATO ships steam about the Black and Baltic seas, where they are pretty much sitting ducks in case hostilities with Russia turn kinetic. So, what that tells us is that hostilities will not turn kinetic because those ships are expensive and there is no money to replace them. There are also NATO exercises in the Baltics, which are right on Russia’s border. They practice invading and slaughtering civilians in quaint medieval villages staffed with Russian-speaking extras pretending to be peasants eager to surrender. (Technically, that should be categorized as a fantasy game rather than a training exercise.) The Russians remain unimpressed. They want nothing to do with the Baltics, which used to be transit states for Russian exports but now they aren’t needed for anything at all (except as a NATO stomping ground). In any case, talking about waging war against Russia with a straight face is something that only extremely stupid people are capable of doing. Executive summary: nothing happens.

Do you notice the refrain? (I am sure you do.) What’s going on is that a has-been country, which can’t stop squandering what little resources it has left on a useless but ridiculously bloated military-industrial complex, is trying to generate activity in order to justify continued lavish defense spending. All sorts of experts and pundits play along, claiming that the threat of this or that war is very real and that therefore we should all be paying attention to what’s happening. But what’s happening is that you are being trolled.

There being nothing better for it to do, the US is trying very hard to troll the whole world, but more and more the world is either refusing to be trolled or trolling the US right back.

• When the US threatens to cut off access to the US financial system, the world works on circumventing it.

• When the US imposes tariffs and sanctions, the world responds by reworking its trading relationships to exclude the US.

• When the US threatens countries with military intervention, the world responds by constructing new alliances and making security arrangements that isolate the US.

But most importantly, the world simply waits. The US is now running a budget deficit that is over a trillion dollars a year and taking on debt at about the same rate as it was during the height of the previous financial collapse. What do you think will happen when the next financial collapse hits? (According to a lot of authoritative voices, it should hit either this year or the next.) Meanwhile, I hope that you enjoy being trolled, because I am sure there will be more trolling from the US, just, you know, to keep busy, I guess.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51829.htm

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Video: “Plutocracy V: Subterranean Fire”.

The latest documentary from Metanoia Films

By Kim Petersen

Plutocracy V: Subterranean Fire from Scott N on Vimeo.

June 05, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Plutocracy V: Subterranean Fire, written and directed by Scott Noble, continues the run of quality documentaries by Metanoia Films. The film provides the historical context that allows the viewer to understand why inequality reigns while social justice and peace lag today. The, at first blink, curious title stems from a quotation by the American labor leader August Spies, who was one of four anarchists hanged in 1887 after being found guilty in the bomb explosion that wounded and killed several policemen and civilians in what became known as the Haymarket affair.
Said Spies to the court:

But, if you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement—the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery, the wage slaves, expect salvation—if this is your opinion, then hang us!
Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up.
It is a subterranean fire.

Subterranean Fire documents historically how the capitalist class have nefariously accumulated wealth and power for selfish purposes by depriving working people of dignity and rights.
Subterranean Fire details at the outset how strike actions and popular revolts were put down by corporations through their cronies, including police, private detectives, vigilantes, and even the National Guard. In the Homestead strike of 1892, after workers had defeated the Pinkerton agency’s private army, the National Guard was brought out.
According to data cited in the film, in 1929, 60 percent of the population lived well below the poverty line. Despite large increases in productivity, there was no trickle down of profits. Neither was there a social safety net.
Labor historian Peter Rachleff tells how organizations like the Red Cross and Salvation Army were enmeshed in the capitalist pattern, categorizing the poor into deserving and undeserving of assistance based on what their “interrogations” uncovered about one’s life style. The unemployed were often blamed for being without employment.

Finally in 1935, unions were legalized. There was hope. A crafts union, the AFL was formed; also formed was an industrial workers union, the CIO. These two were to merge years later into the AFL-CIO.Violence against workers was rampant, and the government was complicit in the violence. The über-rich industrialist Henry Ford hired armed guards to crush disenchanted workers. These armed guards shot and killed hunger marchers from the River Rouge plant.
Subterranean Fire informs how unions sought to end prejudice — an obvious sine qua non in the battle between the moneyed power of the capitalist class and working class.
A message that is compelling and clearly conveyed is that government (and hence “democracy”) is not a force for the masses of workers. Especially prominent in pushing for the dignity of labor were communist leaders.
Communism and Social Justice
Rachleff identified the communists’ goal as developing workers as human beings.
Of particular importance to communists was the inclusion of the Black masses. The KKK, who were supported by state power, warned against Blacks attending communist meetings.
Communists played a prominent role in the scathingly egregious example of racism meted out to the Scottsboro boys. African-American Studies professor Carol Anderson lays out how nine Black teenagers were falsely accused of rape by two White prostitutes. This raised temperatures to boiling among racist Whites. In a one-day trial, eight youths were sentenced to the electric chair and the other youth to life imprisonment. Eventually one woman recanted her false testimony, but it was 17 years before the last prisoner was released for a crime never committed.
Immigrants were also targeted for exploitation.
Stoop labor, such as farm labor where the worker was often stooped over while working in the fields, was considered undesirable. This provided work opportunities for those more desperate; Mexican workers were attracted by the opportunity for work. As immigrant labor, they were without rights and often mistreated. To avoid a labor shortage during WWII, the US-Mexico had reached agreement on the Bracero program, a massive guest worker program that allowed over four million Mexican workers to migrate and work temporarily in the United States from 1942 to 1964. Scandalously, many Braceros still seek to collect unpaid wages from that time. As Justin Chacon, author of No One Is Illegalpoints out, this form of captive labor has continued into the present. The current backlash against immigrants supported by the Donald Trump government augurs back to the Bracero program.
Resistance in the Arts
Artists, writers, and actors were centers of unionization and resistance against exploitation of people. Such artistic expression was opposed by the capitalist class.
Subterranean Fire features an excerpt from director Tim Robbins’ movie Cradle Will Rock, where the capitalist Nelson Rockefeller is questioning the artist Diego Rivera who was commissioned by Rockefeller to produce a fresco for the Rockefeller Center in New York city. However, the pro-communist display was too much for Rockefeller to stomach; he subsequently had the fresco destroyed.
The Importance of Solidarity
In Flint, Michigan, autoworkers occupied factories and conducted sit-down strikes. Historian Sharon Smith points out the ingenuity of such a tactic: while factory owners were readily willing to use violence against workers, they were loathe to damage their own factories.
Women of the epoch played an important role in supporting the labor rights actions of the men. Women auxiliaries sneaked food into the men; they broke windows to prevent men from being overcome by gas attacks; and they served as a distraction to police.
The strikers reached out to fellow autoworkers across the country and fostered much unity. These tactics helped workers win demands from Big Auto.
Sit-down strikes spread across the country. The film tells that in 1937 almost 5 million workers took part in sit-down strikes. It was a heady time for workers.
However, in the end, the grassroots organizing power of workers was undermined by the union leadership which sought an alliance between labor and capital. The Communist Party of America also failed the working class.
In another blow to workers, the Supreme Court ruled sit-down strikes illegal in 1939.
The demonized state of workers was epitomized in the summer of 1937 when Chicago police shot at a parade of striking steelworkers and their families. Fifty were shot and 10 died. President Franklin Roosevelt sat on the fence and blamed both sides for the violence.
Later, however, FDR appeared to have a change of heart, and in 1944 he backed a second Bill of Rights for all, among the rights were such basics as “a right to a useful and remunerative job,” “the right of every family to a decent home,” and “the right to adequate medical care.” According the the documentary, FDR was no true friend of labor, and his expressed views were in anticipation of the United States entering WWII. Nonetheless, FDR died a year later.
Demonizing Workers and the Left
Capitalists, with media in tow, demonized communists and anarchists. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 aimed to preserve the status quo. Japanese-Americans were interred. Communists were targeted.
The FBI was involved. Edgar Hoover had leftists monitored and surveilled by tactics including wiretaps and break-ins. The anti-leftism was so extreme that a section of corporate America supported fascism. The fascists supported Nazi Germany in WWII. [1]
Post-WWII the top income tax rate was 91% until 1964. One-third of workers belonged to a union. From 1940 to 1967 real wages doubled. Living standards doubled.
However, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 would attack workers, banning many types of strikes, closed union shops, union political contributions, communists and radicals in union leadership, and the compelled payment of union dues. The Supreme Court upheld Taft-Hartley, and it remains in force today.
The film also examines McCarthyism, a witch hunt against communists or communist-leaning types, as a psychological attack against Americans. No one was safe. Blacklisting was in vogue and among the first blacklisted were the so-called Hollywood 10 for either communist sympathies or refusal to aid Congress’ House Un-American Activities Committee investigations into the Communist party or having fought for the rights of Blacks and workers. The list expanded much past 10. One celebrity given in-depth prominence in Subterranean Fire was singer Paul Robeson who refused to back down before Congress, stated he was for Negro and worker rights, and accused Congress of neo-fascism.
McCarthyism hit hysterical heights as exemplified by Texas proposing the death penalty for communist membership and Indiana calling for the banning of Robin Hood.
McCarthyism was foiled when it bit off more than it could chew. When McCarthyism took on the establishment, in particular the military, its impetus ground to an inglorious halt. The Alien Registration Act was ruled unconstitutional, and the First Amendment right to political beliefs was upheld.
Subterranean Fire notes that the damage to the labor movement was already done. A permanent war economy was established: overtly through the military and covertly through the CIA. Come 2001, union membership had dropped to 13.5%. Radicals were disconnected from their communities; union democracy was subverted by a top-down leadership which avoided the tactic of striking for collective bargaining; the court system was heavily backlogged with labor-management issues, which usually were ruled in favor of management.
Some outcomes noted in the film,

In the early 21st century, Americans took on the dubious distinction of working more hours than any other country….
There is no single county in America where a minimum wage earner can support a family.

The Rise
Grotesque income and wealth disparity signifies the current state of neoliberalism. Yet Subterranean Fire finds glimmers of change for working men and women.
Despite relating the historical trampling of the working class, the film concludes on a sanguine note. Union strength appears to be on the rebound with solidarity being a linchpin. Labor strikes were on the upswing in the US, with teachers leading the way. Fast-food workers are fighting for a decent wage. Labor which has seen real wages stagnate in the age of neoliberalism is fighting back worldwide. Autoworkers in Matamoros, Mexico are striking and colleagues in Detroit, Michigan have expressed support for their sisters and brothers. The Gilet Jaunes in France have been joined by labor. A huge general strike took place in India. The uptick of resistance was not just pro-labor but anti-global warming in Manchester, UK; Tokyo, Japan; Cape Town, South Africa; Helsinki, Finland; Genoa, Italy; and, Nelson, Aotearoa (New Zealand).
All this, however, must be considered through the lens of the current political context. A virulent anti-socialist president and his hawkish administration occupy the White House in Washington. Despite the nationwide strike actions, the right-wing BJP and prime minister Narendra Modi won a recent huge re-election in India. The purportedly centrist Liberal Party in Canada, rhetoric aside, has been, in large part, in virtual lockstep with the US administration. [2]
The Importance of Metanoia Films
Today, people with access to the internet have little excuse for continuing to depend on state-corporate media sources. Why would anyone willing subject himself to disinformation and propaganda? Not too mention paying for access to such unreliable information and the soul-sapping advertisements that accompany it.
It is important that we be cognizant of the search engine manipulations of Google, the biased opinions parlayed by moneyed corporate media, and the censorship of social media data-mining sites. The corporate-state media nexus wants to limit and shape what we know. The current war on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is proof positive of this. Assange and WikiLeaks exposed horrific war crimes. It is a no-brainer that a person should be congratulated for bringing such evil perpetrated by the state to the public awareness. Instead the establishment seeks to destroy WikiLeaks, the publisher Assange, and Chelsea Manning who is accused of providing the information to WikiLeaks.
Given the corporate-state power structure’s ideological opposition to WikiLeaks and freedom on information as well as the preponderance of disinformation that emanates from monopoly media, it seems eminently responsible that people seek out credible independent sources of information. Metanoia Films stands out as a credible source.
There are plenty of independent news and information sites that provide analysis that treat the reader/viewer with respect by substantiating information provided in reports and articles with evidence, logic, and even morality. The reader/viewer who seeks veracity has an obligation to consider the facts, sources, and reasoning offered and arrive at her own conclusions.
Metanoia documentaries lay out a historical context that helps us understand how we arrived at the state of affairs we find ourselves in today. It is an understanding that is crucial to come up with solutions for a world in which far too many languish in poverty, suffer in war zones, and are degraded by the cruelties of inequality. It is an understanding that is crucial for communicating, planning, and organizing the establishment of new societies in which all may flourish and of which all may be proud.
Independent media is meant for independent thinkers and those who aspire to a better world. Watch Plutocracy V: Subterranean Fire and the first four parts in the Plutocracy series and become informed.
Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at: kimohp@gmail.com. Twitter: @kimpetersen.
Notes
1. For an in-depth history, read Jacques R. Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War (Toronto: Lorimer, 2015), a book which exposes US motivations during WWII as serving corporate interests.

2. Note Canadian prime minister Trudeau’s stand on Assad in Syria, Maduro in Venezuela, Huawei and the extradition hearings on Meng Wanzhou, antagonisms with China, and antagonism with Russia’s Putin. Also consider Canada’s poor record on effectively taking on climate change. These actions differ little from president Trump south of the border.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51722.htm

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