The article is entitled, “The Ruling Elite’s War on Truth.” The fact is, we are all being scammed on a daily basis by our ruling plutocrats.
Below is an excerpt. You can read the entire article here.
Joe Biden’s victory instantly obliterated the Democratic Party’s longstanding charge that Russia was hijacking and compromising US elections. The Biden victory, the Democratic Party leaders and their courtiers in the media now insist, is evidence that the democratic process is strong and untainted, that the system works. The elections ratified the will of the people.
But imagine if Donald Trump had been reelected. Would the Democrats and pundits at The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC pay homage to a fair electoral process? Or, having spent four years trying to impugn the integrity of the 2016 presidential race, would they once again haul out the blunt instrument of Russian interference to paint Trump as Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate?
Trump and Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely, Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global corporations and billionaires.
I recently posted about Trump’s efforts to interfere in the Michigan state presidential election results. I credited state officials for having more integrity than their national counterparts.
Now, it turns out that I spoke too soon.
I am grateful to my friend, Suzanne McDonald, professor at Western Theological Seminary, for sending me more accurate information and the ongoing shenanigans in Michigan.
Sadly, it turns out that the state Republican officials are NOT showing the integrity that I originally thought. Yep, they are playing Trump’s overturn-the-election games as well.
The story in The Detroit News, by Craig Mauger, is entitled, “Michigan House Speaker Floats Possibility of ‘Constitutional Crisis.'” Below is an excerpt, or you can read the entire article here:
Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield referenced the possibility of a “constitutional crisis” during an interview on Fox News Sunday morning, two days after he huddled with President Donald Trump at the White House.
The board features two Republicans and two Democrats. Many legal experts believe the panel has a duty, under Michigan law, to certify the results Monday. .
“The Board of State Canvassers participates in a very straightforward and perfunctory process,” John Pirich, a longtime elections attorney in Michigan, said in the groups’ press release.” Auditing the election is not within its scope of duties; the board is only responsible for reviewing the vote calculations and signing them.
By the way. Michigan state law requires the vote to be certified before an investigation into possible irregularities can begin. But, of course, since when has breaking the law ever deterred Donald Trump?
In her own inimitable way, Caitlin Johnstone captures the impending ethos
Caitlin Johnstone
of a Biden presidency in her latest blog post, “Biden Will Likely Be Worst Than Obama. The Left Must Lead the Backlash, or the Right Will.”
I agree with her analysis. Here is an excerpt:
It looks like a safe bet that Joe Biden will be sworn in on January 20th after successfully campaigning on returning the murderous and oppressive Orwellian US empire back to its pre-Trump “normal”.
The problem with this, apart from the obvious fact that it was an embarrassingly close victory only made possible by the Covid outbreak, is that returning to the pre-Trump “normal” is returning to the exact positions which created Trump. It’s like using a time machine to prevent a train wreck, but only going back to one millisecond before the train wreck occurred.
It is clear that Trump’s election was the result of the easily exploited dissatisfaction caused by years of neoliberal austerity at home and neoconservative bloodshed abroad which Obama forcefully expanded and facilitated throughout two terms as president. . .
And from all appearances it looks like Biden is going to be worse.
Ben Norton has a good article at The Grayzone Project about Biden’s transition team member heading the US Agency for Global Media. His name is Richard Stengel.
Below are a few, deeply troubling excerpts:
“Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for US President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, has enthusiastically defended the use of
Richard Stengel
propaganda against Americans.
“‘My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist,’ Stengel said in 2018. ‘I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.’ . . .
“Stengel has proposed ‘rethinking’ the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech and press. In 2018, he stated, ‘Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons in society, we have to kind of rethink some of those things.’ . . .
“Stengel’s appointment appears to be the clearest signal of a coming escalation by the Biden administration of the censorship and suppression of online media that is seen to threaten US imperatives abroad. . . .”
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign launch the Russia-Gate myth — a myth that lacked substance from the beginning and has been thoroughly debunked over time — intended to cripple Donald Trump’s presidency.
Now Trump has launched his own disinformation campaign in prophetically declaring the presidential election fraudulent before it even occurred.
His loyalists continue to hold to this position despite all evidence to the contrary. It is sad but not surprising.
The Democrats should have known. Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind. Conservative America is now prepared to undermine a Biden presidency as vehemently as Democrats worked to undermine Trump.
In politics, wild dogs always come back to bite those who released them. Pelosi, Shumer, and the rest should have known.
Though I often disagree with him, Fareed Zakaria puts it well:
Today is the 75th anniversary of the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States remains the only nation to have used
Hiroshima after the bomb
nuclear weapons in warfare.
Brett Wilkins, an independent journalist who often writes for Common Dreams, has a good article at Antiwar.com which tells the story, I suspect, from a new perspective for many readers. It is entitled “Nuclear War or Invasion: The False Dichotomy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Every American should also know and remember that we used nuclear weapons offensively when it was unnecessary.
With the passage of time comes more and more evidence about the past.
Over the years, a great deal of evidence has come to light underscoring the
Nagasaki, September, 1945.
fact that almost everything Americans have always been told about America’s justification for wiping Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the face of the earth in two nuclear conflagrations are lies.
In fact, not only has the story always been false, it was known to be false at the time but was perpetuated as a part of a US domestic propaganda campaign.
Below is an excerpt of Wilkins’ excellent article:
Seven of the eight five-star US generals and admirals in 1945 opposed using the atomic bomb against Japan. One of them, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, later said that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
“Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,” President Eisenhower wrote in 1954. “I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer mandatory to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.”
Despite so much high-level misgiving, the US did “hit them with that awful thing.” The idea of giving Japanese officials a live demonstration of an atomic bomb on a remote island, proposed by Strategic Bombing Survey Vice Chairman Paul Nitze and supported by Navy Secretary James Forrestal, was rejected. The US was already destroying multiple Japanese cities every week; it was believed that such a demonstration would likely not have moved the Japanese any more than the ongoing destruction of their actual cities.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1945, Japanese officials increasingly sought an honorable end to the war. Although they had no way of knowing that the US was planning to wage nuclear war against them, they knew that the defeat of Nazi Germany meant that a Soviet invasion, first of Manchuria and Korea and then of Japan itself, was now imminent.
“The Japanese could not fight a two-front war, and were more anti-communist than the Americans were,” Martin Sherwin, an historian awarded the Pulitzer Prize for co-authoring a biography of Manhattan Project leader Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, said a recent webinar sponsored by over two dozen international peace organizations. “The idea of a Soviet occupation of Japan was their worst nightmare.”
One of my daughters lived in Portland, OR for many years.
She keeps in touch with many of her friends in the area, a good number of whom have been out in the streets protesting. Some of them have been arrested. All of them tell the same story.
You can read much of this for yourself on Facebook. Just check out the hashtags #WallOfMoms, #WallOfVets, #WallOfDads.
The story goes like this:
Mixed groups of demonstrators have been in the streets regularly ever since George Floyd’s murder and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement across the country.
The demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful. When unknown agitators destroyed property, group leaders told them to stop and to go away. They were damaging the cause.
Then Federal troops appeared on the scene and began arresting people for no apparent reason, putting them into unmarked vehicles, and locking them up without charges. Some have been kept jailed in undisclosed locations for several days, while family and friends wondered where they were.
These unconstitutional actions by the Feds energized more citizens to march in the streets. Yes, a small group of agitators ramped up their property destruction. But both black and white organizers regularly tried to stop their activities, and were typically unsuccessful.
It is not surprising that this small minority of agitators garner most of the headlines and nearly all of the time on the TV networks, making it look as if Portland is in chaos. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Feds have escalated the confrontations unnecessarily, with their rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, unnecessary aggression and violence against protesters.
It is totally unnecessary.
This is when the Wall of Moms was created, intentionally putting themselves between the demonstrators and the Feds. At this point, a
This protester-mom, was standing, linking arms with fellow demonstrators, when a Federal agent shot her in the face with a rubber bullet
portion of the protests became focused around the Federal courthouse, because that was were the Federal agents were concentrated.
Now the focus of the demonstrations became bifurcated.
The movement’s leaders worked to maintain their focus on Black Lives Matter and police brutality. You don’t have to watch many Facebook videos and pictures to see and hear large crowds chanting “Black Lives Matter.”
But, with the unsolicited intervention of Federal agents, another section of the movement gave their attention to demonstrating against the “police state” activities of Trump’s anti-demonstration forces. The increase in violence is due entirely to the brutal behavior of these Federal marshals and Border Patrol agents.
Yes, a minority of people get out of hand. After the Feds erected a fence in front of the courthouse, a few people focused their anger there and began to build fires under the fence. Again, the organizers consistently tried to stop this from happening.
But, get real! Have you seen the fires? They hardly pose a real threat to anyone, especially to the courthouse!
As the Feds continued to attack both the BLM demonstrators and the Wall of
The bruises on this mom’s body were made by the many rubber bullets fired at her by Federal “police.” Obviously, the Feds don’t hesitate to shoot a woman at close range when her back is turned
Moms, two additional sectors of society began spontaneously to appear: military veterans and dads.
Many veterans, understandably upset at what they were seeing, began to show up in support of the protesters and the moms. A number of videos show how brutally they too have been treated by the Federal agents, beaten with clubs for simply trying to speak to the officers.
Then dads appeared with leaf blowers to fend off the clouds of tear gas being fired by the Feds at unarmed civilians.
Naturally, conservative outlets such as Fox hateall anti-establishment movements, especially when they call for racial justice and condemn police violence.
By definition, conservatives support the establishment.
That is what conservatism means. It’s who they are. Their reporting is pure propaganda, tailored to anger their like-minded viewers, and to condemn the protesters.
Also, remember the old journalistic motto: “if it bleeds it leads.” All the news networks succumb to this principle. They would rather show us the few violent clashes than the masses protesting peacefully. It’s the way news/journalism has always worked in this country.
So, if you want to get angry, then get angry at our government. Get angry at “law enforcement” run amuck, attacking fellow citizens who are exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and freedom of assembly.
Get angry at our president for intentionally making a difficult situation worse, as he manipulates civil unrest for his own personal, political advantage.
Trump is using the predictable FASCIST strategy of generating violence so that he can run on a “law and order” platform in November. You can count on it. This is how he hopes to win reelection.
Professional political blogger, Ms. Johnstone, is very cheeky, and that’s
Caitlin Johnstone
probably why I read her blog. That and the fact that she, as an Australian, frequently offers insightful political commentary.
Her most recent post “Liberals Are Crazy Idiots” offers an all to brief discussion of how and why so-called liberal news outlets like MSNBC, with pundits like Chris Hays and Rachel Maddow, are nearly as useless as Fox News.
Here is an excerpt:
Liberals are such crazy idiots. They pretend to stand for truth and logic then spend years promoting the fact-free Trump-Russia collusion narrative. They pretend to stand for social justice then drop those values the second it becomes politically convenient, like making homophobic jokes about Trump and Putin, calling Lindsey Graham “Lady G” for being a closeted gay man, and lecturing black political leaders about how black people should think and vote. They pretend to stand for the little guy, then support austerity and war while literally worshipping John McCain.
“Roger Stone was what he looked like: a go-between between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, and then he lied about it, which is what he was convicted for,” Hayes said.
This is just completely untrue. The only communications between Stone and WikiLeaks prior to the November 2016 presidential election were WikiLeaks telling Stone to stop falsely claiming that he was in communication with the outlet and had been getting information from them.
Not long before this blasphemous photo-op Trump gave a speech in which he expressed his support for every American’s right to protest. (As if the constitution needs any president’s endorsement).
Then, shortly before he spoke on the steps of this well-know church, D.C. police fired tear gas into a nearby group of peaceful protesters, dispersing stragglers by force. I watched the video.
Now, safely rid of those pesky, peaceful demonstrators, the president awkwardly waves a Bible like an unfamiliar talisman and utters the basest expressions of civil religion for the feverish media.
All in all — another disgusting episode from a wicked man who needs to repent, yet is enabled by so-called evangelicals blinded by secularism, self-centeredness, and power politics.
I won’t go into the various ways in which Israel has taken over (“expropriated”) privately owned Palestinian land in the West Bank (and even within Israel itself). But they do it on a regular basis.
In this post I will focus on the provisions of International Law being violated by Israel’s steady encroachment into the Occupied Territory/West
Israel’s Annexation/ Separation Barrier separating Palestinians from Israel. Observe that it’s not hard to climb. It was not built to stop terrorism, but to steal more land.
Bank.
The Geneva Convention declares that land conquered through war (1) cannot be kept by the conquering power. (2) Neither can it be incorporation as a part of the victorious country. (3) Nor can the conquering country move its own citizens into the occupied region for colonization.
Israel is violating all of these legal requirements.
Here is what International Law says:
Article 49, paragraph 6 of the 1949 Geneva Convention IV says, “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
Article 85(4)(a) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I adds that “the transfer by
Palestinians live under military occupation. Trump’s plan will expand and deepen its oppression
the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” is a serious breach of the protocol.
Article 8(2)(b)(viii) of the 1998 Statute of the International Criminal Courtstates that “[t]he transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” is a war crime.
Why were these restrictions on the ancient attitude of “to the victor goes the spoils” put in place?
The answer is simple. And you’d think Israel might be especially sensitive to this part of the story.
Adolf Hitler.
As I will explain in my next book, during the Second World War, Adolf Hitler
Hitler’s plans for population transfers throughout Eastern Europe — remove the natives and replace them with ethnic Germans
undertook ethnic cleansing in parts of eastern Europe. He then resettled these areas with ethnic Germans, planning to incorporate the newly settled territories into an expanded German state.
For only one example, the Nazis expelled nearly 122,000 Poles from German occupied Pomerania in 1939-40. They were replaced by 130,000 ethnic Germans who were resettled in place of the former Pomerania population.
German settlement expansion in eastern Europe was a part of Hitler’s “Germanization” program, referred to as Generalplan Ost (the GPO).
The Geneva Convention, at the instigation of the United States, hoped to prevent (or, at least, to outlaw) similar population transfers via warfare in the future.
Israel first violated this part of international law in 1948-49 when it conquered 50% of the territory allotted by the United Nations for a Palestinian state.
Israel continues its violation of international law in the West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan during the 1967 war. The West Bank has remained under military occupation ever since, hence its identification as Occupied Territory.
Now it becomes United States policy to endorse the violation of international law. Only a few weeks ago Trump announced that the US considers all Israeli settlements in the West Bank as “legal.”
This week’s Apartheid Plan endorses the illegal annexation and Jewish settlement of the entire Jordan Valley, displacing the many Palestinians farmers from their own property.
All of the Palestinian lands stolen by Israeli fiat, and built up by illegal
Illegal Jewish settlers in the Jordan Valley. They have been breaking the law for a long time. Trump now says it’s OK
Israeli settlers, throughout the West Bank will be officially annexed as a part of Israel.
I know this will offend some and appear an exaggeration by many, but facts are facts. They don’t change because some folks are offended.
Israel is a rogue nation. The international community must condemn its avaricious, illegal, inhumane behavior now.
The United States is the world’s most far-reaching enabler of such rogue behavior, not just in the Middle East, but around the globe.
Sadly, nobly intentioned international law has failed to stop the ghost of racist, ethnic nationalism from stealing from and oppressing other human beings.
The ghost of Hitler hangs heavy over the United States, Israel, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu.
George Floyd’s murder and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement across the country.
advantage.
prevent (or, at least, to outlaw) similar population transfers via warfare in the future.