Authoritehs Are Far From Done With You Dissenting Deviants

consentfactory  |  The main goal of gaslighting is to confuse, coerce, and emotionally manipulate your victim into abandoning their own perception of reality and accepting whatever new “reality” you impose on them. Ultimately, you want to completely destroy their ability to trust their own perception, emotions, reasoning, and memory of historical events, and render them utterly dependent on you to tell them what is real and what “really” happened, and so on, and how they should be feeling about it.

Anyone who has ever experienced gaslighting in the context of an abusive relationship, or a cult, or a totalitarian system, or who has worked in a battered women’s shelter, can tell you how powerful and destructive it is. In the most extreme cases, the victims of gaslighting are entirely stripped of their sense of self and surrender their individual autonomy completely. Among the best-known and most dramatic examples are the Patty Hearst case, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Manson family, and various other cults, but, the truth is, gaslighting happens every day, out of the spotlight of the media, in countless personal and professional relationships.

Since the Spring of 2020, we have been subjected to official gaslighting on an unprecedented scale. In a sense, the “Apocalyptic Pandemic” PSYOP has been one big extended gaslighting campaign (comprising countless individual instances of gaslighting) inflicted on the masses throughout the world. The events of this past week were just another example.

Basically, what happened was, a Pfizer executive confirmed to the European Parliament last Monday that Pfizer did not know whether its Covid “vaccine” prevented transmission of the virus before it was promoted as doing exactly that and forced on the masses in December of 2020. People saw the video of the executive admitting this, or heard about it, and got upset. They tweeted and Facebooked and posted videos of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Bill Gates, the Director of the CDC, official propagandists like Rachel Maddow, and various other “experts” and “authorities” blatantly lying to the public, promising people that getting “vaccinated” would “prevent transmission,” “protect other people from infection,” “stop the virus in its tracks,” and so on, which totally baseless assertions (i.e., lies) were the justification for the systematic segregation and persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” and the fomenting of mass fanatical hatred of anyone challenging the official “vaccine” narrative, and the official New Normal ideology, which hatred persists to this very day.

The New Normal propaganda apparatus (i.e., the corporate media, health “experts,” et al.) responded to the story predictably. They ignored it, hoping it would just go away. When it didn’t, they rolled out the “fact-checkers” (i.e., gaslighters).

The Associated Press, Reuters, PolitiFact, and other official gaslighting outfits immediately published lengthy official “fact-checks” that would make a sophist blush. Read them and you will see what I mean. They are perfect examples of official gaslighting, crafted to distract you from the point and suck you into an argument over meaningless details and definitions. They sound exactly like Holocaust deniers pathetically asserting that there is no written proof that Hitler ordered the Final Solution … which, there isn’t, but it doesn’t fucking matter. Of course Hitler ordered the Final Solution, and of course they lied about the “vaccines.”

The Internet is swimming with evidence of their lies … tweets, videos, articles, and so on.

Which is what makes gaslighting so frustrating for people who believe they are engaged in an actual good-faith argument over facts and the truth. But that’s not how totalitarianism works. The New Normals, when they repeat whatever the authorities have instructed them to repeat today (e.g., “trust the Science,” “safe and effective,” “no one ever claimed they would prevent transmission”), could not care less whether it is actually true, or even if it makes the slightest sense.

These gaslighting “fact-checks” are not meant to convince them that anything is true or false. And they are certainly not meant to convince us. They are official scripts, talking points, and thought-terminating clichés for the New Normals to repeat, like cultists chanting mantras at you to shut off their minds and block out anything that contradicts or threatens the “reality” of the cult.

You can present them with the actual facts, and they will smile knowingly, and deny them to your face, and condescendingly mock you for not “seeing the truth.”

Johnson And Johnson's New War On Consumer Protection

Hitler outlawed independent unions, removed safety and work hour regulations, and cracked down on any complaining workers. Plus, real incomes for the workers fell. He was doing what his boss's, the aristocracy and oligarchs of Germany wanted - he was always a creation of the German upper class wanting to take back the little gains that the working class had made.

An excellent book on this "Big Business and Hitler" by Jacques R. Pauwels, you can probably fund one of his talks on youtube as well.

The elites installed Hitler (made the Chancellor by Hindenberg against the wishes of the electorate) after the Nazi vote went down and more voters were moving to the left wing parties - producing a panic within the elites.

Fascism is the tool used by the elites when "liberal democracy" cannot be managed in such a way to provide the required outcomes. Just like in Italy, Spain and Portugal in the same period (also the military dictatorship in Poland). The elites attempted a fascist coup in France in the 1930s but it was defeated, then implemented fascism in Vichy France.

newyorker  |  Johnson & Johnson is one of America’s most trusted companies, and as Berg moved through her cycles of chemotherapy she kept thinking about a slogan for its body powder: “A sprinkle a day helps keep odor away.” For more than thirty years, she had taken that advice, applying the powder between her legs to prevent chafing. But that powder wasn’t like her chemo drugs: their side effects were awful, but they were keeping her alive. The powder felt, instead, like an unnecessary gamble, one she thought other people should be warned about.

Slippery to the touch and soft enough to flake with your fingernail, the mineral talc is found all around the world, in deposits that can be more than a billion years old. Such deposits are sometimes laced with actinolite, anthophyllite, chrysotile, and tremolite. These accessory minerals, better known in their fibrous form as asbestos, grow alongside talc like weeds in a geological garden. As early as 1971, Johnson & Johnson scientists had become aware of reports about asbestos in talc. They and others also worried about a connection between cancer and talc itself, whether or not it contained asbestos. By the time of Berg’s diagnosis, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer had designated talc containing fibrous particles a carcinogen and the genital application of any talc powder possibly carcinogenic. The F.D.A. had safety concerns, too, but its authority over products like baby powder was and remains, in the words of Ann Witt, a former senior official at the agency, “so minimal it’s laughable.”

Johnson & Johnson has always insisted, including to this magazine, that its baby powder is “safe, asbestos-free, and does not cause cancer”; however, a 2016 investigation by Bloomberg and subsequent revelations by Reuters and the New York Times, based in part on documents that surfaced because of discovery in suits like Berg’s, exposed the possible health risk related to its powders. Following those reports, tens of thousands of people filed suits against the company, alleging that its products had caused their cancers. In 2020, after juries awarded some of those plaintiffs damages that collectively exceeded billions of dollars, Johnson & Johnson announced that it would no longer supply the talc-based version of its product to American stores.

And then, quietly, the company embraced a strategy to circumvent juries entirely. Deploying a legal maneuver first used by Koch Industries, Johnson & Johnson, a company valued at nearly half a trillion dollars, with a credit rating higher than that of the United States government, declared bankruptcy. Because of that move, the fate of forty thousand current lawsuits and the possibility of future claims by cancer victims or their survivors now rests with a single bankruptcy judge in the company’s home state, New Jersey. If Johnson & Johnson prevails and, as Berg puts it, “weasels its way out of everything,” the case could usher in a new era in which the government has diminished power to enforce consumer-protection laws, citizens don’t get to make their case before a jury of their peers when those laws fail, and even corporations with long histories of documented harm will get to decide how much, if anything, they owe their victims.

WSJ Attacks The Railway Labor Act As "Semi-Fascist"

WSJ  |  To make life easier for the algorithms that will be coming for our jobs, we in the journalism business apply a template to labor disputes: management is bad, labor is good. Joe Biden molds his administration to simple stereotypes too. He defines himself as the most pro-labor president in history. The favor is not returned, apparently.

In the wee hours of Thursday, after anticipatory ripples of destruction were already spreading through the economy, an all-night effort by the White House barely averted a national rail strike, supposedly. The deal was dubbed “tentative,” but expect the unions to approve it. Leveraging the president for one last squeeze of the fruit, after all, was how they planned it from day one.

Mr. Biden’s skin in the game was real, and not just the risk to the economy and inflation but fear of voters going to the polls in a few weeks believing the country was slipping into 1970s-style chaos. But something else about this episode should also be plain: its nuttiness. The angst was absurdly disproportionate to the dollar value of the employee benefits at issue, which concerned sick days. A national crisis was spawned for no better reason than an 88-year-old legal throwback to a bygone era of (to borrow a recent Bidenism) semi-fascist corporatism, which is the exact flavor of the Railway Labor Act amendments of 1934.

This obsolete law forces big government, big labor and big business into bed in a way that hardly makes sense anymore in a mostly free-market economy. If not for the law’s legacy, a nationwide strike encompassing the whole of the rail transportation system (33 private companies) would be all but unthinkable, much less the industry’s leverage to force the White House to dance to the industry’s exceedingly penny-ante economic disputes.

In the briefest recap, under the antiquated railroad law, a Biden-appointed emergency board had already tried to split the difference between the 12 unions and 33 carriers, recommending a 24% pay hike and $5,000 in bonuses.

But rejecting the deal were the important engineers and conductors, who insisted on trying further to leverage Mr. Biden over something called attendance policy, which the board considered outside the negotiation’s statutory ambit.

Trains can’t run if crews don’t show up, at least until algorithms take over their jobs, which is not at all farfetched.

Brandon Say: "If You Don't Fully Submit To Your Corporatist Masters - You're Semi-Fascist!"

 washingtontimes |  Students of political and philosophical concepts are required to learn the definitions of socialism, democracy, republicanism, fascism — among many others. Libraries are filled with volumes written by thinkers and theorists explaining the origins of those ideologies and movements. And now President Biden has coined a new term we might add to that list: semi-fascism.

In remarks at a Democratic National Committee reception on Aug. 25, Mr. Biden said former President Donald Trump and his loyalists within the Republican Party represent a distinct threat to American democracy, a theme he has repeated while campaigning for Democrats ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

“And what we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just — it’s not just Trump. It’s the entire philosophy that underpins — it’s — I’m going say something — it’s almost like semi-fascism,” the president said. When asked to clarify what he meant, Mr. Biden, rather than define the term, said, “You know what I mean.”

The word “fascism” is everywhere on social media these days. And while some folks may use it as a slur to attack those with whom they disagree, a number of professional scholars have embraced the term to describe what they view as the dangerous rise of right-wing radicalism in American politics.

In this episode of History As It Happens, scholars Jeffrey Bale and Tamir Bar-On argue that it is historically inaccurate and politically dangerous to label Mr. Trump and the Republican Party as fascists. They are the co-authors of “Fighting the Last War: Confusion, Partisanship, and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right.”

“We believe the threat posed by fascism and the radical right in Western countries has been egregiously inflated and exaggerated ever since the end of World War II. If you listen to certain pundits, radical left-wing groups, or the self-appointed watchdog groups… they’re always presenting this image that fascism is on the march. They’re still living in the past like it’s the 1930s,” said Mr. Bale, an expert on violent political and religious extremists at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Whatever one thinks of Mr. Trump and his politics, they do not fit the definition of fascism, said Mr. Bar-On, a political scientist at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico.

“Fascism is spoken about as if we should know what fascism is. There’s a whole body of literature on what constitutes fascism and it goes back to the period when fascists rose to power in the 1920s. At minimum, I would think that if you are a scholar, a journalist or a think tank, you should define what fascism is,” he said.

So what is fascism? What is semi-fascism? Listen to this episode of History As It Happens.

 

 

Corporate Overlords Steady Creeping To Throttle Last Vestiges Of Peasant Dissent

zerohedge  |  A Senate bill is raising fears among some for its potential to enable Big Tech and mainstream media outlets to collude against smaller and independent media outlets.

The bill, dubbed the Journalism Competition and Protection Act (JCPA), would supersede some existing antitrust laws and allow media companies to band together to negotiate with Big Tech platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

Specifically, the JCPA says:

“A news content creator may not be held liable under the antitrust laws for engaging in negotiations with any other news content creator during the 4-year period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act to collectively withhold content from, or negotiate with, an online content distributor regarding the terms on which the news content of the news content creator may be distributed by the online content distributor.”

In brief, this means that online and print media outlets, including some of the largest and longest-established names in the industry, could band together in a kind of media union to demand concessions from tech companies in order for the coalition to continue to allow their content on the platform. Under existing antitrust laws, such cartels—which describe a collusion of firms in an industry to join together for a common financial or industry outcome—are decidedly illegal.

Proponents of the JCPA have presented it as a much-needed panacea to address dwindling numbers of dedicated local media companies who, proponents say, are often left behind in the umbrella of Big Tech algorithms and advertising capacity.

In a change.org petition that has garnered over 23,000 signatures, the News Media Alliance, one of the most outspoken supporters of the bill, explained this position, presenting it as a hardline position against the reach of big tech power and influence.

“Today, many local newspapers are struggling to stay in business. Big Tech platforms, such as Facebook and Google, control how we access trustworthy news online and how journalism is displayed, prioritized, and monetized. They capture the vast majority of all digital advertising dollars because of their outsized ability to collect consumer data.

“Local newspaper revenues have gone down and as a result, thousands of journalists have been laid off, ‘news deserts’ are emerging across the country, and dangerous misinformation that threatens the fabric of our democracy continues to flourish.”

But opponents of the bill have raised alarm bells, warning that in practice the policy will only serve to benefit established legacy and mainstream outlets, to the exclusion of anti-establishment, independent publications.

Specifically, opponents point to a section of an updated draft of the JCPA that could effectively permit legacy media cartels to demand that tech platforms censor or outright refuse to permit newer, less-established media outlets from publishing on the platform.

 

Only The Fiction Of Democracy Remains

scheerpost  |  There is a fatal disconnect between a political system that promises democratic equality and freedom while carrying out socioeconomic injustices that result in grotesque income inequality and political stagnation.

Decades in the making, this disconnect has extinguished American democracy. The steady stripping away of economic and political power was ignored by a hyperventilating press that thundered against the barbarians at the gate — Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, ISIS, Vladimir Putin — while ignoring the barbarians in our midst. The slow-motion coup is over. Corporations and the billionaire class have won. There are no institutions, including the press, an electoral system that is little more than legalized bribery, the imperial presidency, the courts or the penal system, that can be defined as democratic. Only the fiction of democracy remains.

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism calls our system “inverted totalitarianism.” The façade of democratic institutions and the rhetoric, symbols and iconography of state power have not changed. The Constitution remains a sacred document. The U.S. continues to posit itself as a champion of opportunity, freedom, human rights and civil liberties, even as half the country struggles at subsistence level, militarized police gun down and imprison the poor with impunity, and the primary business of the state is war. 

This collective self-delusion masks who we have become — a nation where the citizenry has been stripped of economic and political power and where the brutal militarism we practice overseas is practiced at home.

In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, economics was subordinate to politics. But under inverted totalitarianism, the reverse is true. There is no attempt, unlike fascism and state socialism, to address the needs of the poor. Rather, the poorer and more vulnerable you are, the more you are exploited, thrust into a hellish debt peonage from which there is no escape. Social services, from education to health care, are anemic, nonexistent or privatized to gouge the impoverished. Further ravaged by 8.5 percent inflation, wages have decelerated sharply since 1979. Jobs often do not offer benefits or security.

2 Parties 1 Ideology And Its Enemy Within Strategy

globalresearch |  Maliciously smearing approximately half of the country as existential terrorist-inclined threats to “the soul of the nation” is nothing but the crudest Machiavellian means of dividing and ruling the population.

The Unprecedentedly Dangerous Divider-In-Chief

US President Joe Biden’s nationally televised speech on Thursday that the official White House website headlined as being about “the continued battle for the soul of the nation” saw the incumbent become the most dangerous and divisive American leader in history. Far from trying to cleanse and protect that very same soul, he shamelessly spit on it by pitting his people against one another as part of an obvious divide-and-rule plot ahead of the neck-and-neck midterm elections that are only two months away.

Debunking Biden’s False Belief In Equality & Democracy

The first part that stands out is Biden emphasizing how the location of his speech, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence was made and the Constitution signed, reinforces the mutually complementary concepts of equality and democracy connected with those two documents. He doesn’t truly believe in either of those though as proven by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemning all minority views as “extremist” earlier that same day.

Nevertheless, he pretended that he’s a true believer in them in order to artificially manufacture the basis upon which to contrast himself with former US President Donald Trump. Biden claimed that his predecessor and those who still support his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement supposedly “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” Falsely framing them as existential threats so close to the midterms is obviously aimed at manipulating voters’ perceptions.

Applying The “Rules For Radicals” Against The MAGA Movement

This crude tactic would be condemned by the American Government if it was employed by any Global South leader irrespective of whether it’s baseless like in Biden’s case or genuinely backed up by facts. Biden then channeled the infamous Saul Alinksy’s “Rules For Radicals”, specifically the thirteenth rule to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it”, when claiming that “the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans”.

By adding that “that is a threat to this country”, the incumbent ominously implied that the full authority of the state will be brought down to bear on those who are even simply suspected of being remotely connected to the former president or his movement on faux national security pretexts. He then instantly reverted to gaslighting once again just like he earlier did by unconvincingly claiming that he supports the Founding Fathers’ vision of equality and democracy by contrasting Democrats and MAGA on false bases.

Who Really Employs Political Violence & Election Conspiracy Theories?

The same man who represents the party that frenziedly fanned the flames of the joint Antifa- and BLM-led Hybrid War of Terror on America all throughout summer 2020, whose countless antagonists were manipulated into functioning as “useful idiots” of the anti-MAGA faction of the US “deep state” (permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies), counterfactually claimed that it’s Trump and his supporters who divided the country through the use of violence for political ends.

Biden also insulted Americans’ intelligence by gaslighting that it’s only some MAGA folks who’ve ever rejected the outcome of a presidential election when most Democrats refused to recognize the legitimacy of Trump’s victory in 2016. Not only that, but their anti-MAGA “deep state” puppeteers literally concocted the Russiagate conspiracy theory that they laundered through allied congressional representatives, law enforcement, media, and NGOs to discredit the entirety of his four years in office.

Globo-Fascist Neo-Nazis Strongly Disapprove Of The Old-Fashioned Nationalist Kind...,

FP  |   Modi’s BJP government is also undercutting India’s institutions in unprecedented ways. It has made a mockery of India’s rich tradition of civil liberties by charging activists and dissidents with crimes under colonial-era laws. One egregious example is the case of left-wing activists detained under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for alleged links to Maoist groups and allegedly fomenting riots. One of the accused, lifelong Jesuit activist Rev. Stan Swamy, died in custody last year. Furthermore, Modi and the BJP have co-opted much of the media and important private sector actors. Journalists have faced intimidation and harassment; prominent nongovernmental organizations have been cut off from foreign funding while others can receive overseas money only into accounts with a government-owned bank.

Unfortunately, the most important lessons from the independence movement seem to be lost on India’s contemporary leaders, as shown by their approach to religious pluralism and democratic institutions. Although India’s leading revolutionaries were committed to nonviolence, tensions between Hindus and Muslims marred the independence movement. These tensions pulled the British Raj apart, and two new countries emerged in its place: India and Pakistan. This week also marks the anniversary of the Partition of India, which triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters as Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were forced to flee in different directions across the new border. A few months later, India and Pakistan went to war over the status of Jammu and Kashmir—a disagreement that still plagues the subcontinent.

In the face of these tensions, India and Pakistan’s leaders charted opposing courses. India’s leaders advanced a progressive and modern vision for their new country, eschewing a national Hindu religion in favor of a secular identity. They worked hard to minimize religious tensions by speaking against communal strife and promoting religious protections. When Gandhi was assassinated in 1948—for supposedly being a supplicant to the Muslim community—his political heirs continued to push for a liberal vision of India. Working with the opposition, they produced a constitution that enshrined a liberal and secular democracy that remains in force today.

On the other hand, Pakistan struggled. The country’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, led the Muslim League that split from the Indian National Congress. But he was rarely clear in his vision for Pakistan: There is some evidence that he wanted a secular state, but he also called for an Islamic republic. When Jinnah died in 1948, he left behind a political mess. Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister, rejected amendments offered by the opposition in his own founding document, which became a precursor to the country’s 1956 constitution that gave Islam its pride of place in the project of Pakistan. By turning to communalism, Pakistan has suffered as political actors stir religious tensions to benefit their own ends. Without credible institutions or norms that allow political differences to be resolved, the country has not been able to maintain political order.

Modi’s speech reflects how he and the BJP appear to embrace some of these traits. By lionizing fringe actors from the independence movement—including those who exacerbated religious tensions—they are rewriting history to suit their own political agenda. They have undermined civil liberties and shown basic disregard for political opposition. Taking a page from Jinnah’s book, Modi has ensured that any substantive decision must come through him. Such a system may work in the short term, but what happens when Modi is no longer prime minister?

The contrast with then-Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s epic “A Tryst With Destiny” speech, delivered on Aug. 14, 1947, couldn’t be starker. Nehru said he sought to “bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic, and progressive nation.” Most poignantly, he highlighted that India’s religious pluralism was integral to the newly founded country: “All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India, with equal rights, privileges, and obligations.”

India’s Independence Day has traditionally provided an opportunity to reflect on the horrors of colonialism and the dangers of religious discord while also celebrating the vibrance of the country’s democracy. Modi’s speech this week reflects the departure that India’s contemporary leaders have made from these foundational values.

It's Against The Law For The Government To Violate Your Rights Via Corporate Proxie

Jim Hoft and The Gateway Pu... by Jim Hoft

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Carol Crawford Is The CDC's Censorship And Disinformation Czar

stevekirsch  |  Carol Crawford is the person at the CDC responsible for censoring misinformation spreaders.

In this video, I make a call to her to propose a way to end misinformation.

At the end of the call, I remind her that she is engaging in illegal acts by telling social media companies what content to censor. See page 7 for her message to Twitter showing them what to censor.

Twitter follows orders, even though Carol is breaking the law. They aren’t going to turn her in. On the contrary, they are in on it. This is collusion to censor free speech.

If you’d like to tell her you support my suggestion, you can reach her at ccrawford@cdc.gov.

I’m sure she’d be delighted to hear from you.

You Tube censored my video within minutes of posting

I also uploaded the video on YouTube, but it was censored after just 6 views! YouTube will censor anything that makes the government look bad. So if you document government corruption, YouTube is not the place to post it.

Canadian Military In Ukraine Pursuing A "Great White Reset"

johnhelmer  |   “Freeland is not acting alone,” comments the Canadian source. “She’s tried hard to bring everyone into her project [to succeed to the prime ministry], but she can’t get the neo-Confederates to settle down and wait for the project to come to fruition , with her at helm, of course.  They’re impatient for the Great White Reset; she needs the Galician dream fulfilled… The military is fine with Canadians, including active and retired service members fighting over there. They are not even pitching a fit about Canadian weapons stocks being emptied in order to be sent over there.”

“If you talk to any of them, they all pretty much have the same mentality. Whatever the West, as they define it, says — white, Christian, capitalist, Anglo, pro-US — goes. The can only see themselves, their career advancement, their ideas of what the country is fighting for within that framework. So they are increasingly upset by even the shallowest semblance of ‘multi-culturalism’ as represented in Ottawa by [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and to a degree, Freeland.”

“From what I’ve seen, the evidence of mutiny became apparent when the ‘trucker protest/ freedom convoy’ came up against the government’s activation of the Emergencies Act this winter.  From what I’ve heard, the military chiefs flat-out refused to back [Minister of Public Safety Marco] Mendicino, [Justice Minister and Attorney-General David]  Lametti, and [Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill] Blair, and Freeland, while active and retired  officers openly sided with the  neo-Confederates who were getting support from the US. It seems that the contradiction here is that the officer corps, heavily committed to the anti-Russia track that cuts across Canadian party lines, is heavily politicized and infected by the neo-Confederate faction in the US. They don’t appreciate what they see as Trudeau’s ‘communism’, and believe that the charges against Cadieu are an expression of it.”

“This is deeply concerning as there can be no doubt that these people know, or strongly believe, that they have the full backing of at least some elements of the US security state, not to mention ‘thin blue line’ law enforcement, militia groups, etc. It’s fascism versus fascism.”

 

Eric Schmidt's STENCH Puppeteering Is Behind SO MUCH Of Our Current Imperial Failing

Years worth of subrealistic dot connecting pointing toward Eric Schmidt as the embodiment - if not the author - of very much of the current and quite conspicuous western elite moral, political, technological, and strategic leadership failure.

Corporations Equal Crime Without Criminals...,

counterpunch |   Crimes without criminals was not a subject for study when I was in law school. The two were seen as part of the same illegal package. That was before notorious corporate lawyers and a cash register Congress combined to separate economic, health and safety crimes from corporate accountability, incarceration and deterrence.

Lawlessness is now so rampant that a group of realistic law professors, led by Professor Mihailis E. Diamantis of the University of Iowa Law School, claim there is no corporate criminal law. I say “realistic” because their assertion that corporate criminal law, does not in fact, exist is not widely acknowledged by their peers.

Most Americans know that none of the executives on Wall Street who are responsible for the lies, deception, and phony investments they sold to millions of trusting investors were prosecuted and sent to jail. “They got away with it,” was the common refrain during the 2008-2009 meltdown of Wall Street that took our economy down and into a deep recession that resulted in massive job loss and the looting of savings of tens of millions of Americans.

Not only did the Wall Street Barons escape the Sheriff but they got an obedient Congress, White House and Federal Reserve to guarantee trillions of dollars to bail them out, implicitly warning that the big banks, brokerage firms and other giant financial corporations were simply “too big to fail.” They had the economy by the throat and taxpayer dollars in their pockets. Moreover, Wall Streeters made out like bandits while people on Main Street suffered.

All this and much more made up a rare symposium organized by Professor Diamantis last year at Georgetown Law School. (See: https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/imagining-a-world-without-corporate-criminal-law-symposium/). He wrote that the “economic impact of corporate crime is at least twenty times greater than all other criminal offenses combined,” quoting conservative estimates by the FBI. It’s not just economic, he continued: “Scholars, prosecutors and courts increasingly recognize that brand name corporations also commit a broad range of ‘street crimes’: homicide, arson, drug trafficking, dumping and sex offenses.”

The litany of corporate wrongdoing ranges from polluting the air and drinking water, dumping microplastics that end up inside human beings, promoting lethal opioids that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, providing millions of accounts or products to customers under false pretenses or without consent, often by creating false records or misusing customers’ identities, (Wells Fargo), manufacturing defective motor vehicles, producing contaminated food, allowing software failures resulting in crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX’s with 346 deaths. (See, Why Not Jail? By Rena Steinzor).

People don’t need law professors to see what’s happening to them and their children. People laugh when they hear politicians solemnly declare that “no one is above the law,” extol “the rule of law” and “equal justice under the law.”

By far the greatest toll in preventable fatalities and serious injuries in the U.S. flows from either deliberate, negligent or corner-cutting corporate crime under the direct control and management of CEOs and company presidents, many of whom make over $10,000 an hour over a 40-hour week.

All The Perogatives Of Personhood With No Accountability: More Human Than Human

HuffPost |  In a 1999 memo entitled “Bringing Criminal Charges Against Corporations,” written when he was deputy U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder argued that government officials could take into account “collateral consequences" when prosecuting corporate crimes.

That memo has resurfaced at a time when Holder, now U.S. attorney general, faces increasing criticism for the Department of Justice's reluctance to bring charges against white-collar criminals.

“There’s all kinds of problems with the applications of this policy which began with the Holder memo and got more formalized,” said John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University and an expert in white-collar crime. “You are going to send a message that we don’t really care significantly about misconduct within those institutions.”

Although it brought only a modest change in the way prosecutors evaluate whether to bring criminal charges against corporations, Holder's memo laid the groundwork for subsequent policies that allowed for more leeway when going after large firms, Coffee said.

Adora Andy Jenkins, a Justice Department spokeswoman, wrote in an email to The Huffington Post that under Holder's leadership, "this Justice Department has stood firm in our approach that no person and no corporation is above the law."

In 1999, Holder highlighted the possibility of deferred prosecution -- an arrangement now common in the wake of the financial crisis -- whereby prosecutors essentially give defendants amnesty in exchange for paying a fine, enacting reforms and cooperating with investigators. But later officials published further memos, turning the option into more of a recommendation, Coffee said.

He said the policy was strengthened in response to the Arthur Andersen scandal of the early 2000s. After the government brought criminal charges against the consulting firm, the company failed, causing 28,000 workers -- many of whom likely had no role in any wrongdoing -- to lose their jobs. A court later overturned the charges.

Holder told the Wall Street Journal in 2006 that he drafted the memo in response to complaints that there seemed to be no uniform rules for deciding whether to bring charges in corporate cases.

"[I] didn’t expect these issues would become as big as they were," Holder told the WSJ at the time. Indeed, they've only grown larger in the seven years since that interview, as the financial crisis wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy.

The government has yet to prosecute any big banks or major executives for their role in the meltdown, and critics have derided Holder and his Justice Department for using the collateral damage argument as an excuse for not doing enough to hold those institutions accountable. The DOJ came under fire last year after declining to prosecute HSBC for years of money laundering violations, saying that to do so would bring too much damage to the global economy.

“The government just backed down,” Coffee said of that case. “There were reasons in 2008 to say maybe we shouldn’t indict any bank we can because it will just add to the systemic risk. But we were in 2012 to 2013 with HSBC -- that risk wasn’t there and we weren’t dealing with something that was relating to the activities that produced the 2008 crisis.”

Yet in addition to the HSBC deal, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and others have criticized Holder for statements he made to senators -- and later walked back -- indicating that he thought big banks had gotten too large to prosecute.

Search "Cass Sunstein" Here To Know The Origin Of The Disinformation Governance Board

 twitter  |  Interesting long thread from the Last Refuge

(1) The FBI is the codependent agency for Antifa.
(2) Homeland Security (DHS) is run by U.S. Intel agencies under the umbrella of the ODNI office.
(3) Nina Jankowicz works for U.S. Intelligence.
(4) "Disinformation" is information adverse to the interests of U.S. Intel.

(5) Big tech social media companies operate on joint access databases of the U.S. govt.
(6) As a result of #5, tech data processing costs are essentially subsidized.
(7) FB, Insta, YouTube, MS, Google, and all tech platforms operating on AWS are connected to intel.

(8) Twitter as a private company is adverse to this preestablished relationship.
(9) ODNI office as well as DHS, DOJ and FBI domestically have self-interest in blocking Musk.
(10) Starlink presents problem for pre-established ISP control nodes for internet traffic surveillance.

(11) Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) is well aware of this relationship between U.S. Intel and Social media.
(12) Current network of U.S. surveillance state is authorized by congress through SSCI notification.
(13) National Security shields prevent disclosure.

(14) Current surveillance system has been active for ten full years.
(15) Budget is hidden by using Ominibus and Continued Resolutions.
(16) Retaining opaque budgeting is why Congress stopped using ordinary budgetary processes.
(17) Last federal budget passed Fiscal Year 2008

(18) Expanded data processing and social media user metadata required massive expansion of data library.
(19) Funding for expansion delivered in federal infrastructure spending.
(20) Federal broadband expansion covered expenses for expanded server library and data processing.

(21) U.S. citizen data is all inclusive.
(22) Two-factor authentication sold under auspices of user security, was critical USIC developmental tool.
(23) U.S. Digital Identity database already exists.
(24) Database and geolocation used in J6 investigation is simple example of use.

(25) Current emphasis for future network expansion is facial recognition program to put it all together.
(26) China is approximately 5 years behind U.S. development of surveillance state.
(27) Huawei operation was/is to identify technology behind U.S. system and replicate.

It's Not Just Fauci: Power-Sunstein An AssClown Two-Fer That Doesn't Bode Well....,(REDUX from 3/8/21)

WaPo |  Almost all conversations about roadblocks Trump faces or opposition to his initiatives centered on what was perceived as the media’s biased portrayal of him and his administration, rather than on anything the Democrats were doing.

Republicans and conservatives have grumbled about unfair coverage from the “mainstream media” for decades. But the Trump era has brought us to a new plateau, one where the media has moved from adversarial to oppositional. Many observers, on both right and left, have come to see the media as the leader of the resistance.

If you care about journalism, it’s a disturbing trend. Many in the media would undoubtedly lay much of the blame on Trump’s “fake news” attacks. But peruse the pages or websites of most of our nation’s leading news providers, and it’s easy to understand why such a perception has taken hold, apart from Trump’s claims. 

Former Democratic president Jimmy Carter’s widely reported comments in Maureen Dowd’s recent New York Times column about the media’s coverage of Trump were a welcome acknowledgment of the obvious from someone other than a Trump loyalist. 

“I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” Carter said. “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.” 

Out of curiosity, I checked the Democratic National Committee’s website this week. Some of the headlines were: “Trump abuses role as commander-in-chief in latest lie.” “Tom Perez on Trump’s executive order to sabotage Americans’ health care.” “Trump’s lapdog Pence must return wasted taxpayer dollars.” 

That’s what you would expect from the opposition party. The problem is, headlines accusing Trump of “sabotage,” “lies” and more are not uncommon from our major media outlets. That’s why I was curious whether the DNC was still bothering to employ a press staff when it has been made so redundant.

We're Witnessing the Implementation of Cass Sunstein's Vile Wet Dream...,(REDUX from 11/1/17)

WaPo |  Almost all conversations about roadblocks Trump faces or opposition to his initiatives centered on what was perceived as the media’s biased portrayal of him and his administration, rather than on anything the Democrats were doing.

Republicans and conservatives have grumbled about unfair coverage from the “mainstream media” for decades. But the Trump era has brought us to a new plateau, one where the media has moved from adversarial to oppositional. Many observers, on both right and left, have come to see the media as the leader of the resistance.

If you care about journalism, it’s a disturbing trend. Many in the media would undoubtedly lay much of the blame on Trump’s “fake news” attacks. But peruse the pages or websites of most of our nation’s leading news providers, and it’s easy to understand why such a perception has taken hold, apart from Trump’s claims. 

Former Democratic president Jimmy Carter’s widely reported comments in Maureen Dowd’s recent New York Times column about the media’s coverage of Trump were a welcome acknowledgment of the obvious from someone other than a Trump loyalist. 

“I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” Carter said. “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.” 

Out of curiosity, I checked the Democratic National Committee’s website this week. Some of the headlines were: “Trump abuses role as commander-in-chief in latest lie.” “Tom Perez on Trump’s executive order to sabotage Americans’ health care.” “Trump’s lapdog Pence must return wasted taxpayer dollars.” 

That’s what you would expect from the opposition party. The problem is, headlines accusing Trump of “sabotage,” “lies” and more are not uncommon from our major media outlets. That’s why I was curious whether the DNC was still bothering to employ a press staff when it has been made so redundant.

Rule Of Law: Elite, Establishment Politics, Psyops, And Livestock Management Methods (REDUX from 5/13/15)

Kahneman |  Another scholar and friend whom I greatly admire, Cass Sunstein, disagrees sharply with Slovic’s stance on the different views of experts and citizens, and defends the role of experts as a bulwark against “populist” excesses. Sunstein is one of the foremost legal scholars in the United States, and shares with other leaders of his profession the attribute of intellectual fearlessness. He knows he can master any body of knowledge quickly and thoroughly, and he has mastered many, including both the psychology of judgment and choice and issues of regulation and risk policy. His view is that the existing system of regulation in the United States displays a very poor setting of priorities, which reflects reaction to public pressures more than careful objective analysis. He starts from the position that risk regulation and government intervention to reduce risks should be guided by rational weighting of costs and benefits, and that the natural units for this analysis are the number of lives saved (or perhaps the number of life-years saved, which gives more weight to saving the young) and the dollar cost to the economy. Poor regulation is wasteful of lives and money, both of which can be measured objectively. Sunstein has not been persuaded by Slovic’s argument that risk and its measurement is subjective. Many aspects of risk assessment are debatable, but he has faith in the objectivity that may be achieved by science, expertise, and careful deliberation.

Sunstein came to believe that biased reactions to risks are an important source of erratic and misplaced priorities in public policy. Lawmakers and regulators may be overly responsive to the irrational concerns of citizens, both because of political sensitivity and because they are prone to the same cognitive biases as other citizens.

Sunstein and a collaborator, the jurist Timur Kuran, invented a name for the mechanism through which biases flow into policy: the availability cascade. They comment that in the social context, “all heuristics are equal, but availability is more equal than the others.” They have in mind an expanded notion of the heuristic, in which availability provides a heuristic for judgments other than frequency. In particular, the importance of an idea is often judged by the fluency (and emotional charge) with which that idea comes to mind.

An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by “availability entrepreneurs,” individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines. Scientists and others who try to dampen the increasing fear and revulsion attract little attention, most of it hostile: anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a “heinous cover-up.” The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone’s mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment. The availability cascade has now reset priorities. Other risks, and other ways that resources could be applied for the public good, all have faded into the background.

Nina Jankowicz Designated "Minister Of Truth" In Preparation For World War III

jonathanturley  |  Many politicians and pundits are in full panic over Elon Musk’s threat to restore free speech values to Twitter.  While Hillary Clinton has called upon Europeans to step in to maintain such censorship and Barack Obama has called for U.S. regulations, the Biden Administration has created a new Disinformation Governance Board in the Department of Homeland Security. It appointed an executive director, Nina Jankowicz, who is literally pitch perfect as an advocate for both corporate and state censorship.

I don't know the exact percentage but I know the vast majority of self-proclaimed "anti-disinformation" agents peddled:

-- The Steele Dossier
-- The fairy tale that Russia seized control of the US with blackmail
-- The CIA fabrication of "Russian bounties" in Afghanistan.

This: pic.twitter.com/EehxRCQCkE

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 29, 2022

It would have been hard to come up with a more Orwellian name short of the Ministry of Truth. However, the DGB needed a true believer to carry out the monitoring of political speech in the United States. It found that person in Jankowicz, who has long been an outspoken anti-free speech advocate.

Jankowicz was selected by the Biden Administration after years of pushing disinformation on the left while calling for censorship of the right.

Jankowicz previously argued that Congress should create new laws to block mockery of women online by reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and including “provisions against online gender-based harassment.”

Jankowicz testified before British House of Parliament last year about “gender misinformation” being a “national security concern” and a threat to democracy requiring government censorship.

She has demanded that both tech companies and government should work together using “creativity and technological prowess to make a pariah of online misogyny.”

On the Hunter Biden laptop, Jankowicz pushed the false narrative that it was a false story and that “we should view it as a Trump campaign product.” She continued to spread that disinformation, including tweeting a link to a news article that she said cast “yet more doubt on the provenance of the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story.” In another tweet, she added “not to mention that the emails don’t need to be altered to be part of an influence campaign. Voters deserve that context, not a [fairy] tale about a laptop repair shop.”

She even cites the author of the Steele Dossier as a guide for how to deal with disinformation. In August 2020, Jankowicz tweeted “Listened to this last night – Chris Steele (yes THAT Chris Steele) provides some great historical context about the evolution of disinfo. Worth a listen.”

She also joined the panic over the Musk threat to reintroduce free speech values to Twitter. In an interview on NPR, she stated “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities.”

 

The RMVP Couldn't Hold A Candle To This Disinformation Governance Board

wikipedia  |  The Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda; RMVP), also known simply as the Ministry of Propaganda (Propagandaministerium), was responsible for controlling the content of the press, literature, visual arts, film, theater, music and radio in Nazi Germany.

The ministry was created as the central institution of Nazi propaganda shortly after the party's national seizure of power in January 1933. In the Hitler cabinet it was headed by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who exercised control over all German mass media and creative artists through his ministry and the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), which was established in the fall of 1933. 

Shortly after the March 1933 Reichstag elections, Adolf Hitler presented his cabinet with a draft resolution to establish the ministry. Despite the skepticism of some non-National Socialist ministers, Hitler pushed the resolution through.^[1] On 13 March 1933 Reich President Paul von Hindenburg issued a decree ordering the establishment of a Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.^[2] It is important to note that at the time the German word ‘Propaganda’ was value neutral. In today's terms, the ministry could be understood to have had a name that meant roughly ‘ministry for culture, media and public relations’.^[3]

The ministry moved into the 18th-century Ordenspalais building across from the Reich Chancellery in Berlin,^[4] then used by the United Press Department of the Reich Government (Vereinigten Presseabteilung der Reichsregierung). It had been responsible for coordinating the Weimar Republic’s official press releases but by then had been incorporated into the Nazi state. On 25 March 1933 Goebbels explained the future function of the Ministry of Propaganda to broadcasting company directors: "The Ministry has the task of carrying out an intellectual mobilization in Germany. In the field of the spirit it is thus the same as the Ministry of Defense in the field of security. [...] Spiritual mobilization [is] just as necessary, perhaps even more necessary, than making the people materially able to defend themselves."^[5]

The ministry was tailored for Joseph Goebbels, who had been the Reich propaganda leader of the Nazi Party since April 1930. By a decree of 30 June 1933, numerous functions of other ministries were transferred under the responsibility of the new ministry. The role of the new ministry was to centralise Nazi control of all aspects of German cultural, mass media and intellectual life for the country.^[4][6]