On This Day 90 Years Ago - FDR Demonstrated American People Centric Leadership

History  |  On March 12, 1933, eight days after his inauguration, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gives his first national radio address—or “fireside chat”—broadcast directly from the White House.

Roosevelt began that first address simply: “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.” He went on to explain his recent decision to close the nation’s banks in order to stop a surge in mass withdrawals by panicked investors worried about possible bank failures. The banks would be reopening the next day, Roosevelt said, and he thanked the public for their “fortitude and good temper” during the “banking holiday.”

READ MORE: How FDR's 'Fireside Chats' Helped Calm a Nation in Crisis

At the time, the U.S. was at the lowest point of the Great Depression, with between 25 and 33 percent of the workforce unemployed. The nation was worried, and Roosevelt’s address was designed to ease fears and to inspire confidence in his leadership. Roosevelt went on to deliver 30 more of these broadcasts between March 1933 and June 1944. They reached an astonishing number of American households, 90 percent of which owned a radio at the time.

Journalist Robert Trout coined the phrase “fireside chat” to describe Roosevelt’s radio addresses, invoking an image of the president sitting by a fire in a living room, speaking earnestly to the American people about his hopes and dreams for the nation. In fact, Roosevelt took great care to make sure each address was accessible and understandable to ordinary Americans, regardless of their level of education. He used simple vocabulary and relied on folksy anecdotes or analogies to explain the often complex issues facing the country.

Over the course of his historic 12-year presidency, Roosevelt used the chats to build popular support for his groundbreaking New Deal policies, in the face of stiff opposition from big business and other groups. After World War II began, he used them to explain his administration’s wartime policies to the American people. The success of Roosevelt’s chats was evident not only in his victory in three elections, but also in the millions of letters that flooded the White House. Farmers, business owners, men, women, rich, poor—most of them expressed the feeling that the president had entered their home and spoken directly to them. In an era when presidents had previously communicated with their citizens almost exclusively through spokespeople and journalists, it was an unprecedented step.

What Un-Parasitized People-Centric Leadership Can Do

gzeromedia  |  With so many other international stories dominating the news these days – Russia’s war in Ukraine, US-China tensions, Iran’s nuclear program, etc. – it’s easy to lose track of more positive stories. And when it comes to Mexico, the headlines suggest the country is struggling.

And I could write that story too. In most media, today’s Mexico conjures images of violent drug cartels and other organized crime groups, trouble at the US border, or large-scale protests led by an opposition that accuses the country’s president of a power grab that threatens democracy.

Mexico has its share of problems. But today, I want to give you three reasons for optimism that, politically and economically, Mexico is strong and getting stronger.

The China substitute

First, Mexico’s economic success remains closely tied to economic growth in the United States. (In 2022, Mexico’s total trade with the state of Texas was five times higher than its total trade with all of Latin America.) Over the years, that’s been a mixed blessing. When the US economy weakens, Mexico’s export revenue takes a hit. There are fewer remittances flowing south from Mexicans working in the United States. There are few American tourists pumping dollars into Mexican cities, towns, and businesses.

But over the decades, the US economy has remained strong and is currently running hot. Even with high inflation and rising interest rates, the US job market is strong, consumers are spending, and pandemic-weary tourists are traveling.

Mexico’s exports are surging. The country’s consumer confidence is close to its highest point in a generation. Add the reality is that the war in Ukraine has put strong upward pressure on global energy prices, boosting Mexico’s oil revenue. As the war grinds on, that advantage is likely to continue.

But the factor that matters most for coming years is souring US sentiment on relations with China. The Biden administration, both Democratic and Republican members of Congress, and many US governors are pushing for a significant national security and strategic decoupling from China and Chinese companies. US businesses are increasingly less confident they can navigate complicated US-China politics, abrupt changes inside China like the 180-degree turn on COVID policy, and other factors to continue to do profitable business in China.

Who benefits? Mexico. Particularly as “nearshoring” becomes a much more familiar word for many Americans. Nearshoring is the practice of shifting investment in manufacturing, production, and business operations closer to home to avoid the problems that come with both political risk and dangerously long supply chains.

Mexico already has the world’s 15th largest economy. While China, much of Europe, and Japan are aging, Mexico also has excellent demographics. Its population tops 130 million; its median age is 29.

A cost-conscious populist

Then there’s the country’s president. Andrés Manuel López Obrador has his fans and his detractors. But overall, he’s remarkably popular. After four years in office, his approval rating stands at 63%. How has he accomplished that? Mexico’s chief executive has crisscrossed the country by car and commercial airlines, visiting people and places, particularly in southern states, where national politicians are rarely seen.

But, talented populist though he is, he hasn’t bought support by launching a state spending spree. Even after the pandemic, Mexico’s debt-to-GDP ratio still stands at a healthy 50%, because the leftist López Obrador, aka AMLO, has confounded critics by both expanding the country’s tax base and keeping government spending in check.

Nor does Mexico’s president face the problem of balancing relations with multiple other countries. AMLO understands that his country’s giant neighbor is its primary source of both opportunities and challenges, and he’s invested in pragmatic relations with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His economic ambitions center on strengthening and expanding the USMCA trade agreement (NAFTA 2.0) rather than on hedging bets on Europe and Asia.

Strong institutions

The one area where AMLO is picking a fight that won’t help Mexico is on the question of judicial oversight of government. At the moment, he’s going after Mexico’s National Electoral Institute, which administers elections, by trying to cut 80% of its funding. This plan has filled Mexico City streets with hundreds of thousands of angry protesters, who warn that if he succeeds, AMLO would undermine Mexico’s ability to hold free and fair elections.

But the president isn’t going to succeed. The country’s Supreme Court is going to rule against him, and though AMLO can (and probably will) call on his own protesters to block traffic, Mexico’s governing institutions are plenty strong enough to keep the country moving forward.

In fact, that’s the lesson from Mexico’s presidential election of 2006, which AMLO lost by the smallest of margins and then rallied his supporters to occupy the center of Mexico’s capital for many weeks. But as I wrote in September 2006, the country’s political institutions absorbed that shock with no great difficulty. Politics continued. The currency remained stable. The economy moved forward.

AMLO has continued to wage war on a political elite he believes is plagued with corruption and cost him victory 17 years ago. But now, as then, Mexico is politically mature enough to handle challenges even larger than we now see in the president’s standoff with courts.

Finally, AMLO has given no indication he wants to remove presidential term limits from the country’s constitution, and unlike former US President Donald Trump and Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, he and his party are genuinely popular and have no need to contest the next election outcome with violence. And all of AMLO’s likely successors agree with the merits of nearshoring and deeper integration with the US, reinforcing the country’s long-term economic stability.

Make no mistake: Mexico will continue to face major challenges in the years ahead. Mexico must continue to develop its infrastructure, energy, and water supplies to fully benefit from nearshoring opportunities. Crime, corruption, and the need to manage shifting US border politics will remain formidable obstacles to progress. But advantages both external and internal provide a solid foundation for progress.

Everywhere You Look U.S. Foreigner Policy Infested By Name-Stealers....,

theatlantic |   “In the past two years, democracies have become stronger, not weaker. Autocracies have grown weaker, not stronger.” So President Joe Biden declared in his 2023 State of the Union address. His proud words fall short of the truth in at least one place. Unfortunately, that place is right next door: Mexico.

Mexico’s erratic and authoritarian president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is scheming to end the country’s quarter-century commitment to multiparty liberal democracy. He is subverting the institutions that have upheld Mexico’s democratic achievement—above all, the country’s admired and independent elections system. On López Obrador’s present trajectory, the Mexican federal elections scheduled for the summer of 2024 may be less than free and far from fair.

Mexico is already bloodied by disorder and violence. The country records more than 30,000 homicides a year, which is about triple the murder rate of the United States. Of those homicides, only about 2 percent are effectively prosecuted, according to a recent report from the Brookings Institution (in the U.S., roughly half of all murder cases are solved).

Americans talk a lot about “the border,” as if to wall themselves off from events on the other side. But Mexico and the United States are joined by geography and demography. People, products, and capital flow back and forth on a huge scale, in ways both legal and clandestine. Mexico exports car and machine parts at prices that keep North American manufacturing competitive. It also sends over people who build American homes, grow American food, and drive American trucks. America, in turn, exports farm products, finished goods, technology, and entertainment.

Each country also shares its troubles with the other. Drugs flow north because Americans buy them. Guns flow south because Americans sell them. If López Obrador succeeds in manipulating the next elections in his party’s favor, he will do more damage to the legitimacy of the Mexican government and open even more space for criminal cartels to assert their power.

We are already getting glimpses of what such a future might look like. Days before President Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrived in Mexico City for a trilateral summit with López Obrador in early January, cartel criminals assaulted the Culiacán airport, one of the 10 largest in Mexico. They opened fire on military and civilian planes, some still in the air. Bullets pierced a civilian plane, wounding a passenger. The criminals also attacked targets in the city of Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa.

By the end of the day, a total of 10 soldiers were dead, along with 19 suspected cartel members. Another 52 police and soldiers were wounded, as were an undetermined number of civilians.

The violence was sparked when, earlier in the day, Mexican troops had arrested one of Mexico’s most-wanted men, Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of the notorious cartel boss known as “El Chapo.” The criminals apparently hoped that by shutting down the airport, they could prevent the authorities from flying Guzmán López out of the state—and ultimately causing him to face a U.S. arrest warrant.

The criminals failed. But the point is: They dared to try. If the Mexican state decays further, the criminals will dare more.

WaPo Breathless About 550 Americans Missing In Mexico

WaPo  |  Lisa Torres was glued to her phone, watching news reports on the kidnapping last week of four Americans in the Mexican city of Matamoros. She lived in the Houston suburbs, hundreds of miles away, but knew well the pain of having a relative snatched on the other side of the border. Her son, Robert, was just 21 when he vanished in 2017.

As Torres flicked through social media posts describing the Biden administration’s rapid response to the abductions, she grew increasingly upset. Finally, after the Americans were found on Tuesday — two alive, two dead — she took to Twitter.

“I’m so angry I couldn’t sleep, thinking about how my U.S. government acted in Matamoros with the kidnappings,” she wrote in Spanish. What happened to the Americans was sad, she wrote. But at least they were recovered. “This only confirms that my U.S. government can help, and they didn’t, in the case of my son. WHY?”

More than 550 Americans are reported as missing in Mexico, a little-known facet of a broader tragedy that has honeycombed this country with mass graves. Soaring violence and government dysfunction have fueled a crisis that’s left at least 112,150 people missing, according to government records here.

Americans make up a small part of that ghastly toll. And they are a tiny percentage of the millions of U.S. citizens who travel to Mexico every year for tourism, work and family visits. But just as there’s been an uproar in Mexico over the government’s all-out effort to find the four Americans, compared with its far more limited search for its own abducted citizens, relatives of the Americans still missing are asking why their loved ones haven’t been a higher priority for Washington.

Mexico's Gulf Cartel delivers 'kidnappers' — and an apology

“We see that when the U.S. government makes strong statements, there are results,” said Geovanni Barrios, a lawyer whose 17-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, was abducted in the border city of Reynosa in 2008. “But there aren’t only four Americans disappeared in Mexico. We don’t see [the U.S. government] making these statements about the hundreds of other missing Americans.”

The kidnappings on March 3 in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Tex., drew attention in part because a passerby recorded men in bulletproof vests dragging three of the victims into a truck a few blocks from the Rio Grande in broad daylight. The video quickly went viral, and the abductions were swept up in a turbocharged American political debate. Lawmakers in Washington were already expressing alarm about Mexican cartels’ exports of fentanyl, which accounts for two-thirds of overdose deaths in the United States. Some Republicans have called for military strikes on the armed gangs.

 

Nice Little Country You've Got There AMLO, Shame If Something Happened To It....,

NC  |  “We will not allow any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less with armed forces,” AMLO told US neocons. 

Relations between US and Mexican lawmakers plumbed new lows this week, as a coterie of Republican senators, congressmen and a former attorney general called for direct US military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels. They included Lindsey Graham, who has lent his support to every single US military intervention and regime change operation since becoming senator in 2003. Together with John McCain, he helped lay some of the ground work for the NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, famously telling Ukrainian soldiers: “your fight is our fight”.

Setting the Stage for US Military Intervention

Now, Graham wants to introduce legislation to “set the stage” for U.S. military force in Mexico, saying it is time to “get tough” on the southern neighbour’s drug cartels and prevent them from bringing fentanyl across the border. The senator’s intervention came just days after four US citizens were kidnapped in the northern Mexican city of Matamoros, two of whom were killed. It is not yet clear why the kidnapping took place, but all four of the victims had lengthy rap sheets, including for drug offences. Whether that has any bearing on the crime has not been confirmed.

Graham added he would “introduce legislation to make certain Mexican drug cartels foreign terrorist organizations under U.S. law and set the stage to use military force if necessary.” Graham escalated tensions on Thursday by describing Mexico as a “narcostate”. His  words elicited a furious response from Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (AMLO for short), who said (translated by yours truly):

Once and for all, let’s set our position straight. We will not allow any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less with armed forces. And from today we will begin an information campaign for Mexicans and Hispanics that live and work in the United States to inform them of what we are doing in Mexico and how this initiative of the Republicans, besides being irresponsible, is an insult to the Mexican people and a lack of respect to our independence and sovereignty. And if they do not change their attitude and continue using Mexico for electoral propaganda… we are going to recommend not voting for this party.

This would be no small matter, given that 34.5 million Hispanic Americans were eligible to vote in 2022’s mid-terms, making Latinos the fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the U.S. electorate. According to Pew Research, the number of Hispanic eligible voters increased by 4.7 million between 2018 and 2022, accounting for 62% of the total growth in U.S. eligible voters during that time. And AMLO has significant influence over this demographic. But that is unlikely to have much of an effect on the Republican neocons pushing for direct US intervention against Mexican drug cartels.

They include, all too predictably, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Also on board are Reps. Dan Crenshaw and Stephen Walts, who in January presented a joint resolution in Congress seeking authorisation for the “use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for trafficking fentanyl or a fentanyl-related substance into the United States or carrying out other related activities that cause regional destabilization in the Western Hemisphere.”

Mexico’s “Narco-Terrorists”

Also along for the ride is former Attorney General (under both George HW Bush and Donald Trump), whom the late New York Times columnist William Safire used to refer to as “Coverup-General Barr” for his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s role in “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra.” In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Barr likened Mexico’s “narco-terrorists” to Isis and calls Reps. Crenshaw and Waltz’s joint resolution a “necessary step”:

What will it take to defeat the Mexican cartels? First, a far more aggressive American effort inside Mexico than ever before, including a significant U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence presence, as well as select military capabilities. Optimally, the Mexican government will support and participate in this effort, and it is likely to do so once they understand that the U.S. is committed to do whatever is necessary to cripple the cartels, whether or not the Mexican government participates.

Barr called AMLO the cartel’s “chief enabler” for refusing to wage war against the cartels with quite the same zeal as his predecessors:

“In reality, AMLO is unwilling to take action that would seriously challenge the cartels. He shields them by consistently invoking Mexico’s sovereignty to block the U.S. from taking effective action.”

Bizarrely, Barr makes this claim even as the US and Mexico are quietly intensifying their military cooperation. As the investigative journalism website Contralinea reports, one of the millions of documents leaked in a massive cyberattack on the Mexican Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena), in October revealed the extent to which the US and Mexican armed forces are deepening their collaboration on “shared security challenges” such as combating organised crime, arms, drugs and people trafficking.

According to the leaked GANSEG document, the objective going forward of the Armed Forces of Mexico and the United States is to interact (emphasis my own) “closely, efficiently and in an orderly manner to strengthen bilateral military cooperation in matters of protection and regional security, evaluating existing bilateral mechanisms in order to work with a common strategic vision.”

The tactical-strategic bilateral military cooperation framework will also involve trilateral meetings between the defence ministers of Mexico, the United States and Canada. But that apparently isn’t enough for certain Republican neocons, who want the US government and military to take matters into their own hands.

While the growing influence of Mexico’s drug cartels is clearly a matter of vital import, not just for Mexico and the US but for the entire American continent, direct, overt US intervention on Mexican soil will make things a darn sight worse. If US citizens are worried about migrants amassing at the border, just wait until the US army begins ramping up the chaos and bloodshed in Mexico.

Also, conspicuously (albeit not surprisingly) absent from the debate in Washington is the central role US arms manufacturers and dealers play in facilitating a large part of the drugs-related violence on both sides of the border. Nor, of course, is their any reckoning with the now-indisputable failure of the US War on Drugs in stemming the flow of narcotics to the US. Even the NY Times recently ran an op-ed declaring that the global war on drugs had been a “staggering failure”.

Mexican Cartel Apologizes For Taking And Killing American Hostages

 

RT  |  A faction of the drug-trafficking Gulf Cartel on Thursday apologized for what they called a rogue operation, which resulted in the deaths of one Mexican and two US citizens near the city of Matamoros. Mexican police found five handcuffed men in a vehicle, along with a note explaining the situation.

“We have decided to turn over those who were directly involved and responsible in the events, who at all times acted under their own decision-making and lack of discipline,” said the note, provided to media by a police source in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The five men broke the cartel’s rules, which included “respecting the life and well-being of the innocent,” it added.

The letter was signed by the ‘Scorpions’ cartel faction, which controls drug distribution in Matamoros, right across the Rio Grande from the US state of Texas.

Four Americans who traveled to Matamoros last Friday were taken captive by the cartel, after a firefight that killed a local woman. They were identified as Latavia McGee, Zindell Brown, Eric Williams, and Shaeed Woodard. Another woman, Cheryl Orange, was denied entry because she did not have the proper documents, according to local media reports.

Orange told AP that the group traveled from South Carolina to Mexico so that McGee could have a “tummy tuck” cosmetic surgery procedure. However the Daily Mail reported on Thursday that the four who entered Mexico had a history of drug charges. 

When Tamaulipas authorities tracked them down on Tuesday morning, in the nearby town of El Tecolote, Brown and Woodard were dead, McGee was “barefoot and covered in dirt,” while Williams had a gunshot wound in the left leg. 

Police arrested a 24-year-old Mexican they say was guarding the prisoners. He was identified only as “Jose N.”

Tamaulipas Attorney General Irving Barrios thanked the public for sharing the images of the abduction online, saying that they helped with the investigation. He added that the authorities initially did not know the victims were Americans, but reached out to the US once they identified the license plates on their minivan.

Is There A Psy-Op Underway To Turn American Sentiment Against Mexico?

CTH  |  Shellenberger, appears on Tucker Carlson tonight to discuss how in the big picture the U.S. government is conducting psychological warfare against domestic citizens through the auspices of Twitter and likely other social media platforms. He’s not wrong, we’ve been calling it out in real time.

Semi-related.  You might remember for several months CTH has been outlining the state of the issues between the United States and Mexico regarding energy policy.  Within the dynamic I have said repeatedly to “watch Mexico” through the prism of: what would the USIC, specifically in this instance the CIA, do to turn American sentiment against Mexico?

Remember me repeatedly saying that?  Within those questions, and from that baseline, you will discover why I have not been writing about a Mexican cartel kidnapping four American hostages, killing two.

CCTV video drives home the point of danger in Mexico.

Yes, Mexico is dangerous.  Yes, drug cartels run a great deal of Mexico including significant control of the Mexican government, military and police.  Yes, the cartels are bad people, and they commit horrible atrocities.

Yes, this well-known history of violence also provides a convenient cover for a U.S. intel operation…. if the U.S. government (CIA) was so inclined.

Unfortunately, in the current state of U.S. politics, one cannot rule out completely the latest story of Mexican kidnapping as a possible U.S. intelligence operation.

Would the U.S. government do, participate in, or stimulate to an outcome, something that horrific just because they were positioning an anti-Mexico narrative as a baseline for U.S. policy toward the Mexican government?

The well publicized CCTV video of the event certainly helped drive a point home.  Can you rule out the CIA involvement?

Making tinfoil matters worse, I previously emphasized, “The U.S. and Canada are going to push every possible political pressure point in order to force Mexico to change energy policy.  The stakes are high. It is going to be remarkable to watch what happens as this battle takes place. Watch Mexico in 2023.” {LINK}  A few weeks later, with more data assembled, I added, “I’m not talking about little threats, or ordinary economic pressure points; watch closely how the U.S threats are established.  The ideologues around Joe Biden will seek to destroy AMLO if he does not go along with the energy change effort. {LINK}

Within these psychological operations, one must always assess exactly where our feeling of outrage is coming from.

 

Journalists Lock Horns With State Sponsored Thought Police In Congress

zerohedge  |  As one might expect, the Judiciary hearing on the "weaponization" of federal agencies, featuring Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger as witnesses was full of fireworks, facts, and ad hominem friction.

Out of the gate, Ranking Member Democratic Del. Stacey E. Plaskett labeled the two "so-called journalists" as dangerous and a "threat" to former Twitter employees.

She claimed that Republicans brought "two of Elon Musk's ‘public scribes'" in "to release cherry-picked out-of-context emails and screenshots designed to promote his chosen narrative - Elon Musk’s chosen narrative - that is now being parroted by the Republicans" for political gain.

“I’m not exaggerating when I say you have called two witnesses who pose a direct threat to people who oppose them,” Plaskett said after the video.

Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, had a simple response to her accusations:

“It’s crazy what you were just saying.”

“You don’t want people to see what happened,” Jordan continued.

“The full video, transparency. You don’t want that, and you don’t want two journalists who have been named personally by the Biden administration, the FTC in a letter. They say they’re here to help and tell their story, and frankly, I think they’re brave individuals for being willing to come after being named in a letter from the Biden FTC.”

Taibbi snapped back...

As Glenn Greenwald chimed in from Twitter: "To Democrats, "journalist" means: one who mindlessly and loyally endorses DNC talking points. "

Unshaken, Matt Taibbi continued, when he was allowed to respond, laid out what he and Shellenberger had found in their research of The Twitter Files:

“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere,” Taibbi said.

“What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”

Taibbi pointedly added that “effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system."

“It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.”

Democrats only response to Taibbi and Shellenberger's facts was to get personal...

The full hearing can be viewed below:

As we detailed earlier, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger are testifying before the House Judiciary Committee's Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government today. Both journalists were involved in the 'Twitter Files' disclosures, in which we learned that the government was directly involved in censoring disfavorable speech.

"Our findings are shocking," writes Shellenberger at his blog. "A highly-organized network of U.S. government agencies and government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, often without them knowing it."

Ahead of the appearance, Taibbi released his prepared remarks. He also dropped a new and related Twitter Files mega-thread on 'THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX' which will be submitted to the Congressional record which, according to Taibbi, 'contains some surprises.'

How Synthetic Sexual Identities Got Fast Tracked Through American Institutions

nationalreview |  What campaigners mean by “trans rights” is gender self-identification: that trans people be treated in every circumstance as members of the sex they identify with, rather than the sex they actually are.

This is not a human right at all. It is a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single-sex spaces, services, and activities. And in its requirement that everyone else accept trans people’s subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws.

Even as one country after another introduces gender self-ID, very few voters know that this is happening, let alone support it.

In 2018 research by Populus, an independent pollster, crowdfunded by British feminists, found that only 15 percent of British adults agreed that legal sex change should be possible without a doctor’s sign-off. A majority classified a “person who was born male and has male genitalia but who identifies as a woman” as a man, and only tiny minorities said that such people should be allowed into women’s sports or changing rooms, or be incarcerated in a women’s prison if they committed a crime.

Two years later, YouGov found that half of British voters thought people should be “able to self-identify as a different gender to the one they were born in.” But two-thirds said legal sex change should only be possible with a doctor’s sign-off, with just 15 percent saying no sign-off should be needed. In other words, there is widespread support for people describing themselves as they wish, but not much for granting such self-descriptions legal status. The same poll also asked whether transwomen should be allowed in women’s sports and changing rooms, sometimes with a reminder that transwomen may have had no genital surgery, and sometimes without. The share saying yes was 20 percentage points lower with the reminder than without — again demonstrating widespread confusion about what being trans means, and that support for trans people does not imply support for self-declaration overriding reality.

A poll in Scotland in 2020 suggests that even young women, the demographic keenest on gender self-ID, become cooler when reminded of the practical implications. A slight majority of women aged 16 to 34 selected “anyone who says they’re a woman, regardless of their biology” as closer than “an adult human female, with XX chromosomes and female genitalia” to their conception of what the word “woman” means. (Young men were much less keen on the self-ID definition, though keener than older men. Overall, 72 percent of respondents chose the biological definition.) But that 52 percent share fell to 38 percent answering “yes” to: “Do you think someone who identifies as a woman, but was born male, and still has male genitalia, should be allowed to use female changing rooms where women and girls are undressing/showering, even if those women object?”

This pattern of broad sympathy for trans-identified people combined with opposition to the practical consequences of gender self-ID also holds in the U.S. In 2020, public-opinion polling in ten swing states found that at least three-quarters of likely voters — including a majority of registered Democrats — opposed allowing male people to compete in female sports. Proposals to ban puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors also polled extremely well. Two more polls the same year, one in California shortly before state laws changed to grant male convicts who identified as women the right to be held in women’s prisons, and one in Idaho to gauge support for the state legislature’s efforts to keep males out of women’s sports, found large majorities supporting separation by sex rather than gender identity.

Gender self-ID does not even play well with left-leaning voters. In early 2020, Eric Kaufmann, a politics professor, gave a random sample of likely British voters some text about a “trans rights” pledge signed by all but one of the candidates for the Labour Party leadership. It described women’s groups campaigning to maintain sex-based rights as “trans exclusionist hate groups,” and said Labour members supporting them should be expelled. The share who said they were likely to vote Labour at the next election was ten percentage points lower than in a control group who read nothing. Progressive campaigners have used “taboos around minority sensitivity to amplify their influence,” Kaufmann concluded, enabling them to “advance unpopular platforms that both weaken the Left and contribute to cultural polarisation.”

Making Snow Black: When We Act - We Create Our Own Reality

strategic-culture |  The infamous Carl Rove (we shall not bother with an explanatory note, whoever remembers this cowboy and is still interested may look him up) twenty and some years ago articulated the gist of the empire’s swaggering ideology:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Students of “empire” must wonder indeed how this foolish man, if he is still around, would now comment his erstwhile utterance. The empire in whose name Rove arrogantly spoke a quarter of a century ago lies in shambles; its reality-producing powers seem notably diminished. If the pretentious nincompoop Rove had any notion of history, he would probably acknowledge that the lifespan of his empire had been even shorter than Assyria’s, its ephemeral prototype from antiquity.

The crude vulgarity of Rove’s boasting should not, however, obscure the fact that a similar disdain for reality was articulated before him by Lord Bertrand Russell, by any measure a genuinely substantial figure. In his 1953 treatise “The Impact of Science on Society,” the sophisticated intellectual Russell wrote up a much more polished and cynical version of Rove’s plebeian ranting:

“The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of schoolchildren on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black” (Page 33).

The effort to invert reality and produce just such an unshakable conviction is in full operation in the terminally sick community of nations Dostoevsky charitably referred to as “the precious graveyard,” now known also as the Collective West.

The West’s newest ideological fad is reality inversion. Another way of putting it is that the most compelling expression of fealty to the West’s values consists of vociferously denying the evidence of one’s senses.

Proof abounds. The dogma propagated in February of this year at an “educational” workshop sponsored by Oklahoma State University was that the biological fact that chromosomes determine an individual’s gender is of no significance. It was expected that on, the contrary, the participants should embrace the unshakable conviction that gender, besides being multiple, was also a matter of arbitrary self-determination. Ideology “cancels” facts. Members of the scientific community and students of biology who, in order to pass their exams, until recently considered it advantageous to affirm empirical facts about the role of chromosomes, are henceforth required to recalibrate scientific knowledge, making it conform to ideological criteria. Who can blame readers who used to be citizens of another empire, denounced not long ago as “evil,” if they find such abrupt reversals of officially approved reality uncomfortable, or even traumatising?

The pandemonium triggered at Portland State University when a biologist contended that there were “explicitly anatomical and biological” differences between men and women, and that taking offense at that constitutes “rejection of reality,” richly illustrates the depth of the madness to which the West has descended.

To summarise, the party line now is that it is not objective factors such as chromosomes that determine gender but “one’s internal sense of being male, female, neither of these, both, or another gender(s) … for transgender people, their sex assigned at birth and their own internal sense of gender identity are not the same. Female, woman, and girl and male, man, and boy are also not necessarily linked to each other but are just six common gender identities.” In other words, one “is” the way one “feels” and the feeling need not be anchored in external reality. (See here.)

When The Hospital Wants You Gone: Unsolved Problems Are Simply Eliminated

knoxnews |  The Knoxville Police Department on Feb. 23 released video recordings of the arrest of a 60-year old woman who collapsed while she was being taken to jail and later died, and said the investigation into how officers handled the incident will continue.

Community reaction to the videos was swift: Nearly 400 comments, the majority critical of how officers handled the situation, appeared within hours on the department's Facebook post of a compilation showing excerpts from various police cameras.

Lisa Edwards, 60, was arrested Feb. 5 outside Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center, where she had been treated earlier. Hospital security called police when Edwards declined to move off the property after she was discharged.

Here's what Knox News knows about Edwards' arrest, her death and the ongoing police investigation.

'This shouldn’t happen': Family of woman who collapsed in KPD custody plans to sue

What did the body camera footage show?

A police video compilation from the Feb. 5 arrest shows how officers arrested her and what happened after she lost consciousness in the car. The compilation includes excerpts from body-camera footage of the initial interaction with Edwards, body camera footage of officers taking her into custody, and in-car camera footage from the time she was placed into the back of a cruiser.

Sgt. Brandon Wardlaw, officer Adam Barnett, officer Timothy Distasio and transportation officer Danny Dugan are shown in the video compilation. All four are on paid leave during the internal affairs investigation.

Body cam footage shows the first KPD officer arrived just before 8 a.m., about an hour after Edwards was discharged from the hospital. Edwards told the officer she had a stroke and couldn’t walk, but he responds by telling her the hospital wants her gone.

 

 

"Surplus Humanity" Means That NiggaHertz Bout To Go Off The Charts

therealnews  |  Well actually, there’s three new books because I published The Global Police State in 2020, and this year, there are two new books, Global Civil War and Can Global Capitalism Endure? But what happened was I was writing and thinking about and speaking about this crisis from 2008 and on, and then the pandemic hit. And it became clear to me as I started researching that and engaging with other people that the pandemic has accelerated in warp speed the crisis itself, and it’s introduced a whole new set of concerns as we face this crisis of humanity. And that book also goes into considerable detail on digitalization, because the digital transformations underway are absolutely tremendous. They’re linked to everything else.

But then the companion to Global Civil War – And both of these came out in 2022 – Is Can Global Capitalism Endure?, which is really the big summation of the crisis and what we can expect in the following years and the following decades. So if it’s possible, I would love to put out a summary here of where we’re at with this crisis.

This is a crisis like never before. This is an existential crisis. It’s multidimensional. Of course, we can talk about the economic or the structural dimension, deep economic, social crisis. We’re on the verge of a world recession, but I think it’s going to be much more than that. It’s going to be another big collapse which might even exceed what we saw in 2008. But it’s also a political crisis of state legitimacy, of capitalist hegemony, of the crack up of political systems around the world. And it’s also a social crisis of what technically we can call a crisis of social reproduction. The social fabric is disintegrating everywhere. Billions of people face crises for survival and very uncertain futures. And of course, it’s also an ecological crisis, and this is what makes it existential.

I am suggesting that the 21st century is the final century for world capitalism. This system cannot reach the 22nd century. And the key question for us is, can we overthrow global capitalism before it drags down and destroys all of humanity and much of life on the planet along with it?

So let me step back and say that we can speak about three types of crises. Of course, there are periodic receptions, the mainstream goals of the business cycle that take place about once every 10 years, but we’re in something much more serious. We’re in what we can call a structural crisis, meaning that the only way out of the system is to fund it. The only way out of the crisis is to really restructure the whole system. The last big structural crisis we had was the 1970s. The system got out of that by launching capitalist globalization and neoliberalism. Prior to that, we had the big structural crisis of the 1930s, the Great Depression. System got out of that by introducing a new type of capitalism, New Deal capitalism, social democratic capitalism, what I call redistributive nation state capitalism. And before that, just to take it back once more – Because these are recurrent, they happen, these structural crises about every 40 to 50 years – Was from the late 1870s to the early 1890s. And the system got out of that by launching a new round of colonialism and imperialism.

So now, from 2008 and on, we’re in another deep structural crisis. And I know later in the interview we’ll get into that dimension, that economic structural dimension. Technically, we call it an overaccumulation crisis. But I want to say that there’s a third type of crisis, and that actually is where we’re at: a systemic crisis, which means the only way out of the crisis is to literally move beyond the system. That is, to move beyond capitalism. So when I say that we are in a systemic crisis, this can be drawn out for years, for decades. But we are in uncharted territory. This is a crisis like no other. If we want to put this in technical terms, we’re seeing the historic exhaustion of the conditions for capitalist renewal. And the system, again, won’t make it to the [22nd] century.

As you pointed out in the introduction, the ruling groups, at this point, are in a situation of permanent crisis management, permanent state of emergency. But the ruling groups are rudderless. They’re clueless. They don’t know how to resolve this crisis. And quite frankly, they cannot. They can’t. What we’ve seen is that over the past 40 years, world capitalism has been driven forward by this trickle process that I lay out in these two new books, Global Civil War and Can Global Capitalism Endure?, of globalization, digitalization, and financialization. And these three processes have aggravated the crisis, really created and aggravated the crisis many times over. And just to summarize a couple other things here, what we’ve seen over the last 40 years is the buildup of this structural crisis and the problem of surplus capital, meaning that corporate profits in 2021 were a record high even in the midst of us all moving down and suffering. Record high profits. So the transnational capitalist class has accumulated enormous amounts of wealth beyond what it can reinvest, hence stagnation, beyond what it can even spend.

And what this has led to is this mass of what we call – I know we’re going to get into this later in the interview – This mass of fictitious capital, meaning all of this capital around the world which is not backed by the real economy of goods and services. It’s what technically we call fiat money, this unprecedented flow of money. And it’s led to this situation where in the world today we have this mass of predatory finance capital which is simply without precedent, and it’s destabilizing the whole system.

But let me conclude this introductory summary by saying the problem of surplus capital has its flip side in surplus people, surplus humanity. The more the surplus capital, the more hundreds of millions, even billions of people become surplus humanity.

And what that means is that the ruling groups have a double challenge. Their first challenge is what do they do with all the surplus capital? How do they keep investing in making profit? Where can they unload this surplus capital and continue to accumulate? But the second big challenge, because the flip side is surplus humanity, is how do you control the mass of humanity? Because there is a global class revolt underway. That’s the title of the book, Global Civil War. After the late 20th century worldwide defeat of proletarian forces, now the mass of humanity is on the move again. There are these rebellions from below breaking out all over the world. And the ruling groups have the challenge of how to contain this actual rebellion underway and the potential for it to bring down the system from, oh, no.

The Money Pipe From Transhumanism To The "Gender Industry"

timesofisrael  |  Last week, Tablet magazine published a bombshell of an article by Jennifer Bilek, “The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities (SSI): The wealthy, powerful, and sometimes very weird Pritzker cousins have set their sights on a new God-like goal: using gender ideology to remake human biology.” Bilek argued that several philanthropic foundations, most notably the Pritzker Family Foundation, are funding “Synthetic Sex Identities,” referring to trans and non-binary identities, as part of a larger “transhumanist” agenda to alter the human body through technology. Bikel names several foundations, some Jewish and some not, who support such an alleged agenda.

Progressive Jewish Twitter jumped into action, as progressive Jewish Twitter does, and condemned the article for both antisemitism and transphobia. Yehuda Kurtzer, the head of the Hartman Institute of North America, tweeted, “I think the piece (which I won’t link to) was horrible, dangerous, and antisemitic. And I’m sure there’s a way to talk about the transformation of sex and gender in our society that’s not that.”

That Bilek names a prominent foundation run by a Jewish family comes no where near the standard of evidence needed for labeling someone an antisemite. Jewish groups on both sides of the ideological spectrum name other Jewish philanthropies they don’t like all the time, and they’re not being antisemitic. Of course, sometimes when people name Jews and Jewish philanthropists like George Soros or the Koch Family they are indeed dog whistling that Jews dominate the media, government, progressive causes, rightwing causes, etc. Dog whistling is a real thing. But that doesn’t mean every time someone cites a Jewish philanthropy in a critical manner that they are tapping into this antisemitic trope or that we have the needed proof to say so publicly.

Accusing someone of a dog whistle without evidence that the person is trying to spread hatred toward Jews circumvents the usual high standard of evidence required before attempting to destroy someone’s reputation for being an antisemite. It’s one thing to speak of trends in antisemitism like dog whistles—we should–it’s another to accuse someone of a specific offense, which ought to require significant evidence.

Those who accuse Bilek of antisemitism might say that Bilek cavorts with extreme rightwing forces. It appears she has and does. Bilek did once question why Jews are so active in “transgenderism.” Her full comments were:

“I just report on who the men are (supporters of trans ideology), I don’t single them out for being Jewish and I have never really speculated about why so many are.  Quite some time ago I came across Keith Woods’ video on his theory of why this might be.  I revisited this today because somebody wrote and asked about the Jewish aspect of the men involved in this agenda and I found it equally as fascinating as I did the first time.  I wonder how others might feel about this.”

The Keith Woods video she mentions does offer up some fanciful speculation about why so many Jews are in the “transgenderism” movement. I’d have to go through his other videos to know if he’s a dyed in the wool antisemite but watching one was quite enough for one day. Bilek does seem to have low standards for citing truly shadowy figures in her writing and in some cases all out antisemites, but never spreads the tropes herself. In reading through much of her writing and social media, I didn’t come away with the impression that this is a woman who hates Jews and is trying to spread Jew-hatred.

The question of Bilek being a transphobe is another matter. The term transphobe has been so overused in condemning people who question any aspect of gender ideology that I’m not inclined to use it. It’s been weaponized to shut down legitimate discourse (which is why we should be so careful in haphazardly accusing people of “antisemitism”—it dilutes the power of the term).

The Benjamins Make Baron HarkonnenJennifer Pritzker's Fetish Into "Synthetic Sexual Identities"

Tablet  | One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

I first wrote about the Pritzkers, whose fortune originated in the Hyatt hotel chain, and their philanthropy directed toward normalizing what people call “transgenderism” in 2018. I have since stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and which ended in 2020 with Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that LGBTQ+ is a protected class for discrimination purposes—is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

Through investments in the techno-medical complex, where new highly medicalized sex identities are being conjured, Pritzkers and other elite donors are attempting to normalize the idea that human reproductive sex exists on a spectrum. These investments go toward creating new SSI using surgeries and drugs, and by instituting rapid language reforms to prop up these new identities and induce institutions and individuals to normalize them. In 2018, for example, at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at the University of California Los Angeles (where the Pritzkers are major donors and hold various titles), the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology advertised several options for young females who think they can be men to have their reproductive organs removed, a procedure termed “gender-affirming care.”

The Pritzkers became the first American family to have a medical school bear its name in recognition of a private donation when it gave $12 million to the University of Chicago School of Medicine in 1968. In June 2002, the family announced an additional gift of $30 million to be invested in the University of Chicago’s Biological Sciences Division and School of Medicine. These investments provided the family with a bridgehead into the world of academic medicine, which it has since expanded in pursuit of a well-defined agenda centered around SSI. Also in 2002, Jennifer Pritzker founded the Tawani Foundation, which has since provided funding to Howard Brown Health and Rush Memorial Medical Center in Chicago, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Foundation Fund, and the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, all of which provide some version of “gender care.” In the case of the latter, “clients” include “gender creative children as well as transgender and gender non-conforming adolescents ...”

In 2012, J.B. Pritzker and his wife, M.K. Pritzker, worked with The Bridgespan Group—a management consultant to nonprofits and philanthropists—to develop a long-term strategy for the J.B and M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation. Their work together included conducting research on developments in the field of early childhood education, to which the foundation committed $25 million.

Ever since, a motivating and driving force behind the Pritzkers’ familywide commitment to SSI has been J.B.’s cousin Jennifer (born James) Pritzker—a retired lieutenant colonel in the Illinois Army National Guard and the father of three children. In 2013, around the time gender ideology reached the level of mainstream American culture, Jennifer Pritzker announced a transition to womanhood. Since then, Pritzker has used the Tawani Foundation to help fund various institutions that support the concept of a spectrum of human sexes, including the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the Williams Institute UCLA School of Law, the National Center for Transgender Equality, the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Palm Military Center, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), and many others. Tawani Enterprises, the private investment counterpart to the philanthropic foundation, invests in and partners with Squadron Capital LLC, a Chicago-based private investment vehicle that acquires a number of medical device companies that manufacture instruments, implants, cutting tools, and injection molded plastic products for use in surgeries. As in the case of Jon Stryker, founder of the LGBT mega-NGO Arcus Foundation, it is hard to avoid the impression of complementarity between Jennifer Pritzker’s for-profit medical investments and philanthropic support for SSI.

Pritzker also helps fund the University of Minnesota National Center for Gender Spectrum Health, which claims “the gender spectrum is inclusive of the wide array of gender identities beyond binary definitions of gender—inclusive of cisgender and transgender identities, gender queer, and nonbinary identities as a normal part of the natural expression of gender. Gender spectrum health is the healthy, affirmed, positive development of a gender identity and expression that is congruent with the individual’s sense of self.” The university, where Pritzker has served on the Leadership Council for the Program in Human Sexuality, provides “young adult gender services” in the medical school’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health.

Oval Office Puppeteers Announce Formal Creation Of National Surveillance State

CTH  |  The “National Cybersecurity Strategy” aligns with, supports, and works in concert with a total U.S. surveillance system, where definitions of information are then applied to “cybersecurity” and communication vectors.  This policy is both a surveillance system and an information filtration prism where the government will decide what is information, disinformation, misinformation and malinformation, then act upon it.

In part, this appears to be a response to the revelations around government influence of social media, the Twitter Files.  Now we see the formalization of the intent. The government will be the arbiter of truth and cyber security, not the communication platforms or private companies.  This announcement puts the government in control.

All of the control systems previously assembled under the guise of the Dept of Homeland Security now become part of the online, digital national security apparatus. I simply cannot emphasis enough how dangerous this is, and the unspoken motive behind it; however, to the latter, you are part of a small select group who are capable of understanding what is in this announcement without me spelling it out.

Remember, we have already lost the judicial branch to the interests of the national security state.  All judicial determinations are now in deference to what is called broadly “national security,” and the only arbiter of what qualifies to be labeled as a national security interest is the same institutional system who hides the corruption and surveillance behind the label they apply.

We cannot fight our way through the complexity of what is being assembled, until the American People approach the big questions from the same baseline of understanding.  What is the root cause that created the system?  From there, this announcement takes on a more clarifying context – where we realize this is the formalization of the previously hidden process.

Barack Obama and Eric Holder did not create a weaponized DOJ and FBI; the institutions were already weaponized by the Patriot Act.  What Obama and Holder did was take the preexisting system and retool it, so the weapons of government only targeted one side of the political continuum.

This point is where many people understandably get confused.

Elevator Speech:

(1) The Patriot Act turned the intel surveillance radar from foreign searches for terrorists to domestic searches for terrorists.

(2) Obama/Biden then redefined what is a “terrorist” to include their political opposition.