BCG and Google Behind India's Ban on Cash

Washingtonsblog |  Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the omnipresent US-consulting company, and Google, the global data miner, issued a joint report in July 2016 on the “$500 bn Pot of Gold”, which is the Indian digital payment market. Even though the authors deny it, the report gives much reason to suspect that the authors knew that something radical was imminent from the Indian government. The report is remarkably honest about the aims of the whole exercise.

There is no statement in the BCG-Google-report “Digital Payments 2020” to the effect that it is related to the joint initiative of USAID and the Indian ministry of finance, formally established in 2015, to push back the use of cash and promote digital payments. Rather it is presented as a freestanding initiative of BCG and Google. I reached out to one of the authors, BCG’s senior partner Alpesh Shah, to ask about this and he insisted:  “This was a joint BCG-Google report, with no connection / relation to USAID/Indian Ministry of Finance.” However, there is much to suggest that there was a connection. First of all, the subject so perfectly fits with the program of that partnership. The subtitle of the report is “The Making of a $500 bn ecosystem in India”. The steering committee for the report included a representative of Visa, member of the Better Than Cash Alliance together with USAID and affiliate of the partnership of USAID and Indian finance ministry to advance digital payments. It also included PayTM and Vodafone, which are also part of the CATALYST coalition, a project, which according to USAID, is a “next step” in said partnership of USAID and the Indian finance ministry.

The report is a call to arms for all payment service providers. They are alerted that things are going to be shaken up in India. On page three it says:

 “We expect the digital payments space to witness significant disruption in the days ahead.”

The disruption came on November 8, when Prime Minister Modi decreed that most of the cash notes by value were no longer legal means of payment. By itself, the remark about the “disruption in the days ahead” might be considered suggestive but weak evidence that BCG and Google new something of those plans. However, combine this with the fact that they forecast a tenfold increase of digital payments and of the merchant acceptance network by 2020 without giving any real compelling reason why such an unlikely development should come to pass.

Democrat Losers: Pathologically Incapable of Getting It

Counterpunch |  In 2008, the American people overwhelmingly voted for “change” in Washington. They never got it. Hence, Trump. To pretend that there’s not a straight line connecting the failed policies of Barack Obama and the subsequent rise of Donald John Trump, is to ignore the obvious and to shrug off responsibility for the situation the country is in today.

Obama created Trump, the man didn’t simply appear from the ether. Had Obama acted in good faith and kept his promises to shake up the status quo, end the foreign wars, restore civil liberties, hold Wall Street accountable or relieve the economic insecurity that working families across the country now feel, Hillary Clinton would have been a shoe-in on November 8th. As it happens, Obama made no effort to achieve any of these goals, which is why Hillary was defeated in the biggest political upset of the last century.

The point we need to underscore here, is that the Democratic leadership is responsible for Trump, not the working class people in the red states who merely did what they had to do to effect change.  These people can’t be blamed for voting their own best interests. That’s what people do. Had Obama done anything to genuinely improve the economy, things might have turned out differently. But he didn’t, in fact– as popular as Obama was– a full two thirds of the American people thought the country was headed in the wrong direction. In other words, the election was a referendum on Obama’s performance as the primary steward of the US economy. Obama lost that referendum.

Even so, the DNC could have reloaded and taken a different approach to the economy under Hillary. They didn’t. They thought the “recovery” meme was effective enough to put them over the finish line. But it wasn’t effective enough, because too many people saw that the recovery was a fraud, that there was no recovery,  it was all a slick Madison Avenue public relations campaign aimed at concealing the fact that Obama had restructured the US economy in a way that deliberately kept growth at-or-below 2 percent so the Fed could continue pumping cheap money to its constituents on Wall Street while everyone else saw their personal debtload grow, their retirement savings vanish, and their standards of living slip.  Isn’t that what really happened? Obama’s grand restructuring project has resulted in perennial economic stagnation and widespread pessimism about the future. The former president  oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from working class people to parasitic plutocrats in the history of the nation. It wasn’t an accident. Obama was following a blueprint that was given to him by his handlers at the DNC.

So now the country is to be led by a brash billionaire reality TV celebrity who has no previous political experience and who seems unusually sensitive to any kind of personal criticism. Not surprisingly, there’s no sign that the Democratic leadership feels any responsibility for this extraordinary development.

Why is that? Why hasn’t anyone in the DNC admitted their failure, admitted that they didn’t accurately gage the mood of the country or the hunger for change? Why haven’t they acknowledged that putting the most untrustworthy candidate of all time –a thoroughly dislikable, warmongering harridan– on the ticket was a mistake? Why?

It’s because this vile collection of corporate Dems who run the party are incapable of self reflection, right? It’s because the Podesta throng — who still hold the party in their deathgrip –truly believe that bamboozling their base with Potemkin executives like Barack Obama, is a terrific model for running the government. They think Obama’s tenure as president was a success story, mainly because  his grandiloquent bloviating and larking around on stage with sleeves rolled up like an overpaid athlete– diverted attention from the trillions of dollars  that were being sluiced to the banking whores on Wall Street. Isn’t that why the Dems haven’t changed?

Why This Shameless Hypocrite Jaw-Jacking From New Haven Instead of Nuevo Laredo?

WaPo |  Ernesto Zedillo, a professor in the field of international economics and politics at Yale University, was president of Mexico from 1994 to 2000.

The Mexican government has been courteous toward Donald Trump, as both a candidate and now U.S. president. Indeed, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has paid a high political cost at home for his being open to working constructively with President Trump. But Peña Nieto has done the right thing by putting the interests of Mexico and the preservation of mutually beneficial relations with our neighbor above his personal popularity. Nevertheless, the time has come to admit that the actions of the new administration have closed off, at least for the foreseeable future, the possibility of any agreement being achieved through dialogue and negotiation that could satisfy the interests of both parties.

This is an unfortunate and sad situation, but the effort to accommodate President Trump’s capricious wishes has proven worthless and should not be continued. It is not useful for Mexico or the United States.

In retrospect, the probability of reaching a mutually beneficial agreement on the topics on President Trump’s Mexico agenda was always small, considering that his demands have defied legal and economic rationality all along.

Mexican Government Faces Yet Another Crisis of Legitimacy

therealnews |  So, John, give us some background about these protests because people are said to be reacting to the price increase of gasoline. So, is that all? Or is there more to this?

JOHN ACKERMAN: No, this is not just about gas or gas prices. This is another step in the collapse of the legitimacy of the ruling government, the ruling regime. We can compare it, I think, to the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela about 25 years ago, the beginning of the '90s. Carlos Andrés Pérez came back for his second presidency, and one of his most important reforms was more privatizing -- they already had more privatizing then was in Mexico but deepening the privatization of oil in Venezuela. This lead to a fiscal crisis of the state and lead to widespread protests and the collapse of what used to be considered the most stable, centralist democracy in Latin America -- Venezuela. And we had a revolution, a peaceful revolution, which lead to a new constitution, lead to a new government. And this is the process we're in the middle of in Mexico.

Now, I'm not trying to say that you know, we're going to have a Chávez coming in, or Maduro, or that Mexico is going to follow the path of Venezuela -- for good or for bad, or however you want to look at it -- but Mexico is going through a collapse of its sitting government and this is being expressed through the question of oil.

When Enrique Peña Nieto came in, in 2012, one of his most important policy programs was to privatize oil. As a result of this oil privatization, he promised that oil prices would come down and that Mexico would grow through increased international investment.

Well, this 20% increase from one day to the next on New Year's Day of 2017 has finally convinced the Mexican people demonstrating this that it was all just a lie from the very beginning. He did privatize oil but it was not for the benefit of Mexicans but for the benefit of his friends and the big oil companies. And so, this is finally sinking in with the Mexican people -- and that's what we're seeing with these protests explicitly against the gas hike, but more generally against authoritarianism and oppression in Mexico.

KIM BROWN: Well, John, then it begs the question, I mean, do you think the situation could endanger the president's position? Because according to polls, his popularity was already was already at a historic low.

JOHN ACKERMAN: Yes. Enrique Peña Nieto is the most despised, I would say, President we've had in Mexico in recent history. Not even, you know, Carlos Slim, or Vicente Fox, or Felipe Calderón, who also got very low on their public opinion ratings, did not get as low as Enrique Peña Nieto. Mexico had been until Peña Nieto an exceptional Latin America. The Mexican people, although they saw there were serious problems with neoliberalism, repression, authoritarianism, in the end, they kind of hoped or believed that the President was going to save them, that he was on their side of the people. But with Enrique Peña Nieto this has changed.

Now Peña Nieto has approval ratings down in, you know, 10, 15... 20% is the highest number I've seen in recent polls. And he gave a State of the... you know, a national address on all the television channels yesterday, at night, and he looked pretty tired. You could note it in his face. You could note it in his expression. He himself seems to kind of want to pack his bags. He's still got another two years left, which could be too long for him.

One of the good opportunities is that, you know, we do have elections coming up next year in 2018, a federal presidential election, also for national congress, lots of state governments. And so that could be an opportunity for reviving politics and democracy in Mexico.

Peña Nieto is no Putin

telesurtv |  Mexico's state-owned oil company Pemex has been ransacked by President Enrique Peña Nieto, other government officials, and the country's oligarchy, and now that it’s bankrupt they have turned it into a Ponzi scheme, prominent economist, researcher, analyst and author James Cypher told teleSUR.

“The Mexican State was levitated by rivers of gold received through the high levels of oil profits but this gold was used so that the oligarchy and their buddies could evade taxes ... almost,” Cypher said. “Public treasury was emptied out years ago — apart from the oil revenues, So, although Pemex has been a huge business, authorities were forced to seek loans everywhere to the oil company afloat.”

Currently, Pemex owes so much money and has been granted so many loans that it struggles to obtain credits, he said, adding that on Thursday the company sold bonds worth over US$250 million, increasing their debt in order to pay off loans.

“In other words, Pemex financing has become a Ponzi scheme,” said Cypher.

The Mexican State has always been in charge and barks out all the orders regarding all issues related to the country, but their achievements or profits always end up in the pockets of government officials.

“The State is an instrument used only for the benefit of the Mexican oligarchy first, and then for U.S. businesspeople and a few more — for example Canadians matter plenty in the mining sector,” Cypher explained.

The U.S. expert and analyst, who currently works for the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, said that contrary to what teleSUR's article on Pemex says regarding partial privatization of Pemex, Peña Nieto's intentions are to completely sell off the company to private enterprises.

The Mexican president’s plans for Pemex contemplate that the company continue operating but it will only carry out support activities that are not profitable.

“We have not had time to analyze how far Pemex will be stripped down but undoubtedly all profitable areas of the company will be taken over by the Mexican oligarchy first, and the rest to the giant oil companies from Houston, Texas,” he noted.

Cypher went on to say that it is almost certain that Hillary Clinton and her advisors participated in one way or another in creating the policies for privatization Peña Nieto has been pushing forward since he took office in 2013.

The renowned economist agreed with leftist Mexican party Morena saying, “Of course! The current Mexican government is going to take their usual share.”

Democrat Losers: The New Democrats Long War on the Working Class

neweconomicperspectives |  To sum it up, Brazile is running the DNC even though all the folks who call themselves “leaders” of the Democratic Party know that she used the Wall Street Journal to attack the democratic-wing of the Democratic Party as traitors to the Nation because they did not support Bush’s dishonest, unlawful, and catastrophic invasion of Iraq.  Further, she praised, and demanded that Democrats emulate, three of the worst chicken hawks who framed the lies, chose the bank fraud as their puppet, and bungled the occupation of Iraq.

So here is my obvious question: what political party in its right mind would choose Brazile as its leader?   She is a disgrace.  Listen to the jingoistic and juvenile phrase she used to sum up the New Democrat’s pro-war policies, particularly in light of her denunciation of Democrats who opposed Bush’s lies as “effete.”  “[Democrats] “need to return to … muscular national security principles.”   “Muscular?”  Of course, people who invade and kill people on the basis of lies are “manly” while those who oppose such invasions are “effete.”  Manly men are “muscular.”  They do not think.  A man that uses his brains rather than his muscles is not smart; he is “effete.”  We should glory in “regime change” because it is “muscular” – even if it transforms Iraq into an ally of Iran and leads to a series of sectarian civil wars in Iraq.  On the issues that separate the New Democrats from progressives, Brazile represents everything that the Democratic Party should be opposing.

Note also that Brazile, unintentionally revealed the massive ideological contradiction, the black hole of hypocrisy that forms the New Democrats’ gravitational center.  The New Democrats purportedly stand for the “end of big government,” deep distrust of government workers and programs, and austerity.  The New Democrats rushed to cheer Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq even though it was the quintessential “big government” endeavor.  They rushed to spend trillions of dollars on the Iraq war and military spending that exceeded the collective spending of the next nine nations with the highest military spending.  The New Democrats demanded that all Democrats cheer this wasteful government spending, which harmed our military, maimed and killed our troops, and maimed and killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.  The New Democrats claim that the federal budget deficits and so-called “funding gaps” on the safety net mandate massive cuts in social spending programs.  They promote invasions and unnecessary and harmful military spending programs that could easily “pay for” those social programs if austerity really were a desirable policy (it is not).

Note that each of these examples of the New Democrats’ black hole of hypocrisy also represented an assault on the American working class.  Our service members are typically working class.  The people hurt most by austerity’s denial of full employment are the working class.  The people who gain enormously from austerity are Wall Street elites and the top one-ten-thousandth of one percent.  The people hurt most by budget cuts in social programs and the safety net are the working class.  The people hurt most by the New Democrats’ embrace of the three “de’s” are the working class.

The New Democrats are shocked that after waging their long war against the white working class – the white working class turned on the New Democrats’ candidate.  Who could ever have guessed that after the New Democrats abused the working class for over 30 years, the white working class would decide to return the favor?  (Again, yes, I understand that the Trump administration is betraying the working class.)

Still the Baddest..., Tulsi Gabbard 2020

congress.gov | 

H.R.6504 - To prohibit the use of United States Government funds to provide assistance to Al Qaeda, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and to countries supporting those organizations, and for other purposes.114th Congress (2015-2016)

BILL

Hide Overview icon-hide

Sponsor:	Rep. Gabbard, Tulsi [D-HI-2] (Introduced 12/08/2016)
Committees:	House - Foreign Affairs; Intelligence (Permanent)
Latest Action:	12/08/2016 Referred to House Intelligence (Permanent)  (All Actions)

Trumps Victory Vs. Deep State Rabbit Hole

strategic-culture |  There are several key reasons why Donald Trump won, such as that he achieved a 1,405,004 nationwide popular-vote victory in all states except California, where he lost by an enormous 4,260,978-vote margin to Hillary Clinton (and so Hillary beat him in all 50 states by 2,864,974 votes) — and the Electoral College represents all 50 states, not just one. But not all of the reasons can (like that one) be understood merely by the numbers; and a particularly important reason for his victory has to do with the deepest level of the way that the American people process what they read and see and hear in the nation’s press, and interpret, from the press, what is happening in and to their country. This will be the subject here:

I thus invite you to follow me now down a rabbit-hole of the American ‘news’media, to focus light upon dark areas of the U.S. government. Along the way, you’ll meet various people and their teams who are contending for power, who are essential to know about, in order to understand the next-lower level down through those subterranean passageways, at the bottom of which is evidence that might help to explain why Trump actually became elected President.

And now we’re getting near the end of this rabbit-hole. It’s where Giraldi’s article says, “Third, when the report was issued, Stephen Hadley told Reuters,” and linked there to

https://www.yahoo.com/news/albright-hadley-urge-u-weigh-using-more-force-195203101.html?ref=gs which has, at the very bottom (as of the present writing) “View Reactions (39)” of which a typical one is:

Barbara Colvin-Kerr 2 months ago

Warmonger Hag Madeline and Liar Hadley who was a main man in the Wilson’s Yellow Cake travesty during the Bush Jr. reign can keep their opinions to themselves. Send Fat Mad and Challenged Hadley to do recon in Syria. They can parachute in.

In other words: On even that mainstream website, Yahoo News, the readership were somehow generally aware that the U.S. federal government is the criminal operation that not only controls the Executive branch but that also controls the Legislative branch, which writes and enforces the laws so the government isn’t criminal at all — but it’s still so evil that it shouldn’t be allowed to invade anywhere, at least not in its present embodiment, its being controlled by neoconservatives, which the general public certainly are not. This government doesn’t represent the American public. It represents only the American aristocracy.

That’s the response of readers on a mainstream ‘news’ site. Not on the site such as you’re now reading, but on Yahoo! (It’s a Reuters news-report.)

And so it’s highly relevant — perhaps even crucial — toward answering the question of why Trump became elected.

Maybe the American public understood far more about its government and ‘news’media than than the government and ‘news’media thought was the case. Maybe the Establishment’s lying-operation was far less successful than its influential liars were expecting it to be.

Maybe a widespread and deep distrust of the nation’s ‘news’media had been underestimated by America’s oligarchs and so left them dazed and incredulous, on the morning of 9 November 2016.

As for the American public, they are confused, even more than they are deceived; and the reason why that is so, is that the lying by the press has simply been going on for too long a time. Americans suspect that the past few decades of U.S. ‘history’ — such as about the 
Kennedy and King assassinations, and 9/11 — are frauds, not history.

Questioning Transgenderism Is Not Transphobic

spiked |  Last week the BBC aired a documentary called Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?. It investigated the best approaches for parents to take if their child has gender-dysphoria issues. It generated immense controversy, not least for featuring the views of Kenneth Zucker (pictured), a doctor considered a leading authority on gender dysphoria until he was fired from Canada’s largest child gender clinic for allegedly practising conversion therapy.

Trans activists were so terrified of what the interviewees in the documentary might say that they started a petition demanding the documentary be shelved until it had been ‘reviewed by experts’. Eleven thousand people signed the petition. ‘No transgender experts in the UK have watched over this programme, which potentially may have a transphobic undertone’, stated Lucas Johnston, creator of the petition. ‘I have no issue with Dr Zucker having an opinion’, he continued, ‘but I do have an issue when that opinion is being spread on primetime national television to potentially millions of viewers… We are not attempting to censor an opinion or block a civil debate from occurring. We just want to have the documentary independently reviewed by an expert before it is aired.’

But if the doc had been pulled pending review by experts, then it would effectively have been banned, and Dr Zucker’s opinion would have been censored. Some interviewees in the documentary disagreed with Zucker, meaning their voices would have been silenced too. Also, if Zucker really is such a crank, as trans activists claim, wouldn’t the British public be able to see that for themselves? Allowing an expert to decide whether a TV documentary should or should not be broadcast would set a dangerous precedent. It would mean the public not being allowed to make up their minds for themselves; an expert would do it for us.

On the subject of experts, what about the more than 500 clinicians and academics who signed a petition protesting against Zucker’s dismissal? Indeed, Zucker’s former employer, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, took down from its website its review of Zucker’s practises because it was shown to contain unsubstantiated claims and one very damaging accusation that proved to be completely false.

The day before the documentary went out, the Guardian posted an article quoting ‘very scared and very worried’ activists. They were criticising a documentary none of them had seen. During production, the documentary makers approached Susanne Green, CEO of the trans charity Mermaids, to ask her if she knew anyone who had de-transitioned. She asked, ‘Why are you focusing on this angle?’. But they didn’t focus on this angle. The finished documentary features just one person who regretted transitioning. I learnt this from actually watching it. It’s always a good idea to watch things before deciding whether they’re good or bad.

Democratic Losers Quadrupling Down on Identity Politics

libertyblitzkrieg |   Now here’s his final paragraph, and it’s the most important one in the entire piece. He accidentally exposes the key flaw in his strategy and why it is doomed to failure.

These are dark days in American politics, but Democrats and progressives must never forget that we are in fact the majority of people in this country. Each of the last three presidential elections have proved that there is a new American majority consisting of the overwhelming majority of people of color and a meaningful minority of whites who vote progressive. The mission of the DNC and its next chair is to start now to put in place the infrastructure to translate that population majority into an electoral majority in enough states to win back the White House and Congress so that we can continue to build a vibrant, just, inclusive multiracial society. That journey begins with making sure the next DNC chair has the skills, experience, strategy and sophistication to lead us on that journey. We’ll ask them these questions and more on Monday. 

He claims “Democrats and progressives must never forget that we are in fact the majority of people in this country.” Note, the key part of this statement is “Democrats and progressives.” If Democrats aren’t progressives, what are they? Neoliberals of course, but he doesn’t want to say that for obvious reasons. Ultimately, this betrays the core flaw in his logic. You can’t say “Democrats and progressives are the majority” if those two groups ideologically clash on everything. At the end of the day, this majority coalition he expects to win elections based on demographics isn’t really a coalition at all.

To summarize, nowhere in this article is there any sort of discussion about economic decay, corporate power, militarism, etc. Why is that? The reason is that the Democrats (ie, neoliberals) don’t want to focus on issues their donors won’t like. Identity politics is perfect for a corporate-Wall Street based Democratic Party. The truly rich and powerful in this country love identity politics and fund it like mad, because identity politics diverts attention away from economic populism, and poses no real threat to them.

Chilling Feverish Minds and Pussies...,

israelshamir |  Men love women, we are made that way. We love their beautiful bodies and their compassionate souls, their high spirit and their subtle mind. They are our lovers, friends, comrades. In all the history of art, there was perhaps one poet, Palladas of Alexandria, who said he abhorred women and even that could be a case of sour grapes. Pity that in our post-Christian, or even anti-Christian society a very old type of women has been reconstructed, that of the women who broke with Logos and united with the dark heathen spirit. Debased and debasing, they are eager to serve their Dark Lord of Wall Street.

Even more revolting are the men who had sent these poor misled souls to riot in the cities of America, hoping to provoke police or public violence. They know it was difficult for real men to defend themselves against a women’s attack, and they use that to the utmost.

A Russian Jewish writer Dmitry Bykov considered it a standard Jewish stratagem: they send a woman to provoke a man with nasty words and insults; if he responds, they attack him in defending the offended womanhood, he wrote in his amusing Living Souls. The Jewish masterminds of the virago revolt – George Soros and his fellow billionaire Tom Steyer, who pledged $100 million for the regime change, utilised this time-honoured subterfuge.

The viragos were joined by LGBT, the evil Tetragrammaton, modern worshippers of Cybele. Cybele priests and worshippers castrated themselves in front of their goddess. This is the aim of the gender agenda: castration of the male. Now they have been defeated, as they were defeated centuries ago, and they are not taking it lying down.

So it is not a shift from Democrats to Republicans – it is a shift from Cybele to Christ. This esoteric side of the regime change had been clear to the protagonists. That’s why Trump went to church hand in hand with his lady-wife just before the oath, thus ceremonially restoring the normal order of things. That’s why Trump by his first blessed act has removed the LGBT smut page off the White House site, restoring its whiteness.

The Wages and Risks of Abiding in the Reality-Based Community

unz |  The ‘they’ stands for those individuals and groups in the power system who operate beyond legal limits as a hydra-headed entity, whose coordination depends on the project, campaign, mission, or operation at hand. Those with much power got away with excessive extralegal use of it since the beginning of this century because systems of holding the powerful to account have crumbled on both sides of the Atlantic. Hence, potential opposition to what the reality architects were doing dwindled to almost nothing. At the same time, people whose job or personal inclination leads them to ferret out truth were made to feel guilty for pursuing it.

The best way, I think, to make sense of how this works is to study it as a type of intimidation. Sticking to the official story because you have to may not be quite as bad as forced religious conversion with a gun pointed at your head, but it belongs to the same category. It begins with the triggering of odd feelings of guilt. At least that is how I remember it. Living in Tokyo, I had just read Mark Lane’s Rush To Judgment, the first major demolishing in book form of the Warren Report on the murder of John F. Kennedy, when I became aware that I had begun to belong to an undesirable category of people who were taking the existence of conspiracies seriously. We all owe thanks to writers of Internet-based samizdat literature who’ve recently reminded us that the pejorative use of the conspiracy label stems from one of the greatest misinformation successes of the CIA begun in 1967.

So the campaign to make journalists feel guilty for their embarrassing questions dates from before Dick Cheney and Rove and Bush. But it has only reached a heavy duty phase after the moment that I see as having triggered the triumph of political untruth.

We have experienced massive systemic intimidation since 9/11. For the wider public we have the absurdities of airport security – initially evidenced by mountains of nail-clippers – reminding everyone of the arbitrary coercive potential that rests with the authorities. Every time people are made to take off their belts and shoes – to stick only to the least inane instances – they are reminded: yes, we can do this to you! Half of Boston or all of France can be placed under undeclared martial law to tell people: yes, we have you under full control! For journalists unexamined guilt feelings still play a major role. The serious ones feel guilty for wanting to ask disturbing questions, and so they reaffirm that they still belong to ‘sane’ humanity rather than the segment with extraterrestrials in flying saucers in its belief system. But there is a confused interaction with another guilty feeling of not having pursued unanswered questions. Its remedy appears to be a doubling down on the official story. Why throw in fairly common lines like “I have no time for truthers” unless you feel that this is where the shoe pinches?

You will have noticed a fairly common response when the 9/11 massacre enters a discussion. Smart people will say that they “will not go there”, which brings to mind the “here be dragons” warning on uncharted bits of medieval maps. That response is not stupid. It hints at an understanding that there is no way back once you enter that realm. There is simply no denying that if you accept the essential conclusions of the official 9/11 report you must also concede that laws of nature stopped working on that particular day. And, true enough, if you do go there and bear witness publicly to what you see, you may well be devoured; your career in many government positions, the media and even academia is likely to come to an end.

So, for the time being we are stuck with a considerable chunk of terra incognita relating to recognized political knowledge; which is an indispensable knowledge if you want to get current world affairs and the American role in it into proper perspective.

Mapping the motives of those who decide “not to go there” may be a way to begin breaking through this disastrous deadlock. Holding onto your job is an honorable motivation when you have a family to maintain. The career motivation is not something to scorn. There is also an entirely reasonable expectation that once you go there you lose your voice publicly to address very important social abuse and political misdeeds. I think it is not difficult to detect authors active on internet samizdat sites who have that foremost in mind. Another possible reason for not going there is the more familiar one, akin to the denial that one has a dreadful disease. Also possible is an honorable position of wishing to preserve social order in the face of a prospect of very dramatic political upheaval caused by revelations about a crime so huge that hardly anything in America’s history can be compared to it. Where could such a thing end – civil war? Martial law?

What I find more difficult to stomach is the position of someone who is worshiped by what used to be the left, and who has been guiding that class of politically interested Americans as to where they can and cannot go. Noam Chomsky does not merely keep quiet about it, but mocks students who raise logical questions prompted by their curiosity, thereby discouraging a whole generation studying at universities and active in civil rights causes. One can only hope that this overrated analyst of the establishment, who helps keep the most embarrassing questions out of the public sphere, trips over the contradictions and preposterousness of his own judgments and crumples in full view of his audience.

The triumph of political untruth has brought into being a vast system of political intimidation. Remember then that the intimidater does not really care what you believe or not, but impresses you with the fact that you have no choice. That is the essence of the exercise of brute power. With false flag events the circumstantial evidence sometimes appears quite transparently false and, indeed could be interpreted as having been purposeful. Consider the finding of passports or identity papers accidentally left by terrorists, or their almost always having been known to and suspected by the police? What of their death through police shooting before they can be interrogated? Could these be taunting signals of ultimate power to a doubting public: Now you! Dare contradict us! Are the persons killed by the police the same who committed the crime? Follow-up questions once considered perfectly normal and necessary by news media editors are conspicuous by their absence.

How can anyone quarrel with Rove’s prophecy. He told Suskind that we will forever be studying newly created realities. This is what the mainstream media continue to do. His words made it very clear: you have no choice!

A question that will be in the minds of perhaps many as they consider the newly sworn in president of the United States, who like John F. Kennedy appears to have understood that “Intelligence” leads a dangerously uncontrolled life of its own: At what point will he give in to the powers of an invisible government, as he is made to reckon that he also has no choice?

Democrat Losers Plotting Yet More Epic Democratic FAIL

newrepublic |  “We really aspire to be like the Kochs,” Brock told BuzzFeed, one of the first to break the story of the summit, which is called Democracy Matters 17. Brock acknowledged that another group of wealthy Democratic donors already exists—Democracy Alliance, whose donors include the billionaires George Soros and Tom Steyer—but Brock thinks that the DA has shirked its duty. The Kochs have been instrumental in building the GOP’s overwhelming advantages at the state and local level, and Brock likes what he sees. “The DA has veered away from politics,” he said. “This conference is openly political.”

Brock is clearly trying to rebrand a set of distressed assets—to make sure that the money spigot stays on now that he has failed in his primary goal of getting Clinton elected. Perhaps this wouldn’t matter so much if Brock could prove himself to be an effective string-puller and put Democrats back in power. Unfortunately for Democrats, Brock fundamentally misunderstands what the Koch network is and why it works. The program for the Democracy Matters 17 summit, obtained by the New Republic, shows that his budding Koch imitation is being built on a shoddy foundation.

Winning!!!

theatlantic |  Protests are a tricky thing, and America isn’t Russia. Protests can bring change, like Black Lives Matter did, and they can topple governments, as they did in Egypt. But in the case of the former, the protests became a movement that reached off the streets and into the presidential race, in part because there was a White House and Justice Department willing to take their concerns seriously. In the case of the latter, there was a political movement—the Muslim Brotherhood—that had been preparing for the moment for decades. Even those cases have proved fleeting: The Muslim Brotherhood took its own authoritarian turn after gaining power in democratic elections, and along with the Tahrir Square movement has since been crushed by the revanche of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Black Lives Matter, vilified by the Republican Party and the Trump campaign, will now potentially face a Justice Department headed by an Alabaman who has been accused of going after black civil rights activists. Both may end up back where they started: on the streets and unheard.

Talking to the protesters in Washington today, it was hard not to hear the echoes of the weakness of the Moscow protests five years ago: a vague, unstructured cause; too much diversity of purpose; no real political path forward; and the real potential for the meaning of the day to melt into self-congratulatory complacency. A Los Angeles woman showing me photos of the march afterward wondered, “Where was everyone before? We didn’t do enough.” Rallying and making funny signs is easy; winning real power in American politics is not.

Nasty Women Leave Lots of Trash in Washington D.C.

reddit |  "Not ur bitch" - don't worry, nobody made the mistake of thinking that you were.

"I'm with HER" - oh, we couldn't tell, you're here virtue signalling and doing nothing of value, you fit right in.

"BUILD BRIDGES NOT WALLS" - well see we're physically connected to Canada and Mexico, so a bridge doesn't make much sense there.

"Feminism is the radical notion that" - I'll stop you right there, feminism is the radical notion that you're an idiotic c**t who doesn't even know that you have more rights than men in your home country and who literally doesn't care that women are having their genitals mutilated, are being forced into marriage, and raped/killed in the middle east by an actual oppressive ideology that feminists support yet our president has sworn to protect you and LGBT members from. But FUCK YEAH FEMINISM!

"Unity" - only we'll force you to cooperate with us, we're not budging. And we're the inclusive, diverse ones!

"Women use our Power for Good" - what power? This isn't a comic book where you have super powers. The only thing you did was waste a lot of your time protesting.. nothing, literally nothing, and then leave a mess on this sidewalk. I'm still waiting for those "powers" and for this "good" you speak of.

"PU$$Y POWER" - oh so you're 12? Cool, I was busy hacking computers when I was 12, it's why I have a job and you're stuck walking around carrying that retarded sign.

"CHOOSE LOVE" - what happened to hope? Did Trump manage to destroy your hope? Fucking A, what a president!

"DONT BACK DOWN" - wait what? Why would you tell me not to back down? I mean you don't have to because I won't, but that's weird.

I need to watch videos of this march. If this is just a small sampling of those signs, I'm sure there's so much entertainment to be had.

Edit: thanks for the gold, I'm going to use it to plate the inside of my apartment so I can feel more like Trump!

The Trump Presidency Was Only Made Possible By __________________?

thesaker |  Just hours ago Donald Trump was finally sworn in as the President of the United States. Considering all the threats hanging over this event, this is good news because at least for the time being, the Neocons have lost their control over the Executive Branch and Trump is now finally in a position to take action. The other good news is Trump’s inauguration speech which included this historical promise “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow”. Could that really mean that the USA has given up its role of World Hegemon? The mere fact of asking the question is already an immensely positive development as nobody would have asked it had Hillary Clinton been elected.

The other interesting feature of Trump’s speech is that it centered heavily on people power and on social justice. Again, the contrast with the ideological garbage from Clinton could not be greater. Still, this begs a much more puzzling question: how much can a multi-millionaire capitalist be trusted when he speaks of people power and social justice – not exactly what capitalists are known for, at least not amongst educated people. Furthermore, a Marxist reader would also remind us that “imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism” and that it makes no sense to expect a capitalist to suddenly renounce imperialism.

But what was generally true in 1916 is not necessarily true in 2017.

For one thing, let’s begin by stressing that the Trump Presidency was only made possible by the immense financial, economic, political, military and social crisis facing the USA today. Eight years of Clinton, followed by eight years of Bush Jr and eight years of Obama have seen a massive and full-spectrum decline in the strength of the United States which were sacrificed for the sake of the AngloZionist Empire. This crisis is as much internal as it is external and the election of Trump is a direct consequence of this crisis. In fact, Trump is the first one to admit that it is the terrible situation in which the USA find themselves today which brought him to power with a mandate of the regular American people (Hillary’s “deplorables”) to “drain the DC swamp” and “make America”, as opposed to the American plutocracy, “great again”. This might be somethhing crucial: I cannot imagine Trump trying to simply do “more of the same” like his predecessors did or trying to blindly double-down like the Neocons always try to.

I am willing to bet that Trump really and sincerely believes that the USA is in a deep crisis and that a new, different, sets of policies must be urgently implemented. If that assumption of mine proves to be correct, then this is by definition very good news for the entire planet because whatever Trump ends up doing (or not doing), he will at least not push his country into a nuclear confrontation with Russia. And yes, I think that it is possible that Trump has come to the conclusion that imperialism has stopped working for the USA, that far from being the solution to the contradictions of capitalism, imperialism might well have become its most self-defeating feature.

Pepe Escobar: Trump's Foreign Policy

thesaker |  The Trump era starts now – with geopolitics and geoeconomics set for a series of imminent, unpredictable cliffhangers.

I have argued that Trump’s foreign policy guru Henry Kissinger’s strategy to deal with the formidable Eurasia integration trio – Russia, China and Iran – is a remixed Divide and Rule; seduce Russia away from its strategic partnership with China, while keep harassing the weakest link, Iran.

In fact that’s how it’s already playing out – as in the outbursts of selected members of Trump’s cabinet during their US Senate hearings. Factions of US Think Tankland, referring to Nixon’s China policy, which was designed by Kissinger, are also excited with the possibilities of containment regarding at least one of those powers “potentially arrayed against America”.

Kissinger and Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski are the two foremost, self-described Western dalangs – puppet masters – in the geopolitical arena. In opposition to Kissinger, Obama’s foreign policy mentor Brzezinski, true to his Russophobia, proposes a Divide and Rule centered on seducing China.

Yet an influential New York business source, very close to the real, discreet Masters of the Universe, who correctly predicted Trump’s victory weeks before the fact, after examining my argument offered not only a scathing appraisal of those cherished dalangs; he volunteered to detail how the new normal was laid out by the Masters directly to Trump. Let’s call him “X”.

Visualizing the Global War on Cash

The Global War on Cash

Ain't No "Intelligence Community" - Just a Taxpayer-Funded Intelligence Mafia

medium |  The US intelligence infrastructure is not just huge, it is colossal, a parallel societyliving among us (yes, us, wherever you live). That has been amply illustrated by the investigative journalism project Top Secret America. According to their research, there are 1200 government agencies, more than 3,666 private companies, 17,000 locations, and 854,000 people in the US that have Top Secret security clearance. Top Secret. None of the cables released by Wikileaks this week are Top Secret. Can you even imagine the amount of data here? This is what the US calls “information dominance” and a “global surveillance system”. Almost all IT and communication companies in the US are a part of the network, and they reach across the globe.

In 2007, 70% of all intelligence budgets were spent on private contractors. That was 3 years ago, and we don’t know how that has changed because all intelligence budgets are classified, but the trend since then has been a definite shift towards more private contractors. Obama likes to use the terms “american intelligence” and “american military” to play games with the truth (see “american troops pull out of Iraq”). If they are private contractors, they aren’t american intelligence, right? And there are other much more important reasons for private contractors, they are allowed to make huge donations to political parties from their billion tax dollar contracts.

Like the military contractors, the private companies also are not bound by government procedure, their contracts are classified so most of the government has no idea what they are doing, and they are private companies who do not have to disclose information to the public. They also have a classified bid system that makes corruption between private companies and politicians particularly easy. Again, like military contractors, they are not being used in secondary roles, they are used in training and in developing and operating all the high tech industries. They are paid with huge amounts of tax money, and in turn, are in a position to drastically influence governmental policies.

“Not only were private contractors involved in the extreme interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, they have taken over the training of military interrogators at the U.S. Army’s Intelligence Center in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. And in hotspots around the world, private contractors are taking the place of government operatives. In Pakistan, for example, three-quarters of the officers posted at the Islamabad CIA station since 9/11 have been private contractors. In the Baghdad CIA station, contractors have sometimes outnumbered government employees and have taken supervisory positions overseeing what CIA agents do every day.”

SkyBoxification: How the Elites Shut Down Class Struggle

thearchdruidreport |  Much of the pushback against Trump’s impending presidency, in turn, is heavily larded with that same sneering contempt and condescension—the unending claims, for example, that the only reason people could possibly have chosen to vote for Trump was because they were racist misogynistic morons, and the like. (These days, terms such as “racist” and “misogynistic,” in the mouths of the affluent, are as often as not class-based insults rather than objective descriptions of attitudes.) The question I’d like to raise at this point, though, is why the affluent don’t seem to be able to bring themselves to come right out and denounce Trump as the candidate of the filthy rabble. Why must they borrow the rhetoric of identity politics and twist it (and themselves) into pretzel shapes instead?

There, dear reader, hangs a tale.

In the aftermath of the social convulsions of the 1960s, the wealthy elite occupying the core positions of power in the United States offered a tacit bargain to a variety of movements for social change. Those individuals and groups who were willing to give up the struggle to change the system, and settled instead for a slightly improved place within it, suddenly started to receive corporate and government funding, and carefully vetted leaders from within the movements in question were brought into elite circles as junior partners. Those individuals and groups who refused these blandishments were marginalized, generally with the help of their more compliant peers.

If you ever wondered, for example, why environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth changed so quickly from scruffy fire-breathing activists to slickly groomed and well-funded corporate enablers, well, now you know. Equally, that’s why mainstream feminist organizations by and large stopped worrying about the concerns of the majority of women and fixated instead on “breaking the glass ceiling”—that is to say, giving women who already belong to the privileged classes access to more privilege than they have already. The core demand placed on former radicals who wanted to cash in on the offer, though, was that they drop their demands for economic justice—and American society being what it is, that meant that they had to stop talking about class issues.  Fist tap Dale.

Why Trump Won the 50%

counterpunch | Neoliberal policies since the 1970s—“free trade”, outsourcing, immigration, busted unions, and stagnant wages; governmental austerity for the poor and lower taxes for the rich; Wall Street investment for the rich and debt for the rest—have combined to transfer a significant amount of yearly national income from the bottom 50% to the top 1%. A recently-published data set by respected economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman confirms the perceptions of those who feel that professional elites, whether Democrat or Republican, have had the “meritocratic” game rigged in their favor.

These methodologically-sound and compelling data show that from 1980 to 2014, the bottom 50% of individuals lost an aggregate 5% share of national post-tax disposable income, while the top 1% gained a similar amount. In terms of 2014 dollars, the combined effect of those policies mentioned above has been the transfer $573 billion of yearly income.

In individual terms, this means that in 2014, 117 million earners over age 18 were left with an average of nearly $5,000 less in disposable income than each would have had if her share of national income had remained constant since 1980. In effect, every 50 of these bottom 50 percenters was forced to collectively transfer $250,000 to one individual in the top 1 percent, a group comprised of 2.3 million adults over 18 (average age 56; 85% men).

The result of this transfer is an average of $17,700 in post-tax disposable 2014 income for the bottom 50%, $830,000 for the top 1%. Whereas the average one percenter made 26 times the average 50 percenter in 1980, that factor was 47 in 2014. The past two years signal no new trend, whatever the exaggerated claims of Obama apologists.

These data show that incomes of the one percent are increasingly comprised of capital income, return on investments. Half the incomes of the one percent, and 2/3 of the .1 percent, are comprised of such “earnings”. The bottom 50% has no financial wealth to speak of, and a relatively paltry amount of housing wealth that is matched by indebtedness of various kinds, exacerbated by marginalized employment and stagnant wages, healthcare-for-profit, and higher education for debt.

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump violated some of the sacred tenets of neoliberalism, especially regarding “free trade”. Thus he was disowned by the political establishment of both parties. While his promises of decreased economic inequality will surely prove hollow, that was no reason for swing voters—including white women—to turn to Clinton, whose condescending attitude to the bottom 50% was rightfully perceived as authentic, unlike everything else about her except her warmongering.

From Davos: Artificial Intelligence (Cognitive Augmentation)

unz |   Fundamentally solve the “intelligence problem,” and all other problems become trivial.

The problem is that this problem is a very hard one, and our native wit is unlikely to suffice. Moreover, because problems tend to get harder, not easier, as you advance up the technological ladder (Karlin, 2015), in a “business as usual” scenario with no substantial intelligence augmentation we will effectively only have a 100-200 year “window” to effect this breakthrough before global dysgenic fertility patterns rule it out entirely for a large part of the next millennium.

To avoid a period of prolonged technological and scientific stagnation, with its attendant risks of collapse, our global “hive mind” (or “noosphere”) will at a minimum have to sustain and preferably sustainably augment its own intelligence. The end goal is to create (or become) a machine, or network of machines, that recursively augment their own intelligence – “the last invention that man need ever make” (Good, 1965).

In light of this, there are five main distinct ways in which human (or posthuman) civilization could develop in the next millennium.