Do You Know How Much Damage One Lil Conk-Wearing Dindu Can Cause?

thedailybeast |   Two weeks before thousands of Trump rioters breached Congress, “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander said his group wasn’t violent—“yet.”

“One of our organizers in one state said, ‘We’re nice patriots, we don’t throw bricks,’” Alexander told a crowd at a Dec. 19 rally at Arizona’s state capitol. “I leaned over and I said, ‘Not yet. Not yet!’ Haven’t you read about a little tar-and-feathering? Those were second-degree burns!”

Alexander, who has described himself as one of the “official originators” of the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, went on to use “yet” as a code word for violence. Then Alexander told the Phoenix crowd about his plans for Washington.

“We’re going to convince them to not certify the vote on January 6 by marching hundreds of thousands, if not millions of patriots, to sit their butts in D.C. and close that city down, right?” Alexander said. “And if we have to explore options after that…‘yet.’ Yet!”

Alexander’s supporters cheered, yelling threats like “noose!” and “nothing’s off the table!”

Alexander led a host of activists in ratcheting up the rhetoric ahead of Congress’ certification of the electoral votes, threatening to “1776” opponents of Trump’s re-election. Now that five people, including a Capitol Police officer, are dead, however, Alexander has gone into hiding, and the website promoting his Jan. 6 rally has been wiped from the internet.

Alexander is defiant, saying he won’t “take an iota of blame that does not belong to me.”

“I didn’t incite anything,” Alexander said in a video posted Friday to Twitter. “I didn’t do anything.”

In reality, even as Alexander claimed his supporters were peaceful, he repeatedly raised the prospect of using violence in the weeks ahead of Jan. 6.

On Sunday night, Twitter banned Alexander’s personal account and an account for “Stop The Steal.” Alexander didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Alexander is a convicted felon, after pleading guilty to felony property theft in 2007 and felony credit card abuse in 2008. Alexander first appeared in conservative politics in the Tea Party era under the name “Ali Akbar,” organizing a group called the National Bloggers’ Club that was tied to “shady data collection operations.”

In the Trump era, now using a new name, Alexander emerged as an idiosyncratic, trash-talking MAGA die-hard affiliated with figures like InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, anti-Muslim Trump booster Laura Loomer, blundering provocateur Jacob Wohl, and Trump ally Roger Stone.

Before Trump’s 2020 election defeat, Alexander was perhaps best known for Donald Trump Jr. retweeting his groundless claim that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is not an “American Black.” He was invited to the White House for Trump’s “Social Media Summit” with various right-wing internet figures, and began frequently wearing orange clothes, claiming God had given him a message that the color had special significance for 2020.

Lawd HaMercy: Sammy Davis Jr. Reincarnated To Help "Stop The Steal"?

bayoubrief |  After amassing more than 350,000 followers, Facebook banned the group “Stop the Steal” once members began posting calls to incite violence at planned protests across the country. 

The protests were the brainchild of Ali Alexander, a controversial far-right operative who boasts more than 140,000 followers on Twitter, where he’s simply @ali.

“Alexander appears to be involved with Stop The Steal both through his tweets promoting it and through his links to one of the websites boosting it,” Mother Jones reported Friday. “Stopthesteal.us’s domain is registered to Vice and Victory, a possibly defunct political consultancy he’s affiliated with. After clicking the site’s donate button, visitors are prompted with the option to donate money to one of several cryptocurrency addresses associated with Alexander, or given links to his Paypal, CashApp, and Amazon wishlist.”

Here in Louisiana, Alexander is better known by his legal name, Ali Akbar. Although he now lives in Texas, for the past four years, Alexander resided in Baton Rouge, a fact that has gone virtually unnoticed in the torrent of coverage he’s recently generated.

In June 2019, Alexander made national headlines for a racist tweet that asserted Kamala Harris was not “an American Black” because her father was Jamaican. His comment was retweeted and then later deleted by the president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr. The next month, Alexander was one of several controversial figures invited to the White House’s “social media summit.”

There’s more.

“According to a 2018 Politico report, the night before the 2016 election, ​a PAC advised by Alexander received a $60,000 donation from hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer​, the pro-Trump billionaire,” Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt reported in September. “Alexander has associated with far-right figures including Unite the Right white supremacist attendee Matt Colligan, and made a habit of noting when members of the media he criticizes are Jewish, ​according to The Observer.”

In an August profile of Alexander, the Daily Dot reported that he had “found a niche among the likes of anti-Muslim activist and Republican Florida congressional candidate Laura Loomer and blundering political fraudster Jacob Wohl….The trio went to Minneapolis in June 2019 to film a documentary called Importing Ilhan, which was severely mocked online for lacking credibility. The video they produced was aimed at proving Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) had married her brother. While filming, they also wore bulletproof jackets only to turn out to report fake death threats against themselves to authorities.” 

Weeks before the election, Alexander promoted a website that floated the bogus claim that Joe Biden secretly suffered from Parkinson’s disease.

 

Rebellious Rednecks In Hotter Water As Internet "Researcher" Downloaded All Of Parler's Posts...,

great job, everyone pic.twitter.com/22gooTH4sl

— crash override (@donk_enby) January 11, 2021

gizmodo |  In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.

The researcher, who asked to be referred to by their Twitter handle, @donk_enby, began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating” evidence. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, among other sources, Parler is one of a several apps used by the insurrections to coordinate their breach of the Capitol, in a plan to overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power. 

Hoping to create a lasting public record for future researchers to sift through, @donk_enby began by archiving the posts from that day. The scope of the project quickly broadened, however, as it became increasingly clear that Parler was on borrowed time. Apple and Google announced that Parler would be removed from their app stores because it had failed to properly moderate posts that encouraged violence and crime. The final nail in the coffin came Saturday when Amazon announced it was pulling Parler’s plug.  

Operating on little sleep, @donk_enby began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99 percent of its content. In a tweet early Sunday, @donk_enby said she was crawling some 1.1 million Parler video URLs. “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded to Parler with all associated metadata,” she said. Included in this data tranche, now more than 56 terabytes in size, @donk_enby confirmed that the raw video files include GPS metadata pointing to exact locations of where the videos were taken.

@donk_enby later shared a screenshot showing the GPS position of a particular video, with coordinates in latitude and longitude.

The privacy implications are obvious, but the copious data may also serve as a fertile hunting ground for law enforcement. Federal and local authorities have arrested dozens of suspects in recent days accused of taking part in the Capitol riot, where a Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick, was fatally wounded after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.

@donk_enby describes herself as hacker, in the sense that she’s “someone with a creative, but skeptical attitude toward technology,” to paraphrase a definition offered by the Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest hacker association. “I want this to be a big middle finger to those who say hacking shouldn’t be political,” she said. @donk_enby work has aided other researchers, including one at New York University’s Center for Cybersecurity.

@donk_enby, whose efforts are documented on the website ArchiveTeam.org, said the data will eventually be hosted by the Internet Archive. (The two sites are not affiliated.)

 

After They Get Done With These Rebellious Rednecks Jimmy Dore - They'll Be Coming For You!

BAR |  It must be noted that back in 2005-06, when Pelosi was gearing up for her first successful run for Speaker, she prevented Democrats from holding hearings on the Katrina catastrophe in fear of identifying the Party too closely with Black issues, and then forbade the Congressional Black Caucus and all other Democrats from attending Republican hearings on Katrina. All of the Black Caucus meekly complied with her diktat – except for Atlanta Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who was shunned by her fellow Black congresspersons as a result. As Peter Gamble and I reported in The Black Commentator , Pelosi “was able to convince the Congressional Black Caucus, as a body, to stand down in the face of a horrific crisis: the displacement of hundreds of thousands of residents of New Orleans.” The Black Caucus’s political irrelevance and impotence can be dated to that debacle. AOC and her Squad are on the same path – and the slope is much steeper in this era of accelerating national and imperial decay. 

“The death of 40 to 60 thousand Americans a year due to lack of healthcare, and 300,000-plus Covid-19 fatalities to date, is corporate-inflicted violence on a horrific scale.”

In her self-pitying funk, the Bronx fashion-plate and champion tweeter -- a rival of Trump, in that regard – sounded no different than the standard “because…Trump” Democrat, blaming the outgoing Orange Menace for her own political cowardice: “[I]n a time when the Republican Party is attempting an electoral coup and trying to overturn the results of our election, this is not just about being united as a party. It's about being united as people who have basic respect for the rule of law.” Having nothing to offer their “base,” Democrats make Trump the excuse for their refusal to buck the corporate masters. What will they do when the Orange Ogre is finally gone?

Doubtless, they will blame the Russians and a “handful of outspoken left-wing activists,” as MSN  dubbed the #ForceTheVote advocates, for undermining the smooth workings of “American democracy.” However, the exodus of the leftmost ranks of the Democratic Party has finally begun, and will accelerate in the excruciatingly unending Covid-19 crisis, and as the post-Covid corporate economic order emerges with the full collaboration of the Democratic Party. The biggest benefactor of the New Year’s revolt is the Movement for a People’s Party, coordinated by Nick Branna, which vows to run a slate of congressional candidates in 2022 and mount a presidential bid in 2024. For the first time in this century, significant numbers of young people of all races – most of them unabashed Democrats only yesterday, it seems – are expressing raw hatred for the Democrats, who are richly deserving of the utmost contempt. 

“Democrats make Trump the excuse for their refusal to buck the corporate masters.”

Having witnessed and participated in the largest demonstrations in the history of the United States in the past year, these young activists correctly see elections as only one aspect of “politics.” Indeed, the corporate monopoly has rendered electoral projects the narrowest, most circumscribed arena of U.S. political expression. Left political parties’ electoral activity must be an extension of grassroots and “street” advocacy. 

Covid-19 ensured the demise of Trump and has laid bare the anti-people nature of racial capitalism and the corporate duopoly that serves the oligarchs. Pelosi and her Democrats have shown themselves to be one with the Republicans in enforcing the Race to the Bottom that capitalists have imposed, worldwide, and whose noose has been tightening in the United States for two generations. Medicare for All is anathema to both corporate parties because it would go far towards deprivatizing one-sixth of the U.S. economy but, just as importantly, it would greatly diminish the precarity and desperation of workers who fear they must take and hold any job that provides health insurance. The oligarchy understands perfectly that its super-profits are derived from super-exploitation of the precarity-stricken workers of the planet, and on the deepening desperation of its own workforce.

Retired Capitol Police Officer "I Think They Allowed Them To Do What They Did...,"

WSWS |   In a telling interaction on CNN Friday, retired capitol policeman Theortis Jones said, “I think they allowed them to do what they did.” The complacent moderator failed to ask who gave the orders to stand back. The interview with the 37-year veteran was ended abruptly soon after he added, “They were a part of allowing these people to come up to the Capitol the way they did.”

The Democratic leadership is boasting that it is conducting an investigation into the death of the police officer who was killed in the riot. But this “investigation” will be conducted by the Capitol Police and the FBI—the very institutions that must themselves be subject to a thorough investigation for their role in this ongoing plot.

The Capitol Police’s self-investigation comes even as Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren reported that the chief of the Capitol Police lied to her by stating that the National Guard had been called up before January 6. The chief “was not truthful to me,” Lofgren told the press. “It was just not true. They had not been called.”

New details are also coming to light showing how close Wednesday’s riot came to ending in a massacre or mass kidnapping event. PBS Newshour correspondent Lisa Desjardins told NPR yesterday that she realized the danger she was in when she noticed police had abandoned their posts inside the Capitol building. She was barricaded in a room with several congressional representatives who held hands and prayed, worried that they were about to be killed.

An aide close to Vice President Mike Pence also told CNN yesterday that the Trump administration did not contact Pence or take any measures to ensure his safety. Pence was with his wife, daughter and brother in the Capitol building Wednesday as he presided over the electoral vote certification. CNN wrote:

Several of the violent Trump supporters who were rampaging the US Capitol were heard screaming ‘where’s Mike Pence,’ the source said, frightening the vice president and his family. Yet, the President and his top aides barely lifted a finger to check in on Pence to make sure he and his family were unharmed, the source added.

Online, fascist militias are now preparing for an even larger event on Inauguration Day. Hampton Stall, the founder of MilitiaWatch and an expert on the US far-right, told the World Socialist Web Site:

There’s a lot of really cryptic chatter and overt discussions of violence around the January 6 event, but a lot of inauguration-related organizing is related to a few different dynamics that have been planned for at least a month’s time. One that stands out is the Million Militia March apparently organized for 20 January at the Capitol. Propaganda and event fliers have been circulating around militia chat groups.

Militia members are also making plans for protests at various state capitols in the days leading up to the inauguration. Stall added that while Wednesday’s demonstration in Washington DC was largely unarmed, this may change on January 20:

There are also multiple state capital events organized for the 17th, 18, 19th and 20th. Fliers for these events have been quite mixed as far as indications as to the specific ideological tendencies of those organizing, whether it be ‘2A’ activism, overt militia organizing, Boogaloo, or something else entirely. The one commonality is that all are expressly right-wing in nature and often point to a militant or armed gathering.

Exactly one year before the date of the scheduled inauguration, on January 20, 2020, the largest armed demonstration in US history took place in Richmond, Virginia involving roughly 10,000 fascists. In December, Trump’s fascist adviser Stephen Miller said, “The only date in the Constitution is January 20,” adding that this was the “deadline” for action to protect Trump’s presidency.

Grassroots Activism Will Be Censored On Social Media

caitlinjohnstone |  Patriot Act 2.0 will be rolled out with a lot of mindless bleating about white supremacists and fighting fascism and the actual policies and laws put into place will have virtually nothing to do with any of those things. It will be geared at preventing the revolutionary changes that need to be pushed for via grassroots activism in the United States.

Listening to US politicians and pundits the last few years you’d assume it’s been raining actual 9/11s and Pearl Harbors in America 24/7.

“Our democracy has been attacked!” screamed the political establishment that just forced you to choose between Donald Trump and Democrat Donald Trump for president.

Saying there’s been an attack on American democracy is like saying there’s been an attack on Kazakhstan’s fjords.

Liberals learned the words “coup” and “insurrection” like five seconds ago and now they are academic experts on both of these things.

The narrative managers’ ability to move liberals and progressives from “Defund the police” to “MOAR POLICING” in just a few months was even more impressive than their ability to move them from “Believe Women” and #MeToo to “Tara Reade is a lying grifter”.

Here’s how politicians, media and government could eliminate conspiracy theories if they really want to:

• Stop lying all the time
• Stop killing people
• Stop promoting conspiracy theories (eg Russiagate)
• Stop doing evil things in secret
• End government opacity
• Stop conspiring

To support the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of monopolistic tech oligarchs to exert more and more global control over human communication. Regardless of your attitude toward whoever happens to be getting deplatformed today, supporting this is self-destructive.

Manuel Lopez-Obrador: In The Face Of Social Media Censorship - Alternative Media Is Necessary

jornada |  Mexico City. Warning of an overbearing attitude by Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg in the face of the events in the United States - and the suspension of Donald Trump's accounts on that company's platforms - President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that it is important to create alternative media as a counterweight to the actions of executives from social networks and traditional media.

Answering a question, related to what happened in the neighboring country, he said that his government will support alternative media, to guarantee the people the right to information, in the face of the risk that the traditional media and the networks tend to believe in a global media power, a Holy Inquisition that censors and silences.

"In all public media there must be possibilities for the work of communicators, of journalists. Of course, to the extent of our possibilities, but we should try to make sure that there are these opportunities to participate in public media.

"We have to be creating alternative means of communication, this thing that you point out as a blackout, this thing that they did in the United States is a bad sign, it is a bad omen that private companies decide to silence, censor. This goes against freedom, so let's not create a world government with the power to control social networks, a world media power. Furthermore, a censorship court like the Holy Inquisition but for the management of public opinion," he said.

It is very serious, he added.

"Of course we must be thinking about options, alternatives, because I do believe that it was a before and after in the case of social networks what happened a few days ago.

"Then I read the letter from the owner of Facebook and I felt it with much arrogance, talking about their rules and what? Freedom? And the right to information? And the role of legally constituted authorities," he said.

Then, said President López Obrador, we do have to think about that "not about trusting us because we already suffered for a long time what was the control of conventional media, social networks appear, it is a new stage, we all celebrate them.

"I still maintain that they are blessed social networks. But these recent events should concern us and we should not stop creating alternative media and always allow the people to be informed, to guarantee the right to information," he said.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Backchannel Bullshidt From A Roided-Out Ewing Ave-Pulaski Rd-Aurora-Elgin-Joliet Man...,

Some cats will never get it through their thick skulls that I grew up with, fought and reconciled with, and continue to live and work with - the rednecked salt of the earth out'chere deep in flyover country. I judge strictly by the demonstrated content of man's character. Everything else is, as they say, STRICTLY CONVERSATION. 

The .0001% is shitting its degenerate pants about now after last Wednesday's outburst. Has nothing whatsoever to do with Trump. Jeezus H. Phukking Christ!!! How ruh-tarded would one have to be to even pretend that this is about T-Rump?!?!?! Here's one such ruh-tard. Former California Gubernator and adulterous sack of fetid shidt, Ah-nold Schwarz-a-neggar...., 

 

Along with what I think about his monkey tail. 

 

and this trifling muhphukkah really fixed his mouth to talk about public service and integrity...., 

jes dayyum!!! 

COMPLETE, TOTAL, AND ABJECT LACK OF CONSCIOUS SELF-AWARENESS, CONSCIENCE, AND PERSONAL INTEGRITY!!!

The Guardians Of Inclusive Capitalism

wikipedia |  In 2012, the Henry Jackson Society created a task force for Inclusive Capitalism Initiative project in order to start a transatlantic conversation about the growing income inequalities and their threat to the capitalist system.^[20]

In 2014, Conference on Inclusive Capitalism, co-hosted by the City of London and E. L. Rothschild holding company, was held in London where the concept of inclusive capitalism was discussed as a practical measure.^[21] At another conference in 2015 the "Pathway to Action" was brainstormed.^[22] In the same 2015 year, the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism was registered in the United States as a not-for-profit organization.^[23] Lynn Forester de Rothschild became the founding CEO of the Coalition. At the 2016 Conference on Inclusive Capitalism in New York City, participants expressed commitment to promote inclusive economic growth.^[24] Members of the Coalition expressed a belief that all stakeholders, including business and society, should be engaged in the enactment of an inclusive capitalism agenda^[25][26]

In 2019, the Embankment Project for Inclusive Capitalism (EPIC) undertaken by the Coalition together with Ernst & Young reported its findings in a white paper. It was a pioneering effort to "develop a framework and identify meaningful metrics to report on long-term and inclusive value creation activities that heretofore have not been captured on traditional financial statements".^[27]

In 2020, the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a partnership of the Coalition with the Vatican, was created.^[28][29][30]

Some pundits express optimism that it is possible to remake capitalism in a more inclusive and responsible way.^[31]

After January 20th The Clampdown Will Begin In Earnest

caitlinjohnstone |  Biden has announced plans to roll out new domestic terrorism laws in the wake of the Capitol Hill riot.

“Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them,” Wall Street Journal reports.

Did you know that Biden has often boasted about being the original author of the US Patriot Act?

The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9/11 attacks. Legislators later admitted that they hadn’t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow its authors were able to gather all the necessary information and write the whole entire thing in a week.

This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET reported the following back in 2008:

“Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, [then-Senator Joe] Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of ‘terrorism’ that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode ‘constitutional and statutory due process protections’ and would ‘authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.’

Biden’s bill was never put to a vote, but after 9/11 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly credited his bill with the foundations of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Capitol Hill Protest Completely Revealed The Shriveled State Of American Governance

unz  |   I think for most of us who were watching, we simply had an overwhelming feeling of Schadenfreude — seeing the political elite that’s been selling us down the river and making our lives hell for decades for once the ones cowering in fear. This was most especially true of the Democrats, who got a taste of their own medicine after endlessly excusing and justifying BLM and Antifa violence over the past four years. Only a few weeks before, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had tweeted an ill-timed message justifying protests, writing, “The thing that critics of activists don’t get is that they tried playing the ‘polite language’ policy game and all it did was make them easier to ignore . . . The whole point of protesting is to make people uncomfortable. Activists take that discomfort with the status quo and advocate for concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small and grows. To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable . . . that’s the point.” On this, we can agree with her.

 

What if activists aren’t PR firms for politicians & their demands are bc police budgets are exploding, community resources are shrinking to bankroll it, & ppl brought this up for ages but it wasn’t until they said “defund” that comfortable people started paying attn to brutality

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 2, 2020

But for me, I was no less happy to see the Republicans on the run. After all, it is they who have been stoking the anger and resentment of populist Americans, secure in their belief that they had conjured a monster they completely controlled and that they could endlessly exploit for their own purposes no matter what they did. Well, that monster turned around and bit them on their fleeing asses on Wednesday. The “people,” whom they love to claim they represent, went from being an ideological abstraction to an angry mob after they felt cheated and decided to take matters into their own hands. It’s important to remember that, according to reports, what first inspired the protesters to descend on the Capitol was when word reached them that Pence had refused to challenge the certification of the Electoral College result. They weren’t just angry at the Democrats; they were angry at the whole lot of them.

Just as among conservatives, there are those on the Dissident Right who see this event as a tragedy, primarily because they believe that this protest has discredited the populist movement. To such people, I can only respond: What were you getting out of being well-behaved? It was already clear before the Capitol occupation that no real attempt was being made to win justice regarding the election results. Those Republicans who have backed Trump in his efforts to challenge Biden’s alleged victory have, for the most part, only done so because they want to be able to tell their Trump-loving supporters that they did their best, but that, in the end, the Democrats cheated them. I’m quite sure that they’ve known for weeks that they had already done all they could do through legal procedures; what they’ve been doing in the meantime was merely theater for their constituents. None of them really wanted to challenge the establishment; they are the establishment. So, from our point of view, what is there to be gained by backing a lost cause? A lost cause that, moreover, didn’t offer much to us to begin with, given that every Dissident Rightist has been deeply disappointed in the Trump administration? Sure, a Trump win was preferable to a Biden win from our perspective, but it’s hardly worth quietly and passively going down with the ship for him.

Of course, even before the Capitol had been cleared, I started seeing the conspiracy theorists coming out of the woodwork to claim that this was yet another “false flag” event, just like every other historical event to have occurred over the past 70 years. The main support for this claim that I’ve seen is that it has been asserted that known Antifa members have been identified in the crowd that occupied the Capitol. Even if this is true, I don’t see what difference this makes. People in Antifa are known to be attracted to violence and chaos, so it’s hardly surprising that a few of them may have shown up to take part.

 

"I Didn't Mean It, I Didn't Mean It!!!" Another LARPing Middle-Aged Pranksta Repents...,

newyorker |  In an interview, Brock confirmed that he was the man in the photos and videos. He denied that he held racist views and echoed Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, saying that he derived his understanding of the matter principally from social media. He told me that he had gone to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate peacefully. “The President asked for his supporters to be there to attend, and I felt like it was important, because of how much I love this country, to actually be there,” he said. Brock added that he did not identify as part of any organized group and claimed that, despite the scenes of destruction that day, he had seen no violence. When he arrived at the Capitol, he said, he assumed he was welcome to enter the building.

Brock denied that he had entered Pelosi’s office suite, saying that he “stopped five to ten feet ahead of the sign” bearing her title that insurrectionists later tore down and brandished. However, in the ITV video, he appears to emerge from the suite. Brock said that he had worn tactical gear because “I didn’t want to get stabbed or hurt,” citing “B.L.M. and Antifa” as potential aggressors. He claimed that he had found the zip-tie handcuffs on the floor. “I wish I had not picked those up,” he told me. “My thought process there was I would pick them up and give them to an officer when I see one. . . . I didn’t do that because I had put them in my coat, and I honestly forgot about them.” He also said that he was opposed to vandalizing the building, and was dismayed when he learned of the extent of the destruction. “I know it looks menacing,” he told me. “That was not my intent.”

Legal experts said that people who breached the Capitol could face a range of criminal charges, from disorderly conduct to seditious conspiracy. “Presumably this person broke into Congress in order to stop or intimidate or interfere with the counting of the Electoral College certification, a fundamental feature of the peaceful transition of power in the United States,” Alan Rozenshtein, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, said.

Brock, a fifty-three-year-old father of three who lives in an affluent suburb of Dallas, graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1989, with a major in international relations and affairs. In a LinkedIn profile that Brock recently deleted, he described himself as having served as a chief operations inspector and flight commander with the 706th Fighter Squadron, at one point leading more than two dozen pilots. Brock told me that he served in Afghanistan and, in a non-combat capacity, in Iraq, and that for his service he received three Meritorious Service Medals, six Air Medals, and three Aerial Achievement Medals. In a statement, Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokesperson, said, “This individual is no longer serving in the Air Force Reserve. He retired in 2014. As a private citizen, the Air Force no longer has jurisdiction over him.” Brock now works for Hillwood Airways, a Texas-based private aviation company.

Brock’s family members and his friend said that his service in the Air Force was central to his identity. Several of Brock’s e-mail addresses and social-media accounts featured his call sign and military nickname, Torch. One family member said that Brock derived “this weird sense of power” from his time as a military pilot, along with a Manichean world view. “He used to tell me that I only saw the world in shades of gray, and that the world was black and white,” the other family member said. “He doesn’t understand the fallout and the people he’s hurting. And I can’t imagine what he was doing there with zip ties, or what he thought he was going to accomplish.”

slate  |   Call the zip ties by their correct name: The guys were carrying flex cuffs, the plastic double restraints often used by police in mass arrest situations. They walked through the Senate chamber with a sense of purpose. They were not dressed in silly costumes but kitted out in full paramilitary regalia: helmets, armor, camo, holsters with sidearms. At least one had a semi-automatic rifle and 11 Molotov cocktails. At least one, unlike nearly every other right-wing rioter photographed that day, wore a mask that obscured his face.

These are the same guys who, when the windows of the Capitol were broken and entry secured, went in first with what I’d call military-ish precision. They moved with purpose, to the offices of major figures like Nancy Pelosi and then to the Senate floor. What was that purpose? It wasn’t to pose for photos. It was to use those flex cuffs on someone.

In October, the FBI and state authorities charged 13 men with plotting to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan. Members of that plot attended protests at the Michigan Capitol in April, real planners of violence mixing easily with those for whom guns are fun protest props. The plotters discussed a summary execution—“knock on the door,” one wrote in the group chat, “and when she answers it just cap her”—but settled on a kidnapping, pulled off while police were distracted by a nearby explosion. Think of that plot, as these men surely did, as a dress rehearsal for what the zip-tie guys wanted to accomplish at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

 

The Price Of Ignoring Capitol Hill Protesters Will Be Civil War

theblaze |  Here, I guess, I should apologize for not joining the rest of the media in feigning outrage and calling for the trespassers to be tried for treason. But I'm neither outraged nor feeling vengeful because of their act of civil disobedience.

I understand it. It was an inevitable repercussion from 2020 and what we've all witnessed the last decade. It was Sir Isaac Newton's third law come to life. 

"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

For four years now, the billionaire and millionaire elites who control academia, the mainstream media, politics, popular culture, and the sports world have framed Trump supporters as racist deplorables worthy of elimination from society.

These same elites spent the past decade elevating Michael Brown, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, Rayshard Brooks, Eric Garner, and other resisting criminal suspects to icon status while simultaneously raising bail money for protesters willing to riot, loot, burn, and vandalize in the name of racial justice.

This blatant hypocrisy will not go unchallenged. You cannot ignore the desires, concerns and feelings of 74 million citizens. You cannot write them off as Nazis and answer all their complaints with allegations of racism or sexism. That's fascism.

At this point, the Deplorables should be commended for their restraint. Antifa and Black Lives Matter search, burn, and destroy well into the wee hours. The Deplorables returned to their hotel rooms by nightfall and watched our lawmakers return to work inside the Capitol by 8 p.m.

The critics say President Trump provoked Wednesday's political "violence." His refusal to concede a corrupt election baited his followers to overrun the Capitol with flags, put Ashli Babbitt in harm's way, and do enough property damage to delay the Electoral College confirmation three or four hours.

Fine. Guilty as charged.

But our president for the next two weeks was not Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone provocateur. He had plenty of collaborators. They work on all the major and cable news and sports networks. They play in the NFL and NBA. They represent both political parties, hold high positions in Hollywood, at Netflix, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The people wagging their fingers the hardest at Trump and the Deplorables sanctioned, financed, and promoted political violence throughout all of 2020 and for much of the past decade.

 

The Difference Between Insurrection and Resistance Is Corporate Sponsorship...,

newyorker |   This is precisely what Trump wanted. It was Trump who repeatedly called on his supporters to travel to Washington, D.C., for the joint session, after his efforts to overturn the election through the courts had failed. It was Trump who repeatedly told those same supporters that the election had been stolen, and that the result needed to be reversed. And it was Trump who ignored reports that some of his supporters were planning to go far beyond the peaceful protest that he claimed to be calling for. Online forums popular with Trump supporters were “filled with violent rhetoric directed at a wide range of perceived enemies,” the Anti-Defamation League warned. “In response to a user who wondered what happens if Congress ignores ‘evidence’ that President Trump won the election, a user wrote, ‘Storm the capitol.’ ”

Before the mob broke into the Capitol, Trump addressed a large group of his supporters who had gathered on the Ellipse, the park just south of the White House. Referring to the election, he declared, “There has never been anything like this—it’s a pure theft—in American history.” Later on, after repeating a long litany of bogus claims about voter fraud, he said, “This is a criminal enterprise.” He ended his speech by saying, “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Ave. . . . We’re going to try and give our Republicans—the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help—we’re going to try and give them kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country.”

For the past four years, there has been a tendency in some quarters to downplay Trump’s incendiary rhetoric. Ever since the election, it has been incessant. With Mitch McConnell and other leading Republicans pledging to accept the election results, Trump’s attempt to bully Congress into submission was—and is—destined to fail. But, when you are dealing with would-be authoritarians like Trump, it is a mistake to focus exclusively on the formal institutions of government; the danger comes from outside the system.

It’s been clear all along that Trump’s supporters took his claims of voter fraud seriously. And when he complained to them that McConnell and even Mike Pence, Trump’s ultra-loyal Vice-President, were preparing to sell him out, they were perfectly willing to believe it. They were even willing to storm the Capitol and terrorize members of Congress on Trump’s behalf. That is how democracies perish. Fist tap Dale for psionically sensing my struggle and turning this liminal foetus into a complete, coherent, and finished thought.

Sen. Josh Hawley Defunded And Disavowed For Tryna Get Off The Fist Up His Sock-Puppet Ass...,

newsweek  |  A Missouri businessman who spent millions of dollars funding Sen. Josh Hawley's political campaigns has disavowed the lawmaker in a damning statement, accusing him of inciting the riot in the U.S. Capitol and calling for his censure.

The president and CEO of Tamko Building Products, David Humphreys, had been a major donor for the Missouri Republicans, with his family giving $4.4 million of the $9.2 million that Hawley raised for his campaign to become attorney general in 2016.

His family also donated about $2 million to independent groups who backed Hawley's bid to become a senator in 2018.

But in a statement to the Missouri Independent, Humphreys expressed his disgust with Hawley for backing President Donald Trump's claims of election fraud, accusing him of fuelling the unrest on Wednesday that had fatal consequences at the heart of American democracy.

Humphreys said he publicly opposed Trump in October 2016 because "you have to look in the mirror and recognize that you cannot possibly justify support for Trump to your children."

He went on: "I need to say the same about Missouri's U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, who has shown his true colors as an anti-democracy populist by supporting Trump's false claim of a 'stolen election.' Hawley's irresponsible, inflammatory and dangerous tactics have incited violence and further discord.

"Hawley should be censured by his Senate colleagues for his actions which have undermined a peaceful transition of power and for provoking yesterday's riots in our nation's capital.

Many are lining up to criticize Hawley—a chorus of condemnation that could hurt his presidential chances in a 2024 race in which he was positioning himself to inherit the mantle and support base of Trump.

His mentor, former Sen. Jack Danforth, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that supporting Hawley and trying to get him elected "was the worst mistake I ever made in my life."

Capital Hill Security Failure So Comprehensive It Had To Have Been Intentional

wired |  Unlike a building such as the White House, in which access is very tightly controlled, the Capitol building is often called the "People's House.” Its security is similar to that of a hospital; many spaces are open and accessible if you have a reason to be there, and only some areas are tightly guarded or otherwise access-controlled. Larkin, who also spent years with White House security in the Secret Service and is now vice president of corporate development at SAP National Security Services, says that the Capitol inherently has more entrances and exits than can be simultaneously guarded at normal staffing levels. He emphasizes that failures to contain and secure the situation happened while the pro-Trump mob was outside the building. But Larkin, who retired as Senate sergeant at arms in 2018, adds that cybersecurity is the next priority after physical security.

 In spite of this, the mob Wednesday had ample opportunities to steal information or gain device access if they wanted to. And while the Senate and House each build off of their own shared IT framework, ultimately each of the 435 representatives and 100 senators runs their own office with their own systems. This is a boon to security in the sense that it creates segmentation and decentralization; getting access to Nancy Pelosi's emails doesn't help you access the communications of other representatives. But this also means that there aren't necessarily standardized authentication and monitoring schemes in place. Larkin emphasizes that there is a baseline of monitoring that IT staffers will be able to use to audit and assess whether there was suspicious activity on congressional devices. But he concedes that representatives and senators have varying levels of cybersecurity competence and hygiene.

It's also true that potentially exposed data at the Capitol on Wednesday would not have been classified, given that the mob had access only to unclassified networks. But congressional staffers are not subject to Freedom of Information Act obligations and are often much more candid in their communications than other government officials. Security and intelligence experts also emphasize that troves of unclassified information can still reveal sensitive or even classified information when combined.

Former National Security Agency hacker Jake Williams points out that, while US law enforcement was somehow caught flat-footed, president Donald Trump's supporters (egged on by Trump himself) have repeatedly foreshadowed that something like this could occur.

“You have to step back and realize that foreign intelligence could have looked at this and said, ‘Yeah, this is going to be an opportunity,” says Williams, founder of Rendition Infosec. “I don’t think every office that was entered everything needs to be burned to the ground, but you need to be acknowledging that there’s real intelligence value in learning legislators’ intentions and plans on policy. This security breach is a big deal.”

Even without physical intrusions, foreign adversaries could also use the incident as a jumping off point to launch phishing campaigns against congressional offices or begin spreading disinformation to foment future unrest.

“One thing I can guarantee you is that in Tehran, in Moscow, in Beijing folks are sitting in meetings right now thinking how can we take advantage of this?" says Kelvin Coleman, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance, who formerly worked in the Department of Homeland Security and National Security Council.

And Of Course The Big Bish Schlapp DuJour..., Sidney Powell

axios  |  Dominion Voting Systems on Friday filed a defamation lawsuit seeking $1.3 billion in damages against Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who has pushed unfounded conspiracy theories alleging that the company was involved in an international communist plot to rig the election against President Trump.

The big picture: Dominion alleges that Powell acted "in concert with allies and media outlets determined to promote a false preconceived narrative about the 2020 election—caused unprecedented harm." In an interview with the Axios Re:Cap podcast last week, Dominion CEO John Poulos did not rule out suing Trump himself.

What they're saying: "As a result of the defamatory falsehoods peddled by Powell ... Dominion’s founder, Dominion’s employees, Georgia’s governor, and Georgia’s secretary of state have been harassed and have received death threats, and Dominion has suffered enormous harm," the lawsuit reads.

• "After Dominion sent Powell a letter putting her on formal notice of the facts and the death threats and asking her to retract her false claims, Powell doubled down, tweeting to her 1.2 million Twitter followers that she heard that “#Dominion” had written to her and that, although she had not even seen Dominion’s letter yet, she was “retracting nothing” because “[w]e have #evidence” and “They are #fraud masters!""
• "Dominion brings this action to set the record straight, to vindicate the company’s rights under civil law, to recover compensatory and punitive damages, to seek a narrowly tailored injunction, and to stand up for itself and its employees."

The other side: Powell wrote on Twitter Friday, "Dominion’s suit against me & DefendingTheRepublic.org is baseless & filed to harass, intimidate, & to drain our resources as we seek the truth of Dominion's role in this fraudulent election. We will not be cowed in exercising our 1st Amendment rights or seeking truth."

Read the full lawsuit.

Right Up To The Moment You Get Caught Then ALL The Little Bish Comes Gushing Out Of You...,

kark |  The Arkansas man photographed inside Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office during the riot at the U.S. Capitol Wednesday is now in federal custody.

Richard Barnett turned himself in to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in Benton County Friday morning.

Barnett, a resident of Gravette, has made headlines since a protest at the national mall turned violent and broke into the capitol building. In the aftermath, Barnett told reporters at the scene that he had taken items from Pelosi’s office.

He is facing multiple federal charges.

MSN |   A rioter who was photographed hanging from the balcony of the Senate Chamber has begged for forgiveness, saying he got "caught up in the moment."

The man—identified by local media as Josiah Colt, from Boise, Idaho—said his actions had been inappropriate and that he had not intended to "stain on our great Country's Democratic process."

His apology comes after he bragged about his rampage through the U.S. Capitol.

In a video posted on Instagram shortly after his rampage, Colt used a derogatory slur to refer to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and called her "a traitor."

The 34-year-old also claimed he was the first to sit in the Democrat's chair, however the seat would have been that of Vice President Mike Pence.

On Thursday, however, Colt said he had "brought shame upon myself" and is now seeking legal advice.

Dayyum It Feels Good To Be A Gangster...,

forbes |  Along with shutting down the proceedings of the U.S. Congress and forcing lawmakers to flee to safety during an important vote on the presidential election, the pro-Trump mob that stormed through the Capitol on Wednesday stole equipment, ripped down signs and damaged property—brazen actions they could be prosecuted for, many of which were caught on camera.  

Trump supporters took over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, upending tables, ripping down pictures, and removing a sign posted by the entrance to be used as a “trophy,” according to the New York Times; computers in Pelosi’s office may have been compromised.  

Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill tweeted that a laptop “only used for presentations” had been stolen from the speaker’s conference room, while House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn told reporters his iPad was stolen.

“Items, electronic items were stolen from senators’ offices, documents and materials were stolen,” Michael Sherwin, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, said Thursday.

Richard Barnett, 60, from Gravette, Arkansas, posed for the New York Times with a note stolen from Pelosi’s office, saying he didn’t steal it because he “left a quarter” on Pelosi’s desk. 

 

Why Didn't The Police Arrest Any Capitol Violators?

If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen.

However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other.

The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar.

This is exactly what’s happening in America today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask.

The real question you need to be asking yourselves is who’s shaking the jar ... and why?

Wake Up!

Stop thinking about parties,and start thinking about movements.

If you are in an ideological battle with your neighbor, then you are disengaged from your true enemy.

Start the education movement. First, educate yourself. Then, work to help others around you to wake up and see who is taking EVERYTHING from you.

Hint: it isn't the bum on the corner, or the Karen across the street. They are victims and tools, and they can be constructively engaged with.

Your true enemy is never seen walking round the neighborhood, and would never stoop so low as to acknowledge - much less engage - a lowly serf on some dirty street like you.

He has almost everything YOU ever worked for, but he wants it ALL.

Once he has it, you will be tilled under as fertilizer on his robotically controlled farm. It is already happening today, and it is rapidly progressing.

Either humans will wake up to what is going on, or, they will largely perish - and soon.

Sum'n Not Right - But Not In The Way This Wokist Spokist Imagines...,

guardian  |  By now, the world has witnessed white rioters seize the Capitol building in Washington DC. After hearing Donald Trump encourage them to reject the presidential election’s outcome, thousands reportedly pushed through cops to storm ongoing congressional debates and reign supreme over politicians who fearfully scurried out of the halls of power. Draped in American, Confederate, and Trump flags, the raiders invaded the House floor, occupied representative offices, and filled balconies and scaffolds that line the windows. Joe Biden took to a podium to respond, cautioning the country that “our democracy is under unprecedented assault”.

On television, I saw paramedics rush a stretcher in the pandemonium. The woman bearing a bloodied face laying on top startled me, the anchor, and the cameraman. Please God, don’t let that woman be dead, I prayed, though her eyes lacked an animating essence. When I saw the video of the Proud Boys burn a Black Lives Matter banner a few weeks ago, I knew there would be more violent acts of desperation because they need a cause to feel empowered. Envying the resistance of the oppressed, Trump supporters want reasons to march and chant, so they create enemies and feign vulnerability as their cause grows lost. They sacrificed their lives to save white supremacy, even though it threatens them, too, materially and morally. And Black lives may never matter to people, like the woman, who will risk their own white lives during a pandemic to attack the nation’s capital to protect Donald Trump.

A senior Capitol police officer reportedly shot and killed her. But even the police shooting of the Trump supporter did not immediately catalyze significant law enforcement action to stop the conservative Caucasian invasion. Later, I watched a group of unmasked white men and women chase down a Black law enforcement agent who wielded only a stick in return. I was angry. Not because I felt bad for the cop, but because in that moment, I watched him realize that he was Black, outnumbered, and per the Dred Scott supreme court decision, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Wednesday was a reminder of one difference between white rebellion to feigned oppression and Black resistance to actual oppression: where there is radical Black resistance, there is state repression. Where there is white rebellion for conservative causes, there is collusion with the state. Even when the white cops are outnumbered, like the McKinney, Texas, cops who assaulted Dajerria Becton in her swimsuit, they escalate; he just pulled the gun out on Black teens who came to her rescue. Police have stomped, beat, shot, teargassed, and arrested protesters who organize, march, pray and sing for our multi-racial liberation movements. Including me. Yet on Wednesday, activists and bystanders knew damn well that if the election refusers who raided the Capitol were Black, then the same politicians who kneeled for George Floyd and painted yellow “Black lives matter” letters onto the streets would have sent the full force of the law to stop it. 

How Was The Security Of The Capitol Building Restored So Quickly After The "Breach"?

From an operational security perspective, consider that any one of the people who "invaded" the capital building yesterday could have been a foreign agent. They would have had the greatest opportunity to plant listening devices, radiological,chemical or biological weapons.
 
It would have been a great time to just scatter some ricin on the carpets or upholstery. While I was watching one of the big three networks yesterday doing live coverage I heard one of the reporters state that it would take a long time to sweep the building to make sure it was secure before they could let congress back in and that the earliest would be sometime the next day before they could resume.
 
Yet just 2 hours after the protesters were kicked out, the Senate was back in session. 

Now from an IT security perspective alone, it would take at least 24 hours to do a basic tempest security sweep of every single computer, printer, ethernet port, electrical outlet, telephone, etc., not including taking these devices apart and doing a visual inspection to ensure nothing untoward had been plugged in or surreptitiously added to the device.

No security officer would EVER allow congress to get back in session that quickly - not if the breach was real.

China's Rise Contradicts Every Aspect Of America's Ruling Ideology

theamericanconservative |  Writing in the journal Palladium, Richard Hanania has produced the first must-read essay of 2021. A research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Hanania is part of an emerging generation of young scholars who reject the increasingly dubious verities of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. Their arrival comes not a moment too soon.

The title of Hanania’s piece is “China’s Real Threat is to America’s Ruling Ideology.” In this context, ideology refers not only to a belief system—liberal democratic capitalism, in our case—but also to a theory of history. Hanania’s real subject is delusion: Washington’s insistence despite abundant evidence to the contrary that the American way of life defines the ultimate destiny of humankind.

Hanania’s essay deserves to be read in its entirety. But a brief synopsis of his argument goes like this: despite the alarmism of official Washington in depicting China as the “national security issue of our time,” the PRC’s emergence as a great power “in no way harms the prosperity or security of most Americans.”

Ordinary Americans have no reason to fear the People’s Republic, Hanania writes. True, the Chinese people enjoy only limited freedom. True also, the Chinese government persecutes and even brutalizes domestic minorities. Yet what should matter to the United States is that Beijing “is not on a mission to fundamentally remake the world.” President Xi Jinping is not engaged in subverting the American Bill of Rights. He has his hands full running China.

Xi’s not-unreasonable strategic purpose is to promote Chinese prosperity while maintaining China’s territorial integrity and insulating itself from threats abroad—a purpose not unlike our own before policymakers in Washington succumbed to fantasies of a world remade in America’s self-image through the assertion of American military might.

In sum, China wants to be very wealthy and very safe—wealthier than any other nation on the planet and so safe as to be immune to outside coercion. And for members of the American policy establishment, therein lies the rub. From Washington’s perspective, “the real problem with Beijing is not that it wants to dominate the world” but that its upward trajectory “might stop the U.S. from doing so in a unipolar manner.”

Post-Cold War expectations of a unipolar international order cultivated by the U.S. policy elite have assumed that the universal embrace of democratic liberalism is an inevitability. This is what being “on the right side of history”—a hallucinatory incantation that pervades contemporary American political speech—signifies.

To the extent that China demonstrates the feasibility of creating a stable, prosperous, and flourishing society while flouting liberal democratic precepts, then claims that history has a single right side become untenable. “If universal democratization is not the ultimate endpoint of history,” Hanania pointedly asks, “how can the American role in the world be justified?”

The answer is that it can’t.

 

America's Ruling Ideology Has Yielded A Bounty Of Poverty, Homelessness, and Crime...,

nakedcapitalism |  Ross What do you think was revealed in 2020 that we all intuitively knew but couldn’t actually see because it hadn’t crystallized?

Michael Hudson Well, it’s obvious that the economy never recovered from the Obama depression after he bailed out the banks, not the economy. So the question is, how long can the economy limp along without recovery?

Well, it’s obvious now that the debts can’t be paid, but the coronavirus only catalyzed that. It’s made it even clearer. So in a sense, the Biden administration is going to be picking up just where the Obama administration left off, namely with huge evictions. Obama evicted about 10 million families. Most of them were black and Hispanic, lower income families who were the victims of the chump mortgages. Biden’s going to start his administration by kicking out probably another five million families. Again, black and Hispanic families are going to be the big losers because they were the people who had the highest coronavirus or were the first to be laid off. So it’s going to begin with a large eviction.

This reverses the trend in homeownership going up to 2008. It’s been going down, and this is going to continue now. People somehow imagined that there was going to be a recovery, that somehow we could recover from the post 2008 breakdown. But now it’s obvious we can’t recover. You’re going to have the polarization of the economy that has been occurring for the last 12 years. It will simply accelerate.

Ross What do you think are the megatrends that we should be looking at in 2021? What do you think is the direction of travel, if you like, for so-called developed economies?

Michael Hudson Well, the big trend in any economy is the growth of debt, because the debt grows exponentially. The economy has painted itself into a debt corner. We can see that in real estate. We can see that for small business. There’s also almost no way to recover. The Federal Reserve has been printing quantitative easing to keep stock and bonds high. But for the real economy, the trend is polarization and lower employment.

The trend also is that state and local finances are broke, especially in the biggest cities, New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. They’re not getting income tax revenue from the unemployed or closed businesses. They’re not getting the real estate tax with so many defaults and mortgage arrears. In New York City there’s talk of cutting back the subways by 70 percent. People will be afraid to take the subways when they’re overcrowded with people with the virus. So you’re having a breakdown not only in state and local finances, but of public services that are state run – public transportation services, health services, education is being downsized. Everything that is funded out of state and local budgets is going to suffer.

And living standards are going to be very sharply downward as people realize how many services they got are dependent on public infrastructure.

Ross Which, of course, opens the door for vulture funds and predatory capital, whether it be private equity, VCs or whatever else to come in and do public infrastructure deals?

Michael Hudson Well, you’ll have privatizations. The American economy will be privatized because the states can’t support their transportation system and other systems. The pressure to privatize subway and transport system, schools are going to be more privatized, as jails have been in the United States. So you’re going to have a huge privatization trend.

This Capitol Hill Police Officer Singlehandedly Set Kneegrows Back 402 Years Today....,