Month: June 2020

Authored by Edward Curtin via Off-Guardian.org,

I am not trying to be cute and play with words. That title is meant to convey what it says, so let me explain.

The people who own the United States and their allies around the world have a plan. It is so simple that it is extremely devious.

Their plan has been in operation for many years.

It has most people bamboozled because it is Janus-faced by design, overt one day, covert the next, but both faces operate under one controlling head. Some call this head the Deep-State. Even the Deep-State calls itself the Deep-State in a double fake. It is meant to make people schizoid, which it has.

The so-called Deep-State has been given many names over the years. I will not bore you with them, except to say that it was once called the power elite. They are the upper classes, the super wealthy who control the financial institutions, Wall Street, the intelligence agencies, the corporate media, the internet, the military, and the politicians. They are multinational.

They are the wealthy nihilists who care not one jot for the rest of the world. They operate in secret, yet also run above-ground organizations such as the World Bank (WB), the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), etc. Their bloodstream runs on war, the preparations for war, and economic exploitation of the world.

All wealthy people are not party to their machinations, but they are almost always complicit in profiting from their crimes, unless they are very stupid. Or play stupid. Since I am talking about a great confidence game, that is quite common.

Other people, all other classes, the poor, middle-classes, even a portion of the upper middle classes mean nothing to the power elite unless they can serve their interests. They are always waging class warfare to maintain their domination and control. Their recent version of this class war is underway in the United States and in many other countries.

As of today, they are using race fears to create chaos and outrage to disguise their class warfare that is leading to the imposition of martial law. Soon they will shift back to the coronavirus fraud. Back and forth, in and out, now you see it, now you don’t.

By shutting down the world’s economy, they have destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people and are creating poverty on a vast scale. Much famine and death will follow. In the United States alone, 40-45 million people have applied for unemployment insurance and job loss is the greatest since the Great Depression. The reason: a massive propaganda campaign created around Covid-19 fear porn.

This class war is not new, but it is conducted today at warp speed since these people control the technology that has allowed them vastly increased power.

In the USA, it is conducted as usual under the guise of Republicans versus Democrats, the two representative political factions that are the faces of the controlled “opposition,” who are actually allies in the larger confidence game. Keeping “hope” alive is central to their strategy. Mind control is what they do. Speed is their greatest ally. Race is central to their game plan. They always say they are protecting us.

It is all a lie. A show. Nothing but a spectacle for the gullible. A shadow play.

The current president, Donald Trump, is the choice of one faction of these psychopaths. This year, Joseph Biden, is the shaky presumptive choice of the other. Both are deranged puppets. Regular people fight over who is better or worse because they are living inside what Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans and the only person to ever bring a trial in the assassination of President Kennedy, long ago called “the doll’s house.”

It is a place where illusions and delusions replace reality. It is 24/7 propaganda. It keeps people engaged. It gives them something to argue about, one team to root for. It’s a sport. It is similar to Plato’s Cave. Fire has been replaced with electronic lighting and screens, but little has changed.

The sick system of exploitation is oiled and greased with the tantalizing bait of hope dangled for the masses. Shit slogans like “We are all in this together.”

But there is no hope for this system.

But when the propaganda is so slick that it creates a double-bind, people grasp at any neurotic “solution” out of frustration. As I write, huge angry crowds are out in the streets protesting the sick murder of a black man, George Floyd, by a white cop. Police infiltrators have started violent looting. Chaos reigns, as planned.

Such killings are routine, but someone turned a switch for this one when just yesterday operation corona lockdown with its fear and fake statistics had everyone cowering behind masks at home as the economic lives of vast numbers were destroyed in a flash.

For today, the masquerade is in the streets. Many good people are caught up in it. In a few days the scene will shift and we can expect another “bombshell.”

These surprises will keep happening one after another for the foreseeable future. Shock and Awe for the home crowd. The war come home. The controllers know you can’t wage war against the rest of the world unless you do so at home as well.

When one group within the deep-state won the internecine battle in 2016 and “shocked” the country with the election of the comical Trump, the other deep-state group called the Democrats, immediately set in motion a plan to try to oust him or to make it seem as if they were trying to do so.

The naïve thought this may happen, and their deluded yearning has been stretched until the 2020 presidential election, although some probably think Trump might go before then. He won’t.

So many people have destroyed their minds and relationships because they can’t see through the fraud.

Early in 2017, as the outgoing front man for the CIA/warfare/Wall St. state, Barack Obama, left his time bombs for the future. The pink pussy hats were sent out marching to open the show. Russia-gate was launched; eventually impeachment was tried. The Democrats. with their media allies, went on a non-stop attack.

It was all so obvious, so shallow in its intent, as it was meant to be. But millions who were in the doll house were outraged, obsessed, frantic with rage. They bought the con-game. Both those who hate Trump and those that love him have spent almost four years foaming at the mouth, breathless.

Trump was cast as the personification of evil. A relentless attack on Trump began and has continued all this time. It is pure theater. Trump remains at the helm, as planned, holding the Bible aloft in a style reminiscent of a Bible thumping Klansman from The Birth of a Nation. Only the ignorant thought it might have been different.

He knows how to perform his role. He is a fine actor. He outrages, spews idiocies, as he is supposed to do. That Mussolini style stance, that absurd hair, the pout. Just perfect for an arch-villain. It’s so obvious that it isn’t. Herein lies the trick.

And who profits from his policies? The super-rich, of course, the power-elite.

Who just stole 6-10 trillion dollars of public money under the hilariously named Cares Act? The super-rich, of course, the deep-state.

It was a bi-partisan bank robbery from the public treasury carried out under the shadow of Covid-19, whose phony hyped up numbers were used to frighten the populace into lockdown mode as the Republican and Democratic bank robbers smiled in unison and announced forcefully, “We care!” We are here to protect you.

Remember how Barack Obama “saved” us by bailing out Wall St. and the big banks to the tune of trillions in early 2009. Then waged unending wars. Left black Americans bereft. He cared, too, didn’t he. Our leaders always care.

Obama was the black guy in the white hat. Trump is the white guy in the black hat. Hollywood on the Potomac, as Gary Wills called it when Ronald Reagan was the acting-president.

Now Obama’s war-loving side-kick, the pale-faced, twisted talking Biden is seriously offered as an alternative to the Elvis impersonator in the White House. This is the false left/right dichotomy that has the residents of the doll’s house in its grip.

If you can’t see what’s coming, you might want to break out of the house, take off your mask, go for a walk, and take some deep breaths. The walls are closing in.

Knees will be on everyone’s necks in the months ahead.

In a stunning harbinger of things to come across the country, on Sunday afternoon, amid calls for defunding police departments countrywide, the Minneapolis City Council members went one further, and announced their intent to disband the city’s embattled police department, which has endured relentless criticism in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.

BREAKING: Nine of the 12 members on the Minneapolis City Council have vowed they will work to end policing as the city currently knows it. Council Member Jeremiah Ellison promised the council would “dismantle” the department. https://t.co/OM0btcZbgG

— The Associated Press (@AP) June 7, 2020

BREAKING: Minneapolis City Council members have announced their intent to disband the Minneapolis Police Department and invest in community-led public safety.

— ACLU of Minnesota (@ACLUMN) June 7, 2020

"Community-led public safety" – is that like private militia for the wealthy and ____ for everyone else?

"We are here today because George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis Police Department. We are also here because, here in Minneapolis and in cities across the United States, it is clear that our existing system of policing and public safety isn’t working for so many of our neighbors,” Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender said in a written statement Sunday. “Our efforts at incremental reform have failed."

The City Council’s decision follows those of several other high-profile partners, including Minneapolis Public Schools, and the University of Minnesota, and Minneapolis Parks and Recreationto sever longstanding ties with the MPD.

The announcement today also arrives after several members of the Council have expressed a complete loss of confidence in the Minneapolis Police Department.

"We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” tweeted Council Member Jeremiah Ellison on June 4, pledging to “dramatically rethink” the city’s approach to emergency response.

We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.

And when we’re done, we’re not simply gonna glue it back together.

We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response.

It’s really past due. https://t.co/7WIxUL6W79

— Jeremiah Ellison (@jeremiah4north) June 4, 2020

 In a TIME op-ed published the next day, Council Member Steve Fletcher cited the MPD’s lengthy track record of misconduct and “decades-long history of violence and discrimination”—all of which are subjects of an ongoing Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigation—as compelling justifications for the department’s disbandment. “We can resolve confusion over a $20 grocery transaction without drawing a weapon or pulling out handcuffs,” Fletcher wrote. 

The last person to disband the police was Sting.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) June 7, 2020

As we reported earlier, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said last night that he opposed disbanding the police department at a protest organized and led by Black Visions Collective against police violence in the city. That answer earned him a thundering chorus of boos and chants of “Shame!” and “Go home, Jacob, go home!” The New York Times  – which has become the unofficial media arm of the BLS movement, and which will certainly delighted by today’s outcome in Minneapolis – called the scene a “humiliation on a scale almost unimaginable outside of cinema or nightmare.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is asked whether he will defund the Minneapolis police department, and is subjected to the most intense walk of shame I’ve ever seen. pic.twitter.com/3ZsbrIjIA2

— Eamon Whalen (@EamonWhalen) June 6, 2020

“The last Democratic mayor, Betsy Hodges, handled the murder of Jamar [Clark] poorly. We told her she was going to lose her job. And she did,” Miski Noor, a Black Visions Collective organizer, said on Frey’s refusal to disband the Minneapolis Police Department.

According to The Appeal, for years, "activists have argued that MPD has failed to actually keep the city safe, and City Councilmembers echoed that sentiment today during their announcement."

MPD’s record for solving serious crimes in the city is consistently low. For example, in 2019, Minneapolis police only cleared 56 percent of cases in which a person was killed. For rapes, the police department’s solve rate is abysmally low. In 2018, their clearance rate for rape was just 22 percent. In other words, four out of every five rapes go unsolved in Minneapolis. Further casting doubt on the department’s commitment to solving sexual assaults, MPD announced last year the discovery of 1,700 untested rape kits spanning 30 years, which officials said had been misplaced.

While Minneapolis may be the first city to take this drastic action, it is hardly the last: the Council’s move is consistent with rapidly-shifting public opinion regarding the urgency of overhauling the American model of law enforcement. Since Floyd’s killing and the protests that ensued, officials in Los Angeles and New York City have called for making deep cuts to swollen police budgets and reallocating those funds for education, affordable housing, and other social services.

Law enforcement officers are not equipped to be experts in responding to mental health crises, often leading to tragic results—nationally, about half of police killings involve someone living with mental illness or disability. As a result, public health experts have long advocated for dispatching medical professionals and/or social workers, not armed police, to respond to calls related to substance use and mental health. Polling from Data for Progress indicates that more than two-thirds of voters—68 percent—support the creation of such programs, versions of which are already in place in other cities such as, Eugene, Oregon; Austin, Texas; and Denver, Colorado. 

Well, all those residents of deeply liberal cities are about to get precisely what they want:

“Our commitment is to do what is necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the truth that the Minneapolis Police are not doing that,” Bender said Sunday. “Our commitment is to end our city’s toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department, to end policing as we know it, and to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.”

We look forward to finding out just what these "systems" are, and while we know that wealthy residents will have little trouble in obtaining their own private security squads and militia – in fact, we are certain that Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari will be among the first to take advantage of security alternatives even as the Fed’s actions continue to tea apart the nation leading to even greater wealth and income inequality that has culminated in the current social collapse, we wonder just who will protect the less affluent segments of society. For the answer we will keep a close eye on downtown Minneapolis, now police free, for a glimpse into the future of America’s inner cities.

Meanwhile watch as gun sales in Minneapolis – both legal and illegal – and in every other city across the country, explode.

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via AxisOfEasy.com,

Update #2: It’s been pointed out on Hackernews thread that the book is now available on Amazon!

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Update #1: File under irony, some folks on Hackernews “flagged” this post as inappropriate, after hitting the top-10 and the front page. Article about Big Tech censorship, flagged as inappropriate.

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Yesterday, author Alex Berenson reported via Twitter that Amazon had spiked his new book about COVID-19 and the lockdowns.

Oh fuck me. I can’t believe it. They censored it. pic.twitter.com/GfPEr7OiV2

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 4, 2020

Berenson is a former New York Times reporter, author of other books, fiction and non-fiction, and he’s even a Twitter blue check. This morning I exchanged a few emails with him and he’s slammed with emails so he sent me his statement on the matter:

The booklet was the first in a series of coronavirus pamphlets I plan to put out covering various aspects of the crisis. Readers of my Twitter feed encouraged me to compile information in a more comprehensive and easier-to-read format, and when I polled people on Twitter to ask if they would be willing to pay a nominal fee for such a pamphlet, the response was strong.

Originally I only planned to write one, but I had so much information I realized that the booklet would be an awkward length – longer than a magazine article but shorter than a book. Also, doing so would take too long, and I wanted to put it out quickly. So I decided to split the booklet into pieces. Part 1 included an introduction and a discussion of death coding, death counts, and who is really dying from COVID, as well as a worst-case estimate of deaths with no mitigation efforts. It is about 6,500 words, and I planned to sell it for $2.99 on ebook or $5.99 paperback. It is called “Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1, Introduction and Death Counts and Estimates.”

I created covers for both yesterday and uploaded the book. I had published Kindle Singles (Amazon’s curated program for short Kindle pieces, which now focuses more on fiction from established writers), so I was relatively familiar with the drill. I briefly considered censorship but assumed I wouldn’t have a problem because of my background, because anyone who reads the booklet will realize it is impeccably sourced, nary a conspiracy theory to be found, and frankly because Amazon shouldn’t be censoring anything that doesn’t explicitly help people commit criminal behavior. (Books intended to help adults groom children for sexual relationships, for example, should be off-limits – though about 10 years ago Amazon did not agree and only backed down from selling a how-to guide for pedophiles in the face of public outrage.)

I didn’t hear anything until this morning, when I found the note I posted to Twitter in my inbox. I will forward it to you in its entirely. Note that it does not offer any route to appeal. I have no idea if the decision was made by a person, an automated system, or a combination (i.e. the system flags anything with COVID-19 or coronavirus in the title and then a person decides on the content). I am considering my options, including making the booklet available on my Website and asking people to pay on an honor system, but that will not solve the problem of Amazon’s censorship. Amazon dominates both the electronic and physical book markets, and if it denies its readers a chance to see my work, I will lose the chance to reach the people who most need to learn the truth – those who don’t already know it.

The text of the Amazon notice follows:

Hello,

We’re contacting you regarding the following book(s):

Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1: Introduction and Death Counts and Estimates by Alex Berenson (AUTHOR) (ID: PRI-GRW1ZENP2S2)

Your book does not comply with our guidelines. As a result we are not offering your book for sale.

Due to the rapidly changing nature of information around the COVID-19 virus, we are referring customers to official sources for health information about the virus. Please consider removing references to COVID-19 for this book.

Amazon reserves the right to determine what content we offer according to our content guidelines.

Berenson is considering releasing the book from his website, so check there for updates. But it looks like I’ll have to add a chapter to my book on surviving deplatform attacks for what to do when the world’s largest retailer (a.k.a The Company Store), refuses to sell what you have to say.

Is it censorship or is it free markets in action?

It’s been an ongoing theme in our #AxisOfEasy newsletter (most recently mentioned this week) that when Big Tech insists that when it comes to coronavirus only information emanating from “official sources” is permissible, it becomes increasingly problematic for two reasons:

1. Official sources frequently get it wrong. We saw this when CDC flip flopped on mask use, or when the WHO waited until March to declare coronavirus a pandemic. There are numerous other examples to mention.

2. Sometimes the unofficial sources get it right and when you decide to tilt the scales of discourse in favour of the former and to squelch the latter, you are no longer a mechanical distributor and you are an arbiter of truth.

It is inevitable that applying this template to coronavirus because we’re in some worldwide global emergency, will sooner than later be applied to adjacent realms, because, hey, emergency, and then over time, to all realms. In Berenson’s case, his material about the COVID-19 virus is being suppressed, as is his material about the lockdowns.

The lockdowns especially, are a contentious issue. Recall the two California doctors, Dan Erickson and Artin MAssihi, who were deplatformed from Youtube for saying that the lockdowns, while initially warranted, were now becoming destructive and would lead to rampant mental health issues such as depression, spousal and child abuse, and suicide. Not only was their video dropped by Youtube, who’s stated policy is also “official sources only”, Facebook dropped their clinics page as well.

It didn’t take long for data to emerge that, being poor statisticians aside, maybe, quite possibly, they were actually onto something.

Now that Big Tech has embraced an Only Official Sources Permitted (OOSP?) policy, what field of endeavour will be next?

My audiobook shop is due to release the Incrementum guys’ book on The Zero Interest Rate Trap this month. Should we be expecting an email someday, from Amazon, telling us they’re no longer selling the book because:

Due to the rapidly changing nature of information around low and negative interest rates, Fed and Central Bank policy, inflation and wealth inequality, we are referring customers to official sources for monetary policy. Please consider removing references to these topics from your book.

…and from then on the only book Amazon will sell that has anything to say about the matter is Ben Bernanke’s “The Courage To Act”? Is this where we’re headed?

Probably.

People often argue, and libertarians are especially prone to this, that the idea of freedom of speech only applies to protection against the government, “why don’t you start your own Amazon?”. While that may be ideologically tenable, practically speaking it’s an impossible remedy. So as a libertarian, it pains me to say, I would encourage and welcome anti-trust investigations into big tech platforms such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Apple.

All  the aforementioned companies have formed quasi-monopolies in their respective spheres. In the cases of Google and Facebook they did so with intelligence agency seed funding. While in the case of Amazon they routinely knock-off their own retailers and they all systemically squeeze out independent competitors and pad out their cash reserves with cushy government and military contracts.

When it comes to Big Tech platforms who were funded with QE-generated hot money and who are the primary beneficiaries of the Brave New World / “never going back to normal” reality we find ourselves in: they get to make their own rules, while everybody else has to play by the rules somebody else decrees.