Source: Rogue Journalist

Everyone who has ever denied that this was happening needs to hang their heads in shame for scoffing at a very real threat to press freedoms everywhere.

“Just confirmed: #Assange has been arrested not just for breach of bail conditions but also in relation to a US extradition request,” tweeted Robinson.

“From #Assange: The US warrant was issued in December 2017 and is for conspiracy with Chelsea Manning in early 2010,” Robinson added.

So there you have it. Extradited for journalism. In a blur, everything that Assange and WikiLeaks have been warning about for years has been proven correct, contrary to mountains of claims to the contrary by establishment loyalists everywhere. The same government which tortured Chelsea Manning is in the process of extraditing her publisher so that they can silence him forever. Everyone who has ever denied that this was happening needs to hang their heads in shame for scoffing at a very real threat to press freedoms everywhere when they could have been opposing this obscene agenda. It’s time for some serious soul searching.

The time to act is now. It’s too late to prevent Assange from losing his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy, so the goal now is to fight extradition. Activist groups are swiftly organizing as I type this, so it will be easy for people around the world to find rallies to attend and online movements to help boost. I encourage everyone in the US, the UK and Australia to contact their elected representatives and politely but urgently inform them that the agenda to extradite Assange to the US must be fought at all costs. Educate yourself as best as you can on Assange’s case, and inform everyone you know about what’s going on.

This is seriously gut wrenching news. Here are ten thoughts on the matter in no particular order:

1 – The Metropolitan police were let into the embassy by the Ecuadorian ambassador, his political asylum revoked under entirely false pretenses in gross violation of international law. Shame on Ecuador.

2 – Assange is an Australian citizen. As of this writing, the Australian government has still not interceded to protect its citizen. Shame on Australia.

3 – The US government is setting a precedent which, if carried out, will constitute a grave threat to press freedoms the world over and a greater leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act. Shame on America.

4 – The UK government is collaborating with the US government’s efforts to imprison a journalist for publishing evidence of US war crimes, just as it has collaborated with the US government in perpetrating war crimes. Shame on the UK.

5 – This arrest warrant was issued under the Trump administration, in full alignment with what the Trump administration has openly been saying about its agenda to silence WikiLeaks. Shame on Trump, and shame on anyone who continues to support him.

6 – This arrest is a Trump administration action, and has nothing to do with the 2016 Russia nonsense that Democrats have been shrieking about, yet these same Democrats who claim to oppose Trump and oppose his war on the press are currently cheerleading for Trump’s prosecution of a journalist who told the truth. Shame on Democrats.

7 – I am going to have a zero tolerance policy for QAnon cultists who try to tell me that this is actually 5-D chess by Trump to overthrow the Deep State. Stay out of my comments, stay out of my social media notifications, stay the hell away from me, and please rethink your worldview.

8 – The precedent set by imprisoning a foreign journalist under the Espionage Act will enable the US government to arrest leak publishers anywhere in the world who expose its crimes. This will cripple our ability to hold the most powerful institution on the planet to account in any way. There is no excuse for any journalist anywhere not to oppose this tooth and claw. If you see anyone calling themselves a journalist but failing to oppose Assange’s extradition, you should call them out for the frauds that they are.

9 – And yes, like it or not, Assange is a journalist. There is no legitimate argument to the contrary.

10 – This is it, folks. This is where we find out what we’re made of as a species. This is where we find out if humanity gets to survive, and if it deserves to. If we can’t stop the empire from imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts right in front of our eyes, we might as well roll over and tap out right now, because if we lose this one it’s never going to get any better from there. If we can’t pass this test, the oligarchs and the opaque government agencies which are allied with them will march us into extinction or Orwellian dystopia, and there’ll be no tool in our toolbox to stop them. We need to seriously dig deep on this one.

WHAT TO DO

• FOLLOW / share widely @Wikileaks and @DefendAssange
• RALLY
  *UK court hearings
  *Global Rallies
• PRESSURE Politicians
  *No US Extradition
  *Abide by @UN Decision
• MONITOR Media
  Correct disinformation with FACTS
• DONATE Legal DefenceFund http://Defend.wikileaks.org

Caitlin Johnstone’s articles are entirely reader-supported. See https://caitlinjohnstone.com/

Source: Rogue Journalist

Person A: Wow, things are looking really bad in Venezuela right now.

Person B: Yeah.

Person A: All that poverty and unrest!

Person B: I know, it’s terrible.

Person A: You know what we should do?

Person B: Please don’t say send in Godzilla.

Person A: What? Why not??

Person B: Because he always makes things worse! You know that! Every time we send in Godzilla to try and solve problems in the world, he just ends up trampling all over the city, knocking down buildings and killing thousands of people with his atomic heat beam.

Person A: Maybe this time would be different though!

Person B: Why in God’s name would this time be different?? You said it would be different in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria. What happened there?

Person A: He trampled all over the cities, knocked down the buildings and killed people with his atomic heat beam.

Person B: Exactly! So what makes you think sending in Godzilla would be any different this time?

Person A: Well we can’t just do nothing!

Person B: Dude, doing nothing would be infinitely better than sending in Godzilla to do the thing he literally always does.

Person A: Hey, inaction has consequences too you know! You probably don’t even talk to Venezuelans. My brother’s co-worker’s dentist is Venezuelan, and he says a Godzilla rampage is just what they need. You should listen to Venezuelans.

Person B: No matter how many Venezuelans I talk to, it will still be an indisputable fact that Godzilla rampages are always disastrous and always make things worse.

Person A: Why are you such a Maduro apologist?

Person B: What?!? I’m not a Maduro apologist! This has nothing to do with Maduro. I just remember what Godzilla is and the things he always does when we summon him up from the bottom of the sea to try and solve problems.

Person A: Look, I understand that Godzilla has made a mess of things in the past, that doesn’t mean you have to go around supporting Maduro.

Person B: I don’t support Maduro! Why do you always do this?? With Iraq you called me a Saddam apologist, with Libya you called me a Gaddafi supporter, with Syria I was an Assadist, and all I’m saying is that Godzilla is a giant nuclear monster that destroys everything in its path!

Person A: So I guess you just don’t care about the people of Venezuela then.

Person B: Of course I care about the people of Venezuela! That’s why I don’t want them to be trampled to death beneath the feet of a destructive nuclear behemoth!

Person A: Yeah but Venezuela is in dire straits right now. It’s not like sending in Godzilla could make things any worse.

Person B: Sending in Godzilla can definitely make things worse! Are you kidding me?? Have you seen Libya lately?

Person A: Oh, right, everything was so perfect in Libya before we sent in Godzilla to kill Gaddafi, I forgot. It was a perfect utopian paradise!

Person B: Nobody’s saying Libya was perfect under Gaddafi, but it was a hell of a lot better than it was before Godzilla went on a chaotic rampage trampling and burning everything in sight. Now it’s a lawless humanitarian disaster!

Person A: You’re just a Godzilla-hating, Maduro-loving socialist.

Person B: This isn’t about socialism. It’s an established fact that sending in Godzilla literally always makes things worse and literally never makes things better. The only reason you keep shifting between straw man arguments and ad homonym attacks is because you know you’ve got no case. All you can do is keep calling me a Maduro supporter, saying I don’t care about the Venezuelan people, and saying it’s because I love socialism, when you know damn well I’m telling it like it is. Honestly, what do you think happens when we send in Godzilla again? Do you think he’s just going to be a cuddly wuddly nice guy all of a sudden and start solving problems with surgical precision?

Person A: Uhh… maybe?

Person B: He won’t! He never will! You keep hoping it will be different and it never, ever is! How do you keep making this same stupid mistake over and over again??

Person A: Well the TV told me this time it’s different.

Person B: They tell you that every time! It’s a narrative advanced by Godzilla rampage profiteers!

Person A: Hey, maybe it won’t even come to that. Maybe Mothra can sort of gently blow Maduro out?

Person B: Mothra hurts civilians too!

Person A: Nuh-uh. Her wind gusts are laser-targeted to solely affect Maduro and Venezuelan oligarchs.

Person B: That’s not even true! Anyway what happens when Mothra starts killing civilians?

Person A: Nothing a bit of Godzilla couldn’t fix.

Person B: Of course. Awesome. Excuse me, I need to go slam my head in the car door.

Caitlin Johnstone’s articles are entirely reader-supported. See https://caitlinjohnstone.com/

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…

Source: Medium

In a system where money rewards sociopathy and money equals power, we necessarily wind up ruled by sociopaths.

I often look at Jeff Bezos when trying to understand how American oligarchy functions for a few reasons.

Firstly, currently occupying the number one slot on Forbes’ billionaires list, he is the top dog. He figured out how to play the plutocracy game quickly, and how to play it better than anyone else.

Second, our civilization is currently headed on a clear trajectory deeper and deeper into Orwellian tech dystopia if we don’t turn things around or drive humanity into extinction first. The new money tech plutocrats own the foundation of that dark future, and we should all keep a very, very close eye on them on general principles as well as to get a read on where things are headed.

Lastly and most importantly, as a new money plutocrat Bezos has had to build his empire with high visibility in the information age. The old money plutocrats built their kingdoms in much darker times, with some families setting the foundations of their rule hundreds of years ago when there was very little in the way of newspaper coverage, and certainly no alternative media scrutinizing power. Bezos’ wheelings and dealings are above ground to a much greater extent, because he’s had to do everything in the public eye.

With that in mind, here are six things we can learn about how US plutocracy operates by looking at Jeff Bezos.

1. The rich rule America because of a system wherein money translates directly into political power.

Amazon has increased its spending on Washington lobbying by 400 percent in the last five years, far in excess of its competition. Bezos hasn’t been doing this to be charitable. With growing antitrust concerns, taxation to avoid, lucrative Pentagon deals to secure, and what some experts are describing as an agenda to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy, he needs Washington on his side.

Plutocrats do not pour large fortunes into lobbying campaigns without reason. They do it because it works.

2. Because money equals power and power is relative, plutocrats are naturally incentivized to keep the public poor.

Plutocrats necessarily rule such an oligarchic system as surely as kings rule a kingdom. But if everyone is king, then no one is king. If your entire empire is built on a system where money equals power, then you are necessarily incentivized to keep money out of the hands of the public while amassing as much as possible for yourself.

The larger the Amazon empire grows, the more of its competition dies and the lower wages get. At the hottest point in the 2016 Democratic party primary, Bezos’ Washington Post ran sixteen smear pieces in sixteen hours against Senator Bernie Sanders, who is largely responsible for bringing the word “oligarchy” into mainstream consciousness.

Sanders famously ran a campaign powered by small donations averaging 27 dollars. The less money people have, the less of those kinds of donations they can afford to make, and the less political influence the masses can wield. With a majority of Americans already unable to afford even a thousand dollar emergency, it doesn’t take much more squeeze to kill all hope of another populist insurgency of that sort.

Power is relative and money is power, so the poorer you are, the more powerful the plutocrats become.

3. Controlling the media is very important to plutocrats.

Jeff Bezos, the most crafty plutocrat alive, did not purchase the Washington Postin 2013 because he expected newspapers to make a lucrative resurgence. He purchased it so that he could ensure exactly what WaPo did to Bernie Sanders in 2016. The neoliberal Orwellian establishment that Bezos is building his empire upon requires a propaganda mouthpiece, so Bezos purchased a long-trusted US newspaper to accomplish that. WaPo is now easily the most virulently pro-establishment among all large mainstream publications, not just defending establishment narratives but actively attacking anyone who challenges them.

The current system which only serves the wealthy and the powerful cannot exist without nonstop advertising convincing the American public that the status quo is in their best interest. Plutocrat-owned corporate media is used to manufacture consent for that system; for the economic system, for the wars which prop it up, for the politicians which the plutocrats own and operate, for the political system which they have infiltrated every level of. The ability to manipulate the way the public thinks is an essential part of plutocratic rule.

4. Plutocrats form alliances with defense and intelligence agencies.

Jeff Bezos is a contractor with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board. He is doing everything he can to cozy up and ingratiate himself to the establishment on which his empire is built, up to and including kicking WikiLeaks off Amazon servers in 2010. This dances very creepily with Amazon’s involvement in surveillance systems and digital “assistance” devices like Alexa.

If you want to be a millionaire in the current system, you can probably do so with luck, privilege, talent and hard work. If you want to be a billionaire, you’ve got to learn how to collaborate with existing power structures. Due to the extreme opacity of those power structures in America hidden behind the veil of government secrecy, it is hard to know exactly what forms those alliances take, but they clearly do happen as a glance at Bezos’ career shows.

5. The people willing to do anything it takes to get to the top are the ones who get there.

Normal human beings would have a difficult time knowing businesses are dying and workers are getting poorer as their empire grows. Jeff Bezos just keeps growing. He will happily collaborate with depraved intelligence agencies, manipulate and propagandize Americans, and expand the gulf between the rich and the poor just to be king of the world.

This is the sort of person who rises to the top in unregulated capitalist systems. Money rewards people who have shut down (or are born without) that part of themselves which empathizes and is made uncomfortable by exploiting and harming others. In a system where money rewards sociopathy and money equals power, that means we necessarily wind up in a system that is ruled by sociopaths. Those plutocrats form alliances with each other and with defense and intelligence agencies to ensure the continuation and expansion of their empires, and that alliance is currently king of America.

6. It will never be enough for them.

Jeff Bezos is worth 131.5 billion dollars as of this writing, and he is getting moreambitious, not less. He doesn’t need that money to buy more stuff; it isn’t about money for him. It’s about power. The impulse to rise to the top of your monkey tribe is an impulse buried deep within our evolutionary heritage, and when that impulse isn’t checked by empathy for your fellow man it creates an unquenchable drive to grow and grow in invincible power no matter what kind of suffering that creates.

This explains why the world is the way it is today, with billionaires making so much money last year alone that they could end extreme poverty for our entire planet seven times over, but don’t. With Americans dying of underinsurance and exposure on the streets while billions of dollars are poured into bombing poor people overseas. With tensions escalating between two nuclear superpowers over some petty geopolitical agendas. With the Arctic warming at an astonishing rate while rainforests and biodiversity vanish perhaps forever.

It will never be enough. They will keep taking and taking and taking and taking, killing and killing and killing and killing, until they have it all and everything is dead. They lack the part of themselves which stops that from happening. This is a vehicle with no brakes.

We need to change the system which enables these depraved individuals to rise to the top and rule over us. Governments should serve people, not omnicidal, ecocidal sociopathic oligarchs. We must take our world back from these monsters.

The original article by Caitlin Johnstone with links for all references is available at Medium…

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…

Source: Medium

Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you’re suspicious of him you won’t believe anything he’s saying.

I write a lot about the plight of Julian Assange for the same reason I write a lot about the Iraq invasion: his persecution, when sincerely examined, exposes undeniable proof that we are ruled by a transnational power establishment which is immoral and dishonest to its core.

Assange started a leak outlet on the premise that corrupt and unaccountable power is a problem in our world, and that the problem can be fought with the light of truth. Corrupt and unaccountable power has responded by detaining, silencing and smearing him. The persecution of Assange has proved his thesis about the world absolutely correct.

Anyone who offends the US-centralized empire will find themselves subject to a trial by media, and the media are owned by the same plutocratic class which owns the empire. To believe what mass media news outlets tell you about those who stand up to imperial power is to ignore reality.

Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its political and media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they’ll be far less likely to take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they’ll be far more likely to consent to Assange’s silencing and imprisonment. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you’re suspicious of him you won’t believe anything he’s saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it’s as good as putting a bullet in his head.

The fact that the mass media can keep saying day after day “Hey, you know that bloke at the embassy who shares embarrassing truths about very powerful people? He’s a stinky Nazi rapist Russian spy who mistreats his cat” without raising suspicion shows you how propagandized the public already is. A normal worldview unmolested by corrupt narrative control would see someone who circulates inconvenient facts about the powerful being called pretty much all the worst things in the world and know immediately that that person is being lied about by those in power.

Relentless smear campaigns against Assange have given the unelected power establishment the ability to publicly make an example of a journalist who published uncomfortable truths without provoking the wrath of the masses. It’s a town square flogging that the crowd has been manipulated into cheering for. Narrative control has enabled them to have their cake and eat it too: they get to act like medieval lords and inflict draconian punishment against a speaker of undeniable facts and leave his head on a spike in the town square as a warning to other would-be truth tellers, and have the public believe that such a bizarre violation of modern human rights is perfectly fine and acceptable.

There are people who worked really hard to get journalism degrees, toiled long hours to earn the esteemed privilege of appearing on the front pages of a major publication, only to find themselves writing articles with headlines like “Julian Assange is a stinky, stinky stink man.”

Ordinary citizens often find themselves eager to believe the smear campaigns against Assange because it is easier than believing that their government would participate in the deliberate silencing and imprisoning of a journalist for publishing facts.

And yes, Julian Assange is most certainly a journalist. Publishing important information about what’s going on in the world so the public can inform themselves is precisely the thing that journalism is. There is no conventional definition of journalism which differs from this. Anyone who says Assange is not a journalist is telling a lie that they may or may not actually believe in order to justify his persecution and their support for it.

Another reason people can find themselves eager to believe smears about Assange is that the raw facts revealed by WikiLeaks publications punch giant holes in the stories about the kind of world, nation and society that most people have been taught to believe they live in since school age. These kinds of beliefs are interwoven with people’s entire egoic structures, with their sense of self and who they are as a person, so narratives which threaten to tear them apart can feel the same as a personal attack. This is why you’ll hear ordinary citizens talking about Assange as though he attacked them personally; all he did was publish facts about the powerful, but since those facts conflict with tightly held identity constructs, the cognitive dissonance that was caused to them can be interpreted as feeling like he’d slapped them in the face.

We live in a reality where unfathomably powerful world-dominating government agencies are scrutinized and criticized far, far less than a guy trapped in an embassy who published inconvenient facts about those agencies.

Assange disrupts establishment narratives even in his persecution. Liberal establishment loyalists in America still haven’t found a rational answer to criticisms that in supporting Assange’s criminal prosecution they are supporting a Trump administration agenda. You now have the same people who’ve been screaming that Trump is Hitler and that he’s attacking the free press cheering for the possibility of that same administration imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts.

The precedent that would be set by the US prosecuting a foreign journalist for merely publishing factual information would constitute a greater leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act, for America and for the entire world.

The billionaire media has invalidated itself with its refusal to defend Assange. They know the precedent set by his prosecution for WikiLeaks publications would kill the ability of the press to hold power to account, but they don’t care because they know they never do that. For all their crying about Jamal Khashoggi and Jim Acosta’s hurt feelings, they do not actually care about journalism or “the free press” in any meaningful way.

Whenever I see a blue checkmark account on Twitter bashing Assange I mentally translate whatever they’re saying into “There is nothing I won’t do to advance my career in corporate media. If you’re in a position to promote me I will literally get down on my knees right this very second and let you do whatever you want to my body.”

I sometimes feel like I respect professional propagandists who smear Assange more than I respect ordinary citizens who go around smearing him for free. What do these people think they’ll get as a reward for their work as pro bono CIA propagandists? A gold star from Big Brother? They’re like slaves who beat and betray other slaves that fall out of line in order to win favor with the master, except they’re not even achieving that. The professional manipulators are at least cheering for their own class to continue to have its leadership’s interests advanced; ordinary people who do it are cheering for their own oppression.

Even lower in my view are the self-proclaimed leftists and anarchists who view themselves as oppositional to the establishment but still help advance this smear campaign. It is impossible to attack Assange without supporting the Orwellian empire which is persecuting him. I don’t care what mental gymnastics you’re doing to justify your pathetic cronyism; what you are doing benefits the most powerful and depraved people on this planet.

Anyone who participates in the ongoing smear campaign against Assange and Wikileaks is basically just saying “Extremely powerful people should be able to lie to us without any difficulty or opposition at all.”

Everyone should always be extremely suspicious of anyone who defends the powerful from the less powerful. It’s amazing that this isn’t more obvious to more people.

Contrary to the narratives promoted by establishment smear merchants, Julian Assange is not hiding from justice in the Ecuadorian embassy. He is hiding from injustice. Everyone who knows anything about the US government’s prosecution of leakers and whistleblowers knows he has no shot at a fair trial, and would face brutal mistreatment at the hands of the same regime which tortured Chelsea Manning.

The persecution of Assange is essentially a question that mankind is asking itself: do we want to (A) continue down the path of omnicidal, ecocidal Orwellian dystopia, or do we want to (B) pull up and away from that trajectory and shrug off the oppressive power establishment which is driving us toward either total extinction or total enslavement? So far, A is the answer we’ve been giving ourselves to that question. But, as long as we switch before it’s too late, we can always change our answer.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Source: Rogue Journalist

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. We need to cultivate an aggressive disgust for all attempts by the powerful to manipulate the public dialogue.

The Guardian has just published an actual, non-fictional op-ed that is titled “Is my Jewish three-year-old too young to learn about antisemitism?”, about a concerned mother who is teaching her toddler about the Holocaust in case Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister.

“Perhaps they’re right and it is too soon even for this gentle introduction,” muses Hilary Freeman. “I certainly don’t want to frighten or traumatise my daughter. And yet, in the current climate, with accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party making headline news virtually every day, and a rise in antisemitism all over Europe, this is an issue that is pertinent to her life and to her future, not just a story in a book. Many Jews in the UK are feeling very unsettled.”

Surely this is as far as they can take this whole “Corbyn is a secret Nazi” narrative? Surely? How could they possibly take it any further into cartoonish lunacy than this? “Terrified by Tory polling decline, I took my cocker spaniel on a tour of Auschwitz”?

I hate mocking the fear of antisemitism, which is a real thing that does happen and should be condemned unequivocally. Even more, though, I hate the British media for making it both extremely easy and one hundred percent necessary to mock them for it.

They say that Corbyn is a secret Nazi who loves antisemitism over and over and over again like it’s a real thing despite the complete absence of anything remotely resembling facts or evidence, then publish op-eds by ostensibly terrified mothers citing “accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party making headline news virtually every day” as the basis for her fear of her three year-old daughter winding up like Anne Frank. And then when this unconscionable behavior sees Corbyn decrying the mass media and pushing for reforms, the British press responds with headlines like “Corbyn is following the Donald Trump playbook on persecuting the media”.

How could they possibly take it any further into cartoonish lunacy than this?

They can make this link because across the pond the narrative is being spun that the President of the United States is treating the mass media propaganda machine unfairly. Last week hundreds of outlets released coordinated op-eds decrying Trump’s “war” and “assault” on the “free press” because he occasionally says mean things about CNN, meanwhile completely ignoring this administration’s horrifying attempts to silence WikiLeaks and persecute Julian Assange for practicing journalism.

“We are not the enemy of the people!” these outlets proclaimed with one voice, chanting as one, repeating the same mantra over and over again like a hypnotist. “We are not the enemy of the people! We are not the enemy of the people! We are not the enemy of the people!”

The mass media absolutely are the enemy of the people. Without question they are. They are the enemy of our entire species.

“Neither the great political or financial powers of the world nor the population in general realize that the engineering-chemical-electronic revolution now makes it possible to produce many more technical devices with ever less material,” the brilliant inventor and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller once said. “We can now take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known. It does not have to be ‘you or me,’ so selfishness is unnecessary and war is obsolete. This has never been done before. Only twelve years ago technology reached the point where this could be done. Since then it has made it ever so much easier to do.”

Fuller said this in 1981. So why hasn’t it happened yet? Why hasn’t humanity turned its creativity and resourcefulness toward human thriving instead of warfare, exploitation, domination and ecocide?

Stuffy intellectuals who’ve spent too much time indoors might scoff and say it’s because Fuller was wrong, that it is simply human nature that we should all be scrambling to get to the top of the heap by clawing at each other’s flesh and stepping upon each other’s heads until we kill our ecosystem and choke to death on dust and ashes.

I say that’s bullshit. The reason we have not turned our creative power toward health and harmony instead of death and destruction is because we are being manipulated by powerful people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. And they are doing so using the mass media.

Humans don’t want to suffer and toil in order to make a few billionaires even more rich and powerful than they already are. Literally nobody wants that for humanity besides those billionaires and their immediate underlings. The reason we haven’t yet used the power of our numbers to create a system wherein everyone gets their basic needs met and we all work in collaboration with ourselves and our environment instead of poisoning our air and water and spending medicine money on bombs is because there are screens in our lives convincing us all day in and day out that this is not in our best interest. Keep consenting to increasing degrees of corrupt crony capitalism. Keep voting for the same oligarch-owned two-headed one-party system day in and day out. Keep ignoring how the US military is the worst polluter on earth and how the cost of the Iraq war could have purchased the planetary conversion to renewable energy.

Day after day after day the public’s psyches are pummeled with these deceitful narratives which manufacture consent for war, exploitation and oppression instead of health and thriving. The only thing keeping us from rising like lions in unvanquishable number as in the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem and creating a healthy world is because we are imprisoned in a psychic cage made of propaganda narratives. The billionaire-controlled mass media are the enemy of the people in the same way a cage is the enemy of a bird.

We have native parrots here in Australia. Sometimes I think about how cool it would be to have one for a pet, but then I look outside and see the galahs and cockatoos playing around in the trees and think, “Nah.”

The billionaires who control the mass media lack that part of themselves. They are our enemy. But we are the many. And they are the few. And we are waking up.

Caitlin Johnstone is a 100% reader-funded journalist. She posts articles regularly on her website Rogue Journalist

Source: Rogue Journalist

Turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper, and it’s nothing but nonstop hagiography and adulation for someone who you know was a serial killer.

If you try to bring up the whole serial killing thing, people react with sputtering outrage that you would dare to speak ill of such a noble and wonderful person.

“Look, I didn’t agree with everything he did, but you can’t just let one not-so-great thing from a man’s life eclipse all the other good things he’s accomplished,” they protest. “For example, did you know he was a baseball captain at Yale?”
“But… what about all those people he murdered?” you reply.

“God, why can’t you just pay respect to a great man in our time of mourning??” they shout in exasperation.

You turn on the TV, and it’s nothing but nonstop hagiography and adulation for this guy who you know was a serial murderer. Pick up a newspaper and it’s the same thing.

On the rare occasions where they do mention his astonishingly high body count, they frame it as a good thing: he got the killing done quickly and efficiently. He helped our country get over its phobia of mass murder. Our streets sure are a lot cleaner without all those unwanted prostitutes and homeless people he butchered.

“What the hell?” you think to yourself. “This guy brutally murdered a whole bunch of men, women and children for no good reason. We all know this. How come that isn’t the single defining thing about this man’s life that we’re all discussing right now? When Timothy McVeigh died people didn’t spend all their time talking about his love of the Constitution or how he never liked broccoli. Nobody cares how much Ted Bundy loved his cat.

Why are they celebrating this mass murderer as though his mass murders are some marginal, irrelevant anomaly in his life and not the single defining feature of it? I mean, that is his legacy!”

How surreal would that be? How weird would it feel to have all that death and destruction go either unmentioned or outright praised in discussing your acquaintance who perpetrated it?

Of course, this will never happen. No random schmuck in your life will ever get caught committing a single murder, let alone many, without being punished and seeing it become the very first thing people think of whenever their name comes up. No, that sort of treatment is a privilege that is reserved only for the elites who rule over us.

If a man kills a lot of people, then his legacy is that of a mass murderer. There is nothing else anyone could possibly accomplish in their lifetime which could eclipse the significance of the act of violently ripping the life out of thousands of human bodies. I don’t care if you started a charity, if you gave a graduation speech, or if you loved your wife very much. If you committed war crimes, knowingly targeted civilian shelters, and deliberately targeted a nation’s civilian infrastructure to gain a strategic advantage after the conclusion of a war based on lies, then you are a mass murderer who may have also done some other far less significant things during the rest of your time on this planet. That is who you are.

Murder is treated as the most serious crime anyone can commit in societies around the world because it is the single most egregious violation of personal sovereignty possible. When you murder someone, you willfully overpower their will for themselves and take everything away from them, without any possibility of their getting any of it back. This doesn’t stop being true if someone happens to be sitting in an office which empowers him to murder people without fear of consequences.

If you murder one person, then what you are for the rest of your life, first and foremost, is a murderer, because murder is such a hugely significant crime. If you murder a large number of people, then what you are is a mass murderer.

George HW Bush was a mass murderer. That is his legacy. That is what he was. Any discussion of the man’s life which does not put this single defining legacy front and center by a very wide margin is being dishonest about the thing that murder is, and is doing so out of fealty to a corrupt power structure which enables consequence-free murder on a mass scale as long as it happens in accordance with the will of that power structure.

Whenever I hold my customary public “good riddance” social media celebration after a war pig dies, I always get people telling me they hope I die for saying such a thing. And of course I am aware that I am courting controversy by saying immediately after someone’s death that the world is better off without them, and hostile reactions necessarily come along with that.

But I also think it says so much about people’s deification of these child-killing elites that simply being glad to see them leave this world, peacefully of old age and in their own homes, is seen as such an unforgivable offense that it deserves nothing short of death. I suppose that’s how high of a pedestal you need to place someone on above the ordinary people in order to see their acts of mass murder as insignificant little foibles instead of horrific atrocities which define their entire personhood.

In the eyes of the thoroughly propagandized public, they are gods, as the nonstop fawning beatification of Poppy Bush makes abundantly clear.

US presidents are not special. They are not made of any different kind of substance than you or I. When they order the extermination of large numbers of human lives for no legitimate reason, they are as guilty as you or I would be if we murdered each and every one of those people ourselves, personally.

And if you or I had done such a thing during our lives, we both know people wouldn’t be spending their time after we die talking about how delightful and charming we were.

George Herbert Walker Bush was a mass murderer, and the only reason that undeniable fact isn’t dominating public discourse today is because of the myopia caused by a deeply unjust power dynamic.

Ken Jarecke’s Death of an Iraqi Soldier, taken on the “Highway of Death” in 1991 has rarely been published in the United States.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Source: Medium

He’s going to destroy everything, she says, and her entire objective now is to convince everyone that it isn’t her fault.

Why does Hillary Clinton keep coming back in, doing interviews, attacking the left, embarrassing her supporters and relitigating a primary election she’d do well to let the world forget? I think I know why.

I’ve seen some theories as folks try to answer this burning question for themselves (she’s gearing up for a 2020 run, she’s trying to sell books, she’s bat shit psycho, etc.), but none of those have really added up for me. I think Hillary keeps coming back because she needs to.

I’ve seen some theories as folks try to answer this burning question for themselves (she’s gearing up for a 2020 run, she’s trying to sell books, she’s bat shit psycho, etc.), but none of those have really added up for me. I think Hillary keeps coming back because she needs to.

Hillary needs to keep coming back trying to convince everyone that President Trump isn’t her fault because her media goons convinced her supporters that President Trump would cause the end of the world. The fearmongering targeted at the left was relentless and brutal in the leadup to the November 8 election, and as a Jill Stein supporter I was told on a daily basis that I was helping to inflict armageddon upon America. I was told that if Trump won, Muslims would be rounded up and thrown into internment camps, marauding bands of brownshirts would be patrolling the streets slaughtering minorities with impunity, 11 million immigrants would be mass-deported, and Trump’s insanity would get us into a nuclear war.

People didn’t get these ideas in their heads out of nowhere, they got them because every time Trump said something asinine the entire mass media machine would ring frantic alarm bells about it for days and extrapolate every single thing he said into its most horrifying possible interpretation and implications. Liberals are still to this day suffering from Trump derangement syndrome because they were told over and over again that hell on earth would be unleashed if Trump won, and then he won.

In opting for this risky gamble of telling Democrats that something uniquely horrible would happen if Trump won, and then losing, Hillary Clinton was forced into a position where she had to either (A) tell America that everything was going to be okay, thereby admitting that much of what her people had been saying about Trump was a lie, or (B) let the fear persist and try to avoid getting blamed for it. She opted for B.

Since Clinton and her cronies have opted to continue advancing the narrative that Trump is going to destroy everything, her entire objective now is to convince everyone that that isn’t her fault. Nobody wants to go down as the woman who helped cause the end of the world, even if that bizarre reality tunnel only exists in the realm of propaganda. She’s keeping everyone locked in that fear, and she wants to make sure that everyone sees Bernie Sanders, James Comey, Russia, WikiLeaks, progressives, the media, the DNC, Barack Obama and everyone else under the sun as the ones who are responsible for that fear, not her.

Clinton ran for president for the same reason Trump ran for president: ego. She wanted to attain the ultimate political trophy because of the way that attainment itself would make her feel. In terms of ego candy, being the woman who helped destroy the world is the polar opposite of becoming the first female president, so she’s trying to avoid it at all cost. She can’t stop coming back in and trying to manipulate the way people see the 2016 election until she’s convinced that the damage she did to her legacy has been indelibly blamed on other people. Until then, she’s going to have to keep trying to influence public sentiment.

America was spoonfed a boatload of lies in order to force the election of what the US oligarchs perceived as a more reliable pro-establishment candidate to protect their assets. Anyone who’s looking at the situation clearly can see that Trump isn’t extremely awful because of the few ways he’s differed from other recent presidents, he’s extremely awful because of the things he’s got in common with them. By far the most evil things that he has done haven’t been new horrors unique to his administration, but continuations of Bush and Obama’s neoconservative civilian-slaughtering foreign policy, oppressive neoliberal domestic policy, and Orwellian surveillance policy. After all the fearmongering and freakouts, we’ve seen conclusively that Trump is essentially a Republican Obama, who was himself essentially a Democratic George W. Bush. If anything, Trump is just more personally obnoxious about doing the things his predecessors did.

You were lied to, America. The mass media propaganda machine filled you to the gills with fear just to try and scare you into electing their prefered candidate, and they’re keeping your countrymen saturated in fear all because they painted themselves into a corner. They can’t admit that they lied, so they’re going to keep terrorizing you with irrational fear propaganda even though their plutocratic bosses ended up with a lackey in the White House who’s catering to at least 90 percent of their wishes anyway. And as long as that’s happening, Hillary’s going to keep showing up trying to make sure you don’t blame her for that fear.

This is not the first time the propagandists have used fear to try and manipulate the public, and it won’t be the last. Until we learn collectively to cease succumbing to this vile tactic and start pushing toward what we want instead of running from what we fear, our world will remain dominated by manipulative tyrants. Don’t let them scare you. Take the wheel and steer toward what you want.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Source: Rogue Journalist

The power establishment, which uses lies and secrecy to manipulate and deceive us, hates having the light of truth shone upon it more than anything.

Insider sources have reportedly confirmed to the Washington Post that Assange has been charged. Because those charges are sealed, it’s impossible to know what they are or how they’re being justified. If you ask #Resistance Twitter, it’s because it’s #MuellerTime and Assange is about to be arrested under some mysterious charges involving WikiLeaks’ publication of non-government, non-classified emails in 2016. If you ask QAnon cultists, it’s because Donald Trump is planning to extradite Assange so as to rescue him and deal a fatal blow to the Deep State.

If you ask people who actually know what they’re talking about, however, it’s most likely for WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan and Iraq war logs and/or last year’s CIA leak publications, and most likely using the Espionage Act. This would constitute a deadly blow to press freedoms, and arguably a greater leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act.

It also proves once again that Julian Assange was completely right.

I’ve had so, so many arguments with people this year about Assange’s publicly stated rationale for remaining in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he was granted political asylum by Ecuador’s previous government on the basis that the US was seeking his extradition. The refrain that he can “leave whenever he wants” is extremely common, with Assange’s detractors insisting that he’d never be arrested and extradited to the United States, and that he is instead hiding from (non-existent) Swedish rape charges.

The narrative that Assange couldn’t possibly be hiding from the same government which tortured Chelsea Manning has been aggressively promulgated by mainstream outlets like the The Guardian, as in this article by James Ball from earlier this year titled “The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride”, claiming that “The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US.”

Ball’s article includes the following galaxy-brained excerpts:

“Visitors, like fish, stink in three days.”

“There is no public criminal case against Assange or WikiLeaks in the US, though Assange frequently says there is evidence of sealed indictments against him and his associates, and there have been publicly disclosed surveillance warrants against WikiLeaks staff, as well as FBI interest in Assange and his current and former co-workers (including me, as I worked with WikiLeaks for a few months in 2010 and 2011). There is no real reason to believe anything has changed with Assange’s situation in the US.” 

“The problem for both sides is that neither wants to lose face: Assange wants to be a symbol of resistance against an overreaching US state, and does not want to admit his asylum was about his personal actions and not those of WikiLeaks. Ecuador does not want to suggest it made a mistake in granting Assange asylum.”

Ball was at best completely wrong, and at worst knowingly lying about the very real possibility of secret US charges. We know that the charges are from the US government, so they’ve got nothing to do with any rape or bail violation allegations. But the narrative that Assange is a stinky, stinky weirdo hiding in a cupboard has been so aggressively promulgated by imperial propagandists like Ball it’s (for me at least) literally impossible to talk about Assange’s plight on social media without some stranger coming up and spewing it all over the conversation.

And it’s no mystery why that is. The alternative to making Assange the creepy rapist hiding from justice would be to acknowledge the possibility of what we now know for certain: that a vast, sprawling superpower, with so many extremely tight alliances that it is effectively the center of a globe-spanning empire, is working to extradite an Australian journalist from an Ecuadorian embassy in the United Kingdom so that it can punish him for publishing facts. Much, much easier to have him be the stinky cupboard man than the center of an assault on speech with implications stretching to all future generations and every corner of the globe.

Julian Assange founded an innovative leak outlet on the premise that corrupt power can be fought with truth and transparency. Corrupt power responded by silencing, persecuting and smearing him. In so doing they succeeded in slowing down the leaks, minimizing the impact of publications, and nullifying Assange’s ability to defend himself, and in exchange they have publicly proved that his thesis was, and is, absolutely correct.

There is a power establishment which uses lies and secrecy to manipulate and deceive us, and it hates having the light of truth shone upon it more than anything. We know that for certain now. There is no doubt whatsoever.

Julian Assange was never hiding from justice. Julian Assange is, and always has been, hiding from injustice. He has been proven right about his reasons for seeking political asylum from Ecuador, as he has been proven right about so very much before.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Source: Rogue Journalist

Veterans Day, like so very, very much in American culture, is a propaganda construct designed to lubricate the funneling of human lives into the chamber of a gigantic gun.

Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its shores are in their nineties, and soon there won’t be any of them left. Every single person who has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil.

I just said something you’re not supposed to say. People have dedicated many years of their lives to the service of the US military; they’ve given their limbs to it, they’ve suffered horrific brain damage for it, they’ve given their very lives to it. Families have been ripped apart by the violence that has been inflicted upon members of the US Armed Forces; you’re not supposed to let them hear you say that their loved one was destroyed because some sociopathic nerds somewhere in Washington decided that it would give America an advantage over potential economic rivals to control a particular stretch of Middle Eastern dirt. But it is true, and if we don’t start acknowledging that truth lives are going to keep getting thrown into the gears of the machine for the power and profit of a few depraved oligarchs. So I’m going to keep saying it.

Last week I saw the hashtag #SaluteToService trending on Twitter. Apparently the NFL had a deal going where every time someone tweeted that hashtag they’d throw a few bucks at some veteran’s charity. Which sounds sweet, until you consider three things:
1. The NFL’s ten wealthiest team owners are worth a combined $61 billion.
2. The NFL has taken millions of dollars from the Pentagon for displays of patriotism on the field, including for the policy of bringing all players out for the national anthem every game starting in 2009 (which led to Colin Kaepernick’s demonstrations and the obscene backlash against him).
3. Veterans should not have to rely on charity.

Seriously, how is “charity for veterans” a thing, and how are people not extremely weirded out by it? How is it that you can go out and get your limbs blown off for slave wages after watching your friends die and innocent civilians perish, come home, and have to rely on charity to get by? How is it that you can risk life and limb killing and suffering irreparable psychological trauma for some plutocrat’s agendas, plunge into poverty when you come home, and then see the same plutocrat labeled a “philanthropist” because he threw a few tax-deductible dollars at a charity that gave you a decent prosthetic leg?

Taking care of veterans should be factored into the budget of every act of military aggression. If a government can’t make sure its veterans are housed, healthy and happy in a dignified way for the rest of their lives, it has no business marching human beings into harm’s way. The fact that you see veterans on the street of any large US city and people who fought in wars having to beg “charities” for a quality mechanical wheelchair shows you just how much of a pathetic joke this Veterans Day song and dance has always been.

They’ll send you to mainline violence and trauma into your mind and body for the power and profit of the oligarchic rulers of the US-centralized empire, but it’s okay because everyone gets a long weekend where they’re told to thank you for your service. Bullshit.

Veterans Day, like so very, very much in American culture, is a propaganda construct designed to lubricate the funneling of human lives into the chamber of a gigantic gun. It glorifies evil, stupid, meaningless acts of mass murder to ensure that there will always be recruits who are willing to continue perpetrating it, and to ensure that the US public doesn’t wake up to the fact that its government’s insanely bloated military budget is being used to unleash unspeakable horrors upon the earth.

The only way to honor veterans, really, truly honor them, is to help end war and make sure no more lives are put into a position where they are on the giving or receiving end of evil, stupid, meaningless violence. The way to do that is to publicly, loudly and repeatedly make it clear that you do not consent to the global terrorism being perpetrated in your name. These bastards work so hard conducting propaganda to manufacture your consent for endless warmongering because they need that consent. So don’t give it to them.

Your rulers have never feared the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the terrorists, the Iranians, the Chinese or the Russians. They fear you. They fear the American public suddenly waking up to the evil things that are being done in your name and using your vast numbers to shrug off the existing power structures without firing a shot, as easily as removing a heavy coat on a warm day. If enough of you loudly withdraw your consent for their insatiable warmongering, that fear will be enough to keep them in check.

This Veterans Day, don’t honor those who have served by giving reverence and legitimacy to a war machine which is exclusively used for inflicting great evil. Honor them by disassembling that machine.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Source: Rogue Journalist

No matter who wins, the wars are guaranteed to continue, the oligarchs are guaranteed to keep siphoning more and more money out of the pockets of ordinary Americans.

By this I do not mean that the votes aren’t real or that the outcomes are predetermined, I simply mean that both mainstream parties are controlled by plutocrats who benefit from the status quo and are only interested in their own power and profit.

No matter who wins on Tuesday, the wars are guaranteed to continue, the oligarchs are guaranteed to keep siphoning more and more money out of the pockets of ordinary Americans, opaque and unaccountable intelligence agencies are guaranteed to continue expanding intrusive surveillance practices and narrative control psyops in collaboration with powerful Silicon Valley corporations, and we’re guaranteed to keep hurtling toward climate catastrophe on the back of an economic system which requires infinite growth on a finite planet.

The only thing that might change a tiny bit is America maybe temporarily having a government which pretends to care about oppressed minorities sometimes.

But there’s a sharp tension in the air about this performance. Whenever I mention how it’s all an act staged to profit nobody but Vince McMahon, I get a bunch of people yelling and cursing at me, with even those those who kind of know it’s fake saying “Okay, but you still gotta cheer for The Undertaker though, come on!”

That tension is there because on paper the outcome of the 2018 midterms is still uncertain. The slight lead Democrats held in polls has narrowed further today, with some analysts going so far as to predict Republicans retaining control of both houses.

Which is, on its surface, bizarre. It is bizarre not only because a new president almost always takes congressional losses at this point in their administration (the only exceptions being the historically significant years of 1934 and 2002), but also because the Republican Party is under the leadership of the most despised presidential candidate of all time.

If US politics were real, this would not be happening. If the Democratic Party were a real political party, a party which advances popular agendas in order to get its members elected to the government the way kids are taught in school, it would be on the cusp of a massive landslide of victories in both the House and the Senate, instead praying Hail Marys that they at least gain a slight advantage in the House. The last two years would have been spent promoting the virally popular agendas of the Bernie Sanders movement like single payer healthcare and getting money out of politics, after a thorough and radically honest autopsy of everything that went so catastrophically wrong in 2016.

Instead, what did Democrats do? They spent the last two years babbling about Russiagate conspiracy theories, and then in a tacit admission that they’ve never believed a word of that nonsense suddenly went completely silent on the issue before midterms and switched to the “We’re not Trump” platform. Oh yeah, and they’re telling Green Party candidates to drop out.

Democrats have done almost nothing in the last two years to fight the Republicans in any way that will ensure victory. Using his personal Twitter account, conservative media lackeys and an army of sycophants, Trump has completely dominated the narrative that his presidency has been a godsend for the economy. Fighting this narrative should have been Democrats’ first and foremost priority from day one, which would have been extremely easy to do since the narrative is entirely false.

Job growth has continued on the trajectory it’s been on since 2012 and ordinary Americans don’t have any more money in their pockets than before; the wealth has stayed at the top no matter how much the economy has grown. An entirely factual counter-narrative about money being siphoned upward to the dollar-hoarding billionaire class with the help of Republican tax cuts would have been an extremely easy sell, but hardly anybody has attempted to do this.

Or war. It’s simply taken for granted that Democrats aren’t going to campaign against war, but how easy would it be for them to win elections if they did? There is no shortage of footage and statistics which could be used to attack this administration’s unforgivable rate of civilian casualties from airstrikes, its expansion of military presence in Syria, Afghanistan and Africa, its horrifying escalations against a nuclear superpower in Russia, its continued facilitation of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world in Yemen, and its depraved implementation of starvation sanctions against Iran.

Democrats could have been shoving these horrors into the public eye since January 2017 and it would have not only galvanized liberals and leftists against Trump but also crippled his appeal with the anti-interventionist paleocons, libertarians and nationalists on the right. But, of course, they did not, because that would have alienated their war profiteer sponsors.

Instead of advancing popular positions to win the votes of the majority as kids are taught happens in school, all Democrats are doing currently is attacking the Republicans over Trump’s obnoxious tweets and generally successful anti-immigrant fearmongering.

Since both parties support all oligarchic agendas in essentially the same ways, the only wiggle room Democrats have left is on issues the billionaire class doesn’t care about, like racism and other forms of bigotry. Plutocrats don’t care if gay people get married or if the president says racist things, they only care about power and profit, so civil rights and opposition to racism are the only means by which Democrats can significantly distinguish themselves from Republicans in a way that helps them get elected. The fact that both parties support the same oligarchic agendas which hurt disadvantaged groups first and worst goes unmentioned by either side.

It was telling when the Democrats lost to the single most beatable presidential candidate of all time in 2016. It was even more telling that they chose to spend two years spouting gibberish about Russia instead of building an actual platform with actual positions that actual people care about. The fact that there is any doubt whatsoever about the donkey party making gains in 2018 proves conclusively that they have been making zero effort to help advance the interests of Americans.

They do not care. It should be as clear as day to everyone by now. And why don’t they care? Because a pro wrestler gets paid the same whether his character wins the match or loses it.

US politics work nothing remotely like how kids are taught in school. The difference is night and day. If the American education system really wanted kids to learn about the way their electoral system actually functions, teachers would bribe student government candidates with Monopoly money to betray the interests of their classmates, and whichever candidate accepted the most bribes would get advertised on the school PA system as the clear and obvious choice to vote for.

By all means go ahead and vote on Tuesday, my American readers, in whatever way you feel might make some difference. But please also remember that you are ultimately participating in a game rigged for your oppressors, and that you deserve a much better system than this.

That’s where the real fight is.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Source: Rogue Journalist

You can’t get more despicable than someone who attacks the powerless on behalf of the powerful while calling themselves a journalist.

Wired has just published what might be the single most brazenly dishonest and manipulative piece of down-punching empire smut that I have ever read.

An article by Virginia Heffernan titled “The Real Houseguest of the Ecuadorian Embassy” revolves around the outright lie that Julian Assange is suing the Ecuadorian government because he doesn’t feel like cleaning up after his cat and maintaining basic hygiene in the embassy he’s been confined to since 2012.

In reality, the legal case arose from the fact that despite being granted political asylum for his journalism, Assange has for months been cut off from the world and forbidden to practice journalism by the new government of Ecuador, and would remain unable to practice journalism under the new conditions Quito recently imposed upon him.

The article reads as though its author is attempting to force snarky humor through a thick fog of hatred and personal misery while seeing how many lies she can pack into each paragraph.

Heffernan claims falsely that Assange is “wanted on various criminal charges”; Assange has not been charged with anything.

Heffernan claims falsely that Assange “has been closely linked to the Kremlin and Russian president Vladimir Putin”; this is just objectively false with no evidence backing it up whatsoever.

Heffernan claims falsely that “the distinct possibility has surfaced that during his embassy tenure Assange communicated with Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s consigliere, via magic decoder rings or the internet”; there’s no evidence that Stone had any “back channel” with WikiLeaks, and the information he notoriously amplified was already public.

Heffernan claims falsely that WikiLeaks is “Russia-aligned”; another assertion for which there is zero evidence and much evidence to the contrary.

You get the picture. I’m not going to spend an entire article beating up on some writer for Wired just for authoring an amazingly horrible article about Julian Assange, especially when there are so very, very many other ambitious presstitutes falling all over themselves in a mad scramble to do the exact same thing right now.

Just as new information begins surfacing that Assange’s safety and security may be in immediate jeopardy, the brave, dauntless journalists of the establishment press have been working around the clock to bring their audiences as many versions as possible of the crucial bombshell news story that the WikiLeaks founder is a stinky, stinky man. Like it would even matter if that were true. Like the barely disguised plot to extradite a journalist for the crime of publishing facts to the same nation which tortured Chelsea Manning would be any less Orwellian if that journalist didn’t change his sheets often enough.

But that,  of course, is not the point. The point is to create public revulsion for Julian Assange, thereby killing sympathy for his unconscionable persecution and dampening the impact of any future WikiLeaks releases. The point is to marry Assange’s name with the idea of bad smells, so that the public will begin to find themselves increasingly disgusted by him and everything he stands for without quite remembering exactly why they feel such disdain for him.

And there are more than enough aspiring pundits out there trying to do exactly that. Every story you see about Assange’s plight in mainstream media now goes out of its way to drag the focus away from the fact that a political prisoner has had his important voice silenced, and suck it into some vapid narrative about personal hygiene and kitty litter. Every few minutes there’s some blue-checkmarked goon making a juvenile tweet about how weird and gross Julian Assange is like a high school bully. There is no shortage of empire loyalists looking to prove themselves worthy lackeys before the watchful eyes of current and future employers.

And make no mistake, that is all it is ever about. The reason almost every journalist below a certain age has a Twitter account these days is because they are taught in no uncertain terms that building a social media profile is an essential part of the job. They know that their social media presence can be just as much a determining factor in whether or not they keep climbing the ladder of prestige and influence as their resume is.

Reporters in western corporate media aren’t usually explicitly told to protect establishment interests, but the ones who consistently do are the ones who get hired to the choice jobs. Making a big show about what a good empire lackey you are by smearing Julian Assange at a key juncture in his fight is a great way to show your peers and superiors that you’re someone who plays along with the beltway groupthink, and the fact that Assange cannot defend himself from those smears makes it extremely risk-free.

So when you see some political writer yukking it up about Julian Assange and kitty litter, what they are really saying is, “Hey! Look at me! You can count on me to advance whatever narratives get passed down from on high! I’ll cheer on all the wars! I’ll play up the misdeeds of our great nation’s rivals and ignore the misdeeds of our allies! I’ll literally spit on Assange if you’ll give my career a boost!”

They are saying, “I support everything the media-controlling oligarchs support, and I hate everything they hate. I will be a reliable mouthpiece of the ruling class regardless of who is elected in our fake elections to our fake official government. I will say all the right things. I will protect what you need protected. I will hide what you want hidden. I understand what you want me to do without your explicitly telling me to do it. I’ve got what you need. I have no principles. Look, I’m even joining in the dog pile against a political prisoner who can’t defend himself.”

Reporters who bash Julian Assange while he is silenced instead of using their platforms to draw attention to the many, many wicked deeds that are being perpetrated by the powerful in their own country are the lowest of the low. They are scum. They are the scum that scum scrapes off its shoes. There is no more despicable, sniveling waste of space on this earth than someone who attacks the powerless on behalf of the powerful while calling themselves a journalist.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Source: Rogue Journalist

The foundations of oligarchy and imperialism have nothing whatsoever to do with Jews or Jewishness but with the way the dynamics of money and power interact.

I don’t have anything interesting or insightful to say about America’s mass shootings, other than to repeat the point I always make that the effects of modern war propaganda on American psychology are wildly under-appreciated and ignored by scientific research. I believe the subject of US gun control is a bit outside my sovereign boundaries as an Australian writer as it only affects Americans, so I don’t really have anything to contribute in the primary debate surrounding the attack. It’s a debate for Americans to have with one another, so I tend to avoid it.

What I do have to offer is a brief description of my experience with conspiracy theories about Judaism and Jewish people as a fringe blogger who writes a lot about conspiracies, and the impression those encounters have left me with.

To be clear, when I talk about antisemites I mean the actual bigots who promote hatred of Jewish people, paranoia about Jewishness, or any type of violence against or mistreatment of Jews as a race.

I do not mean people who voice legitimate criticisms of Israel and its government, I do not mean people who criticize the way Zionism is used as a tool of manipulation to advance geopolitical agendas, I do not mean people who question the justification for the creation of Israel in the first place, I do not mean people who defend Palestinians, and I do not mean people who voice valid, factual criticisms of George Soros or any other billionaire who happens to be Jewish.

I make this distinction because when I try to talk about antisemitism publicly I get critics of Israel confusing the two groups, saying they only ever encounter people who absurdly call you an antisemite for condemning the slaughter of unarmed Palestinians by sniper fire, not people who actually promote the hatred of Jews. And that may indeed be true for them in their case, but as someone who writes a lot about oligarchy, the media, and war in the Middle East I most definitely find myself brushing up against the pernicious mind virus of antisemitism on a regular basis.

It typically happens one of two ways:

1) I’ll be there minding my own business happily attacking CNN or decrying war propaganda against Syria or whatever, and then BAM! Some random asshole splats one of those Jewish caricature memes on the lovely post I spent lots of time and energy creating. It’s always jarring and feels creepy and invasive in the same way as receiving an unsolicited dick pic.

2) They sort of sidle up alongside me on social media, making vague, side-mouthed insinuations which become increasingly specific over time, and before I know it they’re telling me I need to “name the Jew” and talk about “the JQ”.

I hate antisemites. Hate them, hate them, hate them.

Not only are they vile racists whose particular brand of hatred should be easily recognized as uniquely toxic by anyone who’s ever skimmed a history book, but they heap other layers of personal obnoxiousness on top of that as well. They’ll accuse you of being a “coward” if you reject their pet medieval superstitions, but they themselves speak only in coded language and oblique, side-mouthed innuendo because they are too cowardly to come right out and state their points in plain language. They’re arrogant, they’re condescending, and they’re impervious to reason, and they always expect you to treat their vapid, slug-brained perspectives with the same respect you’d treat someone who is making real arguments using actual facts.

More annoyingly, they derail some of the most important conversations that critical thinkers and skeptics of establishment narratives need to be having in the new media environment. The foundations of oligarchy and imperialism have nothing whatsoever to do with Jews or Jewishness but with the way the dynamics of money and power interact with human behavioral tendencies, which I discuss at length in the article hyperlinked here.

One need only to look at the way Jeff Bezos, who is not Jewish, rose to the top of the plutocratic class and began instantly buying up media and forming alliances with intelligence and defense agencies to see how the dynamics of oligarchy play out with no difficulty when Jewishness is completely removed from the equation. One need only look at the prominence and influence of bloodthirsty psychopath John Bolton, who is not Jewish, to see the how dynamics of neoconservative warmongering play out with no difficulty when Jewishness is completely removed from the equation.

Conspiracies happen all the time in the upper echelons of power, and it’s important to examine and talk about the aspects of this reality that are visible to the general public. But the fact that there’s a group of idiots moving throughout conspiracy circles who insist those conspiracies have something to do with Jewish people having some sort of predisposition toward nefarious behavior or global domination gums up the gears of that dialogue, and is used to discredit perfectly legitimate skepticism toward establishment-endorsed narratives about the world and how it works.

Money rewards the sociopath’s ability to step on anyone and do whatever it takes to get ahead, and large amounts of money can be used to buy up political influence. In a dynamic wherein money both rewards sociopathy and translates directly to political power, we naturally wind up ruled by sociopaths who have no problem keeping everyone poor to ensure the dominance of the plutocratic class and creating chaos throughout the world for power and profit.

One of the many reasons antisemitic conspiracy theories gain traction is because those who are devout acolytes of the cult of capitalism will often be resistant to the idea that it is in this way responsible for the worst problems on earth, so to avoid cognitive dissonance they cook up theories about a greedy race of subhumans who suck up power and money because they are intrinsically evil. It allows them to blame Jews for the problems of money and power dynamics. Because Jews as a culture have tended to be generally decent at finance (a trend that probably emerged exactly because of their persecution), they make convenient scapegoats.

In the same way, patriots and nationalists who like to think of their country as sovereign and independent will be resistant to the idea that the lines between nations are increasingly irrelevant at the highest levels of power. The notion that their country is just one branch of a giant, globe-spanning empire of which Israel is also another branch will be far too challenging for their worldview, so they cook up theories about their nation being ruled by a Jewish state via lobbying, media influence and conspiracies.

In reality, the globe-spanning empire which includes Israel and the US is not ultimately controlled by any nation or government, but by a class of nationless corporate and financial powers with no loyalty to anyone but themselves. Functionally Israel is nothing more than the Middle Eastern military branch of the empire, and it is so deeply involved in military conflicts because the Middle East is such a strategically crucial region to control. Zionism is just one of the propaganda narratives used to help manufacture support for that branch, and lobbying and media psyops are just the glue which holds the empire together.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

We can get rid of the new kings just like we got rid of the old kings, only this time we can choose to evolve beyond the urge to dominate and control and enslave.

Words: Caitlin Johnstone. Video Sustainable Human

But they didn’t go away.

As long as there have been humans, there have been humans trying to dominate and control other humans. As societies became larger and more complex it went from trying to become the alpha human in the tribe to the alpha human of an entire country to the alpha human of an empire, but in each case the impulse to try and dominate as many other humans as possible was the same. When kings went out of style, that impulse didn’t leave with them; it simply found a different way of manifesting.

The new alpha dominators of the literate world couldn’t wear gold on their heads and couldn’t torture dissidents to death in the town square. The ones who rose to the top were the ones who figured out that they could still function as kings as long as they weren’t such egotistical cunts about it. They could no longer sit on thrones and make everyone grovel before them, but with a little bit of cleverness and a whole lot of money, they could have all the power of a king and more. All they had to do was keep the people from realizing they were being ruled.

It took them a while to get that last part down and there were a few false starts, like in France where everyone started grabbing them and slicing off their heads with French head slicing contraptions. The new breed of kings which emerged from the chaos and upheaval were ones which understood how to control everyone from behind the scenes without drawing much attention to themselves.

They learned to give the people an official government to create the illusion of freedom and democracy, and they learned to use their money to dominate every important aspect of that government. They learned how to buy up media so they could control the stories the people tell themselves about what’s going on in their society, beginning with newspapers, then radio stations, then television and eventually online media as well.

They learned to control the very economic infrastructure which determines how money works. They passed these secrets on to their heirs along with their vast fortunes in exactly the same way kings used to pass down their crowns.

Today’s kings rule not with brute force and claims of divine right, but with manipulation and with money. They rule from the shadows, never sticking their heads out into the light for fear they’ll start getting chopped off again.

They weave happy stories into public consciousness of freedom and democracy while wielding far more military and economic might with far more control than the kings of old ever dreamed possible. They have used this power to turn humanity into a funnel which pours ever increasing amounts of wealth into their treasuries, and thus ever increasing amounts of power.

The earth itself is being stripped bare to quench their insatiable lust for more and more control over more and more humans.

But the weakness of the new kings is the same as the kings of old: information. We can share ideas and information and point out what the kings have been doing to us, what they are doing to our planet, what they are doing to our minds.

We can point to their lies, point to their hiding places in the shadows. Because these new kings cannot torture us to death in the town square. All they have is lies and money, and we can see through lies and collectively change our minds about how money works. When we do that we can get rid of the new kings just like we got rid of the old kings, only this time we can choose to evolve beyond the urge to dominate and control and enslave.

And then, our eyes freed from the lies and manipulation and delusion, we can all be kings. And we can heal our planet together, and we can place a crown upon its head, and a new humanity can be born. A humanity that works in collaboration with itself and with its ecosystem. A harmonious humanity. A natural humanity. And that would be truly wonderful.

Source: Medium

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. We need to cultivate an aggressive disgust for all attempts by the powerful to manipulate the public dialogue.

One of the weirdest things about the post-Iraq invasion world is how the mass media has actually gotten less accountable instead of more accountable for its reporting since that time.

Right now in the UK there’s an amazingly viral smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn running across all mainstream outlets, which, from what I can tell, consists entirely of narrative spin and no actual evidence. The powerful elites who control British mass media have an obvious vested interest in keeping the UK government from moving to the left, so they advance the absolutely insane narrative that Corbyn is a secret Nazi. They just keep saying it and saying it like it’s true until people start believing it without feeling any pressure at all to substantiate their narrative with facts. It’s been jaw-dropping to watch.

More and more we are seeing narratives about cyber-threats being used to advance reports of “attacks” and “acts of war” being perpetrated which, as far as the public is concerned, consist of nothing other than the authoritative assertions of confident-sounding media pundits. There was a recent NBC exclusive which was co-authored by Ken Dilanian, who is an actual, literal CIA asset, about the threat of hackers working for the Iranian government. The alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections is now routinely compared to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, despite no hard, verifiable evidence that that interference even took place ever being presented to the public.

After the mass media’s complicity in selling the Iraq invasion to the western world, we should have seen scores of people fired and changes put in place to prevent such unforgivable complicity from ever occurring again. Instead, no changes whatsoever were made to ensure that news media outlets never facilitate another disaster at the hands of secretive government agencies, and now these same outlets are allowed to promote world-shaping narratives on no evidentiary basis beyond “It’s true because we said so.”

There’s a consensus, agreed-upon narrative about what’s going on in the world that is advanced by all mass media outlets regardless of what political sector those outlets market themselves to. Exactly what should be done about individual events and situations might vary a bit from pundit to pundit and outlet to outlet, but the overall “how it is” narrative about what’s happening is the same across the board. This is the official narrative, and the plutocrat-owned media/political class has full control over it.

We all know the official narratives, right? The US and its allies are good, the latest Official Bad Guy is bad. You live in a democracy where your vote counts and your government is accountable to you and your countrymen, just like they taught you in school. The two political parties are totally different and their opposition is totally real. The news man on TV never reports any falsehoods because if he did he’d lose his job, which means that the Russian hacking thing, the Syria thing, the 9/11 thing, all happened exactly as the government told us they happened. Iraq was maybe kinda sorta a mistake, but nothing like that could ever happen again because mumble mumble cough hey look what Kanye West is doing.

Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario, though. Let’s imagine a world where there were no official narratives. About anything. At all.

What if there was no dominating elite class telling the public how they were meant to interpret events and situations? What if there was only the raw, publicly available information about what’s going on in the world, and people individually interpreted that information for themselves? And what if they came to differing conclusions, and that was allowed to be okay? What if there was no elite class telling everyone that whoever doesn’t believe X, Y and Z is a paranoid conspiracy theorist, a raving lunatic, and/or a Kremlin propagandist who needs to be shunned and silenced? What if all that were solely determined by the collective, without the control or oversight of any powerful, dominating class?

What would that be like?

You may find that your results in this thought experiment depend largely on where you place your trust. If you trust the dominating class more than you trust people as a collective, you probably find this idea terrifying. What if everyone starts thinking wrong thoughts and believing wrong beliefs? What if everyone decides that humans can fly when they leap from rooftops and running with scissors is safe? What if everyone decides the Holocaust never happened and says “Hell, that means we get a freebie! Let’s get our Final Solution on y’all! Yeehaw!”

If, however, you trust humanity as a collective more than you trust a small group of sociopathic, omnicidal, ecocidal oligarchs who killed a million people in Iraq, you might suspect that whatever happened would surely be better than what happens in the current paradigm.

Without an elite class manipulating the way people think and vote into alignment with plutocratic interests, people would still be able to take actions in response to their best guess about what’s going on in the world. The narrative of anthropogenic climate change for example would in my opinion have a much better fighting chance of winning out in the marketplace of ideas if it were permitted to stand on the merit of the raw supporting data, rather than the manipulations of big oil on one hand and an elite faux liberal class convincing everyone that climate chaos can be averted by banning straws and buying a Prius on the other, and the collective would be able to democratically mobilize to avert catastrophe far more effectively than it can now.

Now let’s consider another hypothetical scenario: what if one day, everyone gets tired of official narratives? What if something happens and everyone gets fed up with being told how they have to think about the world by a thoroughly discredited media and political class? What if, to borrow from a popular Marxist meme, the public decides to seize the means of narrative production?

This might look like the increasingly distrusted propaganda machine of a failing empire pushing an increasingly oppressed populace too far and too hard at some point, maybe in the direction of war, mass censorship or austerity, and losing control of the narrative in a nonviolent populist information rebellion. Instead of the elites being lined up for guillotines, the mass media outlets and talking heads on TV are simply seen for the discredited voices that they are, and people begin creating their own narratives about situations and events. The most popular narratives rise to the top and determine the direction that society takes itself, rather than the narratives forcefully promulgated by media-owning plutocrats. This would be made far easier without the imperialist divide-and-conquer tactics of the establishment manipulators who keep us all pitted against each other in insulated political factions.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The world is better off being controlled by the collective will of the people rather than the will of a few sociopathic oligarchs, and we absolutely have the ability to take that control by force whenever we want to. All we have to do is shift value and credibility from plutocrat-generated narratives to popular collective narratives, and cultivate an aggressive disgust for all attempts by the powerful to manipulate the public dialogue.

Once the way people think, act and vote is no longer manipulated by an elite class which does not represent the interests of humanity, our species will have a fighting chance at moving society out of its patterns of exploitation, war and ecocide and into a direction of health, harmony and thriving. I’m just going to keep pointing out that this is always an option, hoping for a spark to catch someday.

Caitlin Johnstone posts articles regularly on her website Rogue Journalist

See also:
Noam Chomsky: The five filters of the mass media