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By Nick Turse

Record Numbers of War-Displaced to Be Dwarfed by Those Driven From Their Homes by Climate Change

I saw them for only a few seconds. One glimpse and they were gone. The young woman wore a brown headwrap, a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and a long pink, red, and blue floral-patterned skirt. She held the reins of the donkey pulling her rust-pink cart. Across her lap lay an infant. Perched beside her at the edge of the metal wagon was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than eight. Some firewood, rugs, woven mats, rolled-up clothing or sheets, a dark green plastic tub, and an oversized plastic jerry can were lashed to the bed of the cart. Three goats tied to the rear of it ambled along behind.

They found themselves, as I did, on a hot, dusty road slowly being choked by families who had hastily hitched up their donkeys and piled whatever they could — kindling, sleeping mats, cooking pots — into sun-bleached carts or bush taxis. And they were the lucky ones. Many had simply set out on foot. Young boys tended small herds of recalcitrant goats. Women toted dazed toddlers. In the rare shade of a roadside tree, a family had stopped and a middle-aged man hung his head, holding it in one hand.

Earlier this year, I traveled that ochre-dirt road in Burkina Faso, a tiny landlocked nation in the African Sahel once known for having the largest film festival on the continent. Now, it’s the site of an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. Those people were streaming down the main road from Barsalogho about 100 miles north of the capital, Ouagadougou, toward Kaya, a market town whose population has almost doubled this year, due to the displaced. Across the country’s northern stretches, other Burkinabe (as citizens are known) were making similar journeys toward towns offering only the most uncertain kinds of refuge. They were victims of a war without a name, a battle between Islamist militants who murder and massacre without compunction and armed forces that kill more civilians than militants.

I’ve witnessed variations of this wretched scene before — exhausted, upended families evicted by machete-wielding militiamen or Kalashnikov-carrying government troops, or the mercenaries of a warlord; dust-caked traumatized people plodding down lonesome highways, fleeing artillery strikes, smoldering villages, or towns dotted with moldering corpses. Sometimes motorbikes pull the carts. Sometimes, young girls carry the jerry cans on their heads. Sometimes, people flee with nothing more than what they’re wearing. Sometimes, they cross national borders and become refugees or, as in Burkina Faso, become internally displaced persons, or IDPs, in their own homeland. Whatever the particulars, such scenes are increasingly commonplace in our world and so, in the worst possible way, unremarkable. And though you would hardly know it in the United States, that’s what also makes them, collectively, one of the signature stories of our time.

At least 100 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to violence, persecution, or other forms of public disorder over the last decade, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. That’s about one in every 97 people on the planet, roughly one percent of humanity. If such war victims had been given their own state to homestead, it would be the 14th largest nation, population-wise, in the world.

By the end of June, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an additional 4.8 million people had been uprooted by conflict, with the most devastating increases in Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burkina Faso. Yet, as dismal as these numbers may be, they’re set to be dwarfed by people displaced by another signature story of our time: climate change.

Already, shocking numbers have been put to flight by fires, derechos, and super storms, and so much worse is yet to come, according to experts. A recent forecast suggests that, by the year 2050, the number of people driven from their homes by ecological catastrophes could be 900% greater than the 100 million forced to flee conflicts over the last decade.

Worse Than World War II

Women, children, and men driven from their homes by conflict have been a defining feature of modern warfare. For almost a century now, combat correspondents have witnessed such scenes again and again. “Newly routed civilians, now homeless like the others with no idea of where they would next sleep or eat, with all their future lives an uncertainty, trudged back from the fighting zone,” the legendary Eric Sevareid reported, while covering Italy for CBS News during World War II. “A dust-covered girl clung desperately to a heavy, squirming burlap sack. The pig inside was squealing faintly. Tears made streaks down the girl’s face. No one moved to help her…”

The Second World War was a cataclysmic conflagration involving 70 nations and 70 million combatants. Fighting stretched across three continents in unparalleled destructive fury, including terror bombing, countless massacres, two atomic attacks, and the killing of 60 million people, most of them civilians, including six million Jews in a genocide known as the Holocaust. Another 60 million were displaced, more than the population of Italy (then the ninth-largest country in the world). An unprecedented global war causing unimaginable suffering, it nonetheless left far fewer people homeless than the 79.5 million displaced by conflicts and crises as 2019 ended.

How can violence-displaced people already exceed World War II’s total by almost 20 million (without even counting the nearly five million more added in the first half of 2020)?

The answer: these days, you can’t go home again.

In May 1945, the war in Europe came to an end. By the beginning of September, the war in the Pacific was over, too. A month later, most of Europe’s displaced — including more than two million refugees from the Soviet Union, 1.5 million French, 586,000 Italians, 274,000 Dutch, and hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Poles, and others — had already returned home. A little more than a million people, mostly Eastern Europeans, still found themselves stranded in camps overseen by occupying forces and the United Nations.

Today, according to UNHCR, ever fewer war refugees and IDPs are able to rebuild their lives. In the 1990s, an average of 1.5 million refugees were able to return home annually. For the last 10 years, that number has dropped to around 385,000. Today, about 77% of the world’s refugees are trapped in long-term displacement situations thanks to forever wars like the conflict in Afghanistan that, in its multiple iterations, is now in its sixth decade.

War on (of and for) Terror

One of the most dramatic drivers of displacement over the last 20 years, according to researchers from Brown University’s Costs of War project, has been that conflict in Afghanistan and the seven other “most violent wars the U.S. military has launched or participated in since 2001.” In the wake of the killing of 2,974 people by al-Qaeda militants that September 11th and the decision of George W. Bush’s administration to launch a Global War on Terror, conflicts the United States initiated, escalated, or participated in — specifically, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — have displaced between 37 million and 59 million people.

While U.S. troops have also seen combat in Burkina Faso and Washington has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of “security assistance” into that country, its displaced aren’t even counted in the Costs of War tally. And yet there’s a clear link between the U.S.-backed overthrow of Libya’s autocrat, Muammar Qaddafi, in 2011 and Burkina Faso’s desperate state today. “Ever since the West assassinated Qaddafi, and I’m conscious of using that particular word, Libya has been completely destabilized,” Chérif Sy, Burkina Faso’s defense minister, explained in a 2019 interview. “While at the same time it was the country with the most guns. It has become an arms cache for the region.”

Those arms helped destabilize neighboring Mali and led to a 2012 coup by a U.S.-trained officer. Two years later, another U.S.-trained officer seized power in Burkina Faso during a popular uprising. This year, yet another U.S.-trained officer overthrew yet another government in Mali. All the while, terrorist attacks have been ravaging the region. “The Sahel has seen the most dramatic escalation of violence since mid-2017,” according to a July report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution.

In 2005, Burkina Faso didn’t even warrant mention in the “Africa Overview” section of the State Department’s annual report on terrorism. Still, more than 15 separate American security assistance programs were brought to bear there — about $100 million in the last two years alone. Meanwhile, militant Islamist violence in the country has skyrocketed from just three attacks in 2015 to 516 in the 12 months from mid-2019 to mid-2020, according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center.

Compounding Crises to Come

The violence in Burkina Faso has led to a cascade of compounding crises. Around one million Burkinabe are now displaced, a 1,500% increase since last January, and the number only keeps rising. So do the attacks and the fatalities. And this is just the beginning, since Burkina Faso finds itself on the frontlines of yet another crisis, a global disaster that’s expected to generate levels of displacement that will dwarf today’s historic figures.

Burkina Faso has been battered by desertification and environmental degradation since at least the 1960s. In 1973, a drought led to the deaths of 100,000 people there and in five other nations of the Sahel. Severe drought and hunger struck again in the mid-1980s and aid agencies began privately warning that those living in the north of the country would need to move southward as farming became ever less feasible. By the early 2000s, despite persistent droughts, the cattle population of the country had doubled, leading to increasing ethnic conflict between Mossi farmers and Fulani cattle herders. The war now tearing the country apart largely divides along those same ethnic lines.

In 2010, Bassiaka Dao, the president of the confederation of farmers in Burkina Faso, told the United Nations news agency, IRIN, that the impacts of climate change had been noticeable for years and were getting worse. As the decade wore on, rising temperatures and new rainfall patterns — droughts followed by flash floods — increasingly drove farmers from their villages, while desertification swelled the populations of urban centers.

In a report published earlier this year, William Chemaly of the Global Protection Cluster, a network of nongovernmental organizations, international aid groups, and United Nations agencies, noted that in Burkina Faso “climate change is crippling livelihoods, exacerbating food insecurity, and intensifying armed conflict and violent extremism.”

Sitting at the edge of the Sahara Desert, the country has long faced ecological adversity that’s only worsening as the frontlines of climate change steadily spread across the planet. Forecasts now warn of increasing ecological disasters and resource wars supercharging the already surging phenomenon of global displacement. According to a recent report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think tank that produces annual global terrorism and peace indexes, two billion people already face uncertain access to sufficient food — a number set to jump to 3.5 billion by 2050. Another one billion “live in countries that do not have the current resilience to deal with the ecological changes they are expected to face in the future.” The report warns that the global climate crisis may displace as many as 1.2 billion people by 2050.

On the Road to Kaya

I don’t know what happened to the mother and two children I spotted on the road to Kaya. If they ended up like the scores of people I spoke with in that market town, now bulging with displaced people, they’re facing a difficult time. Rents are high, jobs scarce, government assistance all but nil. People there are living on the edge of catastrophe, dependent on relatives and the kindness of new neighbors with little to spare themselves. Some, driven by want, are even heading back into the conflict zone, risking death to gather firewood.

Kaya can’t deal with the massive influx of people forced from their homes by Islamist militants. Burkina Faso can’t deal with the one million people already displaced by conflict. And the world can’t deal with the almost 80 million people already driven from their homes by violence. So how will we cope with 1.2 billion people — nearly the population of China or India — likely to be displaced by climate driven-conflicts, water wars, increasing ecological devastation, and other unnatural disasters in the next 30 years?

In the decades ahead, ever more of us will find ourselves on roads like the one to Kaya, running from the devastation of raging wildfires or uncontrolled floodwaters, successive hurricanes or supercharged cyclones, withering droughts, spiraling conflicts, or the next life-altering pandemic. As a reporter, I’ve already been on that road. Pray you’re the one speeding by in the four-wheel-drive vehicle and not the one choking in the dust, driving the donkey cart.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center.

13 November 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Azeezah Kanji

Why did so many Americans condemn the new supreme court justice’s extremely conservative ideology by likening her to a Muslim?

From beginning to end, Donald Trump’s presidency exposed and exploited structural flaws deeply embedded in the world’s self-proclaimed “oldest democracy” (more accurately classified as a “plutocracy,” according to some academic studies).

Such flaws include, for instance, the organisation of the electoral college with the original aim of upholding the interests of slaveholding states; the concentration of power in the hands of White propertied men (whose property derived in the first place from anti-Indigenous dispossession and genocide); the extension of abusive executive powers without judicial check; and the vulnerability of the courts to political manipulation and control.

Yet in the dysfunctional system that produced the spectacle of the Trump presidency, it is Islam and Muslims that continue to be upheld as the paradigm of illegitimate politics. Once again, in the opposition against new Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a popular rhetorical tactic was put on display: Condemning her extremely conservative ideology by likening her to a Muslim.

Since the 18th century, comparisons to Muslims and Islam have been treated as the ultimate insult in American political discourse. In law, judicial despotism is often emblematised by the trope of “kadi justice” – the image of a “kadi [Muslim judge] under a tree” dispensing judgements according to individual whim, an Orientalist figment plucked not from reality but directly from the pages of 1001 Nights.

Founding Father Benjamin Franklin went so far as to wonder in 1741 whether it was considered “worse to believe in Mahomet [Muhammad] or the Devil?” Of course, the fixation on “Mahomet” conveniently distracts from the “devils” embedded in the US’s own nationalist ideology, founded on church-sanctioned colonial genocide and enslavement.

The continuing replication of centuries-old modes of thinking would, in Muslims, be cited as a sign of stunted historical growth, one more piece of evidence that Islam remains “trapped in the past”. Yet in American politics, the demonising invocations of Islam persist, even among ostensible progressives – indicating the deep entrenchment of Islamophobic structures of thought.

Incensed about the legal assault on abortion rights? Call it “Christian sharia”; never mind that actual Islamic law was less oppressive and provided greater access to abortion.

Outraged about Donald Trump’s unchecked abuses of power? Denounce him as a “caliph” and his officials as “mullahs”; forget that the caliph, in Islamic legal theory, was not considered above the rule of law.

Infuriated by Trump’s regressive policies? Accuse him of waging a “jihad,” on everything from clean energy to immigration to Obamacare to absentee ballots. Funnily enough, the word crusade – which unlike “jihad” actually does mean “holy war” – is frequently used to connote something commendable; while the suggestion that “jihad”, literally “struggle,” might have any positive meaning elicits outrage.

To label these as caricatures of Islam would be a misnomer since caricature suggests a core of truth that is exaggerated. Rather, they are projections: Displacements of one’s own negative features and anxieties onto a denigrated other.

As the confirmation of Justice Barrett to the Supreme Court affirms, the characteristics commonly attributed to the Islamic legal tradition – its alleged irrationality, ideological rigidity, and subservience to authoritarian power – are in fact reflective of the American system itself.

While Muslim jurists were historically independent of the state, judges in the US are political appointees – a reality emphasised by the nakedly partisan political turf war of Supreme Court placements. Justice Barrett has been rammed through onto the bench with 52 Republican votes but zero Democratic votes; previous Trump-nominated Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch were backed by similarly one-sided Republican support.

The result is a court deeply polarised along ideological lines. Justices increasingly engage in “forms of judicial behaviour [that] constitute advocacy, rather than judging”, according to a 2019 study from Northwestern and Loyola Law Schools.

Republican presidents select ever-more-radical conservative judges, and Democratic presidents more centrist-to-liberal judges (although the frequent categorisation of Obama, droner- and deporter-in-chief, as a “liberal” indicates how hollow that descriptor has become). Muslim rulers like 13th-century Mamluk Sultan Baybars, in contrast, ensured space for the operation of multiple schools of law – legal pluralism being understood as valuable in and of itself, to offset the inescapable fallibility and contingency of human reasoning.

The combination of juridicial independence and pluralism enabled Muslims and non-Muslims to exert some agency in choosing the school of legal thought that best met their needs – a form of “sharia” development from below. That is until colonial powers codified monolithic law and imposed draconian interpretations, such as Wahhabism, originally rejected by Muslim scholars and communities. As on the US Supreme Court, retrograde ideologies have been entrenched not by popular will but by sheer political force.

Even before Barrett’s appointment, the Court’s pattern of prostration at the altar of corporate and political power was blatantly apparent. Since 2006, the Chamber of Commerce – the US’s largest business lobby group – has prevailed in 70 percent of Supreme Court cases in which it has filed a brief.

Constitutional provisions meant to guarantee legal equality for the formerly enslaved have been twisted to enshrine corporate “personhood” instead. The court has made it easier for corporations to influence elections, but more difficult for the marginalised to vote; easier to criminalise peaceful speech as “terrorism”, but more difficult to hold cops who kill to account; easier for the White House to wield war powers, but more difficult for the victims of US war crimes to access the courts. It has shielded corporations from legal consequences for international human rights violations while permitting migrants to be indefinitely detained.

Judges like Barrett’s mentor Justice Antonin Scalia have cloaked oppressive decisions in the mantle of “textualism” and “originalism”, claiming they were bound by the original meaning of legal texts. Except, notably, when the original meaning conflicts with the desired outcome – whether eviscerating anti-racism measures, expanding gun rights, or ensuring their party’s candidate is declared the election winner – in which case their originalist and textualist methodologies have been inconsistently applied or quietly discarded.

However, as Islamic legal history shows, textualism is not necessarily synonymous with regressivism. The Zahiri and Hanbali schools often characterised as the most textualist adopted certain positions that would today be considered more “liberal” or “progressive”. For example, Zahiris like 11th-century jurist Ibn Hazm rejected harsh punishments for “sodomy” since they were not specified in the Quran, and Hanbali jurists provided women with greater contractual freedom in marriage and prevented the powerful from escaping criminal sanction.

Perhaps “kadi justice” should instead be called “Scalia justice”.

Justice Barrett now joins the cadre of conservative Supreme Court judges anointed by the Federalist Society, the ultra-right-wing legal organisation on a crusade – not a “jihad” – to remake the US judicial landscape.

Hiding behind the unravelling fiction of the separation of law and politics, Barrett adamantly refused to answer questions about her legal positions during her Senate confirmation hearings. But her judicial record speaks for itself: 76 percent in favour of corporations, 86 percent in favour of police, 85 percent against victims claiming discrimination, and 88 percent against immigrants.

The millions of dollars of “dark money” pumped by the Federalist Society into influencing judicial nominations and subverting state judicial elections have been paying off. With Barrett, six of the nine sitting justices on the Supreme Court are members of the Society, and all but eight of Trump’s 51 appellate court appointments have connections to it. Many of these judges will still be on the bench decades after Trump’s presidency is a distant American nightmare. The effects are already evident: Trump-appointed judges proved themselves instrumental in exacerbating voter suppression leading up to the election.

Yet according to the Federalist Society, it is the supposed “spread of sharia law” – not the spread of Federalist Society law – that is imperilling “democracy, economic justice, and security”.

In the Federalist Society’s legal journal, it is asserted that “the Islamic law of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western law”, a quote attributed to former US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. But by de-contextualising Justice Jackson’s words, his original meaning – that it is precisely because the Islamic legal tradition differs from America’s that it should be a source of insight and inspiration – is completely reversed. (So much for the Society’s stated commitment to originalism.)

“We should abandon the smug belief that the Muslim experience has nothing to teach us,” Justice Jackson wrote. “We may find divergence in legal experience as instructive as parallelism.”

Instead of reducing Islam to an object of derision, we should be anxious to learn from its history of legal pluralism and independence of jurists from the state.

Instead of fearing that Amy Coney Barrett is like a Muslim, we might hope she will be more like a Muslim – specifically, like the pre-modern Muslim jurists who fiercely refused to serve as pawns of political rulers and issued legal opinions checking power’s abuse.

As Justice Jackson urged, “It is time that we stopped thinking of ourselves as the only peoples in the world who love justice or who understand what justice is.” But the toxic combination of American exceptionalism and legal Orientalism ensures Islam is seen as a benchmark of barbarism, never a model to be emulated – to the detriment of Islamic and American legal traditions alike.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Azeezah Kanji Legal academic and writer based in Toronto.

9 November 2020

Source: www.aljazeera.com

By Glenn Greenwald

An attempt to assess the importance of the known evidence, and a critique of media lies to protect their favored candidate, could not be published at The Intercept.

29 Oct 2020 – I am posting here the most recent draft of my article about Joe and Hunter Biden — the last one seen by Intercept editors before telling me that they refuse to publish it absent major structural changes involving the removal of all sections critical of Joe Biden, leaving only a narrow article critiquing media outlets. I will also, in a separate post, publish all communications I had with Intercept editors surrounding this article so you can see the censorship in action and, given the Intercept’s denials, decide for yourselves (this is the kind of transparency responsible journalists provide, and which the Intercept refuses to this day to provide regarding their conduct in the Reality Winner story). This draft obviously would have gone through one more round of proof-reading and editing by me — to shorten it, fix typos, etc — but it’s important for the integrity of the claims to publish the draft in unchanged form that Intercept editors last saw, and announced that they would not “edit” but completely gut as a condition to publication.

**********************************

TITLE: The Real Scandal: US Media Uses Falsehoods to Defend Joe Biden From Hunter’s Emails

Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden’s work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family’s pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories.

One outcome is that the Biden campaign concluded, rationally, that there is no need for the front-running presidential candidate to address even the most basic and relevant questions raised by these materials. Rather than condemn Biden for ignoring these questions — the natural instinct of a healthy press when it comes to a presidential election — journalists have instead led the way in concocting excuses to justify his silence.

After the Post’s first article, both that newspaper and other news outlets have published numerous other emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000, as well as proposals for lucrative business deals in China that traded on his influence with his father.

Individuals included in some of the email chains have confirmed the contents’ authenticity. One of Hunter’s former business partners, Tony Bubolinski, has stepped forward on the record to confirm the authenticity of many of the emails and to insist that Hunter along with Joe Biden’s brother Jim were planning on including the former Vice President in at least one deal in China. And GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who appeared in one of the published email chains, appeared to confirm the authenticity as well, though he refused to answer follow-up questions about it.

Thus far, no proof has been offered by Bubolinski that Biden ever consummated his participation in any of those discussed deals. The Wall Street Journal says that it found no corporate records reflecting that a deal was finalized and that “text messages and emails related to the venture that were provided to the Journal by Mr. Bobulinski, mainly from the spring and summer of 2017, don’t show either Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing a role for Joe Biden in the venture.”

But nobody claimed that any such deals had been consummated — so the conclusion that one had not been does not negate the story. Moreover, some texts and emails whose authenticity has not been disputed state that Hunter was adamant that any discussions about the involvement of the Vice President be held only verbally and never put in writing.

Beyond that, the Journal’s columnist Kimberly Strassel reviewed a stash of documents and “found correspondence corroborates and expands on emails recently published by the New York Post,” including ones where Hunter was insisting that it was his connection to his father that was the greatest asset sought by the Chinese conglomerate with whom they were negotiating. The New York Times on Sunday reached a similar conclusion: while no documents prove that such a deal was consummated, “records produced by Mr. Bobulinski show that in 2017, Hunter Biden and James Biden were involved in negotiations about a joint venture with a Chinese energy and finance company called CEFC China Energy,” and “make clear that Hunter Biden saw the family name as a valuable asset, angrily citing his ‘family’s brand’ as a reason he is valuable to the proposed venture.”

These documents also demonstrate, reported the Times, “that the countries that Hunter Biden, James Biden and their associates planned to target for deals overlapped with nations where Joe Biden had previously been involved as vice president.” Strassel noted that “a May 2017 ‘expectations’ document shows Hunter receiving 20% of the equity in the venture and holding another 10% for ‘the big guy’—who Mr. Bobulinski attests is Joe Biden.” And the independent journalist Matt Taibbi published an article on Sunday with ample documentation suggesting that Biden’s attempt to replace a Ukranian prosecutor in 2015 benefited Burisma.

All of these new materials, the authenticity of which has never been disputed by Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign, raise important questions about whether the former Vice President and current front-running presidential candidate was aware of efforts by his son to peddle influence with the Vice President for profit, and also whether the Vice President ever took actions in his official capacity with the intention, at least in part, of benefitting his son’s business associates. But in the two weeks since the Post published its initial story, a union of the nation’s most powerful entities, including its news media, have taken extraordinary steps to obscure and bury these questions rather than try to provide answers to them.

The initial documents, claimed the New York Post, were obtained when the laptops containing them were left at a Delaware repair shop with water damage and never picked up, allowing the owner to access its contents and then turn them over to both the FBI and a lawyer for Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani. The repair store owner confirmed this narrative in interviews with news outlets and then (under penalty of prosecution) to a Senate Committee; he also provided the receipt purportedly signed by Hunter. Neither Hunter nor the Biden campaign has denied these claims.

Publication of that initial New York Post story provoked a highly unusual censorship campaign by Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, through a long-time former Democratic Party operative, vowed to suppress the story pending its “fact-check,” one that has as of yet produced no public conclusions. And while Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for Twitter’s handling of the censorship and reversed the policy that led to the blocking of all links the story, the New York Post, the nation’s fourth-largest newspaper, continues to be locked out of its Twitter account, unable to post as the election approaches, for almost two weeks.

After that initial censorship burst from Silicon Valley, whose workforce and oligarchs have donated almost entirely to the Biden campaign, it was the nation’s media outlets and former CIA and other intelligence officials who took the lead in constructing reasons why the story should be dismissed, or at least treated with scorn. As usual for the Trump era, the theme that took center stage to accomplish this goal was an unsubstantiated claim about the Kremlin responsibility for the story.

Numerous news outlets, including the Intercept, quickly cited a public letter signed by former CIA officials and other agents of the security state claiming that the documents have the “classic trademarks” of a “Russian disinformation” plot. But, as media outlets and even intelligence agencies are now slowly admitting, no evidence has ever been presented to corroborate this assertion. On Friday, the New York Times reported that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation” and the paper said even the FBI has “acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop.”

The Washington Post on Sunday published an op-ed — by Thomas Rid, one of those centrists establishmentarian professors whom media outlets routinely use to provide the facade of expert approval for deranged conspiracy theories — that contained this extraordinary proclamation: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.”

Even the letter from the former intelligence officials cited by The Intercept and other outlets to insinuate that this was all part of some “Russian disinformation” scheme explicitly admitted that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement,” though many media outlets omitted that crucial acknowledgement when citing the letter in order to disparage the story as a Kremlin plot:

Despite this complete lack of evidence, the Biden campaign adopted this phrase used by intelligence officials and media outlets as its mantra for why the materials should not be discussed and why they would not answer basic questions about them. “I think we need to be very, very clear that what he’s doing here is amplifying Russian misinformation,” said Biden Deputy Campaign Manager Kate Bedingfield about the possibility that Trump would raise the Biden emails at Thursday night’s debate. Biden’s senior advisor Symone Sanders similarly warned on MSNBC: “if the president decides to amplify these latest smears against the vice president and his only living son, that is Russian disinformation.”

The few mainstream journalists who tried merely to discuss these materials have been vilified. For the crime of simply noting it on Twitter that first day, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman had her name trend all morning along with the derogatory nickname “MAGA Haberman.” CBS News’ Bo Erickson was widely attacked even by his some in the media simply for asking Biden what his response to the story was. And Biden himself refused to answer, accusing Erickson of spreading a “smear.”

That it is irresponsible and even unethical to mention these documents became a pervasive view in mainstream journalism. The NPR Public Editor, in an anazing statement representative of much of the prevailing media mentality, explicitly justified NPR’s refusal to cover the story on the ground that “we do not want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories . . . [or] waste the readers’ and listeners’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

[https://twitter.com/NPRpubliceditor/status/1319281101223940096/photo/1]

To justify her own show’s failure to cover the story, 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl resorted to an entirely different justification. “It can’t be verified,” the CBS reporter claimed when confronted by President Trump in an interview about her program’s failure to cover the Hunter Biden documents. When Trump insisted there were multiple ways to verify the materials on the laptop, Stahl simply repeated the same phrase: “it can’t be verified.”

After the final presidential debate on Thursday night, a CNN panel mocked the story as too complex and obscure for anyone to follow — a self-fulfilling prophecy given that, as the network’s media reporter Brian Stelter noted with pride, the story has barely been mentioned either on CNN or MSNBC. As the New York Times noted on Friday: “most viewers of CNN and MSNBC would not have heard much about the unconfirmed Hunter Biden emails…. CNN’s mentions of “Hunter” peaked at 20 seconds and MSNBC’s at 24 seconds one day last week.”

On Sunday, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour barely pretended to be interested in any journalism surrounding the story, scoffing during an interview at requests from the RNC’s Elizabeth Harrington to cover the story and verify the documents by telling her: “We’re not going to do your work for you.” Watch how the U.S.’s most mainstream journalists are openly announcing their refusal to even consider what these documents might reflect about the Democratic front-runner:

CNN/Hunter Biden emails

These journalists are desperate not to know. As Taibbi wrote on Sunday about this tawdry press spectacle: ” The least curious people in the country right now appear to be the credentialed news media, a situation normally unique to tinpot authoritarian societies.”

All of those excuses and pretexts — emanating largely from a national media that is all but explicit in their eagerness for Biden to win — served for the first week or more after the Post story to create a cone of silence around this story and, to this very day, a protective shield for Biden. As a result, the front-running presidential candidate knows that he does not have to answer even the most basic questions about these documents because most of the national press has already signaled that they will not press him to do so; to the contrary, they will concoct defenses on his behalf to avoid discussing it.

The relevant questions for Biden raised by this new reporting are as glaring as they are important. Yet Biden has had to answer very few of them yet because he has not been asked and, when he has, media outlets have justified his refusal to answer rather than demand that he do so. We submitted nine questions to his campaign about these documents that the public has the absolute right to know, including:

• whether he claims any the emails or texts are fabricated (and, if so, which specific ones);
• whether he knows if Hunter did indeed drop off laptops at the Delaware repair store;
• whether Hunter ever asked him to meet with Burisma executives or whether he in fact did so;
• whether Biden ever knew about business proposals in Ukraine or China being pursued by his son and brother in which Biden was a proposed participant and,
• how Biden could justify expending so much energy as Vice President demanding that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor be fired, and why the replacement — Yuriy Lutsenko, someone who had no experience in law; was a crony of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; and himself had a history of corruption allegations — was acceptable if Biden’s goal really was to fight corruption in Ukraine rather than benefit Burisma or control Ukrainian internal affairs for some other objective.

Though the Biden campaign indicated that they would respond to the Intercept’s questions, they have not done so. A statement they released to other outlets contains no answers to any of these questions except to claim that Biden “has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any business overseas.” To date, even as the Biden campaign echoes the baseless claims of media outlets that anyone discussing this story is “amplifying Russian disinformation,” neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign have even said whether they claim the emails and other documents — which they and the press continue to label “Russian disinformation” — are forgeries or whether they are authentic.

The Biden campaign clearly believes it has no need to answer any of these questions by virtue of a panoply of media excuses offered on its behalf that collapse upon the most minimal scrutiny:

First, the claim that the material is of suspect authenticity or cannot be verified — the excuse used on behalf of Biden by Leslie Stahl and Christiane Amanpour, among others — is blatantly false for numerous reasons. As someone who has reported similar large archives in partnership with numerous media outlets around the world (including the Snowden archive in 2014 and the Intercept’s Brazil Archive over the last year showing corruption by high-level Bolsonaro officials), and who also covered the reporting of similar archives by other outlets (the Panama Papers, the WikiLeaks war logs of 2010 and DNC/Podesta emails of 2016), it is clear to me that the trove of documents from Hunter Biden’s emails has been verified in ways quite similar to those.

With an archive of this size, one can never independently authenticate every word in every last document unless the subject of the reporting voluntarily confirms it in advance, which they rarely do. What has been done with similar archives is journalists obtain enough verification to create high levels of journalistic confidence in the materials. Some of the materials provided by the source can be independently confirmed, proving genuine access by the source to a hard drive, a telephone, or a database. Other parties in email chains can confirm the authenticity of the email or text conversations in which they participated. One investigates non-public facts contained in the documents to determine that they conform to what the documents reflect. Technology specialists can examine the materials to ensure no signs of forgeries are detected.

This is the process that enabled the largest and most established media outlets around the world to report similar large archives obtained without authorization. In those other cases, no media outlet was able to verify every word of every document prior to publication. There was no way to prove the negative that the source or someone else had not altered or forged some of the material. That level of verification is both unattainable and unnecessary. What is needed is substantial evidence to create high confidence in the authentication process.

The Hunter Biden documents have at least as much verification as those other archives that were widely reported. There are sources in the email chains who have verified that the published emails are accurate. The archive contains private photos and videos of Hunter whose authenticity is not in doubt. A former business partner of Hunter has stated, unequivocally and on the record, that not only are the emails authentic but they describe events accurately, including proposed participation by the former Vice President in at least one deal Hunter and Jim Biden were pursuing in China. And, most importantly of all, neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign has even suggested, let alone claimed, that a single email or text is fake.

Why is the failure of the Bidens to claim that these emails are forged so significant? Because when journalists report on a massive archive, they know that the most important event in the reporting’s authentication process comes when the subjects of the reporting have an opportunity to deny that the materials are genuine. Of course that is what someone would do if major media outlets were preparing to publish, or in fact were publishing, fabricated or forged materials in their names; they would say so in order to sow doubt about the materials if not kill the credibility of the reporting.

The silence of the Bidens may not be dispositive on the question of the material’s authenticity, but when added to the mountain of other authentication evidence, it is quite convincing: at least equal to the authentication evidence in other reporting on similarly large archives.

Second, the oft-repeated claim from news outlets and CIA operatives that the published emails and texts were “Russian disinformation” was, from the start, obviously baseless and reckless. No evidence — literally none — has been presented to suggest involvement by any Russians in the dissemination of these materials, let alone that it was part of some official plot by Moscow. As always, anything is possible — when one does not know for certain what the provenance of materials is, nothing can be ruled out — but in journalism, evidence is required before news outlets can validly start blaming some foreign government for the release of information. And none has ever been presented. Yet the claim that this was “Russian disinformation” was published in countless news outlets, television broadcasts, and the social media accounts of journalists, typically by pointing to the evidence-free claims of ex-CIA officials.

Worse is the “disinformation” part of the media’s equation. How can these materials constitute “disinformation” if they are authentic emails and texts actually sent to and from Hunter Biden? The ease with which news outlets that are supposed to be skeptical of evidence-free pronouncements by the intelligence community instead printed their assertions about “Russian disinformation” is alarming in the extreme. But they did it because they instinctively wanted to find a reason to justify ignoring the contents of these emails, so claiming that Russia was behind it, and that the materials were “disinformation,” became their placeholder until they could figure out what else they should say to justify ignoring these documents.

Third, the media rush to exonerate Biden on the question of whether he engaged in corruption vis-a-vis Ukraine and Burisma rested on what are, at best, factually dubious defenses of the former Vice President. Much of this controversy centers on Biden’s aggressive efforts while Vice President in late 2015 to force the Ukrainian government to fire its Chief Prosecutor, Viktor Shokhin, and replace him with someone acceptable to the U.S., which turned out to be Yuriy Lutsenko. These events are undisputed by virtue of a video of Biden boasting in front of an audience of how he flew to Kiev and forced the Ukrainians to fire Shokhin, upon pain of losing $1 billion in aid.

But two towering questions have long been prompted by these events, and the recently published emails make them more urgent than ever: 1) was the firing of the Ukrainian General Prosecutor such a high priority for Biden as Vice President of the U.S. because of his son’s highly lucrative role on the board of Burisma, and 2) if that was not the motive, why was it so important for Biden to dictate who the chief prosecutor of Ukraine was?

The standard answer to the question about Biden’s motive — offered both by Biden and his media defenders — is that he, along with the IMF and EU, wanted Shokhin fired because the U.S. and its allies were eager to clean up Ukraine, and they viewed Shokhin as insufficiently vigilant in fighting corruption.

“Biden’s brief was to sweet-talk and jawbone Poroshenko into making reforms that Ukraine’s Western benefactors wanted to see as,” wrote the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler in what the Post calls a “fact-check.” Kessler also endorsed the key defense of Biden: that the firing of Shokhin was bad for Burima, not good for it. “The United States viewed [Shokhin] as ineffective and beholden to Poroshenko and Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs. In particular, Shokin had failed to pursue an investigation of the founder of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky,” Kessler claims.

But that claim does not even pass the laugh test. The U.S. and its European allies are not opposed to corruption by their puppet regimes. They are allies with the most corrupt regimes on the planet, from Riyadh to Cairo, and always have been. Since when does the U.S. devote itself to ensuring good government in the nations it is trying to control? If anything, allowing corruption to flourish has been a key tool in enabling the U.S. to exert power in other countries and to open up their markets to U.S. companies.

Beyond that, if increasing prosecutorial independence and strengthening anti-corruption vigilance were really Biden’s goal in working to demand the firing of the Ukrainian chief prosecutor, why would the successor to Shokhin, Yuriy Lutsenko, possibly be acceptable? Lutsenko, after all, had “no legal background as general prosecutor,” was principally known only as a lackey of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, was forced in 2009 to “resign as interior minister after being detained by police at Frankfurt airport for being drunk and disorderly,” and “was subsequently jailed for embezzlement and abuse of office, though his defenders said the sentence was politically motivated.”

Is it remotely convincing to you that Biden would have accepted someone like Lutsenko if his motive really were to fortify anti-corruption prosecutions in Ukraine? Yet that’s exactly what Biden did: he personally told Poroshenko that Lutsenko was an acceptable alternative and promptly released the $1 billion after his appointment was announced. Whatever Biden’s motive was in using his power as U.S. Vice President to change the prosecutor in Ukraine, his acceptance of someone like Lutsenko strongly suggests that combatting Ukrainian corruption was not it.

As for the other claim on which Biden and his media allies have heavily relied — that firing Shokhin was not a favor for Burisma because Shokhin was not pursuing any investigations against Burisma — the evidence does not justify that assertion.

It is true that no evidence, including these new emails, constitute proof that Biden’s motive in demanding Shokhin’s termination was to benefit Burisma. But nothing demonstrates that Shokhin was impeding investigations into Burisma. Indeed, the New York Times in 2019 published one of the most comprehensive investigations to date of the claims made in defense of Biden when it comes to Ukraine and the firing of this prosecutor, and, while noting that “no evidence has surfaced that the former vice president intentionally tried to help his son by pressing for the prosecutor general’s dismissal,” this is what its reporters concluded about Shokhin and Burisma:

[Biden’s] pressure campaign eventually worked. The prosecutor general, long a target of criticism from other Western nations and international lenders, was voted out months later by the Ukrainian Parliament.Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s younger son, who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.

The Times added: “Mr. Shokhin’s office had oversight of investigations into [Burisma’s billionaire founder] Zlochevsky and his businesses, including Burisma.” By contrast, they said, Lutsenko, the replacement approved by Vice President Biden, “initially continued investigating Mr. Zlochevsky and Burisma, but cleared him of all charges within 10 months of taking office.”

So whether or not it was Biden’s intention to confer benefits on Burisma by demanding Shokhin’s firing, it ended up quite favorable for Burisma given that the utterly inexperienced Lutesenko “cleared [Burisma’s founder] of all charges within 10 months of taking office.”

The new comprehensive report from journalist Taibbi on Sunday also strongly supports the view that there were clear antagonisms between Shokhin and Burisma, such that firing the Ukrainian prosecutor would have been beneficial for Burisma. Taibbi, who reported for many years while based in Russia and remains very well-sourced in the region, detailed:

For all the negative press about Shokhin, there’s no doubt that there were multiple active cases involving Zlochevsky/Burisma during his short tenure. This was even once admitted by American reporters, before it became taboo to describe such cases untethered to words like “dormant.” Here’s how Ken Vogel at the New York Times put it in May of 2019:

“When Mr. Shokhin became prosecutor general in February 2015, he inherited several investigations into the company and Mr. Zlochevsky, including for suspicion of tax evasion and money laundering. Mr. Shokin also opened an investigation into the granting of lucrative gas licenses to companies owned by Mr. Zlochevsky when he was the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources.”

Ukrainian officials I reached this week confirmed that multiple cases were active during that time.

“There were different numbers, but from 7 to 14,” says Serhii Horbatiuk, former head of the special investigations department for the Prosecutor General’s Office, when asked how many Burisma cases there were.

“There may have been two to three episodes combined, and some have already been closed, so I don’t know the exact amount.” But, Horbatiuk insists, there were many cases, most of them technically started under Yarema, but at least active under Shokin.

The numbers quoted by Horbatiuk gibe with those offered by more recent General Prosecutor Rulsan Ryaboshapka, who last year said there were at one time or another “13 or 14” cases in existence involving Burisma or Zlochevsky.

Taibbi reviews real-time reporting in both Ukraine and the U.S. to document several other pending investigations against Burisma and Zlochevsky that was overseen by the prosecutor whose firing Biden demanded. He notes that Shokhin himself has repeatedly said he was pursuing several investigations against Zlochevsky at the time Biden demanded his firing. In sum, Taibbi concludes, “one can’t say there’s no evidence of active Burisma cases even during the last days of Shokin, who says that it was the February, 2016 seizure order [against Zlochevsky’s assets] that got him fired.”

And, Taibbi notes, “the story looks even odder when one wonders why the United States would exercise so much foreign policy muscle to get Shokin fired, only to allow in a replacement — Yuri Lutsenko — who by all accounts was a spectacularly bigger failure in the battle against corruption in general, and Zlochevsky in particular.” In sum: “it’s unquestionable that the cases against Burisma were all closed by Shokin’s successor, chosen in consultation with Joe Biden, whose son remained on the board of said company for three more years, earning upwards of $50,000 per month.”

The publicly known facts, augmented by the recent emails, texts and on-the-record accounts, suggest serious sleaze by Joe Biden’s son Hunter in trying to peddle his influence with the Vice President for profit. But they also raise real questions about whether Joe Biden knew about and even himself engaged in a form of legalized corruption. Specifically, these newly revealed information suggest Biden was using his power to benefit his son’s business Ukrainian associates, and allowing his name to be traded on while Vice President for his son and brother to pursue business opportunities in China. These are questions which a minimally healthy press would want answered, not buried — regardless of how many similar or worse scandals the Trump family has.

But the real scandal that has been proven is not the former Vice President’s misconduct but that of his supporters and allies in the U.S. media. As Taibbi’s headline put it: “With the Hunter Biden Exposé, Suppression is a Bigger Scandal Than the Actual Story.”

Taibbi

The reality is the U.S. press has been planning for this moment for four years — cooking up justifications for refusing to report on newsworthy material that might help Donald Trump get re-elected. One major factor is the undeniable truth that journalists with national outlets based in New York, Washington and West Coast cities overwhelmingly not just favor Joe Biden but are desperate to see Donald Trump defeated.

It takes an enormous amount of gullibility to believe that any humans are capable of separating such an intense partisan preference from their journalistic judgment. Many barely even bother to pretend: critiques of Joe Biden are often attacked first not by Biden campaign operatives but by political reporters at national news outlets who make little secret of their eagerness to help Biden win.

But much of this has to do with the fallout from the 2016 election. During that campaign, news outlets, including The Intercept, did their jobs as journalists by reporting on the contents of newsworthy, authentic documents: namely, the emails published by WikiLeaks from the John Podesta and DNC inboxes which, among other things, revealed corruption so severe that it forced the resignation of the top five officials of the DNC. That the materials were hacked, and that intelligence agencies were suggesting Russia was responsible, not negate the newsworthiness of the documents, which is why media outlets across the country repeatedly reported on their contents.

Nonetheless, journalists have spent four years being attacked as Trump enablers in their overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal cultural circles: the cities in which they live are overwhelmingly Democratic, and their demographic — large-city, college-educated professionals — has vanishingly little Trump support. A New York Times survey of campaign data from Monday tells just a part of this story of cultural insularity and homogeniety:

Joe Biden has outraised President Trump on the strength of some of the wealthiest and most educated ZIP codes in the United States, running up the fund-raising score in cities and suburbs so resoundingly that he collected more money than Mr. Trump on all but two days in the last two months….It is not just that much of Mr. Biden’s strongest support comes overwhelmingly from the two coasts, which it does…. [U]nder Mr. Trump, Republicans have hemorrhaged support from white voters with college degrees. In ZIP codes with a median household income of at least $100,000, Mr. Biden smashed Mr. Trump in fund-raising, $486 million to only $167 million — accounting for almost his entire financial edge….One Upper West Side ZIP code — 10024 — accounted for more than $8 million for Mr. Biden, and New York City in total delivered $85.6 million for him — more than he raised in every state other than California….

The median household in the United States was $68,703 in 2019. In ZIP codes above that level, Mr. Biden outraised Mr. Trump by $389.1 million. Below that level, Mr. Trump was actually ahead by $53.4 million.

Wanting to avoid a repeat of feeling scorn and shunning in their own extremely pro-Democratic, anti-Trump circles, national media outlets have spent four years inventing standards for election-year reporting on hacked materials that never previously existed and that are utterly anathema to the core journalistic function. The Washington Post’s Executive Editor Marty Baron, for instance, issued a memo full of cautions about how Post reporters should, or should not, discuss hacked materials even if their authenticity is not in doubt.

That a media outlet should even consider refraining from reporting on materials they know to be authentic and in the public interest because of questions about their provenance is the opposite of how journalism has been practiced. In the days before the 2016 election, for instance, the New York Times received by mail one year of Donald Trump’s tax returns and — despite having no idea who sent it to them or how that person obtained it: was is stolen or hacked by a foreign power? — the Times reported on its contents.

When asked by NPR why they would report on documents when they do not know the source let alone the source’s motives in providing them, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Barstow compellingly explained what had always been the core principle of journalism: namely, a journalist only cares about two questions — (1) are documents authentic and (2) are they in the public interest? — but does not care about what motives a source has in providing the documents or how they were obtained when deciding whether to reporting them:

[https://twitter.com/mikiebarb/status/783379164409847808]

The U.S. media often laments that people have lost faith in its pronouncements, that they are increasingly viewed as untrustworthy and that many people view Fake News sites are more reliable than established news outlets. They are good at complaining about this, but very bad at asking whether any of their own conduct is responsible for it.

A media outlet that renounces its core function — pursuing answers to relevant questions about powerful people — is one that deserves to lose the public’s faith and confidence. And that is exactly what the U.S. media, with some exceptions, attempted to do with this story: they took the lead not in investigating these documents but in concocting excuses for why they should be ignored.

As my colleague Lee Fang put it on Sunday: “The partisan double standards in the media are mind boggling this year, and much of the supposedly left independent media is just as cowardly and conformist as the mainstream corporate media. Everyone is reading the room and acting out of fear.” Discussing his story from Sunday, Taibbi summed up the most important point this way: “The whole point is that the press loses its way when it cares more about who benefits from information than whether it’s true.”

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Glenn Greenwald is one of three co-founding editors of The Intercept. He is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times best-selling books on politics and law.

9 November 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

By Ramzy Baroud

4 Nov 2020 – The discussion on institutional Israeli racism against its own Palestinian Arab population has all but ceased following the final approval of the discriminatory Nation-State Law in July 2018. Indeed, the latest addition to Israel’s Basic Law is a mere start of a new government-espoused agenda that is designed to further marginalize over a fifth of Israel’s population.

On Wednesday, October 28, eighteen members of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) conjured up yet another ploy to target Israeli Arab citizens. They proposed a bill that would revoke Israeli citizenship for any Palestinian Arab prisoner in Israel who, directly or indirectly, receives any financial aid from the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Worthy of mention is that these MKs not only represent right-wing, ultra-right and religious parties, but also the Blue and White (Kahol Lavan) ‘centrist’ party. Namely, the proposed bill already has the support of Israel’s parliamentary majority.

But is this really about financial aid for prisoners? Particularly since the PA is nearly bankrupt, and its financial contributions to the families of Palestinian prisoners, even within the Occupied Territories – West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza – is symbolic?

Here is an alternative context. On Thursday, October 29, the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, revealed that the Israeli government of right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, plans to expand the jurisdiction of the Jewish town of Harish in northern Israel by 50 percent. The aim is to prevent Palestinians from becoming the majority in that area.

The contingency plan was formulated by Israel’s Housing Ministry as a swift response to an internal document, which projects that, by the year 2050, Palestinian Arabs will constitute 51 percent of that region’s population of 700,000 residents.

These are just two examples of recent actions taken within two days, damning evidence that, indeed, the Nation-State law was the mere preface of a long period of institutional racism, which ultimately aims at winning a one-sided demographic war that was launched by Israel against the Palestinian people many years ago.

Since outright ethnic cleansing – which Israel practiced during and after the wars of 1948 and 1967 – is not an option, at least not for now, Israel is finding other ways to ensure a Jewish majority in Israel itself, in Jerusalem, in Area C within the occupied West Bank and, by extension, everywhere else in Palestine.

Israeli dissident historian, Professor Ilan Pappe, refers to this as ‘incremental genocide’. This slow-paced ethnic cleansing includes the expansion of the illegal Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the proposed annexation of nearly a third of the Occupied Territories.

The besieged Gaza Strip is a different story. Winning a demographic war in a densely populated but small region of two million inhabitants living within 365 sq. km, was never feasible. The so-called ‘redeployment’ out of Gaza by late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, in 2005 was a strategic decision, which aimed at cutting Israel’s losses in Gaza in favor of expediting the colonization process in the West Bank and the Naqab Desert. Indeed, most of Gaza’s illegal Jewish settlers were eventually relocated to these demographically-contested regions.

But how is Israel to deal with its own Palestinian Arab population, which now constitutes a sizeable demographic minority and an influential, often united, political bloc?

In the Israeli general elections of March 2020, united Arab Palestinian political parties contesting under the umbrella group, The Joint List, achieved their greatest electoral success yet, as they emerged as Israel’s third-largest political party. This success rang alarm bells among Israel’s Jewish ruling elites, leading to the formation of Israel’s current ‘unity government’. Israel’s two major political parties, Likud and Kahol Lavan, made it clear that no Arab parties would be included in any government coalition.

A strong Arab political constituency represents a nightmare scenario for Israel’s government planners, who are obsessed with demographics and the marginalization of Palestinian Arabs in every possible arena. Hence, the very representatives of the Palestinian Arab community in Israel become a target for political repression.

In a report published in September 2019, the rights group, Amnesty International, revealed that “Palestinian members of the Knesset in Israel are increasingly facing discriminatory attacks.”

“Despite being democratically elected like their Jewish Israeli counterparts, Palestinian MKs are the target of deep-rooted discrimination and undue restrictions that hamstring their ability to speak out in defense of the rights of the Palestinian people,” Amnesty stated.

These revelations were communicated by Amnesty just prior to the September 27 elections. The targeting of Palestinian citizens of Israel is reminiscent of similar harassment and targeting of Palestinian officials and parties in the Occupied Territories, especially prior to local or general elections. Namely, Israel views its own Palestinian Arab population through the same prism that it views its militarily occupied Palestinians.

Since its establishment on the ruins of historic Palestine, and until 1979, Israel governed its Palestinian population through the Defense (Emergency) Regulations. The arbitrary legal system imposed numerous restrictions on those Palestinians who were allowed to remain in Israel following the 1948 Nakba, or ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In practice, however, the emergency rule was lifted in name only. It was merely redefined, and replaced – according to the Israel-based Adalah rights group – by over 65 laws that directly target the Palestinian Arab minority of Israel. The Nation-State Law, which denies Israel’s Arab minority their legal status, therefore, protection under international law, further accentuates Israel’s relentless war on its Arab minority.

Moreover, “the definition of Israel as ‘the Jewish State’ or ‘the State of the Jewish People’ makes inequality a practical, political and ideological reality for Palestinian citizens of Israel,” according to Adalah.

Israeli racism is not random and cannot be simply classified as yet another human rights violation. It is the core of a sophisticated plan that aims at the political marginalization and economic strangulation of Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority within a constitutional, thus ‘legal’, framework.

Without fully appreciating the end goal of this Israeli strategy, Palestinians and their allies will not have the chance to properly combat it, as they certainly should.

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Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

9 November 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

By Robert J. Burrowes

In his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World Carl Sagan lamented as follows:

“I have a foreboding of [a] time when… awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

“The dumbing down… is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media… but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance…. The plain lesson is that study and learning – not just of science, but of anything – are avoidable, even undesirable.

“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements… profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

While it is 25 years since these words of Sagan’s were published a year before his death, one can only lament the ongoing decline of what might simply be labeled the capacity for critical thinking, whether in relation to society and politics, or the science and technology that so concerned Sagan.

At a time in human history when so much is at stake, why is it so difficult to engage most people in anything resembling a thoughtful investigation, consideration and analysis of what is taking place? Why is it that more people do not question what they are told, what they read and what they are shown? In short, why is it that most people do not seek out the evidence for themselves rather than simply believing what is presented to them?

In one sense, the answer to this question might seem simple. People are daily bombarded with ‘information’, in various guises, and a lifetime of submissively accepting what they are told leaves few with any inclination, or energy, to question anything. But let me offer a fuller explanation given the critical importance of this issue if we are to mobilize an effective response to the challenges confronting humanity.

So first: What is propaganda? A false flag attack? Why do most people simply believe what they are told without investigating, carefully, for themselves? And why are those who challenge the elite-driven narrative often labeled ‘conspiracy theorists’ or, depending on the issue, some other pejorative such as ‘peddling debunked science’, ‘anti-vaxxer’ or ‘anti-semitic’ for example?

What is Propaganda?

Propaganda is the deliberate and systematic effort, using a variety of means, to manipulate people into believing and behaving in accordance with something that is not true. For one comprehensive explanation of how this is done, see Trust Us, We’re Experts! How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future, a book which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. observes ‘shows how giant corporations employ sophisticated psychiatric techniques, unscrupulous public figures, junk science, tainted studies and clever PR mercenaries in a relentless effort to market products that routinely kill, maim, deform and poison consumers and our environment’. See ‘Trust Us, We’re Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future’.

While some people argue that propaganda can be used for good, the fact is that something that is simply true should appeal to people anyway, even if it is unpleasant. This is because the truth is the only powerful place from which to start to address any circumstance, including unpleasant and difficult ones.

Propaganda is delivered by a variety of means. Aside from that issued, in various ways, by governments and corporations, propaganda is delivered by education systems as ‘knowledge’, by the corporate media as ‘news’ and by the entertainment industry as films, television programs, video games, music, literature and in other forms. But all propaganda is designed to instill and reinforce a limited set of fears, approved beliefs and endorsed behaviours so that the ‘individual’ responds submissively within the carefully managed system of elite political, social and economic control.

For example, education is designed to teach the individual a limited range of technical functions intended to help create, maintain but essentially serve the emerging technocratic tyranny (as it supersedes the existing version of industrial capitalism), make the individual a passive consumer and politically submissive, while ensuring that an intelligent mind capable of seeking out relevant evidence for themselves, critiquing society and responding powerfully does not develop. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

What is a False Flag Attack?

A false flag attack occurs when a government carries out a terror attack against its own population and then falsely blames an enemy to justify a political course of action, such as going to war against the country or countries it blames. While, again, those who question false flag attacks are often denounced by elite propagandists as ‘conspiracy theorists’, in fact the documentation of false flag attacks that have later been admitted is quite long. For one list, see ‘53 Admitted False Flag Attacks’. Of course, plenty of false flag attacks have not been admitted, even when the evidence is overwhelming, as in the case of 9/11 for example.

So Why Do Most People Believe Propaganda?

In an early book on propaganda written in 1928 by Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, he opened with this paragraph:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is animportant element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

As Bernays makes clear from the outset, his preoccupation is the manipulation of people to do the bidding of others: clearly, a debased and cynical view of the human individual on which many of humanity’s less morally committed characters have capitalized since Bernays wrote the book.

For example, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945 and an avid reader of Bernays’ work, observed that ‘Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.’

But to understand why the approach of Bernays and his disciples such as Goebbels even works, we need to consider why it is that most people are so gullible in the first place. Why don’t more people ask deeper questions about what is taking place rather than simply accepting, without serious question, whatever is presented to them (whether by parents, teachers, religious figures, doctors, propagandists, marketing agents, governments or the corporate media)?

The fundamental problem is simply this: parents, teachers, religious figures and other significant adults in the child’s life require obedience. And obedience means that the child not only behaves as directed by the adult but also that the child believes what the adult believes. This latter point is easily overlooked but is actually the key issue. Why? Because a child who does not believe what the adult believes might think and behave in a way that scares the adult. And demanding obedience is essentially about eliminating beliefs (and their consequent behaviours) that would frighten the parent, teacher or other adult.

Parents require obedience virtually from the moment of birth, doing everything from comforting a child to stop them crying – see ‘Comforting a Baby is Violent’ – to punishing them for acting contrary to parental will once they start moving independently. Of course, once the child starts to think or believe differently, especially if this ‘difference’ is too far from a belief of the child’s parents, teachers or religious leaders (or a widely-accepted belief within their society), the child is quickly pulled back into line with some combination of inducements and/or violence. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

Despite legal conventions meaninglessly affirming versions of it – such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 18 declaring ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of thought…’ – the freedom to think for oneself is not a human right in any meaningful sense of the term and, even if it were, it would really only mean the freedom to think for oneself within certain clearly defined and narrow parameters. And only if you are an adult.

This is why, for example, a child who decides not to go to school does not emerge. Such a possibility would be frightening to virtually every parent, so no child is given that option, let alone allowed the opportunity to come up with, consider and act on that option for themself. Why? Because attendance at school, wherever it exists, is legally compulsory (meaning punishment will be inflicted for failure to comply), and only the rarest parent has the vaguest concept of freedom themselves, let alone the courage to defend their child’s freedom, including the freedom to choose how they spend the bulk of their time for the 8-13 years of ‘school age’.

Consequently, the freedom to think for oneself and act accordingly is strangled at a very young age and certainly by the time a child is compelled to attend a prison for children, also known as ‘school’. As a result the child’s concept of freedom, should they ever come across the notion, can only be a parody of the real thing. And the adult who emerges from this childhood is simply incapable of comprehending what freedom might mean for the obvious reason that to be meaningfully understood, freedom must be experienced.

Of course, is it not just parental authority and school that denies any child the experience of liberty. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted in his treatise The Social Contract in 1762, ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains’. Every institution in society is designed to circumscribe freedom, one way or another. It is just that a childhood spent living under the control of their parents and then teachers and religious figures leaves all children devoid of the experience of freedom and so any subsequent limits are not even noticed. In fact, they are expected and ‘taken for granted’.

So with parents, teachers and religious figures endlessly inflicting ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence on the child in the name of ‘socialization’ (which includes requiring obedience under threat of violence for non-compliance), the child progressively and rapidly loses several innate capacities, notably including a sense of their own Self-will, the capacities to think and feel for themselves, as well as conscience. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. Anything that is too far from the dominant narrative simply becomes ‘unthinkable’ because the child’s innate capacity to perceive the truth is suppressed along with other mental capacities.

But soon it is not just parents, teachers and religious leaders that are the accepted ‘authority figures’ in the child’s life. No longer able to seriously question the imperatives of parents, teachers and religious figures because they have been terrorized out of doing so, the child has also unconsciously ‘learned’ that virtually any information with which they are presented must be true, even when the source is simply a government or corporate media outlet presenting elite propaganda. For the vast bulk of adult humans, the idea of questioning a dominant narrative does not even occur to them and it is certainly not something they can do with any intelligence, persistent research effort or courage.

So just as Hitler, ably supported by his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, was able to direct most Germans prior to and into World War II, it is quite straightforward for the global elite to be able to direct the bulk of the human population to believe, for example, that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the ‘lone gunman’ Lee Harvey Oswald, that the ‘Gulf of Tonkin incident’ justified the United States war on Vietnam, that a ‘virus’ labeled HIV caused a ‘disease’ labeled AIDS, that the three buildings 1,2 and 7 of the World Trade Center were destroyed by two aircraft flown by novice pilots into the top stories of the Twin Towers and justified the subsequently launched US ‘War on Terror’, that a ‘virus’ labeled SARS-Cov-2 exists and causes a ‘disease’ labeled Covid-19 that has justified the destruction of everything from a range of human rights to the global economy while accelerating four distinct paths to human extinction, that we live in a democracy in which each adult has a say in how they are governed, or even that ongoing effort is being made to bring a greater degree of shared prosperity to the people of the world.

For just a taste of the extensive evidence to debunk each of these propaganda-driven delusions, see these respective analyses of what the evidence actually demonstrates: On the Trail of the Assassins: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy, the Pentagon Papers, AIDS Inc.: Scandal of the Century, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, ‘Unmasking the Lies Around COVID-19: Facts vs Fiction of the Coronavirus Pandemic’, ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’, ‘America After the Election: A Few Hard Truths About the Things That Won’t Change’ and ‘The Federal Reserve Cartel: The Eight Families’.

In essence: my point is that is it is not the power of the propaganda, increasingly sophisticated though it has become, that makes people believe it, but a ‘socialization’ model designed to produce submissively obedient ‘individuals’ who gullibly interpret what is happening, and even their own ‘experience’, in terms of the information or scenario (that is, propaganda) with which they are presented. And because of the deeply-seated and unconscious fear of holding a divergent view, most people simply believe the widely-promulgated propaganda narrative with which they become familiar and, hence, comfortable. Moreover, those who challenge the elite-driven narrative frighten them, particularly when elite agents in government and the corporate media label them ‘conspiracy theorists’. For one explanation of why the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ emerged to denigrate those who challenge elite orthodoxy, see ‘In defence of conspiracy theories (and why the term is a misnomer)’.

And so this combination of dysfunctional parenting, education and religious exposure leaves the child devoid of their intuitive ‘truth register’ as well as the other mental faculties that would make them question explanations that obviously lack credibility while investigating and analyzing the evidence for themself. In fact, the idea of doing so never even occurs to them. Hence, a terrorized, gullible and easily manipulated individual enters adulthood. And, as the elite intends, galvanizing an effective response by such people to the truth hidden behind the propaganda is very difficult.

Resisting Propaganda

There is no point hoping that the global elite will discontinue their use of propaganda to shape the course of human events. This is largely because the global elite is insane. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’. Moreover, attempts to curb the use of propaganda must inevitably run into the institutions and organizations that the elite controls. And while we can strategically resist these if we choose, the most powerful defence we have against elite propaganda is the human mind that can perceive and critique it. Hence, as a priority, I would profoundly alter our parenting model to achieve this outcome. See ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you are uncertain of your own capacity to critique propaganda, you can expand your capacity to do so by feeling the fear (to release it) that limits your mental faculties. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you are interested in planning or participating in a strategy to achieve a peace, environmental or social justice outcome (particularly in relation to those issues that threaten human extinction), or to resist the elite coup currently taking place under cover of Covid-19, you can read sets of strategic goals for doing so in Campaign Strategic Aims or Coup Strategic Aims.

Moreover, if you wish to tackle the environmental threats to human existence while also strengthening your self-reliant capacity to resist the latest elite onslaught to take (much) greater control of your life, consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. The greater your dependence on elite systems and processes of any kind, the less power you will have to resist as the noose tightens.

If you are interested in participating in the worldwide effort to resist elite and other violence, you are also welcome to sign the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

More simply, if you like, you might consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
8. I will not buy rainforest timber
9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

The world is complex: it is difficult to understand and requires enormous effort.

Propaganda is designed to give people information that is easy to understand (and sometimes frightening) while distracting them from the truth and offering a simple ‘choice’ (or command) designed to mobilize action in support of an elite-driven narrative.

For example, by telling people they are threatened by a virus, most will be scared into focusing their attention on the ‘virus’. They will pay no attention to the many more complex and dangerous things that are taking place under cover of the ‘virus’: a technocratic/transhumanist coup that is utterly transforming the very essence of human society, economy and even the human individual. See ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” is being Re-engineered by the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’ and ‘Klaus Schwab and His Great Fascist Reset’.

Only a tiny proportion of the human population has even the vaguest idea of how the world actually works. But not even a tiny proportion of these people recognize that terrorizing children into obedience is the fundamental explanation of why the world works in the way that it does.

Unless we can mobilize greater recognition of our responsibility for giving the global elite the control over us that it has, and tackle this problem at its core – by fundamentally revising existing parenting and education models so that we produce powerful individuals – it will continue to be enormously difficult to mobilize sufficient strategic response to the challenges that confront humanity.

And while we are now fast-tracking four distinct paths to human extinction, there is an urgency about our predicament that accelerates daily.

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Robert Burrowes, Ph.D. is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence.

9 November 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

An insidious trend has developed over this past third of a century. A country that experienced shared growth after World War II began to tear apart, so much so that when the Great Recession hit in late 2007, one could no longer ignore the fissures that had come to define the American economic landscape. How did this “shining city on a hill” become the advanced country with the greatest level of inequality?

One stream of the extraordinary discussion set in motion by Thomas Piketty’s timely, important book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” has settled on the idea that violent extremes of wealth and income are inherent to capitalism. In this scheme, we should view the decades after World War II — a period of rapidly falling inequality — as an aberration.

This is actually a superficial reading of Mr. Piketty’s work, which provides an institutional context for understanding the deepening of inequality over time. Unfortunately, that part of his analysis received somewhat less attention than the more fatalistic-seeming aspects.

Over the past year and a half, The Great Divide, a series in The New York Times for which I have served as moderator, has also presented a wide range of examples that undermine the notion that there are any truly fundamental laws of capitalism. The dynamics of the imperial capitalism of the 19th century needn’t apply in the democracies of the 21st. We don’t need to have this much inequality in America.

Our current brand of capitalism is an ersatz capitalism. For proof of this go back to our response to the Great Recession, where we socialized losses, even as we privatized gains. Perfect competition should drive profits to zero, at least theoretically, but we have monopolies and oligopolies making persistently high profits. C.E.O.s enjoy incomes that are on average 295 times that of the typical worker, a much higher ratio than in the past, without any evidence of a proportionate increase in productivity.

If it is not the inexorable laws of economics that have led to America’s great divide, what is it? The straightforward answer: our policies and our politics. People get tired of hearing about Scandinavian success stories, but the fact of the matter is that Sweden, Finland and Norway have all succeeded in having about as much or faster growth in per capita incomes than the United States and with far greater equality.

So why has America chosen these inequality-enhancing policies? Part of the answer is that as World War II faded into memory, so too did the solidarity it had engendered. As America triumphed in the Cold War, there didn’t seem to be a viable competitor to our economic model. Without this international competition, we no longer had to show that our system could deliver for most of our citizens.

Ideology and interests combined nefariously. Some drew the wrong lesson from the collapse of the Soviet system. The pendulum swung from much too much government there to much too little here. Corporate interests argued for getting rid of regulations, even when those regulations had done so much to protect and improve our environment, our safety, our health and the economy itself.

But this ideology was hypocritical. The bankers, among the strongest advocates of laissez-faire economics, were only too willing to accept hundreds of billions of dollars from the government in the bailouts that have been a recurring feature of the global economy since the beginning of the Thatcher-Reagan era of “free” markets and deregulation.

The American political system is overrun by money. Economic inequality translates into political inequality, and political inequality yields increasing economic inequality. In fact, as he recognizes, Mr. Piketty’s argument rests on the ability of wealth-holders to keep their after-tax rate of return high relative to economic growth. How do they do this? By designing the rules of the game to ensure this outcome; that is, through politics.

So corporate welfare increases as we curtail welfare for the poor. Congress maintains subsidies for rich farmers as we cut back on nutritional support for the needy. Drug companies have been given hundreds of billions of dollars as we limit Medicaid benefits. The banks that brought on the global financial crisis got billions while a pittance went to the homeowners and victims of the same banks’ predatory lending practices. This last decision was particularly foolish. There were alternatives to throwing money at the banks and hoping it would circulate through increased lending. We could have helped underwater homeowners and the victims of predatory behavior directly. This would not only have helped the economy, it would have put us on the path to robust recovery.

OUR divisions are deep. Economic and geographic segregation have immunized those at the top from the problems of those down below. Like the kings of yore, they have come to perceive their privileged positions essentially as a natural right. How else to explain the recent comments of the venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who suggested that criticism of the 1 percent was akin to Nazi fascism, or those coming from the private equity titan Stephen A. Schwarzman, who compared asking financiers to pay taxes at the same rate as those who work for a living to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

Our economy, our democracy and our society have paid for these gross inequities. The true test of an economy is not how much wealth its princes can accumulate in tax havens, but how well off the typical citizen is — even more so in America where our self-image is rooted in our claim to be the great middle-class society. But median incomes are lower than they were a quarter-century ago. Growth has gone to the very, very top, whose share has almost quadrupled since 1980. Money that was meant to have trickled down has instead evaporated in the balmy climate of the Cayman Islands.

With almost a quarter of American children younger than 5 living in poverty, and with America doing so little for its poor, the deprivations of one generation are being visited upon the next. Of course, no country has ever come close to providing complete equality of opportunity. But why is America one of the advanced countries where the life prospects of the young are most sharply determined by the income and education of their parents?

Among the most poignant stories in The Great Divide were those that portrayed the frustrations of the young, who yearn to enter our shrinking middle class. Soaring tuitions and declining incomes have resulted in larger debt burdens. Those with only a high school diploma have seen their incomes decline by 13 percent over the past 35 years.

Where justice is concerned, there is also a yawning divide. In the eyes of the rest of the world and a significant part of its own population, mass incarceration has come to define America — a country, it bears repeating, with about 5 percent of the world’s population but around a fourth of the world’s prisoners.

Justice has become a commodity, affordable to only a few. While Wall Street executives used their high-retainer lawyers to ensure that their ranks were not held accountable for the misdeeds that the crisis in 2008 so graphically revealed, the banks abused our legal system to foreclose on mortgages and evict people, some of whom did not even owe money.

More than a half-century ago, America led the way in advocating for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Today, access to health care is among the most universally accepted rights, at least in the advanced countries. America, despite the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, is the exception. It has become a country with great divides in access to health care, life expectancy and health status.

In the relief that many felt when the Supreme Court did not overturn the Affordable Care Act, the implications of the decision for Medicaid were not fully appreciated. Obamacare’s objective — to ensure that all Americans have access to health care — has been stymied: 24 states have not implemented the expanded Medicaid program, which was the means by which Obamacare was supposed to deliver on its promise to some of the poorest.

We need not just a new war on poverty but a war to protect the middle class. Solutions to these problems do not have to be newfangled. Far from it. Making markets act like markets would be a good place to start. We must end the rent-seeking society we have gravitated toward, in which the wealthy obtain profits by manipulating the system.

The problem of inequality is not so much a matter of technical economics. It’s really a problem of practical politics. Ensuring that those at the top pay their fair share of taxes — ending the special privileges of speculators, corporations and the rich — is both pragmatic and fair. We are not embracing a politics of envy if we reverse a politics of greed. Inequality is not just about the top marginal tax rate but also about our children’s access to food and the right to justice for all. If we spent more on education, health and infrastructure, we would strengthen our economy, now and in the future. Just because you’ve heard it before doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it again.

We have located the underlying source of the problem: political inequities and policies that have commodified and corrupted our democracy. It is only engaged citizens who can fight to restore a fairer America, and they can do so only if they understand the depths and dimensions of the challenge. It is not too late to restore our position in the world and recapture our sense of who we are as a nation. Widening and deepening inequality is not driven by immutable economic laws, but by laws we have written ourselves.

27 Jun 2014

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Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University.

7 November 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

By Richard E. Rubenstein

When I taught political science in my younger days, the received wisdom was that the major U.S. political parties were loose coalitions of diverse groups bound together principally by their common interest in acquiring political power: i.e., governmental offices and the spoils of office. What they notably lacked was the sort of ideological, cultural, and socioeconomic unity that characterized party organizations in many other nations. As a result, except during unusual periods like the runup to the Civil War and the era of the Great Depression, America’s Republican and Democratic parties tended to resemble each other like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. One could either celebrate this incoherence or criticize it, but the lust for office and a taste for unprincipled deal-making long seemed unshakeable political norms in the U.S.A.

No longer! Although President Trump is demanding a recount of votes, the current national elections will almost certainly expel him from the White House and make Joe Biden the 46th U.S. President. They will also confirm Democratic control of the House of Representatives and produce a closely divided Senate, with Vice-President Kamala Harris (the first woman and first person of color to occupy that office) in a position to break tie votes as the Senate’s presiding officer. But the elections’ real headline is the division of the American electorate into two groups almost exactly the same size (approximately 70 million in each camp), which are not describable merely as ad hoc coalitions of power-seeking “interest groups.”

On the contrary, those now identifying themselves either as Republicans or Democrats have come to think of themselves and their comrades as embodying identical or closely related ideological commitments, cultural characteristics, and moral or religious values. They have become modern tribes – a development that is transforming American politics and the politics of many other nations as well.

Some may consider this reference to tribalism an exaggeration, but it is not. Tribalism is what happens when competing social groups identify themselves as peoples or “nations,” with each group embracing a narrative that expresses a commonly accepted version of its history, grievances and destiny. Tribalism emerges when each group comes to trust and patronize its own sources of information and opinion and to distrust “hostile” sources, thus producing separate and conflicting images of the world. Neo-tribal groups consider their own members trustworthy, caring brothers and sisters, while branding outsiders deceitful, cruel, or malicious. The conflicts they engage in with other groups thus come to look far more like ethnic, racial, or religious conflicts than traditional public policy disputes.

This is why – to take one small example – scholars report that “fact checking” rarely changes the minds of group members committed to their own version of the facts. As one researcher puts it, political party affiliation is now as strong as religious identity. “You’re not going to change your religion if somebody tells you that Moses didn’t actually have the Ten Commandments.”[i] The rise of neo-tribalism also helps to explain why conflicts formerly framed as differences over public policy tend to be reframed in terms of the defense of a threatened way of life. The debate about gun control, for example, once considered a dispute about the costs and benefits of firearms regulation now appears to partisans on both sides to be a conflict pitting “civilized” against “uncivilized” groups, with the definition of “civilized” varying according to the political and ethical values of one’s tribe.

The response of each group to the COVID pandemic provides another example of neo-tribal thought. Witnessing the unwillingness of many Trump followers (especially in rural areas) to wear masks, and noting their powerful impulse to reopen workplaces, places of entertainment, churches, and schools as early as possible, members of the liberal tribe see the right-wingers as self-destructive, reckless with other people’s lives, obsessed with primitive ideas of macho freedom, and more interested in moneymaking than lifesaving. To those same conservatives, however, the liberals who label them uncivilized are an effete, overeducated, self-indulgent elite able to work remotely from their homes – snobs looking down their noses at those dependent for their survival on open schools and workplaces. Each side considers the other a deviant tribe and their own group the true America. Stereotyping is the rule on both sides and looking into the mirror the exception.

Many Americans interested in peace and progress are now greeting Donald Trump’s departure from office with sighs of relief and prayers of thankfulness. This is justified, since Trump is a dangerous figure whose attack on the electoral system in the late stages of the electoral campaign resembled nothing so much as the fascist assault on parliamentary institutions in the 1920s and 1930s. But this President did not create American neo-tribalism, and it will not disappear with his departure from office. To create a national community linked organically to an international community also in the process of creation will the task of the next generation of peace- and justice-makers.

The key questions that will soon confront the Biden administration, and that must interest everyone interested in the peaceful resolution of conflicts, are what is causing the pronounced trend toward neo-tribalism, and what can be done to resolve or transform neo-tribal conflicts. Four brief suggestions may be worth considering:

1. Admit that we do not yet have good answers to these questions. The first requirement, yet to be fulfilled, is to recognize the transformation of politics in the direction of neo-tribalism and our own tribal commitments. This immediately suggests that traditional methods of political dispute-resolution (power-based bargaining, judicial interpretation of rules, circulation of elites, and so forth) are unlikely to be effective. The goal here must be conflict prevention to avoid further developments that could lead to serious civil violence.

2. Recognize that neo-tribal conflicts are not cultural/religious as opposed to socioeconomic/political, but explosive combinations of class-based and culture-based antagonism. The American news media, which have an aversion to uttering the words “working class,” note that the majority of supporters of President Trump and the Republican party are white people (white men in particular) without college degrees, while college-educated men and women (women in particular) tend to support the Democrats. The task immediately confronting conflict resolvers is to gain a better understanding of the intimate links between social class and political, racial, and religious identities, and to discuss the systemic changes that will be necessary to satisfy each group’s basic needs.

3. Understand that elections and the advent of new leaders will not produce the needed systemic changes unless politics, on the deepest level, becomes the avocation of masses of people, something to be practiced continuously in a spirit of communal collaboration and experimentation, not reserved for periods of electoral competition. In nations like the United States, democracy will not be “restored”; it will be redefined. The task of redefinition must involve searching for examples of sociopolitical innovation in one’s own history (in the America of the New Deal, for example) and in other nations. Have the Americans nothing to learn about social welfare policy from Europeans, or about how to defeat a plague from Asians? Such questions answer themselves.

4. Recognize that from Roman times until the present, the rise of neo-tribal conflict has been a symptom of imperial decline. It is particularly important for Americans to “connect the dots” that run between the existence of an empire that maintains 800 or so military bases in eighty nations and consumes close to $1 trillion annually in military expenditures and the problems of communities in virtually every part of the nation plagued by poverty, precarity, poor schools, familial discord, overstressed social services, and a decaying infrastructure – all conditions that inflame conflict between groups struggling to maintain basic levels of economic and cultural security. The American system will not be rebuilt so long as it remains subordinate to the demands of the American Empire.

Equally important, the Empire’s decline raises the same sort of questions that have faced other peoples in a post-imperial context: if we are not defined by our role as a global or regional hegemon, who are we? Who do we want to be? Tribalism is one answer to that question, although a very poor one.

Goodbye (and good riddance), Mr. Trump. Welcome, Mr. Biden. Now that the election is over, it is time to get down to business. And the first order of business, in my view, will be to confront and consider how to transcend America’s intense neo-tribalism.

NOTE:

[i] Farah Stockman in New York Times, 11 Sep 2020 (“What I Learned from a List of Trump Accomplishments”)

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Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

9 November 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

By Jonathan Cook

At birth, all of us begin a journey that offers opportunities either to grow – not just physically, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually – or to stagnate. The journey we undertake lasts a lifetime, but there are dozens of moments each day when we have a choice to make tiny incremental gains in experience, wisdom and compassion or to calcify through inertia, complacency and selfishness.

No one can be engaged and receptive all the time. But it is important to recognise these small opportunities for growth when they present themselves, even if at any particular moment we may decide to avoid grasping them.

When we shut ourselves into the car on the commute to work, do we use it as a moment to be alone with our thoughts or to silence them with the radio or music? When we sit with friends, do we choose to be fully present with them or scroll through the news feed on our phones? When we return from a difficult day at work, do we talk the issues through with family or reach for a glass of wine, or maybe bingewatch something on TV?

Everyone needs downtime, but if every opportunity for reflection becomes downtime then we are stagnating, not growing. We are moving away from life, from being human.

Dried-out husk

This week liberal Americans reached for that glass of wine and voted Joe Biden. Others did so much more reluctantly, spurred on by the fear of giving his opponent another four years.

Biden isn’t over the finishing line quite yet, and there are likely to be recounts, court challenges and possibly violence over the result, but he seems all but certain to be crowned the next US president. Not that that should provoke any kind of celebration. The rest of the world’s population, future generations, the planet itself – none of us had a vote – were always going to be the losers whichever candidate won.

The incumbent, Donald Trump, miscalculated, it seems, if he thought dismissing his opponent as “Sleepy Joe” would be enough to damage Biden’s electoral fortunes. True, Trump was referring to the fact that Biden is a dried-out husk of the machine politician he once was. But after four years of Trump and in the midst of a pandemic, the idea of sleeping through the next presidential term probably sounded pretty appealing to liberals. Most of them have spent their whole political lives asleep.

Four years ago, however, they were forcibly roused from their languor to protest against Donald Trump. They grew enraged by the symptom of their corrupt political system rather than by the corrupt system itself. For them, “Sleepy Joe” was just what the doctor ordered.

But it won’t be Biden doing the sleeping. It will be the liberals who cheerlead him. Biden – or perhaps Kamala Harris – will be busy making sure his corporate donors get exactly what they paid for, whatever the cost to the rest of us.

Anger and blame

In this analogy, Trump is not the opposite of Biden, of course. He represents stagnation too, if of a different kind.

Trump channels Americans’ frustration and anger at a political and economic system they rightly see as failing them. He articulates who should be falsely blamed for their woes: be it immigrants, minorities, socialists, or the New World Order. He offers justified, if misdirected, rage in contrast to Biden’s dangerous complacency.

But however awful Trump may be, at least some of those voting for him are grappling, if mostly unconsciously, with the tension between stagnation and growth – and not of the economic kind. Unlike most liberals, who dismiss this simplistically as “populism”, some of Trump’s supporters do at least seem to recognise that the tension exists. They simply haven’t been offered a constructive alternative to anger and blame.

Ritually disappointed

Unlike the liberals and the Trumpists, many in the US have come to understand that their political system offers nothing but stultifying stagnation for ordinary Americans by design, even if it comes in two, smartly attired flavours.

They see that the Trump camp rages ineffectually against the corporate elite, deluded into believing that a member of that very same elite will serve as their saviour. And they see that the Biden camp represents an ineffectual rainbow coalition of competing social identities, deluded into believing that those divisions will make them stronger, not weaker, in the fight for economic justice. Both of these camps appear resigned to being serially – maybe ritually – disappointed.

Failure does not inspire these camps to seek change, it makes them cling all the more desperately to their failed strategies, to attach themselves even more frantically and fervently to their perceived tribe.

That is why this US election – at a moment when the need for real, systemic change is more urgent, more evident than ever before – produced not just one but two of the worst presidential candidates of all time. We are looking at exactly what happens when a whole society not only stops growing but begins to putrefy.

Enervating divisions

Not everyone in the US is so addicted to these patterns of self-delusion and self-harm.

Large swaths of the population don’t bother to vote out of hard-borne experience. The system is so rigged against them that they don’t think it matters much which corporate party is in power. The outcome will be the same for them either way.

Others vote third party, or consciously abstain in protest at big money’s vice-like grip on the two-party system. Others, appalled at the prospect of Trump – and before him the two Bushes, and before that Ronald Reagan – were forced once again to vote for the Democratic ticket with a heavy heart. They know all too well who Biden is (a creature of his corporate donors) and what he stands for (whatever his corporate donors want). But he is slightly less monstrous than his rival, and in the US system those are the meaningful electoral options.

And among Trump’s supporters too, there are many desperate for wholesale change. They voted for Trump because at least he paid lip service to change.

These groups – most likely a clear electoral majority – could redirect the US towards political, social, even spiritual growth, if they could find a way to come together. They suffer from their own enervating divisions.

How should they best use their numerical strength? Should they struggle to win the presidency, and if so should it be a third-party candidate or should they work within the existing party structures? What lesson should they draw from the Democratic leadership’s sabotaging – twice over – of Bernie Sanders, a candidate offering meaningful change? Is it time to adopt an entirely different strategy, rejecting traditional politics? And if so, can it be made to work when all the major institutions – from the politicians and courts, to the police, intelligence services and media – are firmly in the hands of the corporate enemy?

Terrible reckoning

There is no real way to sleep through life, or politics, and not wake up one day – usually when it is too late – realising catastrophic mistakes were made.

As individuals, we may face that terrible reckoning on our death-beds. Empires rarely go so quietly. They fall when it is time for their citizens to learn a painful lesson about hubris. Their technological innovations come back to haunt them, as ancient Rome’s lead water-pipes supposedly once did. Or they over-extend with ambitious wars that drain the coffers of gold, as warrior-kings have discovered to their cost through the ages. Or, when the guardians of empire least expect it, “barbarians” – the victims of their crimes – storm the city gates.

The globe-spanning US empire faces the rapid emergence of all these threats on a planetary scale. Its endless wars against phantom enemies have left the US burdened with astounding debt. Its technologies, from nuclear weapons to AI, mean there can be no possible escape from a major miscalculation. And the US empire’s insatiable greed and determination to colonise every last inch of the planet, if only with our waste products, is gradually killing the life-systems we depend on.

If Biden becomes president, his victory will be a temporary win for torpor, for complacency. But a new Trump will emerge soon enough to potentise – and misdirect – the fury steadily building beneath the surface. If we let it, the pendulum will swing back and forth, between ineffectual lethargy and ineffectual rage, until it is too late. Unless we actively fight back, the stagnation will suffocate us all.

This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

7 November 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Robert Hunziker

A notable satellite-telephonic call to colleagues in late October from Swedish scientist Örjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University briefly described a haunting discovery. On board the research ship R/V Akademik Keldysh, a 6,240-ton Russian scientific research vessel equipped with 17 on-board laboratories and a library, far off the coast of Russia, Dr. Gustafsson reported: “This East Siberian slope methane hydrate system has been perturbed and the process will be ongoing.” (Source: Sleeping Giant Arctic Methane Deposits Starting to Release, Scientists Find, The Guardian, Oct. 27, 2020)

That satellite call referenced a sleeping giant that has enough carbon firepower to adversely impact the world’s climate system. The expedition discovered methane (CH4) that had been securely frozen in shallow subsea permafrost waters forever, and ever, and ever, now “stirring.” Colloquially, “The Monster of the North awakened.” (Although, in fairness to accuracy, the ESAS has been perturbed and leaking/seeping into the atmosphere for some time… but, now it’s much worse than ever before, and terrifyingly, it’s more noticeable to passersby, like expeditions of discerning scientists).

After all, there are scientists who believe the East Siberian Arctic Shelf and neighboring Russian coastline continental shelf seas contain enough methane in frozen hydrates to change human history forever, unfortunately, not for the betterment of civilization.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, as well as other Arctic seas off Russia’s northern coastline, has been the subject of clashing opinions within the scientific community.

Over the years, mainstream science has “talked down the risks” of a massive methane breakout in Arctic waters which could start a vicious cycle of runaway global warming that would be devastating on several fronts for civilized societies, and uncivilized too.

Three years ago, the U.S. Geological Survey labeled Arctic hydrates as one of the world’s four most serious causation events of abrupt climate change. Yet, according to USGS geophysicist Carolyn Ruppel, who oversees the USGS Gas Hydrates Project: “After so many years spent determining where gas hydrates are breaking down and measuring methane flux at the sea-air interface, we suggest that conclusive evidence for release of hydrate-related methane to the atmosphere is lacking.” (Gas Hydrate Breakdown Unlikely to Cause Massive Greenhouse Gas Release, US Geological Survey, Feb. 9, 2017)

According to USGS calculations, sediments in the Arctic contain a huge quantity of frozen methane and other gases – known as hydrates. Along those lines, it’s important to note that methane (CH4) has a warming effect 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over its initial 20 years. Meaning CH4 has a sharper, quicker impact on global warming than does CO2.

That USGS position (“no conclusive evidence”) about the risk of methane release is now three years old. Thus, this new discovery prompts a logical question: Does the current expedition provide conclusive evidence of a change? Meaning, what’s the likelihood of an abrupt shift in the planet’s climate system as a result of the new discovery?

Assuming a major CH4 release, or big burp, is it possible it could lead to planet-wide upheaval? Accordingly, the expedition team reported: “At this moment, there is unlikely to be any major impact on global warming, but the point is that this process has now been triggered.” (Gustafsson)

Therein lies the problem: “It has been triggered.”

Along those lines, a Latin proverb suffices: “Forewarned is forearmed.” Clearly, the results of the Akademik Keldysh expedition qualify as “forewarned,” no doubt about that.

All of which prompts a significant question: How will countries throughout the world respond to this newly discovered risk to climate systems with its potential to damage agriculture and coastal cities beyond recognition?

In that regard, and based upon the nations of the world failing to adhere to voluntary commitments to the Paris 2015 climate accord to reduce carbon emissions, which in fact increase (Oops) year-over- year, the answer is: “It’s not encouraging, not at all.” Indeed, it is questionable that any nation/state anywhere will actually “forearm” as a result of this new report signaling: “The East Siberian slope methane hydrate system has been perturbed.”

Furthermore, what does “forearmed” even look like? Realistically, how does a country prepare for an all-out assault on agriculture and coastlines by an out of whack runaway climate system? Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, according to the initial report from the 60-member team onboard the Akademik Keldysh expedition, the findings are only “preliminary.” The true scale of the discovery will be confirmed when full complements of data are analyzed and published peer-reviewed in a scientific journal.

Significantly, and tellingly, the discovery includes six monitoring points over a slope area of 150km (93 mi.) by 10km (6 mi.) with “clouds of bubbles released from sediment.” It should be noted that “clouds of bubbles” obviously implies one helluva lot of methane erupting from the seafloor. In point of fact, some measurements registered “methane concentrations 400 times higher than should be seen if the sea and the atmosphere were in equilibrium.” (Gustafsson)

By way of comparison to planetary distances, “400xs higher than equilibrium” is a trip to Pluto.

Robert Hunziker, MA, economic history DePaul University, awarded membership in Pi Gamma Mu International Academic Honor Society in Social Sciences is a freelance writer and environmental journalist who has over 200 articles published.

7 November 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Pepe Escobar

A gaming exercise of the perfect, indigenous color revolution, code-named Blue, was leaked from a major think tank established in the imperial lands that first designed the color revolution concept.

Not all the information disclosed here about the gaming of Blue has been declassified. That may well elicit a harsh response from the Deep State, even as a similar scenario was gamed by an outfit called Transition Integrity Project.

Both scenarios should qualify as predictive programming – with the Deep State preparing the general public, in advance, for exactly how things will play out.

The standard color revolution playbook rules they usually start in the capital city of nation-state X, during an election cycle, with freedom fighting “rebels” enjoying full national and international media support.

Blue concerns a presidential election in the Hegemon. In the gaming exercise, the incumbent president, codenamed Buffon, was painted Red. The challenger, codenamed Corpse, was painted Blue.

Blue – the exercise – went up a notch because, compared to its predecessors, the starting point was not a mere insurgency, but a pandemic. Not any pandemic, but a really serious, bad to the bone global pandemic with an explosive infection fatality rate of less than 1%.

By a fortunate coincidence, the lethal pandemic allowed Blue operators to promote mail-in ballots as the safest, socially distant voting procedure.

That connected with a rash of polls predicting an all but inevitable Blue win in the election – even a Blue Wave.

The premise is simple: take down the economy and deflate a sitting president whose stated mission is to drive a booming economy. In tandem, convince public opinion that actually getting to the polls is a health hazard.

The Blue production committee takes no chances, publicly announcing they would contest any result that contradicts the prepackaged outcome: Blue’s final victory in a quirky, anachronistic, anti-direct democracy body called the “electoral college”.

If Red somehow wins, Blue would wait until every vote is counted and duly litigated to every jurisdiction level. Relying on massive media support and social media marketing propelled to saturation levels, Blue proclaims that “under no scenario” Red would be allowed to declare victory.

Countdown to magic voting

Election Day comes. Vote counting is running smoothly – mail-in count, election day count, up to the minute tallies – but mostly favoring Red, especially in three states always essential for capturing the presidency. Red is also leading in what is characterized as “swing states”.

But then, just as a TV network prematurely calls a supposedly assured Red state for Blue, all vote counting stops before midnight in major urban areas in key swing states under Blue governors, with Red in the lead.

Blue operators stop counting to check whether their scenario towards a Blue victory can roll out without bringing in mail-in ballots. Their preferred mechanism is to manufacture the “will of the people” by keeping up an illusion of fairness.

Yet they can always rely, as Plan B, on urban mail-in ballots on tap, hot and cold, until Blue squeaks by in two particularly key swing states that Red had bagged in a previous election.

That’s what happens. Starting at 2 am, and later into the night, enter a batch of “magic” votes in these two key states. The sudden, vertical upward “adjustment” includes the case of a batch of 130k+ pro-Blue votes cast in a county alongside not a single pro-Red vote – a statistical miracle of Holy Ghost proportions.

Stuffing the ballot box is a typical scam applied in Banana Republic declinations of color revolution. Blue operators use the tried and tested method applied to the gold futures market, when a sudden drop of naked shorts drives down gold price, thus protecting the US dollar.

Blue operators bet the compliant mainstream media/Big Tech alliance will not question that, well, out of the blue, the vote would swing towards Blue in a 2 to 3 or 3 to 4 margin.

They bet no questions will be asked on how a 2% to 5% positive ballot trend in Red’s favor in a few states turned into a 0.5% to 1.4% trend in favor of Blue by around 4am.

And that this discrepancy happens in two swing states almost simultaneously.

And that some precincts turn more presidential votes than they have registered voters.

And that in swing states, the number of extra mysterious votes for Blue far exceeds votes cast for the Senate candidates in these states, when the record shows that down ticket totals are traditionally close.

And that turnout in one of these states would be 89.25%.

The day after Election Day there are vague explanations that one of the possible vote-dumps was just a “clerical error”, while in another disputed state there is no justification for accepting ballots with no postmark.

Blue operators relax because the mainstream media/Big Tech alliance squashes each and every complaint as “conspiracy theories”.

The Red counter-revolution

The two presidential candidates do not exactly help their own cases.

Codename Corpse, in a Freudian slip, had revealed his party had set up the most extensive and “diverse” fraud scheme ever.

Not only Corpse is about to be investigated for a shady computer-related scheme. He is a stage 2 dementia patient with a rapidly unraveling profile – kept barely functional by drugs, which can’t prevent his mind slowly shutting down.

Codename Buffoon, true to his instincts, goes pre-emptive, declaring the whole election a fraud but without offering a smoking gun. He is duly debunked by the mainstream media/Big Tech alliance for spreading “false claims”.

All this is happening as a wily, old, bitter operator not only had declared that the only admissible scenario was a Blue victory; she had already positioned herself for a top security job.

Blue also games that Red would immediately embark on a single-minded path ahead: regiment an army of lawyers demanding access to every registration roll to scrub, review and verify each and every mail-in ballot, a process of de facto forensic analysis.

Yet Blue cannot foresee how many fake ballots will be unveiled during recounts.

As Corpse is set to declare victory, Buffon eyes the long game, set to take the whole thing all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Red machine had already gamed it – as it was fully aware of how operation Blue would be played.

The Red counter-revolution does carry the potential of strategically checkmating Blue.

It is a three-pronged attack – with Red using the Judiciary Committee, the Senate and the Attorney General, all under the authority of codename Buffoon until Inauguration Day. The end game after a vicious legal battle is to overthrow Blue.

Red’s top operators have the option of setting up a Senate commission, or a Special Counsel, at the request of the Judiciary Committee, to be appointed by the Department of Justice to investigate Corpse.

In the meantime, two electoral college votes, one-month apart, are required to certify the presidential winner.

These votes will happen in the middle of one and perhaps two investigations focused on Corpse. Any state represented at the electoral college may object to approve an investigated Corpse; in this case it’s illegal for that state to allow its electors to certify the state’s presidential results.

Corpse may even be impeached by his own party, under the 25th Ammendment, due to his irreversible mental decline.

The resulting chaos would have to be resolved by the Red-leaning Supreme Court. Not exactly the outcome favored by Blue.

The House always wins

The heart of the matter is that this think tank gaming transcends both Red and Blue. It’s all about the Deep State’s end game.

There’s nothing like a massive psy ops embedded in a WWE-themed theater under the sign of Divide and Rule to pit mob vs. mob, with half of the mob rebelling against what it perceives as an illegitimate government. The 0.00001% comfortably surveys the not only metaphorical carnage from above.

Even as the Deep State, using its Blue minions, would never have allowed codename Buffoon to prevail, again, domestic Divide and Rule might be seen as the least disastrous outcome for the world at large.

A civil war context in theory distracts the Deep State from bombing more Global South latitudes into the dystopian “democracy” charade it is now enacting.

And yet a domestic Empire of Chaos gridlock may well encourage more foreign adventures as a necessary diversion to tie the room together.

And that’s the beauty of the Blue gaming exercise: the House wins, one way or another.

Pepe Escobar is correspondent-at-large at Asia Times.

6 November 2020

Source: www.informationclearinghouse.info