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Sep 20, 2020. The president of Italy, Sergio Mattarella, votes at the Italian regional elections. In these elections, the first in the age of the COVID, the victory went to the Left largely by means of over a better strategy in managing people’s perceptions of the epidemic. Here, I report some personal considerations on how this result may tell us something about the coming US presidential election.

The regional elections of this weekend in Italy were held after a debate still dominated by the COVID epidemics. Although the virus itself was not mentioned so much in the speeches and in the political programs, the rest of the debate was shallow and lacking ideas on both sides. The Left was unable to propose anything better than “restarting growth,” and the Right little more than vague talks of “Italexit.”

So, the COVID epidemic hovered like a ghost over everything that was said and done. The Left coalition, the parties supporting the current government, had placed their bets on appearing tough on the epidemic. The government-controlled media tried to reinforce this perception by doing their best to terrorize citizens with daily catastrophistic reports. This strategy had a risk: if the elderly were to stay at home for fear of being infected at the polling station, then a disaster was looming for those parties that relied on their vote: in particular the Democratic Party (the former communists).

The Right, instead, never found a coherent strategy on the epidemic. Sometimes, it tried to convince its electorate that the epidemic was brought to Italy by black immigrants from Africa, but that worked only on people already convinced that all evils in Italy arrive from Africa.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Lesser Evil: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

August 23, 2020

A Lesser Evil: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

I really don’t mean to be a pest about this but we are still trapped on a planet where people without functioning empathy centers are waving literal armageddon weapons around in the name of a made-up concept called unipolarism. We should probably put a stop to that.

If you see two separate mainstream political parties, it looks like one is the lesser evil. If you see two oligarchic sock puppets held by the same oligarchy, it looks like they’re both being used to bully you into consenting to an entire system which isn’t designed to serve you.

If you see the latter, what is the correct response? What is the correct response to someone saying you must beg them to punch you with their left hand or they’ll punch you a bit harder with their right? Is it to beg for the left fist? Or is it to knock your abuser the fuck out?

When the oligarchy tells you “Vote for my left party or my right party will take away your civil rights”, the correct response is not bowing to its demands, nor voting right-wing out of spite, nor even merely voting third party. The only correct response is to tear down the oligarchy.

Democrats: Here’s a half-dead piece of beltway flotsam held together by nothing but Aricept and crazy glue who’s been pushing for wars, austerity and the erosion of civil liberties since before most of you were born.

Progressives: I bet we can move him to the left.

Q: What is the Republican Party?

A: An organization which assures Americans of conservative sensibilities that the status quo is working fine.

Q: What is the Democratic Party?

A: An organization which assures Americans of liberal sensibilities that the status quo is working fine.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2020 Is The Year The Unseen Becomes Seen

July 18, 2020

2020 Is The Year The Unseen Becomes Seen

2020 is the year of Julian Assange’s extradition trials, the Kafkaesque proceedings by which the US government is attempting to imprison the WikiLeaks founder for the rest of his life as punishment for exposing US war crimes. Assange started an innovative leak publishing outlet on the premise that corrupt power can be fought with truth, and corrupt power responded by silencing and jailing him. They’ve proved him right about everything, right in front of everyone.

2020 is the year people began protesting police brutality, and police responded with ferocious and widespread acts of brutality. The massive deluge of video footage from these brutal police responses went viral all over the world. The argument about police brutality culture in the US police state was won clearly and decisively, right in front of everyone.

2020 is the year the most powerful government on earth responded to a pandemic virus with the largest upward transfer of wealth in history, leaving massive global corporations with record-high stocks while killing small businesses and throwing the rank-and-file public to the wolves after handing some of them a paltry $1200, all while failing spectacularly to address the threat of the virus itself. This financial abuse is happening right out in the open, right in front of everyone.

2020 is the year this same government’s electoral process is being exposed in front of everyone for the sham it has always been, as two corrupt racist right-wing warmongering dementia patients who’ve both been accused of rape are placed head-to-head in what will inevitably be the single dumbest presidential race in the nation’s history. Neither of these two men are capable of forming a coherent sentence, and their presidential debates will make them a laughing stock of the whole world, right in front of everybody.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Deep State” Dudley Doubles Down: “Explains” What He Really Meant In Scandalous Anti-Trump Op-Ed

September 4, 2019

“Deep State” Dudley Doubles Down: “Explains” What He Really Meant In Scandalous Anti-Trump Op-Ed

There is a saying, when in a hole stop digging.

Unfortunately for former Goldman managing director and NY Fed president, Bill “let them eat iPads” Dudley, that is a saying he is not familiar with, and one week after his stunning Bloomberg op-ed in which he advocated the Fed to prevent Trump’s 2020 re-election by sending the economy in a recession, resulting in a brutal response from virtually everyone who slammed Dudley’s musings as the final proof that the Fed was in fact a political animal, one which is more powerful than the executive branch in its ability to pick and choose presidents, Dudley is out with an “explainer”, seeking to “answer” some of the main questions posed by his “provocative” piece.

After reading “What I Meant When I Said ‘Don’t Enable Trump“, let’s just say that Dudley fails in explaining why he said is not what he said, and if anything he has successfully doubled down, giving Trump even more ammunition to throw the book at the political Fed for not cutting rates fast enough as the president has been demanding for months, and for eventually taking the blame for the coming economic and market crash.

Dudley’s letter, written in rhetorical Q&A format, begins by asking himself what motivated him to write this article. His answer is two fold:

First, President Trump’s trade war with China was increasing uncertainty about how global trading rules would evolve, what tariffs would be imposed, what changes firms might need to make to their global supply chains, and what the downside risks might be for the U.S. economy. Just a few days before the article was published, the president ordered U.S. firms to pull out of China.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas Anymore”

March 29, 2019

“Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas Anymore”

Recently, an American colleague commented to me, “We no longer live in a democracy but a dictatorship disguised as a democracy.”

Is he correct? Well, a dictatorship may be defined as “a form of government in which absolute authority is exercised by a dictator.”

The US today is not be ruled by dictatorship (although, to some, it may well feel that way.)

But, if that’s the case, what form of rule does exist in the US?

At its formation, the founding fathers argued over whether the United States should be a republic or a democracy. Those founders who later formed the Federalist Party felt that it should be a democracy – rule by representatives elected by the people. Thomas Jefferson, who created the Democratic Republican Party, argued that it should be a republic – a state in which the method of governance is democracy, but the principle of governance is that the rights of the individual are paramount.

He argued that, “Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty one percent can vote away the rights of the other forty nine.”

At that time, Benjamin Franklin has been credited as saying, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.”

Very well stated.

As Americans still legally vote, and it may well be that the voting is not altogether rigged, the US could be regarded as a democracy. Of course, to be accurate, it could also be defined as a bureaucracy – rule by officialdom, and/or a plutocracy – rule by the very rich. Both of these descriptions are undeniably accurate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How America’s Dictatorship Works

February 25, 2019

How America’s Dictatorship Works

Trump could not have become America’s President if he had not won the “vote” of his nation’s second-largest political donor in 2016, casinos-owner Sheldon Adelson.

In publicly recorded donations, as of 25 December 2018, Adelson and his wife donated$82,522,800 to Republican candidates in 2016, and this amount doesn’t include any of the secret money. Of that sum, it’s virtually impossible to find out how much went specifically to Trump’s campaign for President, but, as of 9 May 2017, the Adelsons were publicly recorded as having donated $20.4 million to Trump’s campaign.

Their impact on the Presidential contest was actually much bigger than that, however, because even the Adelsons’ non-Trump-campaign donations went to the Republican Party, and the rest went to Republican pro-Trump candidates, and the rest went to Republican PACS — and, so, a large percentage (if not all) of that approximately $60 million non-Trump-campaign political expenditure by the Adelsons was boosting Trump’s Presidential vote.

The second-largest Republican donor in 2016 was the hedge fund manager Paul Singer, at $26,114,653. It was less than a third, 31.6%, as large as the Adelsons’ contribution. Singer is the libertarian who proudly invests in weak entities that have been sucked dry by the aristocracy and who almost always extracts thereby, in the courts, far larger returns-on-investment than do other investors, who have simply settled to take a haircut on their failing high-interest-rate loans to that given weak entity.

Singer hires the rest of his family to run his asset-stripping firm, which is named after his own middle name, “Elliott Advisors,” and he despises any wealthy person who won’t (like he does) fight tooth-and-nail to extract, from any weak entity, everything that can possibly be stripped from it. His Elliott Advisors is called a “vulture fund,” but that’s an insult to vultures, who instead eat corpses. They don’t actually attack and rip apart vulnerable struggling animals, like Singer’s operation does.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Europe is Burning

January 15, 2019

Europe is Burning

Johannes Vermeer The soldier and the laughing girl 1657

There will be elections for the European Parliament on May 23-26 2019. They will likely change the face of Europe more than anything has done since the EU was founded. That is not some wild prediction. Many European countries have held elections since the last European elections in 2014, and just about all had outcomes that shook up domestic political ratios.

In most cases, countries went from traditional parties to newly founded ones. France erased the Socialists and center-right in 2017, and the final round of the presidential elections was between Marine Le Pen’s Front National and Emmanuel Macron’s brand-new En Marche. Macron won sort of by default, because France as a country would never have voted for Le Pen.

In Italy, M5S and Lega have taken over. In Germany, Merkel’s CDU/CSU coalition lost bigly though it remained the biggest party, but Angela lost her ‘socialist’ SPD partner which gave up so much it didn’t want to be in government anymore. In Spain, Mariano Rajoy’s center right lost enough to cede power to the Socialists who came up tops because they played a smart game, not because the Spanish wanted it to rule.

We don’t have to go through all 27/28 different countries to establish that there are almost tectonic shifts happening all over, away from traditional parties and towards whoever showed up without insanely extreme views. And if you think this move is now completed, you may want to think again.

It’s amusing to realize that the country with the biggest political shift, the UK, is the only one that still hangs on to its traditional parties, and seeks its protest voice in a different way, namely through Brexit. That is, Britain shows it can get no satisfaction from the EU, whereas in the other major EU nations the dissatisfaction is projected onto domestic parties.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If America Stopped Destroying The World, The Bad Guys Might Win

January 13, 2019

If America Stopped Destroying The World, The Bad Guys Might Win

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters on Saturday that the government under Venezuela’s recently re-inaugurated president Nicolas Maduro is “illegitimate”, and that “the United States will work diligently to restore a real democracy to that country.”

Pompeo’s remarks, which were echoed by Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton, are interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is because Venezuela’s presidential election in May of last year (which incidentally was found to have been perfectly legitimate by the international Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America) was actively and aggressively meddled in by the US and its allies. The second is that while the US government is openly broadcasting its intention to keep interfering in Venezuela’s political system, it continues to scream bloody murder about alleged Russian interference in its own democratic process two years ago.

What is the difference between the behavior of the United States, which remains far and away the single worst offender in foreign election meddling on the planet, and what Russia is accused of having done in 2016? According to a comment made by former CIA Director James Woolsey last year, it’s that the US interferes in foreign democracies “for a very good cause.”

And that’s really the only argument that empire loyalists have going for them on this subject. The US is different because the US has moral authority. It’s okay for the US to continue to interfere in the political affairs of foreign nations while it would be an unforgivable and outrageous “act of war” for a nation like Russia to do the exact same thing, because the US is countering the interests of the Bad Guys while Russia is countering the interests of the Good Guys. Who decided who the Good Guys and Bad Guys are in this argument? The US.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the US Spent Billions to Change the Outcome of Elections Around the World: A Review

January 9, 2019

How the US Spent Billions to Change the Outcome of Elections Around the World: A Review

The U.S. military state overthrows democratically-elected governments that it deems to be a threat to corporate interests.

“There is plenty of evidence that the United States is the most depraved and dangerous “meddler” in the affairs of other nations that history has ever known.”

Dan Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer, but most of all he is an anti-imperialist and an author of three books. Kovalik’s first two books tackled the specific US war drives against Russia and Iran. His third installment, The Plot to Control the World: How the US Spent Billions to Change the Outcome of Elections Around the World, addresses the broad scope of US election meddling abroad. The book provides much needed political and ideological life support to an anti-war movement in the U.S that has been rendered nearly invisible to the naked eye.

The Plot to Control the World is as detailed in its critique of U.S. imperialism as it is concise. In just over 160 pages, Kovalik manages to analyze the various ways that the U.S. political and military apparatus interferes in the affairs of nations abroad to achieve global hegemony. He wastes no time in exposing the devastating lie that is American exceptionalism, beginning appropriately with the U.S. imperialist occupations of Haiti and the Philippines at the end of the 19thcentury and beginning of the 20th. The U.S. would murder millions of Filipinos and send both nations into a spiral of violence, instability, and poverty that continues to this day.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Macron Heralds The End Of The Union

December 7, 2018

Macron Heralds The End Of The Union

Paul Almasy Paris 1950

The concept of the EU might have worked, but still only might have, if a neverending economic boom could have been manufactured to guide it on its way. But there was never going to be such a boom. Or perhaps if the spoils that were available in boom times and bust had been spread out among nations rich and poor and citizens rich and poor a little more equally, that concept might still have carried the days.

Then again, its demise was obvious from well before the Union was ever signed into existence, in the philosophies, deliberations and meetings that paved its way in the era after a second world war in two score years fought largely on the European continent.

In hindsight, it is hard to comprehend how it’s possible that those who met and deliberated to found the Union, in and of itself a beneficial task at least on the surface in the wake of the blood of so many millions shed, were not wiser, smarter, less greedy, less driven by sociopath design and methods. It was never the goal that missed its own target or went awry, it was the execution.

Still, no matter how much we may dream, how much some of the well-meaning ‘founding fathers’ of the Union may have dreamt, without that everlasting economic boom it never stood a chance. The Union was only ever going to be tolerated, accepted, embraced by its citizens if they could feel and see tangible benefits in their daily lives of surrendering parts of their own decision making powers, and the sovereignty of their nations.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will the 2020 Presidential Election be the Most Violent in American History?

December 5, 2018

Will the 2020 Presidential Election be the Most Violent in American History?

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; Thanks to you I am paying closer attention to what people are saying in politics these days. It seems to be that this was not a Blue Wave they were waging but a Blue War. It is very disturbing to see the hatred is still brewing against anyone who just wants to be left alone. Is this the foundation for the rising civil unrest that turns to a civil war?

ANSWER: Unfortunately, YES! It is really very bad. The CNN political analyst Kirsten Powers actually said that all white women who voted for Donald Trump are racist! She then added that there were those who felt they had to select Trump because Hillary Clinton was simply a terrible candidate whom they could never support. We have three girls all under thirty in the office and they do not identify with Hillary’s ’60s Bra-Burning attitude. The one thing they did not like was Hillary said women were equal and should be drafted into the army as well.

The Clintons have been touring Canada with their usual exploitation to raise a never-ending pot of money. The attendance has been at best 50%. They are drawing fewer and fewer audiences.

It will only get much worse over the next two years and by the time we get to 2020, it is not going to look very civil out there. We have crossed the line. Violence and hate speech is not the norma. There is no tolerance for people to accept an opposing view.

U.S. Supreme Court decided on March 6th, 1857 (1857.178), ruled (7–2) that a slave (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory (where slavery was prohibited) was not thereby entitled to his freedom because African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Criminalization of Politics

December 1, 2018

The Criminalization of Politics

The system is crooked. So why bother, right? Most Americans don’t vote don’t care. Up to 30% don’t file don’t pay taxes. That’s real freedom! As we explain in our book Splitting Pennies – the world is not as it seems.

Personally, I watched the fixing of the 2000 election from ground zero in Palm Beach County Florida. The registration of dead voters, the confusion over the chads, getting prisoners to vote Republican. Gore should have won by a much larger margin (not that I wanted Gore to win, I’m speaking like an objective observer). Being a trader, I wasn’t much interested in voting or politics which was unusual, as I went to a school where Dan Quale and George Bush Sr. were visitors at our mock political rallies, friends of mine were some of Bush’s biggest donors (that was in the year he lost, of course). Barbara Bush came to one of my baseball games, I had the photo where I shook her hand on my bedroom wall for years (I was 8 years old I thought it was significant like meeting the Queen).

But knowing these people intimately, hanging out with some Kennedy’s from time to time on the Island (or at least, seeing an altercation between them and police at the piano bar), seeing the weirdo stuff, the manipulations of other people, using money to silence people, illegal side businesses, their mafia friends when they needed to ‘get things done’ – I realized that there are 2 parallel worlds. There is the world as I called it ‘As seen on TV’ and then there’s the real world. ZH readers know this well, but as a young child one doesn’t manifest this vision automatically. It takes experience seeing this evil, or in my case both – it was later confirmed by the extensive research into the financial system.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Three (3) Reasons Why Elections Don’t Matter

November 9, 2018

Three (3) Reasons Why Elections Don’t Matter

In so many ways, elections in America have become just another manifestation of bread and circuses; like watching a reality TV show when your house is on fire. It’s why this article was almost named:

“The Inevitableness of Reality Requires Honesty and Acceptance”

Of course, the 2018 Midterm Elections will be analyzed ad nauseam, with other writers and pundits parsing it better than this blogger. However, suffice it to say: There was no Blue Wave and Trump has now solidified leadership of his Republican Party; at least more so than during the last two years of his administration.

In a raucous press conference the day after, Trump claimed victory and said his party “defied history to expand our Senate majority”. The president also said his focus in the days prior to the election remained on the senate and pointed out that most of the candidates for whom he campaigned had won their respective races.

Now, with Never-Trump Republican senators like Bob Corker (R-TN) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ), along with Democrats Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Joe Donnelly (D-IN), and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) all gone – Trump has solidified the senate so as to be in a much better position to navigate any cabinet and court appointments. Obviously, the bloodletting has already begun, starting with Mr. Magoo himself, Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Again, there was no Democratic Party political tidal wave in spite of the non-stop and breathless Blue tsunami warnings of the Orwellian Media which, for a few short weeks, replaced their ceaseless fake-news reporting on Russian collusion.

During midterm elections of America’s past, it was quite common for the non-presidential party to gain fifty or sixty seats in the House of Representatives, yet the 2018 results yielded near half of that. This, in spite of scores of Republican incumbents retiring this year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Twilight of the Intelligentsia

November 8, 2018

The Twilight of the Intelligentsia

I promise, I didn’t time this sequence of posts so that this one would come out the morning after one of the most bitterly fought midterm elections in memory. Nor, of course, did I have advance notice of the outcome, though it wasn’t a surprise to me that the much-ballyhooed “blue wave” would flop as badly as it did. In place of the sweeping rejection of Trump’s presidency that the Democratic Party called for, the usual first-term midterm reaction that brings the minority party back into power in Congress gave the Dems only a thin majority in the House of Representatives. Meanwhile they lost badly in the Senate, where an expanded Republican majority can continue to ratify Trump’s judicial nominees and block any attempt to use the constitutional mechanism of impeachment to remove him from office.

In the weeks ahead we’ll doubtless see any number of attempted analyses of what did or didn’t happen in the midterm elections, spinning an equivocal election to support one or the other side of a savagely divided electorate. Popcorn vendors will have plenty of business as those of us not committed to either of these two contending forces watch the posturing from a comfortable distance. Back beyond the momentary passions of politics and personalities move broader forces, and it’s important to try to sense those now, as the smoke of the election clears and it becomes possible, for those who are willing, to look past the present moment and catch some glimpse of the deeper cycles of history in which elections play a transient role.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Economy Does Not Care Who Won The Midterm Elections

November 7, 2018

The Economy Does Not Care Who Won The Midterm Elections

Over the past few weeks I received numerous requests from readers to publish my predictions on the outcome of the midterm elections, but I did not do so for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I view the election process very differently from many people. I do not see it as legitimate in the slightest, therefore my predictions of the past have been based not on voter turnouts, polls or any other such nonsense. Elections are molded events, framed under the false pretense that the Left/Right paradigm in politics is real. As far as the upper echelons of politics are concerned, the paradigm is completely theatrical.

To be sure, the average American does lean either “left” or “right” on the political spectrum. Such divisions are a natural part of social discourse. However, political theater is designed in most cases to drive citizens away from centrally shared principles of freedom and equal opportunity (not equal outcome) and push them to the far ends of the spectrum toward extremism and zealotry. And to be clear, there is no “good” form of zealotry.

Zealots are not self-aware, and they never subject their own positions to scrutiny. They operate on pure assumption that they are divinely correct in everything they do, and anyone who disagrees with them, even in the slightest, is an enemy that must be destroyed by any means necessary. Zealotry is the root of human atrocity. Zealots are a tidal wave of war and genocide. They are a cancer on the soul of mankind.

Certain groups of people within the establishment, namely globalists that desire total centralized control of every aspect of economy and society, prefer that the public remain as radicalized and divided as possible. For them, zealotry is an asset.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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