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An Oligarchy Has Broken Our Democracy. It Must Be Dislodged

January 20, 2016

An Oligarchy Has Broken Our Democracy. It Must Be Dislodged

January 18, 2016 “Information Clearing House” – “The Guardian” –  Each new election year promises change. We will choose a new president and new representatives in Congress; fresh faces will make their appearances in Washington DC, while old ones disappear. But what about the people who stay in power, one election after another, less exposed to the public eye?

The concept of a ‘Deep State’ has been around for a while, but rarely to describe the United States.The term, used in Kemalist Turkey by the political class, referred to an informal grouping of oligarchs, senior military and intelligence operatives and organized crime, who ran the state along anti-democratic lines regardless of who was formally in power.

I define the American Deep State as a hybrid association of elements of government and top-level finance and industry that is able, through campaign financing of elected officials, influence networks and co-option via the promise of lucrative post-government careers, to govern the United States in spite of elections and without reference to the consent of the governed.

These operatives use their proximity to power and ability to offer high-paying jobs to government officials to achieve outcomes foreclosed to ordinary citizens. As professor Martin Gilens of Princeton, who studied the correlation between American popular opinion polls and public policy outcomes,concluded: “[T]he preferences of economic elites have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do … ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.”

America’s growing income disparity is not the inevitable result of impersonal forces like globalization or automation. It is the outcome of hundreds of trade, tax and regulatory measures that achieved the preferred outcome – enrichment – of economic elites who contribute to politicians.

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

Federally Funded Think Tank Explains How U.S. Government Could Attack Decentralized Digital Currencies

January 14, 2016

Federally Funded Think Tank Explains How U.S. Government Could Attack Decentralized Digital Currencies

Screen Shot 2016-01-08 at 9.26.18 AM

The RAND report goes one step further and suggests that governments should use advanced technical means to actively disrupt virtual currencies. That includes terrorist groups, but also peaceful deployments of digital currencies by other non-state actors, and a general war on privacy and encryption.

According to the RAND analysts, virtual currencies demonstrate a resilient means of storing data in a highly distributed fashion that is very hard to corrupt and could permit, for instance, information dissemination (blogs, social media, forums, news websites) that is resilient to nation-state interference.

The RAND report seems to suggest pre-emptive strikes and notes that “perhaps the best strategy for the United States and its allies to thwart a VC [virtual currency] deployment would be to target those properties of a VC that would most increase its acceptance, most notably transaction anonymity, security, and availability.”

– From the Bitcoin Magazine article: The RAND Corporation Report: National Security Implications of Virtual Currency

When government devolves into little more than a Banana Republic-style oligarchy burgeoned by a cadre of media propagandists and corrupt politicians, the only objective of said government is to secure, protect and grow its wealth and power. In such circumstances, which are the historical norm not the exception, “the people” come to be seen as the enemy by government and the oligarchy that controls it. Indeed, this is the unfortunate state of affairs in which we find ourselves today.

Decentralized virtual currencies pose a clear threat to government control, which is why their deployment concerns the status quo so much. Some of these concerns were outlined in a recent RAND Corporation report titled, “National Security Implications of Virtual Currency.” Bitcoin Magazine covered some of its more troubling angles in an article published a couple of days ago.

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

Playing the Government’s Game: When It Comes to Violence, We All Lose

January 4, 2016

Playing the Government’s Game: When It Comes to Violence, We All Lose

By John Whitehead, constitutional and civil rights attorney, the Rutherford Institute.

“When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.”—John Lennon

Yes, the government is corrupt.

Yes, the system is broken. By broken, I mean it’s “dysfunctional, gridlocked, and, in general, incapable of doing what needs to be done.”

Yes, the government is out of control and overreaching on almost every front.

Yes, the government’s excesses—pork barrel spending, endless wars, etc.—are pushing the nation to a breaking point.

Yes, many Americans are afraid. Who wouldn’t be afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government?

Yes, the citizenry has little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.

Yes, in the eyes of the American surveillance state, “we the people” are little more than suspects and criminals to be monitored, policed, prosecuted and imprisoned. As former law professor John Baker, who has studied the growing problem of overcriminalization, noted, “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime.”

Yes, the United States of America is not the democracy that is purports to be, but rather an oligarchy ruled by a wealthy corporate elite.

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

America 2016: What Happens When a Nation Gives Too Much Political Power to the Super Rich

January 3, 2016

America 2016: What Happens When a Nation Gives Too Much Political Power to the Super Rich 

    Sheldon Adelson. (East Coast Gambler / CC BY 2.0)

As the high-powered shenanigans of Las Vegas casino mogul and GOP bankroller Sheldon Adelson show, “Oligarchy, rule by the few, also tends to become rule by the monstrously self-centered,” Paul Krugman writes in The New York Times.

Krugman continues in a column published Friday:

[…] it’s obvious […] that extreme wealth can do extreme spiritual damage. Take someone whose personality might have been merely disagreeable under normal circumstances, and give him the kind of wealth that lets him surround himself with sycophants and usually get whatever he wants. It’s not hard to see how he could become almost pathologically self-regarding and unconcerned with others. […]

Modern America is a society in which a growing share of income and wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, and these people have huge political influence — in the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign, around half the contributions came from fewer than 200 wealthy families. The usual concern about this march toward oligarchy is that the interests and policy preferences of the very rich are quite different from those of the population at large, and that is surely the biggest problem. […]

The most obvious illustration of the point I’ve been making is the man now leading the Republican field. Donald Trump would probably have been a blowhard and a bully whatever his social station. But his billions have insulated him from the external checks that limit most people’s ability to act out their narcissistic tendencies; nobody has ever been in a position to tell him, “You’re fired!” And the result is the face you keep seeing on your TV. […]

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

The War on Encryption and Bitcoin – Nothing to Do with Terrorism, Everything to Do with State Control

November 21, 2015

The War on Encryption and Bitcoin – Nothing to Do with Terrorism, Everything to Do with State Control

In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people. 

– James Madison, Founding Father and 4th President of these United States

Politicians and intelligence agencies throughout the Western world are currently engaged in an all out, shameless propaganda campaign to exploit the recent terror attacks in Paris to convince the citizenry that it should relinquish privacy for absolutely no reason.

The primary targets of the post-attack push have been encryption generally, and Bitcoin specifically. Of course, you don’t need me to tell you that these are two sides of the same coin. Both strong encryption for communication, and Bitcoin for transferring value, provide a level of freedom and dynamism outside of the oligarch-controlled, centrally planned, feudal global economic system. As such, these two tools must be demonized and eradicated to the extent possible.

Yesterday, in the post, Government is Lying – New Study Shows No Increase in Use of Encryption by Jihadists Since Snowden Revelations, I explained in detail how the whole push against encryption is based on total lies and fear-mongering. The key points were as follows:

  1. Terrorists have not increased their use of encryption since the Snowden revelations.
  2. The cat is already out of the bag when it comes to encryption software, and there’s nothing government can do to stop terrorists from using it.

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

Verging on Plutocracy? Getting Real About the Unelected Dictatorship

November 20, 2015

Verging on Plutocracy? Getting Real About the Unelected Dictatorship

plutocrat

In politics as in medicine, excessively mild remedies are typically based on overly placid diagnoses. Look, for example, at the highly esteemed Columbia University historian Eric Foner’s recent letter of congratulations and advice to Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in The Nation. As I have argued in a previous CounterPunch essay, Foner’s missive failed to correct Sanders on the candidate’s incredibly tepid and watered-down definition of democratic socialism as little more than a Scandinavian welfare state. It sent Eugene Debs spinning in his grave when it argued that “socialism today” is about “the need to rein in the excesses of capitalism.” Those were the exact same words used by Hillary Clinton in the first Democratic Party presidential debate, reflecting on what she feels is occasionally necessary to preserve the profits system and what she felt should never be confused with socialism.

There’s one part of Foner’s letter that I forgot to mention in my previous essay even though it is intimately related to his alignment with milquetoast radicalism and Hillary’s fake-progressive corporatism. It comes at the beginning of the letter’s sixth paragraph, when he says that contemporary socialism seeks “to empower ordinary people in a political system verging on plutocracy.”

I’m all for and indeed about empowering ordinary people, but I had to stop and read that statement a second time and ask myself: did the nation’s leading left-liberal historian really just describe contemporary U.S. politics as merely verging on plutocracy? You don’t have to be a radical Marxist to think that’s pussyfooting around the matter. Over the past three plus decades, liberal mainstream political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern) reported last year, the U.S. political system has become “an oligarchy,” where wealthy elites and their corporations “rule.”

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

VIDEO: Chris Hedges on the Big Lie of Neoliberalism and the Very Real Threat of a President Trump

September 14, 2015

VIDEO: Chris Hedges on the Big Lie of Neoliberalism and the Very Real Threat of a President Trump

Chris Hedges doesn’t spare Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or even Bernie Sanders in this wide-ranging take on the big swindle of neoliberalism and his warning for the future in the hands of a “rapacious oligarchic elite.”

Hedges made his statements during a speech he gave in Toronto on Sept. 3, drawing from his newest book, “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” as well as from his Aug. 30 Truthdig column, “The Great Unraveling.”

Some particularly good lines from Hedges’ speech include these well-taken points: “Every promise made by the proponents of neoliberalism is a lie,” “The left is still alive … barely,”  and “Democracy, especially in the U.S., is a farce, vomiting up right-wing demagogues such as Donald Trump, who has a serious chance to become the Republican presidential nominee—and perhaps even president.”

Find out how Hedges views our country’s current predicament, as well as Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, in the video below (via YouTube):

 

The Oligarch Recovery – Low Income Americans Can’t Afford to Live in Any Metro Area

September 1, 2015

The Oligarch Recovery – Low Income Americans Can’t Afford to Live in Any Metro Area

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We were told we needed to bail out Wall Street in order to save Main Street. Well the results are in…

Wall Street has never done better, and Main Street has never done worse.

From the Huffington Post:

Low-income workers and their families do not earn enough to live in even the least expensive metropolitan American communities, according to a new analysis of families’ living costs published Wednesday.

The analysis, released by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, is an annual update of the think tank’s Family Budget Calculator that reflects new 2014 data. The Family Budget Calculator is a formula designed to determine the income “required for families to attain a secure yet modest standard of living” in 618 different communities across the country that the U.S. Census Bureau defines as metropolitan areas. The formula uses data collected by the government and some nonprofit groups to measure costs of housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, “other necessities” like clothing, and taxes for families of 10 different compositions in these specific locales.

The updated Family Budget Calculator shows that even the most affordable metropolitan areas in the country are beyond the reach of millions of American families with incomes above the official federal poverty level. The official federal poverty level for a family of two parents and two children in 2014 was $24,008, according to the EPI. But the least expensive metropolitan area in the country for this family type is Morristown, Tennessee, where a family needs an income of $49,114, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s budget calculator.

The Economic Policy Institute also estimates that minimum-wage workers — who almost universally earn less than the federal poverty level — lack the income needed to make an adequate living in any of the communities surveyed, even if they are single and childless. The think tank notes that this includes minimum-wage workers living in cities or states with a higher minimum wage than the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, or $15,080 a year for a full-time worker.

 

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

America’s Biggest Lie – Dictatorship Or Democracy?

August 7, 2015

America’s Biggest Lie – Dictatorship Or Democracy?

The Deceit About Being A ‘Republic’ Versus A ‘Democracy’

One of my recent articles at several sites, “Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy” generated many reader-comments (such as here) saying things like, “The US has always been a republic. There are no true democracies in the modern world.” This will be my response to all who expressed that view:

You miss the point that Carter made, and that I there documented to be true, which is no semantic issue (“democracy” versus “republic”), but which instead concerns the basic lie about what the United States of America really is now:

Is this a representative democracy, such as its Founders intended and such as it was famous and honored throughout the world for being, until at least around 1980?

Or, is it instead a nation that’s ruled by a tiny elite, an aristocracy, which in this country consists of its 500 or so billionaires, who buy the politicians whom ‘we’ ‘elect’?

Is the U.S. now, basically, a fraud? Is it a dictatorship, instead of a democracy? Is it some kind of aristocracy, which controls the government here?

That’s not a semantic issue, at all. America’s first political party was called the “Democratic Republican Party,” but could as well have been called the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, because those two terms are essentially synonymous in any nation that has a large population, in which the public elect representatives to represent them, instead of directly vote on the policies that the government is to pursue — to place into its law, and to enforce by its duly authorized police or otherwise, and to adjudicate by democratically appointed judges and/or juries.

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

 

 

Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery”

July 31, 2015

Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery”

Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday on the nationally-syndicated radio show The Thom Hartmann Program that the United States is now an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” has created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, “look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”

Carter was responding to a question from Hartmann about recent Supreme Court decisions on campaign financing like Citizens United.

Transcript:

HARTMANN: Our Supreme Court has now said, “unlimited money in politics.” It seems like a violation of principles of democracy … your thoughts on that?

CARTER: It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congressmembers. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over … The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody’s who’s already in Congress has a lot more to sell to an avid contributor than somebody’s who’s just a challenger.

 

I’ve added Carter’s statement to this list of politicians acknowledging that money controls politics. Please let me know if you have other good examples.

(Thanks to Sam Sacks for pointing this out.)

 

Concentrated Wealth + Widespread Stupidity = End Of Democracy

July 20, 2015

Concentrated Wealth + Widespread Stupidity = End Of Democracy

Today’s America is not a democracy:

That terrific investigative news report by Paul Blumenthal at Huffington Post, on 9 November 2013,penetrated beyond what the U.S. oligarchy — or more traditionally called aristocracy — requires its dark-money groups to disclose to the Federal Election Commission; and so Blumenthal researched also into what dark-money groups are required to report to the IRS (America’s tax-authorities). 

This way, Blumenthal was able to discover, for example, that a “dark-money shell game allowed the Wisconsin Club for Growth to influence the elections with both its own ads and those of seemingly unrelated conservative groups with different public agendas. … The trail of cash moving from dark money nonprofit to dark money nonprofit can be traced, in part, through public records of the groups contributing it,” but only by accessing both FEC and IRS public records. And, even then, the picture was incomplete, because the 5-Republican bare majority, on the infamous pro-aristocracy 2010 U.S. Supreme Court Citizens United decision, by five traitors to the U.S. Constitution (which all judges are sworn to protect), prohibits public access to a complete picture of how (like in that Wisconsin election) a few psychopathic billionaires, plus millions of faith-driven fools they sucker with myth-affirming lies, can destroy government of the people, by the people, for the people, and turn it instead into government of the people, by the aristocracy, for the aristocracy. Blumenthal also showed the same billionaires+suckers system replacing democracy in other states. (Today’s Greece is a more extreme case of the same thing. Perhaps what’s today in Greece will betomorrow in America.)

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

 

The Constitution of the EU’s Dictatorship

July 17, 2015

The Constitution of the EU’s Dictatorship

It’s here:

http://www.esm.europa.eu/pdf/ESM Treaty consolidated 13-03-2014.pdf

That’s the treaty establishing (which was originally done in 2012) the ultimate lending-fund for what the EU now officially considers to be a permanent economic crisis in Europe, of member-nations that are experiencing “severe financing problems,” and that are therefore continually ripe for asset-stripping by aristocrats.

It’s called the European Stability Mechanism.

It’s anything but that. Here is what it actually does:

http://corporateeurope.org/economy-finance/2014/06/european-stability-mechanism-esm-no-democracy-bailout-fund

In other words: it establishes the European bureaucracy to serve global aristocrats, so as to help them asset-strip the European populations of corrupt member-nations. These bureaucrats get transferred back-and-forth between this bureaucracy and the big financial institutions (which also are dependent upon the same billionaires), so that these bureaucratic servants of the aristocracy can themselves gradually emerge as aristocrats, basically joining (now becoming principals, no longer merely agents of) the aristocratic financial war stripping the public.

Here are some key provisions of this “Treaty,” or Europe’s (or the EU’s) new constitution:

Article 34. Professional secrecy. The Members or former Members of the Board of Governors and of the Board of Directors and any other persons who work or have worked for or in connection with the ESM shall not disclose information that is subject to professional secrecy. They shall be required, even after their duties have ceased, not to disclose information of the kind covered by the obligation of professional secrecy. 

Article 35. Immunities of persons. 1. In the interest of the ESM, the Chairperson of the Board of Governors, Governors, alternate Governors, Directors, alternate Directors, as well as the Managing Director and other staff members shall be immune from legal proceedings with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity and shall enjoy inviolability in respect of their official papers and documents. …

 

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

Former Senator Opines on the Incredible Corruption in America and the Fourth Branch of Government

June 30, 2015

Former Senator Opines on the Incredible Corruption in America and the Fourth Branch of Government

Screen Shot 2015-06-29 at 6.52.57 PM

On a more personal level, how can public service be promoted as an ideal to young people when this sewer corrupts our Republic? At this point in early twenty-first-century America, the greatest service our nation’s young people could provide is to lead an army of outraged young Americans armed with brooms on a crusade to sweep out the rascals and rid our capital of the money changers, rent seekers, revolving door dancers, and special interest deal makers and power brokers and send them back home to make an honest living, that is, if they still remember how to do so.

Our ancestors did not depart Europe and elsewhere to seek freedom and self-government alone. They came to these shores to escape social and political systems that were corrosive and corrupt. Two and a quarter centuries later, we are returning to those European practices. We are in danger of becoming a different kind of nation, one our founders would not recognize and would deplore.

In addition to the rise of the national security state, and the concentration of wealth and power in America, no development in modern times sets us apart more from the nation originally bequeathed to us than the rise of the special interest state. There is a Gresham’s law related to the republican ideal. Bad politics drives out good politics. Legalized corruption drives men and women of stature, honor, and dignity out of the halls of government. Self-respecting individuals cannot long tolerate a system of election and reelection so dependent on cultivating the favor of those known to expect access in return. Such a system is corrosive to the soul.

– From the Gary Hart article, Gary Hart: America’s Founding Principles Are in Danger of Corruption

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

 

Capitalism Has Devolved Into Looting

June 30, 2015

Capitalism Has Devolved Into Looting

In the Western World Capitalism Has Devolved Into Looting

…when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed.   –  Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged”

There’s no such thing as markets anymore – only interventions.  –  Chris Powell, co-founder and Treasurer of GATA

Ayn Rand is a pariah among those who believe that government is our benefactor. There are times and conditions when government can be a benefactor of the people. But not in the Western world at the present time. As Michael Hudson and I agree, Western central banks refuse to create money to finance economy recovery. Money is created only for the benefit of the oligarchs’ banks in order that the oligarchs can continue to control the governments.

In the US for the past seven years the Federal Reserve has provided cheap bank reserves for the banks to lend at a markup or to speculate with. Banks are no longer suppliers of capital for productive investments and employment. Instead banks invest in speculation, arbitrage, derivatives, financing corporate takeovers and stock buybacks. The Fed has made it unnecessary for banks to pay for deposits. Instead, the banks get free money and charge consumers with negative interest rates for making deposits. For seven years Americans have, thanks to the utterly corrupt Federal Reserve and US government, been deprived of interest on their savings. In the Western world today, savers are penalized, not rewarded.

In Greece and Europe the banks are the oligarchs’ method of control just as the Federal Reserve is in the US and the Bank of England in the UK and the European Central Bank in the EU. The same in Canada, Australia, and Japan.

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

 

 

US criminal economics: TPP secret treaty = ‘constitutional republic,’ debt = ‘money’, 500 million+ dead from poverty = ‘necessary.’ Had enough to demand arrests?

June 23, 2015

US criminal economics: TPP secret treaty = ‘constitutional republic,’ debt = ‘money’, 500 million+ dead from poverty = ‘necessary.’ Had enough to demand arrests?

hat tip: Ellen Brown, Web of Debt Blog

“Psychopaths are unable to form emotional attachments or feel real empathy with others, although they often have disarming or even charming personalities. Psychopaths are very manipulative and can easily gain people’s trust. They learn to mimic emotions, despite their inability to actually feel them, and will appear normal to unsuspecting people… When committing crimes, psychopaths carefully plan out every detail in advance and often have contingency plans in place. Unlike their sociopathic counterparts, psychopathic criminals are cool, calm, and meticulous.” – Psychology Today

The .01% psychopathic oligarch “leaders” (and here) in US government, banking/finance, and corporate media wage war upon the 99.99%  in ~100 crucial areas. Aside from lie-began overt unlawful military Wars of Aggression connected to economic domination with the US starting over 200 such armed attacks since WW2 and war-murdering ~30 million people (with these crimes “covered” by corporate media, let’s consider three central economic policies:

 

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

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