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Aaron Maté Interviews ; Is Interviewed on ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on October 29, 2020

The below video is an interview with José Bustani, “the former head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) reveals new details of how he was targeted in the lead-up to the Iraq war, when the Bush administration engineered his ouster…

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/10/yvonne-lorenzo/aaron-mate-interviews-is-interviewed-on-russia-russia-russia/

By Yvonne Lorenzo

Award winning journalist Aaron Maté might be best known for his writings, featured on Real Clear Politics and The Grayzone, but he hosts a show on YouTube called “Push Back” and as always, these programs are worthy of attention of not only libertarians but truth seekers and anti-war advocates. Recently, several Pushback videos were posted to YouTube (and I do hope the Grayzone, considering YouTube’s recent purges, continues to be hosted), which I will outline below but also Aaron Maté himself was interviewed to voice his concerns and opinions as well. Of course, no “main stream” or “legacy media” platform would cover such topics.

The below video is an interview with José Bustani, “the former head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) reveals new details of how he was targeted in the lead-up to the Iraq war, when the Bush administration engineered his ouster for impeding its plans to invade,” which was posted on October 21st.

Also posted is this brief interview with Noam Chomsky, who “criticizes the chemical watchdog for suppressing, under US pressure, evidence that undermined the pretext for the US-led bombing of Syria in April 2018. The censorship recently extended to the UN Security Council, where the US, UK, and France blocked former OPCW Director General José Bustani from testifying in support of the inspectors whose findings were kept from the public.”

On October 23rd, Aaron featured this interview with former CIA officer Ray McGovern, well known to readers of LewRockwell.com, “Blaming Moscow for Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russiagate disinformation” in which he discusses “discusses the widespread disinformation about ‘Russian disinformation,’ and why it raises new questions about the conduct and claims of the intelligence officials behind Russiagate.

Lastly, Aaron himself is subject of a wide-ranging interview with Polly Boyko of RT “OPCW cover-ups, Russiagate and US Elections: Polly Talks to Aaron Maté.”

Each and everyone of these videos are important, perhaps more so than all the “political theater” surrounding us.

The Best of Yvonne Lorenzo

Yvonne Lorenzo [send her email] makes her home in New England in a house full to bursting with books, including works on classical Greece and Russian history and literature, and has contributed to LewRockwell.com, Unz.com and to TheSaker.is. Her interests include gardening, mythology, ancient history, The Electric Universe, and classical music, especially the compositions of Handel, Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Wagner and the Bel Canto repertoire. She is the author of he Spear of Odin Trilogy: Son of Thunder, The Cloak of Freya and the just published The Well of Mimir.

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Compelled Speech and the Perils of ‘PruneYard v. Robins’ | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on October 28, 2020

However, it is to say that, given the centrality of speech to our self-definitions, (1) the general perception that compelled speech is insincere, (2) the possibility of disclaiming compelled speech, and (3) the state’s non-requirement of a particular type of speech, are not adequate justifications for requiring people to promote messages against their will.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/compelled-speech-and-the-perils-of-pruneyard-v-robins/

by Tommy Raskin

Humans are speakers. When we go to work, buy paintings, send birthday presents to friends, vote, and choose TV shows to watch at night, we don’t merely “do”—we say. We say what our preferences, ideals, and distastes are in the realms of commerce, art, love, and politics. 

But sometimes we show the world who we are by not speaking. By deliberately refraining from saying the Pledge of Allegiance, for example, we convey either disinterest in or opposition to what the flag represents. Thus, if our constant speaking serves an important expressive function, then our regular not speaking serves an important expressive function as well. Some libertarians and anarchists argue that the latter serves such an important function as to render compelled speech unjustifiable in every conceivable case. But we need not adopt this absolutist position in order to doubt the justifiability of the heavy-handed approach to compelled speech that the Supreme Court, pursuant to its decision in PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins (1980), has asked us to embrace. 

The controversy in PruneYard erupted when a group of teenagers entered the PruneYard Shopping Center to circulate a petition concerning a United Nations resolution on Zionism. Enforcing the mall’s policy against circulating petitions, security guards kicked out the teenagers, who proceeded to argue in court that their right to circulate a petition at malls like PruneYard was enshrined in the California Constitution. In response, the shopping mall’s managers argued that they and other private property owners have a “First Amendment right not to be forced by the state” to use their “property as a forum for the speech” of members of the public.  

Speaking through Justice William Rehnquist, the Supreme Court sided with the teenagers, finding that a statute forcing the shopping mall to host these young speakers did not amount to an impermissible imposition on the shopping mall managers. The Court reasoned, in the first place, that because the mall was open to large numbers of people, those who encountered the teenagers were unlikely to assume that the views of these young speakers reflected the views of the shopping mall’s managers. Besides, if the managers were concerned that their own views would be conflated with those of the teenagers, the managers could always post signs indicating that the shopping mall’s management did not necessarily endorse the views of people speaking in the mall.

The Court also argued that because the state was not requiring the shopping mall managers to host any particular group of speakers but was instead requiring them to host speakers generally, the state was not using the shopping mall managers to promote a particular point of view. Against that backdrop, the Court concluded, any compulsion to speak in this case was on balance justified. 

Insofar as the Court, relying on its decision in PruneYard, would be prepared to deploy this reasoning in efforts to compel individuals (rather than corporations) to support speech with which those individuals would prefer not to associate, this reasoning is quite dangerous indeed. To see how, imagine that the leadership of some small town (say, Leith, North Dakota) declares, in the interest of “communal bonding,” that every town citizen must wear a tee shirt decorated by the citizen’s neighbors once a year. Surrounded by white supremacist neighbors, an anti-racist is thereby forced to wear a tee shirt adorned with swastikas on an annual basis. The anti-racist objects, arguing that it disgraces those who perished in the Holocaust for her to affix such an odious symbol to her person.

The Court, if guided by PruneYard, would presumably reject the anti-racist’s claim. For widespread knowledge of this annual “tee shirt decoration event” suggests that people will not conclude that the tee shirt’s anti-racist wearer actually supports Nazism. And, in any event, if the anti-racist is worried about the message that her tee shirt is conveying, she can always match her tee shirt with a hat that says, “I despise Nazism and am wearing this vile tee shirt only because I have a legal obligation to do so” (if she can fit all of that on one hat!). Moreover, the state is mandating, not that the anti-racist endorse any particular message, but “merely” that she serve as a walking forum for speech to be determined by private citizens. 

If the Court’s reasoning here would serve as adequate consolation to the anti-racist, then perhaps PruneYard is convincingly argued after all. But there are reasons to suppose that the anti-racist would not be—and should not be—satisfied. In the first place, potential speakers can have good reason to desire not to speak even when those speakers know that others would not consider the speakers’ speech “sincere.” It is the reason that some actors refuse to use the most vile racial slurs on stage, for example, and the reason that most refuse to engage in intimate sexual acts for an audience. No matter what others would think, the would-be speakers themselves would feel that they are acting discordant with their values. By the same token, the anti-racist would feel, probably appropriately, that she is being untrue to herself by wearing a swastika tee shirt, even if nobody would assume that her wearing the shirt signifies a genuine commitment to Nazism. 

Still, defenders of this hypothetical mandate—like the defenders of Rehnquist’s reasoning—might point out that the government itself would not be requiring the propagation of any particular message in this case and that, in practice, a multitude of views would probably make their way onto the anti-racist’s tee shirt. Perhaps this is right; even so, it hardly justifies the decree. Suppose instead that the law materializes during WWII amid the outbreak of hostilities between the Soviet Union and Germany. Even if just half of the anti-racist’s neighbors draw swastikas on the anti-racist’s shirt (and everyone else draws a hammer and sickle), the anti-racist can still rightly object to her being forced to display the swastika. And if the coerced individual is pacifistic or apolitical, she can rightly object to being forced to display either symbol. 

On these grounds, one can and ought to condemn the Court’s justification for siding with the teenaged protesters in PruneYard. This is not to say that the outcome of the case was wrong; perhaps corporations, being creatures of the state, have more in common with the state than they do with citizens, and perhaps corporations’ speech interests, therefore, should not be treated as solicitously as the speech interests of humans should be. However, it is to say that, given the centrality of speech to our self-definitions, (1) the general perception that compelled speech is insincere, (2) the possibility of disclaiming compelled speech, and (3) the state’s non-requirement of a particular type of speech, are not adequate justifications for requiring people to promote messages against their will.

About Tommy Raskin

Tommy Raskin has contributed to Amherst Magazine, the Good Men Project, and Foreign Policy in Focus. He lives in Amherst, MA.

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THE REVELATIONS OF WIKILEAKS: No. 9—Opening the CIA’s Vault – Consortiumnews

Posted by M. C. on October 28, 2020

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/10/26/the-revelations-of-wikileaks-no-9-opening-the-cias-vault/

By Patrick LawrenceSpecial to Consortium News

On Feb. 6, 2017, WikiLeaks released documents detailing the Central Intelligence Agency’s espionage program in the months leading up to and following France’s presidential election in 2012. 

The agency used spies and cyberweapons to infiltrate and hack into the major political parties with competing candidates — the Socialists, the National Front and the Union for a Popular Movement. Their candidates — respectively François Hollande, Marine Le Pen and incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy — were also spied upon individually, as were many other prominent political figures.

The objectives of the program included ascertaining the contending parties’ political strategies and platforms, their views of the U.S., and their relations with the European Union, with other European nations (Germany, Britain) as well as Israel, Palestine, Libya, Syria, and others. The CIA’s French operation lasted 10 months, beginning in November 2011 and enduring until September 2012, several months after Hollande won the election and formed a Socialist government.

WikiLeaks’ disclosure of the agency’s project bears a special irony: It was just as WikiLeaks published this material in 2017 that the CIA helped propagate unsubstantiated (and later discounted) “intelligence” that Russian hackers and propagandists were interfering with France’s presidential election that year. Similar allegations (similarly lacking in evidence) were floated as the European Union held parliamentary elections in May 2019.

As WikiLeaks reported at the time of the releases on the CIA’s covert activities in France, those revelations were to serve “as context for its forthcoming CIA Vault 7 series.” WikiLeaks’ apparent intent was to display a CIA’s hacking operation in action.

Vault 7, the subject of this latest report on the history of WikiLeaks disclosures, stands as the most extensive publication on record of classified and confidential CIA documents. Never before and not since have the agency’s innumerable programs and capabilities been so thoroughly exposed to public scrutiny.

Biggest Since Snowden

Rally in Germany in support of Edward Snowden, Aug. 30, 2014. (Markus Winkler, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and publisher, described the Vault 7 publications as the most significant since Edward Snowden, the former CIA data analyst, released an unprecedented trove of National Security Agency documents in the summer of 2013. 

The Vault 7 series concerns the extraordinarily sophisticated inventory of cyber weapons the CIA has developed to spy on or hack into the communications of any person or entity it targets. Apart from the espionage function, certain of the programs in Vault 7 — this designation is WikiLeaks’, not the CIA’s — can also plant documents and data without being detected as the source — when, for example, the agency wishes to compromise an adversary via a false-flag operation.

The program wherein this capability was developed, called Marble, may have been crucial to creating the orthodox “narrative” that Russia was responsible for the theft of Democratic Party email in 2016 — the cornerstone allegation in the construct we now call Russiagate.

The Vault 7 releases expose the CIA’s hacking activities from 2013 to 2016. The series began on March 7, 2017, with the publication of “Year Zero,” an introductory survey and analysis of the agency’s globally deployed hacking programs. The Vault 7 series ran for six months, concluding on Sept. 7, 2017.

Complete as of that date, the series is comprised of 23 publications, each of which focuses on an individual hacking or cyber-espionage program. Marble is one of these. 

The CIA’s development of its hacking capabilities began as a joint effort with the National Security Agency. But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, begun in 2001 and 2003 respectively, proved a turning point for the agency. It was during this time that the CIA, as WikiLeaks puts it in its introduction to the Vault 7 series, “gained political and budgetary preeminence over the NSA.”

According to former U.S. intelligence sources, the CIA has invested some $175 billion in its vast variety of cyber programs in the post–2001 years. “The agency’s hacking division, WikiLeaks notes, “freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA’s hacking capacities.”

A Near Deal to Free Assange

Assange in 2014, while in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. (Cancillería del Ecuador, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

WikiLeaks launched the Vault 7 series at a delicate moment for Assange, who was at the time taking asylum at the Ecuadoran embassy in London.

Shortly after Donald Trump took office in January 2017, Assange’s attorneys approached a lawyer named Adam Waldman, who was noted for his Washington connections.

Assange’s team proposed negotiations that would commit the U.S. to granting Assange limited immunity and safe passage from the Ecuadoran embassy in exchange for his agreement to limit publication of classified CIA documents. The agency knew by this time that WikiLeaks had an extensive inventory of CIA documents it was prepared to publish. These included what WikiLeaks soon named Vault 7.

Crucially, Assange signaled that he was also willing to reveal technical evidence that would shed light on who was not responsible for the theft of email from the Democratic National Committee in mid–2016. This was key: By this time the “narrative” that Russia had hacked the DNC’s computer servers was well-established; the Democratic Party, the intelligence agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the media were heavily invested in it. Assange, while observing the WikiLeaks principle of not revealing sources, had by this time asserted that Russia had nothing to do with the intrusion.  

The Justice Department and Assange’s attorneys drafted an immunity deal in the course of the negotiations that both sides agreed to pursue. The attorneys’ initial contact, through Waldman, was a DoJ official named Bruce Ohr. The lead DoJ negotiator was named David Laufman. When WikiLeaks released “Year Zero” on March 7, 2017, these negotiations were still in progress; the release had no apparent impact on the talks.

But at this point the contacts between Assange and the U.S. government took a fateful turn. The only full account of the events summarized below was written by John Solomon, who has followed the Russiagate phenomenon from the first, and was published in The Hill on June 25, 2018.

Shortly after negotiations began, Waldman, the go-between, contacted Mark Warner, the Democratic senator from Virginia, to see if the Senate Intelligence Committee, of which Warner was vice-chairman, wished to contact Assange on its own in connection to matters related to Russia. This proved a miscalculation.

Sen. Mark Warner giving keynote address during 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. (Qqqqqq, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Warner, who had vigorously pressed the Russiagate narrative from the first, soon contacted James Comey, then the FBI director. Comey was also an aggressive Russiagate advocate and had a direct interest in sustaining the official account of events: It was while he ran the FBI that the bureau worked with CrowdStrike, the infamous cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC, to build what is now demonstrated to be an entirely false case to support the Democrats’ assertions of Russian responsibility for the mail intrusion.

Any proof that Russia had no role in the DNC mail theft would have discredited the FBI and Comey and very likely destroyed the career of Comey and numerous others. 

Comey, working through Sen. Warner, immediately ordered Waldman to cut off the Assange–DoJ talks. Although negotiations continued a brief while longer, Comey had effectively dealt them a soon-to-be-fatal blow. By this time WikiLeaks had released two other Vault 7 document collections, including what it called the Marble Framework.

The DoJ finally broke off the negotiations on April 7, when WikiLeaks released a fourth set of documents, this one called Grasshopper. Six days later Mike Pompeo, then CIA director, gave a notably aggressive speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Washington think tank, in which he called WikiLeaks “a nonstate hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” https://www.youtube.com/embed/pe3ApagvwNM?enablejsapi=1&autoplay=0&cc_load_policy=0&iv_load_policy=1&loop=0&modestbranding=1&fs=1&playsinline=0&controls=1&color=red&rel=0&autohide=2&theme=dark&

With the CSIS speech, Pompeo effectively opened the Trump administration’s rigorously pressed campaign to have Assange extradited from Britain. The WikiLeaks founder appears never to have had another chance to negotiate an agreement providing for his freedom.

Run Amok

The Vault 7 releases continued at a steady pace, roughly four a month, for the next five months. The documents WikiLeaks made public, along with descriptions of the programs WikiLeaks deemed significant, can be found via its “Vault 7: Projects” report. Taken together they describe an expensively funded U.S. government organization that has run frighteningly amok, operates with no regard for U.S. or international law, and stands entirely beyond civilian control. Many of the projects exposed in the Vault 7 releases, and very likely most or all, violate Fourth Amendment rights to privacy and the CIA’s charter, which bars the agency from activity on U.S. soil.

Former CIA Director Allen Dulles. (CIA)

The history of the CIA, reaching back to Allen Dulles’ tenure as director (1953 to 1961), indicates that from its earliest days it entertained a diabolic desire to accumulate the power to operate with no reference to constraints of any kind, including those imposed by ordinary standards of decency. In this way it was effectively the id of America’s exceptionalist consciousness. What we see in the Vault 7 series is the perversely logical outcome of this culture of limitless impunity and immunity.

By the end of 2016, the hacking division of the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence had more than 1,000 hacking, malware, virus-implanting, remote-control and Trojan-horse programs in its inventory. These comprised more than 700 million lines of computer code.

Former CIA and NSA officials told Consortium News that a line of code costs roughly $25 to produce, putting the cost of the agency’s hacking tools over the years these programs were developed at $175 billion. “The CIA had created its ‘own NSA,’” WikiLeaks noted when it began releasing the Vault 7 publications, “with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.”

What follows are accounts and summaries of the most significant of the 23 Vault 7 releases. We present these chronologically, the earliest first, to give readers a clear idea of how WikiLeaks organized and presented the Vault 7 project. 

Year Zero

March 7, 2017

With the publication of “Year Zero,” it was immediately clear that WikiLeaks had penetrated into or very near the core of the CIA’s cyberoperations. This first Vault 7 release is comprised of 8,761 documents and files obtained from what WikiLeaks describes as “an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia, the agency’s headquarters.

Aerial view of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. (Carol M. Highsmith, Wikimedia Commons)

As WikiLeaks notes, the agency had “lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal” shortly before it published “Year Zero.” There had been a massive leak, to put this point in simple terms. “The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner,” WikiLeaks reported, “one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.” This occurred at some point in 2016.

“Year Zero” serves as an overview of “the scope and direction of the CIA’s global hacking program” and an introduction to material included in the Vault 7 releases to follow. The agency’s inventory of tools was the purview — and we can assume continues to be so — of the Engineering Development Group (EDG), a technology department under the authority of the Center for Cyber Intelligence.

The EDG also tests and operates its products once they are perfected and added to the agency’s arsenal. The engineering group, Wikileaks reported, has developed some 500 projects, each with its own malware and hacking tools. The EDG’s focus is on penetration, implanting, control and exfiltration. “Year Zero” analyzes the most important of these. 

High among the objectives of Vault 7 programs was to achieve the capability of penetrating the manufacturers of cellular telephones and other electronic devices for a variety of operations. Among the products targeted for this purpose were Apple’s iPhone and iPad, Google’s Android operating system, Microsoft Windows and Samsung televisions.

Programs included in the Vault 7 collection were designed to hack these and other commonly used devices and systems remotely so they can corrupt the targets and also send the CIA the owner’s geographic location and all audio and text communications. Other programs were capable of turning on a device’s microphone and camera without the owner’s knowledge. Other attack-and-control programs targeted MAC OS X, Solaris and Linux operating systems.

A number of the CIA’s programs revealed in the Vault 7 releases focus exclusively on one or another of these companies, most commonly Microsoft.

Building 92 at Microsoft Corporation headquarters in Redmond, Washington. (Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

“Grasshopper” (April 7, 2017) is a platform for the development of malware designed for attacks on Windows operating systems. “AfterMidnight” (May 12, 2017) and “Brutal Kangaroo” (June 22, 2017) also target the Microsoft Windows platform, while “Weeping Angels” (April 21, 2017) infiltrated Samsung televisions. “Outlaw Country” (June 30, 2017) is designed for attack on computers that use the Linux OS. 

“Year Zero” also details the CIA’s use of what the agency calls “zero days.” These are commonly occurring software code imperfections and vulnerabilities in electronic devices that the CIA knows and makes use of but does not disclose to manufacturers or the public.

In some respects, zero days are treated as commodities. While the CIA discovered some zero days on its own, it obtained others from the NSA, GCHQ (the NSA’s British counterpart), or the FBI. It also purchased zero days from private cyber-weapons manufacturers much as the Pentagon would buy a weapons system from a defense contractor.

The CIA’s stockpile of zero days enables it to bypass encryption systems installed in such communications applications as WhatsApp, the widely used long-distance telephone and text service. This makes zero days, which can be used either locally or remotely, especially significant in extending the reach of the agency’s hacking operations. The CIA’s practice of keeping zero days secret — effectively hoarding them, as WikiLeaks notes — is especially cynical and dangerous.

As WikiLeaks explains:

“If the CIA can hack these phones then so can everyone else who has obtained or discovered the vulnerability. As long as the CIA keeps these vulnerabilities concealed from Apple and Google (who make the phones) they will not be fixed, and the phones will remain hackable. The same vulnerabilities exist for the population at large, including the U.S. Cabinet, Congress, top CEOs, system administrators, security officers and engineers. By hiding these security flaws from manufacturers like Apple and Google, the CIA ensures that it can hack everyone– at the expense of leaving everyone hackable.”

Most malware developed by the EDG and related units in the CIA’s organizational structure is designed to remain in implanted devices for considerable lengths of time — in some cases years — after it is installed. So long as it is present it communicates regularly and in two-way fashion with the CIA’s Command and Control systems.

While many programs are implanted remotely, some require a physical presence. This typically means an agent infests a targeted device on site. But in some cases, the CIA covertly intervened into supply chains and delivery services, including postal services, by opening, infecting, and on-sending products without the knowledge of either the manufacturer or the purchaser.

As it began its Vault 7 series with “Year Zero,” WikiLeaks took the occasion to note “an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber ‘weapons,’” as Assange put it at the time. He drew a comparison between these weapons and the global arms trade, noting “the inability to contain them, combined with their high market value.”

The source of the Vault 7 trove, who was among the former government hackers and contractors circulating the Vault programs among themselves, shared these and other concerns:

“In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation, and democratic control of cyber-weapons.”

This is Consortium News’s intent in publishing its report on Vault 7.

Mindful of the risks attached to proliferation, and perhaps of past (and unfounded) charges that its publications compromised U.S. national security and American personnel, WikiLeaks notes that it was careful to avoid distributing what it termed “‘armed’ cyber-weapons” as it published the Vault 7 series.

It also said it redacted “tens of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United States.” In a note in an FAQ section appended to “Year Zero,” WikiLeaks states, “Names, email addresses, and external IP addresses have been redacted in the released pages (70,875 redactions in total) until further analysis is complete.”

Dark Matter
March 23, 2017

Projects developed in the “Dark Matter” program were designed to penetrate Apple Macs and iPhones with what is called firmware — that is, malware that continues to infect the units attacked even if the OS is reinstalled. “Sonic Screwdriver,” a sub-project in this group, allowed attackers to install and activate computer code while users booted up these Apple devices.

See the rest here

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for theInternational Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.

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The Coming of Corporate Collectivism – Doug Casey’s International Man

Posted by M. C. on October 28, 2020

Benito Mussolini stated that “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”

https://internationalman.com/articles/the-coming-of-corporate-collectivism/

by Jeff Thomas

Benito Mussolini stated that “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”

Quite so.

Interestingly, many, and perhaps most people today, lack an understanding as to the system under which they are ruled.

In the US in particular, most people who vote Republican take pride in believing that the US is a capitalist state.

Democrats, too, regard the US as a capitalist state, and take the view that that’s what’s wrong with America today. Increasingly, they seek a move in the socialist (or collectivist) direction to save them from the perceived evils of capitalism.

Interestingly, though, the evils to which they refer are the socio-economic inequalities that exist and the fact that those on the lower levels of society have decreasing opportunity to improve their lot in life. And, of course, since they believe they live under a capitalist system, they assume that capitalism must be the problem.

But this is not the case.

It can be said that the first major introduction of corporatist collectivism occurred in 1913, with the introduction of the Revenue Act and the Federal Reserve Act.

These were enacted under President Woodrow Wilson and were peddled to the American public as being anti-corporatist. The Revenue Act, which introduced income tax, was touted as creating a tax primarily for the rich, which would even out income disparities. The Federal Reserve was claimed to be a government agency that would ride herd over the greedy banking interests on Wall Street.

However, those few who actually read the bill learned that the Federal Reserve was neither federal nor a reserve. It was to be owned by the larger banks and would give them the power to control the currency of the US.

By promising collectivist changes, the goals of corporatism were advanced.

And so it is today. Virtually all the ills of American society, as described by liberals, have been caused by the introduction of collectivist concepts, capitalized upon by the plutocracy of the US.

The US is not a capitalist state. If we were to define it accurately, the economic system is corporatist and the social system is collectivist. It is, however, true that there exist the remnants of a free market, or capitalism.

Yet, to most – either liberal or conservative – this would seem impossible. We’ve been taught to regard Wall Street as a denizen for greedy capitalists. Surely, they would never support collectivism – the saviour of the masses.

Well, yes and no. Wall Street has dominated the American economy for over one hundred years. And in all of that time, they’ve sought a greater level of collectivism. They understand that collectivism (under any of its guises of socialism, fascism or communism) is a highly effective means by which to rule over others.

Collectivism does not raise up the masses, as Karl Marx suggested. Instead, it evens out the classes by lowering the great majority of people to an equal level of poverty.

The premise is a simple one: Promise largesse from the government, with the stipulation that basic freedoms must be relinquished in order to receive the largesse. Then, once all have been subjugated under collectivism, the largesse is steadily diminished. Corporate leaders convince the people to give up their rights, but then fail to deliver on their end of the bargain: to bestow riches upon the now-subjugated populace.

And again, this is nothing new. In 1917, one Leon Trotsky was hosted in New York by the most prominent banking and industrial firms. He was provided with funding, along with a US passport, courtesy of President Wilson. A contingent then went with Mister Trotsky to Russia with the funds necessary to wrest control of the new Soviet Union – to replace the Mensheviks with the Lenin/Trotsky-led Bolsheviks. The bargain was that the Soviet Union would be collectivist and that the goods needed by Russians would be supplied from New York, in perpetuity, unseen by the public in either Russia or the US.

Within a decade, the same firms began funding an up-and-coming Adolf Hitler. They funded his rise to power in 1933 and spent the remainder of the decade taking control of much of German industry, in addition to installing American-owned plants in Germany.

Prior to Hitler’s rise, Germany was flat broke and heavily in debt, but the massive monetary shot in the arm from Wall Street firms ensured that Germany would rise quickly and come to dominate Europe. Indeed, without US funding, the creation of the German war machine would have been impossible.

The term “Nazi” is an abbreviation for Nationalsozialistische – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Like the Russian people, the German people had been sold the collectivist promise, believing that their lives would somehow be better if they agreed to give up their liberties and accept totalitarian rule.

What they received was the totalitarian rule without the promised largesse.

The effort to create the same situation in the US has long been in the works. In the 1930s, great strides were made toward collectivism under the New Deal. However, post-war prosperity made Americans unwilling to give up liberties for largesse.

But today, increased governmental regulation has diminished the free market, diminishing opportunities for the average American. This has created a condition in which roughly half of Americans now buy into the empty promise of collectivism.

America no longer has true “liberal” and “conservative” parties. They now have “liberal” and “liberal-light” parties. Regardless of who is president, the US is on course to go full-bore in 2021 into dramatic social and legislative changes that will complete the transformation into Corporate Collectivism. All that’s needed is a trigger, as occurred in Germany in February of 1933.

Just two weeks prior to the 1933 German national elections, Adolf Hitler hosted a secret fundraising meeting for German and American industrialists, which netted him millions in donations, upon which he could finance a totalitarian corporate collectivist government.

He then surreptitiously created the Reichstag fire, blaming it on dissidents and political opponents, ensuring that he would be elected.

In his address at that fundraiser, he stated,

“There are only two possibilities, either to crowd back the opponent on constitutional grounds, and for this purpose once more we have this [upcoming] election, or a struggle will be conducted with other weapons, which may demand greater sacrifices… I hope the German people thus recognize the greatness of this hour.”

Germany was about to receive a totalitarian corporate collectivist rule, either through election or through the creation of civil unrest.

Similarly, the US today is about to undergo dramatic change. The remaining question is whether that will take place through election or its historic alternative.

Editor’s Note: The economic, political, and social volatility in the days and weeks ahead promises to be extreme. The impact on your savings, retirement funds, and personal freedoms could be unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

Do you want to know exactly what you should be doing differently with your portfolio and in your personal life?

EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: The Day After—How to Prepare for What Comes Next 

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Insiders – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on October 28, 2020

The best remaining scam other than printing money and illegal drug trade is healthcare, where else can you sell emergency room stitches for $1000 apiece? If you get admitted to a hospital it is $6,000 per night hotel with bad food, no bar and for that pleasure you will get woken up every four hours to check vitals: blood pressure and temperature. Should they do anything to you that number goes higher quickly.

The War on Drugs was really a war on individual freedom and their constitutional protections – drug criminal has no rights: to be accused is to be guilty.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/10/george-giles/insiders/

By George Giles

Here is a hypothetical scenario. It is based on insiders and outsiders. If you can call the President of the United States on the phone and talk to him you are an insider, otherwise you are an outsider. As Dan Aykroyd so elegantly showed in the movie Trading Places, outsiders, standing in the cold rain, get to press their nose against the glass and see what the insiders are enjoying.

Twenty years ago I read a book called ‘Blowback’ and the basic theme was that the illegal drug trade was so profitable that it kept the US gov’t, banks and stock exchange from cratering because of a century of mis-management via wars, taxes and paper money; that all our wars were just excuses to let the government do whatever it wanted and keep the whole charade going longer. The War on Drugs was really a war on individual freedom and their constitutional protections – drug criminal has no rights: to be accused is to be guilty.

The best remaining scam other than printing money and illegal drug trade is healthcare, where else can you sell emergency room stitches for $1000 apiece? If you get admitted to a hospital it is $6,000 per night hotel with bad food, no bar and for that pleasure you will get woken up every four hours to check vitals: blood pressure and temperature. Should they do anything to you that number goes higher quickly.

Eight trillion dollars were printed and $300 billion given to individuals. Where did the other seven trillion seven hundred billion and change go? Guaranteed we will never know. So now Blowback makes more sense – freedom for financial innovation i.e. scams is getting more limited.

The US is now well over the point where national debt being is greater than one year pre-covid GDP and realistically after printing 20+ trillion dollars, a dollar for dollar accounting effort is not only unlikely, it is probably also hopeless; pretty much any fiscal responsibility is long gone. Trump/Biden are now in a race to see who wants to give away the most $$ for election.

When the US economy gets a cold (recession) all the other economies go on life support (depression) so by that logic crippling the US economy will kill others around the world.

The drums are beating now against Russia/China. Everyday you hear something new about them. Our government always needs an enemy even if they have to make one up like Vietnam or War on Terror/Drugs/Racism/Sexism whatever.

Value is subjective, it is based upon perception and everyone’s perception is different from everyone else’s. As Ludwig von Mises demonstrated in his epic ‘Human Action’ value is based upon acting man’s dissatisfaction with something and then trying to ease that mental tension by acting, doing something, creating value. Imagine the satisfaction of sitting in the cold rain until one of your buddies shows you a nice dry cave. Another genius rubs sticks together with leaves, dry wood and a warm fire appears. This mental tension of dissatisfaction has driven our primitive tribe based hunter/gatherers to our modern economies. Nonetheless value still remains subjective.

If we wanted to decimate the hopelessly corrupt Chinese government all we need do is default on our bonds then block all Chinese imports. We are already block their semiconductor business (Huawei) and are trying to get other countries to go along.

The wealthy elite have literally all their wealth predicated upon ownership of stocks/bonds and trust accounts (I trust you to give me back my money). History has shown stocks/bonds and paper money always become worthless eventually. This means that the world’s wealthiest man for example, Jeff Bezos, can become a pauper like the rest of us when the paper goes to 0 value. The whole purpose of the Federal Reserve System is to protect the wealthy and things they own like banks.

What von Mises proved using deductive logic is that specie based money (gold/silver) is the only system that does not fail. With such a system the economy undergoes slow gentle deflation. When this happens the value of savings, that is capital, grows slowly over time. Prices continue to fall which makes a workers income have greater and greater purchasing power. Modern bankers are the one class of people that have no purpose in this system, their thieving system of inflation is gone. Sadly every significant economy in the world is fiat/paper currency based.

We cannot let the common man profit at the bankers expense. ALL banks are inherently unstable, they start that way, they live that way and they die that way. There is not a bank in existence that can tolerate a run on their debts. Cash bank deposits are debts, not assets. The assets a bank has are outstanding loans. As happened many times in history. Bank runs are just deposits the account holders  have and they now want their money back. Cannot allow the common man control his future!

Franklin Delano Rosevelt, worshipped by most politician’s, repudiated the contract with Americans exchanging gold for dollars which had been the law. He seized all gold bullion in the country. He followed this up by making ownership of gold except pre 1933 US coins a crime. He did not announce this in his campaign. The day he took office he ended prohibition. The gold seizure got lost in the frenzy.

The power FDR had has been worshipped by the vast majority of national level politicians. The Federal Register documents in excruciating detail leviathan’s strangling control and the end of freedom. A free country has no need of classified laws (Patriot Act) however an unfree country requires a vast spy network and a secret police. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Internet (your cell phone is just a computer on Class A non-routable but private network) and location information (where your cell phone has pinged) is stored along with every email and text ever sent.

The US now has all the tools in place for the President to do whatever he/she wants. Crush China then repudiate bonds. This will also bring the rest of the world to its knees. Politicians actually despise the wealthy out of simple resentment but historically they have been tolerated in order to facilitate politician’s dreams. These ‘useful idiots’ as Stalin said are essential to the plan to take control.

On the bright side the United States Government has proven that along with its allies (more useful idiots) it can be completely self-sufficient in food, energy and manufacturing as we demonstrated so ably in World War II. Estimates on the casualties of World War II were between 50 and 100 million deaths; US deaths under 300,000. Very very cost effective. To the government an individual is just another tool in the toolbelt.

World War III is not going to be fought with nuclear weapons or large standing armies. It will be fought with paper. American citizens will be allowed to have blue dollars. Green dollars will be just to light your cigars with should you have any then.

Historically every empire ultimately dies at the bank. Battlefields just accelerate the process.

President Donald Trump was elected against the mainstream media’s collective desires and they have been in a froth over this. They thought it was their sacred duty to say who wins and loses. They got drunk with power when they got the Arkansas Rube Clinton elected.

While Trump is human thus like the rest of us and has many flaws he has steadfastly refused to start anymore wars no matter how loud our media sycophants have brayed about them. This is where covid comes in, kill the economy, and the people will be so desperate for help which is to say socialism! As von Mises has shown it is always a product of the wealthy. As he said “Socialism is for those who would think and must be prevented.” The covid pandemic has gone a long way to scare the world and make them desperate for the help that only strong central governments can provide. Sadly a socialist country always runs out of other people’s money. Socialism drains the future for the present. Capital that could be used in productive future enterprises gets drained by the political present. The problem with this, as von Mises has shown, economies thus become fragile and some unplanned exigence renders them helpless since there is no capital available to construct a solution.

So in the event the President will not take your call then you are an outsider. You will not make things happen, things will happen to you. Outsiders just ride the big wave, hoping not to drown but incapable of determining where it goes or what it hits. All empires fall. The only question is when. Don’t let it fall on you and yours.

“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” ~Albert Einstein

The Best of George Giles George Giles [send him mail] spent 15 years working at an elite private University and Medical Center. Mercifully he got early retirement for time served. In college in Detroit he worked in the meat processing industry. If you like sausage/healthcare then you do not want to see what goes on behind the scenes at the slaughterhouse.

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A New World Monetary Order Is Coming – Activist Post

Posted by M. C. on October 28, 2020

Making your life an open book.

Shutting you and access to your assets off with the flick of a switch.

https://www.activistpost.com/2020/10/a-new-world-monetary-order-is-coming.html

By Stefan Gleason

The global coronavirus pandemic has accelerated several troubling trends already in force. Among them are exponential debt growth, rising dependency on government, and scaled-up central bank interventions into markets and the economy.

Central bankers now appear poised to embark on their biggest power play ever.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, in coordination with the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), is preparing to roll out central bank digital currencies.

The globalist IMF recently called for a new “Bretton Woods Moment” to address the loss of trillions of dollars in global economic output due to the coronavirus….

Under a central bank digital currency, direct credits and debits could replace stimulus checks and taxes. It would be the vehicle through which modern monetary theory could be fully implemented – with the central bank becoming tax collector and funder of all government operations.

If depreciating the value of the currency through the inflation tax wasn’t enough, the Fed could also stick dollar-holders with a direct tax in the form of negative interest rates. Once paper notes are phased out, holding cash itself would no longer be a way for individuals to escape negative rates.

The only escape hatches would be volatile alternative digital currencies (such as Bitcoin) or hard money (gold and silver).

Under a monetary order where electronic digits representing currency can be created out of thin air in unlimited quantities, the best hedge is the opposite – tangible, scarce, untraceable wealth held off the financial grid.

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Ron Paul’s Gift of Wisdom – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on October 28, 2020

The last line of the book is ominous (pg46), “We are indeed in uncharted waters surrounded by blood-thirsty sharks.” This analogy is in contrast to the classic analogy of frogs in a pot slowly brought to boil.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/10/ira-katz/ron-pauls-gift-of-wisdom/

by Ira Katz

I did something recently that every LRC reader should also consider doing. I made a donation to the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and thereby received a copy of Dr. Paul’s new book The End of Unerarned Opulence. This little gem is truely Ron Paul’s gift of wisdom to the world. Of course, he is well known to LRC readers as a man of great experience, learning, and judgement. In this book he reflects on the state of the United States in these difficult times. He uses the legend of Dr. Faustus (maybe we should insert Dr. Fauci?) and his pact with the devil as a foil to our moral decline due to our pact with the Federal Reserve and its fiat money. Listed below are my selection of highlights that strike at the heart of our dilemma.

(pg16) Our Founders warned us that without a moral society liberty is unworkable. Though perfection is not achievable, liberty’s basic concept must be understood and accepted by the thought-leaders of society for it to succeed. Simply put, for a free society to exist, the government must protect the right of all persons to life, liberty, and property, and reject aggression as a tool for molding social and economic conciditions. The mess in which we today find ourselves has resulted from the majority of the people refusing to accept this basic rule of decency and honor.

(pg25) The goal orchestrated by the anti-police street violence, is not justice. It’s designed to promote political and economic chaos in order to usher in a radical Marxist political system which they falsely claim will be a utopian system.

(pg34) However, what was not yet understood was the devil’s ability, in this nearly 50 year period [since Nixon removed the last vestige of the gold standard in 1971] of free stuff, opulence, overweening power, and the people’s loss of a moral compass, to establish all the parameters needed to make it a cake-walk for Marxism to take over our entire economic and social system. The existing system of corporatism has become a close ally of modern-day Marxism, and even though they seem to be “strange bedfellows,” they are joined at the hip with the desire to share in the loot and power available to totalitarian governments.

(pg40) The problem with that approach [government imposing morality] is the process of the dictatorial rules to control personal behavior are all dependent on the immoral use of force by the special interests that have gained control over government. Constitutions, no matter how well written, cannot create a moral people. It is the people, not the government, who are responsible for saving America’s soul.

I have written about what can be done as an individual. But what should we expect from our leaders (Mr. Trump?) that could actually work in this fetid environment. Dr. Paul suggests two sites of action that I think could start the long process of regeneration of the body politic. He states that, (pg17) “What needs to be done with the monetary system is not complex. Replace it with honest money. Eliminate the Federal Reserve. Legalize competition.” I totally agree. Could’t the legal tender laws simply be repealed allowing complete open competition in money? Wouldn’t this eventually force the Federal Reserve in the direction of honest money. Dr. Paul also noted, (Pg43) “The day that the “nail in the coffin” ended the Republic, was November 22, 1963. The CIA assissinated John F. Kennedy on that date and carried out a successful coup. Subsequently even the illusion of the fake idealism of “Camelot” was smothered.” If Trump had really followed through on the release of documents still classified and emphasized the truth of this one event (and then also on the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy) he might have blunted the ability of the deep state to continue their assault on his own presidency. He should still do this even at this late date.

The last line of the book is ominous (pg46), “We are indeed in uncharted waters surrounded by blood-thirsty sharks.” This analogy is in contrast to the classic analogy of frogs in a pot slowly brought to boil. Dr. Paul’s analogy gives me hope that people will finally recognize the danger of being in the water surrounded by sharks and act to protect themselves from this obvious danger. Perhaps the elites who have foisted this potential dystopia on us have gone too far too fast.

The Best of Ira Katz Ira Katz [send him mail] lives in Paris and works as a research engineer for a French company. He is the co-author of Handling Mr. Hyde: Questions and Answers about Manic Depression and Introduction to Fluid Mechanics.

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How to Limit Social Media’s Power without Growing Government | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on October 27, 2020

Doing what we can to help narrow Section 230 immunities back to a free speech interpretation could solve this while actually reducing government involvement in speech. Naïvely throwing up our hands and hoping some free speech startup someday survives the woke gauntlet is equivalent to quitting the field of ideas while the other side is very much on the march.

https://mises.org/wire/how-limit-social-medias-power-without-growing-government?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=980090c04d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-980090c04d-228343965

Peter St. Onge

Censorship by private companies is a topic that divides free marketers but has suddenly become important in the wake of Twitter and Facebook’s recent attempts to squash a New York Post story alleging corruption in the Biden family. Last year, economist James Miller argued that just as the power company can’t turn off your electricity for being a Trump supporter, social media companies shouldn’t be able to silence you for your political opinions. Others have argued that companies can silence whomever they like because it’s their company. This is a red herring that misses the fact that reform would actually reduce government intervention by narrowing something called Section 230 immunity.

First, what free marketers agree on: regulation of speech by government is both unconstitutional and a very bad idea. From 1949 to 1987, the so-called fairness doctrine was used to utterly silence the Right—Rush Limbaugh was a salesman for the Kansas City Royals until Reagan finally repealed the rule, and Murray Rothbard famously could fit the entire libertarian movement in a living room. The doctrine’s repeal opened the floodgates for talk radio, then Fox News, and now content from the Mises Institute to Praeger University to the Babylon Bee. Given that the vast majority of federal workers remain partisan Democrats—the “Deep State,” if you will, hasn’t changed its colors. Reimposing regulation of speech likely means a return to socialist domination of speech.

However, actual solutions being proposed involve not more regulation, but less. In particular, narrowing an immunity that was granted to online platforms in Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. This was a special immunity from liability for user-posted content so long as the company was acting as a platform open to all comers—think “common carrier” rules like with the phone company.

Ironically, an original selling point of Section 230 was to prevent censorship by creating a safe harbor so companies could let people express themselves online. And that’s how Section 230 worked for the first twenty years, on the understanding that active censorship would convert an online platform into a publisher with the same liability exposure as, say, a newspaper.

From a business perspective, this platform-publisher distinction was existential for social media companies. Because liability exposure would mean either ruinous lawsuits for crazy things users say, or it would require an army of content-moderating lawyers to meticulously preapprove the 500 million tweets per day that are sent on Twitter. This meant, up until 2016, that social media companies were very careful to maintain a hands-off policy, allowing essentially all legal speech so they wouldn’t lose that shield.

This started changing in 2016, as progressive pressure was brought against social media companies for the sin of giving voice to conservatives during the Brexit referendum, followed soon after by Donald Trump’s election victory. Meanwhile, individual judges increasingly interpreted 230 more broadly as permitting censorship at will. In fact, European regulators actually started requiring censorship for any speech individual regulators personally regarded as too right-wing. This, unfortunately, built a broad censorship capability in social media companies.

Given the existential importance of the shield, social media companies started gradually demonetizing users so they couldn’t earn money on their channels. They moved on to outright bans, again starting gradually by banning intentionally provocative users like former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopolos and Alex Jones of Infowars, and now on to increasingly mainstream users, including, last week, the largest conservative newspaper in the US, the New York Post.

Because a divided Congress won’t rewrite 230, practical reform involves narrowing 230 immunities so that egregious censorship becomes, once again, a bad choice for social media. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has openly wished for a test case so the court can do this, while market-friendly FCC director Ajit Pai has proposed rules narrowing 230 immunities back to what they used to be.

These solutions highlight that social media censorship isn’t a binary question of market versus regulation, rather it’s a question of an existing government intervention now being used to censor rather than give voice. Indeed, the pure free market position would be repealing 230 altogether, so that Twitter or Facebook face the same liability as the New York Post or, indeed, as you and I.

The alternative to reforming 230, of course, is to leave it to the market. After all, MySpace was the dominant platform until Facebook came along. Unfortunately, the market isn’t as competitive as it used to be. Conservative-friendly social media startups such as Gab and Parler have faced a gauntlet of harassment and choke points, from being denied bank accounts or payment accounts to being denied essential services like web hosting or hacker protection. Given the recent explosion in corporate “wokeness,” this harassment isn’t going away, and in fact is likely to increase.

Beyond harassment and the natural network effects of social media, there are other anticompetitive tactics that hobble new entrants. Facebook itself rose by “scraping” user information from MySpace, something it now forbids, and other social media companies have copied this anticompetitive strategy. Meanwhile, Facebook in particular buys promising competitors like Instagram or WhatsApp, essentially buying an insurance policy against future competition. As a result, the competitive landscape in social media has changed markedly from the MySpace era. Of course, regulators could punish these strategies with aggressive antitrust, but, again, that brings government uncomfortably close to patrolling speech, so it’s playing with fire.

At this point, there is broad consensus that censorship is problematic—not only among libertarians and conservatives. Fully 76 percent of Americans think tech has too much influence on political discourse—just 6 percent think too little. Progressives would never tolerate being silenced by a roomful of activists on Twitter or Facebook, and neither should we.

Doing what we can to help narrow Section 230 immunities back to a free speech interpretation could solve this while actually reducing government involvement in speech. Naïvely throwing up our hands and hoping some free speech startup someday survives the woke gauntlet is equivalent to quitting the field of ideas while the other side is very much on the march.

Author:

Peter St. Onge

Peter St. Onge blogs on economics at Profits of Chaos.

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Nolte: New York Times Accidentally Confirms Breitbart’s Voter Fraud Reporting

Posted by M. C. on October 27, 2020

There is much noxious clickbait on Breitbart but their lead piece writers are often on the mark.

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/10/26/nolte-new-york-times-accidentally-confirms-breitbarts-voter-fraud-reporting/

By John Nolte

The far-left New York Times accidentally confirmed all of the voter fraud reporting we’ve done here at Breitbart News.

So, let me extend my congratulations to all our hard working reporters and editors.

New York Times Headline:

Conservative News Sites Fuel Voter Fraud Misinformation

Sub-Head:

Breitbart, The Washington Examiner, and others amplify false claims of rampant cheating in what a new Harvard study calls a “propaganda feedback loop.”

Complaint:

So far in October, Breitbart has published nearly 30 articles with the tag “voter fraud.” President [Donald] Trump has posted links to several Breitbart articles on Twitter, including one in August in which a Republican-appointed poll challenger estimated that up to 20,000 absentee primary ballots had been improperly counted in Detroit, a city “known for voting heavily Democrat,” the article said. The Detroit News later reported that election officials in Michigan said the problems “weren’t examples of fraud and don’t call into question the integrity of the results.”

Facts to Back Up Complaint:

Crickets: Chirp. Chirp. Chirp.

The Times article is 1300 or so words long and not a single word — not one — is utilized to point out a single fact in a single one of our voter fraud reports that we got wrong.

The Times went through 30 articles we published on voter fraud — thirty! — and could not come up with a single misreported fact, a single example of fake news, or anything we reported that was misleading or deceptive.

You’ll note that the one article they cherry pick, they don’t even dispute the facts. No one claims our reporting was wrong, only that “the problems” — oh, so there were problems! — we reported on “weren’t examples of fraud and don’t call into question the integrity of the results” — which is what I call gobbily-gook.

So to me, the headline here is this: “EXTRA! NEW YORK TIMES CONFIRMS BREITBART NEWS’ REPORTS ABOUT VOTER FRAUD!!!”

Get this… the far-left activists and serial liars at the Times spent heaven knows how many corporate dollars to fine-tooth-comb us and came up with “bup” in one claw and “kis” in the other.

Not a single one of those 1300 or so words backs up the headline or the sub-head or the angle of the piece. Which means the attack on us is pure smoke, pure propaganda, pure fake news…

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Protesters Return to Baghdad a Year Later, Say Demands Still Unmet

Posted by M. C. on October 27, 2020

Eighteen years and it takes an armed convoy with chopper cover to get from the US embassy to the airport.

With results like that it shouldn’t be a surprise there are protests.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2020/october/26/protesters-return-to-baghdad-a-year-later-say-demands-still-unmet/

Written by Jason Ditz

The one-year anniversary of some of the last major protests in Baghdad saw thousands take to the streets in Tahrir Square, insisting that their demands are still generally unmet after all this time, and that the promises which were supposed to placate them generally didn’t pan out.

As with the last protests, the government sought to handle this rally by sending police out en masse to fire tear gas and put up barricades. Past history suggests this will not work, and will just rile up more people.

The demands have been straightforward for the protesters, who want a break form historic corruption, and free elections in which the candidates are loyal to the Iraqi voters first and foremost, instead of being aligned to either the US or Iran.

This has downed several internal governments, which haven’t been able to get the election laws ready, keep protesters placated, and avoid anger from either the US or the Iranians. Navigating all of that is a lot of work for the election, though the current government has expressed confidence that a June vote will take place.

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