State of the Disunion Address by Dennis Leahy

[Sarah Rainsong]

Posted by onawah (here)
I can recommend listening to this show even if you haven't listened to the preceding parts 1 & 2 (though you may want to go back and listen to them too, after part 3).
There is so much new and interesting information that I can't imagine it not being compelling listening.
I would say that DJ clearly doesn't think that the Kerry/Romney Hail Mary thing is a positive development, but it may sound like he does simply because he anticipates feeling a sense of satisfaction when more evidence is revealed proving that his suppositions have been correct.
I think he's concerned about the possibility of HRC getting back into the game, and he hopes that a third force will come into play.
The Hail Mary is proof that the entrenched Dems really don't want Sanders to be the nominee ( and that's an indication that he would probably be the best choice for the voters, imho, in spite of his support of Biden.)
(Given that we are talking about the lesser of evils here.)
DJ thinks Trump was a better choice than HRC, and he still thinks Trump is (or at least, WAS) anti-globalist (unfortunately), though he's been much more disillusioned of late.
But there is so much more info of worth in this show (particularly historical) that has nothing to do with the election, so I hope that part won't put anyone off.

Thanks. I didn't get the impression that he thought it was positive until the very end, and actually it was the co-host that suggested that, but he didn't really argue with her. So that's why I was a little confused.

Where do I find parts 1 & 2? I thought it was the whole thing LOL! He's got a ton of videos on his channel, so I'm not sure which ones you're talking about.

This is the link I used. :

Posted by onawah (here)
Try this:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WGJOj-ZSBW4

Sorry--corrected that in the original post

[onawah]

Here are parts 1 and 2

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9gs93adcO9A

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Nwoxa7d_Rhs

Posted by rainsong (here)
Where do I find parts 1 & 2? I thought it was the whole thing LOL! He's got a ton of videos on his channel, so I'm not sure which ones you're talking about.

This is the link I used. :

Posted by onawah (here)
Try this:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WGJOj-ZSBW4

Sorry--corrected that in the original post

You can find the whole X Series here in numerical order: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m2Q...lzEGUgoH496qay

[onawah]

I wish we could clone you, Rahkyt!
We could really use one of you on my town's council!

Posted by Dennis Leahy (here)

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
It's a shame that Dennis and Rakyt do not run for office. They would make a formidable team!

I'd be honored just to hang out with Rahkyt, a very bright and compassionate guy - among the best and brightest. But this brings back a point Mike made about needing the best and brightest in positions of governance. I don't think we need that, or want that. I think we need to shift our thinking to embrace the "ordinary citizen*" as representatives, and that their job would be to carry out the collective will of the people, which would be gleaned via the new election process.

Posted by Rahkyt (here)
Thanks Ernie, I think we would make a good team, as part of a larger group of concerned citizens of the type and working toward the implementation of some of the innovative governmental forms that have been discussed in this thread and, in particular, Dennis's response here. And I would be honored in turn, Dennis, to just hang! If you ever make it to Central Texas, don't hesitate to let me know.

After 2 years on the Ethics Review Commission for my city, San Marcos, TX, I was honored last Fall to be elected to the City Council in December after a run-off election. As it is a non-partisan position, I didn't have to make a choice of political parties, thank God, as, even though my ideologies and understandings of the world lean more to the far distant fields beyond Left and Right. I'm pretty active in social media and have gotten to know folks in my community and around February of last year, small groups started asking me to do it. I'd never considered it previously, although my family has a history of service to our nation and communities. Many of y'all have known me since I came here in 2011, so you're familiar with the span of my ethical and spiritual beliefs and probably some of my political understandings as well. They are not mainstream.

[shaberon]

Posted by Dennis Leahy (here)
However, the greatest accumulation of real wealth is property/land, as the US 'founding fathers' knew, and they wrote a Constitution to protect theirs. Like the end of the monopoly game, I do suspect at some point that the serfs will kill the landlord and take the land, but can't visualize it happening while the lords have the protection of the US military.

This is largely correct, and it is called Private Property, which is protected by the Constitution and by laws. And for example, in the Louisiana Purchase, it was protected--whoever really owned a farm then suffered nothing from leaving France.

The overthrow of Private Property is called Real Estate. The estate is no longer really the land, but a legal entity, like a corporation, a permanent lease under threat. If you get a house, can you even check a box marked "private?" No, your choice is probably Residential. Well, a resident is just a status criminal like a homeless vagabond, a pauper at law. Private Property where one lives is called a Domicile.

Amendment Seven protects Private Property purchased for more than twenty dollars: it cannot be seized, it can only be subjected to due process. This means it has to cost over twenty dollars of Lawful Money--i. e., silver dollars. You can't even buy property with legal tender, it works on debts, which can never be paid, only extinguished.

The whole shebang of hassles pretty much vanishes if you are a non-citizen National Domiciled on Private Property. Nothing will affect you except for Code. Statutory law only applies to "serfs".

You can do the same thing with a car and get rid of its registration and insurance, but, you better know the right words--"operating a motor vehicle" is considered a type of taxi which is a form of commerce, subject to statues. So, yes, it is done by the "sleight of hand" in changing legal words from what they "really mean" into what it "sounds like it means".

For instance, when I was young and didn't understand, one of the courts or police asked me if I was a citizen. I said what does it mean--they said it means "were you born here". That is a trick, false, or wrong. It means do you consent for the Fed to have sovereignty over you. Just like Resident does not mean do you live here, and Operating a Motor Vehicle does not mean driving a car. A Person may be a Corporation. Basically the whole statutory legal vocabulary is terms of voluntary servitude.

It does not work if you don't agree to it. The Federal government has no jurisdiction outside of properties it owns, until it is handed to them.

As far as I can tell, whatever was achieved in the Revolution is still sitting right there, but it isn't being used because we have forgotten what it means. A web of words has conned us out of our legal standing.


One of my favorite things I have seen was a piece of money from around 1922. So there were some years from around 1918-1926 when each branch of the Federal Reserve printed its own stuff. So you would see Chicago or wherever it was from. And beside that, someone had written "Bolshevik". So there really was awareness and opposition to this kind of money power for a long time, but, subsequently, with all the advertising and propaganda, the main issues are almost unknown.

[onawah]

One of the things which Dark Journalist said in episode 81 ( https://youtube.com/watch?v=WGJOj-ZSBW4 ) which I certainly agree with is that the only thing that has ever really brought about the kind of changes that are needed now has to come from the people, a mass movement from the grass roots up.
Which is also what various day prophets, both modern and historic, have foretold would be happening to bring about the next shift (such as Dr. Christopher Hills, a great visionary, imho, and my favorite mentor, whose work Dennis also appreciates).
What has been called "the Second Coming" may be not so much the appearance of another great avatar in the tradition of Jesus, Buddha, etc., but the awakening of a higher state of consciousness in humanity as a whole.
Not a new subject to this forum, of course, but it seems like the year 2020 may finally be the turning point.
Of course this is being hindered by as many obstacles as the regressive element can throw in our path--toxins of all kinds--vaccines, GMOs, chemtrails, emfs, glysophate, pharmaceuticals, fluoride, pandemics, etc etc.
But if the prophets are right, it's inevitable that the leap will be accomplished in time.
Not as easy as I suspect many of us anticipated, but I don't think there is reason to give up hope just yet.
I like the analogy of the yo-yo--it doesn't build the momentum to make its' ascent back up the string until it has hit the bottom, though it definitely takes a lot more energy on the ascent than on the descent.
Apologies if this is sounding trite, but sometimes the truth isn't really all that complicated.

[onawah]

Update today from Dark Journalist revealing the Hail Mary pass of Election 2020:
A Unity Ticket featuring Former Secretary of State Democrat John Kerry and Utah Senator Mitt Romney will be forthcoming as a major attempt to capture the White House in November
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkSZh-aJuOQ
Also posted here: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1335835

[onawah]

DEEP STATE PETE (Buttgieg)
2/13/20
Alexandra Bruce
https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/deep-state-pete/

"Incredibly, a winner has still not been declared in the Iowa Caucuses ten days after the election. Current data indicates Pete Buttigieg has narrowly won the pledged delegate count, despite Sanders having slightly more votes and much stronger grass roots support. Ironically, Buttigieg wants to abolish the Electoral College if elected president.

Dark horse candidate, Pete Buttigieg has been helicoptered in from behind because the Globalist Neoliberal establishment is desperate to prevent a Sanders candidacy. As YouAreFreeTV explains here, Mayor Pete has been groomed to be the US President since he was a teenager, with ties to the most ignominious war profiteering firms, like McKinsey, Baupost Group and Franklin Templeton.

These Deep State firms buy up the debt of countries that have been ravaged by USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI), which contract private mercenaries to destabilize designated “rogue” regimes, like Syria, Libya and Ukraine and then they finance the debt right back to USAID, in a vulture capitalist handshake that parasitizes US taxpayers while destroying weak nations.

It’s so diabolical and it explains that evil glint in Buttigieg’s eyes. His buddy from Harvard, who was his Best Man at his 2018 wedding, Nathaniel Myers is currently a Senior Transition Advisor at USAID-OTI. Buttigieg also has strong ties to two Neoliberal think tanks, the Truman National Security Project, where he sits on the Board of Advisors and the Aspen Institute, where he received a Rodel Fellowship.

Last December, Max Blumenthal wrote an éxposé of the young candidate, who some wags on Twitter are calling “Vanilla Barry”:https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/17/n...ete-buttigieg/

“Pete Buttigieg has crafted an image for himself as a maverick running against a broken establishment…the real Buttigieg [is] a Neoliberal cadre whose future was carefully managed by the mandarins of the national security state since almost the moment that he graduated from Harvard University.”

It’s beyond nauseating that someone so entrenched in the darkest machinations of the Deep State can pontificate about Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky: “He’s made it clear that he deserves to be impeached.”

Pete’s deadpan duplicitousness isn’t surprising, once you understand that he is a proponent of covert interventionism, vulture capitalism and the diabolical fraud that is USAID.

The problem is, almost nobody is aware of the unfathomably dark side of Mayor Pete, as he radiates his millennial platitudes and bland psychobabble to his would-be base.

His neotony and his “marginalized” status as a gay man will largely shield him from the kind of scrutiny required of someone who shills the predatory Neoliberalism of the past three decades that has so damaged the world.

Last night, Tucker Carlson joked, “Is this so-called Pete Buttigieg exactly what he appears to be, a corporate hologram designed by the HR Department at Google for instructional purposes? Every word Buttigieg utters is perfectly synchronized with the official view from Silicon Valley and the finance world.”

Chikin’Pete: G00GLE Nevada, CIA McKinsey Proxy Stand In- UNITY Ticket 2020
Feb 12, 2020
You Are Free TV
2/13: "How is PETE claiming so many delegates? Globalists are backing him and he has paid his dues every single step of the way! Meanwhile, AG Barr sets mutliple investigations in motion..."

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=33qc1htP3Jo

(start 15 minutes in for focus on Buttigieg)

[onawah]

How National Security Mandarins Groomed Buttigieg & Managed his Future
12/17/19
by Max Bloomenthal
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/17/n...ete-buttigieg/

"Pledging to “end endless wars,” Pete Buttigieg claims he has “never been part of the Washington establishment.” But years before he was known as Mayor Pete, an influential DC network of military interventionists placed him on an inside track to power.
By Max Blumenthal

In his quest for front-runner status in the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has crafted an image for himself as a maverick running against a broken establishment.

On the trail, he has invoked his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a de-industrialized Rust Belt town, as well as his experience as a Naval reserve intelligence officer who now claims to oppose “endless wars”. He insists that “there’s energy for an outsider like me,” promoting himself as “an unconventional candidate.”

When former Secretary of State John Kerry endorsed Joe Biden this December, Buttigieg went full maverick. “I have never been part of the Washington establishment,” he proclaimed, “and I recognize that there are relationships among senators who have been together on Capitol Hill as long as I’ve been alive and that is what it is.”

But a testy exchange between the South Bend mayor and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard during a November 20 Democratic primary debate had already complicated Buttigieg’s branding campaign.

Like Buttigieg, Gabbard was a military veteran of the 9/11 generation. But she had taken an entirely different set of lessons from her grueling stint in Iraq than “Mayor Pete.” Her campaign had become an anti-war crusade, with opposition to destructive regime change wars serving as her leitmotif.

After ticking off her foreign policy credentials, Gabbard turned to Buttigieg and lit into him for stating his willingness to send US troops to Mexico to crack down on drug cartels.

A visibly angry Buttigieg responded by accusing Gabbard of distorting his record, then quickly deflected to Syria, where he has argued for an indefinite deployment of occupying US troops.

Rehashing well-worn criticism of Gabbard for meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a diplomatic visit she took – her trip was devoted to de-escalating the US-backed proxy war that had ravaged the country’s population – Buttigieg attacked the congresswoman for engaging with a “murderous dictator.”

Throughout the exchange, Buttigieg appeared shaken, as though his sense of inviolability had been punctured. Gabbard had clearly struck a vulnerable point by painting the self-styled outsider as a conventional DC-style politician unconsciously spouting interventionist bromides.

How could someone who served in the catastrophically wasteful US wars in the Middle East, and who had seen their human toll, be reckless enough to propose sending US troops to fight and possibly die in Mexico? “But Assad!” was the best response he could muster.

The remarkable dust-up highlighted a side of the 37-year-old political upstart that has been scarcely explored in mainstream US media accounts of his rise to prominence. It revealed the real Buttigieg as a neoliberal cadre whose future was carefully managed by the mandarins of the national security state since almost the moment that he graduated from Harvard University.

After college, the Democratic presidential hopeful took a gig with a strategic communications firm founded by a former Secretary of Defense who raked in contracts with the arms industry. He moved on to a fellowship at an influential DC think tank described by its founder as “a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s.” Today, Buttigieg sits on that think tank’s board of advisors alongside some of the country’s most accomplished military interventionists.

Buttigieg has reaped the rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook. He recently became the top recipient of donations from staff members of the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the Justice Department – key cogs in the national security state’s permanent bureaucracy.

His Harvard social network has been a critical factor in his rise as well, with college buddies occupying key campaign roles as outside policy advisors and strategists. Among his closest friends from school is today the senior advisor of a specialized unit of the State Department focused on fomenting regime change abroad.

That friend, Nathaniel “Nat” Myers, was Buttigieg’s traveling partner on a trip to Somaliland, where the two buddies claimed to have been tourists in a July 2008 article they wrote for The New York Times.

Their contribution to the paper was not any typical travelogue detailing a whimsical safari. Instead, they composed a slick editorial that echoed the Somaliland government’s call for recognition from the US government. It was Buttigieg’s first foreign policy audition before a national audience.

A short, strange trip to Somaliland
Under public pressure for more transparency about his work at the notoriously secretive McKinsey consulting firm, the Buttigieg campaign released some background details this December. The disclosures included a timeline of his work for various clients that stated he “stepped away from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time with a Democratic campaign for governor in Indiana.”

How Buttigieg’s “full-time” role on that gubernatorial campaign took him on a nearly 8,000-mile detour to Somaliland remains unclear.

Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers spent only 24 hours in the autonomous region of Somaliland. In that short time, they interviewed unnamed government officials and faithfully relayed their pro-independence line back to the American public in a July 2008 op-ed in the New York Times.

The column read like it could have been crafted by a public relations firm on behalf of a government client. In one section, the two travelers wrote that “the people we met in Somaliland were welcoming, hopeful and bewildered by the absence of recognition from the West. They were frustrated to still be overlooked out of respect for the sovereignty of the failed state to their south.”

Since declaring its independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland has campaigned for recognition from the US, EU, and African Union. It even offered to hand its deep water port over to AFRICOM, the US military command structure on the African continent, in exchange for US acceptance of its sovereignty.

Several months after Buttigieg traveled to the autonomous region, Al Jazeera reported, “The Somaliland government is trying to charm its way to global recognition.”

And just a few weeks before Buttigieg’s visit, the would-be republic inked a contract with an international lobbying firm called Independent Diplomat, presumably to help oversee that charm offensive.

Founded by a self-described anarchist named Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat represents an array of non and para-state entities seeking recognition on the international stage. Ross’s client list has included the Syrian Opposition Coalition, which tried and failed to secure power through a Western-backed war against the Syrian government.

Independent Diplomat did not respond to questions from The Grayzone about whether it had any role in facilitating the trip Buttigieg and Myers took to Somaliland.

According to John Kiriakou, a former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated whistleblower, Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism.

“There really is nothing going on in Somaliland,” Kiriakou told The Grayzone. “To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It’s not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist.”

Kiriakou visited Somaliland in 2009 as part of an investigation for the Senate Intelligence Committee on what he described as the phenomenon of “blue-eyed” American citizens converting to Islam, traveling to Somalia and Yemen for training with Salafi-jihadist groups, then returning home on their US passports.

To reach Somaliland, Kiriakou said he took an arduous seven-hour journey from the neighboring state of Djibouti. His junket was coordinated by the US ambassador to Djibouti, a regional security officer of the US Diplomatic Security Service, and an embassy attaché.

“It is not the easiest place to reach and there’s no business to do there,” Kiriakou said.

Whether or not Buttigieg’s trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record – and on an absolutely non-controversial issue.

In his bio, Nathaniel Myers identified himself simply as a “financial analyst based in Ethiopia.” According to his resume, which is available online at Linkedin, he was working at the time as a World Bank consultant on governance and corruption.

By 2011, Myers had moved on from that neoliberal international financial institution to a specialized government at the center of US regime change operations abroad.

The imperial social network
Nathaniel Myers’ relationship with the presidential hopeful began at Harvard University. There, they formed two parts of “The Order of Kong,” a close-knit group of political junkies named jokingly for the Chinese restaurant they frequented after intensive discussion sessions at the school’s Institute of Politics.

Like most members of the college-era “Order,” Myers and Buttigieg have remained close. When the mayor married his longtime partner in 2018, Buttigieg chose him as his best man.

Myers currently works as a senior advisor for the United States Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI) in Washington DC. The OTI is a specialized division of USAID that routinely works through contractors and local proxies to orchestrate destabilization operations inside countries considered insufficiently compliant to the dictates of Washington.

Wherever the US seeks regime change, it seems that USAID’s OTI is involved.



In a 2015 op-ed arguing for a loosening of bureaucratic restraints on USAID’s participation in counter-terror operations, Myers revealed that he had “specialized in programming in places like Yemen and Libya” – two conflict zones destabilized by US-led regime-change wars. (Myers was working as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations at the time, but would return to USAID’s OTI the following year.)

USAID’s OTI has also fueled Syria’s brutal proxy war, coordinating US government assistance to supposed civil society groups like the White Helmets that were attached to the armed extremists who ruled over portions of the country for several years.

In Venezuela, the OTI has spent tens of millions of dollars cultivating and training opponents of the late President Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro. It has done the same in Nicaragua, serving as the linchpin of a US effort to “lay the groundwork for insurrection.”

In Cuba, meanwhile, the OTI attempted to stir up civil unrest through a fake, Twitter-style social media site called ZunZuneo, hoping to turn the public against the country’s leftist government through coordinated flash mobs. To populate the phony social media platform, the OTI contracted a DC-based firm called Creative Associates that had illicitly obtained half a million Cuban cellphone numbers.

USAID and Creative Associates attempted to place ZunZuneo into private hands through a Miami foundation called Roots of Hope, which was founded by students at Harvard University. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was even solicited by the State Department to operate the platform. (Roots of Hope board member Raul Moas, who personally trained ZunZuneo employees, is today the director of the Knight Foundation.)

The devious operation and its eventual exposure revealed the extent to which covert operations historically associated with the CIA had been outsourced to private contractors and NGOs.

And the role of the Harvard-founded “Roots of Hope” in the scheme demonstrated how much USAID and its contractors depended on the same Ivy League talent pool that produced Buttigieg and Myers.

A lengthy paper Myers authored for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2015 indicated that he had special knowledge of the ZunZuneo scheme and had been invested in its success.

Myers took the journalists who exposed the USAID-OTI program to task, claiming that “individual grants were pulled out of context and described as failures without heed to their actual goals,” provoking an unfair “Capitol Hill pillorying.”

He lamented that the exposure of covert programs like these had forced USAID officials to pursue “the opposite of the programming most likely to produce real impact in a hard aid environment.” In other words, fear of public scrutiny had complicated efforts to subvert societies targeted by the US for regime change – and he didn’t like it one bit.

To Syracuse University professor of African American studies Horace Campbell, youthful cadres like Myers were a symptom of the American university’s transformation into a neoliberal training ground.

“Many idealistic graduates from elite centers such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Maxwell School of Citizenship of Syracuse University or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University among others had been seduced” into careers with USAID contractors like Creative Associates, Chemonics, and McKinsey, Campbell lamented in a lengthy 2014 survey of the OTI’s sordid record.

“It has been painful,” the professor wrote, “to see the ways in which the so called NGO initiatives have been refined over the past twenty years to support neoliberalism and to depoliticize idealistic students.”

Campbell’s comments painted a clear portrait of Myers, who earned his master’s degree at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School on his way towards becoming a “hard aid” specialist at USAID.

They also captured the psychology of Buttigieg, who celebrated Bernie Sanders as a hero when he was a high school senior, and spoke out against the Iraq war as a Harvard junior before being absorbed into the culture of McKinsey and DC institutions like the Truman Center.

The Truman show
When Pete Buttigieg made his journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the Democratic Party.

Buttigieg likely earned the fellowship after answering an ad like the one the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student Government in 2010. Soliciting applicants for its security fellowship, the center declared that it was seeking “exceptionally accomplished and dedicated men and women who share President Truman’s belief in muscular internationalism, and who believe that strong national security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin.”

This was not the first time Buttigieg had dipped his toes into Washington’s national security swamp. After graduating from Harvard, he worked at the Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen that maintained an extensive client list within the arms industry. (As The Grayzone reported, the Cohen Group has been intimately involved in the Trump administration’s bungling regime change attempt in Venezuela).

But it was Buttigieg’s fellowship at the Truman Center that placed him on the casting couch before the Democratic Party’s foreign policy mandarins.



A Tablet Magazine profile of Truman Center founder Rachel Kleinfeld described her as a “gatekeeper and ringleader” whose network of former fellows spanned Congress and the Obama administration’s National Security Council. Her career trajectory mirrored Buttigieg’s.

She had earned degrees at elite institutions (Yale and Oxford, where Buttigieg pursued his Rhodes scholarship) before accepting a job at a private contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, that performed an array of services for the US military and private spying for intelligence agencies.

Kleinfeld’s boss at the company was James Woolsey, the neoconservative former CIA director who has lobbied aggressively for US military assaults on Iraq and Iran.

According to Tablet, “Woolsey positioned Kleinfeld to work on sensitive government projects the company was pursuing in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, including one that involved working as a researcher for the military’s Defense Science Board, investigating information-sharing between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.”

When Kleinfeld founded her think tank in 2005, she named it for the president who oversaw the detonation of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, threats of another nuclear assault on North Korea and the killing of 20 percent of that country’s population. The Truman doctrine, which called for “containing” the Soviet Union through internal destabilization and relentless pressure on its periphery, was the basis of Washington’s Cold War policy. (Following Kleinfeld’s lead, Buttigieg named one of his two pet dogs Truman).

“We decided there really was a need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to really start to think about it, very much as a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s,” she told the Forward at the time.

To fill the center’s board of advisors, Kleinfeld assembled a cast of Democratic foreign policy heavyweights whose accomplishments included the devastation of entire countries through regime change wars.

Among the most notable Truman advisors were Madeleine Albright, the author of NATO’s destruction of Yugoslavia and president of an influence-peddling operation known as the Albright Stonebridge Group; the late Council on Foreign Relations President Les Gelb, who once proposed dividing Iraq into three federal districts along sectarian lines; former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who oversaw record levels of migrant deportations; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department Policy Planning Director who conceived the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) doctrine deployed by the Obama administration to justify NATO’s disastrous intervention in Libya and drum up another one against Syria.

“The Truman Project mobilizes Democrats who serve the conventional interventionist agenda,” journalist Kelly Vlahos wrote. “Beyond that, they are part of a broader orbit of not so dissimilar foot soldiers on the other side of the aisle.”

Buttigieg listed his fellowship at the Truman Center as one of the credentials that qualified him for Indiana State Treasurer when he ran for the position in 2010.

Though he lost in a landslide, Buttigieg won election as mayor of South Bend the following year. “Mayor Pete” had not only secured his future in the Democratic Party, he had won a place in its foreign policy pantheon with a seat on the Truman Center’s advisory board.

Balancing opposition to “endless wars” with support for new ones?
This July 11, Buttigieg rolled out his foreign policy platform in a carefully scripted appearance at Indiana University. Introduced by Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman who was a fixture on the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, Buttigieg blended a call to “end endless wars” with Cold War bluster directed at designated enemies.

Before an auditorium packed with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era, blaming President Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the US. He then attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in Korea, slamming the president for exchanging “love letters” with “a brutal dictator,” referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

More recently, Buttigieg’s campaign pledged to “balance our commitment to end endless wars with the recognition that total isolationism is self-defeating in the long run.” This was the sort of Beltway doublespeak that defined the legacy of Barack Obama, another youthful, self-styled outsider from the Midwest who campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq war, only to sign off on more calamitous wars in the Middle East after he entered the White House.

On the presidential campaign trail, “Mayor Pete” has done his best to paper over the instincts he inherited from his benefactors among the national security state. But as the campaign drags on, his interventionist tendencies are increasingly exposed. Having padded his resume in America’s longest and most futile wars, he may be poised to extend them for a new generation to fight."

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

[Dennis Leahy]

Posted by onawah (here)
Update today from Dark Journalist revealing the Hail Mary pass of Election 2020:
A Unity Ticket featuring Former Secretary of State Democrat John Kerry and Utah Senator Mitt Romney will be forthcoming as a major attempt to capture the White House in November
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkSZh-aJuOQ
Also posted here: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1335835

I don't think Daniel's apparent enthusiasm has anything to do with the douchebag militarist-corporatist "hail mary team", but rather was excited to present a journalistic "scoop." I honestly haven't listened to him much (I'm not one for talk radio or podcasts, especially long ones), but he seems WAY too intelligent to support these globalist clowns. At least, I hope so.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

I'm going to edit the opening post and add or expand on another important point.

[AutumnW]

I ignore Liszt, with prejudice. I don't care what his political beliefs are. I get lost in the weird constellations of frenzied dot connecting. "Look, I can connect Trump's professor uncle with Nichola Tesla!" And he's OFF to the races, leaving substance in his wake while pursuing curly cue trails of "OMG, REALLY, LOOKY HERE!!"

His show will deteriorate even more over time because he must generate content, as Bill Ryan so aptly describes. Joseph Farrell the same.

Ignore the distractions. There is some quality there but most of it is pure hokum!

[onawah]

I doubt very much that DJ is having any problem generating content, and I doubt that Fitts or Farrell will either, certainly not in the year 2020.
Different kinds of minds think differently, and for some, DJ's approach is very interesting.
I like to know about the big picture as well as lesser known subjects which tend to be underestimated in terms of importance, and he is very good at bringing those to light.
It's a spontaneous, unpredictable, participatory process, which is rather unique in journalism, and if it weren't for DJ, I wouldn't be nearly as interested in what's going on in the world;he has a way of making people care, and some of the information that his viewers add to the show via chat can be quite fascinating.
I'm generally double-tasking at the same time that I'm listening to his shows and I stop if there's something vital that needs my focus, so there's no waste of time .
But each to his own.

[Dennis Leahy]

Well, Daniel Lizst is getting too much "airtime" or "column inches" in this thread, for only being peripherally related to the thread's topic. There are a bunch of bullet points in the opening post that are on-topic, and the overview that US citizens have been locked out of the actual election process is on topic.

The report nicknamed the "Princeton Report" (which has been partially scrubbed from the Internet, last time I searched), states that US citizens have ZERO input in governance. The Democrat and Republican corporations not only completely run elections, but also pre-select all candidates that they, and the corporate mass media owned by the same oligarchs that control the "two" political parties, make those and only those candidates viable. Thus, all elections are rigged long before voting starts. The corporate duopoly hires its own replacements, which is why nothing ever really changes. These corporate-owned puppets are not in office to change anything, they are in office to protect the status quo. The status quo is murder, incorporated, on a global scale. These corporate-owned puppets feed the global death machine that the oligarchs have designed and that has become the number one industry of the USA. American citizens who are silent, or supporting the status quo, are complicit in imperialism and murder on a global scale, and are (whether they understanding it or not) supporting fascism. I don't give a rat's ass who the particular miscreants are that the Democrat corporation and the Republican corporation are putting on the ballot - that's not the point. The point is that they are all controlled by the oligarchs through their allegiance to the Global Corporate Network, which is fascism.

This topic isn't about Trump, Pelosi, Sanders, Biden, Pence, Gabbard, Clinton, Buttigeig, etc. That's all temporary. I'm discussing the bigger picture, that US citizens have no control over US elections which is why US citizens have zero control over "their" government. This topic is about the fact that the corporate overlords, the oligarchs, have created a global empire based on global dominance not just financially but by imperialist war. This Empire already is the new world order, so people can stop waiting for it to happen (and dedicate themselves to ending it.) There is also far too much emphasis placed on the president of the US (though, via misuse of the privilege of executive order, the office of the president has unconstitutionally usurped some of the authority of the legislative branch, Congress.) There are 535 corporate-supported henchmen of the oligarchs in the US Congress, and replacing all of them with citizens who represent citizens and are not connected to the oligarchs' Global Corporate Network is just as important as the presidency.

If anyone reading these words supports ANY of the miscreants in the US federal government, ANY Democrat or ANY Republican, they are ignorant - they are ignoring reality. Ignorance can be cured by facts (stupidity can't.) This topic is about whether each reader understands the current oligarch-controlled electoral and governance reality and supports it, or whether each reader understands the current oligarch-controlled electoral and governance reality and doesn't support it. For those in the latter group, I propose a citizen takeover of the entire election system, locking out the oligarchs' henchmen from office. I propose that the citizens of each country control their country's elections and thus control their own governance.

This topic also isn't about a new or different form of government, it is about citizens gaining control of the one that exists, and unplugging the oligarch control.

[T Smith]

Posted by Aragorn (here)

Posted by AutumnW (here)
Peterson understands Fascism and Communism but leaves out Corporatism.

That's because corporatism is fascism ─ literally.

Hi Aragorn, no need to apologize for your cogent insights, particularly the following:

Posted by Aragorn (here)
the USA, as a nation, is a de facto fascist regime.

Posted by Aragorn (here)
Both parties also adhere to American Exceptionalism, which is a belief that the USA is somehow exceptional in its values ─ notwithstanding irrefutable exposure, time and time again, of how the US government continuously betrays the very values it claims to uphold.

Posted by Aragorn (here)
The average US American is completely oblivious of how brainwashed they are, and completely unfamiliar with any other culture than their own. They also don't see that the US Democrats are not "the left", because there is no real "left" in the USA. The US Democrats only sit marginally to the left of the US Republicans, and from the international standpoint, both parties are right-wing and authoritarian.

For those of you who believe that the USA stands for freedom and democracy, I have only two words: Patriot Act. Enough said.

There absolutely is a widespread delusion US Americans maintain regarding their government and political system, but I would say most of us here already understand this--even those who---gasp---follow the infamous Q Anon phenomenon (more on this below). For a detailed historical perspective I would encourage those interested further to read Tragedy and Hope and Anglo-American Establishment by American historian Carroll Quigley. Quigley does an outstanding job laying out USA's fascist proclivities and documents the history you eloquently describe.

However--and now to share your <deep sigh> by delving into more controversial observations--I find some who understand the geopolitical machinations underpinning the false veneer of America's political system are sometimes overly cynical of what appears to me to be an extremely complex dynamic riddled with various ambiguities and shades of gray. Yes, USA is a fascist regime. We can all agree. Yes, corporatism is the driving force of American imperialism, militarism, and the exploitation of planetary resources, including the exploitation of humans. These observations are indeed poignant, but I find it over-simplifying to render every politician who participates in the aforementioned system, or who condones or fails to eradicate or forcefully condemn every single injustice inherent to the system, to be a sociopath non-human without a soul (as some have suggested), wound up and controlled, as it were, only by selfish ulterior motives and sinister forces. It seems to me these kind of uniform judgments are overly cynical and derive more from frustration and anger than from a critical examination of the human condition. Of course none of us like being subjected to psychological warfare (we’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore!) so perhaps we are all too quick to assume the populist actors currently on stage (Farage/Trump, etc.) have merely hijacked the will of the people to further advance the fascist interests that have a stranglehold on our political system. Be that as it may, what we are really railing against, it would seem to me, is our collective state of learned helplessness with which we have been inculcated since birth. We are all powerless, or at least we believe ourselves to be powerless; to assume otherwise would be to embrace our naiveté and cognitive dissonance.

Let’s consider. We know our elected officials’ jobs are to serve the interests of the corporate power structure in whatever way is required while pretending to represent their constituents. We can all agree. Some do this because they are evil and only want to seize power, some play to enrich themselves along the way, others to satisfy their ambitions and ego, yet others for more idealistic reasons, to wage some implausible plot against the controlling yolk of power (think Bernie Sanders), which always turns out to be an empty threat in the final equation. In other words, the sociopolitical dynamic in America is a complex deception of varying agendas, the only common denominator being the Corporate Power Structure’s management of public expectation through elected proxies who pretend to serve the interests of the people.

The question is, why does the corporate power structure need their proxies to pretend in this way? Why not just shed the pretense and adopt fascism proper (as you allude is inevitable) as Hitler and others did? Why not just do away with the whole charade? Would that not be a much easier and more efficient way to affect the agendas of the PTB? In the infamous words of George W. Bush, who attempted a sarcastic answer to the question after falsely being accused of being a dictator “…if this were [truly] a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier… Hehehe…”

And so it would.

It is evident to me the reason why the particular brand of fascism we see in the USA requires deception and the utter manipulation of its people. And the answer is the elephant in the room. It is because a good majority of the 300 million people in the USA, unlike their European, Asian, and Australian counterparts, are armed to the teeth on account of an inconvenient 2nd Amendment to the Constitution the people of the US apparently take seriously, even though they don’t quite understand why. What’s even more dangerous is these armed serfs have deluded themselves with deep-seated beliefs in democracy and freedom and a system of government that, save for fantastical constructs existent only in the minds of the 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers who devised them, are mere relics on paper (as Dennis aptly points out). In my view the concept of this fictional form of government, which promises empowerment to the people, and which ironically has nothing whatsoever to do with the real system of governance in the USA—constitutes the American Exceptionalism to which most Americans subscribe and in the name of which so many injustices around the world are carried out.

The greater irony, of course, is the corporate power structure is founded and utterly dependent on this ongoing deception and psyop on the people; it needs to continually maintain this charade in order to sustain its power via sophisticated indoctrination beginning at birth, subtle brainwashing, and 24/7 propaganda. So in other words so long as we serfs are armed (American Revolutionists be damned), the PTB must cajole the masses with illusions of freedom and democracy at all costs. Were the corporate power structure ever to do anything overtly totalitarian, expose themselves for what they are, or shatter the collective illusion—say to drop elections altogether or attempt to establish some form of hard fascism or dictatorship—no power on Earth could contain the uprising.

To address your final point, I find myself often defending the Trump Administration’s modus operandi in response to some observations people have regarding their varying insights on American politics. This is never really my intent at the outset. However, I do feel compelled to share my humble perception not because I’m advocating or cheerleading or pitching for Trump—or even because I like Trump or support his agenda—but because I am often confused by how so many people perceive and understand Trump. It would seem a lot of people misunderstand DJT through a distorted lens (which is an entirely different subject matter altogether).

The first thing I found perplexing about your insights regarding Trump was the implication that POTUS Trump, like his predecessors, is a corporatist, or at very least is serving corporatist interests, presumably unbeknownst to the common men and women who support him. It is true this is more or less the generic definition of the modern American politician, but in my view this implication does not at all fit the model of Trump, the man. It is also true capitalism ultimately evolves to corporatism (fascism), but regardless of the ulterior motives that may or may not drive the Trump Administration’s policies, I would argue Trump is a capitalist, not a corporatist. Subscribe or not, we are now amid a new era. Corporatism is the consolidation or centralization of power, whereas Capitalism is the decentralization and breakdown of power via competition.

We do not have a true form in capitalism in America (for better or worse), nor have had for several decades, but if we did it would not look like fascist corporatism characteristic of USA circa 2020. The point is people often conflate Trump with the corporatist model and condemn him right alongside mega corporations that have amassed tremendous political power and own entire political parties. It is evident to me that Trump, the man—and the politician—has no affiliation with this power bloc.

If we did have a capitalist America it would look much more like the socioeconomic model Trump espouses in his populist rants, e.g. an expansion of manufacturing and production, fair competition, entrepreneurial laissez-faire markets and deregulation, etc. (again, for better or worse) and not the socioeconomic model David Rockefeller espouses, which describes a system rigged to the highest bidder. All said “Trump’s brand of capitalism” is also highly problematic, as Marx and Dickens point out, and I am not necessarily advocating for this economic model. I’m merely pointing out that people who do not discern the subtleties between Capitalism and Corporatism continually misbrand and misunderstand Trump.

Let’s consider. The man now occupying the White house is not an elitist; he is a nouveau-riche commoner. His father was a self-made businessman and Trump himself is but three generations removed (essentially) from the humble heritage of poor European land serfs. Donald Trump is a throw-back capitalist whose family went from rags to riches in very short period, whereas Corporatists and elitists loathe competition, amass their fortunes by forming oligarchies and monopolies, concentrate political power to achieve their objectives, and lock out the likes of enterprising serfs. In the famous words of David Rockefeller, the ultimate corporatist, competition is a sin….

Expanding on this, Donald Trump’s back-story segues nicely into our current state of the union, or disunion, as it were, depending on one’s vantage. What we are currently seeing in American politics, in my view, and contrary to the idea that DJT is a shill for corporatist oligarchs, is a faction of capitalists who vehemently oppose the corporatists, and who have tapped the populist uprising to gain the necessary political capital to wage a silent coup d’état on the stranglehold the corporatist global concentration of power has on we the people. As evident as this is to me, it is admittedly a controversial thesis because it validates the Q Anon narrative to some degree and also the idea that Donald Trump is indeed fighting the “Deep State,” which he absolutely is. I don’t hang on the words of Q drops, but I do respect the views of many here on the forum more versed on the topic than I. I respect their insights and know for a fact that they hold no illusions about the chilling political reality Dennis describes in the OP. In short, Q Anon is not a psyop; it is a public relations platform for the capitalist bloc at war with the “Deep State” corporatists. This does not mean Q Anon is 100% credible or accurate anymore than we might say MSM (or any corporatist propaganda platform) is 100% credible or accurate. Rather, we should understand the bigger picture as small faction of outsiders fighting a battle on the terms that support their own interests (and by extension, they argue, the interests of the people) vs. the corporatists. Trump supporters, who also bitterly oppose the corporatists, and who have backed the cause, may or may not fully understand this. Frankly, I’m surprised no one has ever pointed this distinction out in the “Trump is Not the Answer” thread.

In sum, we should not confuse what is going on in American politics with whether or not the battle with the Deep State is real. This should be abundantly evident when we consider the interests of the players. For example, why would you expect capitalists fighting corporatists to condemn the Endangered Species Act? Why would you expect them to not to promote tax havens for big corporations? Corporations are not the enemy, so long as they exist in free markets that encourage competition and do not concentrate political power.

There, I’ve said it, withstanding all judgement on what is...

There are two schools of thought regarding regime change. We can either reform what we have or raze it to the ground and try to start over. I fully agree with how we have identified the problem here. Kudos to your insights Aragorn and also to Dennis, more "purveyor of truth" than "fool on the hill" . I’m just a little weary about talk of a complete overhaul of the political and electoral system; we all know how the latter worked out for the people under the Bolsheviks in the early 20th century....

[AutumnW]

If we did have a capitalist America it would look much more like the socioeconomic model Trump espouses in his populist rants, e.g. an expansion of manufacturing and production, fair competition, entrepreneurial laissez-faire markets and deregulation, etc. (again, for better or worse) and not the socioeconomic model David Rockefeller espouses, which describes a system rigged to the highest bidder. All said “Trump’s brand of capitalism” is also highly problematic, as Marx and Dickens point out, and I am not necessarily advocating for this economic model. I’m merely pointing out that people who do not discern the subtleties between Capitalism and Corporatism continually misbrand and misunderstand Trump.==TSmith

Aside from California, this is where blue collar manufacturing is going. And it is ramping up under Trump. This is textbook fascism.

Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets. A company that operated a maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California. In Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.

[Former] Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that “there won’t be any transportation costs; we’re offering you competitive prison labor (here).”

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pr...f-slavery/8289

[Dennis Leahy]

T,

The problem with attempting to differentiate a single corporation (the basic "unit" of capitalism since the 1800s) from the Global Corporate Network is the network.

Trump has his own corporate assets, but they are but a dot on the following 3D cloud chart:

The study author's main emphasis is the interconnectedness of the corporations - a global network of corporations.

The red dots are "superconnected" corporations, and the yellow dots are "connected" corporations. This graphic represents the Global Corporate Network, that Trump and every other office-holder of high office is fed by. Not all of them have a dot (Trump's dot is probably pretty tiny), but they are all fed by this network. Even if Trump didn't have his own tiny dot, he would at best be shaking an empty fist at the Global Corporate Network (like Sanders does) while at the same time suckling on it.

Is Trump going after the "Deep State" or just the Democrats that "done him wrong?" (It appears to me that he has a right to be pissed off at the criminal actions of the DNC against him personally, the whole bull**** 'Russiagate' nonsense - especially within the reality of Israel's actual vector and degree of control over elections and US foreign policy. But it ain't actually the Deep State/oligarchs.)

Is Trump fighting the Deep State by imprisoning Assange - one of, if not 'thee', greatest threat to the Deep State? (Oh, I know, Q probably calls it 'protective custody.') Or fighting the Deep State by attacking Venezuela? Or attacking and occupying Syria? Or by shoveling taxpayer money to the military industrial complex corporations which are clearly one of the largest assets/moneymakers for the Global Corporate Network? Other than going after the Democrats (who are indeed controlled by the Deep State, as are the Republicans), just exactly what is Trump doing to end fascism, to end the control of the US government by the Deep State? I noted in a post of yours elsewhere, that you give Trump a pass on following the militarist imperialist agenda of the GCN/oligarchs/deep state, as if he could do nothing about the fact that he stepped into an ongoing agenda and is simply along for the ride. If the GCN has Trump too scared or impotent to do anything about the USA's greatest connection to and collaboration with the GCN (the US military and military industrial complex corporations), and too scared or impotent to do anything about the intelligence/security state, then why is he given something between a pass and hero worship?

Really, specific discussion of Trump or any other individual politician is off topic in this thread, and I am now guilty of doing it as well. We're never going to discuss the real issues if we keep falling back to discussing politicians rather than the oligarchs/GCN/deep state that controls those politicians. Trump is not the enemy, he is an asset of the enemy of the people of the USA and the world.

[AutumnW]

More on the same subject:

Executive Director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, Scott Paul stated that "It's bad enough that our companies have to compete with exploited and forced labor in China. They shouldn't have to compete against prison labor here at home. The goal should be for other nations to aspire to the quality of life that Americans enjoy, not to discard our efforts through a downward competitive spiral."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_..._United_States

I would like someone, anyone, to explain to those participating on this forum how this phenomenon will change under either party, with the exception of true progressives who can somehow gain leverage over the single minded drive for profit. That is the essence of capitalism, be it corporate or otherwise. But capitalism, by its very nature will end up oligarchic or monopolistic.

[onawah]

From Caitlin Johnstone's latest entry, which explains why she is supportive of Sanders: "I’ve been writing for a long time about the possibility of a grassroots information rebellion in which ordinary people use new media in sufficient numbers to actually seize control of important dominant narratives, and, at least within the limited scope of Sanders’ presidential campaign, we’re seeing an actual model for what such an insurgency might look like. In their endless freeform improvisation on social media, Berners have demonstrated the ability to collectively send hashtags to the top of Twitter’s trending list like #ILikeBernie, #BloombergIsRacist and #WarrenIsASnake, and to meme top presidential campaigns like that of Kamala Harris completely out of existence.

Centrist elitists are fond of saying “Twitter isn’t real life”, meaning the dominant views you’ll see on social media aren’t necessarily reflective of the broader public, and of course that’s true. But clearly Twitter, like any other large and influential media platform, is able to help shape narratives which affect real life. The difference is that unlike other forms of billionaire-owned media, Twitter allows for the possibility of a grassroots campaign by the people to influence those narratives.

Even if you’re not a Sanders supporter I highly recommend keeping tabs on his online base, because it’s a force that is truly something to behold. And also because it sets an example of something that could change the world, if people could just figure out a way to expand their grassroots information rebellion beyond the scope of a single candidate’s presidential campaign.

And that’s the real reason the imperial narrative managers are so freaked out about it. Not because anyone is being “viciously attacked”, but because they understand that narrative control is power. The people collectively seizing control of the dominant narratives within the empire is the stuff of oligarchic nightmares, because whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

Power is the ability to control what happens. Absolute power is controlling what people think about what happens.Humans are story-oriented creatures, so if you can control the stories that the humans are telling about what’s going on, you can control those humans. Any adept manipulator understands this. So they understand that the people taking control of dominant narratives is a direct threat to their rule."
See more at:https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1336055

Posted by Dennis Leahy (here)
Well, Daniel Lizst is getting too much "airtime" or "column inches" in this thread, for only being peripherally related to the thread's topic. There are a bunch of bullet points in the opening post that are on-topic, and the overview that US citizens have been locked out of the actual election process is on topic.

The report nicknamed the "Princeton Report" (which has been partially scrubbed from the Internet, last time I searched), states that US citizens have ZERO input in governance. The Democrat and Republican corporations not only completely run elections, but also pre-select all candidates that they, and the corporate mass media owned by the same oligarchs that control the "two" political parties, make those and only those candidates viable. Thus, all elections are rigged long before voting starts. The corporate duopoly hires its own replacements, which is why nothing ever really changes. These corporate-owned puppets are not in office to change anything, they are in office to protect the status quo. The status quo is murder, incorporated, on a global scale. These corporate-owned puppets feed the global death machine that the oligarchs have designed and that has become the number one industry of the USA. American citizens who are silent, or supporting the status quo, are complicit in imperialism and murder on a global scale, and are (whether they understanding it or not) supporting fascism. I don't give a rat's ass who the particular miscreants are that the Democrat corporation and the Republican corporation are putting on the ballot - that's not the point. The point is that they are all controlled by the oligarchs through their allegiance to the Global Corporate Network, which is fascism.

This topic isn't about Trump, Pelosi, Sanders, Biden, Pence, Gabbard, Clinton, Buttigeig, etc. That's all temporary. I'm discussing the bigger picture, that US citizens have no control over US elections which is why US citizens have zero control over "their" government. This topic is about the fact that the corporate overlords, the oligarchs, have created a global empire based on global dominance not just financially but by imperialist war. This Empire already is the new world order, so people can stop waiting for it to happen (and dedicate themselves to ending it.) There is also far too much emphasis placed on the president of the US (though, via misuse of the privilege of executive order, the office of the president has unconstitutionally usurped some of the authority of the legislative branch, Congress.) There are 535 corporate-supported henchmen of the oligarchs in the US Congress, and replacing all of them with citizens who represent citizens and are not connected to the oligarchs' Global Corporate Network is just as important as the presidency.

If anyone reading these words supports ANY of the miscreants in the US federal government, ANY Democrat or ANY Republican, they are ignorant - they are ignoring reality. Ignorance can be cured by facts (stupidity can't.) This topic is about whether each reader understands the current oligarch-controlled electoral and governance reality and supports it, or whether each reader understands the current oligarch-controlled electoral and governance reality and doesn't support it. For those in the latter group, I propose a citizen takeover of the entire election system, locking out the oligarchs' henchmen from office. I propose that the citizens of each country control their country's elections and thus control their own governance.

This topic also isn't about a new or different form of government, it is about citizens gaining control of the one that exists, and unplugging the oligarch control.

I was posting info from Dark Journalist because he was bringing to light a great example of current political moves designed to keep the oligarchy operating with the unity ticket Hail Mary, and advancing elite puppet Pete Buttigieg over Bernie Sanders, who has the best good grass roots base.

Johnstone's ideas are a compromise compared to what you propose, Dennis, but it's a step, at least...

But back to topic!

[AutumnW]

Just real quick, because I don't know if it's on topic. Socialism is not Communism. The oligarchs have worked double time to entrench their power through media with little tactics like never using the word Communist anymore, just referring to any system other than the Oligarchy as "Socialism."

I am not surprised Caitlin supports the Socialist, Sanders, Onawah. Thank you so much for posting that. I wasn't aware where she stood on the matter. A vote for Sanders is not a vote for collective farms, a grey stagnant life where upward mobility is impossible. It is a vote to somehow move a little closer to the European and Canadian economic model that supports universal health care for all--for starters.

Apologize for hijacking thread, a bit.

Love to hear more from Aragorn. Really enjoying his posts!

[T Smith]

Posted by Dennis Leahy (here)
T,

The problem with attempting to differentiate a single corporation (the basic "unit" of capitalism since the 1800s) from the Global Corporate Network is the network.

Trump has his own corporate assets, but they are but a dot on the following 3D cloud chart:

The study author's main emphasis is the interconnectedness of the corporations - a global network of corporations.

The red dots are "superconnected" corporations, and the yellow dots are "connected" corporations. This graphic represents the Global Corporate Network, that Trump and every other office-holder of high office is fed by. Not all of them have a dot (Trump's dot is probably pretty tiny), but they are all fed by this network. Even if Trump didn't have his own tiny dot, he would at best be shaking an empty fist at the Global Corporate Network (like Sanders does) while at the same time suckling on it.

Is Trump going after the "Deep State" or just the Democrats that "done him wrong?" (It appears to me that he has a right to be pissed off at the criminal actions of the DNC against him personally, the whole bull**** 'Russiagate' nonsense - especially within the reality of Israel's actual vector and degree of control over elections and US foreign policy. But it ain't actually the Deep State/oligarchs.)

Is Trump fighting the Deep State by imprisoning Assange - one of, if not 'thee', greatest threat to the Deep State? (Oh, I know, Q probably calls it 'protective custody.') Or fighting the Deep State by attacking Venezuela? Or attacking and occupying Syria? Or by shoveling taxpayer money to the military industrial complex corporations which are clearly one of the largest assets/moneymakers for the Global Corporate Network? Other than going after the Democrats (who are indeed controlled by the Deep State, as are the Republicans), just exactly what is Trump doing to end fascism, to end the control of the US government by the Deep State? I noted in a post of yours elsewhere, that you give Trump a pass on following the militarist imperialist agenda of the GCN/oligarchs/deep state, as if he could do nothing about the fact that he stepped into an ongoing agenda and is simply along for the ride. If the GCN has Trump too scared or impotent to do anything about the USA's greatest connection to and collaboration with the GCN (the US military and military industrial complex corporations), and too scared or impotent to do anything about the intelligence/security state, then why is he given something between a pass and hero worship?

Really, specific discussion of Trump or any other individual politician is off topic in this thread, and I am now guilty of doing it as well. We're never going to discuss the real issues if we keep falling back to discussing politicians rather than the oligarchs/GCN/deep state that controls those politicians. Trump is not the enemy, he is an asset of the enemy of the people of the USA and the world.

Perhaps I should come in at this from another angle. We are on the same page identifying the problem. However, I am not suggesting the "Deep State Corporatists" and the "Capitalist Populists" maintain mutually exclusive interests.

.

Let's just say, for sake of illustration the "Deep State" represents the Kings in the image above and "Trumpism" represents the Hearts... They both don't give a damn about the Endangered Species Act or Juiian Assange. Trump is rogue and has foolishly (and arbitrarily) followed some policy advice from his neo-con advisors, while at times he has agitated the very same advisors by ignoring similarly-delivered advise. On these matters there is no consistency in this Administration, which suggests to me a situation just the oppose of being controlled. In other words, being manipulated and/or cajoled by said interests is not the same as being controlled by said interests. On these issues, among others, we may refer to the King of Hearts in the image... Anyway, you get the gist.

All this really has nothing to do with the Democrats; they just so happen to be the most vocal political mouthpiece of the Kings at the moment (I would also point out that it was not too long ago that both Democrats and Republicans were firmly in this Deep State bloc. Both parties adamantly opposed Trump, we sometimes forget, until Trump hijacked, co-opted, and essentially commandeered the latter political party, essentially bending it to his will).

In sum, I am not refuting the problem. What I am refuting is the notion of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss, puppet of said problem..." That's not what is going on, in my estimation. We can avoid talk about specific politicians if it serves the topic best, but in my view The GCN/Deep State bloc does not control DJT.... there is something much more complicated going on here. If we can't continue our discussion on this premise it won't serve our mutual understanding of the problem, in my humble estimation.

Of course we can agree to disagree on this point if you judge I am mistaken. And I am of course open to your arguments. What seems clear to me, however, is Trump’s regulatory reforms and anti-corporatist policies favor the Hearts (save for the King of Hearts), e.g. the small businesses and a brand of throw-back capitalism counter to corporatist interests, whereas the yellow-dotted corporations in your model are best positioned for a regulated global economy, unlimited immigration, and unencumbered foreign access to U.S. markets.

Perhaps most unsettling of all for those who oppose the current Adminstration is not the idea that the GCN/deep State is controlling Trump, but the notion that it is not controlling the current Administration...

[Praxis]

Posted by T Smith (here)

Posted by Dennis Leahy (here)
T,

The problem with attempting to differentiate a single corporation (the basic "unit" of capitalism since the 1800s) from the Global Corporate Network is the network.

Trump has his own corporate assets, but they are but a dot on the following 3D cloud chart:

The study author's main emphasis is the interconnectedness of the corporations - a global network of corporations.

The red dots are "superconnected" corporations, and the yellow dots are "connected" corporations. This graphic represents the Global Corporate Network, that Trump and every other office-holder of high office is fed by. Not all of them have a dot (Trump's dot is probably pretty tiny), but they are all fed by this network. Even if Trump didn't have his own tiny dot, he would at best be shaking an empty fist at the Global Corporate Network (like Sanders does) while at the same time suckling on it.

Is Trump going after the "Deep State" or just the Democrats that "done him wrong?" (It appears to me that he has a right to be pissed off at the criminal actions of the DNC against him personally, the whole bull**** 'Russiagate' nonsense - especially within the reality of Israel's actual vector and degree of control over elections and US foreign policy. But it ain't actually the Deep State/oligarchs.)

Is Trump fighting the Deep State by imprisoning Assange - one of, if not 'thee', greatest threat to the Deep State? (Oh, I know, Q probably calls it 'protective custody.') Or fighting the Deep State by attacking Venezuela? Or attacking and occupying Syria? Or by shoveling taxpayer money to the military industrial complex corporations which are clearly one of the largest assets/moneymakers for the Global Corporate Network? Other than going after the Democrats (who are indeed controlled by the Deep State, as are the Republicans), just exactly what is Trump doing to end fascism, to end the control of the US government by the Deep State? I noted in a post of yours elsewhere, that you give Trump a pass on following the militarist imperialist agenda of the GCN/oligarchs/deep state, as if he could do nothing about the fact that he stepped into an ongoing agenda and is simply along for the ride. If the GCN has Trump too scared or impotent to do anything about the USA's greatest connection to and collaboration with the GCN (the US military and military industrial complex corporations), and too scared or impotent to do anything about the intelligence/security state, then why is he given something between a pass and hero worship?

Really, specific discussion of Trump or any other individual politician is off topic in this thread, and I am now guilty of doing it as well. We're never going to discuss the real issues if we keep falling back to discussing politicians rather than the oligarchs/GCN/deep state that controls those politicians. Trump is not the enemy, he is an asset of the enemy of the people of the USA and the world.

Perhaps I should come in at this from another angle. We are on the same page identifying the problem. However, I am not suggesting the "Deep State Corporatists" and the "Capitalist Populists" maintain mutually exclusive interests.

.

Let's just say, for sake of illustration the "Deep State" represents the Kings in the image above and "Trumpism" represents the Hearts... They both don't give a damn about the Endangered Species Act or Juiian Assange. Trump is rogue and has foolishly (and arbitrarily) followed some policy advice from his neo-con advisors, while at times he has agitated the very same advisors by ignoring similarly-delivered advise. On these matters there is no consistency in this Administration, which suggests to me a situation just the oppose of being controlled. In other words, being manipulated and/or cajoled by said interests is not the same as being controlled by said interests. On these issues, among others, we may refer to the King of Hearts in the image... Anyway, you get the gist.

All this really has nothing to do with the Democrats; they just so happen to be the most vocal political mouthpiece of the Kings at the moment (I would also point out that it was not too long ago that both Democrats and Republicans were firmly in this Deep State bloc. Both parties adamantly opposed Trump, we sometimes forget, until Trump hijacked, co-opted, and essentially commandeered the latter political party, essentially bending it to his will).

In sum, I am not refuting the problem. What I am refuting is the notion of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss, puppet of said problem..." That's not what is going on, in my estimation. We can avoid talk about specific politicians if it serves the topic best, but in my view The GCN/Deep State bloc does not control DJT.... there is something much more complicated going on here. If we can't continue our discussion on this premise it won't serve our mutual understanding of the problem, in my humble estimation.

Of course we can agree to disagree on this point if you judge I am mistaken. And I am of course open to your arguments. What seems clear to me, however, is Trump’s regulatory reforms and anti-corporatist policies favor the Hearts (save for the King of Hearts), e.g. the small businesses and a brand of throw-back capitalism counter to corporatist interests, whereas the yellow-dotted corporations in your model are best positioned for a regulated global economy, unlimited immigration, and unencumbered foreign access to U.S. markets.

Perhaps most unsettling of all for those who oppose the current Adminstration is not the idea that the GCN/deep State is controlling Trump, but the notion that it is not controlling the current Administration...

You are praising a con man that is conning you just because he is not conning you for the wrong people.

For those paying attention to policies, we are watching the same thing again and again and again.