Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/blo...c-34cbeacdd8a9 The US Has Placed Itself In Charge Over Which Nations Get To Eat
by Caitlin Johnstone
Listen to a reading of this article:
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The globally influential propaganda multiplier news agencies AP and AFP have both informed their readers that a "fugitive" has been extradited to the United States.
"Fugitive businessman close to Venezuela's Maduro extradited to US," reads the AFP headline.
"Alex Saab, a top fugitive close to Venezuela's socialist government, has been put on a plane to the U.S. to face money laundering charges," AP announced on Twitter.
You'd be forgiven for wondering what specifically makes this man a "fugitive", and what that status has to do with his extradition to a foreign government whose laws should have no bearing on his life. The Colombian-born Venezuelan citizen Alex Saab, as it happens, is a "fugitive" from the US government's self-appointed authority to decide which populations on our planet are permitted to have ready access to food. His crime is working to circumvent the crushing US sanctions which have been starving Venezuelan civilians to death by the tens of thousands.Absolutely shameful that @AP is describing a Venezuelan diplomat being kidnapped by the US as a "fugitive." https://t.co/52AxFOFB80
— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) October 16, 2021
Saab is being extradited from the African nation of Cabo Verde where he has been imprisoned since last year under pressure from the US government. In an article published this past May titled "Alex Saab v. The Empire: How the US Is Using Lawfare To Punish a Venezuelan Diplomat", Roger D Harris explains how the US uses its domination of the international financial system to crush nations which disobey it and outlines the real reasons for Saab's imprisonment, which has included torture and draconian living conditions. Harris writes:Special Envoy and Ambassador to the African Union for Venezuela Alex Saab was on a humanitarian mission flying from Caracas to Iran to procure food and gasoline for the Venezuelan CLAP food assistance program. Saab was detained on a refueling stop in the African nation of Cabo Verde and has been held in custody ever since June 12, 2020.
Saab’s “crime” — according to the U.S. government, which ordered the imprisonment — was money laundering. That is, Saab conducted perfectly legal international trade. Still, his circumventing of the U.S. sanctions – which are designed to prevent relief to the Venezuelans – is considered by Washington to be money laundering.
After a two-year investigation into Saab’s transactions with Swiss banks, the Swiss government concluded on March 25 that there was no money laundering. Saab is being prosecuted because he is serving his country’s interest rather than that of the U.S.
News agencies like AP and AFP are well aware that Saab is being extradited not for breaking any actual law but for daring to transgress Washington's unilateral sanctions. As FAIR's Joe Emersberger wrote back in July:Reuters (3/15/21, 3/18/21) has casually reported that Saab “faces extradition to the United States, which accuses him of violating US sanctions,” and that he has been “repeatedly named by the US State Department as an operator who helps Maduro arrange trade deals that Washington is seeking to block through sanctions.” A Reuters article (8/28/20) about Saab’s case in 2020 mentioned in passing that “the United States this month seized four cargoes of Iranian fuel bound for Venezuela, where fuel shortages are once again worsening.”
The extradition of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab is a clear signal the Biden Administration has made no break with Trump’s all out assault on int’l law
Also a worrying sign for the case of Julian Assange— another foreign citizen the US has essentially kidnapped and held hostage https://t.co/aBVcWI8E3Z
— Anya Parampil (@anyaparampil) October 16, 2021
Critics of the US empire have had harsh words for the extradition.
"Biden, picking up Trump's baton, has kidnapped Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab for the crime of trying to feed Venezuelans in defiance of US sanctions designed to prevent that," tweeted journalist Aaron Maté. "Venezuelans aren't allowed to eat so long as the D.C. Mafia has marked their government for regime change."
Yes indeed. The US government has appointed itself the authority to unilaterally decide which of the world's populations get to eat and which do not, and to imprison anyone who tries to facilitate unauthorized eating in a US-sanctioned nation.
"The extradition of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab is a clear signal the Biden Administration has made no break with Trump’s all out assault on international law," tweeted journalist Anya Parampil. "Also a worrying sign for the case of Julian Assange— another foreign citizen the US has essentially kidnapped and held hostage."
This is true. It would seem that the primary difference between Assange's case and Saab's is that the US empire is working to extradite Assange because he transgressed its self-appointed authority over the world's access to information, whereas Saab transgressed its self-appointed authority over the world's access to food.
"The US rogue state just ripped up every international law, after imprisoning and now extraditing Venezuelan DIPLOMAT Alex Saab. Diplomatic immunity is dead; the US empire killed it. Now all foreign diplomats are fair game to be kidnapped and imprisoned, if Washington wants to," tweeted journalist Ben Norton, adding, "The US accusations of 'money laundering' are absurd and politically motivated. The US claims anyone who violates its ILLEGAL sanctions is a 'criminal'."
Indeed, "money laundering" is a vague charge which basically just means trying to conceal the source or destination of money that is deemed to have been obtained illegally, and since the US government considers itself the arbiter of what financial transactions are lawful in nations it is sanctioning, it can apply that claim to anyone who tries to get around US sanctions financially.
The US government does not deny that its sanctions hurt Venezuelans by attacking the economy they rely on to feed themselves, in fact it has openly admitted that “sanctions, particularly on the state oil company in 2019, likely contributed to the steeper decline of the Venezuelan economy.”
The US government also does not deny that the starvation sanctions it has inflicted upon Iran are directed at its civilian population, with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo openly admitting in 2019 that Washington's economic warfare against that nation is designed to pressure Iranian civilians to "change the government," i.e. make them so miserable that they wage a domestic uprising to topple Tehran.
The US government also does not deny that the starvation sanctions it has inflicted upon Syria are designed to hurt its civilian population, with current Secretary of State Tony Blinken reaffirming just this past Wednesday that it is the Biden administration's policy to "oppose the reconstruction of Syria" as long as Assad remains in power. In other words the US will not allow Syria the funds to help rebuild itself from the devastating regime change proxy war the US and its allies waged against it, even as the UN reports that 60 percent of the nation's population is close to starvation.
And of course there's the US power alliance's horrific blockade on Yemen which is murdering people by the hundreds of thousands via starvation and disease, with the UN reporting that a further 16 million people are "marching towards starvation."
Starvation is the only kind of warfare where, because of the continual reframing of mass media propaganda, it is considered perfectly normal and acceptable to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force.Last month, the UN warned that 16 million Yemenis are currently “marching towards starvation” due to the US-backed Saudi war on Yemen. https://t.co/fkefzYQtQX
— Human Rights Watch Watcher (@queeralamode) October 16, 2021
The US empire is entirely open about the fact that it sees itself as the gatekeeper of the world's food supply. If a population disobeys the empire its people will starve, and anyone who tries to obtain food for them will be arrested by US proxies and extradited to a US jail cell.
This is the imperialist's vision of heaven on earth. A world where America's stranglehold over global financial systems allows it to choke off entire populations if their governments disobey imperial decrees, without even firing a shot. A world where the PR nightmares of bombed civilians and destroyed nations are a thing of the past, where disobedient nations can simply be squeezed to death by modern siege warfare tactics while imperial propaganda firms like AP and AFP blame their starvation on their nation's leaders.
That's ultimate power right there. That's total control. Having the world so bent to the will of the almighty dollar and the massive military force with which it is inextricably intertwined to such an extent that disobedience becomes impossible. That's what's being fought for in the slow motion third world war that the empire is waging against unabsorbed governments like Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia and China. And that's why those unabsorbed governments are fast at work moving away from the dollar in response.
It should really go without saying, but a power structure that would openly starve civilians to death to ensure global domination is not the sort of power structure that humanity should want dominating the globe. The willingness to do such monstrous things exposes a depravity and a lack of wisdom which has no business determining what direction our world should take into the future.
Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.co...urprise-ending
Humanity's collective awakening will unfold in ways that nobody is anticipating, for the same reasons an individual's awakening always unfolds in ways they can't anticipate.
An individual's journey into greater consciousness is rife with plot twists and M. Night Shyamalan surprise endings, because it is always by necessity a journey into the unknown. Success on the quest to become a more conscious human will necessarily come with surprises, because you're bringing the light of consciousness to things that weren't previously seen. The things you discover surprise you because there's no way you can really anticipate something you haven't yet seen for yourself.
When inner work and therapy begin yielding insights into the underlying sources of one's unhappiness or self-destructive behavior, those insights are often accompanied by a sense of surprise as one realizes for example that a parent whose actions they'd always believed were normal was in fact abusive and traumatizing, or that an early sexual encounter they'd previously believed was innocent was in fact rape. Things that have been kept hidden in unconsciousness due to our inability to grapple with them earlier in life are seen clearly as we coax them into consciousness, and the realization that they weren't what we'd previously assumed can shift our entire experience of life.
When you get it into your head that you need to "find yourself", the Sixth Sense surprise ending of that hero's journey is that there has never been any self to find. People mistake thoughts and the apparent existence of a physical body for a "self", the identification with which they weave into their psychological functioning and energetic experience of life in early childhood. But through careful investigation it's possible to come to the jarring insight that no aspect of our experience actually contains an inherent "me" in it; that it was an unquestioned assumption which got woven into our habits of cognition and perception early on, and that we can consciously un-pick those habits from our way of functioning by bringing awareness to the way life is really happening.
The surprise twist at the end of the quest for liberation is the realization that true freedom comes from setting life free. That freedom from slavery to one's conditioning and the ability to experience life in its natural boundlessness is only possible with a letting go of all effort to control things; to control outcomes, to control our experience, to control others, to control life. All egoic patterning is ultimately born of a desire to control, and freedom from that patterning can only come when there's a letting go of that desire.
The surprise ending of the search for inner peace is the realization that peace has always been here, closer to you than your own heartbeat. That our experience of life in all its sloppy tumultuousness is painted upon a canvass of infinite peace, and that this canvass is your true nature. It was simply overlooked for a time.
The surprise ending in search for unconditional love is the realization that unconditional love is already the case for the entire universe; that everything which appears is utterly beloved exactly as it is without any desire to change it in the slightest. And that change is also utterly beloved. And that even confusion and unconsciousness is utterly beloved. Even in its most painful manifestations.
Every positive change in human behavior is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness, whether you're talking about an individual or an entire world. But you can never truly know ahead of time what's on the other side of that expansion until it happens, because you're not yet conscious of it. A dream character can't know what's happening in the bed of the dreamer. A confused individual can't know what it's like to be a buddha. A confused humanity can't know what it's like to be a conscious humanity. Because they're not conscious of it yet. The lights haven't yet switched on.
And I point this out because I see a lot of people giving up hope for our future; based on what they can perceive and understand about our situation they see no reason to believe humanity will avoid being locked in an Orwellian dystopia if armageddon and extinction doesn't end us altogether. But that's just it: there's so very much we can't yet see and understand about our situation, because we're simply not conscious of it yet.
We are a young species. So much is still hidden in our collective unconsciousness. There are so many lights that can yet be switched on. So many potential doors currently hidden in darkness creating the illusion that there is no exit.
I don't know what's going to happen. I'm just as incapable of seeing what's behind all the curtains of our collective unconsciousness as everyone else. Maybe we'll make it, and maybe we won't. But there's one bet I'd definitely lay down good money on, and it's this: by the time we know for sure how this thing turns out, we'll have surprised ourselves many times.
Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words
Published two days ago (1 March) on Consortium News:
Caitlin Johnstone: The Single Most Important Question In The World Right Now
The more tense things get, the greater the likelihood of an unthinkable chain of events from which there is no coming back.
There is one question today that is more important than any other question that could possibly be asked, and it’s this:
“Is what the U.S. and its allies are trying to accomplish in Ukraine worth continually risking nuclear armageddon for?”
Russian state media confirmed that Vladimir Putin’s orders to move the nation’s nuclear deterrent forces into “special combat duty mode” have been carried out, citing “aggressive statements from NATO related to the Russian military operation in Ukraine.”
“Russia’s ground, air and submarine-based nuclear deterrent forces have begun standby alert duty with reinforced personnel, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has informed President Putin,” Sputnik reported.
This came days after Putin issued a thinly veiled threat of an immediate nuclear strike should western powers interfere in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying, “Whoever tries to hinder us, and even more so, to create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate. And it will lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history.”
https://twitter.com/scharap/status/1497989127303843840
This also comes as the U.S. and E.U. countries commit to sending fighter jets and stinger missiles to assist Ukraine in fighting an unwinnable war against a longtime target of the U.S. empire, perhaps with the hope of dragging Moscow into a costly military quagmire like it deliberately worked to do in Afghanistan and in Syria.
This also comes as the ruble crashes following crushing sanctions and the banning of Russian banks from the international money transfer system SWIFT by the U.S. and its allies. The economic hardship that follows will hurt ordinary people and may foment unrest, and it is here worth noting that in 2019 then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted that the goal of brutal sanctions on Iran was to push people to rise up and overthrow their government.
We’re also seeing the all-too-familiar phrase “regime change” used in reference to Putin by prominent western narrative managers like Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haas, European Council on Foreign Relations Co-Chair Carl Bildt, Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institute and Hoover Institution, as well as USA Today.
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1498289187040157699
All of this has made nuclear war in the near term a whole lot more likely than it was just a few days ago… which is a really strange thing to type.
As I’m always saying, the primary risk of nuclear war is not that anyone will choose to start one, it’s that one could be triggered by any combination of miscommunication, miscalculation, misunderstanding or technical malfunction amid the chaos and confusion of escalating cold war tensions.
This nearly happened, repeatedly, in the last cold war. The more tense things get, the greater the likelihood of an unthinkable chain of events from which there is no coming back.
Cold war brinkmanship has far too many small, unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that they can ramp up aggressions without triggering a nuclear exchange. Anyone who feels safe with these games of nuclear chicken simply does not understand them.
To get some insight into how easily an unpredictable scenario can lead to nuclear war I recommend watching this hour-long documentary or reading this article about Vasili Arkhipov, the Soviet submariner who single-handedly saved the world from obliteration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was one of three senior officers aboard a nuclear-armed sub that was cornered near Cuba by U.S. war ships who did not know the sub had a nuclear weapon on board.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4VPY2SgyG5w[/url]
The U.S. navy was dropping explosives onto the sub to get it to surface, and the Soviets didn’t know what they were doing as they had cut off all communications. It took all three senior officers to launch the nuke their ship was armed with, and two of them, thinking this was the beginning of World War 3, saw it as their duty to use it. Only Arkhipov, who had witnessed the horrific effects that radiation can have on the human body during a nuclear-powered submarine meltdown years earlier, refused.
You, and everyone you know, exist because Arkhipov made that decision. Had his personal history and conditioning been a little bit different, or had another officer been on board that particular ship on that particular day, nothing around you right now would be there. We got lucky. So lucky it’s uncomfortable to even think about it. But it’s important to.
This again is just one of the many nuclear close calls we’ve experienced since our species began its insane practice of stockpiling armageddon weapons around the world. We survived the last cold war by sheer, dumb luck. We were never in control. Not once. And there’s no reason to believe we’ll get lucky again.
A 2014 study by Earth’s Future found that just a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would throw 5 Tg of black carbon into the stratosphere, blocking out the sun for decades and potentially starving everything to death. India and Pakistan have 160 and 165 nukes each, respectively. The U.S. and Russia have 5,550 and 6,257.
https://twitter.com/Chinchillazllla/...90973049544706
So I repeat again the world’s most important question: is what the U.S. and its allies are trying to accomplish in Ukraine worth continually risking nuclear armageddon for?
Well? Is it?
It’s not really a question you can just compartmentalize away from if you have integrity. It demands to be answered.
Is it worth it to continue along this trajectory? Is it? Is it really? Perhaps there might be some things that would be worth risking the life of every creature on earth to obtain, but is refusing to concede to Moscow’s demands in Ukraine one of them?
Whatever your values are, whatever your analysis is, whatever beliefs you’ve been holding to justify your support for the west’s side of this conflict, will you still proudly stand by them if you look outside and see a mushroom cloud growing in the distance?
Well? Will you?
Here’s a hint: if your answer to this question is premised on the assumption that nuclear war can’t or will never happen, then you don’t have a position that’s grounded in reality, because you’re not accounting for real possibilities. You’re justifying your position with fantasy.
https://twitter.com/PaulSonne/status...75412194332673
I understand the argument that if we let tyrants do whatever they want just because they have nukes they’ll just do whatever they want. I understand the argument that if we don’t stop Putin now he’s going to take over all of Europe because he’s literally Hitler and blah blah blah. I understand why people ask “Well if we don’t stand up to him now, then when? Where is your line??” I really do.
But the U.S. has been making risk-to-benefit calculations based on the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons every single day since Stalin got the bomb. There are things Russia has been permitted to do that weaker nations would have been forcefully stopped from doing, like annexing Crimea and intervening in Syria, exactly because they have nukes. If those weren’t the line, why specifically does Ukraine have to be? Surely there’s a line somewhere, but it would have to exist at a point where it would be worth risking the life of every living creature for.
So is it? Is keeping the possibility of NATO membership open and retaining control of the Donbas really so important that we should roll the dice on the existence of the entire human species on it? Is maintaining a hostile client state on Russia’s border truly worth gambling the life of every terrestrial organism for? Are the desperate unipolarist grand chessboard maneuverings of a few powerful people in Washington, Langley and Arlington really worth risking the life of everyone you know and love?
If the answer is no, then building some opposition to what we’re seeing here becomes a very urgent matter. Very urgent indeed.
Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words
Caitlin Johnstone could have included this video in her article, it fits right in. Received it from a friend a few minutes ago, she said, "just in case".
Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words
Growing Up Means Extracting The Beliefs That Were Placed In Your Head By Others
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.co...ng-the-beliefs
Most people never grow up. Not really.
Growing up means maturing. It means becoming independent. It means developing into your own person and standing on your own two feet.
Few people really do this. Because few people ever get around to extracting all the beliefs that were placed in their heads by other people.
Most people have similar beliefs to their parents about life, society, politics and religion. If it's not their parents it's other influential figures in their lives like friends, teachers, or the media pundits they follow.
More significantly, most people hold a lot of beliefs about themselves and their place in the world that were put in their heads by people they care about. The average person goes from cradle to grave without ever seriously examining their beliefs about who they are, what they're like, or any of the other ideas about themselves that get inserted into their minds by the verbal and nonverbal communications of the people around them.
For most people, a huge amount of their personality is pretty much locked into place in early childhood by the life experiences that they have with other people during that time. They're still essentially who they were when they were kids, but we call them grown ups just because they're a certain age and can have kids of their own.
Really growing up means doing the hard, earnest work of extracting all the bull**** that was placed in our minds over the course of our lives by people who were just as immature, traumatized and confused as us. It means really excavating our beliefs about ourselves, about life, and about our world, all the way down to the old subconscious beliefs that are buried so deep inside us that we don't even normally notice them.
This isn't easy. It takes work, it takes dedication, and it takes courage, because truly relinquishing long-held core beliefs is like a kind of death. But unless we've done it we can't really say we have matured as human beings, because we're still existing in more or less the same state we were in when we were children: sponge-like imitators who soaked up whatever was placed in our minds by trusted authorities.
And to make things even harder, it turns out that there's a whole other category of people who've been placing beliefs in our minds, and they're complete strangers. It turns out that powerful people have been pouring massive amounts of wealth and effort into manipulating the way the public thinks, speaks and behaves in order to manufacture consent for agendas and status quo policies which benefit them.
It's obnoxiously unfair, if you think about it. You go through all the hard work of uprooting all the dopey nonsense that was put into your head by your parents, preachers and teachers since you were small, only to find out that you've got a bunch of other garbage in your head that was dumped there by the news media and the manufacturers of mainstream culture for the benefit of a few powerful assholes. Just as you put down your shovel and got ready to relax, you've got to pick it back up and get right back to shoveling.
But hell, that's the job. That's what it takes to become a mature human being. You've got to rip out all the crap that was placed in your mind over the course of your life by confused elders and corrupt manipulators if you want to live a life that's grounded in truth instead of bull****.
This doesn't mean that you can't have beliefs, or that you can't have beliefs that came from other people. Humanity has been full of brilliant minds with great ideas, and the world is full of true and helpful information. The difference is that you are consciously choosing as a mature adult to take on board whatever you take on board for however long you find it useful, rather than mindlessly ingesting it into your worldview because someone told you to.
And you can't do that until you've cleared everything out. Stripped your worldview bare of everything that was put there before you were mature enough to lucidly interrogate its truthfulness, including your most fundamental assumptions about self, life, and reality. From there, you can consciously construct your own worldview based on what you have independently found to be true.
Again, this isn't something most people tend to do, including the powerful people who are destroying our world and driving us toward disaster and annihilation. Our world is being steered by confused psychological infants who have not done the work of becoming true adults, and it's going about as well as it sounds like it would go.
Humanity needs to mature if we are to avert disaster and begin creating a healthy world. We are each singularly responsible for our own role in that maturing process. Every mature human brings humanity as a whole that much closer to maturity, and provides one more voice that can help orient the world toward truth. The work starts here and now, beneath our own feet.
