Keep the Electoral College and abolish the corrupt billionaire financed two-party system

Since the election of President Donald Trump there has been an unprecedented not only bi-party effort to remove America’s elected president from office but that of a foreign country, Britain.  With the assistance of a corrupt media owned by the billionaires who fund the campaigns for public office, Donald Trump’s presidency has been attacked as “illegitimate” from the beginning.

Donald Trump came to office by way of winning the Electoral College votes, in spite of the massive disinformation and outright lies spread by the billionaire-funded duopoly.  Unlike George W. Bush who the duopoly claims won the 2000 presidency by winning the Electoral College, which he did not, Trump actually did win the electoral College.  George W. Bush lost the election in 2000 and lost the Electoral College votes. 

In the 2000 election George W. Bush’s brother Jeb was governor of Florida.  As governor of Florida, along with Jeb’s paramour and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the groundwork was laid for a Bush victory.  In spite of caging lists that eliminated thousands of black voters from the voting rolls, designating thousands more as felons, setting up road blocks to stop black voters from reaching polling places, a butterfly ballot that placed the hole to punch for Patrick Buchanan where it should have been for Al Gore, to closing polling stations in black precincts, Bush still lost.

When Katherine Harris tallied the votes, she declared the election for George W. Bush, but thousands of complaints were called in to the election officials complaining of fraud.  Al Gore’s running mate, the much hated Zionist Joe Lieberman who the Democratic Party forced on Al Gore, immediately conceded losing to Bush, even though he had no authority to do so.  Ignoring Lieberman’s attempt to sabotage the Gore campaign, Al Gore called for a recount of the votes and was backed by the Florida Supreme Court.

Once the recount started, the massive amount of fraud in Florida began to unfold.  Republican operatives were bused into Florida to interrupt and stop the recount from taking place.  In what was called the Brooks Brothers rebellion, the recount station was bombarded and the people who were counting the votes were violently attacked shutting down the operation.  From Gregory Palast:

Excerpt:

Roger Stone is not just an impotent trickster

He's a violent, evil man who had a lot to do with fixing the vote in Florida in 2000

Roger Stone is not just an impotent trickster. He's a violent, evil man who had a lot to do with fixing the vote in Florida in 2000. George Bush supposedly officially won the presidency by 537 votes in Florida — just 537 votes! But 178,000 ballots were disqualified, considered unreadable. A hundred and seventy-eight thousand!!! These were concentrated in Democratic and Black areas: Jacksonville, Gadsden County, Miami-Dade and Broward.

Miami was “recounting” those ballots (remember the hanging chads?). We use the term “recount” but what we really mean is counting ballots that were never counted in the first place. Al Gore had those ballots. Those were overwhelmingly Gore ballots. Bush would have lost. So they stopped the count.

And one way to stop the count in Miami was Roger Stone literally led a riot. He was the instigator of what they called the White Collar Riot (aka Brooks Brothers riot). They were trying to break windows and smash doors, but it was white guys in suits led by Roger Stone.

That type of violence elected a president. The Republican operatives loved it. They figured this guy will do anything we need. And he does. It's not cute, it’s not little dirty tricks. It is deeply evil vote manipulation. It's violent and it's racist — and it's Roger Stone.

The Bush campaign brought in outside counsel to sue the Gore campaign on behalf of Bush claiming recounting the votes was a violation of Bush’s civil rights.  The case was brought before the U.S. Supreme court, who had no jurisdiction over the Florida voting system as voting laws fall under the jurisdiction of the state and the Florida Supreme Court had already ordered the recount.

Nevertheless, five corrupt Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “if the votes were to be counted it would have a devastating effect on a Bush presidency” therefore they declared Bush the winner.  The court further stated that their decision only pertained to Bush v. Gore and could not be used as a precedent in any other similar case.

This judgement gave Bush enough electoral votes to win the election.  In other words Bush lost both the nationwide election and the Electoral College until the Supreme Court intervened and awarded Bush the presidency.  

In the 2016 campaign Trump actually understood the Electoral College system and fine-tuned his campaign in order to win the Electoral College votes.   Trump stumped across all of the states directly appealing to the people’s disgust toward the corrupt two party monopoly that ignores the wishes of the people and serves the interests of the billionaire class.  Trump capitalized on the corruption of the two party system and ran on a populist agenda.  He went to every state and made his case.

On the contrary Hillary Clinton’s highly paid campaign staff concentrated only on states with the largest populations with large Electoral College votes believing if they could win these few states they would have enough Electoral Votes to win the day.  The media provided bogus poll data showing Clinton overwhelmingly leading Trump in order to create a sense of futility on the part of Trump voters.  Their gamble failed.

By ignoring states like that of Wisconsin, where Trump campaigned more than once, even though the Republican Party of Wisconsin did not support him, the Clinton campaign lost support.  In the end, Hillary got about two million more votes than Donald Trump but Trump carried more counties across the nation than Clinton did.    From Governing.com:

Excerpt:

Looking Back at Trump's Win in Raw Numbers

The president's victory has been extensively explored. But a state- and county-level look at the data offers stunning evidence of just how large the shifts were in certain places.  For the first half of the year, I was writing the state and gubernatorial chapters of the Almanac of American Politics 2018, the once-every-two-years, 2,000-page-plus "Bible of politics" that is being released in early August.

As part of that effort, I gave special attention to state- and county-level data on last year's presidential voting patterns, focusing on locations where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton did well or poorly compared to their party's performance in 2012.  I found some interesting results. Let's start by looking at Trump.

 Trump's Areas of Strength

In a number of states, Trump's candidacy resonated so strongly with voters that these places became even redder across the board than they were in 2012. These states included Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and West Virginia.  In others, Trump didn't do well enough to win, but he did do well enough to cut into the Democrats' winning margins.

In Rhode Island, for instance, the winning Democratic margin shrank by 13 percentage points between 2012 and 2016. Similarly, Delaware saw its margin shrink by eight points; Minnesota, by about seven points; New Hampshire, by six points; and Nevada, about four points.

Older Voters

Two demographic groups, in particular, produced notable results for Trump's candidacy. The first is senior citizens, whose influence was most noticeable in Florida.  Trump ran strong in the Interstate 4 corridor that stretches from Tampa past Orlando. He flipped from blue to red such counties as St. Lucie and Pinellas, which includes St. Petersburg. He also saw six-digit raw-vote increases in the counties of Lee, home to Fort Myers; Pasco; Volusia (Daytona Beach); Polk; Manatee (Bradenton); Hernando; Sarasota; and Charlotte.

Blue-Collar Voters

The strong affinity between Trump and non-college educated voters has been extensively explored since the campaign. But a state-by-state look offers stunning evidence of just how large the shifts were in certain counties. 

One of the best examples of this is Colorado's Pueblo County, a historically Democratic stronghold that is home to many blue-collar, religious, gun-friendly voters. Barack Obama won the county by 14 points. This time, though, Trump won it, albeit narrowly, and even as incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet won re-election in the county by about 7,000 votes.

There were similar shifts in solidly blue states.

In Connecticut, the town of Plainfield, near the border with Rhode Island, went for Obama by 10 points but backed Trump by 22. Naugatuck, south of Waterbury, backed Trump by 16. In New York, Trump won 19 counties that had voted for Obama in 2012. Franklin County and Oswego County both saw their margins shift by more than 30 points toward the GOP. Five other counties saw margins shift by between 20 and 29 points, while another nine shifted by between 10 and 19 points.

But the more important shifts for Trump -- for his victory in the Electoral College, anyway -- came in competitive states.

In Maine, Trump won nine counties in the state, which was eight more than Romney did in 2012. It was enough to secure an electoral vote (Maine allocates a portion of its electoral votes by congressional district). The margin in Oxford County shifted 28 points toward Trump; it shifted 25 points in Aroostook County, 24 in Franklin County, 17 in Kennebec County (Augusta), and 14 in Penobscot County. And it wasn't just the margins that gave him a victory: In these five counties alone, the overall level of voter turnout rose by 6 percent over 2012.

In Ohio -- which went from blue to red in 2016 -- Trump's gains were especially strong in the state's blue-collar northern tier. In seven of the Obama counties that Trump was able to flip, the margins shifted toward the GOP by between 12 and 32 points. Even in some of the counties that remained blue, the Democratic margins narrowed significantly, shrinking by 25 points in Mahoning County (Youngstown), by 16 points in Lorain County (west of Cleveland), by 14 points in Lucas County (Toledo) and by seven points in Summit County (Akron).

In many places, Trump outperformed Romney robustly, such as Stark County (Canton), where a virtual tie in 2012 became a 17-point Trump romp in 2016.

In Pennsylvania, the cumulative Republican improvement over 2012 in just five blue-collar counties in western Pennsylvania -- Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland -- was almost enough by itself to supply Trump's statewide winning margin in this previously blue state. Trump's margin was also in the ballpark of his improvement in Luzerne County (Wilkes-Barre) and Lackawanna (Scranton).

In Wisconsin, another blue-to-red state, Clinton won only about one-third of the counties Obama had won four years earlier. The swing in Trump's direction reached 31 points in Forest County, which is located between Green Bay and Lake Superior.

A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel analysis found that in Wisconsin communities of less than 2,000 people, Trump won by 24 points, a margin six times bigger than Romney's. And while Trump lost the state's metro areas by five points, the newspaper calculated, he won non-metro areas by 19 points…

Yes, Hillary Clinton couldn’t be bothered to campaign in States like Wisconsin.  Now there are hews and cries to end the Electoral College.  The Electoral College was a brilliant idea of the founding fathers to protect the rights of the average Joes to have a say in who governs them.  The duopoly is irate that they lost control of the electoral process in 2017.  The only lessons learned by the governing elite is to eliminate the Electoral College and restore power to the powerfully connected.

The devastation left behind the Covid-19 pandemic should have been a wakeup call to the Democratic Party that the American people desperately need universal healthcare, good paying jobs and affordable housing.  But alas, the Democratic Party is too deeply wedded to big Pharma, big banks and the insurance industry that they don’t give a flying fig about the American people.  Their pandemic relief package is just another big taxpayer giveaway to the DNC and RNC’s well-heeled constituents, their campaign donors.

 CARES Act and HEROS Act anything but caring or heroic:

Wall Street based for profit health insurance vs. health care:

From Jacobin:

Excerpt:

Why Does Nancy Pelosi Want to Subsidize a Brutal For-Profit Health Insurance Industry?

We desperately need a Medicare expansion to provide health care to millions. But instead, Nancy Pelosi’s office is backing a health policy reform that is actually more expensive and will cover less people — all to placate centrist Democrats and insurance executives.

“It’ll be big” is how speaker Nancy Pelosi described the next coronavirus bill being discussed in the House of Representatives. Yet on Tuesday, when House Democrats unveiled the HEROES Act, their primary proposal to provide health care was to subsidize COBRA payments for the unemployed.

This is yet another example of the Democratic Party thinking small, subsidizing a horrific industry, and condemning people to suffer at the hands of a morally unjustifiable health care system…

COBRA is more expensive than even ACA plans. Premiums for the average family are currently more than $20,000 per year, making them unaffordable for most people with jobs, much less the unemployed.

Pelosi deals with this issue by simply having the government cover the cost while not dealing with the other weaknesses of COBRA: it is a limited program that will not cover you if your employer closes shop; it still forces people to find thousands of dollars to pay for deductibles and co-pays to actually get care; and it still makes us deal with the cruelty of private insurers who profit by denying Americans care.

Why claim to go big, yet play the smallest of ball when it comes to the most fundamental issue during a pandemic — health care? Especially when other, better options that specifically focus on health care exist. Progressive Caucus cochair Pramila Jayapal and more than thirty of her House colleagues introduced the Medicare Crisis Program Act. Bernie Sanders is introducing a similar bill in the Senate — legislation that would cover those recently unemployed, and those who are already uninsured, by expanding Medicare.

Here is the rub — it’s actually cheaper than subsidizing COBRA. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group of conservative deficit scolds, the cost of this program would be “$150 billion over four months and $400 billion over the course of a year.” 

The driver of this cost is that instead of directly paying for health care, COBRA is a subsidy to insurance companies. They’re receiving money to cover people at a time when, ironically, health care demand has fallen off a cliff.

Representative Ro Khanna noted, “The decision to extend Cobra benefits instead of providing the unemployed with Medicare or even ACA subsidies is economic nonsense. Cobra won’t cover those who work for businesses that go under. Cobra is 25% more expensive than Gold plans on the ACA and much more than Medicare.” 

Furthermore, under COBRA health insurance, companies charge consumers an extra 2-percent administrative fee on top of their premiums. With the government picking up the tab, the fee is a bonus worth billions of dollars.  As Representative Ilhan Omar pointed out, “Expanding COBRA would be a massive giveaway to for-profit insurance companies and leave millions of Americans uninsured during this pandemic.”

This handout would be grotesque under normal circumstances but becomes even more obscene when considering the health care industry is actively gloating about their financial position during this crisis.  Anthem’s CFO claims the company will save money because of people canceling voluntary procedures while Cigna executives say they are “not expecting a material financial impact.”

Considering these facts, I asked a member of Congress why they believed Pelosi took this approach. They responded, “it makes no sense.”  They went on to explain that Pelosi’s office believes Medicare is “bad politics with the moderates” and, furthermore, expanding the Affordable Care Act in any significant way is “something Blue Dogs don’t want to litigate.”

Even in a crisis, the first group standing in the way of universal health care is centrist Democrats. In this case, they cannot even use cost as an excuse, since the plan they are proposing is more expensive than a Medicare expansion.

Their stance here hearkens back to the strategy that Never-Trump Republican Bill Kristol proposed in 1993 to defeat the Clinton health care plan. “Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy — and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security,” he wrote. “Its success would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back that idea in other areas.”

Centrists recognize that expanding Medicare now and normalizing its adoption across age brackets would inevitably lead to growing support for Medicare for All. In addition, it would begin to put in place mechanisms that would inevitably make the program’s implementation far easier.

Overt hostility to Medicare for All is widespread in Washington. Pelosi’s top health care aide, Wendell Primus, gave a presentation to Blue Cross Blue Shield executives, just after Democrats retook the House in 2016, to make it known that Democratic leadership had no intention of pursuing Medicare for All or other policies that would cut into their bottom line.

We must recognize that this is not a fight on the merits of policy. Nancy Pelosi’s office is backing a more expensive policy that will cover less people, in order to placate moderates and health insurance CEOs.  Of course, no one expects the HEROES Act to become law as written. Instead, its purpose is to set the parameters for the next round of negotiations with the Senate and the White House.

What establishment Democrats are doing is setting the Overton window, boxing out the most sensible and cost-effective policy option that would deliver health care to the most Americans, effectively demonstrating that their arguments against Medicare for All were never made in good faith.

Yes, Pelosi and the Democrats CARES and HEROS Acts is anything but caring or heroic, it’s a big giveaway to the insurance industry and to their donors and themselves.  They are hogs at the trough.  Also part of their big giveaway is the Payroll Protection Program sold as a program to help small businesses retain their staff and survive the loss of income due to the pandemic.

The payroll protection act:

From Naked Capitalism:

Excerpt:

BANKS STAND TO MAKE $18 BILLION IN PPP PROCESSING FEES FROM CARES ACT

BANKS WILL MAKE out with $18 billion in fees for processing small business Paycheck Protection Program relief loans during the pandemic, according to calculations by Amanda Fischer, policy director at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive economic think tank.

That’s money taken directly out of the overall $640 billion pot of funding Congress allocated to the program it created as part of the CARES Act. “If we did it through a public institution, there would be [more than] $140 billion left,” Fischer noted, as opposed to the $130 billion still up for grabs. The Washington Center for Equitable Growth is releasing an analysis of the government response to the pandemic as soon as this week.

The fees compensate the banks for some of the costs that come with processing loans — call center time to handle business owners’ questions, employee hours spent on processing paperwork for both loan and forgiveness applications — and some of the risk they shoulder if any of the loans they extend end up being fraudulent. But there is no credit risk; if business owners who qualified for PPP loans later default, the Small Business Association takes the hit, not the banks. “Basically it’s free money,” Fischer said.

For some banks, this money represents a hefty windfall. New Jersey-based Cross River Bank’s estimated $163 million haul would be more than double its net revenue last year. JPMorgan Chase could make $864 million.

The fact that banks are siphoning money off of the relief program is thanks to the fact that the United States had no existing public infrastructure ready to quickly get money out to struggling businesses when the pandemic hit. Fischer characterized it as “a failure of preparedness,” adding, “We should have invested in better systems…”

But on top of the fact that the program leaked money to banks, relying on these firms meant an uneven distribution of funds. One study found that areas served by the country’s four largest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and Bank of America — underperformed in terms of how many businesses got PPP funding.

On the flip side, another found that places with large numbers of mid-sized and community banks saw more businesses get PPP loans.

That meant that whether a small business received the money it needed to stay afloat depended in large part on the composition of financial institutions in its area. “That’s a really perverse outcome,” Fischer said.

The other major business relief program, the Federal Reserve’s Main Street Lending Program, is also being run through private Wall Street firms. The Fed contracted with asset management firms BlackRock and Pimco to help it purchase hundreds of billions of dollars worth of commercial bonds and short-term borrowings to shore up mid-sized companies, doing so without soliciting bids from any other firms.

“This is another example where, theoretically, it could have been done in-house,” Fischer said. She notes that the Fed has 23,000 employees, some of whom could have been deployed to purchase investments for the Fed themselves. Instead, advocates are warning of vast conflicts of interest in having BlackRock and Pimco do it, as both firms are also shareholders or bondholders in many of the companies from which they may buy investments at the behest of the Federal Reserve.

BlackRock can even purchase its own exchange-traded funds. Financial reform advocates have also warned that BlackRock could use inside information from the Federal Reserve to make its own proprietary trades.

BlackRock stands to make as much as $40 million a year from the program through the fees it will charge for setting up the program and on each bond or loan it purchases. Still, that’s not a huge windfall for a firm that manages trillions of dollars in assets. What Fischer sees it accruing is, instead, power. “I imagine [BlackRock CEO] Larry Fink has [Federal Reserve Chair] Jay Powell on speed dial,” she said. “If the Fed needs to rely on you to stabilize the entire economy, then there’s not a lot of room for them to push back and regulate you rein in your conduct in other circumstances.”

Instead of using such a privatized system, governments of other European countries have just directly paid companies for their payroll costs to keep them from firing employees. The approach dampened skyrocketing unemployment numbers in the beginning of the crisis.

In Denmark, businesses simply applied for money directly from the government’s Danish Business Authority. “They had the capacity to just, in-house, accept all the applications … and get money to small businesses in a time-effective way…”  Fischer noted that there has been little public outrage over the fact that banks skimmed PPP money in the form of fees, whether or not it was authorized.

Instead, outrage has been directed at companies and people that received PPP loans but don’t appear deserving, or the IRS sending stimulus checks to dead people. The $18 billion captured by banks “is technically above board,” she noted. “But it’s a much bigger grift than some elderly person getting a check because their spouse died three months ago.”

Yes indeed, the two parties rose to the occasion after shutting down the entire economy by shoveling borrowed cash into the coffers of banks, campaign donors and their own families and friends while leaving the people to twist in the wind.  They did, in their “generosity” give a portion of the population one-time $1,200 dollar checks which did little to nothing to help the people, while Wall Street soared on “false” profits propped up by the Federal Reserve Bank.  From Reason.com:

Excerpt:

The Paycheck Protection Program Is a Mess. Here's Who Is Benefitting From the Dysfunction.

A program designed to keep workers on payrolls showered benefits on lobbyists, advocacy groups, and even members of Congress.

The list of companies and organizations that received loans through the federal government's flagship coronavirus relief program includes firms linked to powerful politicians, celebrities, lobbyists, and government spending hawks.  On Monday, the Small Business Administration (SBA) released a list of organizations that each received more than $150,000 through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

That program, first approved as part of the $2.3 trillion CARES Act in late March, allocated $670 billion to purchase loans made by banks to businesses and non-profits with fewer than 500 employees. The government would forgive those loans so long as the recipients spent a certain portion of the money on retaining or hiring back employees.

Politico reports that PPP borrowers included companies owned or founded by members of Congress, as well as the educational arms of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Several lobbying firms, technically barred from receiving loans if over half their revenue comes from lobbying, also benefited from PPP.

On the executive side of things, the Daily Beast reports that several companies linked to the family of White House Special Adviser (and President Donald Trump's son-in-law) Jared Kushner received PPP loans.  That list includes Observer Holdings LLC, a media company once owned by Kushner himself and currently held by an investment firm run by his brother-in-law. The Beast reports that hotels owned by Kushner Companies, a real estate investment firm owned by members of Kushner's family, also received PPP loans.

Aspiring presidents have had their turn at the trough too. Clothing brand Yeezy, which is owned by rapper and recently announced presidential candidate Kanye West, received a loan of between $2 million and $5 million. (The SBA did not release exact loan amounts.) 

Even advocacy groups have been cashing in, including some noted critics of profligate government, spending such as Americans for Tax Reform and the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI).  The latter's acceptance of government aid provoked a lot of jeering on Twitter about the alleged hypocrisy at play, although ARI has said since late May that it would gladly accept PPP loans as an effective return of stolen goods…

The list of PPP beneficiaries also includes progressive watchdogs like Public Citizen Foundation, the research and litigation wing of Public Citizen Inc., which received between $350,000 and $1 million from the program…

NBC News reports that 43 Planned Parenthood affiliate organizations received between $65 million and $150 million in PPP loans. Congressional Republicans have argued that these affiliates are too closely tied to the national Planned Parenthood organization to qualify for the small business program. The SBA has demanded that these affiliates return the PPP money they received.  NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, an advocacy group, and the National Abortion Federation, which represents abortion providers, also both received PPP loans.

Critical headlines about connected businesses and lobbyists receiving PPP money has sparked a backlash of sorts against "PPP shaming."  The basic argument here is that so long as these funds kept employees on an organization's payroll—whatever type of organization it is—then PPP was a success on its own terms. By accepting aid, these organizations fulfilled the public purpose of the program…

But there are always trade-offs when the government spends money, "money printer goes brrr" memes notwithstanding.  Any PPP loan that went to a politically connected lobbying firm or a billionaire-owned shoe company is a loan that did not go to the government-shuttered restaurant or similar small business down the street. All those PPP dollars could have gone towards relief programs better targeted at the least well off. The money could have also gone straight back into the hands of taxpayers.

Congress has tried to reform PPP by passing a law that gives recipients more time and flexibility when it comes to spending the money received from the program. But Congress has devoted very little time to winnowing down who is actually eligible for the program in the first place…

Yes, while the American people suffer from lack of healthcare, lack of nutrition, no jobs and now are being evicted from their homes because the measly $1,200 checks did little to help them, congress has been languishing on yet another vacation.  They are due to come back July 20 to possibly pass another emergency aid package before they leave for their month-long vacation in August.  Already they are bickering about being too generous to the American people.    

However there is another constituency that congress has ensured is engorged with American tax dollars, that is the military industrial complex.  No belt tightening there, no sir we always have money for spreading war, death and destruction.  From Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept:

Excerpt:

How the House Armed Services Committee, in the Middle of a Pandemic, Approved a Huge Military Budget and More War in Afghanistan

WHILE THE COUNTRY IS SUBSUMED by both public health and an unemployment crisis, and is separately focused on a sustained protest movement against police abuses, a massive $740.5 billion military spending package was approved last week by the Democratic-controlled House Armed Services Committee. The GOP-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee will almost certainly send the package with little to no changes to the White House for signing.

As we reported last week, pro-war and militaristic Democrats on the Committee joined with GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and the pro-war faction she leads to form majorities which approved one hawkish amendment after the next. Among those amendments was one co-sponsored by Cheney with Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado that impeded attempts by the Trump administration to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and another amendment led by Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., and Cheney which blocked the White House’s plan to remove 10,000 troop stationed in Germany.

While those two amendments were designed to block the Trump administration’s efforts to bring troops home, this same bipartisan pro-war faction defeated two other amendments that would have imposed limits on the Trump administration’s aggression and militarism: one sponsored by Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to require the Trump administration to provide a national security rationale before withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF, signed with the Soviet Union in 1987, and another to impose limits on the ability of the U.S. to arm and otherwise assist Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemen.

Perhaps most remarkable is the amount of the military budget itself. It is three times more than the planet’s second-highest military spender, China; it is ten times more than the third-highest spender, Saudi Arabia; it is 15 times more than the military budget of the country most frequently invoked by Committee members as a threat to justify militarism: Russia; and it is more than the next 15 countries combined spend on their military. They authorized this kind of a budget in the midst of a global pandemic as tens of millions of newly unemployed Americans struggle even to pay their rent.

How does this happen? How do Democrats succeed in presenting an image of themselves based on devotion to progressive causes and the welfare of the ordinary citizen while working with Liz Cheney to ensure that vast resources are funneled to the weapons manufacturers, defense sector and lobbyists who fund their campaigns?...

This media dynamic is exacerbated by the journalistic practice of obsessing on the areas where the two parties squabble, while steadfastly ignoring the very consequential and numerous areas where they find full agreement — such as approving close to a trillion dollars in military spending and ensuring the oldest war in U.S. history continues without end.

When the two parties are in agreement, as they so often are, this is boring from a media perspective, so it is typically ignored. This has the dual-propagandistic effect of creating the appearance that the two parties never agree when they in fact agree constantly, while also suppressing those vital policies which receive overwhelming bipartisan consensus…

It was remarkably revealing about how the U.S. government really functions, who the culprits are, what their motives are in pursuing policies that so blatantly have no benefit for the people they pretend to represent, and the vast gap between the image they create for themselves and the reality of what they really do in Washington.

It is, of course, impossible to understand how the Congress works without understanding those who wield power in it. The chair of the House Armed Services Committee selected by Nancy Pelosi and her caucus is the obscure but powerful Rep. Adam Smith of Washington. He has a long record of supporting pro-war policies, from the invasion of Iraq to numerous Bush/Cheney war on terror transgressions to blocking reform of the NSA after the Snowden reporting to denouncing the Obama administration’s efforts to reduce the troop presence in Afghanistan.

When Smith had a progressive challenger in 2018, who criticized him for this militarism, the defense industry, as my colleague Lee Fang reported, poured money into his coffers to ensure their loyal pro-war servant kept his perch as chair of this crucial committee.

A similar episode occurred the same year when a progressive challenger emerged to run against the former Marine and Iraq War veteran Jason Crow. House Majority Leader Steney Hoyer, as Fang also revealed by publishing a secret recording, tried to bully his opponent out of the race. Crow now joins with Liz Cheney to continue the war in Afghanistan. PRO-WAR DEMOCRATS WIELD ALL THE POWER FOR MILITARY AND FOREIGN POLICY BECAUSE THAT IS WHO HOUSE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP SELECTS…

There is a pocket of anti-war and anti-imperialism resistance on the committee and in the broader Congress, particularly on the left and to some extent on the isolationist right. But, as the House Armed Services Committee hearing of last week proves, they are outnumbered by the Adam Smiths, Jason Crows, and Liz Cheneys who work in bipartisan tandem to ensure their defeat and maintain a path of endless war for the United States.

And it is impossible to overstate the central role which the concocted, wildly exaggerated “Russia threat” plays in all of this. Over and over, the pro-war committee members from both parties invoked the scary threat of Moscow and the Kremlin to justify this bloated budget of imperialism and aggression…

So who supports these military budgets and the forever wars?  Is it the members of America’s military?  Do members of the military feel their sacrifice is worthwhile?  All recent polls say NO!  According to Consortium News:

Excerpt:

More significant and unique is the recent wave of defiance from normally conservative low- to mid-level combat veterans, most, though not all, a generation junior to the attention-grabbing ex-Pentagon brass and suits. There were early signs of a shift among those post-9/11 boots-on-the-ground types. In the last year, credible polls showed that two-thirds of veterans believed the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria “were not worth fighting,” and 73 percent supported full withdrawal from the Afghan War in particular. Notably, such rates of antiwar sentiment exceed those of civilians, something for which there may be no precedent….

Should the sudden wave of military and veteran dissent keep rising, it will invariably crash against the pageantry patriots of Chickenhawk America who attended that Tulsa rally and we’ll all face a new and critical theater in this nation’s culture wars. I don’t pretend to know whether such protests will last or military dissent will augur real change of any sort. What I do know is what my favorite rock star, Bruce Springsteen, used to repeat before live renditions of his song “Born to Run”: Remember, in the end nobody wins, unless everybody wins.

They say your budget reveals your values and your priorities and no budget shows the values and priorities of the American government better than the budget for fiscal year 2020.  According to Thomas Schatz, President of Citizens Against Government Waste the horrendous boondoggle known as the F35 Joint Strike Fighter which after 20 years of congress shoveling money into the production on a time and materials basis still doesn’t work.

F35 Joint Strike Fighter give $2.1 billion for Fiscal Year 2020.

Thomas Schatz, President of Citizens against Government Waste

Congress has appropriated another $2.1 billion for the F35 Joint Strike Fighter in the 2020 budget.  The appropriation for the 22 aircraft goes beyond that requested by the Department of Defense.  This earmark represents 13% of all earmark spending bills for fiscal year 2020.  

The program is 19 years in development, is 9 years behind schedule, the acquisition costs are almost double the initial estimate, the lifetime operation and maintenance is almost $1.2 trillion making it the most expensive weapon system  in history.  This was the project of the late Senator John McCain who was Chairman of the Armed Services committee who said “the program is both a scandal and a tragedy with respect to cost, schedule and performance.” 

When is the last time that congress appropriated more than asked for, for education, housing, jobs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or any program that actual provides some relief for the American people?  When?  

Now not the Democratic Party has coalesced around removing Trump from office for his great sin of wanting to end the endless wars, but they have been joined  by Never Trump Chicken Hawks.  The media has joined forces to put their clout behind the Zionist warmongering crook, Joe Biden.  From Ted Rall:

The CIA’s final solution: A color revolution in America during America’s descent into madness

Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Mo. so given to quasi-martial crowd control methods (such as bans on walking on the street) and, per the reporting of Riverfront Times, the firing of tear gas at people in their own yards? (“‘This my property!’ he shouted, prompting police to fire a tear gas canister directly at his face.”) Why would someone identifying himself as an 82nd Airborne Army veteran, observing the Ferguson police scene, comment that “We rolled lighter than that in an actual warzone”? ~ Walter Olson Cato Institute

It was only a matter of time before the Bush/Obama doctrine of regime change through CIA color revolutions would come home to America. What you are witnessing in America is the complete destruction of law and order by CIA paid operatives who infiltrate peaceful demonstrations inciting violence.   

Utilizing the CIA controlled Mockingbird Media to spread outright lies and propaganda the Deep State is throwing everything they have at Donald Trump’s Administration in hopes that the uber-corrupt, Alzheimer’s addled Deep State presidential candidate Joe Biden will defeat The Donald in November.  The CIA, FBI, DNI, Pentagon, State Department and other unelected government agencies are infested with war-mongering financial criminals whose loyalties lie not with Americans but with foreign governments who desperately want Donald Trump removed from office.  This attack against Donald Trump is an attack against the American people by the elites and their government lackeys.

To date they have failed in every attempt to stop Trump be it, Russia-gate, Stormy Daniels-gate, Ukraine-gate or impeachment-gate, they have failed miserably.  Now in desperation they are launching a three-pronged attack; the American made Covid-19 Scamdemic; Trump-Russia treason part two including fake news story of Russian bounties to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan; and the CIA backed violent Color Revolution.  From Medium.com:

Excerpt:

America’s “Color Revolution”

For those readers who may be unfamiliar with the term “Color Revolution”, it refers to what has now become the standard technique for promoting “regime change” in targeted nations.

The term may have its origins in the works of Gene Sharp, who wrote some guidebooks on how to organize popular revolts using Madison Avenue-style marketing techniques. He recommended to the sponsors that rather than confusing or boring the participants with too much political theory, they should motivate their budding revolutionaries with pop culture, using catchy, content-free slogans, logos, and team colors.

Color Revolutions are expensive ($5 billion in the case of Ukraine) and are typically orchestrated by a public-private partnership comprised of government agencies such as the State Department and MI6 and/or CIA, combined with private funding and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

The most famous organization of this sort is the National Endowment For Democracy, a curious entity that is funded by the US Government through USAID (as well as by donations from major neocon private foundations), and has two sub-organizations that disseminate the funds to various Regime Change projects: the International Republican Institute, affiliated with the Republican Party, and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, affiliated with the Democrats.

Both organizations carry out the same activity, which underscores the fact that on matters of subverting and bullying the rest of the world, there is a lot more bipartisanship in the US than people are inclined to think.

Another name associated with funding and orchestration is George Soros, whose various tax-exempt organizations such as the Open Society Foundations invariably pump money into the latest Color Revolutions, for reasons that are often more commercial than strictly political.

After the September 11 attacks in 2001, the neocons fanned the flames of indignation and xenophobia, and were able to exploit them in order to assume a dominant role in most American institutions, particularly the political parties and the media. Regime Change fever swept the foreign policy establishment, and anyone who looked cross-eyed at a neocon became a target.

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama embraced the neocon ethos and gave them virtual carte blanche to carry out Color Revolutions around the world. The advent of social media, which fosters communication in the form of short, catchy slogans and images that can be made to “go viral,” was particularly conducive to Gene Sharp’s formula of organizing the masses around advertising copy and team colors. The Color Revolution techniques were used on a large scale in the former Soviet Union, such as in the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia or the 2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

If the targeted populations can’t be organized effectively to overthrow their leaders, there is always the fall back option of arming mercenary groups to seize power by violence, or if that fails, out and out military aggression by the US or NATO.

The most reliable method seems to be a combination of non-violent and violent action, such as in the case of Ukraine’s second Color Revolution in 2014 (a coup which was comically dubbed the “Revolution of Dignity” by its neocon sponsors, who know that a successful marketing campaign must never be understated.) A similar case was the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, where gang violence was deployed in hopes of provoking a crackdown by the state which could then be exploited for propaganda purposes.

But it was inevitable that these techniques would eventually be used on the US itself. Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of reducing US reliance on Regime Change wars and NATO “out-of-area deployments” as a centerpiece of foreign policy. This was anathema to the neocons. Once in office, Trump vacillated, bringing prominent neocons into his cabinet and allowing them to launch multiple Regime Change operations. However, Trump was not a doctrinaire neocon, and he angered them by advocating better relations with North Korea, Russia and China. And for the neocons, anything short of total allegiance to their ideology is tantamount to betrayal.

The standard methodology was put into play the moment Trump was inaugurated. The team color was pink, in the form of the pink “pussy hats” (these ostensibly called attention to Trump’s sexual vulgarity and libertine lifestyle, which lacked the charm of Bill Clinton’s.) The buzzword was #Resistance, which was intended to conjure up images of the struggle by nations which had been conquered by Nazi aggression during World War II…

But it’s not possible to mobilize a population with hats and hashtags alone. There had to be some minimal political content, and herein lay the dilemma for the organizers of America’s Color Revolution. There was widespread popular discontent with what has become known as the “forever war” policy, as well as the neoliberal economics which have produced an unprecedented income disparity between the 1% and the 99%, and this popular discontent was key in electing Trump. The neocons wanted discontent, but not on those issues, since they had no intention of changing those policies…

Despite Trump’s outbursts of bellicosity toward Russia and other neocon targets, Trump was portrayed as being “soft,” an appeaser, or an outright enemy agent. The Democratic Party, which is considered to be the more liberal of the two parties and had in decades past expressed some nominal opposition to military adventures in Vietnam and elsewhere, swung way to the right of the Republicans in the jingoism derby.

The secret police agencies and their pet journalists concocted what will be admired by historians as one of the most preposterous conspiracy theories in recorded history, the tale of Russia manipulating the 2016 election with a computer hack which somehow cannot be detected by the NSA, and puppy pages on Facebook.

There was also a big focus on Trump’s personality, which is admittedly none too winsome. This is consistent with the neocon “Hitler of the Month Club” formula, where each new nemesis, from Manuel Noriega to Saddam Hussein to Muammar Gaddafi to Vladimir Putin, is depicted as the most brutish, authoritarian dictator ever to walk the face of the planet.

They succeeded in impeaching Trump in December 2019, almost three years into his first term in office. They did not actually charge Trump with an impeachable crime, but rather offered the rationale that he had allegedly used the power of his office in ways that could benefit his re-election campaign (something that no other American president would ever dream of doing.)…

Meanwhile, with the massively FUBAR Iowa caucuses of February 2020, questions were once again raised once again about the Democratic nominating process. Bernie Sanders was emerging as a new threat to neocon dominance, this time from within the Democratic Party.

During the days leading up to Super Tuesday, there was a remarkable development. Every prominent neocon, from Bill Kristol to Max Boot to David Frum to Susan Rice, acted with synchronized, military precision to endorse Joe Biden. Several neocon-friendly Democratic presidential candidates abruptly withdrew from the race to endorse him as well. There was an immediate Pavlovian response from cable news pundits and other putative journalists. Russiagate was dusted off and started up again, this time for use against Sanders. On April 8, Sanders capitulated and withdrew from the race.

No one in their right mind believed that the confused and incoherent Biden could defeat the also incoherent, but clever and confident Trump. But at this point, it was more important to the neocons that they keep control over at least one of the two parties, and a decision was made that it were better to throw the election to Trump rather than to allow Sanders’ brand of left-populism to become ascendant in the Democratic Party.

But then the neocons saw a fresh opportunity, following the May 25 murder of African-American George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. Protest demonstrations by the Black community intersected the anxieties of a population frightened and frustrated by the one-two punch of economic collapse combined with public health isolation to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Violent groups from the Antifa milieiu, possibly assets of the FBI’s COINTELPRO progam, initiated vandalism and looting.

The beleaguered Trump had already been showing signs of psychological fatigue, and there had been significant lapses in his already questionable judgement. In addition to mishandling the public health measures and the economic crisis, he had capitulated once more to the neocons and went on an anti-China tirade. Then, when the social unrest began in the wake of the George Floyd killing, all of Trump’s political flaws came into play.

The neocons triumphantly hit the airwaves and the digital arena. Their great oracle, The Atlantic, published an article that serendipitously confirms the central theme of the article you are presently reading. Neocon high priestess Susan Rice suggested that the Russians were to blame for the rioting. Trump’s every misstep was amplified by neocon pundits. Suddenly the idea of electing Biden was no longer so implausible, as long as he could be kept away from live microphones.

The good news is that the neocons are not omnipotent. They are adept at conning the public and they have the full cooperation of the corporate media, but the public is volatile and increasingly skeptical of the official “narratives.” This is why the neocons are growing more and more hysterical in their public proclamations about “conspiracy theories” and “disinformation.”

They are in fact strongly in favor of conspiracy theories and disinformation, provided that it is their own conspiracy theories and not someone else’s. They are demanding censorship of social media, to drive everyone into the arms of CNN and The Atlantic, but they are getting only some of what they want.

As long as the option is open, follow alternative news sources online. I recommend the Grayzone and Consortium News, both of which I have found to be quiet reliable. The neocons are frightened; they worry about what John Durham’s investigation, or others, may reveal about their methods of manipulation. Frightened people make tactical errors. We must keep our wits about us and find ways to turn those errors to our advantage.

Ah yes, as the article says “the neocons are adept at conning the public and they have the full cooperation of the corporate media, but the public is volatile and increasingly skeptical of the official “narratives.”  So skeptical are the public that the neocons’ latest propaganda attempt to smear Donald Trump as an agent of Putin is falling flat on its face.  From Caitlin Johnstone:

Excerpt:

It is the US intelligence’s job to lie to you. NYT’s Afghan bounty story is CIA press release disguised as news

Whenever one sees a news headline ending in “US Intelligence Says”, one should always mentally replace everything that comes before it with “Blah blah blah we’re probably lying.”

“Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill Troops, US Intelligence Says”, blares the latest viral headline from the New York Times. NYT’s UNNAMED SOURCES ALLEGE that the GRU “secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops”, AND THAT THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HAS KNOWN THIS FOR MONTHS.

To be clear, this is journalistic malpractice. Mainstream media outlets which publish anonymous intelligence claims with no proof are just publishing CIA press releases disguised as news. They’re just telling you to believe what sociopathic intelligence agencies want you to believe under the false guise of impartial and responsible reporting. This practice has become ubiquitous throughout mainstream news publications, but that doesn’t make it any less immoral.

In a post-Iraq-invasion world, the only correct response to unproven anonymous claims about a rival government by intelligence agencies from the US or its allies is to assume that they are lying until you are provided with a mountain of independently verifiable evidence to the contrary. The US has far too extensive a record of lying about these things for any other response to ever be justified as rational, and its intelligence agencies consistently play a foundational role in those lies.

Voices outside the mainstream-narrative control matrix have been calling these accusations what they are: baseless, lacking in credibility, and not reflective of anything other than fair play, even if true. 

“Same old story: alleged intelligence ops IMPOSSIBLE to verify, leaked to the press which reports them quoting ANONYMOUS officials,” tweeted journalist Stefania Maurizi.

“So we are to simply believe the same intelligence orgs that paid bounties to bring innocent prisoners to Guantanamo, lied about torture in Afghanistan, and lied about premises for war from WMD in Iraq to the Gulf of Tonkin ‘attack’? All this and no proof?” tweeted author and analyst Jeffrey Kaye.

“It’s totally outrageous for Russia to support the Taliban against Americans in Afghanistan. Of course, it’s totally fine for the US to support jihadi rebels against Russians in Syria, jihadi rebels who openly said the Taliban is their hero,” tweeted author and analyst Max Abrams.

On the flip side, all the McResistance pundits have been speaking of this baseless allegation as a horrific event that is known to have happened, with Rachel Maddow going so far as to describe it as Putin offering bounties for the “scalps” of American soldiers in Afghanistan. This is an interesting choice of words, considering that offering bounties for scalps is, in fact, one of the many horrific things the US government did in furthering its colonialist ambitions, which, unlike the New York Times allegation, is known to have actually happened.

It is true, as many have been pointing out, that it would be fair play for Russia to fund violent opposition to the US in Afghanistan, seeing as that’s exactly what the US and its allies have been doing to Russia and its allies in Syria, and did to the Soviets in Afghanistan via Operation Cyclone.

It is also true that the US military has no business in Afghanistan anyway, and any violence inflicted on US troops abroad is the fault of the military expansionists who put them there. The US military has no place outside its own easily defended borders, and the assumption that it is normal for a government to circle the planet with military bases is a faulty premise.

But before even getting into such arguments, the other side of the debate must meet its burden of proof that this has even happened. That burden is far from met. It is literally the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you. The New York Times has an extensive history of pushing for new wars at every opportunity, including the unforgivable Iraq invasion, which killed a million people, based on lies. A mountain of proof is required before such claims should be seriously considered, and we are very, very far from that.

I will repeat myself: it is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you. I will repeat myself again: it is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you. Don’t treat these CIA press releases with anything but contempt.

It is amazing that anyone believes anything printed by CIA stenographers in the American mainstream media.  On Sunday’s CIA scripted TV show, “Meet the Press” with Chuck Todd, the American people were appalled as they were subjected to what can only be described as Todd giving disgraced war criminal John Bolton a blow job during an interview.  Todd “revived the discredited Russian collusion theory.”

"Do you think that the president is afraid to make Putin mad because maybe Putin did help him win the election and he doesn't want to make him mad for 2020?"

Todd not only accused Trump of colluding with Russia to “steal the election” but cited the New York Times fake news article that Caitlin Johnstone called “a CIA press release disguised as news” accusing Trump of treason.”   Chuck Todd and his ilk in the mainstream media were cheerleaders for the Iraq War and failed to hold the W. Bush Administration to account for lying America into war.  Remember Colin Powell’s disgraceful presentation of falsehoods before the U.N. Security Council?

Having learned nothing from the totally bogus, and unconfirmed Steele Dossier that was used to illegally spy on the Trump campaign, the same disgraced British “intelligence sources” are now behind the big scoop “Russia paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American Soldiers in Afghanistan.  From LaRouche.com:

Excerpt:

 ‘The Usual (British) Suspects’ Behind the Latest Attack on Trump Talking to Putin

June 29, 2020 (EIRNS)—White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany confirmed June 29th that neither the President nor the Vice President were briefed on the claim, circulated by the New York Times and London Guardian, that the Russian GRU offered bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers. The June 27 Guardian account adds “Russian bounties to kill U.K. soldiers” to the mix. McEnany reiterated that there was no consensus in the U.S. intelligence community that the claim was true. As a result, the President was not briefed.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Vice-President Joe Biden, John Bolton, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Rep. Liz Cheney and other useful dupes prone to ingesting British Kool-Aid claimed either that this was yet another instance of Trump being soft on Russia at the expense of American lives or that immediate investigations must be launched to get to the “heart of this.”

The Guardian story locates this latest outrageous Trump/Russia conspiracy claim right where the last one began, with British intelligence and NATO. According to the Guardian’s June 27th account, the Russian GRU unit behind the Afghanistan bounties was the same one that poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. In support of this bogus claim, they cite Dr. Yuri Felshtinsky, the MI6 asset who collaborated with the anti-Putin oligarch Boris Berezovsky and Alexander Litvinenko, in London-based operations against Putin and Russia.

Litvinenko, who died as the result of polonium poisoning, was case officered by MI6’s Christopher Steele, the author of the fake dossier against Donald Trump. The Guardian also cites former British ambassador to Moscow Sir Andrew Wood in support of the “Russian bounties” story. Wood personally handed the bogus Christopher Steele Trump dossier to Sen. John McCain and, in general, vouched for Christopher Steele’s credibility throughout the intelligence community. Representative Kinzinger received the first copy of the “Steele dossier” in 2016.

Just in case the sourcing of the bogus claim is not clear from the above, the Guardian went on to hypothesize that unjustified fears expressed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his predecessor, Theresa May, about upsetting Donald Trump, are behind the suppression of an Intelligence and Security Committee Report, concerning Russia’s operations in Britain, which includes the continued claim that Russia has a hold over the American President. The author of that report? Christopher Steele.

The incident occurs as President Trump has pressed for a complete U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a position fiercely opposed by the Pentagon, war hawks, and NATO. John Bolton mocks Trump’s position repeatedly in his recently produced novel while naming those in opposition to the President’s plan. The Congressional Research Service just completed a report on Afghanistan, urging Congress to become more involved in the decision whether or not to withdraw.

An end to the Afghan war would, of course, open up major development among China, India, and Pakistan—a casus belli in the minds of Lord Halford Mackinder’s kindergarten in British and British-influenced military and intelligence circles. It would also end U.S. protection of the world’s opium supply lines.

Funny isn’t it, the same people who peddled the Steele Dossier are now pushing the fake “Russian bounties” news just as Trump is trying to pull out of Afghanistan.  God forbid that the U.S. protection of the world’s opium supply lines would be turned over to the Taliban who practically eradicated the poppy production prior to the U.S. launching the war there.

So here we go again, endless investigations, endless lies, and endless attempts to remove Donald Trump from office.  From Tom Luongo:

Excerpt:

Black is the New Black in Color Revolutions

The U.S. is in a Civil War. It began four years ago after Donald Trump’s election and has finally boiled over into open warfare here in 2020.  From the moment the protests against the killing of George Floyd were hijacked into looting and rioting I worried about this turning into something far greater, something with a far higher purpose.

Within a couple of days it was obvious the U.S. was now the subject of a color revolution of the same type and build up that occurred in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Egypt, Serbia and others.  And it’s pretty clear the color for our revolution isn’t orange or brown or violet, it’s black.

The questions I have are why this is happening now? The obvious answer is the full court press to deny Trump a second term. That’s a practically stated goal at this point.  But I feel this is far deeper than that, and likely has to do with knowing that Trump has pieces in place post-Jeffrey Epstein raid/murder to upset the Deep State’s apple cart.  And that brings me to why I’m interested in Hungary again.  I haven’t spoken much about Hungary in recent months but maybe I should have been. For me the two big stories of the week are:

1) Trump explicitly going after the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and the removal of U.S. Attorney Geoff Berman.

2) The European Court of Justice striking down Hungary’s Anti-NGO law which targets George Soros’ ability to fund revolutionary groups within Hungary.

The through line here is that both of these stories attack the heart of the Color Revolution process… the monied interests behind them. Useful idiots shooting each other in downtown Seattle or knocking down statues to Thomas Jefferson are not the story.  They are the means to power to be discarded (they hope).  Useful idiots eventually become useless eaters in any post-Marxist revolution worth discussing.

But for the people who foment these things. They have to start with laying the groundwork. And the stronger the local cultural institutions and local economic power the longer and harder they have to work to undermine it.  The U.S. has been under constant attack this way since before even World War II, going back to Commintern (which never ended, it just morphed into today’s NGO’s)

Trump and Orban represent leaders who understand this problem explicitly and are trying to dismantle the apparatus arrayed against them.

Let’s start with the SDNY. It is close to the most lawless place in the world for all practical purposes because the highest crimes committed there, those of finance and systemic looting by the banks who are the financiers of The Davos Crowd’s push for transnational control, go unpunished.  Headline grabbing fines which are 0.1% of the money and power stolen by Wall St. is not effective government oversight. Regulatory capture is real and the SDNY is the poster child for it.

For those wanting Trump to make good on his promises to Drain the Swamp, the SDNY is the source of the Swamp’s lifeblood, money. It allows the worst crimes to go unpunished, fueling the Marxist rants of the Occupy Wall St. crowd who have morphed into Black Lives Matter and are actively moving towards open warfare with the U.S. government.

And, true to their Marxist teachings, these folks are too dumb they are being played like cheap flutes found at a Mediveal Faire.  Trump removing Berman is a clear case of payback for his string of prosecutions paving the way for the impeachment debacle from this past winter. But, again, it’s far deeper than that.  Trump and William Barr have to go after the funding sources of Antifa, Black Lives Matter and all the other NGO’s operating to funnel money into this brewing civil war. In the process they will rein in the SDNY and create a real climate of fear for those put in power to protect it.

And that’s not going to happen if the SDNY is not under their control. From the outrage and the response from key players like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Jerry Nadler and even Berman himself, it’s clear that’s what is on the table now — they are scared Trump and Barr got close here.  No less than ultimate anti-Trumper, king Neocon himself Bill Kristol tweeted out this tidbit from, of all places, a fact-free screed from The Atlantic:

Bill Kristol

✔

@BillKristol

"Why replace Berman? The answer lies in the firing earlier this year of Jessie Liu, the former U.S. Attorney for D.C...Once they seized control, Barr’s team...interceded in the sentencing of Stone, and made an effort to dismiss the case against Flynn..."https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/why-bill-barr-got-rid-geoffrey-berman/613339/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share …

Why Bill Barr Got Rid of Geoffrey Berman

This is how an authoritarian works to subvert justice.

theatlantic.com

3,749

9:39 AM - Jun 21, 2020

This is the Swamp in high gear protecting someone who, until Friday, no one in the U.S. even cared about.  And now, firing a U.S. attorney is beyond the pale, an example of lawlessness, rampant authoritarianism and all the rest of the usual bromides…

After a series of setbacks in the Supreme Court, where it’s clear Chief Justice John Roberts is compromised in a fundamental way, Trump and Barr going after Berman makes sense. It was Berman oversaw the raid on Jeffrey Epstein’s home and who is, apparently, still in control over what can be done with the materials gained.  You can see how forcefully this defense of Berman is turning into a circus, quickly, as they flip this into another round of ‘Impeach Trump’ for doing his job.

Nadler’s already saying Berman will testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee. And the Twitterati are spinning this as an own goal strong enough to impeach both Barr and Trump.  That’s nonsense. This was a direct shot at the biggest target and even if it didn’t completely hit the mark, forcing Berman out and having his assistant Audrey Strauss take over in the interim, it did move the ball forward.

Since now a new Senate confirmation process can begin for Berman’s real replacement. This is the third U.S. attorney in the SDNY under Trump. He fired Preet Bharaha which led to Berman’s appointment because the Senate refused to confirm anyone.  They are hoping to play the same game again, allowing the SDNY to set its own rules. Berman was appointed by judicial fiat, not Senate confirmation.

Dismantling the cover of the SDNY is key to uncovering, officially, what’s really going on in the U.S.’s Black Revolution as well as everything else and that’s why they are circling the wagons here.  The same way that the European Court of Justice is covering up for the obvious money laundering going on through NGO’s in Europe.

For Hungary, the fight that Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been at the forefront of for years is an existential one. Orban must stop any further destabilization of Eastern Europe on behalf of the European Union.  The infiltration into the younger generations of Hungarians of neoliberalism is deep enough that staying in front of it is becoming increasingly difficult for Orban.

This is why Orban, loudly, passed the so-called Anti-NGO law which made public all sources of money to foreign organizations operating in Hungary. The purpose was to out, publicly, George Soros and the rest of The Davos Crowd who operate in Hungary. It would take away their funding the future takeover of the country, either through the ballot box or color revolution if the former doesn’t work.

With Orban being one of the few sovereigntists in power in Europe with a clear majority in his parliament he’s under constant attack from the EU. But, at the same time, Hungary is too small to stand on its own.

It can neither alienate the West completely, as represented by the EU, nor fully turn East and look to Russia to protect it. This is why Orban, like Trump, talks a big game, makes some moves to declare Hungary sovereign but ultimately yields to the jackals in Brussels when they push back because he cannot afford to exist outside of that apparatus lest the country be completely destroyed.

So he fights skirmishes which play well at home, shoring up his popular support while making deft economic and infrastructure moves which just skirt the wrath of the European Union.  I don’t expect Orban to fight the EU over the ECJ striking down the Anti-Soros law. But he will force open some transparency, gaining a real win but nothing on par with what Vladimir Putin achieved in Russia.

For now, Soros’ Open Society Foundation and Central European University are gone from Hungary but you can see the intensity with which this war against independence from The Davos Crowd is fought. 

Even lowly Hungary, a country of no great importance and just 10 million people, must be crushed under the boot heel of these pigs who are, obviously, more equal than the rest of us, just like their new shocktroops in the Black Revolution here in the U.S.

At some point Orban, like Trump, will have to make a major move which changes the direction of his country permanently, but this Anti-NGO law is not the hill to fight that battle on.  It is these fights that happen away from the front lines in places like Atlanta and Seattle, that highlight just how big the stakes are and how deep the problems are.

What’s also clear is that Trump just confirmed for us that he understands these stakes and he’s willing to take on the biggest racketeering operation in the world today, the people protected by the SDNY, as he stares at an unbridled assault on both his presidency and the future of the Western world.

Indeed, Trump understands and is willing to take on the biggest racketeering operation in the world that is why the CIA’s color revolution in coming to America.  Combined with the Covid-19 destruction of the American economy, Trump will face unending attacks by the CIA controlled fake news.

And, of course no fake news story is complete without stoking fear in the American psyche by ramping up the disinformation campaign about “Covid-19 cases increasing in America.”  From Ron Paul:

Excerpt:

The Media is Lying About the ‘Second Wave’

For months, the Washington Post and the rest of the mainstream media kept a morbid Covid-19 “death count” on their front pages and at the top of their news broadcasts. The coronavirus outbreak was all about the number of dead. The narrative was intended to boost governors like Cuomo in New York and Whitmer in Michigan, who turned their states authoritarian under the false notion that destroying people’s jobs, freedom, and lives would somehow keep a virus from doing what viruses always do: spread through a population until eventually losing strength and dying out.

The “death count” was always the headline.

But then all of a sudden early in June the mainstream media did a George Orwell and lectured us that it is all about “cases” and has always been all about “cases.” Death, and especially infection fatality rate, were irrelevant. Why? Because from the peak in April, deaths had decreased by 90 percent and were continuing to crash. That was not terrifying enough so the media pretended this good news did not exist.

With massive increases in testing, the “case” numbers climbed. This is not rocket science: the more people you test the more “cases” you discover.  Unfortunately our mainstream media is only interested in pushing the “party line.” So the good news that millions more have been exposed while the fatality rate continues to decline – meaning the virus is getting weaker – is buried under hysterical false reporting of “new cases.”

Unfortunately many governors, including our own here in Texas, are incapable of resisting the endless lies of the mainstream media. They are putting Americans again through the nightmare of forced business closures, mandated face masks, and restrictions of Constitutional liberties based on false propaganda.

In Texas the “second wave” propaganda has gotten so bad that the leaders of the four major hospitals in Houston took the extraordinary step late last week of holding a joint press conference to clarify that the scare stories of Houston hospitals being overwhelmed with Covid cases are simply untrue. Dr. Marc Boom of Houston Methodist said the reporting on hospital capacity is misleading. He said, “quite frankly, we’re concerned that there is a level of alarm in the community that is unwarranted right now.”

In fact, there has been much reporting that the “spike” in Texas cases is not due to a resurgence of the virus but to hospital practices of Covid-testing every patient coming in for any procedure at all. If it’s a positive, well that counts as a “Covid hospitalization.”

Why would hospitals be so dishonest in their diagnoses? Billions of appropriated Federal dollars are being funneled to facilities based on the number of “Covid cases” they can produce. As I’ve always said, if you subsidize something you get more of it. And that’s why we are getting more Covid cases.

Let’s go back to the original measurements used to scare Americans into giving up their Constitutional liberties: the daily death numbers. Even though we know hospitals have falsely attributed countless deaths to “Covid-19” that were deaths WITH instead of FROM the virus, we are seeing actual deaths steadily declining over the past month and a half. Declining deaths are not a great way to push the “second wave” propaganda, so the media and politicians have moved the goal posts and decided that only “cases” are important. It’s another big lie.

Resist propaganda and defend your liberty. That is the only way we’ll get through this.

Resist indeed.  Gone are the good old days when there was an opposition party that fought against foreign wars and for working Americans.  There is no longer a Democratic Party, its dead.  From James Howard Kunstler:

Excerpt:

The Party of Chaos and Falsehood

The USA has gone so batshit crazy in these months of the corona virus freak-out that an orgy of looting, arson, and murder, on top of epic job loss and business failure, propelled the stock markets up-up-and-away back to near-record highs — until it finally puked yesterday in a rare moment of self-revulsion, like a sot who has been drinking after-shave.

The news media barely mentioned it, though, so fraught are they by the toils of systemic racism, a morbid condition not unlike “the vapors” of Sigmund Freud’s early days, curiously lacking specificity.

Which raises the question: how much of the response to the public killing of one George Floyd has been an engineered operation by the Democratic Party and its allies in the propaganda industry? I’d say, an awful lot, considering the presentation of events in The New York Times and other organs of the perpetual Resistance that have been luxuriating in existential woe surrounding the indecencies of whiteness, culminating in the fake abject ritual of contrition put on by Ms. Pelosi and Chuck Schumer taking-a-knee in their Kente cloth prayer shawls. Within a few more days, at least four cops around the country were ambushed and shot in the head, but there were no public displays of mourning for them.

Meanwhile, the country has watched countless scenes captured on smartphone video of young people in flash mobs looting, trashing, and burning one city business district after another — but don’t believe your lying eyes, these were “mostly peaceful protest demonstrations” (Ali Velshi, MSNBC). The police mostly stood by and watched, under instructions to avoid producing a batch of fresh martyrs to feed the flames of rage stoked by the talking heads of cable news. By some miracle, the cops’ restraint prevailed, but many of the trashed and looted businesses will not come back, and the cities themselves will be permanently diminished by the losses suffered.

The Democratic Party Resistance apparently believes that all this mayhem, and the false sanctimony excusing it, works to their advantage in the coming national election. They may be disappointed about how that works out, as they’ve been disappointed in three years of previous gambits to overthrow the government and seize power by any means necessary. The picture of them is resolving into the party of bad faith, foul play, coercion, and tyranny.

Even the corona virus scare carries a taint of Resistance manipulation. One moment the populace is hustled into an economically devastating lockdown; and then suddenly, on a fine spring day, they’re incited to mix in moiling mobs of street protests with the predictable result of a fresh spike in virus contagion and the possibility of a second lockdown. Like many activities in our national life lately, it’s another hostage racket, and, guess what, you’re the hostage.

Their most transparent artifice is the utterly false elevation of Joe Biden as their candidate for president. Everybody knows he’s incapable of performing the job, and probably even of functioning through a campaign. His inchoate utterances on events and policy make Donald Trump sound like Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He’s left behind himself an evidence trail of financial crimes running to at least nine digits of grift. And, of course, if you believe all women, he’s a sexual molester. Everything about his public presentation is false, including his hair, teeth, and soul.

This past week, his handlers posed him as Grief Counselor-in-Chief (via video from his basement) at the state funeral for George Floyd, accompanied by an inspirational music soundtrack to shore up the sham sentimentality.  Never have so many hollow platitudes been woven into such garment of alternative reality for public consumption.

Most pathetically of all, the audience of mourners, mere props, as black America has long been employed by the cynical party, went along with the charade that George Floyd was a model citizen and father, now soaring on golden wings to the place on high where you don’t need methedrine and fentanyl to feel happy.

A couple of days later, Democratic Party bigwig and Clinton henchperson, Terry McAuliffe, told a meeting of the faithful that Joe Biden should remain confined to his basement. In a matter of weeks, you may be sure, we’ll learn that the party is compelled to draft Hillary Clinton as poor Joe’s replacement. It can’t be helped. Her turn will not be denied, even if she has to destroy the country to get it.

America get ready for a brutal year ahead of the November election because all stops are being pulled out to defeat Donald Trump.  The Covid-19 Scamdemic is going to be ramped up in order to deny Americans the freedoms so many have died for.  The international bankers are in debt up to their ears and ready to collapse.  America has been robbed of everything it took over 200 years to amass.  Both political parties are corrupt beyond repair and will do everything possible to keep Donald Trump from winning another term. 

In a country like America, with a Wall Street profit-driven health insurance system instead of a universal healthcare system it is impossible to contain the COVID-19 virus.  How can it when millions of people do not have access to health care unless they are willing to lose everything they worked for their entire lives.  Nancy Pelosi has already assured Big Pharma and Big Insurance that the status quo of Wall Street profiteering from American deaths will remain.  From State of the Nation:

Excerpt:

THE GREAT SCAMDEMIC: Biggest and Deadliest Medical Fraud Ever Perpetrated on the Human Race

“All the official COVID-19 numbers are fake, totally made up!”  — The Coronavirus Coach

• All the COVID-19 infection rates and number of cases by locale and nation are fabricated

• All mortality rates by city, state and nation are falsified, most COVID-19 classified deaths are other causes of death

• All coronavirus hospital admissions are either confusingly misrepresented, deliberately inflated or grossly exaggerated

• All COVID-19 statistics officially issued by virtually every government within the world community of nations are either highly inaccurate, purposefully distorted or patently false

• Geriatric genocide is the primary cause of death especially in the United States, Italy, Great Britain, Spain, France and Germany

No other viral pandemic or epidemic in recorded history has ever exacerbated during the summer months the way that the 2020 novel coronavirus pandemic has.

There are several good reasons why the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic is so odd and inexplicable.  Especially during the hot season in places like Florida, Texas, California and New York is the present COVID-19 spiking trend obviously manufactured.

But why now … and why these particular states?

Because Florida, Texas, California and New York are the bellwether states having the most electoral votes.  They’re also the four largest state economies in the USA, that’s why!

The New World Order globalist cabal, working in tandem with Deep State, is determined to wreck and ruin these 4 state economies.  In so doing, they are assured of collapsing the U.S. economy before Election Day.

Also, the Democrats know that if they can flip either Florida or Texas or both to Biden, the bolsheviks steering the ongoing Purple Revolution will go unprosecuted.  The treasonous coup plotters are not stupid; they know: Crash the economy, slash the chances of a Trump victory.

KEY POINT: Notice how Florida, Texas and California, in particular, experienced so-called COVID-19 spikes just before, during or right after the reopening of their economies this June.  The extremely suspicious timeline of the most relevant fake news about the spiking, as captured by the published mainstream media accounts, clearly reflects a highly concerted effort to shut down those state economies yet again.  Essentially, the Republican governors of Florida and Texas are being coerced by the MSM false reporting to stall the reopenings all summer long and, perhaps, until Election Day…

How do we know with absolute certainty that these stats are untrue and made up?

Because the COVID-19 test has been proven to be predictably inaccurate by various coronavirus attending physicians, medical researchers, qualified epidemiologists and investigative journalists.  Not only do the COVID-19 tests produce countless false positives, they even result in false negatives, although quite infrequently.  The overwhelming consensus of the experts is that the COVID-19 test kits themselves are flawed and unreliable.

CORONAVIRUS TEST: A total fraud, gives up to 80% false positives, can be adjusted to produce any result

Furthermore, the “cause of death by COVID-19” is being intentionally used by the colluding medical authorities, WHO, NIAID and hospitals across the USA as a blanket explanation put on death certificates regardless of the actual cause.  This, of course, is medical fraud.  Such deliberate misclassification constitutes a criminal pattern of governmental malfeasance to misrepresent the vital data that are driving this engineered pandemic.

“The Medicare reimbursement is $13,000 for Covid-19 admissions to the Hospital; and if those Covid-19 patients receive ventilator treatment, the reimbursement is $39,000.”(Source: Here’s why COVID-19 deaths are being grossly inflated across America!)  Remember, the Medicare reimbursement schedules were purposefully designed to encourage this fraudulent scheme nationwide (see the preceding excerpt).

The perps at the top had already created a conducive crime scene when they began shutting down all discretionary medical services especially elective surgeries.  This put hospital finances in such dire straits that they were willing to go along with the COVID-19 fraud just to keep their doors open.

The perps then forced numerous hospitals to stage fake COVID-19 ICUs with no patients; hence, no revenue coming in but still having to pay the hospital crisis actors.  Look it, when the man at the very top of this Big Pharma-Government crime syndicate is a career criminal like Dr. Stephen Fauci, what official data or information about this pandemic can be taken seriously. See: FAUCIgate: OPERATION COVID-19 Point Man Tony Fauci Must Be Arrested and Prosecuted for Genocide

Then there is the world’s premier vaccine pitchman Bill Gates whose every utterance somehow concerns the forced vaccination of every single person on the planet.  Since it is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that is now WHO’s biggest funding agent, how can any of their stats be trusted. See: BILL GATES: A Menace to Society Who Must Be Arrested and Prosecuted for Crimes Against Humanity

Geriatric Genocide

If there is one aspect of THE GREAT SCAMDEMIC that has been completely ignored, or shockingly downplayed when it can’t be, it’s the ongoing geriatric genocide taking place every day now.  This premeditated mass murder of the elderly, particularly those with underlying conditions and/or those who have been institutionalized, has been carried out with ruthless execution.

GERIATRIC GENOCIDE: All of These People Should Be in Prison! (Video)

It’s very easy to explain away the myriad deaths of hospital, nursing home and assisted living residents who are over 65 years old as coronavirus caused—EVEN THOUGH IT ISN’T.

Let’s face it, older folks with serious medical ailments and/or health conditions are much more vulnerable to developing full-blown Coronavirus Syndrome.  However, this fact of life also makes them easy targets for a methodical yet stealthy geriatric genocide. See: CORONAVIRUS SYNDROME: The Ultimate Genocidal Bioweapon System

There are several objectives behind such a nefarious conspiratorial plot that are beyond the scope of this exposé.  One of the most obvious, however, was to provide a means by which the perps could endlessly fabricate an alarmingly high infection rate, but more significantly a high mortality rate.  In this way, this transparently bioengineered pandemic could then be super-hyped by the MSM thus creating a contrived justification for mandatory masks, sheltering in place, social distancing, contact tracing and a future mandated vaccine.

Another self-evident objective is the rapid bankruptcy of whole sectors of the U.S. economy.  The restaurant, hospitality, cruise line, airline and tourism industries are contracting as never before, to name just a few.  In fact, closures — both temporary and permanent — as well as bankruptcies, are at an all-time high, especially in the crucial small business category.

PLANDEMIC: The Pre-Planned Controlled Demolition of the American Economy—WHY?

Not only is Main Street once again closing down in towns and cities across the country, Wall Street and Corporate America are the major beneficiaries of the economic collapse.  This is the real tragedy that is being foisted on the American people by the unelected Medical Mafia that has effectively enacted a modified Medical Martial Law.  This paralyzing state of affairs is but a prelude to a much more draconian regime planned by the NWO cabal.

Conclusion

The American people should expect several more “October Surprises” between now and November 3rd.   The severity of each of those fastidiously planned black operations and/or psyops is a function of how desperate the NWO globalists are to ensure a Trump loss.

Therefore, it’s a foregone conclusion that THE GREAT SCAMDEMIC will be milked by the perps in every way possible and by any means necessary.  The communist leaders of this seditious plot to overthrow the Trump administration know they will be soon heading to the gallows otherwise.

In point of fact, so many Deep State crime waves and Democrat crime sprees have been exposed since Trump first declared his candidacy in June of 2015 that the perpetraitors have no other way to avoid charges of treason and capital punishment.  For these and several other reasons, the globalists will artificially prolong THE GREAT SCAMDEMIC until every person on planet Earth has been strictly accounted for via contact tracing and vaccinated with the coming COVID-19 microchipped vaccine…UNLESS WE STOP THEM.

It was only a matter of time before the CIA would turn against the American people and institute a color revolution in America.  So desperate is the Deep State to destroy Donald Trump that they will destroy America if that is what it takes.  The three-pronged attack they are currently foisting upon Americans i.e. the American made Covid-19 Scamdemic, Trump-Russia treason and the violent Color Revolution are in full force.   

Americans must resist the unconstitutional attacks on our freedoms and remove all treasonous members of congress from office.  The only chance Americans have to survive and reclaim their country and their wealth is to reelect Donald Trump in order to drain this putrid swamp once and for all.  God help us.