Pavlovian Dog Stock Speculators Push Stocks Higher Every Time Trump Lies About Rosy Outlook In His Trade War With China

It happened again today. Just how stupid ARE these people? It ALWAYS turns out to be false when Trump makes a positive assertion about the fraught trade negotiations (more accurately trade conflict).

This idiotic gullibility should put paid to the egotistical conceit that rich people are smarter than anyone else.

My bullshit is PERFECT for fooling rich ninnies!

"No One Is Above The Law," Except Untouchable Joe Biden

When Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi announced on September 24th that she was siccing her political underlings on president Donald J. "Jackass" Trump to trump up excuses to impeach him, one of the hackneyed political themes in the canned announcement she intoned was "No one is above the law."

Except, apparently, Democratic Party poohbahs like Joseph Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, et al.

The Clintons ran a super-grifting operation called the "Clinton Foundation," which collected BILLIONS of dollars from foreign governments and corporations (domestic and foreign), including millions of dollars from Russia that resulted in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signing off on a deal allowing Russia interests to buy 20% of the U.S.' uranium reserves. [1]

As for Biden, when he was vice president in the regime of Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, Obama put him in charge of dealing with the Ukraine after the U.S. seized its government and made it into a newly-minted U.S. quasi-satrapy.  PURELY COINCIDENTALLY, the Democrats and most of the U.S. corporate media want us to believe, Biden's neer-do-well son Hunter was appointed to the board of directors of Ukrainian gas company Burisma, owned by a Ukrainian plutocrat, with "compensation," as they say, of $50,000 a MONTH. By the time Hunter resigned from his post this year, he had pocketed $3,000,000. Hunter Biden has exactly zero experience in the fossil fuel industry.


Now, if that was perfectly legitimate, why did Hunter resign this year? He resigned because his Dad is running for president, and they didn't want any questions about this, apparently.

The U.S. propaganda system is almost uniformly claiming there's "nothing there" and "no evidence" of anything wrong with the Bidens's Ukraine scam. At the same time, they think it is illegitimate to investigate the matter to find evidence. And the Democrats are OUTRAGED at the betrayal of the national interest, the "threat to national security" Trump committed by delaying arms delivery for a few days to the Kiev regime so they can kill more people in the breakaway eastern Ukraine, how venal that Trump acted for "personal interest," not the national interest (it was apparently in the national interest that vice president Biden's son get $3 million from a U.S. client regime) by trying to "get dirt" on a rival for the 2020 presidential election. (The power elite have already chosen Biden to run against Trump: the voters will have to be manipulated to get into line.)

By the way, "the" media almost always "forgets" to mention how much Hunter was being paid, or that he had ABSOLUTELY NO QUALIFICATIONS to be serving on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

Except one perfect qualification: he's the son of Joseph Biden. On its face this is corrupt. You only need to know the facts I've stated.

SIX- Count 'Em. SIX!- committees in the House have been unleashed to cobble together excuses to impeach Trump. One, the "Intelligence" committee, is led by one of the most dishonest political mountebanks in the country, Adam Schiff. He's spent the past three years spewing disinformation about Russian subversion of U.S. "democracy" and (non-existent) slam dunk "evidence" "proving" Trump is a Russian agent/puppet/captive of Putin. Another committee, the Judiciary, is headed by Jerrold Nadler, who has also spent the past three years demagogically pushing the Russiagate hoax. Nadler insisted that the (actually nonexistent) Russian hack of a DNC computer was just the same as the Japanese bombing of U.S. military bases at Pearl Harbor in World War II. (Why the U.S. didn't declare war on Russia- the Democrats' man, Obama, was president at the time- Nadler didn't explain.) [2]

As in the failed Russiagate hoax, this latest pseudo-scandal rests on the thinnest tissue of actual facts. [3]

On July 25th Trump called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky (the TV comedian who replaced billionaire president Petro Poroshenko, installed after the U.S.-sponsored coup overthrew president Viktor Yanukovych). The notes of the phone call reveal that it was friendly, and contrary to Adam "Schifty" Schiff, not at all like a "Mafia" gangster "extorting" someone. You can read it for yourself online as the notes of the government drones listening in have been made public.

A so-called "whistleblower" (a CIA officer) filed a complaint August 12th with the Inspector General in the office of the Director of National Intelligence. This CIA person was complaining about Trump's phone call to the Ukrainian president based on what other people told him. In other words, the content of the complaint is entirely hearsay. And before the Democrats even got a chance to see the transcript of the call OR the CIA officer's complaint, Pelosi announced the start of impeachment "investigations."
 
First the verdict, then the evidence.

This Alice In Wonderland-style political offensive against Trump is being promoted relentlessly every day by most U.S. media. They are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Trump was mainly concerned with getting facts about Ukraine's interference in the 2016 presidential election, during which they provided financial information about Paul Manafort, who was forced to resign as Trump's campaign manager as a result. (Trump went through several campaign managers, including the thuggish Corey Lewandowski, who notoriously manhandled a female reporter and is a nasty goon.) Secondarily he asked for Ukrainian cooperation with Attorney General William Barr and with Rudolph Giuliani, working as a private attorney for Trump, and who was once dubbed "America's Mayor" by that arbiter of reality, Time magazine. (Giuliani was an assistant U.S. Attorney General in the fascist Reagan regime, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, then New York City mayor, then a spectacularly failed presidential candidate.)

Of course, Trump and the opportunists who gather around and cling to him like dust on a dust mop are grifters just as the Democratic Party is a party of grifters. What we are seeing is a tawdry power struggle between factions of the power elite. Don't be fooled by the ludicrously grandiloquent rhetoric of Democratic Party hacks. (I'll have more on that in a later essay.)

Why is the scandal-ridden Joe Biden being protected by a solid wall of lies by "the" media and Democratic Party politicians?

Obviously because the bulk of the power establishment has already chosen him to be the next emperor- I mean president of the U.S. As a fallback, they are promoting Senator Elizabeth Warren, who projects a false front that is superficially similar to Senator Bernie Sanders, who is also running. Warren is, like Hillary Clinton, scamming the public. Secretly in bed with big money interests, she is doing a political chameleon act of sounding politically like Sanders in public. Warren recently edged ahead of Biden in the polls, so she has become the "safety" candidate for the corporate/imperialist power structure.

Thanks to the sheeplike quality of the mass of the citizenry, the next president won't be from the Green Party or the Libertarian Party. It will be either more Trump or a Democratic Party political stooge of big capital.


The U.S. oligarchy will have the populace choose between cyanide and arsenic. Let Freedom Ring!

    

  Nancy Pelosi. "When I said 'No one is above the law,' what I MEANT 

                                     was we are going to find reasons to impeach Donald Trump."

1] The New York Times even ran an extensive expose of this matter, which has been chucked down the memory hole by U.S. media, including by the NYT itself. You'd never guess from reading any article since that it was ever published in that paper. See "Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal," NYT, April 23, 2015, and "Donations to the Clinton Foundation, and a Russian Uranium Takeover," NYT, April 22, 2015.


2] Both chambers of the U.S. Congress are structured in hierarchical fashion, with the Speaker of the House controlling that body through her various powers, such as appointing and removing committee chairs, who in turn wield power over the committees. In the Senate, the Majority Leader of whichever of the two-parties of the political cartel that monopolized political power in the U.S. has the majority of Senators, has near total control in that body. Nothing can come up for a vote unless he allows it. (Currently that person is Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, a venal being.)

The Speaker of the House is chosen by majority vote of the Representatives (Congresspeople), which in practice means the party with the majority chooses the Speaker. Obviously the Speaker has to be politically adroit so as not to alienate the members of her party. In the Senate, the caucus of the majority party chooses its leader, who in turn is effectively boss of the Senate.

The way impeachment works is this: impeachment is akin to an indictment. Under the U.S. Constitution, any Federal official can be impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors," a completely vague term that is otherwise unexplained in that document. It is obviously subjective, yet legal "scholars" and "experts" and even run-of-the-mill politicians pontificate in tones of certainty as to what is and isn't "impeachable." In practice it is whatever the House of Representatives decides.

If a majority of the House votes to impeach, the matter is presented to the Senate for a simulacrum of a "trial." The Senate has to vote by a two-thirds majority to actually remove the accused official from office.

A handful of Federal judges who were guilty of outrageous behavior and refused to resign (they have lifetime appointments, a stupid feature of the Constitution) have been impeached, convicted, and removed from office.

Two presidents have been impeached: Andrew Johnson, a virulent racist who became president at the end of the U.S. Civil War when president Abraham Lincoln was murdered by Confederate agents AFTER the Confederacy had surrendered, and Bill "This Isn't A Pickle In My Pocket, I'm Actually Glad To See You" Clinton. Neither was convicted, so neither was removed from office.

it is virtually impossible to imagine a scenario by which Trump can be convicted in the Senate. The Senate has a Republican majority, and with a handful of exceptions, every Republican politician is slavishly behind Trump, because almost all Republican voters are enthusiastic Trump fans. Nothing is going to change that. Trump has a lifetime of experience sensing just how far he can push things, just how much he can get away with. So far, over three years of machinations by the secret police Deep State, and the relentless pushing by the Democrats and most of the corporate media of sham reasons for criminal charges or impeachment, first the Russiagate hoax, now the Ukraine phone call, have been utter failures. All the while, the valid reasons to criticize Trump (other than his chronic lying, which has been covered ad nauseam, and some but too little and too tame coverage of the atrocities of ICE and the Border Patrol) are mostly ignored.

3] Here's the unrefuted proof that there was no Russian hack of a DNC server (which the Democrats and their media foghorn accomplices inflated into "hacking the election" and "attacking Our Democracy).

• The DNC refused to allow the FBI to examine their computer! This is supposedly the Crime of The Century, a foreign enemy "attacking Our Democracy," and the Dems withhold the evidence! So the FBI just took the word of the hired liars of the Dems, the notorious company Crowdstrike, who sent the FBI a censored ("redacted") report!
• 
  NO evidence was ever presented to back up the assertion of the Russian hack and subsequent appearance of the Democrats' emails in WikiLeaks, which revealed how the Democratic National Committee, while feigning neutrality in the primaries for the Democratic presidential nomination, was in fact a wholly owned subsidiary of the Clinton campaign and repeatedly cheated her main rival, Bernie Sanders. Obama's Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, hand-picked 3 "analysts," one each from FBI, CIA and NSA, to write the report which concluded, sans proof, that Russia was guilty. And the NSA was equivocal. Yet if there had been such a transfer of data from ANY U.S. computer to Russia, the NSA would have a copy of the data flow, since they collect and store ALL Internet traffic. These 3 analysts were inflated into "16 (sometimes 17) intelligence agencies say Russia hacked" and "the intelligence community concluded that Russia hacked" in the ensuing propaganda campaign.
• 
  Two of the NSA"s top technical officers (who were retired after long careers at the agency), William Binney and Kurt Wiebe, analyzed the download speed of the data transfer and tested to see if the Internet transfer speeds available at the time made such a transfer possible. Not even close. But the speed matched a transfer to a flash drive.
• 
  Seth Rich, a young Democratic Party worker who had access to the computer system and is suspected of being the one who passed the emails along to WikiLeaks, was murdered in Washington, D.C. His murder is unsolved. Out of all the thousands of murders committed annually in the U.S. each year, this is the ONLY ONE for which WikiLeaks has offered a reward for information on, $25,000. And Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, in an interview on European television, tiptoed right up to the edge of admitted that Rich was the source.
• 
  Most importantly, if we pretend Russia did it, that was NOT an "attack on democracy," it was a GIFT to democracy, because it enabled the American public to be BETTER INFORMED ABOUT ONE OF THE CANDIDATES, HILLARY CLINTON. It revealed her secret speech to the Goldman Sachs conference of financiers, in which she nakedly stated that she's a two-faced manipulator and that the financiers should ignore what she says in public to the dumb rubes whose votes she needs, in fact she'll be defending THEIR interests- as indeed she always has throughout her career. When she lived in Arkansas as wife of that state's Attorney General and then Governor Bill Clinton, she sat on the board of the union-hating Walmart corporation. Her class loyalties have always been evident. In college she was a Goldwater Girl, Barry Goldwater being a fascist and racist. As virtual co-president with her husband, she was foresquare behind all his class war policies and attacks especially on the black population.

Joseph Biden Is ACTUALLY Guilty Of What Adam "Shifty" Schiff Accuses Trump Of

The Democratic Party has lost its collective mind.

Again.

First it was the Russiagate hoax they put us all through. Now it's a phone call Trump made asking the Ukrainian president's help in investigating what should be a scandal around the Democratic Party establishment's and corporate media's favorite candidate for president in 2020, the segregationist Joseph R. Biden.

Democratic Party Congressman and chair of the House "Intelligence" Committee Adam Schiff says that Trump is the same as a Mafia boss and he extorted the Ukrainian president, even though the transcript of Trump's phone call to that president shows no such thing. Schiff says it doesn't have to be explicit to be extortion. In fact, there isn't even a veiled threat in the call, as described in notes prepared by the various apparatchiks who monitored it. Trump wanted Ukraine's help in getting to the bottom of how then-vice president Joseph Biden's smarmy son, Hunter, got a plum position on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and a cool $3 million payday.

Trump delayed delivering military equipment to Ukraine for a few days. This is something the Dems call "impeachable."

You know how many times U.S. presidents have held up Congressional appropriations?

LOTS.

Or misdirected the monies, as Trump is doing to build his border wall.

Or "abused" presidential power for personal ends, as the current agit-propaganda is screeching is grounds for impeachment. No other president has ever done THAT, RIGHT?

What a crock.

Bill Clinton bombed other countries to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal! He actually KILLED people!

I'll bet EVERY U.S. president has used his powers for personal ends!

And at least some vice presidents.

In 2014, when Joseph Biden was vice president under president Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, Biden ACTUALLY threatened the Ukrainian government with cutting off U.S. aid unless that country's chief prosecutor was fired. That prosecutor was looking into the strange case of Hunter Biden's extraordinary good fortune.

The prosecutor was duly given the axe. Biden says it was because he was corrupt. But EVERYONE in the Ukrainian government was and is corrupt. Including the former prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was hand-picked by State Department apparatchik Victoria Nuland and installed following the coup the Obama regime instigated.

Schiff is a completely unethical and dishonest mountebank who distinguished himself during the years-long Russiagate hoax as one of the worst liars and fake conspiracy mongers in the Democratic Party. A stream of false assertions and slanderous innuendoes poured forth from his mouth. Actually facts bounce off his bulletproof exterior. This political cyborg does a poor imitation of a human being.

 

The eminently trustworthy The Honorable Adam Schiff. 

This is the same scam the Democrats pulled when their damning emails were revealed by WikiLeaks in 2016. With the crucial help of their corporate media and Deep State secret police allies, the Democrats suppressed the content of the emails and made the "issue" one of "RUSSIA ATTACKED OUR DEMOCRACY!" (Russia actually wasn't the source of the emails, but never mind.) True information was ignored and replaced by an ongoing hoax claiming Trump was a Russian puppet.

This time, the important facts- that the son of vice president Biden got an incredible favor he could not have possibly gotten on his own merits, which demands an explanation- are once again being ignored in favor of a ginned up fake scandal.

I see nothing wrong with asking a foreign government to investigate such a matter. Foreign governments are enlisted in U.S. investigations all the time. And why is getting information on a candidate from outside U.S. borders an impermissible "interference" in a U.S. election? It makes no difference where facts come from as long as they are true!

Another thing that is being treated as a grave violation of "normal procedures" and impeachable is that the notes of the phone call were stored in a highly classified system. 

So fucking what?

Every year, millions of documents are "classified" just to keep the public from knowing what the government is up to!

Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats leader in the House of Representatives, had the nerve to say that Trump did that to hide something.

Unlike Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State setting up a private email server to HIDE ALL HER MESSAGES!

The hypocrisy and double-standards of this latest absurd campaign to oust Trump is mind-bending. And it's being done instead of attacking Trump for the actual horrible things he does.

But the Democrats actually agree with almost all of those things. If not all of them. Backing Saudi Arabia and Israel to the hilt, trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government (both Pelosi and Charles "Upchuck" Schumer, the Senate Democrats leader, have publicly cheerleaded for that subversion), giant tax cuts for the rich and big corporations, and more.

The Democrats haven't even defended abortion rights or Planned Parenthood. Trump cut off their Federal funds without a peep from the Democrats.

Despite the fact that most of the propaganda system and the secret police Deep State is arrayed against him, Trump is going to win this one. So if he gets reelected, as seems more probable than ever, the blame should go to the Democrats and their enablers.

Saudis Slaughtering Yemenis for 5 Years? Big YAWN. Yemenis retaliate against Saudi oil field? TIME TO FREAK OUT!!!

The political elites of the "Western world" (the U.S.-bossed capitalist bloc) and their propagandists have hit one of their disgusting low points of moral depravity and dishonesty in the aftermath of a successful attack on the main Saudi petroleum processing facility by Houthi tribe militia in Yemen, who claimed responsibility for the attack by drones. This has temporarily knocked out half of Saudi Arabia's crude oil processing capacity. The Saudis currently sell 5.7 million barrels of oil a day (although they have capacity to sell considerably more) in a world market whose daily oil consumption is 100 million barrels. Currently the U.S. and Russia are the top two exporters.

According to the propaganda campaign launched in the immediate aftermath of the attack by the Western media, politicians, and government officials, the attack wasn't an attack on Saudi Arabia, retaliation for five years of war crimes against the people of Yemen. No, it's "an attack on the world's energy supply." That's even more hyperbolic and hysterical than the other phrase the world's capitalist propagandists are ALL using, "the world's oil supply." You'd think the whole world was a communist society and we all own the oil in Saudi Arabia. Last time I checked, it's the Saudi "royal" family that owns it. (They call themselves a "government" of course.) All the world's capitalist media immediately fell into line behind Trump's Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, parroting this line. [1]

The effect of this terminology is to paint the Houthis, who are at a huge military disadvantage to the U.S.-backed Saudis attacking Yemen for the past five years, as the enemies of all humanity. It's "our" energy supply viciously attacked by "Iranian-backed" Houthis, Iran being a Demon Nation ever since 1979, when the U.S.-installed dictator of Iran, the so-called "Shah" ("King") was overthrown. Overthrowing a U.S. dictator is like spitting in the eye of America. How DARE you!

Far from an attack on "the world," on all of us, the Houthis unintentionally did the world, did all humanity, a FAVOR. Burning fossil fuels is causing a disaster by raising the temperature of our home planet! And if there's fear of an oil "shortage," TRUMP could alleviate that by the stroke of a pen by allowing two of the world's largest oil-producing countries, IRAN and VENEZUELA, to SELL THEIR OIL! (Venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves, NOT Saudi Arabia.) So this "crisis" is totally BOGUS. (The excited elite chattering about it died down in only 2 days. And all they cared about was money.)

Pompeo, a loathsome political creature created by the political machine of the malign billionaire Koch brothers of Kansas; a neo-fascist slug who has publicly called for the execution of Edward Snowden; immediately blamed the attack on Iran. This was predictable. If someone threw a brick through Pompeo's window, he'd blame Iran.

Pompeo is the guy who, after the vile Saudi tyrant, "Crown Prince" Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was butchered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, dismembered like an animal in an abattoir, and his body parts smuggled out, immediately ran to Riyadh to conspire with Salman about how to get Salman out of the jam he'd created for himself. (The Trump regime didn't even make Salman come to then!) Ever since, Trump and Pompeo have done their best to obfuscate Salman's obvious guilt.

Here they are, just after the shit hit the fan from the Khashoggi murder:

Pompeo and Salman. Salman and Pompeo. I love you Bro! -I love you too!

The attack on the petroleum facility occurred over the weekend, when the markets on which parasitic speculators set the price of oil by their trading of futures and options contracts are closed. But 24 hours a day, bid and ask prices are still posted. Before markets opened on Monday, futures indicated a 20% rise in the two benchmark oil prices, the Brent crude oil price and the West Texas Intermediary oil price. (Typically Brent trades higher than Texas.) But when trading actually began, the prices were up only 8%. Later in the day they hovered 10% higher. But that is still LOWER than the price was in late 2018. Finally oil closed up 15% on the day. And in any event, oil has languished between $50 and $60 a barrel for several years, after its crash from about $120, a crash deliberately engineered by Saudi Arabia, ostensibly aimed at putting U.S. shale oil producers out of business (which it didn't do) but really aimed at inflicting severe economic damage on Russia and Venezuela (which it DID do, especially Venezuela). Both those nations are heavily dependent on oil exports, and both have been targets of ongoing attack by the U.S. for years now. [2]

Needless to say, the U.S. and the Saudi "royal' family frequently engage in nefarious conspiracies together, one of the most notorious being the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers on September 11, 2001, under the guise of an Al-Qaeda aerial attack with hijacked planes. [3]

Pompeo, Trump, the Democratic and Republican members of Congress, and U.S. corporate media propagandists are not exactly the most reliable folks in matters involving Iran. Remember the last time the U.S., Pompeo, Trump, the "leaders" of both parties and any political hack who could get on TV, and the entire U.S. corporate propaganda system asserted as fact that Iran committed an "attack"? It was the damage inflicted on a Japanese and a Norwegian tanker. Even though that was definitely refuted, they still pretend it's true. [4]

These are people who are totally untrustworthy, with zero credibility. But probably Iran at least supplied the weapons. And who knows? Maybe even launched the attack themselves. But Pompeo had no proof of that in the immediate aftermath- or the U.S. military would have surely provided it.

The true context for this, the 5 year long war against the people of Yemen by Saudi Arabia, which would not be possible without U.S. support, from both the Obama and Trump regimes, is totally ignored. That is what is fundamentally dishonest about the media "coverage," which thus must be seen as propaganda, not news.

The numerous atrocities of the Saudis, using their U.S. weaponry, have been virtually ignored by Western, and especially U.S. media. (Britain, that awful relic of an evil empire, is also a major arms supplier to the Saudis.) Without U.S. weaponry, and U.S. targeting information, and even U.S. refueling craft for Saudi jets, which Obama provided, the Saudi war on Yemen would not be possible. The Saudis have slaughtered tens of thousands of Yemenis directly. They have created famine conditions for millions of Yemenis. (The UN's aid organizations have repeatedly avowed this.) They have blockaded Yemen, starving the populace, making medicines unavailable. (Bombing hospitals and clinics doesn't help either.) The world's largest cholera epidemic has been created in Yemen by the Saudis. (And their Western imperialist enablers.) (For more on the background of the current situation in Yemen, see footnote [5] below.)

None of this is to endorse the Houthis. But clearly the Yemenis should have to sort out their rivalries amongst themselves. As for Iran being the instigator, in fact it was the former longtime dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who formed a temporary alliance with the Houthis and egged them on to rebel. Iran saw an opportunity, or wanted to stop the Saudis installing the ruler the Houthis had just overthrown back in power as a Saudi client/puppet.

 

 A picture is worth a thousand words, especially words citing statistics. "Six milion Jews died in the Holocaust has nowhere near the emotional impact of a photo of skeletal concentration camp inmates, standing behind barbed wire, or a pile of their desiccated corpses. So here are three photos from Yemen in place of 3,000 words:

This Yemeni child was starved to death by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. 

 

 

 Here's another of the countless thousands of children murdered by the 

U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Reminiscent of Nazi concentration camp victims.

 

Sometimes it's more satisfying to kill children quickly, instead of having to wait for them to die slow, agonizing deaths that take months. This school bus was bombed by the Saudis, flying the jets the U.S. happily sold them (Obama and Trump both), dropping those fabulously accurate U.S. precision bombs. 51 died, 40 of them schoolchildren. That was in August, 2018. Still waiting for some war crime indictments.

It is an illustration of the utterly cynical and callous nature of "global politics" or "international relations" or "statesmanship" (the preferred term of the mass murderer Henry Kissinger) that causing so much human suffering isn't given a second thought in the pursuit of greater power by those who rule.

The U.S. (and other) media have spent the past five years of Saudi atrocities barely mentioning any of it. They've also done a bang-up job keeping the American public ignorant of the U.S. role in providing the essential tools of mass murder. But the U.S. is constantly victimizing poor people all over the planet. This fits the pattern of U.S. global class warfare. The U.S. has also directly killed civilians in Yemen, both by aerial bombings and in raids by "special" forces.

When I say that U.S. elites are immoral and despicable, that is something they themselves prove to be true every day.


"The" media is already pushing the Saudis' line that the drone strike came from Iraq or Iran, not Yemen. And maybe it was missiles, they're saying. Oh, and the drone parts are Iranian. (Probably are, as Iran has been helping the Houthis.)

Trump immediately expectorated some tough-guy bluster, declaring the U.S. "locked and loaded," and only waiting word from Saudi Arabia to confirm Iran did it to presumably pull the trigger. The same Saudi Arabia that has been trying for years (along with Israel) to goad the U.S. into starting a war on Iran. Gee. I wonder what the Saudis are gonna determine happened!

Thank heavens he fired John Bolton!

 The "Crown Prince" that swallowed the Superpower.

1] A day later, The Invisible Man, the nitwit former Texas Governor whom Trump picked to be Secretary of Energy, belatedly got in on the act, putting in his two cents which immediately sank to the bottom of the media pool without a trace. Said Rick Perry: "Make no mistake about it. This was a deliberate attack on the global economy, and the energy market." This is the same guy who campaigned for the presidency on a platform promising to abolish the cabinet Department he now heads. 

Actually, Tex, I think it was an attack on the Saudi Arabian regime.

2] Stocks on Monday, the first trading day after the attack, declined modestly.  The  S & P 500 index (500 major public companies) declined 0.3%, the Nasdaq (several thousand companies) declined about a quarter of one percent, and the Dow Industrial Average (a mere 30 stocks) fell about one-half percent. The following day, Tuesday, September 17, oil actually FELL $3. Wholesale gasoline is up 20 cents, 1-3 cents at the pump. Word is the Saudis will have the bombed site back up and running in two weeks.

3]  It would take too long to go into all that here. To start to educate yourself, watch some of the videos put out by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of over 3,000 architects and engineers who have debunked the nonsense that the towers fell because airplanes crashed into them. Oh, and Number 7 WTC fell straight down in the afternoon. All were the result of controlled demolitions, as you will learn.

4]  In brief, the U.S. claimed Iran planted mines on the sides of the ships. The crew of the Japanese tanker said there WERE no mines, but that flying objects hit their ship. The Japanese Foreign Minister was IN TEHRAN at the time of the attack, meeting with the Ayatollah, trying to help Iran. The U.S. government and the global bourgeois propaganda system would have us believe that Iran was determined to sabotage its OWN DIPLOMACY designed to try and relieve the garrote around Iran's neck that is strangling its economy.All the details, with news videos substantiating the facts, are at "Dishonest U.S. Media Lying U.S. Into Another War of Aggression," June 20, 2019. 

5]  Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world. A country without a real government, it was ruled for 33 years by a dictator/warlord with the title of "president," Ali Abdullah Saleh. Saleh was happy to play footsie with the Bush and Obama regimes in their "war on terror," pretending that U.S. drone missile assassinations were the work of his military. He also took the opportunity to have political rivals eliminated by U.S. drone strike by telling the U.S. they were "terrorists" and giving them location information. One such attack even made the front page of the Wall Street Journal, which is how I know about this practice of Saleh's. But that changed nothing.

But Saleh came under increasing domestic pressure- which in Yemen means armed resistance, the only thing that counts in Yemen- and the U.S. thought it was time to replace him before he was overthrown. Saleh resisted, but was eventually squeezed out. In November 2011, Saleh signed an agreement to leave power- then reneged on it. Eventually he was forced out in 2012. His successor as "president," Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, one of Saleh's erstwhile cronies,  took over the various rackets that take the place of an actual government in Yemen. In January 2015 the Houthi tribe rebelled, forcing Hadi to flee by shelling his palace. The Saudis decided they wanted Hadi to rule Yemen as their puppet or client, and commenced a war against the Houthis, heavily targeting civilian targets such as apartment buildings, hospitals, mosques, wedding parties, and so on. As of a couple of years ago, retired U.S. army colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the top aide to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in the Bush II regime, asserted that 5,000 of 15,000 Saudi aerial bombings were of civilian targets.  Meanwhile Hadi sits in Riyadh, content to watch "his" people being slaughtered, the country destroyed, waiting to be reinstalled as "president" of Yemen by his Saudi puppet masters.

U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman Waits 3 Weeks To Stop Prosecuting Dead Man Jeffrey Epstein

Apparently the chief Federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York could hardly bring himself to drop the charges against the corpse of Jeffrey Epstein, currently the World's Most Notorious Sex Offender. ("The" media turned him into that. He wasn't a serial rapist/murderer, for example, which would be a far more worthy object of universal opprobrium, theatrical revulsion, and nonstop vilification.) Berman's office is based in lower Manhattan, along with the largest FBI secret police field office. Berman appeared with the local FBI chief when the two of them announced the new indictment of Epstein in July.

Berman belatedly moved in Federal court for the dismissal of the charges last week, formally submitting the motion for the pro forma approval of a Federal judge, nearly three weeks after Epstein was assassinated in the Federal jail in Manhattan in a fake "suicide." The main reason we know it was murder is from hard physical fact. Epstein's neck was broken, which would have been impossible to occur according to the New York City Medical Examiner's account of his death. According to the M.E., relying in part on the claims of Epstein's jailers, Epstein allegedly tied a bedsheet around his neck and around the post of the upper bunk in his cell, then "knelt forward." You could choke or strangle yourself like that. You couldn't break your neck bone unless you were 90 years old with advanced osteoporosis. Epstein was 66 and apparently in good health. He wasn't frail, and there's no assertion that he had unusually weak bones. The M.E. nevertheless went along with the coverup as one would expect and deemed the death a "suicide."

It's well established that Epstein's "pedophile trafficking" operation was also a blackmail operation being run by an "intelligence service." The U.S. Attorney who prosecuted him in Florida over a decade ago- or rather, who protected him- Alexander Acosta, told the Trump transition team when they were vetting him for the post of Labor Secretary in the Trump regime that he was told to lay off Epstein because Epstein "belonged to intelligence," a nice and ambiguous way of laying a protective cloak over him. Was he an asset? A target? An actual employee or agent of a secret police agency? Part of an ongoing operation? Who knows? it's deliberately vague.

So Acosta crafted a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein's lawyers, lawyers who are heavyweights in the U.S. power structure, including Alan Dershowitz andd Kenneth Starr, the man assigned by the Republican Party to bring down president Bill Clinton. (Ironically, Clinton spent a lot of time with Epstein and his stable of available young females, and Dershowitz admits to getting a "massage" but denies raping a girl under Epstein's control, as the now adult woman claims.) Epstein pled to a minor state charge and had to sleep in a special suite set up for him in the county jail while going to his office during the day, for 13 months. (A discount off the sentence of 18 months. For "good behavior" I suppose.) Acosta broke Federal law by keeping the agreement secret from Epstein's victims instead of notifying them as required. A U.S. Attorney breaking the law- that's another sign that he was acting under secret police direction and assumed he would be protected.



There's good reason to believe, as a number of knowledgeable former secret policemen and attorneys believe, that Epstein was running a blackmail operation, surreptitiously recording his prominent "friends" in their trysts with underage females. The other explanation for Acosta's inexplicable action in bending over backwards to protect Epstein, that Acosta was intimidated by Epstein's "powerful" lawyers, is a crock. The Department of Justice isn't a pushover. And if Acosta was doing this without some kind of authorization or direction, he would be putting himself at serious reputation and career risk, and possible sanction by DOJ an/or the courts. There was overwhelming evidence of multiple crimes by Epstein- the testimonies of multiple girls, and written records seized from Epstein documenting encounters and contacts with numerous minors. Perry Mason couldn't have gotten this guy off the hook.

But "the" media is determined to protect the secret police and their smarmy covert operation. Presumably it was either a CIA operation or a joint CIA-Mossad one. Mossad because Epstein's "procurer," Ghislaine Maxwell, was the daughter of known Mossad asset Robert Maxwell, the late British media baron who also "committed suicide" by jumping off his yacht. (His company was bankrupt, and I guess Israel didn't want to cough up the money to bail him out, so who knows? Maybe he really did commit suicide. At least that "suicide" is physically possible, unlike Epstein's with the broken neck bone.)



Furthermore, Epstein, being Jewish, rich, and well-connected, would have been a tempting target for Mossad recruitment. Mossad recruits non-Israeli Jews all over the world to use in its operations, playing on Jewish solidarity to gain their cooperation. (Secondarily they use money and favors, and probably at times threats to recruit Jews, although the heavier stuff would be used much more to induce Arabs, Iranians, etc., to do Mossad's bidding.)

A less likely suspect for the unnamed "intelligence agency" would be the FBI. The FBI has a long history of blackmailing politicians and other prominent figures. This was one of longtime FBI chieftain J. Edgar Hoover's specialties. He even personally blackmailed President Kennedy, among others. (But in the "nicest" way. He's inform JFK, for example, of all the sexual affairs Kennedy had had, and assure him that his secrets were safe with him, Hoover. Of course JFK got the message. Those secrets would only stay secret if JFK never crossed Hoover.)

The FBI was involved with Acosta in the Florida whitewash of Epstein's crimes. On the other hand, now that Berman has gone after Epstein, the FBi office in New York City has been part of the Get Epstein attack team. However it must be kept in mind that the NYC FBI field office is at this point an independent fiefdom within the FBI. They in effect forced former FBI Director James Comey to torpedo Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in October 2016, just a couple of weeks before the election, by dredging up once again her use of a private email server to circumvent government record keeping and future access to the record of her actions as Secretary of State under president Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama. After Hoover's iron grip on the FBI was broken with his death, the FBI has become harder to control, with agents acting more independently. No FBI agent would have dared "leak" to the media under Hoover except under his direct instructions. Not anymore.

But if Epstein was protected last decade, why couldn't the CIA protect Epstein this time around? What changed? Well, society changed, social conditions changed. The Me Too Movement didn't exist ten years ago. This time a woman reporter at the Miami Herald was incensed by the matter, got her editors to let her run with the story, then other media organs picked it up and amplified it.

So why couldn't the CIA just go around to their media contacts and tell them to hush? After all, even-or rather, especially- the major media organs at the pinnacle of the U.S. corporate propaganda system- the TV networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, are slavish in their obeisance to the secret police organs.

Slavish yes, but not slaves. Their slavishness is voluntary, not compulsory. The CIA would have been linking themselves to Epstein by asking their media contacts to quiet the story down. That would have raised a lot of uncomfortable questions. Why are you protecting this "predatory pedophile," CIA? What's your connection to him? The whole blackmail operation risked exposure.

Since they could no longer protect Epstein, the secret police had to kill him.
But not to worry, CIA. As long as you lay low, "the" media has no interest in putting the CIA in a bad light with a scandal. (I know, it's ironic. All the monstrous CIA crimes since its founding aren't scandalous, but this would be.)

Mostly "the" media has fallen in line behind the "suicide" story, ignoring the broken neck. Bits of dissonant facts peek out from under the media coverup, for example they reported (just on one day) that Epstein's lawyers don't buy the suicide story. And one of his accusers was on a CBS program saying she didn't think he was the type to kill himself. (For sure!) She thought the writing of the will two days before his untimely demise was an attempt to put his assets out of reach of people like her. (The lawyers for these women must have dollar signs in their eyes. They're in it for a cut of the loot, obviously. Another point being uncharacteristically ignored by "the" media.)

Perhaps Epstein was told by one of his handlers to write a will because they were going to fake his death and smuggle him out. Or perhaps he'd been threatened. It was reported back in July that he was "found unconscious with marks on his neck," and the circumstances of that event were never and have never been clarified.

And some of those who are calling it a murder are attributing it to the Clintons. I don't think the Clintons these days have the power to have someone in a Federal jail assassinated.

Nor does Trump have that ability. Too much of the Deep State is hostile to him for him to be able to pull it off. Anyway he's confident of his ability to lie his way out of anything. No woman used by Epstein has accused Trump of sexual misbehavior, as far as I've heard. And Trump broke off with Epstein about 15 years ago, reportedly because he made some kind of sexual advance on a girl inside a Trump property. (Guess Trump thinks it's only okay to grab the vaginas of adult females.)

By the way, guess what? It's just been reported that there's no "usable" video from the Federal jail where Epstein was killed. How about that. Took them long enough to decide how to handle THAT! Did a Nixon on the recordings.

The Epstein Affair actually is like an X-Ray into American society. it reveals much, and I don't mean just the machinations of the Deep State and its powers. I will have more to explain in future essays.

      "Hey, when you're a cog in the system and the Deep State gives you an order, you obey."

 Dead Men Tell No Tales.

New Details From Government Autopsy Make Jeffrey Epstein "Suicide" Story Even More Implausible

The New York City Medical Examiner has done an autopsy on the body of Jeffrey Epstein, who was locked up in the Federal Government dungeon in lower Manhattan called, in what sounds like a tribute to the "Newspeak" in George Orwell's dystopia political novel "1984," the "Metropolitan Correctional Center." All the elements of the power establishment, including of course "the" media, want us to believe that Epstein committed suicide.

Which I could have believed, if they'd only been more assiduous at hiding certain physical facts that causes the suicide story to strain credulity.

First there was the information that Epstein's neck bones were broken. If you blinked, and didn't scour media relentlessly to come across it, you would have missed this.

Now we're told that Epstein tied a bedsheet to the top bunk in his cell, and then "knelt" to hang himself. In other words, he was standing up, then crouched down, killing himself.

I can believe it is possible to choke or strangle oneself to death in this manner, although I think it would be difficult to control the automatic responses of one's own body, such as reaching with the hands, or rising with the legs. But breaking neckbones? And Epstein wasn't a slender guy. He didn't have an extremely thin neck, say.

This information slipped out in the fourth paragraph of a Wall Street Journal story. Here is the paragraph in its entirety:

"Early findings by authorities indicated Mr. Epstein hanged himself by using his bed sheet, according to people familiar with the investigation. [So-called investigation, actually a cover-up.] Authorities [whoever they are] believe he tied the bed sheet to the top bunk of his bunk bed, then knelt forward to the floor, one of the people said." [My emphases.] [1] 

They BELIEVE? Didn't they find his dead body? Wouldn't the bedsheet still be tied around his neck and to the bunk if he'd killed himself?

And he knelt forward to the floor. From a standing position, presumably. How would that have fractured his neck bones?

It wouldn't have.

The article didn't mention the broken neck bones. If you want to find out about reality from the U.S. power structure's media, you have to act like a detective and hunt around for clues in various disparate sources and then assemble the pieces like you're doing a jigsaw puzzle. Our rulers count on most people having neither the time nor the motivation to do that, especially for EVERY SINGLE EVENT. And the events they completely black out are another challenge, because you may have never heard of them.

The article also quotes the city's chief medical examiner, Barbara Sampson, as officially concluding "in a brief statement" that Epstein's demise was suicide, without any details, after in her words "careful review of all investigative information." I.e. taking at face value what the Federal prison told her. Which would be all the "investigative information" she had at this point. And calling it "investigative information" is just dishonest. It's really public relations spin.

And Sampson's "review" couldn't have been very thorough, as there wouldn't be much to review. The various Federal "investigations" (at least 3 have been announced!) have just begun, yet the ME has already reached a conclusion! Barely a week since Epstein's death. A rush to judgment, for sure.
By the way, bogus autopsies are routine in nations that commit political assassinations. They go with the territory. We had a lulu of a fraudulent military autopsy in the JFK murder by the CIA. That one was done by an officer who didn't even perform autopsies! And who somehow missed the giant exit wound in the back of JFK's skull that all the surgeons who examined him at Parkland Hospital in Dallas described on film.

There still has never been an explanation of what occurred in July, when Epstein was "found" in his cell, unconscious, with "marks" on his neck. The "authorities" never said it was a suicide attempt. It was all very murky. Sometimes "the" media described it as a suicide attempt, but government officials never said that.

So what was it? An attack by another inmate? By a guard? An incompetent assassin? What kind of "marks" were they? What did Epstein say about it?

Nothing. Just the sound of crickets from "the authorities" and "the" media.

He was briefly put on suicide watch after that, but almost immediately taken off it. So "the authorities" apparently DIDN'T think it was a suicide attempt! Or else they are grossly feckless, negligent, and incompetent. (A possibility that we cannot rule out, thus confusing matters further.) But in the highest-profile case such as this one, with daily saturation media coverage, how could it be that the Federal government could be so inept? They surely were paying very special attention to Epstein!

But you're just a loony conspiracy theorist if you don't swallow the official guff from government officials being shoveled at you daily and around the clock by "the" media. I guess that makes Epstein's lawyers crackpots, since according to the same WSJ article, they don't accept the ME's "findings," and want to obtain video from the Federal dungeon. Good luck with THAT. The longer the Government stalls releasing that footage, the more certain you can be that it was tampered with, altered, or completely fabricated. And digital video is very easy to alter undetectably. They can even put a false time stamp on the footage of empty hallways they'll be showing to "prove" there was no foul play.

One major function of dishonest propagandists (who nowadays call themselves "journalists") is to obfuscate reality. Another major function is replacing reality with a fake reality, a story, a myth, a legend, that the targets of the propaganda are tricked into believing is true and real.

The U.S. government has murdered so many people, and lied so often, and "the" media has perpetrated so many hoaxes, that neither should have a smidgen of credibility at this point in history. They should have to prove, with overwhelming genuine (not fabricated) evidence, every assertion they make.

1]  "Epstein Killed Self, Autopsy Concludes," Wall Street Journal, August 17-18, 2019, page A4, fourth paragraph. Interesting how the WSJ downplayed this article. Not just putting it on page A4, but running it as a narrow sidebar on the left side of the page (in English we start reading on the right) in a long narrow column 1 and 3/4ths inch wide, with the text a mere 1 and 5/8ths inch wide.

Dow Jones Company owns the WSJ and another rightwing financial rag, Barron's. Rupert Murdoch bought the Dow Jones Company from the plutocrat Bancroft family and promptly locked up the websites of the publications behind firewalls. So here's the top portion of the page with the paragraphs I cited.

Evidence Jeffrey Epsein Was Murdered: His Broken Neckbones

We are to believe that Epstein, the reviled "pedophile" (he had sex with teenagers, NOT children, so that is NOT pedophilia, that is sex with legal minors who are sexually mature physically) hung himself with his bedsheet in his cell in the gothically horrible Federal jail in Manhattan, the "Metropolitan Correctional Center." [1] (The U.S., being a cruel and barbaric empire, commonly runs its prisons and jails in sadistic ways.) If that is so, it is passing strange that his neck bones were broken, as has been reported that the official autopsy found. He would have been strangled or choked to death.

When a person is hung on the gallows, a trap door under their feet is rapidly sprung open and they plunge down until the rope suddenly stops their fall. The weight of their body causes the neck to snap, which if done properly results in instant death. A thick knot of rope at the back of the neck facilitates the breaking of the vertebrae and severing of the spinal cord.

Someone tying a bedsheet to cell bars and dropping down a short distance would not necessarily have that effect. I suppose it is not impossible. That's why I say this is evidence, not proof.

We DO know that callous indifference is about the best treatment prisoners at the MCC get. Read the article or watch the video in the footnote below.

One fact is indisputable: Jeffrey Epstein's death sure is convenient for other sex criminals like the known rapists Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, Alan Dershowitz, and a British "royal." The fact that the Empire elevates rapists to its top power position is a symptom of the moral degeneracy of this empire.


1] See "Horror at MCC: “Gulag” Conditions at NYC Jail Were Known for Decades Before Jeffrey Epstein’s Death," Democracy Now!, August 15, 2019.

Even DEATH Is Too Good For Jeffrey Epstein!

Amazingly, that's the attitude being transmitted by the establishment propaganda system (which calls itself "the media," as if it's the one and only media in the universe and not a particular group of organs representing corporate oligarchy and U.S. imperialism) in the wake of the death of Jeffrey Epstein. Here in America, we're being treated to a deluge of teeth gnashing that although Epstein in effect got the death penalty for paying teenagers to indulge his sexual proclivities, he "escaped justice." What would "justice" have been? Drawing and quartering? Burning alive at the stake? Crucifixion?

Of course he was being crucified, by the media, and by an incredibly vengeful, opportunistic U.S. Attorney in New York City. The crimes he was all but convicted in advance of date to the early 2000's. I haven't heard a whisper about statute of limitations. For most Federal crimes, it's seven years.

And still "the" media, and the prosecutors, are protecting the various eminences who partook of the pleasures of the flesh provided by their host, Epstein. These include two U.S. presidents (Trump and Clinton) and a British "prince." And the loathsome Zionist attack dog Alan Dershowitz. Instead all the focus now is on getting Elaine Maxwell, Epstein's erstwhile "girlfriend" and alleged "procurer" of teenagers. (Whom the media attack dogs insist on calling "children," thus infantilizing sexual beings, and falsely pasting the "pedophile" label on Epstein.

Epstein was charged with "trafficking." To whom did he traffic? Himself? Yet the U.S. Attorney running the inquisition, Geoffrey Berman, didn't so much as name the members of the protected elite who partook of forbidden sex as unindicted co-conspirators. Media yakkers finger Maxwell as the next target, along with "pilots and whoever." Nary a mention of those being protected.

And already the propagandists are sneering at the "conspiracy theories" that Epstein was silenced to protect the highly privileged "pedophiles."

Now Trump's handpicked U.S. Attorney General, William "Cover Up Pro" Barr, is reported to have "asked" the Department he's the boss of, the Department of "Justice," and an agency that is under the nominal purview of that Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (the notorious political secret police, the FBI), to "investigate" the Epstein death. We can always rest assured when the government investigates itself. (Specifically he wants the DOJ Inspector General to investigate, as well as the FBI. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, whose prisoner Epstein was, is part of the DOJ also. The DOJ is a many-armed octopus of repression.)

Barr has an "interesting" history which "the" media helpfully hides. As a key cog in the regime of George Herbert Walker Bush, Bush the Elder (the slaughterer of 4,000 poor Panamanians and countless hapless Iraqi conscripts running for their lives), Barr is the one who got Bush to issue preemptive pardons to Iran-Contra criminals like Caspar Weinberger before they could be brought to book by the special counsel, who was much outraged by the move. By doing so, Bush protected himself. He did exactly what Democrats and their media allies have been screaming that Trump better NOT do- issue pardons that protect himself. Bush did exactly that- and he was given a two-week apotheosis was the old murderer died.
As for how Epstein ended up dead: There are plenty of solid reasons to be skeptical of the "suicide" conclusion. For one thing, the New York City Medical Examiner has completed an autopsy but so far  refuses to release the results. It's only a "suicide" because the propaganda system says it is.

Then there was the previous "suicide" attempt. Or was it? The government has never actually said that it was. All that has officially been announced by "the authorities" was that Epstein "was found unconscious" with "marks on his neck." Anything else has been media (propagandist) speculation and surmise.

Epstein may well have killed himself. He looked extremely depressed in the photo released of him in captivity, a release that was part of the humiliation ritual imposed on him. At a minimum, he was allowed to kill himself. What the establishment propaganda outlets have reported is that he was on a suicide watch after the first incident, then he was taken OFF suicide watch, but protocol called for him to have a cellmate to prevent self-harm. But he was left alone, locked up with his despair, and unwatched.

Various excuses have been defensively floated out by the guards. They are overworked. They are working overtime. (Apparently they don't "work" overtime but NAP overtime.) The prison is overcrowded. (Yet there was room to give Epstein a cell to himself alone.)

It's all a crock, of course. Obviously they wanted him dead. This prisoner was extremely high profile, subject of daily, lurid "coverage." Yet if we are to believe his captors, they were completely indifferent and feckless and inattentive to their highest profile prisoner in the Manhattan Federal Jail, the absurdly misnamed "Metropolitan Correctional Center." (Like they want to rehabilitate people!)

Usually in cases where a target of a political inquisition has damning evidence against the establishment itself, he is simply prevented from speaking at trial, and then consigned to a U.S. black hole, like the "Supermax" prison in Florence, Colorado, where prisoners are locked in tiny, windowless concrete cells for life, deprived of all human contact. Apparently it would be too kind to have a small porthole in the cell so the prisoner consigned to this living hell could at least look outside at the mountains, at the sky, at clouds. Since these prisoners are "monsters," they must be made to suffer as much as possible.

Manuel Noriega could have told a damning story about CIA drug dealing, and his work for them, but wasn't allowed to. "El Chapo" could have told about the millions in bribes he's paid to Mexican officials, including presidents, and U.S. complicity in Mexican corruption, but wasn't allowed to. Now he's to be buried alive in the "Supermax."

The next chapters in the Epstein saga are the substitution of Elaine Maxwell to be burned at the stake, and "justice" for the "victims" by their looting Epstein's estate. This has already been announced by "the" media as a form of "justice." A couple of the former teens and their lawyers are complaining they were deprived of "closure" by Epstein's death. Maybe they should stop traumatizing themselves by insisting they were so horribly victimized by getting paid a few hundred dollars for what was mostly mild sex (not counting one woman who serviced Epstein numerous times for money, and then claims he raped her, and maybe he did) that they can never get over it.

The man is DEAD. Can you let it go?

The establishment doesn't want to, for various reasons. That will have to await another essay.

Jeffrey Epstein died in jail, age 66. Was in good health so had many years to live. 

                                         "He got away with it!" screech The Morally Outraged. (Oh really?)

Iran Cannot "Violate" The Nuclear Deal That the U.S. Nullified in 2018- Another Big Lie By Western Propaganda Media

What would you think of someone who openly cancelled a deal they made with you, but insisted that YOU had to ABIDE by it, and threatened violence to force you to do so?

You'd call that a gangster.

Imperialists, of course, are gangsters.

Western media and political elites are all in a tizzy suddenly about Iranian "violations" of the agreement that the U.S. abrogated over a year ago, and which is thus null and void. This is an example of how demented Western "elites" are. Trump tore up the nuclear accord with Iran in March of 2018, and not only reimposed the sanctions that were lifted by the U.S. in return for Iran shutting down and mothballing its various nuclear enrichment programs, even permanently crippling a brand new reactor to prevent it from producing plutonium, but has intensified sanctions even more than the Obama regime had imposed, including a declared goal of blocking ALL Iranian oil exports. The U.S. has forced even China and India to stop buying Iranian oil. It just had its British stooges seize an oil tanker carrying Iranian oil to a Syrian refinery, near British-controlled Gibraltar on the Mediterranean tip of Spain. (To be sure, the Assad regime is monstrous.) The U.S. has effectively prevented all major companies all over the world from doing business with Iran, under threat of U.S. economic punishments levied on the companies. Iranians are dying today because vital medicines are effectively blockaded by the U.S.' actions.

But IRAN is expected to continue to ABIDE BY THE AGREEMENT! It's simply insane. Iran should have stopped abiding by it as soon as the U.S. abrogated it and reimposed sanctions. Iran got raped, completely ripped off, by the U.S. They handed over a stockpile of enriched uranium, crippled a reactor, mothballed their centrifuges, and much else. This is one of the greatest double-crosses in recent history. (The Kurds know a lot about being double-crossed by the U.S., having been so victimized repeatedly.) [1]

But Trump said it was "the worst deal ever." Because? it expires in 15 years. And it didn't ban Iran from having ballistic missiles. And it didn't end Iran's alliance with Hezbollah, a major part of Lebanon's political establishment. And it didn't ban Iran from trying to help Hamas in the Gaza open air concentration camp. And it didn't force Iran to abandon the Houthi rebels in Yemen. And it didn't conpel Iran to stop fighting on the side of the Assad regime in Syria.

But Trump said it was "the worst deal ever." Because? it expires in 15 years. And it didn't ban Iran from having ballistic missiles. And it didn't end Iran's alliance with Hezbollah, a major part of Lebanon's political establishment. And it didn't ban Iran from trying to help Hamas in the Gaza open air concentration camp. And it didn't force Iran to abandon the Houthi rebels in Yemen. And it didn't compel Iran to stop fighting on the side of the Assad regime in Syria.

And another fatal flaw in the 2015 Obama deal, from the perspective of John Bolton and Michael Pompeo: it didn't overthrow the Iranian regime.

However, the U.S. was just one party to the agreement. It was Iran on one side, pitted against the U.S., China, Russia, France, Britain, and Germany, all against Iran's nuclear program. Iran has patiently waited for over a year for those other parties to the deal to DO something to counter the U.S. imposition of the worst sanctions yet. Instead they have abided by the U.S. sanctions policy, while in the case of the Europeans, making noises about creating mechanisms for their companies to do business in Iran. But those countries won't even purchase Iran's oil. And the lame moves the Europeans have made otherwise have been a joke.

 So now Iran is being roundly attacked in the Western media, and threatened by European politicians (and most gallingly, by TRUMP!) for not continuing to abide by the deal in which they have been totally double-crossed. Even though Iran totally lived up to the deal from 2015 until last month, over a year after Trump killed the agreement and in the face of relentless economic warfare. (And no doubt all kinds of covert sabotage by "special ops" and via computer attacks.)

Trump has called for a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (which is responsible for monitoring Iran's compliance with the agreement) to gin up further political and diplomatic attacks on Iran to force it to keep its side of a bargain that Trump loudly reneged on.

It's enough to make your head spin, unless you ignore reality. Which is exactly what those in power in Western nations expect you to do.

The deal that had been worked out took years, and immense pressure on Iran, and was the best that was obtainable. Trump's strategy is to force Iran to crawl on its belly, using U.S. power to wreck the Iranian economy (done) and compel the rest of the world to bow to U.S. diktat and conform to U.S. policy (done). Will it work? Who knows?

In addition, the U.S. has created fake "Iranian attacks" on oil tankers as part of a military brinksmanship campaign, using the threat of war to intimidate the Iranian rulers. [2] So far it hasn't worked. That was followed by Iran shooting down a U.S. spy drone (which maps the location of Iranian defense installations and sniffs out vulnerabilites in their defenses and collects the frequencies of their radars and communications, enabling the U.S. to jam, attack, spoof, and render ineffective these systems). U.S. surveillance ops provide preparation for future U.S. aggression. The Iranians properly defended itself from this menacing, hostile foreign power by shooting down the drone. The bickering over which side of the Iranian maritime border it was on at the time is frankly irrelevant. (The U.S. is SO punctilious about international law when it wants to be. Not so much in its own behavior, like sabotage, torture, subversion, election-meddling, coups, assassinations, invasions, and other such "tools of statecraft.")

There was much screeching by U.S. politicians and "commentators" over the fact that Trump didn't pound Iran with bombs afterwards. One of the few things Trump did that was RIGHT.



Look, the Iranian government is pretty bad. It's a repressive theocracy. But only about half as repressive as the Saudi Arabian theocracy, with which the U.S. is so chummy. So "freedom" and "democracy" and "human rights" have NOTHING to do with the U.S. hostility towards Iran. And by making the Iranian economy scream, and killing Iranians by blockading medicine, the U.S. demonstrates how much it really cares about the well being of the Iranian people. It's the same cynical song the U.S. sings whenever it destroys a country- Iraq, Guatemala, Vietnam, you name it.

He's kinda arrogant, don't you think?

1] It just so happens that the U.S. has one of the worst records in the world of honoring its treaty obligations. It solemnly signed hundreds of treaties with Native American Nations and broke every single one. It has committed international aggression repeatedly, a crime under international law. It has subverted governments. Under Bush the Younger it infamously created a system of institutionalized torture, even though it is a signatory to the Torture Convention. And so on.

2] See "Dishonest U.S. Media Lying U.S. Into Another War of Aggression" for detailed factual analysis of the U.S.-created "Iranian tanker attacks." As the crew of the Japanese tanker said, they were attacked by flying objects, not limpet mines placed on the hull. Plus we are supposed to believe that Iran wanted to sabotage its own diplomacy with Japan! The story is too long and detailed to recount here. There are videos included with this report.

The Last, Best Word About July 4th, U.S. Independence Day

We've just been subjected to our annual booster shot of chauvinistic jingoism about the Birth of America, Land of Liberty, Home of Democracy, Guardian of Human Rights.

Herein, a small, necessary corrective.

Over a century and a half ago, someone gave a speech that precisely nailed the truth about the U.S.A. The impassioned, uncompromising words of this speech lifted up the rock of mendacious and stultifying rhetoric to reveal the ugly face of the U.S. beast that lives behind the shiny facade of Big Lies.

Today, those words are still right on the money about the U.S. Having withstood the test of time, and never been surpassed in incisiveness, they bear repeating.

They are the words of Frederick Douglass, a man born in slavery, spoken in 1852 to the Rochester [NY] Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society on July 5th of that year. The Society had asked Douglass to speak in celebration of the Fourth of July. No doubt they got more than they bargained for.

The original speech is quite long. It was untitled, and since has been given the title “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” or small variations thereon. It deals mostly with American slavery, the laws and practices of it, the supporting role of American churches, and the hypocrisy of American blather about liberty democracy freedom blah-blah-blah. Yet much of it is relevant to today's U.S. crimes, its spread of oppressive death squad dictatorships around the world, its role as the Arsenal of Fascism since World War II, its economic hyperexploitation of poorer countries, and most of all, the demented, self-righteous, totally un-self-aware prattle that constitute its declared "values."

Here are excerpts: [1]

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes [i.e. marks from whippings] and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour forth a stream, a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

We need more fierce people like him today.

Current American Emperor Donald J. Trump The First

1]  I found a lengthy version that is labeled "full document" at TeachingAmericanHistory.org. That site also has related documents.

Anchorage, Alaska Breaks Temperature Record at 90 Degrees Fahrenheit- Another Omen For the Future

That's 32.2 degrees Celsius to you in the rest of the world. Understand that Alaska is America's Siberia- far north and freezing cold, partly above the Arctic Circle.

But that's not hot enough to change the minds of the global warming deniers, or their cousins in denial and dishonesty, those who deny that the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels is the cause.

Maybe if it hits 100 degrees they'll budge?

NAH! Ideology always trumps mere reality. As Ronald Reagan once said: "Facts are stupid things."

So he just made up his own. As does his GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) successor Donald J. "Jackass" Trump.

And ideology driven by economic interest has the weight of a mountain!

In case you hadn't noticed, the oil industry in particular is huge and lies at the core of the current global economic structure, as it is the main fuel for transportation, including airplanes and ships, which makes it a critical military commodity. Saudi Arabia's power is derived from petroleum, and the U.S. strongly protects Saudi Arabia, (even after the murder of a contributor to the Washington Post, the in-house organ of the power elites of the capital of the U.S. empire, Washington D.C.).

Oil corporations are hugely wealthy and politically powerful in the U.S. And in addition, plastics are derived from petrochemicals.

Reactionary polemicists for hire by the oil and coal industries are plentiful. And the U.S. media is reactionary and pro-corporate oligarchy. This power structure is already indifferent to such facts as the 50% reduction in Arctic sea ice since 1979. [1] Why would they care about a hot day in Anchorage?

So guess what? A hot day in Alaska changes nothing.

Once a happy family, now not long for this world:  polar bears. Having no habitat means extinction.

So long, fellow mammal.

1] CBS News, of all places, radio broadcast, July 6th, 2019, 11 am Eastern Standard Time.

Trump Violates Constitution to Fund Vanity Parade For Himself

Trump has been hankering for a grand military parade for himself ever since French neoliberal president Emmanuel Macron celebrated Trump's arrival in Paris with such a display of military might. (Trump and Macron are such great friends that Trump even ostentatiously plucked "dandruff" off Macron's suit, announcing what he was doing in front of the gathered media, when Macron visited in Washington.)

So Trump has stolen $2.5 million from the National Parks Department budget, appropriated by Congress for funding park improvements, to pay for tanks and jets to celebrate The Ego of Trump. Coincidentally, the military muscle will be shown off on July 4th, officially U.S. "Independence Day." (The Parks Department has a maintenance backlog of $11 billion. So what's a few million more. Make America Great Again!)

The Constitution delegates to Congress the appropriation of funds. For the president to take funds appropriated for one purpose and use them for another is a direct violation of the U.S. Constitution and the president's oath of office.

Trump in his carnival barker mode tweets that it will be "The Parade of a Lifetime!"

This is the first time heavy armored vehicles are going to be on Washington streets. The mayor objected because the tanks will damage the pavement. The mall is expected to take a beating. Don't be surprised if the local government will have to pay for the repairs itself.

In another first, the mall is being closed off to the public and is being reserved for GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) big shots, who will receive tickets for entry to the "V.I.P." zone. Nothing like an ersatz aristocracy to celebrate "democracy."

Presumably the climate-crisis-denying Republicans will thrill to the sight of U.S. bombers and fighters flying overhead, safe in the knowledge that they only drop their "payloads" on defenseless and poor Third World countries, killing mostly poor people, in "defense" of the "freedom" of rich swells.

This is not the first time Trump has stolen funds appropriated for other purposes and illegally used them to satisfy his own whims, like a medieval King (or a Saudi ruler) might do. Trump took money for badly needed repairs on military bases to pay for wall construction on the Mexican border.

Nor is Trump the first president to swipe money in this way. He may be the first to do so openly, however. What differentiates Trump from his modern predecessors is that he says and does openly what used to be denied. This is a symptom of the political degeneration of the U.S. empire.

Another symptom of political decadence is that presidents routinely violate the Constitution in various ways, but are never impeached for it. But that goes back to at least the second president, John Adams, who imprisoned publishers of newspapers that criticized him. (So much for those "guarantees" of "rights.") So maybe we should just consider it evidence of the moral and political corruption at the core of the U.S. power establishment.

They used to do their coups covertly, and deny them. Now they do them openly and with fanfare, as the Trump regime is doing to Venezuela, to the vigorous applause of the top Democratic Party politicians such as Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer, "leaders" of the Democrats in the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, respectively.

This degeneracy is not recent either. The Reagan regime (1981-1989) created the so-called "National Endowment for Democracy," which has been tasked ever since with doing openly things the CIA used to do covertly: subverting foreign governments, creating front groups abroad, manipulating elections in other countries. In other words, the U.S. now acts as if it has the RIGHT to do things it used to hide because they are outrageous and illegal under international law, violate the sovereignty of other nations, and attack and destroy the right of other peoples to self-determination. In other words, as so often with the U.S. the "National Endowment for Democracy" has a perfectly Orwellian name that reverses the meaning of words. It is the National Endowment for ANTI-Democracy.

And of course the U.S. wouldn't be satisfied if it wasn't an outrageous hypocrite at the same time. Witness the years-long propaganda campaign falsely claiming that "Russia attacked our democracy!" and "hacked our election!" The sanctimonious outrage of the politicians and "pundits" is a sight to behold.

The U.S. is certainly Number One in utter cynicism and breathtaking hypocrisy. Give credit where credit is due.

Thanks for the Tanks!

Ego, I Salute You!

I love a parade! Especially when it's for ME!