The DNC Version of “Democracy”

The recent DNC coup seals the deal. Biden is out and Kamala Harris is in. Is that democracy in action? The Washington Post thinks so, as Matt Taibbi explains in his article, "In Final Kick in the Pants, Departing Biden Denounced as Another Trump: When Joe Biden failed to immediately assume the position when party bigwigs called for his head, Beltway insiders lumped him in with the Orange One". An Excerept:

Florida canceled a primary for him; North Carolina, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Wisconsin submitted only his name to ballots; and New Hampshire chose delegates through a “nominating event” that didn’t include voters. Under a new vision in which “the DNC [was] not something separate” from the Biden campaign, the party refused to schedule debates with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dean Phillips, or Marianne Williamson. Proof that “America’s beleaguered system still functioned” would have involved a competitive primary through which Democratic voters could discover Biden’s infirmities early enough for them to have a say in choosing a fitter candidate. Instead, the public was only confronted with the truth a few weeks ago, by which time only internal party power brokers were positioned to make a change. That’s a failure of democracy, unless you think choosing a candidate without voter input is a systemic improvement.

The Post cheered the stage-managed primary season throughout, running laudatory pieces about “How the DNC challenger-proofed the primaries for Biden” and profiles of the “hidden campaign” Biden ran with the party. The paper noted the Biden team’s belief that the president could “seize the advantage of a unified party apparatus” while “splintered” Republicans faced “an increasingly bitter primary battle between Trump and his rivals for the presidential nomination.” In reality, Republicans benefited from competition, getting long looks at Trump and rivals like Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, while Biden was shielded from competition all the way through his calamitous collapse in the middle of a general election season.

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The Connection Between the War in Ukraine and the U.S. Censorship industrial Complex

You have a choice. One option is to follow the dictates of the U.S. warmongering uniparty, who tells you, "Putin is bad. So shut the fuck up and support our policy of endless treasury-draining war. Or you could listen to Mike Benz, Executive Director of Foundation for Freedom Online.

Mike discussed Ukraine and U.S. censorship recently on Twitter. I created a transcript of his conversation with Win Marshall:

Win Marshall

Do you not think America should have supported Ukraine in the war?

Mike Benz

It's good question. It's strange for-- You know, if I'm hesitating, it's because to answer that question, there are so many layers that come before it that I haven't even really honestly had to think about where I actually fall on the underlying issue, because the process is so corrupted. And we lived through Russiagate, this thing where anybody who supported a detente with Russia was it was effectively deemed to be a Putin puppet, and then you could launch a federal investigation. You could bring in indictments and domestic spycraft on, you know, Trump's whole campaign, because of his policy of neutrality, with with Russia effectively, or his NATO skepticism. They were able to argue, you know, that he was effectively a Russian puppet, and so they spied on his campaign.

Win Marshall

These things are happening today in Britain with Nigel Farage, and he's been called a Putin apologist. I think it's continuation

Mike Benz

It's the same thing. And so I think the way I would answer the question is: if you took the gun off of my head, where the state, the regime, the NGOs, the cutouts, the media, the lawyers, the federal investigators, all said, "Hey, you know what? If you have your own opinion on the Ukraine war, I'll put the gun down." Then maybe I'd think about and say, Okay, well maybe we can now talk about whether or not it actually redounds to US interests to try to secure these $12.4 trillion in the natural resources, whether it redounds to our benefit to have this elaborate CIA State Department operation to kill Gazprom and pry all the profits off with this endogenous, you know, Ukraine Petro industry and lifeline by all these US oil and gas companies and British companies like Shell. Maybe. But the answer is a hard no while they still have a gun to my head, because you can't, you can't do that.

Win Marshall

Okay, so let's say there's no gun to a head.

Mike Benz

That feels like a hypothetical that is kind of irresponsible for me to indulge in because there is a gun to my head. The censorship industry grew out of Ukraine. That whole infrastructure of censorship that Americans live under and inherited during the 2016 presidential election cycle came from the 2014 US-UK overthrow of the Ukrainian-democratically elected government. When, when we orchestrated that coup, when the head of the US Embassy was personally handing out cookies and water bottles to the January 6 style protesters surrounding the parliament building, pumping them full of money, when our own senators like John McCain were there on the ground calling for a transition of the government, when we overthrew that government and then did not expect the blowback, did not expect the counter coup.

When the entire eastern side of Ukraine broke away and declared itself a breakaway state in 2014 and when Crimea voted in its referendum to formally join the Russian Federation, this set off a total crisis across NATO and called for a fundamental reimagining of how NATO understood warfare. This gave rise to something which I've talked a lot about. You know, first was called the Gerasimov doctrine. Then it was called hybrid warfare, and now it's sort of called sharp power. But it was essentially this idea that NATO could no longer just be a military alliance. It had to expand its mandate, and this is a direct quote from Jen stellenberg, from tanks to tweets. The reason that we lost in Ukraine was because we lost the information war. We lost to Russian propaganda, infecting the mines of Ukrainians. And it was Russian propaganda who was infecting the mines of Germans, because at the time the German AFD party was on the rise. They were running on restoring gas relations with Russia, because they were mostly a sort of working class, sort of like Trump, Trumpism. They were running on, sort of because these sanctions that the US State Department and UK Foreign Office effectively imposed on all these different other European countries, after Crimea, to sanction Russian gas, which was the cheapest gas.

The alternative was LNG liquefied natural gas harvested in Houston, liquefy ship 5000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. You know, de-liquefied in ports in Portugal or in through the Baltic strait into Poland. You know, de-liquefied transported. That's orders of magnitude more expensive than Russia, which means the industries suffer, which means the middle class suffers. The welfare safety net suffers. So AFD was running on restoring gas relations with Russia. Marine. Le Pen was was running on the same from from France. So is the Vox party in Spain.

And so NATO is saying, Oh, my God, these right wing populist parties are all running on this economic nationalist what's best for us. Don't care what the US or UK says about, you know, being a good Global Citizen and sanctioning Russia, we want to do what's economically best for our own middle class citizens. And so our intelligence State, the trans military alliance of NATO, at that point in 2014 declared this hybrid warfare doctrine. Said war is actually not about tanks anymore. It's about tweets. It's about control over social media. Because we lost to Russia without Russia firing a bullet, Crimea voted itself to join the Russian Federation. It's the same thing as if they had rolled into Crimea with tanks and submarines, they now control it because of the referendum of the people.

Well, where are they getting their information?

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RFK, Jr: “We no longer have a democracy”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr."

We do not have a Democracy now because the little guy in this country has absolutely no say in what's happening with his government.”

“That's part of the reason there’s a rise in this violence and the polarization, etc. People know that they don't own their government anymore, that the system's rigged, it's rigged against them, and it's rigged to shift money upward.

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Mike Benz Defines and Describes “The Blob”

Mike Benz often speaks of "the Blob." To what is he referring? I created the following transcript Dr. Drew's interview of Mike Benz:

"The Blob" is actually a term from President Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, who was opining on the difficulty within the White House of getting things done because they seem to be up against an impenetrable force, an a amorphous alien monster that was more powerful than even even the Obama White House. And so he sort of coined this phrase, out of exasperation, in a certain sense, but it's been adopted in Washington. It refers to the foreign policy establishment and I'll sketch out what that is, and it's not just the foreign policy establishment within the government. It is the external stakeholders in the corporate and financial worlds who are the donor draftor class off of the government activity.

So I'll sketch that out a little bit here. The foreign policy establishment is the side of our government that faces outward rather than inward to manage the American empire, rather than the American homeland. We have government agencies that manage the American homeland, like Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor. They all face inward. They don't do international business, so to speak with, you know, Ukraine or Moldova, or Sub Saharan Africa.

We have three sides of our government--three departments or constellations of entities that face outward and those are the Pentagon, the State Department and our intelligence services, such as the CIA. Now, together, they basically form this defense diplomacy intelligence apparatus. And because they face outward and their mandate is to protect and maximize US national interests on the world stage, they have a license to do dirty tricks that domestic facing institutions are not empowered to do. So for example, they can wiretap foreign citizens. They don't need to get a warrant for it. They can bribe foreign media institutions to promote or kill stories. They can set up their own media vehicles to be able to swing hearts and minds so that another country's own parliament votes for or against a different bill there in order to get the people of a foreign country to support a US military base in the region, or a UN Security Council vote in a region. And they're they're deployed with this dirty tricks power, which involves a license to lie.

So for example, the Central Intelligence Agency under National Security Council 10-2 back in the 1940s, was given basically a license to do all sorts of criminal or illegal illegal activity as long as they maintain plausible deniability, meaning as long as the US government could plausibly deny that the Central Intelligence Agency or that the US government was behind it, they could engage in criminal activity. Now, that was all set up the foreign policy establishment, the blob, who again on the inside is State Department, Pentagon and, and CIA--we'll just say for shorthand--for the intelligence community. The social contract when that was set up in 1947 1948, was that it was for managing the American empire for the benefit of the citizens of the homeland. And it would have these dirty tricks powers. It would be able to spy. It would be able to lie. It would be able to rig elections, be able to rig media, because at the end of the day, the citizens here would benefit from it, but it would never be turned on our own citizens. That's what our constitution is for. And, and all the other you know, protections that go into being a US citizen.

That's the inside of the blob. The outside of it is the corporate and financial stakeholder class. These are the corporations and the banks, and the financial investors who are the sort of donor draftor class off of the activities of the government. When I refer to drafting you can think of it like a bike race. The strategy in a bike race is not to be out in front where the full blast of the wind is hitting you. The most efficient strategy in a bike race is to be second in line, to draft off of the person who goes first, so that they cut the wind for you so you save all your energy and are able to just overtake them on the last lap, so to speak.

So US multinational corporations, since the age of globalization, have relied on the blob, have relied on the State Department, the Pentagon to the CIA, in order to protect and secure foreign markets for their products, to protect and secure cheap manufacturing in those regions. To protect and secure against issues around tariffs or taxes or labor or regulations. And it's the job of the State Department to go in and pressure that foreign country's government. It is the job of our Central Intelligence Agency to go in and rig those elections or to go in and set up a constellation of surround-sound NGO media in order to get that country's population to support that initiative. And it's the job of the Pentagon to do both the sort of dangling threat of military intervention in the name of democracy or the civil affairs of hearts-and-minds works around psychological warfare in order to make that that happened.

Now, that is not that redounds to the benefit of US multinational corporations who operate in that region. So famous example: in the oil and gas space, for example, is Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, these companies, most of their most of their profits come from all the different shale or hydrocarbon reserves around the whole rest of the world. Other countries don't want to voluntarily just give up their oil or give up their gas or give up these these loose business partnerships where they get mostly railed in negotiations there. The government has to cut the wind for Chevron and for ExxonMobil, the government has to go in and basically coerce these foreign governments or or offer carrots and sticks. And so so those companies draft off of the activities of the blob. Now because they are also major financial donors to the political class, they are essentially donors into the decision making within the government, while their own corporate and financial interests draft off the activities of the government who does that work?

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