Subject: Your June 13 Poll is FAKE NEWS, deliberately omits Congresswoman Gabbard from choices
UC Berkeley (a publicly funded university):
This is unacceptable and damages the integrity and reputation of your organization. I will be contacting others and writing about this absurdity of censoring out a sitting US Congresswoman with a clear suggestion to remove and fire whomever is responsible for rigging Berkeley’s political polls. You no longer can be trusted. What’s that worth to you?
Payments can happen cheaply and easily without banks or credit card companies. This has now been demonstrated – not in the United States but in China. Unlike in the US, where numerous firms feast on fees from handling and processing payments, in China most money flows through mobile phones nearly for free. In 2018 these cashless payments totaled a whopping $41.5 trillion; and 90% were through Alipay and WeChat Pay, a pair of digital ecosystems that blend social media, commerce and banking. According to a May 2018 article in Bloomberg titled “Why China’s Payment Apps Give U.S. Bankers Nightmares”:
The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a technology company—whether from China or a homegrown juggernaut such as Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc.—replicates the success of Alipay and WeChat in America. The stakes are enormous, potentially carving away billions of dollars in annual revenue from major banks and other firms.
That threat may now be materializing. On June 18, Facebook unveiled a white paperoutlining ambitious plans to create a new global cryptocurrency called Libra, to be launched in 2020. The New York Times says Facebook has high hopes that Libra will become the foundation for a new financial system free of control by Wall Street power brokers and central banks.
But apparently Libra will not be competing with Visa or Mastercard. In fact the Libra Association lists those two giants among its 28 soon-to-be founding members. Others include Paypal, Stripe, Uber, Lyft and eBay. Facebook has reportedly courted dozens of financial institutions and other tech companies to join the Libra Association, an independent foundation that will contribute capital and help govern the digital currency. Entry barriers are high, with each founding member paying a minimum of $10 million to join. This gives them one vote (or 1% of the total vote, whichever is larger) in the Libra Association council. Members are also entitled to a share proportionate to their investment of the dividends earned from interest on the Libra reserve – the money that users will pay to acquire the Libra currency.
It will start as a private, permissioned, not-trustless, centralized oligopolistic members-only club. So much for calling it “blockchain”. … [I]t is blockchain in name only and a monopoly to extract massive seignorage from billions of users. A monopoly scam.
Another Zero Hedge writer calls Libra “The Dollar’s Killer App,” which threatens “not only the power of central banks but also the government’s money monopoly itself.”
From Frying Pan to Fire?
To the crypto-anarchist community, usurping the power of central banks and governments may sound like a good thing. But handing global power to the corporate-controlled Libra Association could be a greater nightmare. So argues Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who writes in The Financial Times:
This currency would insert a powerful new corporate layer of monetary control between central banks and individuals. Inevitably, these companies will put their private interests — profits and influence — ahead of public ones. . . .
The Libra Association’s goals specifically say that [they] will encourage “decentralised forms of governance”. In other words, Libra will disrupt and weaken nation states by enabling people to move out of unstable local currencies and into a currency denominated in dollars and euros and managed by corporations. . . .
What Libra backers are calling “decentralisation” is in truth a shift of power from developing world central banks toward multinational corporations and the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.
Power will shift to the Fed and ECB because the dollar and the euro will squeeze out weaker currencies in developing countries. As seen recently in Greece, the result will be to cause their governments to lose control of their currencies and their economies.
An example of Zuckerberg’s complete detachment from meaning. I go to CNN to harass them for their endless propaganda. I am not a “fan” and I do not want their silly “badge.”
Facebook, today, has locked me out of posting to groups, evidently because one sniveling coward in one group didn’t like my Sophia the Robot music video. What that has to do with all the other groups? Nothing whatsoever.
Previously, Facebook kicked me off for extended periods for teaching basic history about the Nazis and how the same shit–the BIG LIE in particular–is being used today by the US regime. The people behind Facebook, including supposed humans who look at “appeals” are so stupid, perhaps representative of the drooling imbeciles across the society, that you cannot trust it to have any sense whatsoever. It’s a random authoritarian computer regime regulating the speech of the human population across the globe.
Even FOX couldn’t manage to rig their poll to show their fascist thug winning. The reality could be much higher for Bernie.
We have the best campaign to defeat Donald Trump. When we are in the White House we will fight for the working people of this country and take back power from the billionaire class. pic.twitter.com/e0kuykdLXF
“Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, but what’s worse I think is they’ll come back twenty years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.” –Frankie Boyle
This film may have been the one that inspired Frankie’s rant.
As the next team of warmongers gears up to lie the world into an illegal assault on Iran, this film takes on added significance. It’s angering on so many levels from the monsters in suits, to the reign of terror, to the Nazi-level war crimes, to the willful blindness of both participants and filmmakers.
Some Background
America’s invasion of Iraq was exactly comparable to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, from a legal standpoint. No American ever had the legal right to step one foot on Iraqi soil. Iraq was a sovereign country, a principle that World War Two was fought to establish, costing upwards of 70 million lives.
America thinks it’s above the law and has led the assault on any restraints to its exercise of force, Iraq being a most glaring example.
No End In Sight says not one word about any of that. Far from it. They accept the US regime’s main argument that Saddam was a bad guy, and so somehow it was okay to invade his country. It was not.
They knew it was not. That’s why they concocted phony “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lies to try and deceive the United Nations into granting Security Council approval for the attack–and their obvious lies failed. That made the entire war a breach of the UN Charter and the “Supreme International Crime,” Crimes Against the Peace. Every subsequent action was the direct fault of those who initiated the war, every atrocity, every evil, every consequence, every kidnapping, every maiming, every rape, every murder. These people are monsters towering well above and beyond the Saddams or Qaddafis of the world.
By their own logic, as they are immoral and gleefully evil, other nations now have a right to invade America and install a new regime. That’s not the way international law works. It’s the way imperial war propaganda works, however.
Spinning the Indefensible
Now onto the fiasco depicted in the film. We have a cast of self-styled do-gooders participating in a major war crime, desiring to stabilize the country and rebuild it (after their own military destroyed it). They are prevented from doing so by a series of seemingly incomprehensible bad decisions from Rumsfeld, Cheney, Paul Bremer and their gaggle of incompetent lackeys.
1. Upon the fall of Saddam, no law is enforced, allowing complete chaos and looting all over the country.
2. The Iraqi army is disbanded leaving hundreds of thousands of armed, trained men, with no income and nothing to do.
3. The Americans refuse to even speak with Iraqis as their stormtroopers raid and kill and torture their family members.
I’m of the mind that all of this was intentional, and that the PLAN A was never to win the peace in Iraq. Wars are so difficult to launch, they wanted Iraq to descend into region-wide chaos engulfing Syria (done) and Iran (still very much on the agenda).
General Wesley Clark divulged the Bush Junta’s plans, which were to attack “seven nations in five years,” barely a week after they allowed the 9/11 attacks to succeed. That’s another story, and America has yet to recover a modicum of self-respect and demand justice.
What No End in Sight captured was a small part of this large imperial agenda for a “new American Century” of aggression and the seizing of vital resources, particularly oil and gas.
While the film talks about Paul Bremer’s presumed incompetence, it fails to mention his 100 Orders slicing up Iraq’s economy like Darth Vader seizing a new star system. Of course, pillaging other countries is glaringly illegal, but we’ve already established the blinders worn by the filmmakers.
These types of key omissions are why I don’t ever trust US documentarians when it comes to foreign policy. They revert to the juvenile “mistakes were made” mindset. They’re not “mistakes” when you do them on purpose: those are crimes, capital crimes punishable by death. They violate every Treaty the country has signed–and which the US helped create in the first place–including the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter.
The most evil criminals wear suits and they get away with it. One of the reasons they get away with it is because of biased journalism that spins away their crimes so that the public is dissuaded from thinking of US rulers as criminals on par with the worst war criminals one can name. In the end it’s an assault on reality as well as morality.
“As much as 30% of the world’s oil supply transits the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Wily Persian Gulf traders – who know better – are virtually unanimous; if Tehran was really responsible for the Gulf of Oman tanker incident, oil prices would be going through the roof by now. They aren’t.“
Nobody with knowledge of the situation believes America’s lies.
Iran is not powerless to retaliate.
Pepe Escobar:
As I previously reported, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz would destroy the American economy by detonating the $1.2 quadrillion derivatives market; and that would collapse the world banking system, crushing the world’s $80 trillion GDP and causing an unprecedented depression.
As Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hasan Nasrallah has been stressing in his speeches, “war on Iran will not remain within that country’s borders, rather it will mean that the entire [Middle East] region will be set ablaze. All of the American forces and interests in the region will be wiped out, and with them the conspirators, first among them Israel and the Saudi ruling family.”
Political Film Blog 