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OpEd

Opinion: The American Bankers Association Announce Seminar on ‘Domestic Terrorism’ While Ignoring Other Issues, Because YOU are the Real Danger

By ,

The American Bankers Association  (ABA) has recently announced that they will be holding a seminar on September 28, 2022, titled ‘Domestic Terrorism: A Threat to the Financial System’.

As per their website,

 “ABA proudly represents institutions of all asset sizes and charter types. These diverse perspectives drive the development of our daily work and policy positions. Take a look at where we’ve been, and where we’re going. From delivering the latest industry news to developing mission-critical training offerings, we support America’s banks as they perform their vital role in energizing the economy and helping communities thrive.”

This webinar comes as more serious threats to our economy mount. The webinar does not seem to cover high inflation, big hits to manufacturing, exceptionally high consumer prices, and households accumulating unprecedented credit card debt to survive; all as the economy is weakening at an alarming pace.

Despite this, the ABA has decided to focus in on ‘domestic terrorism’, a term whose definition has become rather amorphous in recent years as it’s been used to describe disgruntled citizens, concerned parents, poll watchers, protestors, and so on. 

Some have gone so far as to call the seminar “continued indoctrination”. The seminar’s description reads:

Take a closer look at the rise of domestic terrorists and other extremist groups, how they communicate and receive funding, and the threats they pose to the financial system.

Discussion highlights:

  • The changing threat landscape and the risks to the integrity of our financial system
  • The informal nature of the groups and their reliance on social media
  • How they receive funding

Audience:

  • Chief Risk Officer

  • Chief Compliance Officer

  • BSA Officer

  • BSA Manager

  • Fraud Manager

  • Compliance Managers

  • Risk Managers

  • Internal Audit

  • First Line Compliance Managers

One can’t help but wonder if the timing of this seminar has anything to do with the recent mass hire and arms training of 87,000 new IRS agents. If anyone is committing acts of terrorism, it’s the so-called financial institutions of the United States.

 

Technocracy 101: If Fed and CDC Are ‘Independent,’ Elections Mean Nothing

By ,

Ben Bartee,
June 22nd, 2022

Basic civics recap: the US president, per the Constitution, is the elected executive. That means he is tasked with executing government functions.

He is granted – again, through a theoretically democratic election process – the authority to dictate government activities within the confines of the laws. The legislative branch passes laws; the judicial branch vets them for constitutionality; the executive implements them.

The process, as designed, is not at all vague.

How odd, then, that the Biden White House press secretaries – first Jen Psaki and now the admitted diversity hire Karine Jean-Pierre – repeatedly undermine their own president’s executive authority.

Whenever they’re asked about Federal Reserve or CDC (Centers for Disease Control) policies — government agencies under the umbrella of executive authority — they refuse to give a straight answer on the grounds that the government body in question is “independent.”

“The Federal Reserve is independent. We leave them to make their own policy decisions. We do not get involved in that.”
-Karine Jean-Pierre, WH spokeswoman

The WH has the same hands-off approach to the dictates of the CDC and the shadowy, unelected “experts” who set its policies.

Here’s just one example (you can literally find one from every WH press conference), on the unscientific CDC “travel bans” from abroad last year despite COVID being already widespread in the US:

“Psaki: We are always going to be guided by our North Star — and that is the CDC and our health and medical experts.”
…
Reporter: The Delta variant is already dominant in the U.S., so how does keeping people from foreign countries out, like, protect people in the U.S.?
…
Psaki:  I’m not a doctor or a medical expert.  I think that that would best be posed to a member of the CDC… But I think their decision was made based on the fact that the Delta variant is more transmissible.”
–White House Press Briefing, July 26, 2021

And on the mask mandate issue – even after a federal court struck down the airline mask mandate – Psaki came out and publicly “disagreed” with the court’s decision because, she declared, the CDC is in charge:

“[The Department of Justice] indicated that they would appeal, not just because they think it’s entirely reasonable, of course, to have this additional time to look at it but because they think that for current and future public health crises, we want to preserve that authority for the CDC to have in the future.”
–White House Press Briefing, April 20, 2022

Consequential decisions with life or death implications are theirs, not your (theoretically) elected leaders’!

Who “they” are, exactly, remains unclear, as no one ever actually cites the specific “experts” referenced by name.

“Experts say“= “shut up and obey, ignorant serf. The Science© Gods run the show now. They speak through their conduit, His Grace Anthony Fauci.”

Turning off your mental faculties in blind submission symbolizes your good faith.

Psaki: ‘Sir Fauci of the independent NIH has decreed this duck is a cat. Jot that down, loyal subjects, for dissemination to the peasants.’

WH Press Corps: ‘Without delay, Slay Queen.’

—————–

This is fundamental stuff that can’t be lost on even the most distracted ADHD-afflicted voter.

If government agencies act independently — meaning elected leaders have no influence over their operations — then what’s the point of participation in elections?

Voting becomes ceremonial democratic ritual minus the actual democracy.

No one elected the CDC head to do anything. Ditto with DHS Secretary, the DOD Secretary, NIH Director Warlord Fauci, et al.

But it gets deeper. At least those department figureheads are appointed by a theoretically elected leader, so there’s arguably some tangential democratic tether connecting them to the will of the voters.

But what about the multinational Deep State — the real policy setters never discussed in the New York Times or on MSNCB — who linger in the shadows from administration to administration, who set policy priorities passed down from the international level?

 

“What we are very proud of, is that we penetrate the global cabinets of countries with our WEF Young Global Leaders.”

Top politicians are no longer selected by corrupt in-house Boss Hog-like political machines, which would be bad enough. The nomination process for American leadership is now offshored to a real-life technocratic Dr. Evil, headquartered overseas and adorned in menacing dystopian techno-garb like a Star Trek villain.

Musk: the president isn’t the president

I have long said that Biden is a disposable puppet president. Now, Elon Musk, who has much greater reach, has publicly agreed.

Lots of well-intentioned dissident commentators often repeat the rhetoric that “Biden did this,” “Biden did that.”

Biden doesn’t do anything. The most he can be said to do is to parrot his talking points on cue, but he barely ever makes it out of the basement for that. And when he does fumble through them, he’s barely coherent.

The implication of “Biden did that, what a bad guy” is that driving him out of office will solve anything. It won’t.

Getting rid of Biden, while a plus, will do nothing to cripple and usurp the Deep State power structure.

Once Biden inevitably goes, the technocratic ruling class will simply replace him with a new titular puppet. And the agenda will continue uninterrupted.

—————

Things might not be as hopeless as they might seem – if we take the right lessons.

Elections at the local level, for instance, to elect county commissioners who make practical decisions daily do count far more than national-level ones.

Decoupling from the multinational corporate technocracy isn’t going to be painless, but it’s doable with the proper paradigm shifts.

Globalization is the disease; localization is the cure.

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose, Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter.

OpEd: Now That the CDC Got Caught Abusing Sacred Navajo Indigenous Peoples of Color© Privacy Rights, Maybe the Left Will Care

By ,

Ben Bartee

Originally published via Armageddon Prose:

The corporate left and their legion of lobotomized NPC robots cheerlead when legacy MAGA Americans get caught in the crosshairs of the Deep State surveillance state.

That’s liberal and loving. Because those are Our Values©. Running roughshod over the Constitutional rights of “white nationalists” (leftist code for “whoever disagrees with us”) is, of course, how Democracy© works.

Here’s an excerpt from a Signal conversation with an otherwise intelligent and empathetic SF-based friend concerning the recent advent of the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ — the Empire’s new technological terror project to subvert Constitutional protections of free speech.

 

(I have to supply my friend with CNN articles because Bill Gates-funded fact-checking scams have convinced him that those are the only “authoritative” sources of information. Otherwise, he won’t even read information I relay on the grounds that it’s a Russian disinformation psy-op or whatever.)

Somewhat surprisingly, my friend hadn’t even heard of the ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ – even after its creation had dominated corporate media headlines for over a week.

Despite being totally team DNC, he’s usually better informed about stuff going on, especially when it saturates social media to the extent that corporate media is forced to cover it.

Here was his reply.

 

“If it’s pissing off right-wingers, it must be good.”

This is now a near-universal knee-jerk reaction to abuse of government power among overeducated coastal elites.

For brevity’s sake, we’ll only mention in passing the glaring fact, which I pointed out, that the US government is the biggest misinformer in recorded history.

That’s the entire job of the State Department.

 

US Secretary of State Colin Powell displays to the world rock-solid evidence of Saddam’s non-existent WMD program so start a war, Feb 5, 2003

Maybe, though – just maybe — the mindless leftist NPCs might be a little more sympathetic to civil liberties proponents once they learn of the dystopian surveillance grid enacted upon the native sacred Persons of Color© in addition to MAGA.

Via VICE:

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard.”

It’s a sad state of affairs — and it says a lot about far Western civilization has fallen — but the only way to convince anyone on the “left” to stand up for civil liberties anymore is to try to make a connection, however tangential, to grievance-based identity politics.

The American Civil Liberties Union, for one, isn’t riding in on a white horse. That organization is now far more interested in promoting fascistic vaccine mandates while claiming they somehow “further civil liberties” and congratulating themselves for hiring racial tokens to leadership positions than protecting Americans’ civil liberties.

 

Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose, Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter.

OpEd: Food Shortages, Fuel Prices, and Inflation are All Products of Globalist Policy

By ,

Ryan DeLarme,
June 2nd, 2022

The World Economic Forum is essentially the face of globalism today. We know that they espouse such things as “the Great Reset” and “the Great Narrative” and they do it in a much bolder fashion than previous globalist think-tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, or the Bilderberg group.

We reported on some of the things coming out of Davos last week, particularly a potential “green” social-credit system. While it is true that the forum has been receiving more attention and scrutiny now than ever before, many onlookers remain unaware that most of today’s crises are a direct result of WEF policy pushed by forum members who also happen to be installed within the governments of many nations.

First, let’s look at energy, where shortages have led to the highest gas prices the US and UK have ever seen. Unfortunately, the perpetually imminent, amorphous bogey-man the elites have branded as climate change has completely changed the world’s energy situation. 

[A side note on Climate-Change vs True Environmentalism: It is important that we do not conflate well-branded buzz terms such as “climate change” with environmentalism itself. It is totally possible to care about being good stewards of the planet and practicing without falling for the “climate change” scam. The term came about after the global-warming data manipulation scandal broke as an attempt to rebrand. It’s the globalist strategy of using a perceived impending crisis as a way to consolidate power and create new forms of economic warfare. If you’d like to learn more I highly recommend reading Climategate by Brian Sussman.]

Blaming members of the WEF for our current crisis is a bold statement, let me explain what that actually looks like. 

  • Canada’s tar sands wouldn’t have been demonized and the country would have built the Keystone XL Pipeline and other pipelines to transport ever greater quantities of energy across the continent and beyond.
  • Liquefied natural gas facilities on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Asia, the Americas, and Europe would have been built to ship and receive plentiful natural gas.
  • “Net Zero” policies are crippling the financing of new fossil fuel facilities. Carbon taxes wouldn’t be making energy ever more expensive.

In the same fashion that the United States became the world’s largest oil and gas exporter during the Trump administration after we scaled back crippling regulations, Europe could have been awash in energy had bans on fracking and offshore fossil-fuel development been lifted to allow the development of its immense oil and gas reserves. 

The WEF relies on prophecies of certain doom to create a sense of urgency behind its policies. What they don’t tell us is that their ominous forecasts are based on computer climate models, all of which have proven false to date.

Despite these climate policies, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—now at 400 parts per million—has reached record levels. Many consider this to be a good thing because CO2—also known as nature’s fertilizer—has produced a bounty of bumper crops. Australia reports record wheat, barley, and canola crops and near-record sorghum crop. India and Brazil also expect record numbers.

Regardless of these record crop numbers, starvation is on the rise. The United Nations warns that we’re in the midst of a “global food crisis” in which “44 million people in 38 countries are at emergency levels of hunger.” Here, too, the responsibility rests with globalist policies that make food unaffordable.

The primary contributing factor to famine is the supply chain disruptions caused by the globalists’ decision to abandon traditional responses to pandemics in favor of an experimental lockdown of much of the world’s economy. Another contributing factor to supply chain disruptions was the globalists’ decision to perpetuate the Russia-Ukraine war by providing Ukraine with billions in armaments, a departure from the past norm of pressuring combatants to resolve their differences through negotiations. As a result, agricultural production in Ukraine, once known as the breadbasket of Europe, collapsed, with wheat production falling by 44 percent and corn by 39 percent.

This barely touches on the myriad additional concerns regarding the World Economic Forum and the ideas they have for the world, but hunger, inflation, and gas prices are a great starting point. These are things that affect every single one of us.

‘Left’ Is Now Political Shorthand For ‘Corporate State Technocracy’

By ,

Ben Bartee
May 26th, 2022

The left-right paradigm was always dubious as a way to describe the Western political dichotomy. Given what modern “Leftism” entails, it’s even more irrelevant now.

Here’s a basic definition of “Leftist” ideology that, once upon a time, characterized many aspects of leftist politics in the early-to-mid-20th century:

“The portion of the political spectrum associated in general with egalitarianism and popular… control of the major institutions of political and economic life… Leftists tend to be hostile to the interests of traditional elites, including the wealthy and members of the aristocracy, and to favour the interests of the working class.”

What a difference a few decades of corporate capture makes!

What sort of egalitarian, hostile-to-elite-interests positions does the modern Western left take?

Does the ‘Left’ safeguard Constitutionally-guaranteed free speech?

Nope!

The liberal coast elites are panicked at the possibility of free speech erupting on social media, or anywhere else. Watch them meltdown over the possibility of – clutch the pearls! – an open speech platform in the digital public square where non-blue-check dissenters don’t get arbitrarily purged for “hatespeech”:

According to notorious white race entrepreneur, Shaun King, who has two white parents but insists he is black to access the BLM gravy train, “free speech” is just code for “muh white supremacy”:

https://twitter.com/shaunking/status/1518576839777734657?s=20&t=IGIXwke6BJuc4FKqZ1dQcA

Shaun King, like most modern “leftists,” frequently employs this type of self-serving reductionism – anything to further the narrative:

“A theory in psychology centered on reducing complex phenomena into their most basic parts. It is often contrasted with holism, which is focused on looking at things as a whole.”

Instead of free speech, neoliberals favor an amorphous concept, fermented approximately one week ago in the diseased intestines of some DC think tank, called “equitable speech.”

Does the ‘Left’ protect civil liberties?

Naw!

Hitherto unprecedented civil liberty crackdowns were most recently pushed by the left, not the right, under the pretense of “stopping the spread” of COVID-19.

The result — in addition to handicapping the economy for years, starving millions, stunting children’s psychological well-being irreparably, and wrecking Americans’ psychological health writ large – was no measurable public health benefit whatsoever, as reported by the National Academies of Sciences::

“Previous studies have claimed that shelter-in-place orders saved thousands of lives, but we reassess these analyses and show that they are not reliable. We find that shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits.”

Strangely, the liberals didn’t clamor to shutter Amazon’s or Walmart’s (their donors) doors – just your already-struggling neighborhood business.

What egalitarianism! What wondrous liberalism!

And here’s neoliberal hero down under Dr. Kerry Chant telling Australian slaves they’re not allowed to talk to their neighbors anymore, because of COVID:

Is the ‘Left’ anti-war?

No way!

The most vocal proponents of starting wars to “defend democracy” are on the left, not the right.

Whether it’s Obama using ten times more drones than George Bush to kill poor brown people overseas, the 5-year Russiagate scam to start a war in Eurasia as well as to distract from Hillary Clinton’s epic 2016 defeat (two birds, one stone), or Slay Queen Hillary’s personal project to utterly destroy Libya in retaliation for Gaddafi’s attempts to form a pan-African currency independent of the central bankers’ petrodollar, the “Left” is all war, all the time.

Libya, before and after Hillary liberated it:

Feel the liberal love!

Is the ‘Left’ economically populist?

Definitely not!

Liberal media leads the charge to centralize and control cryptocurrency because it challenges central banking monopoly power near and dear to the ruling class heart.

Self-styled “progressive” (another inaccurate and deceptive label) Elizabeth Warren just wants to help the People desperate to escape a sinking dollar by monitoring, regulating, and taxing their cryptocurrency under penalty of law. Because those are our values in a democracy!

No non-taxable, untraceable, non-central-banker money for you, peasant! Skirting taxes is strictly reserved for the oligarchs (AKA political donors).

Is the ‘Left’ anti-corruption?

Don’t be silly! Zombie corpse House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) openly defends insider trading on the floor of the People’s House. “This is a free market,” she says in response to questions regarding her profiting illicitly off of privileged information that only Congress members are privy to, which is theoretically necessary to conduct the People’s business effectively.

The corporate state technocracy’s personal servants: What modern ‘Leftism’ actually is

Perhaps the most succinct summary of the modern ‘Left’ is illustrated by “Antifa” (a truncated version of “anti-fascist”) unironically cheerleading fascistic lockdown, masking, and forced lockdown measures:

To tie the threads together, the modern ‘Left’ is reduced to a conglomeration of the absolute worst of all political machinations: authoritarian, elite centralized, anti-free speech, economically rapacious, warmongering.

The “Right” political machine, though, is not the inverse of “Leftism” nor should it be exempt from criticism. At the top, it’s staffed by the exact same types of cancerous vultures as found on the Left, albeit with mildly saner social positions in the culture war (they at least don’t advocate transing kindergarteners).

Joe Jarvis and I recently touched on the relevance, or lack thereof, of the left-right paradigm in a wide-ranging discussion posted to YouTube.

The general takeaway from that section of the conversation was that the “Left” and “Right” shorthand is increasingly archaic as a way to describe competing political ideologies in the Brave New World post-COVID.

The real fight is elites vs everyone else. Couching this political conflict in “Left vs Right” terms might do more to obfuscate the nature of competing factions more than it clearly defines them.

The hopeful news here is that a deluge of self-identified leftists who genuinely embrace conventional free speech, anti-authoritarian left values — Jimmy Dore and Glenn Greenwald, just to name two — are fleeing the plantation. And they’re dragging their viewers and readers with them.

We need honest actors on the “Left” to defect to our side, not to write off everyone who embraces that label (however inaccurately) as irredeemable. We need solidarity in the trenches, not mindless partisanship.

“People merge on state of mind from all
Different walks of life
Don’t need any more stupid division…

Brother – I’ll always look out for you
If I feel it back
Sister – we’ll brave the outside world
Off the beaten track
When it’s us vs. them
You can always count on me
When it’s us vs. them
It’s a global unity.”

-Sick Of It All, Us vs Them