(Editor’s Note: I was a little shocked to see this piece in The Guardian, but — hey — good for them. The article is a devastating portrayal of the soulless corporate monsters running this country. They are, truly, the personification of Jewish intellectual and writer Hannah Arendt’s classic book ‘The Banality of Evil’. — Mark Taylor)
WE REPRODUCE THE MATERIAL BELOW AS A PUBLIC SERVICE
I’ve written about relationships betweentech companiesand the militarybefore, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by anything I saw or heard at this conference. But when it ended, and I departed DC for home, it felt like my life force had been completely sucked out of my body.
I also went to a panel in Palantir’s booth titled Civilian Harm Mitigation. It was led by two “privacy and civil liberties engineers” – a young man and woman who spoke exclusively in monotone. They also used countless euphemisms for bombing and death. The woman described how Palantir’s Gaia map toollets users “nominate targets of interest” for “the target nomination process”. She meant it helps people choose which places get bombed.
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Lili News 029
In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
Things to keep in mind...
Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.
Unfortunately, most people take this site for granted. DONATIONS HAVE ALMOST DRIED UP… PLEASE send what you can today! JUST USE THE BUTTON BELOW
In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
Things to keep in mind...
Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.
Unfortunately, most people take this site for granted. DONATIONS HAVE ALMOST DRIED UP… PLEASE send what you can today! JUST USE THE BUTTON BELOW
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
China’s superior leadership, rational system, and generous vision fuel her ascendancy
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Billy Bob's Dispatches THE WORLD THROUGH AN INDEPENDENT LEFT LENS
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Her culture and style of governance remain incomprehensible to Western elites.
n 1936, Mao Zedong foretold the future when he prophesied the following: "When China finally wins her independence, then legitimate foreign trading interests will enjoy more opportunity than ever before. The power of production and consumption of 450,000,000 people is not a matter that can remain the exclusive interest of the Chinese, but one that must engage the many nations. Our millions of people, once really emancipated, with their great latent productive possibilities freed for creative activity in every field, can help improve the economy as well as raise the cultural level of the whole world."
In 1945 Mao said “Some people refuse to understand why the Chinese Communists do not fear capitalism but, on the contrary, develop it as much as possible. Our answer is simple: we have to replace foreign imperialist and native feudalist oppression with capitalist development because that is the inevitable course of our economy and because both the capitalist class and the proletariat benefit. What is superfluous is not native capitalism but foreign imperialism and native feudalism. On the contrary, our capitalism is indeed too little. To develop industry, enormous capital is required. Where will it come from? It can only come from two sources: the capital accumulated by the Chinese people themselves and from foreign loans, and we must welcome all foreign investments as long as they obey the laws of China and are advantageous to our economy.”
Of course, Mao’s desire to integrate into the global economy was put on hold due to the unilaterally imposed Western trade embargo and the Sino-Soviet split. But Mao did not give up on his vision of global economic integration and he continually raised the issue of ending the trade embargo during the 136 ambassadorial level meetings that took place in Geneva (1954-1958) and later Warsaw (1958-1970). Mao’s efforts finally paid off as Nixon and Kissinger officially agreed to end the Western trade embargo in 1972.
After Mao’s death, Deng took full advantage of the newly available trade opportunities and re-oriented China’s economy in order to maximize direct foreign investment. It is nearly impossible to summarize the unprecedented skyrocketing of every conceivable metric that China has achieved over the last several decades, but here are some highlights that may provide some awareness of China’s amazing accomplishment: Wages have tripled every ten years for forty years in a row. Education spending has doubled every eight years for forty years in a row. 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty (“poverty” as defined by the World Bank). According to the “Lived Change Index”, between 1990 and 2019, China experienced the highest increase in per-capita GDP of any country on earth (which is even more impressive when one considers China’s large population and the fact that Poland in the number two position, only grew by a factor of nine, while China, in the top spot, grew by more than a factor of thirty!!!).
China’s planned socialist economy did not allow massive slums to sprawl as they always do as an unwanted consequence of capitalist development and economic growth. Instead, China built hundreds of cities from scratch, including twenty cities that house over a million citizens. China developed the world's greatest high-speed rail network, they became the world's leading manufacturer of green energy as well as the world’s greatest user of green energy. China developed a world-class education system that leads the world in the number of patents and published research papers. Perhaps most importantly, China is working with the developing world and offering them a hand up, instead of a knee on their necks (as is offered by the Western imperialists). China is helping the under-developed world to develop and is sharing their expertise and know-how, and providing assistance with large infrastructure projects that are desperately needed to improve lives and bring prosperity. Additionally, China provides low-interest loans that finance, facilitate, and enable, all the development described above.
China's Industrial Vigor is Revolutionising All Applied Sciences,
Civil Engineering Included
The Chinese have pushed furthest the notion of the city as a product. One of the most important aspects of China’s recent economic development is the profusion of new cities being built from scratch. These aren’t expansions of existing communities but fully master-planned, manufactured centers of economic and social life, often built on newly developed land such as artificial islands or reclaimed desert. On some estimates, China has built more than 600 new cities since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Some of these manufactured cities have been extraordinary successes. Shenzhen rose from a rice paddy into one of the world’s most dynamic metropolises—its economy is the size of South Korea’s—in just three or four decades. But even Shenzhen pales, compared with the plans for Xiongan in Hebei province, a new city that covers over 770 square miles, more than twice the size of New York City. (Bruno Maçães, The City in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, City-Journal, Autumn 2019)
The West is not happy with any of this. After ending the trade embargo in 1972, the West had hoped to affect regime change culminating in the failed color revolution in Tiananmen Square. The West has worked tirelessly to infiltrate China’s political apparatus and get their political puppets in power in order to implement policies that benefit Western interests. This is the basic MO of Western imperialism, but it has failed in China. Wikileaks reported on a leaked diplomatic cable that laments Xi Jinping is “untainted by corruption”, “Mr. Clean”, “low key, humble, and self-effacing”, “a good guy”, and ideologically “redder than red”. None of these traits make Xi someone that the West can use to further their own malign interests, quite the contrary in fact. This is why Xi is reviled in the Western press and presented as a dictatorial human rights abuser who routinely harvests the organs of religious folks, when he’s not selling fentanyl to Appalachia or genociding Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
But, Mao’s vision has come true and it is coming more true with each passing day, much to the consternation of the West. Western hegemony is being destroyed by a rising China and there is no clear solution to this problem. Since China is so integral to the global economy, it will not be easy to sanction or isolate China economically. Since the Chinese market is so lucrative, it is difficult to get greedy Western capitalists on board with the policy of decoupling urged by Western strategists. You may remember how Trump was mercilessly mocked by the entirety of the liberal press when he tweeted:
“We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far better off without them… Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”
In order to attain a decoupling from China, Biden has adopted a more sophisticated approach. Unlike Trump, Biden has harnessed his media allies to promote the manufactured narrative that Western strategists hope will help achieve China’s economic isolation. This new strategy is predicated on the hypocritical trashing of decades of “free trade” rhetoric as well as decades of faux environmentalism and a pretend desire to increase our use of renewable energy including solar panels, batteries, and electric cars. In true Orwellian fashion, the Biden administration is trusting that everyone will simply forget about the decades of propaganda extolling free trade as being in the best interest of everyone because it lowers prices, breeds competition, and benefits consumers by increasing access to goods. We are to immediately forget that fossil fuels will soon render our planet unlivable. As imperialist imperatives change so do their narratives.
The new buzzword is “overproduction”. China has “broken the rules” by subsidizing its green energy industries. Of course, this is just more hypocrisy as Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in August of 2022, invested a trillion dollars into our own domestic green energy industries. All of a sudden things have changed 180 degrees. Free trade is now bad, green energy is now bad, and subsidizing domestic industries is now bad (except for when we do it).
So, China must be sanctioned with tariffs because they have “overproduced” green energy which has caused the price of solar panels, batteries, and electric cars to be “too low”. There is now “too much” green energy. China has “overproduced” green energy. It’s almost as if every US household has all their useful surfaces covered in solar panels and yet there are extra solar panels just lying around the yard and on the side of the house cluttering everything up. There’s only one solution to this clutter caused by China’s “overproduction”. Biden is putting a 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars so US consumers will have to pay double what they otherwise would. Solar panels from China will cost US consumers 50% more than what they otherwise would. So much for promoting free trade and green energy. It’s almost as if Biden doesn’t give a fuck about the interests of the working class and is solely interested in making sure China responds with tariffs of their own. And Biden and his media allies are prepared to spin the most hypocritical, irrational, and counter-intuitive narratives, in order to implement their imperialist strategy.
My guess is that Biden hopes to stoke a trade war and that he is ready with additional tariffs and sanctions immediately following China’s response to this current round of tariffs. In this way, Biden hopes to go back and forth with escalating rounds of tariffs and sanctions, eventually making it unprofitable for Western companies to do business in China. What else can Western strategists do when greedy capitalists who have no class consciousness or concern for the imperatives of imperialism refuse to decouple from China’s immensely lucrative market? Initiate a trade war and make sure that it becomes unprofitable to do business with China, seems like their only option.
Additionally, the speed of the green energy revolution will also be tremendously slowed down and reliance on fossil fuels will remain unnecessarily high. This is just a bad policy and bad strategy for an empire in decline that lacks the competence necessary to shift from confrontation to cooperation. Indeed by choosing confrontation the US ruling cliques show their appalling mediocrity and political myopia by not properly appreciating the political pacification benefits derived from assuring a decent consumption floor to the beleaguered working class. Until this fundamental shift takes place, and civilised collaboration replaces economic war, the ruling Western Establishment will continue to escalate its violent, immoral, and counterproductive efforts to maintain its supremacy while asking the global working class to make all the sacrifices on their behalf.
Lili News 029
In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
Unfortunately, most people take this site for granted. DONATIONS HAVE ALMOST DRIED UP… PLEASE send what you can today! JUST USE THE BUTTON BELOW
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
TALKING WITH REGIS TREMBLAY ABOUT ISRAEL, COLLEGE PROTESTERS, AND US POLICY
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Garland Nixon • Regis Tremblay
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Garland and Regis discuss how the US "official narrative"—especially the US foreign policy lies—keep a criminal empire "legitimate" in the eyes of the population, and how the Gaza genocide may have finally broken the almost century-long "disinformation hypnosis" and precipitated a confrontation with the reality that Israel is a criminal entity, and that US citizens do not enjoy irrevocable, Constitutionally guaranteed rights, but merely "privileges" at the whim of a tiny, obscenely rich and sociopathic oligarchy. Now that the very nature of the US state is at issue, that its "goodness" can't be taken for granted, what is the globalist establishment likely to do in the face of a still-growing protest movement?
Americans are the most heavily propagandised population in history. But the spell is finally lifting.
TALKING WITH REGIS TREMBLAY ABOUT ISRAEL, COLLEGE PROTESTERS, AND US POLICY
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
The View from Abroad: Notes on the World’s Motherlode of Moral Hypocrisy
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Fred Reed FRED COMES AT YOU FROM A RIGHTWING POINT OF VIEW, BUT MANY THINGS HE SAYS DESPERATELY NEED TO BE SAID.
mong the more nauseating elements of what has become the American national character is the moral preening, the lecturing of others on the virtuousness of the Exceptional Nation, on America’s incontinent goodness and sense of superiority. The world isn’t buying it. The internet makes fraud impossible.
New York City: An actual homeless person, not an staged shot. You can't make this up. (Getty Images)
This essay was first published on May 25, 2021 Start with the domestic. The whole world can see, in what calls itself the richest country in the world, squalid, diseased, often rat-infested encampments of tens of thousands the homeless on the sidewalks of city after city: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Austin, on and on. In New York they live in subway stations, often on the trains. Forgotten diseases return. This must cause astonishment in civilized countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China.
Next, crime, levels of which constitute a measure of civilization. American lawlessness is a wonder of the world. Over seven hundred killed annually in Chicago, three hundred in Baltimore, with perhaps three times as many shot but not killed. Similar numbers per capita can be adduced for many other cities. Equally elevated figures exist for assault, rape, carjacking, mugging, shoplifting. To citizens of Taiwan or South Korea these numbers must look more appropriate to civil war in Sudan than a country that regards itself as an example to the world.
America talks of its commitment to human rights. Yet the world just watched agape as some four hundred cities exploded in looting, arson, and vandalism citing abuse of human rights by the police. Uighurs? As the world can easily see, and does, the black population lives generation after generation in crime-infested, drug-ridden semi literacy. Racial relations are terrible, probably worsening, and so bad that whites dare not walk in black regions. The frequent horrific racial attacks by blacks on whites are carefully kept out of the American mass media, but the world can see them in foreign publications such as the Daily Telegraph.
"At this writing America is the only country of note steadfastly supporting Israel’s search for lebensraum in the West Bank and its conversion of the Gaza Strip into the Warsaw Ghetto, with the IDF inflicting its usual devastation..."
The fetid, necrotic, and hopeless ghettos are widespread. Consider Newark, Camden, Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, St Louis, Cincinnati, New Orleans, just to begin.
Human rights? America’s unending race riots appear in graphic detail all around the world. Cities burn, over and over, decade after decade, as American politicians speak of their values, which they seem to want the rest of the world to adopt.
Race relations in the most moral, preachy, and indispensable nation, two examples of many, many dozens that could be given:
Felicity, love, and love in Georgia
[Who can figure this kerfuffle? The Tweet was filed by a supposedly charitable Christian! Fact is we don't know what actually happened here, but the attacker is already classified as an animal. ]
[And this one too, is incendiary for racial relations. But the social context is missing, except the killer is older and black.—Ed]
Public disaffection is rampant in America. Washington is so afraid of its citizens that it called in over twenty thousand soldiers to assure calm when Biden was inaugurated. The whole earth watched, some in shock, others in amusement, as infuriated citizens stormed the Capitol. During a recent trial in Minneapolis, troops were needed to protect the proceedings from an angry population, with stores boarding up in fear of looting. Can anyone imagine this in Tokyo?
And of course, few around the world can have failed to notice the disparity between China’s quick and effective response to the epidemic and the chaos, verging on anarchy of the American, in which no one appeared to be in charge and much of the population refuses to cooperate with the government.
Americans are not an historically aware people and so have little idea of how or why they are regarded as they are abroad. Consider Mexico, where I live. People here know of the Mexican-American War (of which, preposterously many Americans have never heard) as well as the bombardment of Veracruz and Pershing’s incursion. Peoples remember their defeats and humiliations as the victors do not. Mexicans know they are powerless against America, resent it intensely. Latin Americans in general know of the almost endless list of invasions, coups, dictators installed, economic exploitation that Americans have never heard of. Today they see the persecution of Cuba, the attempt to starve Venezuela into giving Washington control of its oil, the coups and murder attempts against Maduro, the coup in Bolivia, other attempts in Ukraine and Byelorussia, on and on.
Many countries have endured American manipulation exploitation, invasion. Americans seldom know of these things, but the countries involved do. For example, China remembers that American (and European) gunboats seized Chinese ports, forced the opium trade on the country, and that American troops have rampaged through Beijing, looting, raping, and killing for sport. There was the burning of the Summer Palace (look it up if you haven’t heard of it.) During the Cold War, Americans saw themselves as on a moral crusade against Communism. The Chinese saw it as a crusade against China. Which is how the “trade war” looks to them now.
How does America appear to much of the world today? As a brutal, utterly unprincipled, destructive, out of control monster wreaking havoc on any country that doesn’t submit.
If this seems to you extreme, you are probably a normal American. But try for a second, if only as an exercise in mental gymnastics, to see how it looks from abroad.
Below: A segment from CBS Sunday. The comfortable upper-middle class in the media deign to take a look at the homeless, US society's "losers"
America killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and wrecked it for generations, has killed and killed and killed for almost twenty years in Afghanistan. Supervised the destruction of Libya, currently occupies much of Syria and kills there too, bombs Somalia, supports a grisly Saudi war against Yemen. In an earlier generation it killed millions in Southeast Asia.
At this writing America is the only country of note steadfastly supporting Israel’s search for lebensraum in the West Bank and its conversion of the Gaza Strip into the Warsaw Ghetto, with the IDF inflicting its usual devastation.
Human rights? The world saw the godawful photos of torture in America’s prison at Abu Ghraib. They know of the continuation of “enhanced interrogation,” in Guantanamo. These things could be seen, and were, everywhere from Kathmandu to Finland and all over the Moslem world, where they served to spur enlistment. The American media carefully do not speak of the horrors of the torture camps, or of the death and mutilation caused by the wars. Web sites in other countries are not as reticent. No, the pols speak ok American values.
Which leads to a question I often hear in Mexico: “Why don’t the gringos worry about their own problems instead of causing new ones for the rest of us?”
Amen.
Write Fred at jet.possum@gmail.com Put the letters pdq anywhere in the subject line to avoid autodeletion .
Fred Reed, who has referred to Oprah Winfrey as looking “like five hundred pounds of bear liver in a plastic bag,” takes a jaundiced and highly irreverent view of all things sacred-journalism, marriage, affirmative action, federal scams, governmental uselessness, women, men, fellow reporters, and popular culture. On the other hand, he has a kind word for drunks, bar girls, and children. Neither a liberal nor a conservative-he describes these as “twin halves of the national lobotomy”-he is just Fred. He figures it is enough. Anything more would be multiple-personality disorder. Fred has spent many years doing things your mother wouldn’t want you to do, such as living in alleys in Taipei, Bangkok, and Saigon, with some of the strangest people ever to crawl this weary earth. Once a war correspondent in Viet Nam and Cambodia, then for years a police reporter in places the media don’t admit exist, he spent most of a decade writing a syndicated column on matters military. While he tends to write with wit, he has seen, he says, a lot of ugly things, and doesn’t like the people responsible. He says so. Fred may charm or offend, but he’ll keep your attention. “Funny, sharply observant and often deeply poignant, Fred Reed writes what a hell of a lot of Americans are thinking, but are afraid these days to say. He is delightfully beyond category for anyone with an open mind, which is probably why he lives in Mexico, far enough away that the politically correct of both camps cannot strangle him.” –Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus
Lili News 029
In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
If you find the above useful, pass it on! Become an "influence multiplier"!
—The Editor, The Greanville Post
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Our main image motif: Painted by famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, Glorious Victory is a critical and condemnatory view of the 1954 CIA coup of Guatemala’s democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The United States removed Árbenz from power and replaced him with a dictatorial military commander because Árbenz threatened the landholdings of the United Fruit Company with his agrarian reform laws.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post
All image captions, pull quotes, appendices, etc. by the editors not the authors.
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Mark Taylor
