Sweden Axes Gates Mad Global Warming Scheme

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by F.William Engdahl
OpEds



Crossposted with  New Eastern Outlook

On April 2 the Swedish Space Agency, announced that the program, the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), funded by Bill Gates, has “divided the scientific community” and will therefore not be carried out.SCoPEx was a scheme funded for several years by personal funds from Gates to test the feasibility of dimming the sun via manmade geoengineering.

The plan is to drop sulphate aerosolor calcium carbonate dust into the atmosphere from high altitude balloons in a madcap scheme to try blocking the sun and thereby “prevent “ global warming. The Swedish agency decided to cancel the experiment because of a major opposition from not only the scientific and environmentalist community, but also indigenous Swedish Saame or Laplander people who are reindeer herdsmen and feared the particles could cause severe or unknown environmental pollution to their herds. Notably, the Saami Council warned that the Gates experiment “essentially attempts to mimic volcanic eruptions by continuously spewing the sky with sun-dimming particles.”


Since at least 2010 Gates has called for manmade dimming of the sun. He has given a reported $4.6 million to Harvard physicist David Keith to advance the scheme. Keith has been an advisor to Gates since 2005. Along with Chevron, Gates is also a major investor in Keith’s company, Carbon Engineering, a Canada-based Direct Air Capture firm. Direct Air Capture is another mad scheme, a process of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the ambient air, using large fans to push ambient air through a filter where it is treated with caustic solvent to extract CO2. It involves staggering amounts of water and energy, and a land area the size of India by some estimates. By conservative estimates carbon capture to reach zero CO2 from fossil fuels would run more than $5 trillion yearly even if it was possible on a mass scale. Keith seems happy to play with such bizarre projects on the tab of billionaire pseudo-scientist Gates.

In a 2010 TED talk, Gates answered a question on solar blocking to try to offset global warming. He stated then, “Do we have to start taking emergency measures to keep the temperature of the earth stable?… There is a line of research on what’s called geoengineering, which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us 20 or 30 years to get our act together.”

Keith said despite the Swedish setback the group will look for support in the Biden Administration to do the tests in the US. The USA National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently published a report calling for $100-200 million to be pumped into “solar geo-engineering” over the next five years.

Geo-engineering very real

Until recently the US Government has denied conducting geo-engineering and has labelled any discussion of such projects as “chemtrail” spraying of the skies as “conspiracy theory.” Now they seem to be more open about what have been highly classified geo-engineering projects. In November 2017 the Republican-dominated US House of Representatives held the first hearings on “Geo-engineering: Innovation, Research, and Technology.” The panel discussed the need for further research into solar reflection geo-engineering, known as stratospheric aerosol injection.

One substance being considered for the Gates project and other such sun blocking schemes is what is called coal fly ash, the residue left in a coal power plant after burning coal. However, coal fly ash, which in modern coal plants is captured and disposed safely, if seeded in clouds to dim the sun, could bring a toxic acid rain to Earth.

According to the Physicians for Social Responsibility, “Depending on where the coal was mined, coal ash typically contains heavy metals including arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and selenium, as well as aluminum, antimony, barium, beryllium, boron, chlorine, cobalt, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, thallium, vanadium, and zinc.” The group notes that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found that,“If eaten, drunk or inhaled, these toxicants can cause cancer and nervous system impacts such as cognitive deficits, developmental delays and behavioral problems. They can also cause heart damage, lung disease, respiratory                                                           distress, kidney disease, reproductive problems, gastrointestinal illness, birth defects, and impaired bone growth in children.” That is not minor.

Grand Solar Minimum

There is much that can be said against the Gates-Harvard project. The statement by the Saami Council that the Gates-Keith sun-blocking enterprise is an attempt “to mimic volcanic eruptions by continuously spewing the sky with sun-dimming particles,” is the most relevant, and for reasons not being discussed as widely as it should.

What the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) refuses to discuss is the relation between the sun and climate changes on Earth. By far the greatest factor in Earth climate change and weather is the sun and its cycles of solar eruptions and cyclically also lack of same.

The  fundamentalpoint about changes today in climate is that the Earth is in the early stage not of global warming, but of a global cooling period, called by astrophysicists a Grand Solar Minimum. If this is correct, it portends the most dramatic and by far most dangerous climate change imaginable. According to NASA our planet entered what they estimate will be the strongest solar minimum cycle in some 200 years.

What Al Gore and others try to keep hidden is the fact that the Earth is not warming since around 2000, and since summer 2020, has entered what will be a cooling phase lasting some predict until around 2055. Historically periods of Grand Solar Minimum, taking place every 200 years or so, create highly unstable weather patterns, prolonged major floods, massive crop failures and wild swings in temperature (both up and down),as well as jet stream disturbances, which create singular heat waves and wild fires among other extreme events. These effects have also all been registered during periods at least a century before invention of the internal combustion engine.

What no Global Warming computer model is capable of is to incorporate the effects of our sun on Earth climate, this despite well-documented scientific evidence that solar cycles are the greatest factor in changing climate over years. In fact they do not even try to.

Solar eruptions known popularly as sunspots rise and decline in 11-and 22-year cycles roughly. On top of these cycles are 100-year and 200-year grand cycles. Since                                                           June 2020 we have begun such a Grand Solar Minimum, one in which sunspot activity could likely decline to zero for several decades.

Volcanoes and the Sun

Increasing scientific research is finding  that while the driving mechanism is not entirely clear, periods of solar minimum and, especially of Grand Solar Minima, are also associated with dramatic increase in earthquakes and of volcanic activity.

A group of Japanese scientists led by Toshikazu Ebisuzaki examined the timing of 11 eruptive volcanic events that produced silica-rich magma from four volcanoes in Japan. They found that “Nine of the 11 events occurred during inactive phases of solar magnetic activity (solar minimum), which is well indexed by the group sunspot number. This strong association between eruption timing and the solar minimum is statistically significant to a confidence level of 96.7.” That is a very high correlation.

Some 200 years ago we had the last Grand Solar Minimum period, known to scientists as the Dalton Minimum,in the beginning of the 19th century. In 1816, the cloud cover across the planet was so severe that it was known  as the Year With No Summer.The Dalton Minimum lasted from circa 1790 – 1820. In 1815 a huge volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history, spewed so much volcanic ash into the atmosphere that in 1816 Thomas Jefferson recorded in his weather diary in Virginia the absence of summer sun.  It triggered extreme weather and harvest failures in many areas around the world. Frost and snow in North America during June 1816 destroyed most agriculture crops. Globally it was the worst famine of the 19th Century. The huge volumes of volcanic ash in the atmosphere lasting more than one year from Tambora reflected significant amounts of solar radiation, causing unseasonably cool summers that contributed to food shortages.

The evidence that we are in the early stages of a Grand Solar Minimum similar to that of the 19th Century or worse is compelling. Sumatra’s incredibly active Sinabung Volcano has exploded in spectacular fashion March 2, sending volcanic ash 40,000 feet high into the atmosphere.Particulates ejected to altitudes above 32,800 feet (10 km) –and into the stratosphere– have a direct cooling effect on the planet. Iceland, the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, and other eruptions in recent weeks suggest we may be in for far more dramatic climate shocks than the self-appointed global climate czar Bill Gates admits. Gates, the Davos World Economic Forum and countless grant-hungry climate “scientists” refuse to consider the solar reality, instead pursuing such mad projects as chemical dimming of the sun. The trillions of dollars projected to be spent on inefficient solar and wind energy, indicates their agenda has nothing to do with health of the planet, nor of us. We can be sure those scientists who advise Gates re fully aware of solar cycles.Give them credit on one point, they are masters of deception.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics
 
* * *

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. In the center of the mural, secretary of state John Foster Dulles is seen shaking hands with military commander and then president Castillo Armas, Washington's putschist general. Rivera paints Dulles with an expression of idiocy to demonstrate how he was too ignorant (or indifferent) to understand the terrible chain of events he had sparked.


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Jimmy Dore: Showing MSNBC, the NYTimes and the rest of the media jackals how to do real journalism

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Help us break the corporate media monopoly before it kills us all. The global oligarchy depends on its disinformation machine to maintain its power. Now the malicious fog of Western propaganda has created an ocean of confusion in which even independent minds can drown. Please push back against this colossal apparatus of deception. Consider a donation today!


Jimmy Dore et al



From standup comedian to pre-eminent political analyst and communicator, Jimmy Dore has evolved into one of America's most indispensable social media champions. Jimmy Dore and his crew—Stefanie Zamorano, and frequently the always lucid Ron Placone, Graham Elwood and others of similar merit—are worth watching regularly, for more can be learned in one of their sessions than in anything offered by the haughty NYTimes, MSNBC, or the rest of the so-called "legacy media", that is, the establishment media owned by billionaires and solely dedicated to selling us their criminal agenda.

—The Editor
—The Editor


The first rule of good physicians is "Do no harm." For people in media it should be, "Do not lie". But that is precisely the first rule they break.

#TheJimmyDoreShow.

Rachel Maddow's Jaw-Dropping Propaganda For Dems Stimulus Bill
MANUFACTURING CONSENT



Mar 14, 2021
Excellent exposé of establishment presstitutes. And paid shills and trolls in social media (see below).


Popular Twitter Account Exposed As Shill Paid To Smear Progressives

Mar 11, 2021


Mar 14, 2021

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Black Agenda Radio: Billionaire Wealth Breaks All Records in Crisis • US Militarists Invent Enemies – and Russiagate — for Dollars

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Help us break the corporate media monopoly before it kills us all. The ruling oligarchy depends on its disinformation machine to maintain its power. Please consider a donation today!]


Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford



 
02 Feb 2021
 

Billionaire Wealth Breaks All Records in Crisis

The US billionaire class has grown at unprecedented speed during the pandemic and economic crises, increasing their wealth by over a trillion dollars and adding 46 new oligarchs to their numbers, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. Never has the world seen wealth accumulation at such a scale, said Omar Ocampo, a researcher for the study. “We need to create an economic system that does not allow for wealth to be (so) extremely concentrated,” said Ocampo. “ This could be done by “growing the labor movement” and instituting “workplace democracy and worker ownership.” [Better still, by doing away with capitalism once and for all, and buildng socialism.—Ed]

US Militarists Invent Enemies – and Russiagate -- for Dollars

Russiagate is a fiction concocted by Democrats and intelligence agencies explain Hillary Clinton’s defeat and fuel a New Cold War, said Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst. “You can’t spend $740 billion a year if you don’t have a plausible enemy, like Russia and now China,” McGovern told Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal, of The Gray Zone. McGovern is active with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Abolish Police, from the US to Nigeria

Crystal Eze, a first-generation US citizen of Nigerian descent and activist with the Assata Collective, supports the abolition of police in both countries. “The call for abolition is very adamant from the Nigerian youth,’ who have launched a mass movement against police brutality and corruption, said Eze, a college nursing graduate.

Anti-Black Racism Is Environmental Hazard

Environmental justice should be put at the cutting edge of the social justice movement, said Dr Ugo Edu, an African American Studies professor at UCLA, and a medical anthropologist who has done field work in Brazil. “If the police are stopping you arbitrarily, we should talk about that as creating an unsafe environment,” said Edu. “The kind of anxiety, the kind of vigilance that is necessary to ive in” such an environment “doesn’t bode well in terms of your health.”

The American Way of Fascism

In an essay for Prison Radio, Mumia Abu Jamal cited journalist Chris Hedges’ contention that “the Christian Right is always “ready to support repressive measures against all who do not embrace their movement.” American fascism has distinctly Christian characteristics, according to the nation’s best known political prisoner.

Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour. 


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How Billionaires Transfer Blame to Others

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Eric Zuesse
Crossposted with Strategic Culture



Billionaires in 2014. Observe that Bezos is nowhere near the top—yet. Today his fortune is (barring Gulf despots) one of the biggest in the world, at almost $150 bn. By January 2021, Elon Musk had become the richest man on earth.



Throughout history, aristocrats, and their flaks such as their ‘news’-media, cast blame downward, away from themselves who collectively control the government, and onto, instead, some minority or other mass group, who can’t even plan or function together so as to be able to control the government.
 
The U.S. has a two-Party aristocracy, as is clear from the “Open Secrets” list of the 100 biggest political donors in the 2020 U.S. Presidential and congressional campaigns, the “2020 Top Donors to Outside Spending Groups”. Those are only these individuals’ publicly acknowledged expenditures, none of the dark political money, which, of course, is donated secretly. At the top there, of the donors’ lists, is Sheldon Adelson (who just died, on January 11th in California, and was buried in Israel), who spent far more than anyone in all of U.S. history had ever spent in any campaign cycle, $215 million, which amount far exceeded even the $82 million that he had spent in 2016, which in 2016 was second only to Thomas Steyer’s $92 million (the previous all-time-highest amount donated in any campaign year). Adelson gave exclusively to Republicans, whereas Steyer gave exclusively to Democrats. Steyer in 2020 gave $67 million, which — though he was himself running for President in 2020, and hadn’t been running in 2016 — was only 73% of his 2016 donations, in that year, when he had been the nation’s top political donor. He was only the 5th-biggest donor in 2020, instead of #1.
 
The second-biggest donor in 2020 was the liberal Republican Michael Bloomberg, who ran in the Democratic Presidential primaries in order to defeat the only progressive in that contest, who was Bernie Sanders. Bloomberg spent $151 million of his own funds for that purpose. In 2016, he had spent $24 million in order to help Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders, and then try to beat Donald Trump.
 
The third-biggest in 2020 was Timothy Mellon, the son of Paul Mellon and grandson of Andrew Mellon. Timothy Mellon gave $70 million, all to Republicans.
 

Hyper-zionist Sheldon Adelson bankrolled Trump. Steyer did the same for Hillary.


In 2020, the top ten donors, collectively, spent $776 million to own their chunk of the U.S. Government. The second group of ten (#s 11-20) donated only $187 million; and, so, the top twenty together donated $963 million, just shy of $1 billion. All 80 of the other top-100 donors, together, gave around $370 million, so that the total from all 100 was around one-and-a-third billion dollars. 47 gave to Republicans; 53 gave to Democrats.

 
The smallest publicly acknowledged donor among the top 100, Foster Friess, gave $2.4 million, all to Republicans. 
 
Most of these 100 donors are among America’s approximately 700 billionaires; and, even the ones who aren’t are serving and doing business with the billionaires, and therefore are to some extent dependent upon having good relations with them, not being enemies of any billionaire. All of these 100 are, obviously, also dependent upon the governmental decisions that the public officials whom they have purchased will be making, not only regarding regulations and laws, but also regarding foreign policies. For example, Friess merged his company into Affiliated Management Group, which “is a global asset management firm” that “has grown to approximately $730 billion.” Virtually all of the top 100 political donors are internationally invested, and their personal wealth is therefore affected by American foreign policies, in ways that the personal wealth of the rest of the population is not.
 
When the U.S. invades a foreign country, or issues sanctions against a foreign country, it benefits some American investors, not only in corporations such as Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil, but even in some foreign-headquartered corporations. America’s spending around half of the entire world’s military expenses gives an enormous competitive boost to America’s billionaires, which is paid for by all U.S. taxpayers. It takes away money that would otherwise go toward the rest of the U.S. population — people who might even become crippled or killed by their military service for the benefit of America’s billionaires. Marketing this military service to the public, as “national defense” (actually international aggression) — even at a time when no nation has invaded or even threatened to invade America after 1945 — is good PR for America’s wealthiest families, regardless of whether it’s of any benefit whatsoever to other Americans. Because of the success of this PR for the military, Americans consider the U.S. military to be America’s best institution — far higher than any other part of the U.S. Government or any non-governmental institution, such as churches, the press, or the medical system. The U.S. Department of Defense is, besides being the most respected, by far, the most corrupt of all Departments of the U.S. federal Government. This fact is carefully hidden from the U.S. public, so as to keep the public admiring the military, who serve as the international enforcers for America’s billionaires.
 
Billionaires use their media, and their scholars, to point the finger of blame, for the problems that the public does know about, anywhere else than against themselves; and, though the billionaires have political differences amongst themselves, they are unified against the public, so as to continue the gravy train that they all are on. 
 
In order for the aristocracy not to be blamed for the many problems that they cause upon the public, their first trick is to blame some minority or some other vulnerable mass within the public. Or else to blame some ‘enemy’ country. But if and when such a strategy fails, then, they and their media blame the middle class or “bourgeoisie,” in order to fool the leftists, and also they blame the “communists” and the poor, in order to fool the rightists. That’s a two-pronged PR strategy — one to the left, and the other to the right. Since the aristocracy is always, itself, fundamentally conservative, they would naturally rather blame the leftists as being “communists,” than to blame the middle class and poor, because to do the latter would place the public’s ideological focus on economic class, which then would threaten to expose the billionaires themselves as being the actual economic “elite” who are the public’s real enemy (and as being the elite against which the propaganda should instead be focused). Blaming the middle class and poor might work amongst their fellow-aristocrats, but if tried amongst the public, it would present serious danger of backfiring. Consequently, there is a return to the days of America’s famous ‘Red’-baiting U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, but this time without communism. Thus, here is how the White House correspondent for a Democratic Party ‘news’-site, CNN, closed his ‘news’-analysis, on January 14th, under the headline “Washington's agony is a win for autocrats and strongmen”:
 
Mission accomplished
Nice work, Mr. Putin.
According to a US intelligence community report, Russia’s chief goal in interfering in the 2016 election in support of Trump against Democrat Hillary Clinton was to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process.” Four years on, there have been two impeachments and an insurrection against the US legislature. Millions believe Trump’s lies that he was illegally ejected from power, and doubt Biden’s legitimacy.
Conspiracy theorists have seats in Congress. There are serious questions about whether one of the country's great political parties is now anti-democratic. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in a federal system that grants vast power to the states. And America’s self-appointed role as an exceptional nation and beacon of democracy is in the gutter.
Most of the disorienting events of the last few years can be blamed directly on Trump and his particular skill at tearing at the social, racial and political divides that are just below the nation's surface. So the ex-KGB man in the Kremlin hardly deserves all the credit. But Russia, China and other autocratic nations are gaining much from Washington's agony. They're already using it to promote their own closed and totalitarian societies as models of comparative order and efficiency — and to beat back brave local voices calling for democracy and human rights.
In an effective declaration of victory for Russia's espionage offensive against the US more than four years ago, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower house of the Russian Parliament, slid home the knife. “Following the events that unfolded after the presidential elections, it is meaningless to refer to America as the example of democracy,” he said.
“We are on the verge of reevaluating the standards that are being promoted by the United States of America, that is exporting its vision of democracy and political systems around the world. Those in our country who love to cite their example as leading will also have to reconsider their views.”
 
That’s propaganda from “leftist” (i.e., Democratic Party) billionaires. A good example of an independent American journalist who has been fooled by Republican Party billionaires to blame some amorphous mass of “leftists” is Sara A. Carter’s 12 January 2021 youtube “Rudy Giuliani talks big tech censorship”, blaming America’s problems on “the government,” or “the bureacracy,” and, of course, especially on Democrats. At 10:15 there, she said there that “My mother fled from Cuba.” Carter, as a conservative, is so obsessed with her visceral hatred of “communism,” that she interpreted America’s dictatorship as being communists, instead of as being billionaires — of both Parties: actually, fascists, not communists. In a two-Party fascist dictatorship, she fears the leftists. This is typical of propagandists on the conservative side. But propagandists on the liberal side (such as the CNN correspondent exemplified) are no better, just different. 
 
Both propaganda-operations cast blame away from the real culprits.
 
In a two-Party dictatorship, the important truths are prohibited from being publicized on either side. What the public sees and hears, instead, is political theater, merely tailored to different audiences.


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ELECTION 2020: Bourgeois Democracy Meets Global Governance

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Classical essays • This is a Repost • First published on 28 August, 2020

Diana Johnstone considers the fun and games surrounding the possibility of a disputed U.S. election result and concludes that the future is being planned elsewhere, for instance at the next meeting in Davos.  

President Donald Trump arriving in Ashville, N.C., Aug. 24, 2020. (White House, Shealah Craighead)


Dateline: Paris
Special to Consortium News

A small number of very rich men are quite sure they know what is best for the future of the world and have enough wealth and influence to believe they can make it happen. They can be called oligarchs, but the term is inadequate.  They are a special category, the shapers of the Global Governance destined to replace bourgeois democracy.  I can name two: one who is famous, notorious even, but very old, and another who is a generation younger, not yet so well known or so rich but probably even more influential.

The Global Governors

The old one is of course George Soros, who needs no introduction.  He has no doubt that the world should be one big Open Society — in a word, globalization — in which borders and nation states dissolve into a kaleidoscopic mix of cultural identities in which major decisions are taken by brilliant financial oligarchs like himself.

The younger one is Nicolas Berggruen, the dashing 59-year-old Paris-born son of a leading art collector. Berggruen enjoys double U.S.-German citizenship and membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, the NYU Commission on Global Citizenship, the Brookings International Advisory Council, the Leadership Council at Harvard’s Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership, the World Economic Forum – and on and on.  He helped get Emmanuel Macron elected president of France and has friendly relations with Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Union Commission.

The billionaire has his own “think and action tank,” the Berggruen Institute, to promote his interests which center on “global governance.”  He is particularly interested in technological ways to shape and guide the world of the future.  The future for Berggruen belongs to digitalization and above all transhumanism.  In a short video, he muses over whether or not the digital age makes us “less human.”


Nicolas Berggruen, center, in 2017. (Financial Times, Flicker, CC BY 2.0)


We are all connected and “less free” but we are all “part of something bigger — communities, families, friends” … The digital world “looks less human but it’s still being created by us.” (And who is “us” exactly?)  Berggruen’s model of the future family may be seen in his own choice: two motherless children manufactured with donated ovules and born by two surrogate wombs.

Like European-born Soros and Berggruen, the United States is above all the current command and control center of the Western world still aspiring to be the nucleus of a global empire. U.S. elections are important to these world visionaries in staying the course of world transformation. For both of them, President Donald Trump can only be an intolerable glitch in the screen.  This must be corrected in 2020.  The entire liberal elite is in overwhelming agreement.

The Transition Integrity Project

Rosa Brooks, center, in 2018, during a New America conference.(New America, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)


 

So, it has been easy to arouse near panic in the Washington Establishment and beyond over the notion that Trump might not be dislodged by the November 2020 election.  Fear is being spread less that Trump might win the election (too unthinkable to think) than that he will lose the election but refuse to budge.  This possibility received a big boost from a unique social event organized by Professor Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University, a leading champion of women’s participation in the National Security State, and historian Nils Gilman, a head researcher at the Berggruen Institute. 

This well-connected pair easily enlisted dozens of power pointers to take part in what The Boston Globe called “a Washington version of Dungeons and Dragons,” on the model of Pentagon planners who form teams to imagine what the U.S. and Russia might do in a nuclear war confrontation.  They named their fun and games the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), clearly suggesting that the “integrity” of the anticipated transition from Trump to Biden was their main concern. 

Only a few of the 67 participants have been identified: anti-Trump Republican Michael Steele, former President Bill Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, David Frum (ghost writer of President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech), and neoconservative political analyst William Kristol.

On Aug. 3, the Transition Integrity Project issued its report, entitled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition.”  This report gave the results of the make-believe gaming scenarios, which provided imaginary support to the growing liberal Democratic hypothesis that Trump is determined to steal the November election. 

“Like many authoritarian leaders, President Trump has begun to lay the groundwork for potentially ignoring or disrupting the voting process, by claiming, for instance, that any mail-in ballots will be fraudulent and that his opponents will seek to have non-citizens vote through fraud.”  It was taken for granted throughout that Trump’s fears and accusations are fake whereas his opponents’ fears and accusations are soundly based. 

The Transition Integrity Project report made a feeble attempt to appear neutral: “TIP takes no position on how Americans should cast their votes, or on the likely winner of the upcoming election; either party could prevail at the polls in November without resorting to ‘dirty tricks’” — a neutrality consistently violated by the entire exercise. 

The exercise comprised four scenarios: (1) an ambiguous voting result, (2) clear victory by the Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, (3) clear Trump win, (4) narrow Biden win.  The game was played by teams, primarily “Team Biden” and “Team Trump,” but it is pretty clear that none of the players were pro-Trump, including the players on “Team Trump.”   But the games claimed to show how Trump supporters would react in these circumstances.

  • “Team Trump was consistently more ruthless than Team Biden — more willing to ignore existing democratic norms, to make use of disinformation, to deploy federal agencies to promote Trump’s personal and electoral interests, and to engage in intimidation campaigns.”

But “Team Biden” was much nicer:

  • “Team Biden generally felt constrained by a commitment to norms and a desire to tamp down violence and reduce instability.”
  • “Team Biden often had the majority of the public on its side, and the ability to mobilize resentment about the structural disenfranchisement in the way we conduct presidential elections.”

Russiagate intruded into the gaming in an odd and even ludicrous way: “There was quite a bit of speculation that Trump might […] attempt to rally nationalist feelings to himself, or placate foreign leaders to whom he may feel beholden, such as Vladimir Putin.” Huh?

Nobody Dares Lose

Campaign image of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. (2020DemConvention, Twitter)


 

A particularly alarming and disturbingly credible assumption of the Transition Integrity Project game is that in this election, neither side is prepared to accept defeat.  The scenario exercises “revealed that for many Democrats and key Democratic constituencies, this election represents an existential crisis, the last chance to stop a rapid and potentially irreversible U.S. decline into authoritarianism and unbridled nativism.”  So, as much as Trump, many Democrats are ready to stop at nothing to win this election – for the best of reasons, of course.

Trump is depicted as equally desperate to win in order to avoid being treated as a criminal. An underlying assumption of this story-telling is that once out of office, Trump will be arrested and tried for unspecified crimes. This would indeed be an incentive for him not to lose.

At this point, it is necessary to recall that democratic election of national leaders depends on a degree of mutual trust that is being lost in America. The United States regularly insists that all foreign countries should elect their leaders by “fair and free elections.” But there are many countries where, at some time of their historical development, this method is not advisable because one party, or tribe, fears for its very life if a rival party, or tribe, should take power.

In such states, peace depends on the rule of a king, a mediator, a dictator.  The United States can currently be seen to be regressing to just such a degree of mutual hatred and distrust.

No Compromise

It seems to me that if the Democratic Establishment gave priority to a peaceful election and transition, against the possibility that Trump might reject the results, the smart and reasonable thing to do would be to reassure him on the two counts which they suggest might incite him to balk: postal vote fraud accusations and the threat of criminal charges against him.

As to the latter: “Participants in the scenario exercises universally believed that self-preservation for President Trump and his family will be Trump’s first and possibly only priority if he is forced to concede electoral defeat.”  So, it is a bit odd that the Transition Integrity Project goes on to report that: “During several of the TIP exercises, Team Biden attempted to enter into negotiations with Team Trump about a pardon and graceful transition, but those overtures were consistently rejected.”

Since there were no Trump supporters on either team, these game results merely reflect the intention of the Democratic Establishment to assume that Trump will be charged with “state crimes,” as yet unspecified.  No compromise deal is desired.

As for postal balloting, it should be conceivable that Trump’s misgivings are justified. Trump is not against absentee ballots, which require identification of the voter, comparable to going to the polls, but is suspicious of mass mailings of ballots back and forth.

In an age when anyone can photocopy any document, when mails are slow and when there are many ways in which ballots might be destroyed, such misgivings are not far-fetched.  Indeed, in the course of Game No. 1, “a rogue individual destroyed a large number of ballots believed to have supported Biden.”  Why could the gamers imagine Biden ballots being destroyed, but rule out destruction of ballots supporting Trump?

For the sake of domestic peace, why not try to find a compromise?  Democratic vice-presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has introduced legislation to generalize postal balloting.  Why not, instead, extend polling time, opening polls not only on the second Tuesday in November but on the preceding Saturday and Sunday?  This would provide time to allow voters afraid of Covid-19 to keep distances from each other, as they do when they go to the supermarket.  It would reduce the number of absentee ballots, the time needed for counting and above all the suspicions attached to postal voting.  But the more wary Trump is of postal voting, the more Democrats insist on making it universal.

It becomes clearer and clearer that hatred of Trump has reached such a pitch, that for the Democratic Establishment and its hangers-on, defeating Trump at the polls is not enough. They are practically inciting him to contest the election.  Then they can have something more exciting and decisive: a genuine regime change.

Preparing for Regime Change

The classic regime change scenario involves a contested election, mass street demonstrations including civil disobedience and finally, military intervention.

So, to start with, the gamers posit an authoritarian leader who won’t step down. That’s Trump.

Next, “a show of numbers in the streets – and actions in the streets – may be decisive factors in determining what the public perceives as a just and legitimate outcome.” In an interview

stressing “the flaws in our electoral system,” Transition Integrity Project organizer Gilman said that what we need “is for people to be prepared to take to the streets in nonviolent protest” if appeals to officials do not suffice.

 “We’ve learned over the last couple of months, since the Movement for Black Lives protest really took off again in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, that taking to the streets and showing commitment to a democratic process beyond just the ballot box is a really important part of driving change.”  The demonstrations must be nonviolent, Gilman stressed.

As the Transition Integrity Project report put it, “the scale of recent demonstrations has increased the stakes for the Democratic Party to build strong ties with grassroots organizations and be responsive to the movement’s demands.”  Certain of these grassroots organizations – MoveOn and Black Lives Matter – have enjoyed financial support from  Soros, as the Democratic Party clearly tries to co-opt the protests. 

George Soros. (georgesoros.com)


 

According to the scenarios, such protests could arise not only in case Trump refused to recognize a Biden win, but also, in Game No. 3, in case of a “comfortable Electoral College victory for President Trump (286-to-252) but also a significant popular vote win (52 percent for Trump, 47 percent for Biden).  The game play ended in a constitutional crisis, with threats of secession, and the potential for either a decline into authoritarianism or a radically revamped set of democratic rules that ensure the popular will prevails (abolishment of the Electoral College…)”

The Biden campaign retracted its initial concession, capitalizing “on the public’s outrage that for the third time in 20 years a candidate lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.” The Biden campaign encouraged California, Oregon and Washington to secede “unless Congressional Republicans agreed to a set of structural reforms to fix our democratic system to ensure majority rule.” Congress supported Biden. “It was unclear what the military would do in this situation”.

In reality, Democrats know that they have managed to keep the Permanent State, including the military and intelligence agencies, on their side throughout Trump’s presidency.  Where are the forces that could carry out a pro-Trump coup d’état?

Whose Coup?

Hillary Clinton addressing Democratic convention, July 2016. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr)


 

“During the exercises,” the report notes, “winning ‘the narrative’ emerged as a potentially decisive factor. Either side can expand or contract the ‘margin of contestation’ if they succeed in substantially changing how key decision makers and the public view the ‘facts,’ the risks of action or inaction, or external events such as civil unrest.” 

Winning the narrative appears to be a main purpose of the Transition Integrity Project, and it was quickly seconded in its efforts by top Democrats.

“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Hillary Clinton said in an interview on Aug. 25.

A couple of days later, Al Gore, the former vice president and unsuccessful 2000 Democratic presidential candidate, chimed in.  Trump, he said in a particularly loaded image, is “attempting to put his knee on the neck of democracy” by criticizing mail-in ballots. “He seems to have no compunctions at all about trying to rip apart the social fabric and the political equilibrium of the American people, and he’s strategically planting doubts in advance.”

People ask whether Trump will leave office next Jan. 20. “Well,” said Gore, “it doesn’t matter because it’s not up to him. Because at noon on January 20th, if a new president is elected… the police force, the Secret Service, the military, all of the executive branch officers, will respond to the command and the direction of the new president.”

The Bottom Line

Outside the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, Jan. 24. (World Economic Forum, Mattias Nutt, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Meanwhile, Americans can listen to the extravagant rhetoric of the two enemy camps, calling on them to choose between “authoritarian white supremacy” and “radical Marxist socialism” while offering absolutely nothing in terms of coherent public policy of benefit to the American people and the world. The politicians cling to ineffective office, while the future is being planned elsewhere.

Policy will be designed by the Global Governors, for instance at the next meeting in Davos of the World Economic Forum which, according to its founder and chairman Klaus Schwab, will lay out the “Great Reset” agenda for the Fourth Industrial Revolution that is destined to reshape all our lives. Nicolas Berggruen will be there with his ideas.  So will other billionaires. 

They will not be “conspiring,” but rather laying plans for what they consider best for the world.  There is no political system enabling us to influence or even fully understand the projects they will sponsor. Surely these projects deserve to be sharply debated.  But the politicians supposedly representing us are somewhere else, fighting furiously with each other over contrived issues.

The Electoral College is not the most fatal flaw in American democracy.  Rather, it’s the monopoly of political discourse by a two-party system fueled essentially by personal ambition, taking its cues from lobbies, the military industrial complex, Wall Street and the Global Governors. 

Diana Johnstone lives in Paris. Her latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020).

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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The current state of American democracy after many generations of virtually unchallenged plutocratic evisceration. Can this be fixed?

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