Dark clouds have been gathering over the American empire for a long time, and the functional collapse may be a lot closer than its ruling elites anticipate. But who's really paying attention at the top?
The 21st century has seen the enormous inequality of previous periods expand to proportions that only those confined to a mental concentration camp could see as a system of democracy and equality, though idealized as such by majorities reduced to accepting the purchase of elections by a wealthy minority under the guise of choice for the working majority.
In America, fading from dominance as the center of the global system but still frighteningly powerful militarily and thus a menace to all humanity, voices are raised in opposition to that power, but so far successfully divided into minorities of relatively less social impact which only rewards segments of the population to keep in power the smallest minority with the greatest state control: the wealthiest 1% who own and operate what passes for a democracy but is no more so than the one which elected Hitler and the Nazis in Germany in the last century.
And that doctored historic memory of political fascism is constantly used to keep current populations in line, warning them against suffering the horrors of pre-second world war capitalism, rather than becoming aware of that system’s present horrors kept nearly secret by consciousness control and mind management techniques to maintain the prevailing disorder of our social life in maintenance of the dominating order of their private profits.
Capitalism ruled Germany before and after Hitler and still rules up to the present moment, as it does in the USA and most of the global community. Food, clothing, shelter, war, peace, health, illness, pets, tattoos and everything else are for sale at the market and available to any who can afford the price, and to none who cannot. If there is a private profit to be made, the product will be available. If only the public good will be served, forget about it. That is why we spend more than 700 billion a year on war and more than seventy billion on pets while hundreds of thousands live in the street and medical workers and the entire health care community are criminally over-worked and suffering breakdowns leading to death by disease and suicide during the present capitalist pandemic.
Germany in the 1930s, like the United States, was in the grips of an economy near collapse and moved to total ruling class domination without pretense of democratic values by putting the commanding heights of that economy under control of the state. That state, always an arm of ruling power, was a force to keep the peace among the rich and poor by having elections to maintain wealth and poverty in as polite terms as possible, even creating the world’s first national health care system long before the collapse.
The USA was also in economic chaos with as much as 25% unemployment and communist and socialist parties demanding real democracy, which would have meant radical transformation of the economic system.
Contrary to common beliefs, Hitler and his Nazis quickly implemented some economic reforms to keep at least a segment of the population pacified if not exuberantly supportive. "The People's Car" (Volkswagen) and infrastructure works were among the projects the Nazis introduced to win over the working class.
While more overtly oppressive fascist capitalism took power in Germany, the social democratic form prevailed in the USA, as cooler ruling class heads saw that the market left alone, under religious belief that freedom would flower under the idiotic doctrine that buying cheap and selling dear was the word of god, was a bit more dangerous than minority wealth could rely on. It could lead to social revolution.
The capitalist war saw the USA triumph and after millions of deaths and incredible destruction the social democratic model took hold in the western world and market interference was allowed to the extent that dreadful poverty would not be visible to most of the population and confined to relatively invisible-by-design communities in national and foreign ghettos.
For some fifty years now that phase has been under assault by a return to free market fanaticism as an answer to the only slightly higher taxes and lower profits of the social democratic form, with practitioners of both schools preventing the people from seeing that it is the system itself and not the way it is arranged that guarantees failure for most at tremendous benefit to only some.
The 21st century has seen the enormous inequality of previous periods expand to proportions that only those confined to a mental concentration camp could see as a system of democracy and equality, though idealized as such by majorities reduced to accepting the purchase of elections by a wealthy minority under the guise of choice for the working majority. In the past, thousands of multi-millionaires were somehow rationalized as healthy aspects of capitalism since they would invest in businesses and thereby create jobs and prosperity for the toiling masses and their professionally trained upper classes.
At present, there are some 700 earthly creatures called billionaires, having amassed such incredible wealth and power over perverse democracies that past tyrants seen as deities by their subjects might in present terms amount to no more than what were once called rich peasants. These incredibly wealthy individuals shame the very notion of democracy and are treated as more royal than past deities in hopes that they will invest in “my” identity group’s security and that will somehow represent success for the millions left out of “my” group. Viva capitalist democracy.
At a time when the most incredibly massive state and personal debt ever accumulated have the system tilting precariously on a mountain of symbolic finance with roots in a foundation of substantial fiction, a capitalist pandemic has both aggravated the situation further while also making radical change necessary not just to overcome the pandemic but ultimately capitalism itself. So, the people are bombarded anew into fear of political fascism bringing on further deprivation leading many to be swept up in fake-left and phony-right political excuses for the preservation of the moral toilet of an economic system which must be changed for humanity, which is composed of far more earthly beings than our relatively tiny American numbers.
There are more than 7.5 billion humans on earth and the shockingly anti-democratic inequality in America is far more horrifying on a global scale, but the American numbers are bad enough to provoke social revolution once the public finds out, which will never be the case as long as bi-partisan capital owns and operates both major political parties.
The class differences which have existed since organized states began have taken on far more malevolence and created greater threats to the future of humanity under the rules of market capitalism which have rewarded many while destroying far more. The seemingly good life enjoyed by some under alleged democracy are really no different than they were under slavery, when many lived in a degree of comfort even though not owning slaves, just as a shrinking middle class now survives without owning any capital, let alone exercising any control over it. And rest assured that being privileged enough to own some stock in a major corporation will not mean the 1% will be phoning you asking your advice before hiring cheaper immigrant labor or laying off more expensive American workers in pursuit of still greater private profits.
The next American election will offer the usual lesser evil choice to be accepted by a minority of the electorate in a supposed exercise of democracy that would make sense only in a world where pimping meant true love and starvation meant being on a diet, the organizing and action that must take place to end the virus of con-19 and its parent capitalism will need to take on greater efforts than ever to avoid potential disaster not only for America but humanity itself.
Democracy, in material reality and not continued rape of language, is more necessary than ever, to bring about another world and not just a different America. We will all need to think globally while acting locally, and then not just politically but economically before that, lest our politics continually reinforce rather than transform social reality. And the lives of the American and global majority matter more than ever but will amount to less than nothing if we only think of ourselves as nationals or different-than-human members of subjugated groups, and not our class of humanity which is now, as always, the overwhelming majority of working people on the planet.
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
The Global Reset – Unplugged
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Peter Koenig
Imagine, you are living in a world that you are told is a democracy – and you may even believe it – but in fact your life and fate is in the hands of a few ultra-rich, ultra-powerful and ultra-inhuman oligarchs. They may be called Deep State, Illuminati, or simply the Beast, or anything else obscure or untraceable – it doesn’t matter. They are less than the 0.0001%.
For lack of a better expression, let’s call them for now “obscure individuals”. These obscure individuals who pretend running our world have never been elected. We don’t need to name them. You will figure out who they are, and why they are famous, and some of them totally invisible. They have created structures, or organisms without any legal format. They are fully out of international legality. They are a forefront for the Beast. Maybe there are several competing Beasts. But they have the same objective: A New or One World Order (NWO, or OWO).
These obscure individuals are running, for example, The World Economic Forum (WEF – representing Big Industry, Big Finance and Big Fame), the Group of 7 – G7, the Group of 20 – G20 (the leaders of the economically” strongest” nations). There are also some lesser entities, called the Bilderberg Society, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Chatham House and more. The members of all of them are overlapping. Even this expanded forefront combined represents less than 0.001%. They all have superimposed themselves over sovereign national elected and constitutional governments, and over THE multinational world body, the United Nations, the UN.
In fact, they have coopted the UN to do their bidding. UN Director Generals, as well as the DGs of the multiple UN-suborganizations, are chosen – mostly by the US, with the consenting nod of their European vassals – according to the candidate’s political and psychological profile. If his or her ‘performance’ as head of the UN or head of one of the UN suborganizations fails, his or her days are counted. Coopted or created by the Beast(s) are also, the European Union, the Bretton Woods Organizations, World Bank and IMF, as well as the World Trade Organization (WTO) – and – make no mistake – the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It has no teeth. Just to make sure the law is always on the side of the lawless.
In addition to the key international financial institutions, WB and IMF, there are the so-called regional development banks and similar financial institutions, keeping the countries of their respective regions in check. In the end its financial or debt-economy that controls everything. Western neoliberal banditry has created a system, where political disobedience can be punished by economic oppression or outright theft of national assets in international territories. The system’s common denominator is the (still) omnipresent US-dollar.
The supremacy of these obscure unelected individuals becomes ever more exposed. We, the People consider it “normal” that they call the shots, not what we call – or once were proud of calling, our sovereign nations and sovereignly elected governments. They have become a herd of obedient sheep. The Beast has gradually and quietly taken over. We haven’t noticed. It’s the salami tactic: You cut off slice by tiny slice and when the salami is gone, you realize that you have nothing left, that your freedom, your civil and human rights are gone. By then it’s too late. Case in point is the US Patriot Act. It was prepared way before 9/11. Once 9/11 “happened”, the Patriot Legislation was whizzed through Congress in no time – for the people’s future protection – people called for it for fear – and – bingo, the Patriot Act took about 90% of the American population’s freedom and civil rights away. For good.
We have become enslaved to the Beast. The Beast calls the shots on boom or bust of our economies, on who should be shackled by debt, when and where a pandemic should break out, and on the conditions of surviving the pandemic, for example, social confinement. And to top it all off – the instruments the Beast uses, very cleverly, are a tiny-tiny invisible enemy, called a virus, and a huge but also invisible monster, called FEAR. That keeps us off the street, off reunions with our friends, and off our social entertainment, theatre, sports, or a picnic in the park.
Soon the Beast will decide who will live and who will die, literally – if we let it. This may be not far away. Another wave of pandemic and people may beg, yell and scream for a vaccine, for their death knell, and for the super bonanza of Big Pharma – and towards the objectives of the eugenicists blatantly roaming the world – https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_innovating_to_zero?language=en#t-11976. There is still time to collectively say NO. Collectively and solidarily.
Take the latest case of blatant imposture. Conveniently, after the first wave of Covid-19 had passed, at least in the Global North, where the major world decisions are made, in early June 2020, the unelected WEF Chairman, Klaus Schwab, announced “The Great Reset”. Taking advantage of the economic collapse – the crisis shock, as in “The Shock Doctrine” – Mr. Schwab, one of the Beast’s frontrunners, announces openly what the WEF will discuss and decide for the world-to-come in their next Davos Forum in January 2021. For more details see https://www.globalresearch.ca/davos-great-reset/5715515 .
Will, We, The People, accept the agenda of the unelected WEF?
A professional enabler for the global elites, Klaus Schwab is major figure behind the WEF machinery of plutocratic coordination. In Latin America, such individuals are aptly called "lameculos".
Mind you, it’s all connected. There are no coincidences. The infamous Agenda 2021 which coincides with and complements the so-called (UN) Agenda 2030, will be duly inaugurated by the WEF’s official declaration of The Great Reset, in January 2021. Similarly, the implementation of the agenda of The Great Reset began in January 2020, by the launch of the corona pandemic – planned for decades with the latest visible events being the 2010 Rockefeller Report with its “Lockstep Scenario”, and Event 201, of 18 October in NYC which computer-simulated a corona pandemic, leaving within 18 months 65 million deaths and an economy in ruin, programmed just a few weeks before the launch of the actual corona pandemic. See COVID-19, We Are Now Living the “Lock Step Scenario” and https://www.globalresearch.ca/global-capitalism-world-government-and-the-corona-crisis/5712312 and https://www.globalresearch.ca/moderna-covid-vaccine-trials/5713705. ….
The Beast’s nefarious plan to implement what’s really behind the UN Agenda 2030 is the little heard-of Agenda ID2020. See The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is “Agenda ID2020”. It has been created and funded by the vaccination guru Bill Gates, and so has GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations), the association of Big Pharma – involved in creating the corona vaccines, and which funds along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) a major proportion of WHO’s budget.
Following the official path of the UN Agenda 2030 of achieving the SDGs, the ‘implementing’ Agenda ID2020 – which is currently being tested on school children in Bangladesh – will provide digitized IDs possibly in the form of nano-chips implanted along with compulsory vaccination programs, will promote digitization of money and the rolling out of 5G – which would be needed to upload and monitor personal data on the nano chips and to control the populace. Agenda ID2020 will most likely also include ‘programs’ – through vaccination? – of significantly reducing world population. Eugenics is an important component in the control of future world population under a NOW / OWO – see also Georgia Guidestones, mysteriously built in 1980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptions.
The ruling elite used the lockdown as an instrument to carry out this agenda. Its implementation would naturally face massive protests, organized and funded along the same lines as were the BLM protests and demonstrations. They may not be peaceful – and may not be planned as being peaceful. Because to control the population in the US and in Europe, where most of the civil unrest would be expected, a total militarization of the people is required. This is well under preparation.
In his essay “The Big Plantation” https://www.globalresearch.ca/big-plantation/5716077, John Steppling reports from a NYT article that a “minimum of 93,763 machine guns, 180,718 magazine cartridges, hundreds of silencers and an unknown number of grenade launchers have been provided to state and local police departments in the US since 2006. This is in addition to at least 533 planes and helicopters, and 432 MRAPs — 9-foot high, 30-ton Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles with gun turrets and more than 44,900 pieces of night vision equipment, regularly used in nighttime raids in Afghanistan and Iraq.” He adds that this militarization is part of a broader trend. Since the late 1990s, about 89 percent of police departments in the United States serving populations of 50,000 people or more had a PPU (Police Paramilitary Unit), almost double of what existed in the mid-1980s. He refers to these militarized police as the new Gestapo.
Even before Covid, about 15% to 20% of the population was on or below the poverty line in the United States. The post-covid lockdown economic annihilation will at least double that percentage – and commensurately increase the risk for civil turbulence and clashes with authorities – further enhancing the reasoning for a militarized police force. --------- None of these scenarios will, of course, be presented to the public by the WEF in January 2021. These are decisions taken behind closed doors by the key actors for the Beast. However, this grandiose plan of the Great Reset does not have to happen. There is at least half the world population and some of the most powerful countries, economically and militarily – like China and Russia – opposed to it. “Reset” maybe yes, but not in these western terms. In fact, a reset of kinds is already happening with China about to roll out a new People’s Bank of China backed blockchain-based cryptocurrency, the crypto RMB, or yuan. This is not only a hard currency based on a solid economy, it is also supported by gold.
While President Trump keeps trashing China for unfair trade, for improperly managing the covid pandemic, for stealing property rights – China bashing no end – that China depends on the US and that the US will cut trading ties with China – or cut ties altogether, China is calling Trump’s bluff. China is quietly reorienting herself towards the ASEAN countries plus Japan (yes, Japan!) and South Korea, where trade already today accounts for about 15% of all China’s trade and is expected to double in the next five years.
True, China’s exports did decline by about 3% in April 2020 as a result of the covid-lockdown, but US exports decreased by almost 8% in the same period. It is clear that the vast majority of US industries could not survive without Chinese supply chains. The western dependence on Chinese medical supplies is particularly strong. Let alone Chinese dependence by US consumers. In 2019, US total consumption, about 70% of GDP, amounted to $13.3 trillion, of which a fair amount is directly imported from China or dependent on ingredients from China.
JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Israel hawk premier B. Netanyahu at a WEF meet. A large number of attendees are, or should be, technically, indicted for fraud or war crimes.
At present, the dollar is fiat money, debt-money created from thin air. It has no backing whatsoever. Therefore, its worth as a reserve currency is increasingly decaying, especially vis-à-vis the new crypto-yuan from China. In order to compete with the Chinese yuan, the US Government would have to move away from its monetary Ponzi-scheme, by separating itself from the 1913 Federal Reserve Act and print her own US-economy- and possibly gold-backed (crypto) money – not fiat FED-money, as is the case today. That would mean cutting the more than 100-year old ties to the Rothschild and Co. clan-owned FED, and creating a real peoples-owned central bank. Not impossible, but highly improbable. Here, two Beasts might clash, as world power is at stake.
Meanwhile, China, with her philosophy of endless creation would continue forging ahead unstoppably with her mammoth socioeconomic development plan of the 21st Century, the Belt and Road Initiative, connecting and bridging the world with infrastructure for land and maritime transport, with joint research and industrial projects, cultural exchanges – and not least, multinational trade with “win-win” characteristics, equality for all partners – towards a multi-polar world, towards a world with a common future for mankind.
Today already more than 120 countries are associated with BRI – and the field is wide open for others to join – and to defy, unmask and unplug The Great Reset of the West.
Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! - Essays from the Resistance. Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Arch swamp insider Jay Clayton: Trump's natural choice.
The Republican Fox ‘News’ operation didn’t mention any of this but just gave the boilerplate, “President Trump nominated the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, to replace Geoffrey Berman as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, late Friday night in what appears to be political shakeup.”
However, a libertarian financial news site, Zero Hedge, posted on June 22nd an article by a fellow-libertarian Tom Luongo, and this was overtly pro-Trump, because libertarians oppose regulation (anything that the government imposes to restrain criminality by corporations and their executives and owners) — it can even be defined as hostility toward regulation. Luongo headlined “The US Is In Civil War (And Why Berman's Firing Matters)”, and he said:
From the moment the protests against the killing of George Floyd were hijacked into looting and rioting I worried about this turning into something far greater, something with a far higher purpose.
Within a couple of days it was obvious the U.S. was now the subject of a color revolution of the same type and build up that occurred in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Egypt, Serbia and others.
And it’s pretty clear the color for our revolution isn’t orange or brown or violet, it’s black.
The questions I have are why this is happening now? The obvious answer is the full court press to deny Trump a second term. That’s a practically stated goal at this point.
But I feel this is far deeper than that, and likely has to do with knowing that Trump has pieces in place post-Jeffrey Epstein raid/murder to upset the Deep State’s apple cart. …
Useful idiots eventually become useless eaters in any post-Marxist revolution worth discussing.
But for the people who foment these things. They have to start with laying the groundwork. And the stronger the local cultural institutions and local economic power the longer and harder they have to work to undermine it.
The U.S. has been under constant attack this way since before even World War II, going back to Comintern (which never ended, it just morphed into today’s NGO’s)
Trump and Orban represent leaders who understand this problem explicitly and are trying to dismantle the apparatus arrayed against them.
No mention is made in any Republican media regarding the obvious corruptness of Trump’s having chosen to lead the SEC a corporate insider and professional defender of corporations, who also happens to be an investor in a money-laundering operation, and now reassigning him to become instead the U.S. prosecutor against Wall Street banks (though Clayton had never even been a prosecutor).
Clayton’s wife Gretchen had resigned from being one of the many Vice Presidents of Goldman Sachs in order for her husband to be allowed to lead the SEC. But Trump wanted him now to lead the prosecution of Wall Streeters, and this certainly indicated that Trump was just as much a protector of megabank CEOs and top executives as Obama had been. Like Obama had secretly told them: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. … I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you. … I’m going to shield you.” And he did.
So, this time it’s a Republican President who will “clean the swamp.” (Or so libertarians might somehow hope.) The only difference is that instead of Democrats promising to do it, Republicans are. And now Joe Biden is. Nothing changes. And each Party’s media attacks the other Party.
Later, on June 20th, was announced that Berman’s deputy Audrey Strauss would lead the office on an interim basis, as “Acting” Prosecutor on Wall Street, and that Berman said of her “She is the smartest, most principled, and effective lawyer with whom I have ever had the privilege of working.” She had been an elite corporate defense lawyer, as had been her boss, Berman. None of them had had any experience as a prosecutor. All of them were career defenders of America’s top corporations. That’s the type of career the U.S. Government wants to ‘police’ Wall Street. And the American public thinks that this is an acceptable Government. The problem isn’t only Trump, and it’s not only his opponents. It instead is virtually everyone who ascends to the top of the U.S. Government. If one’s career isn’t dependent upon American billionaires, then one stands next to no real chance to make it into that level. Billionaires also control the ‘news’-media. So, the public accept this system, the system that basically authorizesbillionaires to control the Government. It’s the modern form of serfdom, and it’s called ‘democracy’. People such as Clayton, Berman, and Strauss might represent different mega-corporations, but they know their place and whom their real bosses are. Their bosses might be different individuals, but they all are of the same class. It’s a class of around 600 individuals. And it’s the class that controls this Government.
One class, two political Parties. But really just one big party.
UNLESS STATED OTHERWISE, ALL IMAGES, CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
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Meet the far-right oligarchs working to topple Mexico’s progressive President AMLO
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By José Guadalupe Argüello III and Ben Norton THE GRAYZONE
A Trump-like Mexican oligarch, Gilberto Lozano, is leading a coalition of corporate leaders and far-right fanatics called FRENA to try to overthrow President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s victory in Mexico’s 2018 presidential election marked a historic feat, promising a respite from a roughly 40-year period of continuous neoliberal rule over the country.
López Obrador, better known as AMLO, is taking Mexico down a new route toward greater national autonomy. Under a revolutionary process that he calls the Fourth Transformation, he is fighting systemic corruption and rampant theft of public resources, while boosting social benefits for the poor.
From the beginning of AMLO’s term in December 2018, members of the parties that have dominated Mexican politics for decades, particularly the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and neoliberal Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), have worked tirelessly to block the new administration’s reforms and abort the Fourth Transformation.
Powerful oligarchs have also leveraged their substantial economic power to try to destabilize and ultimately unseat López Obrador – and have sought foreign support to do so.
In the first part of this investigative series, The Grayzone reported on the Broad Opposition Bloc(Bloque Opositor Amplio, or BOA), a coalition of opposition parties, corporate elites, and media outlets that are seeking to remove AMLO from power, and appear to have support in Washington and on Wall Street.
But there is another opposition alliance, which is listed as a participant in the BOA but is even more extreme in its ideology and its tactics, that deserves deeper scrutiny.
The symbol of FRENA, Mexico’s far-right National Anti-AMLO Front
The extremist National Anti-AMLO Front (FRENA) proposes a color revolution
On May 30 and throughout the weekend of June 13 and 14, traffic across Mexico was disrupted with motorcades of honking cars displaying signs of opposition to President López Obrador. In the days leading up to the event, opposition supporters in the country, and in parts of the United States, had been called to protest in vehicle caravans under the slogan “Andrés López, we don’t want you.”
The group that organized these protests calls itself the National Anti-AMLO Front (Frente Nacional Anti-AMLO in Spanish), and uses the acronym FRENAAA, typically simplified to FRENA. This far-right Mexican group modeled its demonstrations against AMLO after similar protests organized by the neo-fascist party Vox in Spain.
FRENA represents one of the most extreme – and also elite – opposition groups in Mexico. And its explicitly stated goal is to force AMLO to step down as president by November 2020, well before the next scheduled presidential elections in 2024.
The National Anti-AMLO Front comprises an alliance of some of the most fanatically right-wing forces in Mexico. FRENA characterizes the elected government as a “communist dictatorship,” and claims López Obrador, a center-left progressive nationalist, is part of a conspiracy to implement communism through gender equity, education equality, and homosexuality.
According to the official FRENA website, the group is organized in a top-down fashion, with a governing council comprised of 67 elites – although only four of these are publicly named. This council formulates strategies to remove AMLO, which are then implemented by various so-called volunteer commissions, led by coordinators across Mexico.
A section of the FRENA’s site, the “Strategy of the National Front,” lays out three stages toward its goal of regime change. It claims that “for security purposes this is a draft of a detailed plan to save Mexico from a communist tyrant” (any emphasis with capital letters is from the website):
To seek out AMLO’s resignation before November 30, 2020 utilizing the law and the media, but mostly SOCIAL PRESSURE.
Upon the success of the first stage, to continue to prepare a UNIFIED candidate for the new elections, surrounded by all opposition parties as the SOLE desire OF THE MEXICAN PEOPLE.
National Reconstruction, as a large conglomerate of organized citizens to be the supreme organ of vigilance, managing the destiny towards a new Mexico.
In the same section on the FRENA website, visitors can learn about US government-backed “color revolution” mastermind Gene Sharp and obtain a free copy of his soft-coup manual, From Dictatorship to Democracy, which is accessible as a Spanish-language PDF or audiobook.
As Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal have previously reported at The Grayzone, Gene Sharp worked with a former analyst for the US Defense Intelligence Agency to create a “strategic blueprint that weaponized protest as a form of hybrid warfare, aiming it at states that resisted Washington’s unipolar domination”.
On its website, FRENA also promotes a documentary on Sharp, in which acolytes credit him with inspiring color revolutions in Serbia, Ukraine, Iran, and Egypt.
FRENA leader Gilberto Lozano intends to add Mexico to this list.
Mexican oligarch and leader of the anti-AMLO front FRENA, in one of his YouTube videos
Gilberto Lozano: ultra-elite oligarch with extreme, fascistic views
Gilberto Lozano González has established himself as one of the most die-hard opponents of President López Obrador.
A mega-rich oligarch from the heartland of Mexico’s elite, Lozano has made himself the figurehead of his National Anti-AMLO Front, FRENA.
Lozano publishes indignant rants on YouTube, where his channel has nearly 150,000 subscribers, calling the elected president a would-be dictator and warning that “the communist agenda is advancing”.
Most of the videos are recorded in Lozano’s opulent mansion, where viewers can see his loft ceilings, fancypaintings, mountain of hats, and grand piano. And the oligarch has a penchant for dramatic flair, posing in front of a statue of an angel armed with a club, or holding up a tray with a caricature of AMLO’s face. This, coupled with Lozano’s entertaining, fury-infused fits, might partly explain the popularity that drives views of his social media videos to well over 50,000.
FRENA leader Gilberto Lozano holding a caricature of AMLO on a tray in one of his YouTube rants
In these often lengthy video rants, Lozano repeats his familiar refrains, ironically accusing López Obrador of carrying out a “soft coup” while simultaneously calling for the elected leader to be removed before November 30 and replaced with an “interim president”.
In fact, FRENA published an open letter to President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and US Ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau this past May, seeking their support.
In the missive, FRENA claimed AMLO is a “tyrant whose sights set on the Latin American Castro-Chavista socialism” and a “commander-in-chief whose agenda is none other than that of the Sao Paulo Forum led from Cuba and supported by Venezuela”.
Claiming to have the support of 2 million Mexicans, FRENA asked the US president “and all levels of your government to stop calling [AMLO] ‘a friend.’ He is not your friend nor your country’s.”
Lozano subsequently shared a link to the letter from his personal Twitter account, adding the note, “Available to talk with you Mr. Trump”. He even apparently included his phone number in the message.
In a follow-up tweet, Lozano added, “I am waiting for this call or audience with [Ambassador] Laundau”.
— ????Sociedad Civil México ???????? (@SocCivilMx) May 27, 2020
But before he became a key figure in the anti-AMLO opposition, Gilberto Lozano was known as one of Mexico’s most powerful business magnates.
Lozano previously directed corporate giant FEMSA, the largest bottler of Coca-Cola in the world, and spent 16 years at the helm of the massive, multibillion-dollar multinational conglomerate the Alfa Group.
He was also the owner of the enormous convenience store chain Oxxo, as well as a distributor of numerous corporate brands, including Heineken.
Lozano is a native of Monterrey, a city in northern Mexico infamous for being controlled by ultra-rich right-wing families with nearly unlimited economic resources – and thus significant sway over their country’s politics. These powerful oligarchs are known collectively as the Grupo Monterrey, or Monterrey Group. And in perfect symbolism of his elite status, Lozano served as president of their Monterrey Football Club.
The businessman has used his extensive connections to put a heavy footprint on Mexican politics. Lozano founded and directs the influential National Citizen Congress (Congreso Nacional Ciudadano, or CNC), a group of oligarchs who claim to be apolitical, but who aggressively lobby for right-wing neoliberal policies, as part of their plan to create a “new Mexico”.
In a lecture at Canada’s McGill University in 2015, Lozano described the strategy of his National Citizen Congress in starkly Gene Sharpian terms: using a “horizontal structure” to build “power and agency.” Combining right-wing populist flair with libertarian and anarchist rhetoric, the oligarch claimed they were ushering in a new “revolution,” weakening and dismantling the state and government institutions in order to construct a decentralized society that ensures “self-determination” and “autonomy” for individuals.
Lozano and his National Citizen Congress also have extensive economic and political connections in the United States. Lozano boasts that he has a network of CNC activists in the US.
The oligarch frequently makes trips to Texas, where he conducts interviews with right-wing US activists, ranting about how AMLO and his Morena party are purportedly destroying Mexico.
FRENA leader Gilberto Lozano doing an interview in Dallas, Texas, discussing National Citizen Congress activities in the US and Mexico
In a trip to Dallas, Texas in November 2018, Lozano discussed the anti-AMLO activities that his National Citizen Congress oversees in both the US and Mexico.
Lozano barked into the camera, condemning then President-elect López Obrador’s transition team for inviting representatives from Venezuela’s internationally recognized government to his forthcoming December inauguration. Although AMLO had not yet taken power, Lozano shrieked that the left-wing leader would turn Mexico into a “corrupt killer dictatorship” with no toilet paper, as he portrayed Venezuela.
Mexican oligarch and FRENA leader Gilberto Lozano ranting about AMLO and Maduro at a Pemex gas station in Houston, Texas
In the video, Lozano claimed that pro-AMLO protesters were being paid by the government. Then, in the comments below, Lozano accused his critics of being bots and fake accounts run by López Obrador’s Morena party.
These might seem like the ravings of a madman, but Gilberto Lozano’s ravings have fallen on fertile social media soil. He is also a regular fixture on Mexico’s mainstream corporate media networks, which are owned by some of the same right-wing oligarchs who want to unseat AMLO.
In May 2019, Lozano and his National Citizen Congress brought an absurd criminal complaint before Mexico’s House of Representatives, formally accusing President López Obrador of treason.
The oligarch leveled more than 20 accusations against AMLO. Among them, local media outlets reported, was “subjugating the Mexican people’s sovereignty, independence, and integrity to foreign interests. His evidence for this incendiary claim was the supposed arrival of Central Americans, Cubans, ISIS cells, Islamists, Africans, and Mara Salvatruchas members.
In his legal complaint, Lozano claimed López Obrador’s policies will destabilize Mexico, destroy the economy, and fuel more violence, endangering women, and even unleashing illnesses and viruses, including ebola.
The influential left-wing public intellectual John Ackerman, a close ally of AMLO, dubbed Lozano “the Mexican Trump“, arguing he uses the “same racist and neofascist discourse as the President of the United States”.
However, Ackerman predicted that Lozano would not succeed as Trump has, because the “Mexican political culture is more resistant than others to fascism.” Ackerman reminded readers that a similarly extreme, Trumpian presidential candidate, Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, only received 5 percent of the vote in the 2018 election.
FRENA’s May 30 car protest and anti-AMLO governors’ support
Gilberto Lozano’s elite National Citizen Congress established the institutional framework for what later became the National Anti-AMLO Front, or FRENA. At this point, they are essentially the same organization – the official CNC Facebook page even changed its username to FRENA.
In 2019, Lozano and the National Citizen Congress helped organize anti-López Obrador demonstrations that were popularly derided at the time as “marchas fifí” – or “bougie marches”, in slang – because they were populated by wealthy upper-class Mexicans.
The FRENA marches from May 30 this year had a similar feel. An independent media outlet called México en Marcha described the caravan in Guadalajara: “this group [of protesters] is no larger than 50 people, but because they are riding in cars and because they have resources to make these signs, their presence is felt a bit more, but in reality, they do not add up to 100 people in the whole state of Jalisco”.
FRENA also paid for professionally made banners in various states of Mexico, reading “In [this state] we don’t want you Andrés López”. Supporters posed for strategic photo ops to try to portray the movement as large and widespread across Mexico.
Hoy miles de mexicanos protestaron en contra del gobierno comunista de @lopezobrador_.
These demonstrations were reminiscent of upper-class marches held in Brazil in the lead-up to the impeachment and soft-coup against left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. They also mirrored the protests held in the elite bastion of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, which set the stage for a military coup. against the elected socialist President Evo Morales in November 2019.
Supporters of AMLO mocked the FRENA protests for their small sizes. And while the demonstrations clearly lacked the support of the majority of working-class Mexicans, the anti-AMLO Front does have friends in high places.
The leaked Broad Opposition Bloc document claimed that governors of 14 of Mexico’s 32 states support the opposition campaign. Of these, seven anti-AMLO governors have refused to follow the central government’s policy to flatten the Covid-19 curve, which is known as the “stop light” plan, and was created by Mexico’s Under-Secretary of Health Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez, an epidemiologist and expert on infectious diseases.
Several of these right-wing governors encouraged and even supported FRENA’s anti-AMLO protests. In the state of Jalisco, for instance, transit police vehicles were spotted sporting signs that said “Fuera (out) López Obrador”. That is to say, Jalisco’s local government used Mexican taxpayer money to assist protests against their elected president.
Jalisco’s opposition governor Enrique Alfaro has earned national notoriety through a series of scandals. This May, a Mexican construction worker named Giovanni López was arrested in Jalisco, allegedly for not wearing a mask, but the police appear to have beaten him to death. He died in the hospital of what doctors said was a traumatic brain injury, and suffered a gunshot wound in his leg.
The death of Giovanni López inspired large protests which began in Jalisco and subsequently spread across Mexico. These drew many parallels to the simultaneous protests in the United States over the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of police.
Moma Nuñez@momanunez22
This is happening right now in Guadalajara, México. A man's life was taken.He was tortured and murdered by the Jalisco State Police because he didn't wear a face mask . WE DEMAND JUSTICE#JusticiaParaGiovanni
Despite the large demonstrations, Alfaro, the Jalisco governor, defended the arrest of Giovanni López. He even claimed that the protesters were from other parts of Mexico, blaming the protests on López Obrador and accusing his Morena party of encouraging violence. The inflammatory rhetoric fueled further unrest, exposing the extremism of much of the anti-AMLO opposition.
Alfaro also attracted national attention when it was revealed that he had paid more than 1 million Mexican pesos (nearly USD $50,000) of Jalisco state funds to outlets run by the prominent right-wing media personality Enrique Krauze to spread propaganda praising the governor.
In its second anti-AMLO protest, FRENA claimed to have 140 vehicle caravans across Mexico and the United States on the weekend of June 13 and 14.
Protests were reported in all major Mexican urban centers, along with major cities in Texas, California, Michigan, Illinois, and Washington, as well as Toronto, Canada.
As in the demonstrations in May, these featured many luxury cars and trucks, bearing signs with messages like “Leave now AMLO, we don’t want communism”.
Es la BOA.
SR PRESIDENTE ni original es hace malas copias de sus ídolos CASTRO,MADURO,CHAVEno sabe leer instrucciones ya no improvisar no ve que todo le sale mal manda a lady infracción y manda reventadores y aquien le pasan la factura tonto de remate#AMLOseVA#FRENAAApic.twitter.com/OMx3jD9KIl
Mexican Twitter was quick to point out the unintentional comedy of the protests, such as a viral photo of a banner on the back of an SUV that read, “No to Communism, No to Socialism, No to Mozimism, Mexico is Catholic”. Mozimismo is not a real ideology; it is fictitious term made up by trolls.
Supporters of AMLO also made their presence felt. Another image went viral on Twitter of a humble working-class Mexican holding a sign saying “AMLO, here in Dzan, Yucatan we love you! To hell with the fifís”.
— Margen izquierdo ???????? (@MarBianhi) June 15, 2020
The anti-AMLO Front is still relatively small, and almost entirely dominated by Mexican elites. But FRENA claims to be growing rapidly, and the second protest practically doubled the size of the first in the number of participating cities, and a third protest is scheduled for June 27 and 28.
FRENA member Pedro Ferriz de Con calls for foreign intervention to remove AMLO
Although FRENA lacks a grassroots, working-class base, it has the support of some powerful elites. Not all of these oligarchs are publicly disclosed, however.
While the National Anti-AMLO Front says there are 67 members of its elite governing council, only four of these are named. Alongside Gilberto Lozano, the FRENA website lists Pedro Ferriz de Con, Rafael Loret de Mola, and Juan Bosco Abascal.
Prominent anti-AMLO activist Pedro Ferriz de Con, who called for Mexican oligarchs to overthrow the president, with foreign backing. A classical traitor by any standard.
Pedro Ferriz de Con is an anti-AMLO journalist known for his propensity for hyperbolic statements, like claiming “the government has not had this many problems since the Mexican Revolution”. Ferriz ran for president in 2018 as an independent candidate.
This April, an audio recording was leaked in which Ferriz de Con called “for AMLO to be removed from office with the help of a group of businessmen along with foreign powers”.
These comments ignited a national scandal in Mexico, leading a group of citizens to bring a case against Ferriz de Con to the attorney general’s office.
Ferriz de Con published a video on Gilberto Lozano’s YouTube channel voicing his full-throated backing for FRENA. He also repeated his characteristically exaggerated claims, insisting that López Obrador’s government is the worst and most dangerous that Ferriz de Con has seen in his nearly 70 years of life, or that he had ever heard about from his father.
Under AMLO, “We see that there is not, as there was in the past, at least an opportunity for the free market, free competition, respect for private property, for intellectual property, for industrial property”, Ferriz de Con declared.
“I don’t want, for my children, for the next generations, to leave Mexico immersed in socialism. And today I’m seeing that this country is becoming the head of the Sao Paulo Forum”, he added, referring to an international conference of left-wing parties in Latin America.
Ferriz de Con concluded the video by insisting that FRENA should take advantage of the coronavirus pandemic, which he gleefully predicted would lead to unemployment, “enormous capital flight”, and a lack of foreign investment, in order to oust López Obrador.
FRENA member Rafael Loret de Mola, an elite neoliberal journalist
Opposition journalist Rafael Loret de Mola, a leading member of the anti-AMLO front FRENA
Joining Lozano and Ferriz de Con on the FRENA governing council is Rafael Loret de Mola, who retired very publicly in August 2019, after 38 years as a journalist, in an act of protest against AMLO, whom he accused of persecuting right-wing reporters.
Loret de Mola also made a video strongly endorsing FRENA, demonizing AMLO’s Fourth Transformation as the “Fifth Trap”, calling the López Obrador government a “farce”.
Although he has formally left the media, Loret de Mola’s son Carlos is continuing his father’s legacy as a viciously anti-AMLO journalist.
Carlos Loret de Mola previously hosted a popular news program on the Mexican media conglomerate Televisa. The younger Loret de Mola has worked with the top corporate media networks in both Mexico and the US, and currently writes for the Washington Post.
Both Lorets de Mola have also been instrumental in providing the intellectual justification for neoliberal economic policies rammed through in previous Mexican governments. Before AMLO’s presidency, the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and neoliberal Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) both worked to make constitutional changes that privatized Mexico’s natural resources and state industries, resulting in private and international corporate involvement in the energy sector, particularly in oil and electricity.
These neoliberal reforms were extremely controversial, given public ownership of Mexico’s substantial fossil fuel reserves was enshrined in the country’s 1917 constitution, which was drafted during the Mexican Revolution.
So to justify and maintain these changes, and to criticize any group or individual opposed to them, the Mexican right-wing dispatched a team of self-declared “intellectuals” to influence the public. In Mexico, the public intellectual is still revered as a mainstream figure that has the ear of large parts of the population.
Rafael and Carlos Loret de Mola have diligently played the part of these anti-AMLO public intellectuals, spilling much ink criticizing the president.
The AMLO government has a series of “Essential Projects and Programs” that aim to wrest back the energy independence Mexico achieved in the late 1930s. Carlos Loret de Mola has harshly criticized AMLO’s National Electric Energy Plan, arguing that the state-owned power utility the Federal Electricity Commission (Comisión Federal de Electricidad, or CFE) is “inefficient”. His proposed alternative, of course, is “private initiative“, which he claims is cheaper and better for the environment — an argument challenged by actual scientific experts.
Carlos Loret de Mola and the Council of the Americas: the Washington connection
What is most noteworthy about this opposition figure, however, are his close links to the Americas Society / Council of the Americas (ASCOA), a US-based business organization posing as a think tank that lobbies for neoliberal policies to advance the interests of the most powerful corporations in North and South America.
ASCOA was founded at the height of the Cold War by oligarch David Rockefeller, expressly in order to unite efforts by corporate oligarchs to crush the growing socialist movements in Latin America.
ASCOA is funded by some of the biggest corporate giants on Earth, including Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BlackRock, Citigroup, Google, J.P. Morgan, Monsanto, Walmart, and Boeing. Correspondingly, it has pushed for aggressive measures to topple left-wing governments in Latin America, backing numerous coups.
Carlos Loret de Mola gave a speech to the Americas Society / Council of the Americas in 2015, titled “The Evolving Economics of Mexico’s Drug Cartels”. ASCOA’s media arm, Americas Quarterly, returned the favor, publishing a fawning review of his TV broadcast in Chiapas, arguing how the “Mexican government’s savings plans could come at the cost of people they are trying to help”.
Even more intriguing is an event that Carlos Loret de Mola held with ASCOA two days after AMLO won the July 2018 presidential election. ASCOA says it hosted “an off-the-record conference call with Carlos Loret de Mola, who shared insights into the implications of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s landslide victory”. There is no recording or transcript of this call anywhere. Moreover, the call was “an invite-only program”; the only way to have participated was to pay to be an elite corporate “member” of ASCOA, alongside the most powerful corporations on Earth.
ASCOA’s private call with anti-AMLO journalist Carlos Loret de Mola, an invite-only event for corporate members
FRENA’s religious extremist member Juan Bosco Abascal warns of the “Synagogue of Satan”
The last currently known member of the FRENA governing council is Juan Bosco Abascal, an elite businessman with very strange fundamentalist religious beliefs.
On his Facebook page, where he posts non-stop anti-AMLO propaganda and has nearly 13,000 followers, Abascal says he worked as a “leader for human development projects” for restaurant and hotel chains, the Jalisco state’s finance ministry, and Pemex, the Mexican state-owned oil company.
Abascal also helped lead an ultra-conservative NGO that calls itself Family, Force of the Future. There, he served as a consultant and speaker, addressing themes such as “death, culture, abortion, the pill, and other scourges”.
Juan Bosco Abascal, a leader of the anti-AMLO Front FRENA, arguing in a YouTube rant that Free Masons are trying to create a New World Order to control the planet, like Presidents Chávez and Maduro in Venezuela
Keeping in line with his religious extremism, Abascal says he is currently a teacher for Regnum Christi, an international federation of the Catholic Church. The priests and seminarians in Regnum Christi make up the fanatical Legionnaires, which the Wall Street Journal described as a “fast-growing conservative Roman catholic order” backed by “a handful of Latin American billionaires and some of the world’s top financiers”.
Regnum Christi “concentrates on ministering to the wealthy and powerful in the belief that by evangelizing society’s leaders, the beneficial impact on society is multiplied”, the Wall Street Journal explained. In other words, it pushes a trickle-down spirituality.
The Catholic order’s most infamous Mexican member is a priest by the name of Marcial Maciel, who was accused of sexually molesting eight teenage seminarians over two decades.
Juan Bosco Abascal has made his fundamentalist religious views very clear in lengthy video rants on Facebook and YouTube, in which the prominent anti-AMLO opposition figure frequently cites the Bible to explain how the “universal Free Masons” are trying to establish a “New World Order” and create a “world government” by using the international drug trade and mass media.
Abascal portrays leftist grassroots movements in Latin America, such as Venezuela’s Chavismo, as examples of this Satanic influence, citing Presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro as symbols of his nefarious conspiracy.
In an even more shocking YouTube rant, Abascal advises parents how to “cure” their LGBT children. He argues that “being gay, in whatever of its 120 forms, does not have a genetic or biological basis. They are all emotional and psycho-sexual deformities caused by inadequate parents and the toxic environment in which children were raised.”
In addition to warning in his videos of the threat of “losing our souls in the Synagogue of Satan or Church of the Anti-Christ,” Abascal has written two books pushing these deranged conspiracies.
One book-length screed blames virtually all of the world’s problems on “postmodernism“, warning of “the modern enslavement of humanity by the postmodern phenomena against Virtue, such as Trivialization, Desacralization, Dechristianization, Disintegration of the Family, and many more.”
The other book by Abascal, a novel titled From the Nest of the Serpent, reflects the anti-AMLO activist’s extreme-right worldview. It tells the story of a brave multimillionaire protagonist who, inspired by his Christian faith, refuses to work with the global drug mafia; so the bad guys bribe the corrupt politicians who “abandoned their Catholic faith” to murder his family members. The capitalist oligarch responds by forming a private army he calls the “Spartan League,” and takes his battle to the “Universal Masonry,” declaring a war to rid the planet of drugs and Satanic influence.
In case it wasn’t already clear that Abascal sees himself and his elite friends as the multimillionaire protagonist of the novel, he situates the story in Mexico.
The cover of the book employs textbook anti-Semitic imagery, displaying a Star of David caging the planet.
The far-right Christian extremist book “From the Nest of the Serpent”, by anti-AMLO FRENA activist Juan Bosco Abascal
Abascal’s fascistic views did not discourage Gilberto Lozano from openly promoting him as an “esteemed member” of FRENA. On his personal YouTube channel, Lozano published footage of Abascal endorsing the National Anti-AMLO Front. In the video rant, Abascal refers to AMLO as “MALO” (bad in Spanish), and repeatedly calls the global coronavirus pandemic the “China plague.” Abascal attacks the Mexican health system and medical professionals, and spins an elaborate conspiracy: The prominent FRENA member claims that the López Obrador government has used Covid-19 as a weapon, that it “intentionally let Mexico get infected with the virus” in order to implement its revolutionary Fourth Transformation, and that the country is now “heading to a monstrous, unimaginable crisis.”
Prominent FRENA member Juan Bosco Abascal spreading coronavirus conspiracies on Gilberto Lozano’s YouTube channel
In the past, one other member of FRENA had been publicly disclosed: Pedro Luis Martín Bringas, a prominent shareholder in the Soriana Organization, a grocery store chain based in Gilberto Lozano’s hometown of Monterrey and one of the businesses granted a tax waiver under previous governments.
Martín Bringas appears to have been kicked out of FRENA on May 17, however, according to the website.
One point of ire for the big business community is the AMLO administration’s efforts to force businesses to pay their current and back taxes, in order to provide much-needed government revenue.
FRENA brands gender equality and homosexuality a communist conspiracy
The cast of delirious right-wing fanatics arrayed against Lopez Obrador may seem too fringe to have a sizable impact on Mexican politics, but these are precisely the same kind of extremists that have touched off successful campaigns to overthrow leftist governments in Latin America in the past.
A close look at the FRENA website reflects precisely the same kind of fascistic ideology that has spread across Latin America with the help of Washington.
One section of website is titled “Mexico Sao Paulo Forum Communist Plan.” Here, the anti-AMLO Front argues that the mere presence of López Obrador’s Morena party at the left-wing event – an annual conference bringing together progressive organizations from across Latin America – in Cuba in 2018 means that the administration intends to make Mexico a communist country.
FRENA also fabricated a paranoid and plan of the Sao Paulo Forum to “install communism in Mexico.”
Some of the steps in this phony blueprint include ensuring “gender equity”, “de-mystifying religions,” “reforming education for equality,” and the spooky “progressive agenda (ABORTION, drugs, homosexuality, relativism of values.”
The conspiracy theory that the Sao Paulo Forum is controlling governments and social movements in South and even North America is increasingly popular in far-right circles. This deranged accusation has even been used against The Grayzone and its editor Max Blumenthal to absurdly paint them as orchestrators of the anti-police brutality protests currently sweeping the US.
FRENA leader Gilberto Lozano has repeated this conspiracy on numerous occasions. In an interview on Mexico’s major television network La Octava on June 5, Lozano stated in no uncertain terms that “there is no doubt that Francisco Arias, Venezuela’s ambassador to Mexico, is writing [AMLO’s] agenda”.
La Octava host Hernán Gómez Bruera, a popular mainstream Mexican journalist, asked Lozano how exactly the López Obrador government was driving Mexico toward communism, noting that AMLO never talks about socialism. Lozano again pointed to Morena’s participation in the Sao Paulo Forum and insisted AMLO is “following the Sao Paulo Forum’s agenda”.
This point is particularly ironic, because Mexico’s center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, or PRD) is also publicly listed as an official member of the Sao Paulo Forum, and the PRD has joined the opposition movement against AMLO. The PRD was part of a coalition to support candidate Ricardo Anaya against López Obrador in the 2018 presidential elections, and the PRD is also apparently a member of the Broad Opposition Bloc, BOA, that is conspiring to remove AMLO from office.
On its website, FRENA also maintains a “Gallery of the Communist Dictatorship”, which is a name and shame collection of AMLO supporters, including unflattering pictures of current cabinet members, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals.
Weaponizing blatant xenophobia, this FRENA blacklist makes sure to emphasize which of López Obrador’s allies were born in foreign countries by highlighting their ethnic background next to their name – failing to mention that they are all naturalized Mexican citizens who have spent decades living in the country.
The FRENA blacklist of AMLO allies singles out who was born in a foreign country, even though they are all naturalized Mexican citizens
Gilberto Lozano has repeatedly resorted to this xenophobia in his attacks on AMLO. In his June 5 interview on La Octava, Lozano once again tried to portray López Obrador’s top advisors as foreign fifth columnists, insisting that John Ackerman (born in the US), Paco Ignacio Taibo II (born in Spain), and Héctor Díaz Polanco (born in Cuba) were not truly Mexican, even though they are naturalized citizens.
The next Bolsonaro?
Hernán Gómez, the La Octava presenter, prefaced his interview with Lozano by acknowledging that Lozano is an extreme figure. He even published a follow-up column describing FRENA as the “Frente Nazi-onal contra AMLO,” likening the front to the Nazis.
But Gómez believed it was important to interview the FRENA leader out of concern that Lozano could become a figure similar to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.
“I know there are people who do not agree with giving a platform to these kinds of people, but I am convinced that we cannot underestimate figures like this,” Gómez said. “Because some time ago, the president of Brazil was a mediocre legislator who could not get a law passed, a rude and quarrelsome man who, like Lozano, who nobody took seriously. In fact, some thought that he was mentally unstable.”
“Few imagined that he would become Brazil’s president. But as after Obama came Trump, so did Bolsonaro come after Lula,” the La Octava host continued. “So, it is wrong to underestimate people like Gilberto Lozano, not so much because somewhere he may have hidden grandeur, but rather because if it goes badly for this [AMLO] government, or if they are not able to meet the expectations of certain sectors such as the middle class, eventually an ultra-right, anti-system figure could grow strong, and get a stroke of luck”.
José Guadalupe Argüello III is an educator based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He can be found on Twitter at @jgarguello3.
In just three months, the U.S. added 29 more billionaires while 45.5 million filed for unemployment.
Billionaire wealth surged over $584 billion as $6.5 trillion in household wealth vanishes during first Quarter.
As the Federal Reserve reported during the week of June 10th, more than $6.5 trillion in household wealth vanished during the first three months of this year as the pandemic tightened its hold on the global economy.
“This is the biggest economic shock in the U.S. and in the world, really, in living memory,” Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell told reporters on June 10th. “We went from the lowest level of unemployment in 50 years to the highest level in close to 90 years, and we did it in two months.”
Since March 18th, the US Billionaire class has seen their wealth increase by 20%, or $584 billion, since the rough beginning of the pandemic, as 45.5 million Americans filed for unemployment and the economy cratered, according to a new analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies – Program on Inequality (IPS), building on the IPS Billionaire Bonanza 2020 report.
Overall, between March 18—the rough start date of the pandemic shutdown, when most federal and state economic restrictions were in place—and June 17, the total net worth of the 640-plus U.S. billionaires jumped from $2.948 trillion to $3.531 trillion, based on the two groups’ analysis of Forbes data. Since March 18, the date Forbes released its annual report on billionaires’ wealth, the U.S. added 29 more billionaires, increasing from 614 to 643. During the same three months, over 45.5 million people filed for unemployment, according to the Department of Labor.
The top five billionaires—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison—saw their wealth grow by a total of $101.7 billion, or 26%. They captured 17.4% of the total wealth growth of all 600-plus billionaires in the last three months. The fortunes of Bezos and Zuckerberg together grew by nearly $76 billion, or 13% of the $584 billion total.
“This orgy of wealth shows how fundamentally flawed our economic system is,” said Frank Clemente, ATF’s executive director. “In three months about 600 billionaires increased their wealth by far more than the nation’s governors say their states need in fiscal assistance to keep delivering services to 330 million residents. Their wealth increased twice as much as the federal government paid out in one-time checks to more than 150 million Americans. If this pandemic reveals anything, it’s how unequal our society has become and how drastically it must change.”
“The last thing U.S. society needs is more economic and racial polarization,” said Chuck Collins, director of the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and co-author of the Billionaire Bonanza 2020 report. “The surge in billionaire wealth and pandemic profiteering undermines the unity and solidarity that the American people will require to recover and grow together, not pull further apart.”
During the same approximate three-month period nearly 2.1 million Americans fell ill with the virus and about 118,000 died from it. Among other pandemic victims are 27 million Americans who may lose their employer-provided healthcare coverage. Low-wage workers, people of color and women have suffered disproportionately in the combined medical and economic crises. Billionaires are overwhelmingly white men.
Wealth growth of other select billionaires in the top 30 on the Forbes June 17 list is below.
List above includes 13 billionaires who are among the top 37 billionaires as of June 17, 2020. Sources: All data analyzed by ATF and IPS is from Forbes and available here. March 18, 2020 data is from the Forbes World’s Billionaires List: The RIchest in 2020. June 17, 2020 data was taken from Forbes real-time estimates of worth that day.
Remarkably, 12 billionaires more than doubled their wealth over the last three months. One of them, Trevor Milton, the founder of Nikola Motor that is building semi-trucks powered by batteries and hydrogen, increased his wealth more than five times.
Decades of tax cuts for the rich have fueled the growth of billionaires and their wealth. Even in the midst of the greatest national emergency since World War II, tax handouts to the wealthy have continued—most recently in the form of the “Millionaire Giveaways” slipped into the CARES pandemic relief law enacted in late March.
The recently passed House HEROES Act would repeal this tax break that is giving an average tax cut of $1.6 million this year to 43,000 millionaires and billionaires, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. JCT estimates closing this loophole would raise $246 billion, a huge sum that could be used for pandemic relief.
Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which appears online at the blog Legalienate http://legalienate.blogspot.com) 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
