Confronting Godzilla (Corporatocracy) -- Part A
Written September 5, 2017
Posted January 29, 2018
(c) 21st C Futurescapes21C, 2018. All rights reserved
 
The truth today, however, is that the United States is neither a democracy nor a republic. Americans are ruled by a corporatocracy: a partnership of “too-big-to-fail” corporations, the extremely wealthy elite, and corporate-collaborator government officials. (Bruce E. Levine)1
 
DAPL and Standing Rock
Is it a case of life imitating art or art imitating life? In the long running cartoon TV series, The Simpsons, the sinister Charles Montgomery (“Monty”) Burns is the embodiment of the dark instincts of corporate America. Mr. Burns, a shriveled specimen of a human being who bears a striking resemblance to Nathan Rothschild, is the owner of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and Homer Simpson’s boss. A trademark Burns response to perceived threats is ordering his assistant to “release the hounds” allowing his vicious guard dogs to attack intruders, enemies or even invited guests. As to his modus operandi, Burns “uses his power and wealth to do whatever he wants, usually without regard for consequences and without interference from the authorities" (Wikipedia).
 
Some encounters between the two sides in the Standing Rock - Dakota Access Oil Pipeline standoff were ominously Burns-esque in nature. The protest was launched against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), by a reported 500 Native American tribes. They considered the project to be an assault on sacred ancestral sites and environmental threats to the Missouri River.
 
Even though the US Army Corps of Engineers denied the permit for building the pipeline under the Missouri River last November, an executive order signed by President Trump the following January instructed the army corps of engineers to “review and approve” the project “in an expedited manner.” After the final easement was granted in late February of this year, “the move was enthusiastically greeted by Energy Transfer Partners, the pipeline’s developer.2
 
In September of 2016, the Monty Burns-Simpsons parallel at Standing Rock was complete with its “release the hounds” moment. Protestors complained that in one clash with the security firm employed by Energy Transfer Partners, they were pepper sprayed and bitten by their guard dogs.3 
 
It’s been 30 years since the publication of Our Common Future offered the world a more enlightened approach to economic development.4 We were led to believe that we had entered the era of Sustainable economic development, one that would see a more judicious integration of economic objectives with social and environmental priorities. Are we supposed to believe that the “resolution” of the DAPL-Standing Rock dispute in some way fulfilled the promise of Our Common Future? Or, did it merely expose the willingness of the federal government to subordinate social and environmental interests to those of Big oil and its financial partners?
 
In weighing this question, consider among other things, that the CEO of Energy Transfer Partners donated $100,000 to the Trump Campaign, the Republican National Committee and State Republican Parties.5 And, Kinder Morgan reportedly paid $115,000 to Massachusetts state police to stop protests against the DAPL pipeline.6 More recently, the Dakota Access Pipeline developer has sued Greenpeace and a number of other environmental groups. Energy Transfer partners alleging the group, engaged in “racketeering and defamation that increased the cost of construction by at least $300 million.”7
 
The tyranny of corporatocracy
There’s hard evidence that US citizens have lost their influence over American politics and policies. A Princeton-Northwestern Universities study examined1,800 US policies enacted between 1981 and 2002 and compared them to the expressed preferences of average Americans. The researchers found that an economic elite dominates America.
 
… economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.8
 
The DAPL-Standing rock outcome wasn’t surprising in the least. What it did do was confirm the stark reality that a corporatocracy governs the American Empire. A corporatocracy is defined as “the rule by an oligarchy of corporate elites through manipulation of a formal democracy”9 Robert Gore sees it as more than a matter of large corporations exercising undue influence over the government. He argues that America’s large corporations and its government have merged. Gore adds that while the two retain their own distinct legal structures and managements, it’s no longer possible to separate them or delineate their individual contours.
 
Gore struggles to find adequate descriptors of the product of this forbidden marriage, settling on “big,” “rapacious,” “intrusive” and “conjoined blob.”10  It’s reminiscent of the language Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone Magazine used to describe the investment bank, Goldman Sachs. In Taibbi vernacular, it is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”11 The commonality mirrored in these two descriptions is the concern that large corporate entities interests are preying on America.
 
The analysis of American author and lecturer, Marianne Williamson is no less blunt. She labels this new form of governance as “corporate totalitarianism.”12 Political philosopher, Christopher Wolin differentiates this form of totalitarian from its Stalinist and Nazi predecessors, and describes it as “inverted totalitarianism.” As he explains, this is a system where corporations have corrupted and subverted democracy and economics trumps politics.
 
Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent.13
 
Ultimately, Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism, Williamson’s corporate totalitarianism and Gore’s corporatocracy imply the same kind of governance. The forbidden marriage of government and corporate interests has birthed something ugly and oppressive. As we come to better understand the psychology and appetites of this beast, we will discover it is every bit as dangerous as the fictitious out-of-control freak of nature, Godzilla.
 
A slow-motion coup
So what happened? How did it come about that a political Godzilla rules the American Empire? Graham Vanbergen contends that the “creeping colonization of public life” by corporations resulted in a “slow motion coup d’etat.’ He adds that globalization has continually compounded corporate power and consolidated its influence on global governance.” Government for its part, ignored signs an advancing coup. The warning signs that should have prompted corrective action appeared in a year 2000 study by Corporate Watch, Global Policy Forum and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). The study found:

• 200 of the approximately 40,000 worldwide corporations had global reach and influence;

 

• The top 200 companies were bigger than the combined economies of 182 countries and wielded twice the economic influence of 80 per cent of all humanity;

 

• As worker wages stagnated, corporate profits soared and wealth concentrated; and

 

• Corporate concentration was greatest in the trading, banking, automotives, retail and electronics sectors.14

 
In 2011, three Swiss mathematicians published the results of their efforts to map the network of connections between transnational corporations (TNCs). Their goal was to gain insights into the structure of economic power. Working from a database of more than 43,060 TNCs, they isolated a “super-entity” of 147 tightly- knit companies at the core of the TNC network. This super entity controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. All but one of the top 50 within this node were financial institutions.15
 
For its part, the financial sector, made a determined effort to free itself of its regulatory chains in the mid-nineties. Susan George describes the campaign. 
 
From the mid-1990s, the largest American banking, securities, insurance and accounting transnational corporations joined forces and, employing 3000 people, spent $5 billion to get rid of all the New Deal laws passed under the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s – the very laws that had protected the American economy for over sixty years. Through this collective lobbying push, they won total freedom to remove any money-losing assets from their balance-sheets and move them into “shadow” banks that appeared nowhere on their balance sheets. They became free to create and trade hundreds of billions worth of toxic derivative products, such as bundles of sub-prime mortgages, with no regulation whatever. 16 
 
A “liberated” banking sector has come to wield enormous political influence in recent years. Consider for example, the Wikileaks revelation that Citigroup bank chose Obama’s 2008 cabinet.17 Goldman Sachs is considered to be even more of a political powerhouse. Katherine Fisk describes Goldman Sachs’ reach into the Oval Office. 
 
They are the power in the Oval Office, where what Goldman says determines policy. The financial advisors behind the Vatican. The funders of fast track to get the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement through Congress. They are the hand that pulls the strings on both the Democratic and Republican nominees for US President, who is just the next “crisis actor” that will sit in the White House, while He Who Would Be King steers from behind.17
 
Wall Street’s dominance of the White House didn’t end with the Obama era. Despite Trump’s criticisms of Wall Street throughout his campaign, he promptly surrounded himself with Goldman Sachs alumni once elected.18
 
The mega corporate invasion and ascent to governance finds something of an equivalent in a viral infection. The corporate virus first invades and acquires control of its government host, and then, once established, systematically feeds off public resources. The US government’s annual bill for corporate welfare is $100 billion. It comes in many forms – grants, tax credits, bail-outs and other types of assistance. The arguments for and against aside, it’s noteworthy that Corporate welfare disproportionately favours big business.” Of an estimated $18 trillion awarded between 2000 and 2015, 99 per cent went to large companies and 78% went to 12 large US and foreign banks.19 Now that gives new meaning to the phrase “taking care of business,” doesn’t it?
 
It can be difficult for members of the public to follow the machinations of the ruling corporate powers behind the coup. Typically, they are drip fed the news an issue at a time, which makes it inherently difficult to grasp the big picture. Those seeking critical analyses must penetrate the fog of corporate PR, journalistic puffery, censorship and disinformation. And the wall of secrecy that screens the public eye from the dealings of government with their corporate friends further impairs their scrutiny.
 
Government’s long retreat
As the term, slow motion coup d’etat implies, the conquest of government didn’t occur over night. Ralph Nader, in an interview with Chris Hedges, suggests the creeping coup began around 1970. He links it to a decision by the Democratic Party to aggressively compete with Republicans in the electoral fund raising competition for corporate dollars. From that point on, the Democrats were more intent on courting the favour of big business than putting the brakes on its excesses.20
 
It should also be said that the coup wasn’t completely a matter of the raging ambitions of big banks and other TNCs. Government was a facilitator of the coup. Looking back on my own career, much of it of working with various levels of government, it’s clear how trends in government management opened the doors to corporate encroachment. Five of the most popular and enduring management trends in government over the past thirty five years have been:

• Recurring drives for increased operational efficiency frequently leading to reductions in public resources assigned to delivery of services, the monitoring of industry activities and regulatory enforcement;

 

• Pursuit of private sector-public sector partnerships (“Triple P) in service delivery and infrastructure development;

 

• Privatization of government programs (widely celebrated and “sold” in Maggie Thatcher’s day) 

 

• Recurring de-regulation campaigns with some aimed at industry self-regulation with a stated intention of fostering increased innovation and international competitiveness; and

 

• The shifting of scientific research once financed and carried out in the public sector to private sector corporations.

 
The effect of the widespread adoption of these management approaches and strategies over a period of decades is obvious. Government’s regulatory role eroded as responsibilities and resources were shifted to the private sector. In reality then, government leaders and public servants were respectively, champions of and collaborators in the power shift. Whether they clearly demarcated and enforced limits on corporate encroachment is another matter. When it comes to the management of natural resources, for example, Colin Todhunter challenges the idea that profit-driven transnationals have a legitimate claim to be custodians of natural assets.
 
“There is the premise that water, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to powerful and wholly corrupt transnational corporations to milk for profit, under the pretence these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.
 
Todhunter argues that these natural assets (“the commons”) belong to everyone and their stewardship is a matter of the common interest. As such they should to be managed by local people “assisted by public institutions and governments acting on their behalf.”21 When governments fail to protect the commons, preferring instead to serve corporate interests, we get the DAPL-Standing Rock kind of outcome. This brings us to the pivotal matter of accountability.
 
The broken chain of accountability
One can think of healthy democracies as systems characterized by a continuous chain of accountability linking “the people”, governments and corporations. When that chain is broken,  it has far reaching consequences. David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World, puts it this way:
 
The healthy function of society requires that governments be accountable to the electorate and that corporations in turn be accountable to democratic governments. Our ability to deal with every other issue of our time — from climate disruption to inequality to violence — depends on that accountability.22
 
Neither governments nor corporations appear to be particularly concerned about the problem. So even as concerned citizens call for more accountability and transparency from transnational corporatations (TNCs), the corporatoracy acts to reduce both further and slam the shades down. In June 2016, Vanbergen reported efforts in the EU parliament to criminalize whistle blowing.  
 
Just a few weeks earlier, we discover that the European Parliament voted in favour of the “Trade Secrets Protection Directive – a law that gives corporations alarming new superpowers to prosecute and criminalise whistleblowers, journalists, and news organizations that publish leaked internal documents.23
 
This EU parliament’s move to criminalize whistleblowing reminds me of the attempts by the US livestock industry to do the same in several US states using what’s were dubbed by critics as “ag gag” laws. Such legislation is designed to criminalize undercover investigations of livestock abuse. Three states introduced ag gag laws in 2011 and 2012 and a flurry of other bills followed in other states in the years following.24 A battle that started in the nineties regarding the issue of public transparency continues in 2017 producing both wins and losses for animal welfare activists.25
 
David Korten explains how the globalization of the operations by TNC’s made it even more difficult to hold them to account. In some respects globalization untethered TNCs from national allegiances and regulations.
 
The lack of corporate accountability is amplified when a corporation sheds its allegiance to any place, person, or public interest. It may be chartered in the United States, park its profits in Bermuda to avoid taxes, contract with sweatshops in Bangladesh, sell its products in France, and be a subsidiary of a parent corporation headquartered in Brazil. In effect, it is stateless and operates as a power unto itself, and has no concern for the interests of any people or place.26
 
Transparency and accountability are areas where PR double speak prevails. While governments and corporate powers talk a good game in terms of their commitment, but their actions say something else. There have simply been too many counter moves like those described earlier to take the jive talk seriously. And the oft stated concern for the protection of whistleblowers is an equal pretence. There are simply too many stories of whistleblowers whose careers were terminated and their lives turned into a living hell, or worse yet, ended under suspicious circumstances to believe the official party of those corporations vested in   the corporatocracy game.
 
Godzilla’s delusions
One of the things that makes the corporatocracy particularly dangerous is its delusions. There are troubling signs that Godzilla suffers from some kind of narcissistic personality disorder. The grandiose “feeding the world” sloganeering of Big Ag transnationals, for example, suggests they are either misguided, propagandizing or suffering from a kind of god complex.27 Here’s a reality check.

• More than 50% of the agricultural exports to its top 20 importers were for animal product or meat;
• 2.3% of the world’s most undernourished countries’ diet comes from exports from the United States; and
• Less than 1% of US agricultural exports went to the world’s 19 most hungry or undernourished countries.28

 
And then there’s the fertilizer manufacturer, JR Simplot, who thinks that it is “Bringing earth’s resources to life.”29 Really? Now there’s a serious god complex! Someone should tell the brain trust at Simplot that 1 square metre of rich soil can harbour up to a billion living organisms. I won’t even bother with Big Pharma which appears to be pretty busy inventing imaginary health conditions.
 
The marketing mavens at Coke also occasionally drift off into la la land. Author Jill Richardson flagged an ad featuring a young girl who harbours a desire to grow a garden for the world. She grows up and goes to works for Coca Cola and says that she’s fulfilling that dream. How does that work? Richardson provides the reality check. First choosing to drink Coke isn’t helping the poor. At best, Coke is a sugary drink that provides no nutrition. People may drink it because they enjoy the taste.30 That’s it.
 
There are also clear signs of co-dependency in the government-Big Ag/Agribusiness- industry marriage. The most telling sign is the tendency on the part of government to serve as an enabler and defender of corporate ag's abuses of the public trust. It’s a deeply disturbing development with a chilling effect on public employees wishing to do the right thing as good stewards of the public trust.
 
A survey of 1,300 USDA scientists in 2017 found that nearly 10% of them believe superiors have tampered with their work. The research of one USDA scientist revealed that a lucrative pesticide might be harming pollinators such as bees. When this researcher published a report cautioning against use of department-approved pesticides, he found his career began to fall apart.31 In short, questioning the official, corporately-approved narrative can be career-limiting.
 
Canadian scientists could identity with their USDA counterparts. During the administration of former PM, Stephen Harper, many Canadian scientists took to the streets to protest their muzzling under restrictive media relations policies aimed at message control. A number of specific examples are cited in a paper entitled: Muzzling Civil Servants: A Threat to Democracy?.32
 
Godzilla’s god complex has taken on new and alarming dimensions of late. Major Corporations are now becoming arbitrars of public morality. Peter Hassan cites the example of the domain hosting company GoDaddy.com which booted neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer from its servers on August 13, 2017 in the wake of a deadly antifa-alt right confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia. GoDaddy decided that a Daily Stormer article trashing the victim of the clash was offensive.             
 
Sometimes it’s a case of telecoms or on-line media services responding to pressure from an aggrieved political faction seeking to extract some form of “justice” in response to a perceived wrong.
 
Fox News cancelled “The O’Reilly Factor” in April after advertisers pulled their money from the show amidst a slew of sexual harassment accusations against host Bill O’Reilly. The advertisers pulled the ads following an intense pressure campaign from left-wing activists who claimed the advertisers had a moral obligation to defund “The O’Reilly Factor.”33
 
The dangers of corporatocracy-sanctioned censorship by monopolistic telecoms should be readily apparent. The mechanisms for suppression of free speech by Google and Facebook in favour of the politics du jour, for example, are in place and being applied with new rigour. Jordan Peterson is a professor at the University of Toronto, who has dared to challenge the fascistic tendencies of post-modernism inherent in Canada’s gender legislation, among other things. In August 2017, he was surprised to discover that Google had arbitrarily blocked him from his YouTube account with no explanation. Peterson rightly finds the treatment worrying.34
 
He’s not alone. It appears that Google is now censoring videos deemed “too politically incorrect or not advertiser friendly.” Once Google demonetizes a targeted YouTube site, the uploader cannot make money from its content. Former US Congressman, Dr. Ron Paul and his YouTube Analysis Channel, the Ron Paul Liberty Report was abruptly targeted. Julian Assange of Wikileaks suggests Dr. Paul was punished for his recent criticism of Donald Trump for sending additional troops into Afghanistan. He labels this “economic censorship.”35
 
Graham Vanbergen’s article: “The truth war is being lost to a global censorship apparatus called Google” is disturbing. The article describes how social media has become a tool of the CIA, and how Google has become a global censor, skewing searches toward politically correct sites. The stench of corporately administered censorship is discernible in an April 25/17 statement by Ben Gomes, Google’s VP of Engineering. Gomes stated that Google’s update of its search engine would block access to “offensive” sites, while working to surface more “authoritative content.” Vanbergen estimated the loss of traffic to just 13 non-mainstream web sites following the changes in Google’s search evaluation protocols.
 
…these losses of readership in the last six months, from highs to lows amounted to a colossal 30.4 million unique visitors a month. I can’t vouch for other websites but at TruePublica the average visitor reads 1.84 pages per visit. At this calculation over 55 million pages of content a month are being withheld from just the 13 websites listed above. It is not possible to come to any other conclusion that Google has blatantly been involved in an act of global censorship.36
 
Big Brother giveth and Big Brother  taketh away. Once upon a time, Google enlarged our world through its powerful search service. Now, the Ministry of Truth has declared the boundaries of our world of information shall be reduced in accordance with Big Brother’s political preferences. Are you getting claustrophobic yet?
 
Godzilla’s anti-democratic tendencies
One of the more serious charges against corporatocracy is that it’s anti-democratic in nature. Ralph Nader contends that today’s international trade agreements are, in effect, democracy-reversing.
 
[Free trade agreements] are trade agreements that don't stick to trade…they colonize environmental labor, and consumer issues of grave concern (in terms of health safety, and livelihoods too) to many, many hundreds of millions of people - and they do that by subordinating consumer, environmental, and labor issues to the imperatives and the supremacy of international commerce.  
 
Nader argues that this is exactly the reverse of how democratic societies have advanced. Specifically, they subordinate the profiteering drive of companies to such things as higher environmental health standards, abolition of child labour, and the right of worker to fair labour standards. In a truly democratic system, the onus would be corporations to demonstrate that they weren’t harming consumers with monopoly powers, damaging the environment or compromising the rights of workers. But that order has been turned upside down.
 
…its workers and consumers and environments that have to kneel before this giant pedestal of commercial trade and prove that they are not, in a whole variety of ways, impeding international commerce…so this is the road to dictatorial devolution of democratic societies…37 

Julian Assange of Wikileaks has added his voice to Nader’s, regarding the TTP. Assange affirms that the TPP, the largest international economic trade agreement goes ever far beyond trade.
 
Only five of the 29 chapters are about traditional trade. The others are about regulating the Internet and what information …Internet service providers have to collect. …It’s about regulating labor, what labor conditions can be applied, regulating, whether you can favor local industry, regulating the hospital healthcare system, privatization of hospitals. So, essentially, every aspect of the modern economy, even banking services, are in the TPP.38 

The negotiation process for international trade deals remains remarkably deaf to citizens’ interests and concerns. Verbergen recalls that Cecilia Malmstrom, the leading EU trade commissioner for TTIP trade negotiations was asked why she continued to promote the deal in the face of massive public opposition. Her response was telling: “I do not take my mandate from the European people.”39 Meanwhile, US opponents of the TTP were dismissed as “protectionists” for their opposition. There’s some irony in that charge as opponents were concerned that elements of the deal would “undermine the free flow of goods and services by expanding some protectionist anti-competitive policies.” Doctors Without Borders, for example, was critical of the monopoly protections and patents the deal would create for big pharmaceutical companies and their products.40 Now who is being protectionist?
 
In this chapter, we have pulled back the curtain and looked the beast in the eye. As a result of a corporate coup in the mid-nineties, the American Empire is now ruled by a monstrous corporatocracy. The prevailing myth however, is that America is a model of democracy to the world. The corporatocracy perpetuates the delusion, of course as a cover for its operations. This predatory shape-shifting creature is dangerously unaccountable and out of control. Its reach is global,  it’s nature instinctively controlling, its operation parasitic and its mental health unstable.
 
There’s more to learn about the corporatocracy named Godzilla. In the next chapter, we will examine the criminal nature of the Corporatocracy and where its insatiable appetite for power and profits has taken us geopolitically. And then we will turn to the urgent matter of how Godzilla can be recaptured.


1 The myth of US democracy and the reality of U.S. corporatocracy, Huffington Post, May 25, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-e-levine/the-myth-of-us-democracy-corporatocracy_b_836573.html
 
2 Dakota Access Pipeline protest site is cleared, CNN, February 24, 2017 http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/22/us/dakota-access-pipeline-evacuation-order/index.html
 
3 Dakota Access Pipeline company attacks protestors with dogs and mace, Common Dreams, September 24, 2016, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/09/04/dakota-access-pipeline-company-attacks-protesters-dogs-and-mace
 
4 Our Common Future, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Common_Future
 
5 Trump’s greenlighting of Keystone and DAPL is a powerplay that won’t pay create jobs, The Slatest, January 24, 2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/01/24/trump_s_green_lighting_of_keystone_and_dapl_is_a_power_play_that_won_t_create.html
 
6 Kinder Morgan paid $115,000 to Mass. State police to step protests against pipeline, Blacklisted News, August 21, 2017, http://www.blacklistednews.com/Kinder_Morgan_Paid_%24115,000_To_Mass._State_Police_To_Stop_Protests_Against_Pipeline/60447/0/38/38/Y/M.html
 
7 Dakota Access Pipeline owner sues Greenpeace for ‘criminal activity’, NPR, August 22, 2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/22/545310247/dakota-access-pipeline-owner-sues-greenpeace-for-criminal-activity
 
8 The US is an oligarchy, study finds, The Telegraph, April 16, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10769041/The-US-is-an-oligarchy-study-concludes.html
 
9 Corporatocracy, Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Corporatocracy
 
10 The Corporatocracy, by Robert Gore, Straight Line Logic, April 28, 2017, https://straightlinelogic.com/2017/04/28/the-corporatocracy-by-robert-gore/
 
11 The Great American Bubble Machine, Rolling Stone, April 5, 2010, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405
 
12 Corporate Totalitarianism, or not, Huffington Post.com, March 2, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marianne-williamson/corporate-totalitarianism_b_9361826.html
 
13 Sheldon Walin and inverted totalitarianism, Chris Hedges, Truthdig, November 2, 2015, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/sheldon-wolin-and-inverted-totalitarianism/
 
14 The rise of the corporatocracy, Graham Vanbergen, Information Clearing House, June 21, 2016, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44929.htm
 
15 Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world, New Scientist, October 19, 2011, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354-500-revealed-the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world/
 
16 The rise of the corporatocracy, Graham Vanbergen, Information Clearing House, June 21, 2016, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44929.htm
 
17 Citigroup chose Obama’s 2008 cabinet, Wikileaks document reveals, Global Research, October 1, 2016, http://www.globalresearch.ca/citigroup-chose-obamas-2008-cabinet-wikileaks-document-reveals/5551327
 
17 How Goldman Sachs rules the world and gets away with it, Veterans Today, March 21, 2016, http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/03/21/how-goldman-sachs-rules-the-world-and-gets-away-with-it/
 
18 List of Goldman Sachs alumni in Donald Trump’s administration, Heavy, January 5, 2017, http://heavy.com/news/2017/01/donald-trump-goldman-sachs-drain-swamp-steve-bannon-steven-mnuchin-gary-cohn-jay-clayton/
 
19 Corporate welfare: How big business lives off government subsidy, Blacklisted News, August 14, 2017, http://www.blacklistednews.com/Corporate_Welfare%3A_How_Big_Business_Lives_Off_Government_Subsidy/60316/0/38/38/Y/M.html
 
20 Chris Hedges and Ralph Nader: History of the corporate coup d’etat, Dandelion Salad, November 3, 2015, https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/chris-hedges-and-ralph-nader-history-of-the-corporate-coup-detat/
 
21 Soil, Monsanto and the Agribusiness giants: Conning the world with snake oil and doughnuts, Global Research, August 24, 2017, http://www.globalresearch.ca/soil-monsanto-and-the-agribusiness-giants-conning-the-world-with-snake-oil-and-doughnuts/5605487
 
22 How the power imbalance between corporations, governments and people prevents sustainable solutions, Wake Up World, March 28, 2017, https://wakeup-world.com/2017/03/28/how-the-power-imbalance-between-corporations-governments-and-people-prevents-sustainable-solutions/
 
23 The rise of the corporatocracy, The European financial review, June 20, 2016, http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=6074
 
24 2013 was the year bills to criminalize animal cruelty videos failed, The Salt, npr, December 27, file://localhost/2013, http/::www.npr.org:sections:thesalt:2013:12:19:255549796:2013-was-the-year-every-new-ag-gag-bill-failed
 
25 Judge overturn Utah’s ‘ag-gag’ ban on under-cover filming at farms, The two way, npr, July 8,
2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/08/536186914/judge-overturns-utahs-ag-gag-ban-on-undercover-filming-at-farms
 
26 How the power imbalance between corporations, governments and the people prevents sustainable solutions, The Event Chronicle, March 27, 2017,

27 Why Big Ag won’t feed the world, The Atlantic, January 20, 2010, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/01/why-big-ag-wont-feed-the-world/33666/
 
28 Does Big AG “Feed the World”, or are such slogans just clever public relations?, The Farmarian, November 4, 2016, http://www.farmarian.com/does-big-ag-feed-the-world-or-are-such-slogans-public-relations/
 
29 Simplot.com, http://simplot.com/  
 
30 Soda doesn’t ‘feed the world’, Jill Richardson, Other Words, http://otherwords.org/soda-doesnt-feed-the-world/
 
31 Some USDA scientists say their work has been tampered with – Bangor Daily News, August 31, 2017, http://bangordailynews.com/2017/04/21/news/nation/some-usda-scientists-say-their-work-has-been-tampered-with-maybe-for-political-reasons/maybe for political reasons,
 
32 Muzzling civil servants: A threat to democracy, Environmental Law Clinic, University of Victoria, Clayton Greenwood, February 2013,
http://www.elc.uvic.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Muzzling-Civil-Servants_2012-03-04_2013Feb.pdf 

33. The O'Reilly Factor: cancelled; Tucker Carlson Tonight to replace Fox News series, TVseriesfinale, April 19, 2017 https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/oreilly-factor-cancelled-fox-news-channel/

34 “I’m very worried” Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson discuss Google, YouTube suspension, YouTube, August 24, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmjuptpDsA
 
35 YouTube “economically censors” Ron Paul, labels videos “not suitable” for all advertisers. Zero Hedge, August 27, 2017, http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-27/youtube-economically-censors-ron-paul-labels-videos-not-suitable-all-advertisers
 
36 The truth war is being lost to a global censorship apparatus called Google, Global Research, August 27, 2017, 
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-truth-war-is-being-lost-to-a-global-censorship-apparatus-called-google/5602578?utm_campaign=magnet&utm_source=article_page&utm_medium=related_articles
 
37 Ralph Nader quotes, Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/47237.Ralph_Nader
 
38 Julian Assange on the Trans- Pacific Partnership: Secretive deal isn’t about trade, but corporate control, Democracy Now, May 27, 2015, https://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/27/julian_assange_on_the_trans_pacific
 
39 The rise of the corporatocracy, The European Financial Review, June 20, 2016, http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=6074
 
40 More than 50 groups call on US Congress to stop TPP, the worst trade deal ever for access to affordable medicines, Doctors Without Borders, April 12, 2016, http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/article/more-50-groups-call-us-congress-stop-tpp-worst-trade-deal-ever-access-affordable-medicines
​
(c) Futurescapes21C, 2018 All rights reserved

Exposing the Empire of Lies (Part B)
written June 3, 2017 
Posted January 23, 2018
© Futurescapes21C, 2018 All rights reserved
 
In the previous essay (Part A), I offered seven internal signs or symptoms of a decaying America. This essay, (Part B) provides further evidence of its deteriorating state. You may be thinking ahh, but you are missing so much good in America. Yes, of course, there is much good in America. But, unfortunately the good is captive of the dark forces. The point isn’t that there is yet some residue of decency and goodness remaining in America. It’s that the virtuous is being systematically destroyed by devious powers that be (PTB) holding the country captive.
 
There’s absolutely nothing to be gained then in continuing the pretense of "America the Beautiful," or any variant of such veneer a minute longer. The illusion has already prevailed for far too long. And it has only served the purposes of the PTB. With each passing decade, the deceptions and atrocities have only become more outrageous. So let’s be clear. My intent is to expose the parasitic forces consuming America from the inside out. I suspect that when we turn the light of day on these entities, they will, like shadows projected on the wall of Plato’s cave, quickly shrivel and lose their power over us. 
 
Frankenstein security agencies
The United States has more than 17 security agencies. There are 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working for the federal government on issues of domestic and international intelligence in 10,000 locations with over 854,000 people holding top-secret clearances.1 So, the average American could be forgiven for assuming that this vast complex would be sufficient to protect the country and fellow citizens from all varieties of foreign and domestic threats.
 
This vast intelligence apparatus is reason enough for any thinking individual to question the official 9/11 narrative. And if that in itself doesn’t invite a rethink of the narrative, then the failure of this vast network to bring the perpetrators to justice for the crime of the century should be more than enough. The failure of the PTB to provide America and the world with a truthful version of events and those behind it is the real conspiracy.2
 
The betrayal of US citizens at the hands of "their" own security agencies presumably guarding the nation challenges the imagination. I described earlier some of the predatory surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA). In this essay, I will focus on the two best known of the "alphabet" security agencies, the CIA and the FBI. In short, these are deeply corrupted organizations. And while monetary corruption is a key feature of their operation, I’m really talking about corruption of their intended purpose, guiding principles and management. Both are characterized by divided loyalties and rife with competing interests.  Each operates  to a large degree, as a law unto itself.
 
The citizens of the Empire of Lies are also victims of their own naïveté. It’s as if they take the  vanilla textbook depictions or the “good guy” movie portrayals of their institutions at face value. Consider this rather benign Wikipedia description of the CIA.
 
The CIA is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the United States federal government, tasked with gathering, processing and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT). As one of the principal members of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and Cabinet.
 
It sounds nice in theory; but the reality is something far different. The central issues are transparency and accountability. So while the above description says the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), it simply means that the DHI is charged with oversight of the CIA. It doesn’t mean that the DHI controls the CIA. The Anonymous Patriots, writing in The Millennial Report, contend that the CIA has positioned itself to be a higher authority than Congress, the president or the citizens of the United States and act in secrecy in all its affairs.3
 
As to its nefarious roles, I have already described the long-standing role of the CIA in infiltrating corporate media (Project Mockingbird) and engaging in the propagandizing of American citizens. I have also alluded to its lengthy history in orchestrating conflict and regime change around the world.  And, we have referenced the CIA’s obsessive spying on ordinary citizens as revealed in The Vault 7 leak. While we have grown accustomed to seeing the CIA meddle in the affairs of other countries, the public is now seeing more clearly than ever before, signs of its meddling in the political process in America.
 
Patrick Lawrence, writing in The Nation in February of this year, wonders in an article of the same title: if America is witnessing a coup operation against the Trump Whitehouse? He is struck, in particular by the succession of treasonous activities that the Trump Whitehouse has been convicted of by CIA-controlled media including The Times. He cites the description of the agency given by Tom Wicker, a former Times reporter. In Wicker’s analysis it is a “Frankenstein monster no one can fully control.”4 In light of what is transpiring in America and abroad under its influence, it’s an apt description.
 
Gordon Duff, the controversial senior editor of Veterans Today, would likely agree with the “Frankenstein” label. He describes another realm of CIA activity that is less discussed than its propaganda and regime change activities; specifically, its dealings in drugs.
 
As CIA director, in 1977 George Walker Bush sent his son Jeb to Venezuela to take over banking relationships between that nation and Colombia. George H.W. and son Jeb were key players in the creation of the drug cartels in Colombia and played a critical role in establishing the CIA connection. The Colombia connection was all about controlling the world’s cocaine.
 
Simultaneously, the CIA under Bush established strong connections with the narco-tribes of Northern Afghanistan. The CIA built a narcotics empire there based on heroin. It took 9/11 to give George W. Bush a chance to exploit it. The CIA subsequently took over world heroin production as well.
 
Duff offers more nauseating details regarding the Bush connection to Afghanistan war and its opium production.
 
The family that brought crack cocaine to America’s school children now delivers Afghani heroin at even lower prices. When the farce of 9/11 led to two invasions, to Afghanistan to put the drug lords of the Northern Alliance in position to kick out the anti-opium Taliban and to loot Iraq’s oil resources, there was no independent CIA left.5
 
CIA history is replete with other examples of its anti-human behaviour. Middle East analyst, Vladimir Platov writes that we used to think that conducting cruel and inhuman experiments on human beings was something restricted to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Increasingly, we’re learning that such experiments are conducted in by US intelligence agencies on what are often unsuspecting citizens. Platov chronicles some of the ill-conceived, reckless and illegal research activities carried out by the CIA during the 20th and the 21st century.

• The study of syphilis in African Americans in Tuskegee Alabama (1932 to 1972). The availability of antibiotics was hid from patients.

 

• Nuclear tests conducted at Bikini Atoll in 1954, exposed people of the Marshall Islands to radiation resulting in a doubling of their rates of miscarriages and stillbirths and increased cancer rates.

 

• A variety of biological and chemical weapons experiments in the 50s and 60s were conducted using American citizens of guinea pigs.

 

• Thousands of individuals were subjected to the abuses of the CIA’s secret MK Ultra mind control program experiments that led to serious mental disorders in some cases.

 

• CIA Director, George Tenet, authorized employees to conduct illegal research on humans in prison from 1997-2004. 

 

• The CIA conducted experiments on the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan 2004-2009.6

 

• During the George W. Bush era “war on terror”, Iraqi prisoners were subjected to such enhanced-interrogation methods as “waterboarding, “rectal rehydration,” weeks or months of nakedness in total darkness and isolation, and other techniques.”7

 
The fact that no high level official has been held accountable for such abuses confirms that the rogue CIA has a host of enablers and collaborators within the Deep State justice system shielding it from public accountability.
 
The FBI it seems, has similarly found justification in the war on terror for shifting its focus and expanding its repertoire. Trevor Aaronson’s book, The Terror Factory (2013)8 exposes FBI involvement in manufacturing terrorism. His investigative work reveals that not only is the majority of terrorism, “false flag,” but that creating and curing the “disease of terrorism,” has become one of the biggest rackets in the world.
 
According to Aaronson, the FBI has recruited more than 45,000 counter-terrorist informants with most of them not “on the books,” and unaccountable. He reports that many are criminals, “cooperating with authorities to avoid prison or to be allowed to continue their criminal enterprises, some unfettered by law enforcement, many in full partnership.”
 
Aaronson describes the devious methodology used by the FBI to “prevent” terrorist attacks.
 
Informants report to their handlers on people who have, say, made statements sympathizing with terrorists. Those names are then cross-referenced with existing intelligence data, such as immigration and criminal records. FBI agents may then assign an undercover operative to approach the target by posing as a radical. Sometimes the operative will propose a plot, provide explosives, even lead the target in a fake oath to Al Qaeda. Once enough incriminating information has been gathered, there’s an arrest-and a press conference announcing another foiled plot.
 
Such sting operations have been employed in many cases that made headlines, including: the Washington Metro bomber, the New York subway plot, the plot to blow up the Sears Tower, the plot to bomb a Portland Christmas tree lighting. According to Aaronson, each of those plots, and dozens more, was managed by “an FBI asset.”
 
Many such terror strikes or supposedly disrupted attacks have something else in common. The individuals targeted are the “mentally ill, feeble minded, the homeless and easily influenced individuals.” (See the Nuttall case in British Columbia, Canada.)
 
Since 9/11, hundreds of arrests of terrorist suspects and 158 prosecutions were reported in the US. The punch line is that of all the reported “major terror plots,” only three could not be tied to terror suspects who were directly recruited, trained and supplied by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gordon Duff adds that there are doubts about those three exceptions.
 
Aaronson offers his assessment of what’s been transpiring and the devious role of the FBI. He concludes were witnessing COINTELPRO operations, “the long discredited program that ran for nearly 50 years organizing church and synagogue burnings, lynchings, bombings and assassinations through infiltration of ‘radical groups,’ often anti-war or civil rights organizations, have not only continued but expanded to the point they are, in fact, the primary function of the FBI.”
 
Seemingly, there’s no business like the booming terror business. Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security has its own program. In one of them, Operation Fast and Furious, the DHS supplied “thousands of military weapons to criminal groups operating throughout Mexico and the US.”9 Aaronson’s TED talk on the subject of how the FBI is creating US-based terrorists can be found YouTube.10 So much for helping make America and its citizens more secure.
 
Aaronson isn’t alone in his finding that the vast majority of false flag terrorist strikes in the US were government orchestrated. Former Marine Corps intelligence officer, Robert David Steele contends that in the United States, “every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI.”11 He adds that situations have now arisen where citizens are taking out restraining orders against FBI informants trying to incite terrorism.
 
Steele may be one of those former employees of the security complex who has had enough and has turned to exposing its deceptions. Those who visit his website will find among other things, an article entitled: Draft List of 63 Orlando false flag anomalies.12
 
It’s important to keep in mind that this section on Frankensteinian security agencies offers a mere sample of the madness being orchestrated by America's leading so-called “security” agencies. The sad irony is that they have become agencies of insecurity, deception and death. So, instead of helping bring peace and security to the citizens of the Empire, they bring confusion, chaos and suffering.
 
Let me state the obvious. Elements of America’s foremost security agencies have gone rogue. They are to some extent at war with American citizens. They have, as feared by JFK, turned on their host. The reality is that the foremost of America’s security agencies with a mandate for protecting the country are actually contributing to Americans' insecurity. And the ultimate terrorists are those posing as our protectors. It doesn’t get much more diabolical than that.
 
It’s not surprising that we’re hearing critics call for a wholesale scaling back and in some instances, a disbanding respectively of the FBI and the CIA. The foremost of America’s security agencies are no longer accountable to the elected government. They are traitors. 
 
Government-orchestrated terrorism and fake terrorists
To understand the devious role of the FBI in the so-called “war on terror” it’s important to consider the role “the boogeyman.” A “boogeyman is simply defined in the on-line free dictionary as “a terrifying specter.” Honest politicians have long acknowledged the significance of the boogeyman in politics. You could say it’s the secret ingredient in their political sauce. And when politicians didn’t acknowledge it, honest journalists (rare these days) pointed it out.
 
In a 2006 article, Blake Fleetwood, a former reported for the New York Times provided this somewhat satirical analysis of the prospects of George Bush securing a second term.
 
For Republicans to have any chance at winning the mid-term elections, Bush needs a boogeyman with a “Big Bomb” to scare the bejesus out of the electorate.
 
The term that Fleetwood uses to describe the relationship between politicians and boogeymen is “symbiosis.” He concludes: “they need each other.”13 Today, the boogey man of choice is the terrorist. And historically, it has some well-known advocates as pointed out in a Washington Blog post.  
 
Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”. – Adolph Hitler
 
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. – Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.
 
The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened.
– Josef Stalin
 
Terrorism is commonly packaged and presented to the unsuspecting public in the form of false flag theatre. Despite the fact that the term is just entering the mainstream, the false flag has a lengthy history in the West. The Washington Blog article lists 42 admitted false flags carried out between 1931 and the present day.14
 
Wikipedia’s defines of false flag as follows:
 
False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations, and have been used in peace-time; for example, during Italy’s strategy of tension.15
 
It’s as Machiavellian as you can get, but Hitler, Goering and Stalin were right about the effectiveness of false flag terrorism. When it comes to government use of false flags, state-managed terrorism has the multi-purpose utility of a Swiss Army knife. Among other things, it keeps the members of the public confused and psychologically dependent. British author, George Orwell understood this tactic stating that the minds of confused people are malleable and thus inclined to submit to the will of Big Brother. Orwell states, “When a public is stressed and confused, a big lie told repeatedly and unchallenged can become accepted truth.”16
 
A false flag also provides a handy pretext for foreign intervention and a rationale for attacking “them” before they attack “us.” And, a terrorist threat provides the military industrial complex with a justification for demanding ever-larger budget allocations. A third motive can be to provide a pretext to “enact draconian laws in the name of national security” as pointed out the Washington Blog article.
 
Finally, one can make better political sense of state sponsored false flags when you put them in the context of the initial step in the cycle of action-reaction-solution approach of the PTB. When, there’s an attack, the public becomes scared and angry, and then the Deep State can introduce “the solution” that it had planned from the outset. This may be a military invasion, a bombing campaign or new laws restricting some aspect of human activity such as gun ownership. Suffice to say, the state finds fake terror to be a very useful political management tool.
 
Researcher, Dr. Richard Dolan, explains that false flags really came into common use after World War I to the point where today, staging them is a sophisticated science. He adds that if an Olympics of false flags were held, Britain would win bronze, Israel silver, and the USA would win gold. (Cue chant: “We’re number one, we’re number one!”) Dolan describes false flags as the “ultimate tool in the propaganda tool kit.”17
 
In 2013, Canada’s RCMP, in me-too fashion, attempted to imitate its American cousins in at least one well-known instance. Thankfully, however, a judge saw it for what it was and intervened. B.C. Supreme Court judge, Catherine Bruce concluded the Mounties entrapped two Surrey BC drug users (The Nuttals) into plotting a terrorist attack they were incapable of carrying out on their own. As a result, their convictions for conspiring to commit murder and possessing explosives were overturned in 2016.18
 
I cited earlier (Frankenstein Security Agencies) the insights of former Marine Corps Intelligence officer, Robert David Steele regarding the orchestration of terrorism. False flag analysts in the alternative media are getting quite good at discerning a false flag. Their list of suspected false flag attacks includes: the Orlando nightclub, Charlie Hebdo (France), Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, and the Boston Marathon bombing, the Paris attack, and it continues.
 
Within hours of its occurrence, false flag analyst, Dr. Kevin Barrett had exposed the suspicious aspects of the Manchester bombing (May 22, 2017), highlighting a number of the now standard features of false flag. Here are a few of them:

• Illuminati style numerology (Man 22, kills 22 on May 22.);
• The perpetrator’s ID conveniently located on the scene;
• strategic timing politically (in this case favouring the election of Theresa May over Jeremy Corbyn);
• suspension of security procedures -- pat downs at entrance prior to the attack;
• the convenient death of the perpetrator (not one to question);
• a presumed terrorist said to be known to the authorities; and
• the prior staging of a practice terror drill in the vicinity.

 
Barrett goes on to point out that false flag expert Ole Dammegard, predicted the Manchester bombing which just happened to fall “on the fourth anniversary of the fake beheading of Lee Rigby”.19
 
Let’s look more closely at the subject of fake or “manufactured” terrorists. In an RT interview, FBI whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds, describes how government propagandists, as a matter of effective marketing, periodically update their terrorist narrative in order to keep the public engaged.
 
“…the ISIS is what is the U.S. media and the propaganda creators behind the media decided to create. I mean, tomorrow or 3 months from now we will start hearing another name that we’ve never heard of, and within a month they can make that the world’s greatest or the most dangerous threat.
 
And, again, that is the main concept here, and I know the Western media… they have been playing it as such, but they did exactly the same thing with Al-Qaeda. I mean, Al-Qaeda was hundred people, or 100,000 people, or ten million people… Another interesting perspective in this is that I referred to the brand-change, and sometimes you have to switch the brand for the marketing purposes…”20
 
Edmonds analysis should resonate with anyone paying attention to the parade of super villains that have been featured in our news over the last 16 or so years. The Empire’s boogeyman hall of fame includes: the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Assad, Al Nusra. Yes, the terrorism marketing division is alive and well. At Edmonds suggests, it’s not difficult to see the mindset of marketing specialists behind the parade and the tales of their villainy.
 
Periodically, however, someone spills the bean. Back in 2005, former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook revealed the Al Qaeda and ISIS fabrication. Cook was reported to have died at age 59 while hill climbing in Scotland the same year. Perhaps he was too honest for the system as he had the integrity to resign from Cabinet on the eve of the Iraq war. 
 
“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda, and any informed intelligence officer knows this. But, there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an intensified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the United States.”21 
 
More recently, Canadian economist, Dr. Michael Chossudovsky, offered this explanation for the rise of Islamic terrorism.
 
“We are dealing with a criminal undertaking at a global level . . . and there is an ongoing war, it is led by the United States, it may be carried out by a number of proxy countries, which are obeying orders from Washington . . . The global war on terrorism is a US undertaking, which is fake, it’s based on fake premises. It tells us that somehow America and the Western world are going after a fictitious enemy, the Islamic state, when in fact the Islamic state is fully supported and financed by the Western military alliance and America’s allies in the Persian Gulf.
 
. . . They say Muslims are terrorists, but it just so happens that terrorists are Made in America. They’re not the product of Muslim society, and that should be abundantly clear to everyone on this floor. . . . The global war on terrorism is a fabrication, a big lie and a crime against humanity.”21
 
It seems that plans for the introduction of fake enemies, or a succession of them, has been in place for some time. Aaron Russo, told of how he was invited by Nick Rockefeller to join the NWO. Russo declined, but learned from Rockefeller that the elite had planned false flag attacks, a terrorist boogeyman and a global war on terror long before 9/11 occurred. Dr. Carol Rosin, former Corporate Manager at Fairchild Industries, (aerospace) tells of conversations with Nazi/NATO insider Werner von Braun. Braun told her that the long game plan included a series of fabricated threats to humanity -- fake communism, fake terrorism, fake third world country “crazies,” fake asteroids and the last card to be played, an extraterrestrial invasion.22
 
You have been warned – when the enemy du jour, the human terrorist, is no longer spooky enough to give the citizenry goose bumps, brace for the next new one. It’s likely to could be from outer space.
 
Machiavellian foreign policy 
Mark Taliano describes the fakery in the US-NATO led invasions and wars justified as “humanitarian” interventions. Taliano explains that the latest example of a coercive strategy is that employed against the Syrian Arab Republic. The strategy features the following elements. 

• Destroying hospitals and infrastructure
• Starvation
• Disinformation campaigns/erasing “history”
• Balkanization/partitioning
• Bombing civilian populations

 
He warns that the end game is “to de-populate and to destroy target countries and to subjugate the remaining population.” So, if we just take the time to scrape the veneer off the Empire’s cynical pretense of humanity, we discover colonial greed and selfish geopolitical ambitions.23
 
Novelist, philosopher and investigative journalist, Andre Vitchek explains how the Western powers crush nations under the cover of a fake morality and pretense of goodness.
 
All conquests, all genocides, all plunders have been eternally rationalized, painstakingly justified. Grand bogus concepts of charity, of ‘altruism’ have been erected. Subjugated nations have always been ruined in the name of some higher principles, in order to save them from themselves. For centuries, the West has portrayed itself as a sacrificial lamb, as a hand chosen by some divine power, as the greatest civilization that is continuously and altruistically liberating the world.24
 
Nowhere is that bogus concept of self-sacrificing altruism more apparent than in the justifications for NATO presence on foreign soil.  NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was formed in 1949 as a system of mutual, collective defence against attacks by an external party (Wiki). With the collapse of the Soviet Union, came calls for its dissolution, since there was no major threat to defend its members from. Those calls were ignored, and NATO has grown into an ugly regime change monster dubbed the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization by its critics. Its intervention in Libya was justified on the basis of its so-called “responsibility to protect” (R2P).
 
R2P was intended to allow for international intervention in a foreign country where its own government was deemed incapable of protecting its citizens against, genocide, war crimes and human rights abuses. The United States and NATO perverted that moral justification to serve their own imperialistic goals. Today, Libya is a mess, thanks to the R2P intervention.25
 
Policy analyst, David Rieff comments:
 
“For those of us who feared that R2P was just a warrant for war, our fears have been vindicated,” said Rieff to the Economist at the time of the NATO intervention in Libya.”26
 
Western foreign policy, deceptively coated in the morality of humanitarian interventions, is highly selective. Obama threatened Syria’s Assad regularly for defending his country against US-backed foreign invaders while conveniently ignoring Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in its war with Yemen. Thus, US foreign policy conveniently packages the US’s enormous sins of both commission and omission into a single virtue. It could not secure the permission of the citizenry, of course, without the services of the MSM in manufacturing public consent.27  
 
CIA-corrupted media peddling propaganda
In George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) Big Brother government cultivates fear and war hysteria in the population of Oceana using manufactured boogey men and pervasive war propaganda. One day, the two central characters, Winston and Julia, get into an argument about which country theirs was at war with four years ago. Was it Eurasia or Eastasia? Finally, in exasperation, Julia responds: ‘Who cares?’ It’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.’ 28
 
Julia, a character created in 1949, could have just as easily been commenting on the real world situation in 2017. War is a constant enabled in large measure by the fabricated justifications served up by the MSM. We have grown up believing that a free and independent media, the fourth estate, is a vital pillar of a healthy democracy. As this pillar has crumbled, it’s left the entire democratic construct teetering on a failing foundation.
 
Six major corporations control about 90% of the media in America. This degree of consolidation confers unprecedented ability upon this oligarchy to shape the thinking, if not the reality, of the citizens of Empire. We have known about the warped role of corporate media for some time. Noam Chomsky and co-author, Edward Herman characterized the role of the mass media in their revealing book, Manufacturing Consent: The political economy of the mass media, in 1988.”29 
 
Recently the release of 12 million declassified CIA documents has shed new light on what Shawn Helton describes as “the symbiotic relationship between the CIA and American media.” This relationship dates back more than half a century. Shelton notes that the CIA to ran a program in the fifties called Operation Mockingbird. The mission was to propagandize the American public through the news media and various student and cultural organizations and magazines as front organizations.30
 
So, when it comes to the recent “fake news” uproar, it should be clear which side in the battle (the MSM versus independent media) that’s the more reliable source for those seeking the truth. The alternative media has also been infiltrated by those engaged in disinformation,  so discernment is always required. Author and attorney, John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute, states that one of the biggest propagators of fake news is the US government.

In the midst of the media’s sudden headline-blaring apoplexy over fake news, you won’t hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news--often with the help of the corporate news media—because that’s not how the game works.31
 
Jonathan Cook has analyzed how the US government, collaborated with the MSM to secure public support for the invasion of Iraq. It was achieved based on the lie advanced by an individual the CIA knick-named “Curveball.” Curveball provided the convenient lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, the justification for invasion.
 
Cook explains how the illusions of a naive public on the one hand, intersect with those perpetuated by transnational elites. These illusions are fused together into a narrative or worldview. Three illusions from Cook’s list of examples are:
 
“… we, in particular (consumers), and the global workforce in general are the chief beneficiaries of the corporations’ wealth creation.”
 
“… the corporations and the ideology that underpins them, global capitalism, are the only hope for freedom.”
 
“… there are groups, called terrorists, who want to destroy this benevolent system of wealth creation and personal improvement.”
 
The complicity of the media is defined is relation to the worldview knit from these illusions.
 
The job of sanctifying these assumptions — and ensuring they are not scrutinised — falls to our mainstream media. Western corporations own the media, and their advertising makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media cannot fulfil the function of watchdog of power, because in fact it is power. It is the power of the globalised elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative horizons of the media’s readers and viewers. It does so to ensure that imperial interests, which are synonymous with those of the corporations, are not threatened.32
 
This then is the role of the Empire’s media magicians --- ensuring these assumptions are not scrutinized. And there’s no end of distractions at their disposal. Some Hollywood trivia can always be readily inflated or some identity politics conflict easily ignited. Should awakened individuals “go off the reservation,” the corporate media has techniques for neutralizing them. A favourite tactic is to discredit the source by smearing their reputation or otherwise undermining their credibility (digital assassination). And the MSM can always deploy counter narratives provided by reliable puppets like “war hero” John McCain. All one has to do is question the wisdom of some humanitarian intervention (regime change) and you are immediately smeared as a tool of the enemy du jour, a role assigned to Russia at the moment.
 
The hypocrisy of the MSM knows no bounds. Even as example after example of its fake news output was exposed in 2016, it distracted and deflected the puck. In late 2016, in a display of unmatched chutzpa, the MSM attempted a ju jitsu move against its alternative media opponents. It presented the members of the MSM as the faithful guardians of the truth and pointed an accusing finger at independent media as untrustworthy purveyors of fake news. Beyond this, it has blacklisted specific independent media sources and proposed various schemes to vet fake news stories on behalf of the public.  George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth is alive and well.
 
The trend toward censorship is unmistakable. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter announced plans in December of 2016 to launch an Internet censorship database in 2017. The intent is to scrub anything labelled “extremist content.” This should set off alarms for free speech advocates. Governments have long censored political information that has nothing to do with extremist content. And it wasn’t that long ago that Japan, for example, banned news regarding its Fukushima earthquake. The EU and US governments have pushed for separate legislation to crack down on what the establishment calls “fake news.” The EU takes the suppression of political information farther threatening to take “non-legislative” action (punitive fines) if Facebook, Twitter and YouTube do not censor what it considers to be “illegal” online content within 24 hours.33
 
Awakened individuals in the US at least will have noticed that the level of propaganda has intensified significantly in recent years. There’s a reason why this is the case. The average citizen might have assumed that their government reserved propaganda campaigns for external military enemies. It’s not the case, however. On July 2, 2013, lawmakers amended the National Defense Authorization Act removing the protection that the Smith-Mundt Act provided American citizens from propagandization.34
 
The power of propaganda shouldn’t be underestimated. It has, and it continues to change the course of history. Usually, it’s not for the better. John Whitehead illustrates the danger in terms of how a false flag (with the aid of the media) was used to trigger the Viet Nam war.
 
… in August 1964, the nation’s leading newspapers—including the Washington Post and New York Times—echoed Lyndon Johnson’s claim that North Vietnam had launched a second round of attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. No such attacks had taken place, and yet the damage was done. As Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon report for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, “By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.”31
 
Increasingly with the assistance of public relations, advertising and political operatives and actors, theatre and fiction is overtaking reality. As Chris Hedges explains, pseudo-events and richly orchestrated productions have the capability to appear real even though we know they are staged. And fictional events can become accepted as truth. Ominously, Hedges observes, “Truth is irrelevant.”
 
Reporters, especially those on television, no longer ask whether the message is true but rather whether the pseudo-event worked or did not work as political theater. Pseudo-events are judged on how effectively we have been manipulated by illusion. Those events that appear real are relished and lauded. Those that fail to create a believable illusion are deemed failures (Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, 2009.)35
 
And where is the resistance? Where is the outrage? There was a notable instance during Obama’s term in office when the MSM objected. Since then, it appears that the media has succumbed to fulfilling the role of echo chamber for the State Department.36
 
Author and political analyst, Paul Craig Roberts cites the May 2017 issues of Newsweek and Time as examples of “presstitutes” serving the National Security State with propaganda designed to fuel conflict. The front cover of Newsweek features a picture of Putin and the headline, The Plot Against America: Inside Putin’s Campaign to Destroy Democracy in the US.  Roberts responds by saying that US democracy was destroyed by special interest groups, and by a phony war on terror that destroyed the US Constitution. The image on the Time cover implies with a splash of red brush strokes that Trump is converting the White House into the base for the Kremlin and Saint Basil’s cathedral. Roberts laments that this “extraordinary propaganda” seems to be accepted by the majority of Westerners.37 
 
There’s an old maxim that you (can expect to) reap what you sow. A recent statistics suggests that if you seed sufficient lies and deceptions, you will in time reap the distrust of those you propagandize. According to the findings of a May 2017 Harvard-Harris poll, two thirds of Americans believe that “there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media.” The breakdown on this statistic is 80 percent of Republicans, 60 percent of independents and 53 percent of Democrats. Eighty-four percent of voters said it is hard to know what news to believe online.
 
The troubling conclusion reached by Harvard-Harris co-director Mark Penn is that much of the media is now “…just another part of the partisan divide in the country…Every major institution from the presidency to the courts is now seen as operating in a partisan fashion in one direction or the other.”38
 
Clearly, the propagandizing of US citizens has earned the MSM the well-deserved distrust of is audiences. There’s a larger tragedy here too. It’s the tragedy of a once united nation fragmenting into the divided peoples of America. And If Hedges is correct in his assessment that falsity has triumphed over truth, then a corollary must also be considered. It’s the liklihood that the Magician has triumphed over the Truth Teller. 
 
Fake heroes
Not surprisingly, the Magicians of the Post-Truth era have given the citizens of the Empire fake heroes. The latest has arisen amidst the Syria conflict and the accompanying blitzkrieg of war propaganda served up to gullible citiizens. It’s the Nobel Prize nominees and Netflix movie heroes, the White Helmets. Awakened patriots might well ask how a UK and US-funded PR agency managed to turn associates of Al Qaeda in Syria into folk heroes.
 
The campaign will go down in history as a demonstration of the power of PR over factual reality. In 2016, I received an email from one of Canada’s opposition parties encouraging my support for the nomination of the White Helmets for a Nobel Prize. It was bad enough that the US and Canadian governments were resolutely insisting that Saudi Arabia, the global epicenter of jihadist ideology was a friend and an ally. But, now A Canadian opposition party was encouraging support for the associates of Al Qaeda. The circle of delusion in government was complete. I bit my lip and politely suggested to the latest groupies of the White Helmets that these pretend humanitarians weren’t worthy of the adoration.   
 
The White Helmets were trained by British ex-military officer, James Le Mesurier who would like us to believe that they are group of ordinary citizens – taxi drivers, bakers and teachers moved to serve their countrymen. The Ron Paul Institute describes these ordinary citizens differently.39
 
We have demonstrated that the White Helmets are an integral part of the propaganda vanguard that ensures obscurantism of fact and propagation of Human Rights fiction that elicits the well-intentioned and self righteous response from a very cleverly duped public. A priority for these NGOs is to keep pushing the No Fly Zone scenario which has already been seen to have disastrous implications for innocent civilians in Libya, for example. 39
 
Independent journalist, Vanessa Beeley, who has regularly reported from Syria throughout the conflict, describes them this way.
 
Like many other ‘NGOs’, the White Helmets have been deployed by the west to derail the Syrian state, first by undermining existing civic structures and by disseminating staged PR to facilitate regime change propaganda, through western and Gulf state media outlets. Despite the fact that they were started, and are still generously funded by NATO members states, particularly from the US and UK, the White Helmets’ official statement still claims categorically that they are somehow “fiercely independent” and “have accepted no money from governments, corporations or anyone directly involved in the Syrian conflict“. This is both farcical and deeply misleading.
 
So, the White Helmets, lauded by the West, are terrorist-promoting imposters. Beeley points out that the real Syria Civil Defence was founded in 1953, “some 63 years before the White Helmets were a glimmer in the eyes of CIA and MI6 operatives.” The real Syria Civil Defence is a group of 150 volunteers who live and serve under constant threat of being targeted by an assortment of up to 22 terrorist brigades. This threat includes the phoney White Helmets supported and celebrated by the West. A member of the real Syria Defence describes the White Helmets this way:
 
They are terrorists, not rescuers.  They stole our ambulances and three of our fire engines. They don’t do any rescue work.  They drive round with guns in the back of their car like any other terrorist.  Some are from East Aleppo, some are from Syria but not from Aleppo and some are even coming in from abroad.40
 
So which is it? Are our government leaders just extremely naïve, profoundly ignorant or deviously complicit in such deceptions? Think about it. National governments use tax payer funded offices and assets to propagandize the very citizens that they are supposed to serve. It's every bit as devious and nausea-inducing as the daily goings on in the fictitious Oceana of George Orwell's creation.  
 
Think tanks that can’t think
Washington’s policies, particularly its foreign policy, are often birthed and developed by the country’s so-called think tanks and universities. The problem is many can’t think straight to begin with, because they are beholden to their founders, donors and/or clients. In other words, while they may have the outward appearance of disinterested, independent third parties offering unbiased analysis and policy proposals, they are no such thing. They are often intended to serve a narrower set of private interests and must carefully colour between established lines. In short, they are compromised.
 
There’s nothing like hearing it straight from the figurative horses mouth. New Yorker correspondent Connie Bruck reported that Haim Saban, “a hawkish Israeli-American” billionaire speaking at a 2009 conference in Israel, described the “three ways to be influential in American politics” as donating to political parties, creating think tanks, and buying up influential media.41
 
Did you catch that? An Israel-focused American (by his own admission) informs us that one of the three best ways to influence American politics is by creating think tanks. It goes without saying that such think tanks are predisposed to advance a particular point of view. Their billionaire sponsors have such think tanks on a leash. Promote the right policy ideas or suddenly, your funds dry up. Think tanks know it’s unwise to bite the hand that feeds them. It’s hard to imagine for example, the Heartland Institute, a recipient of Koch Brothers money, recommending actions against climate change, something that could have economic consequences for their patrons.
 
It’s not just domestic interests that have created captive think tanks. Foreign players are getting into the think tank business. Writing in 2014 in the Observer, Nina Burleigh reports that some of the major think tanks are partially owned subsidiaries of the petro states. One think tank, The Center for Strategic Studies, accepted a million dollars to help build a new headquarters near the White House. And Brookings Institute was the recipient of a four year $14.8 million donation from Qatar.
 
Burleigh explains what happens when liberal institutions team up withwhat she calls “regressive rich petro states”. In short, something has to give. She reports that Saleem Ali, a former visiting fellow at Brookings, Doha, was informed during his job interview that he couldn’t take positions “critical of the Qatari government” in his papers. Ali commented that while a member of Congress using Brookings reports may not be getting a false story, but they will not be getting the full story.42
 
Put another way, this doesn’t sound like the a policy research group dedicated to go where the evidence takes them.  
 
Turkey, under an increasingly authoritarian Recep Erdogan, was awarded the title of  “the poster child when it comes to foreign lobbying opportunities for former members of both parties” by Politico in the fall of 2016. One of its many friends in Washington in the Atlantic Council, is a pro-NATO think tank. What lubricates that friendship? It’s reported that the Atlantic Council’s top financial supporters include “no fewer than five major Turkish government and business organizations, along with Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and other large military contractors”.43
 
Knowing that, it’s not hard to guess the flavour of the policy proposals likely to be advanced by the Atlantic Council is it? If you want to hear a case for bulking up on armaments to ward off imagined Russian aggression, you know where to go. When the New Republic examined the partnerships of the Atlantic Council, the two authors concluded that the Council, “…-- like so many other Washington think tanks – has a definition of “intellectual independence” that differs from typical scholarly institutions.”44
 
I might add that some of those scholarly institutions, the universities have themselves been taken captive by the ideology du jour, including recently, cultural Marxism. Nor have they proven themselves particularly interested in the open, rigorous intellectual debate. Follow the money; they too have rich and powerful benefactors they don’t wish to alienate.
 
Compromised think tanks are part of the reason for the persistence of Washington group think. It’s group think that produces a chorus of voices calling for an arms build-up and more not less aggression. Washington think tanks are brains on a leash. A number have been born out of the same deceptive appearance and motives as “astro turf” non-profits with a political bent. Again they would like us to believe that they are independent thus conferring on them the authority of independent expertise. It’s one more reminder that a sign of a dying democracy is a campaign to reduce a nation's capacity for divergent thinking in subordination to groupthink. Of course, politicians must excel in double speak in order to maintain the illusion that Big Brother encourages divergent thinking. 
 
Weaponized weather
You may not have realized it, but there are “military dolphins.” They are described as “oceanic dolphins trained to rescue lost naval swimmers or to locate underwater mines.”  Apparently a dolphin named K-Dog performed mine clearance work in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq War.45 When I first learned that the American military had militarized dolphins, it occurred to me that the Empire demands the militarization of everything. Nothing is sacred. Nature, too must submit to the indignities of war-making. And true to form, the Empire has also militarized the weather.
 
Climate scientists, geo-engineering specialist and Rutgers University professor, Alan Robock explains the potential consequences of weaponizing weather.
 
Some countries might try to create clouds and send them toward an enemy, for example. Or there may be disputes over the "right" temperature, setting off what's been dubbed "the Thermostat Wars" -- if Indonesia wants cooling to avoid sea level rise and Russia wants warming to increase agricultural production, for instance.
 
Robock points out that the US already has a history of using weather in hostile ways, citing the seeding of clouds over Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War “to make the major supply route for North Vietnamese foot soldiers too muddy to pass” as well as over Cuba “to make it rain and ruin the sugar harvest.”46
 
If past performance is the best predictor or future behaviour, we have every reason to suspect that weather warfare technology has advanced considerably beyond such small scale applications. The Air Force assessment of its potential is just too upbeat to think otherwise. The US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report reads in part, “Weather modification offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary’ and, it says, they “extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes.”   
 
The forward looking language of the report leaves little doubt as to the importance weather modification will play in the future of military conflict.
 
Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog, and storms on earth or to modify space weather, … and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of technologies which can provide substantial increase in US, or degraded capability in an adversary, to achieve global awareness, reach, and power. (US Air Force)47
 
Western governments have been discussing the military applications of weather modification capabilities for some time. On 5 February 1998, the EU’s Parliament's Subcommittee on Security and Disarmament held a hearing the subject, which included it’s the US’s HAARP operations in Fairbanks Alaska. The project and its military capabilities were described as follows:
 
HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project) is run jointly by the US Air Force and Navy, in conjunction with the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Similar experiments are also being conducted in Norway, probably in the Antarctic, as well as in the former Soviet Union.(22) HAARP is a research project using a ground-based apparatus, an array of antennae each powered by its own transmitter, to heat up portions of ionosphere with powerful radio beams. The energy generated heats up parts of the ionosphere; this results in holes in the ionosphere and produces artificial 'lenses'.
 
The report had more to say about the military application of HAARP.
 
HAARP can be used for many purposes. Enormous quantities of energy can be controlled by manipulating the electrical characteristics of the atmosphere. If used as a military weapon this can have a devastating impact on an enemy. HAARP can deliver millions of times more energy to a given area than any other conventional transmitter. The energy can also be aimed at a moving target which should constitute a potential anti-missile system.48
 
As far back as 2010, some observers were citing evidence that the US has already used its HAARP microwave technology as an “earthquake weapon.” They cite two earthquakes in particular as the result of the military use of HAARP technology, the Fukushimo earthquake and tsunami and possibly the 2008 Chile earthquake (a 7.8). It’s also speculated that the Haiti Hurricane was the result of a test gone wrong with devastating consequences. The Chinese and Russians may also possess some capabilities in the realm of weather weapons.49
 
Geo-engineering researcher, Dane Wigington, speculated in his blog in December 2014, that “weather warfare assaults” might have been made on several countries that had incurred the wrath of the Empire. He cites a devastating ice storm in Slovenia (Feb, 2014); record flooding in Pakistan (2010); a devastating flood in Thailand (2011); an ice storm in Hungary (2014) and a record strength typhoon in the Philippines (2013). Japan’s Fukushimo tsunami (2011) and Haiti’s quake (2011) also made the list. It’s a fascinating analysis in that in each case, Wigington describes specific interests or tension between the target country and the US in play at the time.50

It isn’t just the military applications of weather modification that concern Wigington. He has stated that the number one threat facing humanity is “extreme weather modification to cool the planet.” The method being used is climate geo-engineering, and critics in the alternative media have long stated that the most obvious evidence of this is chemtrails in the sky. Another symptom of ill-advised geo-engineering is what Wigington calls “weather whiplash.” He cites an example when New York weather went from record-breaking high to snow in less than 24 hours.
 
So why aren’t national governments putting this subject on the table for discussion with their citizens? Why isn’t this subject being discussed in association with climate change discussions and national strategies? And why aren’t any existing international agreements among nations, being disclosed? It’s not as if we all don’t have a shared interest in the future of our atmosphere and its importance to the health of earth’s ecosystems. The agriculture and agrifood industry alone has a vital interest in the risks which weather modification in all its forms could present. It’s just one more case where the silence on the part of our leaders is deafening.
 
Let’s sum up what we’ve learned about the state of the Empire in Parts A and B of Exposing the Empire of Lies. This investigation has revealed the following:  
 
Part A

• An imaginary democracy;

• An unelected Deep State government;
• Treasonous, war criminal presidents;
• Compromised puppet politicians;
• Police state variety policing;
• Extreme surveillance; and

• Rigged elections.

 
Part B

• Frankenstein security agencies;
• Government-orchestrated terrorism and fake terrorists;
• Machiavellian foreign policy;
• CIA- infiltrated media peddling propaganda;
• Fake heroes;
• Think tanks that can’t think; and
• Weaponized weather.

 
I could go on. My files contain a great deal more evidence of even more fakery and fabrication. It’s not necessary, however, as I have shed light on the decaying state of the American Empire via 14 different evidential windows. Collectively they reveal an America that is compromised, corrupt, captive and controlled. Beneath the many layers of veneer we have found corrupt institutions infested with treasonous leaders and parasitic domestic and foreign interests. Collectively, they are killing the host.  

The parasites have invaded the brain of their host and turned it into a dangerous, out-of-control monster that’s bringing death and destruction throughout the world in its wake. This  monster endangers us all.   

We also find enslaved and deluded citizens. The trusting and distracted citizens of the Empire have provided plausible explanations for the implausible, glossed over the anomalies and lies, ignored their gut and given the benefit of the doubt where it wasn’t warranted. Thus, they are complicit in constructing and maintaining the walls of their own prison.
 
But when will the tyranny end? It will end when an awakened populace rejects the Empire's hypnotic illusions. It will end when we, like the young boy on the edge of crowd in the Hans Christian Anderson tale, dare to call out the claims of our delusional Emperors. When we dare to tell the truth, the teetering Empire of Lies, Humpty-Dumpty-like, will all come crashing down. 
 
Now, it's time for another long walk.
 

1 Three factions of the CIA that control the world, Veterans Today, January 16, 2017, http://www.theeventchronicle.com/editors-pick/three-factions-cia-control-world-recommended/
 
2 Lt. Col. Bowman: “Who were the 9/11 Conspirators?”, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6Ls6sifFJo 
 
3 Exposed: CIA – The Swamp Monsters, The Millennial Report Exclusive, January 14, 2017, http://themillenniumreport.com/2017/01/exposed-cia-the-swamp-monsters/
 
4 Are we witnessing a coup operation against the Trump Whitehouse?, The Information Clearing House, February 24, 2017, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46532.htm
 
5 The nasty truth about the CIA, New Eastern Outlook, April 4, 2017, http://journal-neo.org/2017/04/04/the-nasty-truth-about-the-cia/  
 
6 The CIA and human experiments, July 7, 2015, http://journal-neo.org/2015/07/07/the-cia-and-human-experiments/
 
7 The CIA tortured humans and it experimented on them, Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for Political Economy, May 17, 2017, http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/05/17/cia-tortured-humans-experimented/  

8 The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s manufactured war on terrorism, Trevor Aaronson, Ig Publishing, 2013, https://www.amazon.com/Terror-Factory-Inside-Manufactured-Terrorism/dp/1935439618
 
9 FBI terrorism and the false flag war, Veterans Today, February 19, 2013, http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/02/19/fbi-terrorism-and-the-false-flag-war/
 
10 Trevor Aaronson: How the FBI strategy is actually creating US-based terrorists, TED Talks, YouTube, June 4, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGG97dDfZ7E
 
11 EX-CIA agent: Every terrorist attack in US was a false flag attack, YourNewsWire, September 22, 2016, http://yournewswire.com/intelligence-officer-every-terrorist-attack-in-us-was-a-false-flag-attack/
 
12 Robert Steele, Draft list of 63 Orlando false flag anomalies, Public Intelligence Blog, http://phibetaiota.net/2016/06/robert-steele-draft-list-of-56-orlando-false-flag-anomalies/ 

13 Bush needs a Boogeyman with a big bomb, HUFFPOST, September 28, 2006, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blake-fleetwood/bush-needs-a-boogeyman-wi_b_30456.html
 
14 42 admitted false flags, Washington  Blog.com. February 9, 2015, http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/02/41-admitted-false-flag-attacks.html
 
15 If we learn our history, we’re NOT doomed to repeat it, Washington Blog.com, September 6, 2012, http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/09/false-flag-2.html
 
16 The psychology of soft slavery, Philosopher’s Stone, January 14, 2017, http://www.philosophers-stone.co.uk/?p=17397
 
17 False flags, a history of deception, Richard Dolan, August 18, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4Gy-Dr50j4&t=74s
 
18 Judge overturns convictions of John Nutalll and Amanda Korody in connection with plot to bomb B.C. legislature, The Georgia Straight, July 29, 2016, http://www.straight.com/news/746076/judge-overturns-convictions-john-nuttall-and-amanda-korody-connection-plot-bomb-bc
 
19 Manchester false flag: Man 22, kills 22 on May 22, Veterans Today, May 23, 2017, http://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/05/23/man22/
 
20 U.S. wants to revive terror scare in order to keep up the terror war industry - FBI whistleblower, RT, Daily Motion, October 14, 2014, http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x27vhjc_u-s-wants-to-revive-terror-scare-in-order-to-keep-up-the-terror-war-industry-fbi-whistleblower_news

21 British Labour Leader tells the world who’s really funding ISIS, Collective Evolution, February 2, 2016, http://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/02/02/another-politician-speaks-out-british-labour-leader-tells-the-world-whos-really-funding-isis/ 

22 About Carol Rosin and the late Werner Von Braun, http://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/02/02/another-politician-speaks-out-british-labour-leader-tells-the-world-whos-really-funding-isis/
 
23 US- NATO “Humanitarian Interventions” have resulted in “Crimes against Humanity”, Global Research, March 9, 2016, http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-nato-humanitarian-interventions-have-resulted-in-crimes-against-humanity/5524140
 
24 The entire world is “fake news”, New Eastern Outlook, January 6, 2017, http://journal-neo.org/2017/01/06/the-entire-world-is-fake-news/
 
25 The destruction of Libya: US-NATO Crime against humanity, March 18, 2015, 21st Century Wire, http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/03/18/the-destruction-of-libya-us-nato-crime-against-humanity/
 
26 Responsibility to protect justified imperialist goals in Libya, March 18, 2017, http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Responsibility-to-Protect-Justified-Imperialist-Goals-in-Libya-20170318-0015.html
 
27 Pentagon heads toward escalating genocide in Yemen Global Research, March 27, 2017, , http://www.economist.com/node/18709571
 
28 1984, George Orwell, Penguin Books, 1949, p. 161.
 
29 Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Pantheon Books, 1988, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manufacturing-consent-edward-s-herman/1100011970
 
30 Mockingbird Mirror: Declassified docs depict deeper link between the CIA and American media, March 1, 2017, 21st Century, http://21stcenturywire.com/2017/03/01/mockingbird-mirror-declassified-docs-depict-deeper-link-between-the-cia-and-american-media/
 
31 When it comes to fake news, the US government is the biggest culprit, Rutherford Institute, November 21, 2017, http://www.theeventchronicle.com/fake-news-agenda/comes-fake-news-u-s-government-biggest-culprit/ 
 
32 An Empire of Lies: The CIA and the Western media, Global Research, February 28, 2011, http://www.globalresearch.ca/an-empire-of-lies-the-cia-and-the-western-media/23432
 
33Internet censorship database announced by Google, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft, HNN, December 6, 2016, http://alexanderhiggins.com/internet-censorship-database-announced-google-twitter-facebook-microsoft/
 
34 US government funded domestic propaganda has officially hit the airwaves, SF Gate, July 16, 2013, http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/US-Government-Funded-Domestic-Propaganda-Has-4668001.php
 
35 The Praetorian’s Bodyguards, (Of the Empire’s Liars), PoxAmericana, May 13, 2017,
http://poxamerikana.com/2017/03/13/179539/
 
36 Censorship: 38 Journalism groups slam Obama’s ‘politically-driven suppression of news’ Patriot Rising, September 7, 2014, http://patriotrising.com/2014/07/09/censorship-38-journalism-groups-slam-obamas-politically-driven-suppression-news/
 
37 Truth has become Un-American, Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for Political Economy, May 23, 2017, http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/05/23/truth-has-become-un-american/
 

38 Poll: Majority says mainstream media publishes fake news, The Hill, May 24, 2017, http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/334897-poll-majority-says-mainstream-media-publishes-fake-news
 
39 Syria: The propaganda ring, the Ron Paul Institute, August 27, 2015, http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2015/august/27/syria-the-propaganda-ring/  

40 Exclusive: The real Syria Civil Defence Exposes fake ‘White Helmets’ as Terrorist-linked imposters, 21st Century Wire, September 23, 2016, http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/09/23/exclusive-the-real-syria-civil-defence-expose-natos-white-helmets-as-terrorist-linked-imposters/
 
41 Israel lobby pays the political piper, Consortium News, May 21, 2017, https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/21/israel-lobby-pays-the-political-piper/
 
42 Stop taking Saudi money, Washington, Observer, September 29, 2014, http://observer.com/2014/09/stop-taking-saudi-money-washington/
 
43 Roll call of contributions, Atlantic Council,  http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/support/supporters
 
44 Chuck Hagel’s think tank, its donors, and intellectual independence, New Republic, February 12, 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/112398/chuck-hagels-atlantic-council-foreign-donors-and-independence
 
45 Military Dolphin, Fandom, http://military.wikia.com/wiki/Military_dolphin
 
46 Climate researcher claims CIA asked about weaponized weather: What could go wrong?, Computerworld, February 16, 2015, http://www.computerworld.com/article/2883763/climate-researcher-claims-cia-asked-about-weaponized-weather-what-could-go-wrong.html
 
47 Chemtrails – the secret war, The Event Chronicle, Dec 2014, http://www.theeventchronicle.com/study/italian-chemtrails-secret-war-free-film/
 
48 Report, January 14, 1999, European Parliament, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security, and Defence Policy, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+REPORT+A4-1999-0005+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN
 
49 Are we in a HAARP “earthquake war”?, Before it’s news, May 5, 2010, http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2010/05/are-we-in-a-haarp-earthquake-war-20951.html
 
50 Are weather warfare assaults devastating noncompliant countries around the globe?, GeoEngineering Watch, December 9, 2014, http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/are-weather-warfare-assaults-devastating-noncompliant-countries-around-the-globe/
 
 (c) Futurescapes21C, 2018 All rights reserved

Exposing the Empire of Lies (Part A)
Written May 23, 2017 draft, rev May 29
Posted January 16, 2018
© Futurescapes21C 2018 All rights reserved

 
“But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist.”  – Chris Hedges
 
In this essay, I will pull back the curtain on the American Empire. You will get a glimpse of the real America minus the Madison Avenue hype, Hollywood mythology, Vegas glitz and cultivated sentimentality. It won’t be a pretty picture. As you may have heard, the truth, as freeing as it is, brings its own misery.
 
Author Chris Hedges states that the America you thought you knew, no longer exists. For some who have long been faithful to cherished myths, like America the Beautiful, the weight of these revelations could be too much to process at one sitting. For this reason, I have broken my analysis into two parts. I’ve also done my best to forewarn and prepare you for what you are about to discover. It would be also helpful to intersperse the heavy reading with some long walks.
 
The good news is that escaping a delusion can be immensely freeing. It’s not unlike emerging from the blur of a dense fog or the choking smoke of a forest fire. For the first time in some time, perhaps ever, you will be able to see the world more clearly. Pursuing a more accurate understanding of the real America doesn’t make you disloyal. Nor does it mean the end of the world, just the end of a personal delusion. You may have already glimpsed cracks in the facade. You may have had doubts about the lavish claims made in the advertising. And if you suspected that you were being deceived, you're right and likely to a far greater degree than you ever thought.

Bill Willers tells of an encounter with a Brussels protester at a 2007 demonstration in Brussels, who after 30 years of living in the US had returned to Europe. The protester said he had returned, because, after 30 years of living in the US, he didn’t like what he saw happening to is citizens.
 
They've been taken hostage for the past 20 years by a group of people who destroyed them physically, spiritually and intellectually, and now they're trying to do the same thing in Europe." Willers asks, How many lies over the years does it take before a society comes to its senses and realizes that its overriding worldview has been crafted largely by manipulative lies?1
 
Good question: “How many lies does it take?”

An imaginary democracy
American author, Chris Hedges declares that democracy in America is a “useful fiction.” A closer look reveals that what may have once resembled democracy has given way to an oligarchy or a corporatocracy with totalitarian features. I first awakened to this reality when I stumbled across a study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page. The two concluded that: “over the past few decades America's political system has slowly transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where wealthy elites wield most power.” Drawing on data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, they concluded that: “…. rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of or even against the will of the majority of voters.”2
 
These findings resonate when one considers how unelected powerful influencers now shape the policies of the US government. We have learned, for example that Obama’s 2008 cabinet was for the most part picked by Citibank. Clearly, this in itself would predispose the legislative agenda and policy focus for Obama’s first term.3
 
The number of lobbyists in Washington at any given time could range from 15,000 to more than double that number because thousands aren’t registered. Registered and non-registered lobbying is estimated at $9 billion per year. Many lobbyists have previously served in the federal government and are highly skilled in the art and science of bending politicians’ ears and will.4 They bring a single-minded focus on their clients’ interests, with a number of them even happy to write the new legislation for the legislator.5
 
Author and political theorist, Sheldon Wolin, describes the American system as “inverted totalitarianism” or a “managed democracy” at best. Significantly, in Wolin’s conception of inverted totalitarianism, the economic order trumps the political order.
 
There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on “American Idol.” Mass emotions are directed toward the raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.6
 
Considering Wolin's analysis, it’s not difficult to understand why middle class American citizens feel disconnected from their governments and their elected leaders. One the one hand, they see the trappings and participate in the rituals of a democracy, but on the other, decisions in Washington yield the same predictable results, irrespective of which party assumes power. Author and political analyst, Paul Craig Roberts paraphrases Vladimir Putin’s description of America’s imaginary democracy.
 
In the West, voters cannot change policies through elections, because the ruling elites control whoever is elected. Elections give the appearance of democracy, but voting does not change the policies that favor war and the elites. Therefore, the will of the people is impotent.
 
People are experiencing that they and their votes have no influence on the conduct of affairs of the country. This makes them afraid, frustrated, and angry, a combination of emotions that is dangerous to the ruling elite, who in response organize the powers of the state against the people, while urging them with propaganda to support more wars.
 
Roberts highlights the entrenchment of America’s status quo establishment, despite the many promises of change which bring successive administrations to power. Obama promised to get America out of Afghanistan and reverse the police state created by George W. Bush. Ultimately, he increased America’s military entanglements and expanded the police state. The title of an article by Roberts tidily sums up his assessment: “American democracy: A dead man walking.”7
 
An unelected, Deep State government 
The best explanation for the death of American democracy lies in the fact that the country is ultimately governed by the Deep State. Wikispooks defines the Deep State as:
 
…(loosely synonymous with the shadow government or permanent government) is in contrast to the public structures which appear to be directing individual nation states. The deep state is an intensely secretive, informal, fluid network of deep politicians who conspire to amplify their influence over national governments through a variety of deep state milieux.8
 
Author and founder of the Rutherford Institute, John Whitehead describes the parallel covert operation and extensive reach of this hybrid, public-private entity. 
 
As Lofgren reveals, this state within a state, “concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue,” is a “hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.
 
The Deep State not only holds the nation’s capital in thrall, but it also controls Wall Street (“which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater”) and Silicon Valley.9
 
It’s often been pointed out that both presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kenney warned Americans regarding the growing threat of the Deep State. Eisenhower specifically named the growing military industrial complex as a potential threat to America’s democracy. Kennedy’s November 12, 1961 speech to the American Newspaper Publisher’s Association, while more nuanced, warned of “a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence…”10 This could have been a subtle reference to the Deep State influences, which, according to some analyses, had him assassinated in November 1963.11
 
Until now, the Deep State has largely been submerged alligator-like below the water of the swamp. The US presidential election of 2016 and, seemingly a post election political struggle have riled the water and brought the alligator to the surface. Professor and attorney, Rahul Manchanda contends that we can now make out the identity of the players and the characteristics of Deep State actors that distinguish them from average American citizens.
 
The first of his seven defining characteristics is “an overwhelming desire to start WWIII”. The last is “a deep commitment to the Stasi-like police state with its attendant social engineering, manipulation of the judiciary and the courts, and complete and total control over the legislative (Congress and Senate), and if possible, domination and infiltration of the Executive Branch.”12 In a subsequent article, Manchanda elaborates on his point regarding Deep State control of the judiciary.
 
Many long-term surviving judges have reported that the Constitution intended that only elected lawmakers be permitted to create law, yet federal and state judges routinely and daily create their own law in the judicial system based on their own activism, personal opinions, corruption, bribery, and bias.
 
…The Deep State Plutocrat/Oligarch Elite control these financial purse-strings, and exercise this power on a daily basis, so that our body of law and jurisprudence is today, and at once, totally unrecognizable from the visions of the Founding Fathers and our first American courts.13
 
Seemingly, American assumptions regarding the integrity of their justice system are like that of the Empire itself, cherished illusions. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that that American Justice has become something of a marketplace where favourable verdicts may be bought or can be crafted to suit the occasion by artisan judges shaping verdicts as they are inclined.
 
Ironically, it is those who have been on the receiving end of the brute force of American imperialism who understand the Empire best. Syria’s President Assad describes the power of the Deep State and its control over US presidents in particular.
 
The American President has no policies. There are policies drawn by the American institutions which control the American regime which are the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, the big arms and oil companies, and financial institutions, in addition to some other lobbies which influence American decision-making. The American President merely implements these policies, and the evidence is that when Trump tried to move on a different track, during and after his election campaign, he couldn’t. He came under a ferocious attack. As we have seen in the past few weeks, he changed his rhetoric completely and subjected himself to the terms of the deep American state, or the deep American regime.14
 
That pretty much sums it up doesn’t it.

Note: Some analysts differentiate between the Deep State and the more permanent and powerful structure of the Shadow Government.

Treasonous, (war) criminal presidents
Treason, simply defined, is the betrayal of one’s country. A closer look at official and hidden US history reveals that the country’s leaders have betrayed the country time and time again. It’s a pattern that continues to the present. Some expect that full disclosure of the events of 9/11 will reveal the US was betrayed by the country’s leaders. The 9/11 attack should be viewed as a pivotal point in US history for more than one reason.
 
Among other things, it provided a pretext for the so-called “war on terror” and an open-ended series of US-led regime changes abroad. It also provided the impetus for a shift of power from Congress and “the people” to the office of the president. The implications of that power shift continue to play out in both US domestic and foreign policy today.
 
George Bush’s Patriot Act (October 26, 2001) significantly expanded state and presidential powers. Among other things, the act provided the ability to detain immigrants indefinitely and to search homes and businesses without the owner or occupant’s knowledge or permission. And while Obama’s Freedom Act (2015) placed some constraints on NSA surveillance, the broad trajectory of national legislation has been toward a major expansion of government powers to spy on American citizens. These powers extend to the ability to monitor electronic communications with little oversight and to seize the business records of telecom companies.
 
Journalist, John Pilger contends that Obama’s most historic achievement was brining the war on democracy “home to America.” Pilger explains how anti-terrorism legislation puts American citizens, once considered innocent until proven guilty, at risk.
 
Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) granted the Pentagon “the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only “associate” with those “belligerent” to the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeas corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.”
 
Pilger points out that President Obama can start wars abroad “at will” and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without any permission from Congress. This power extends to “arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory.“15 It sounds almost god-like, doesn’t it?
 
Loyal citizens of the empire cling desperately to their collective delusions regarding America’s moral superiority. The pretense is unsustainable, however in the face of the apparent criminality of America and its leaders. Paul Craig Roberts indicts four successive American presidents:
 
Our country has had four war criminal presidents in succession. Clinton twice launched military attacks on Serbia, ordering NATO to bomb the former Yugoslavia twice, both in 1995 and in 1999, so that gives Bill two war crimes. George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and attacked provinces of Pakistan and Yemen from the air. That comes to four war crimes for Bush. Obama used NATO to destroy Libya and sent mercenaries to destroy Syria, thereby committing two war crimes. Trump attacked Syria with US forces, thereby becoming a war criminal early in his regime.16
 
A footnote on the subject of war crimes committed by US presidents is that on September 22, 2000, the district court in Belgrade handed down guilty verdicts against government leaders of NATO countries for war crimes. The defendants, including Tony Blair, Robin Cook, George Richardson, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and nine others, were each sentenced to 20 years in a Yugoslav prison.17
 
In his 2005 Nobel speech, Harold Pinter comments on the relative silence regarding America’s criminality. He attributes the silence to America’s bold deceptiveness. And he notes, it has also enabled by the unthinking passivity of American citizens. 
 
The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. ... Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties, but it's very comfortable.18

The hypocrisy demonstrated by America's political leaders is mind-warping. Even as their crimes are exposed to the world, they continue to point condemning, holier-than-thou fingers at the failings of foreign leaders who dare to object to America’s demands. Look more closely and you can detect the odour of the regime change propaganda is in the air. The nakedness of the emperors is increasingly apparent.
 
Compromised puppet politicians
You may have heard the cynical assessment to the effect that America has the best government that money can buy. You may have wondered how otherwise intelligent individuals can be turned into puppets. And, you might also have wondered if it’s a classic case of a few bad apples or something more systemic. Then there are the questions of who pulls the political strings and how? 
 
There are different kinds of strings and a variety of string pullers controlling Washington’s puppets. One string is Gulf Petro dollars. Investigative reporters with the New York Times and the Nation have reported, “the Saudis, UAE and Qatar have been flooding the nation’s capital with greenbacks.”19 In June of 2016, Prince Mohammed of Saudi Arabia was quoted as saying that his country had financed 20% of the cost of Hillary Clinton’s election campaign.20 These funds no doubt went some distance in buying US support in the country’s war with Yemen and silence regarding its war crimes.
 
Turkey also has its fingers on the strings. It’s been described as the poster child when it comes to creating foreign lobbying opportunities for former members of both political parties. In recent years, Turkey has hired and “army of lobbyists” including a former house speaker, a former director of the CIA, former house members and former representatives.21
 
And when it comes to puppet masters, there is perhaps none more effective than Israel’s lobby group, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Phillip Geraldi describes AIPAC as a 1,600 pound gorilla.22 Could this be one of the reasons that Ariel Sharon, in 2001, was able to boast that, “We, the Jewish people, control America, and America knows it.”23 Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu also boasted about the pliability of America. He is quoted as stating: “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.”24
 
The boast perhaps derives in part from the fact that AICPAC influence can end political careers, something that keeps a lot of members of congress attentive to Israel’s interests. But the controls are more elaborate than that. Former Georgia Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney was the first to publicly describe how the Israel lobby used one of its strings to control members of Congress.
 
According to McKinney, candidates in both the House and the Senate were asked to sign pledges of support for Israel. The pledge committed the signatory to vote to provide consistent levels of economic support to the Zionist state. The pledge also included a vow to support Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel. And, there were consequences if a candidate didn’t sign. (She explained that the tactic changed after she made this one public.)
 
You make a commitment that you will vote to support the military superiority of Israel—the economic assistance that Israel wants, that you would vote to provide that…
 
Every candidate for Congress at that time had a pledge, they were given a pledge to sign…If you don’t sign the pledge, you don’t get money.25
 
Israel may have even more powerful tools of persuasion at its disposal. Former US army officer, Jaochim Hagopian explains in some detail how billionaire Jeffrey Epstein frequently flew high profile politicians and lawyers on his private Jet, the “Lolita Express” to his Caribbean resort, “Lolita Island.” Some of those high profile people who came to the island to fulfill their sexual fantasies may not have realized their activities were video recorded. The videos serve as leverage to blackmail and extort these now-compromised individuals. This is a long standing CIA-Mossad run system designed for controlling powerful politicians.26
 
Multiple alternative media sources have described a connection between pedophilia and the political impotence of Washington politicians. One report by an individual identified as an anonymous Department of Homeland Security employee suggested that one out of three electors are compromised. The leaker explained the perverse relationship between pedophilia and a politician’s career success, saying that, “Politicians who have pedophile tendencies are groomed for power, because they can be later extorted and controlled.”27 The “one out of three” is consistent with an estimate provided by an anonymous on-line FBI leaker. This leaker stated that 30% of Washington DC’s politicians is compromised because of their links to elite child pedophilia rings.28
 
If these reports are accurate, they would certainly explain a lot of things that defy logic like the pathological desire to put Israel’s interests before America’s interests on the part of some members of Congress. See John McCain and Lindsay Graham dance.
 
Note: This is a probably a good juncture for some deep relaxation breathing, a walk outdoors or some playtime with the family pet. 
 
A police state variety of policing 
Suppose for a moment, that you read that somewhere, citizens who dared to resist the police or question an order were “being subjected to all sorts of government-sanctioned abuse ranging from forced catheterization, forced blood draws, roadside strip searches and cavity searches, and other foul and debasing acts that degrade their bodily integrity and leave them bloodied and bruised.” And reading further you learned the children, “as young as 4 years old are being leg shackled, handcuffed, tasered and held at gun point for not being quiet, not being orderly and just being childlike—i.e., not being compliant enough.” You would probably conclude that these were reports of police abuses occurring in some third world dictatorship. And you’d be wrong. These are abuses reported to be occurring daily in America.29 
 
Here’s how Norm Stamper, former Seattle police chief described the state of policing in America today.
 
Policing is broken... It has evolved as a paramilitary, bureaucratic, organizational arrangement that distances police officers from the communities they’ve been sworn to protect and serve. When we have shooting after shooting after shooting that most people would define as at least questionable, it’s time to look, not just at a few bad apples, but the barrel. And I’m convinced that it is the barrel that is rotted.
 
There are several ominous signs and symptoms pointing to the emergence of an American police state. John W. Whitehead, author of Battlefield America: The war on the American people (2014) contends that policing in America has departed from the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. One ominous sign that something’s wrong with policing is simply it’s expanding size. The police force in America has grown into what reporter David Feige describes as “a vast army of 800,000 people with general arrest powers and increasingly armed with automatic weapons and automatic vehicles” to enforces its will.30
 
This isn’t the only number that should raise concerns. Here are a few other numbers supportive of Whitehead’s assertion that a police state has emerged.
 
50,000: the number of people admitted to emergency each year for treatment of injuries inflicted by the police.31
 
5,000: The number of Americans killed by cops since 9/11.32
 
963: The number of people killed by police in 2016.33
 
70: That’s how many times the US police-related deaths are higher than any of the other first world countries.34
 
There are several explanations for the current “broken” state of policing in America, including its increasingly brutal nature. The most plausible reason is police force mindset/culture, training and weaponry. As to the first, a strict “law and order” mentality absent accountability has contributed to what has been described by some critics as a war against the people. Journalist, Daniel Biers believes that inevitably when cops are told over and over that they’re “in a war, under siege or under attack and the citizens are the enemy, it will give rise to an atmosphere of fear, tension, and hostility, it’s going to turn out badly for citizens.”35 
 
Paul Craig Roberts offers another explanation. Roberts cites the training of US police by either Israelis or Americans trained by Israelis. He points out that the practices of Israeli soldiers come from occupying a hostile Palestinian population unwilling to accept the theft of their land and isolation in what Roberts calls “ghetto enclaves.” 36 Certainly, the intimidating practices of an occupying army are not consistent with the fifties motto of the LAPD police department: “To protect and serve.”
 
Whitehead flags the role the federal government in the militarization of policing, specifically as it relates to the use of military equipment. In Whitehead’s assessment, the federal government has turned the police into extensions of the military by distributing “billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to local police agencies” enhanced by federal grants for militarized training and SWAT teams.
 
Radley Balko, writing in the Washington Post, goes farther and suggests what ultimately lies behind the brutality of police tactics.
 
We’ve reached the point where state actors can penetrate rectums and vaginas, where judges can order forced catheterizations, and where police and medical personnel can perform scans, enemas and colonoscopies without the suspect’s consent. … In most of these cases, they were suspected only of possession or ingestion. Many of them were innocent… But these tactics aren’t about getting drugs off the street… These tactics are instead about degrading and humiliating a class of people that politicians and law enforcement have deemed the enemy (author’s italic).37 
 
Looking ahead, I see no sign that the relentless march toward a police state model of policing will be halted soon. To borrow a familiar phrase, it’s likely going to get worse before its gets better. For one, the mechanisms for bringing about increased accountability on the part of police forces are apparently out of order. Second, those in positions of power and able to demand change appear to be unconcerned, and in fact, see the situation in very different terms. It’s said that President Donald Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions sees no problem with policing in America. And Trump, rather than being alarmed about the abuses, refers to a “dangerous anti-policing atmosphere” in America as wrong and has vowed to “end it.”
 
This analysis is at odds with the fact that statistically being a cop in America is safer than it has ever been. According to Newsweek, “it’s safer to be a cop than it is to simply live in many U.S. cities... It’s safer to be a cop than it is to be a fisher, logger, pilot, roofer, miner, trucker or taxi driver. It’s safer to be a cop today than it’s been in years, decades, or even a century, by some measures.”38
 
What’s going to hold back the tide of an advancing police state when the country’s leadership sees the expanding police force as a victim rather than the perpetrator of crimes against the American people?  It doesn’t sound like it will be the Trump administration.
 
Extreme surveillance 
In the dystopian world described by George Orwell in his classic book, 1984, the eyes of Big Brother see everywhere. There are helicopters hovering in the sky, “telescreens” in homes and offices listening to every conversation, and hordes of thought police reporting the slightest signs of resistance. The image of Big Brother on the back of a coin prompts some reflection on the part of Winston, the story’s main character, “Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you…. Nothing was your own except a few cubic centimeters in your head.”39
 
It’s a haunting thought. As chilling as it is, I wonder if the citizen’s the Empire today are either surprised or troubled by this image of total state surveillance. If they aren’t, I suspect they are ignorant or cowed by the convenient dictum that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear.
 
Big Brother America has been rapidly ramping up surveillance capabilities since 9/11, all in the name of preventing terrorism of course. I speak here of a terrorism that is mostly of the Empire’s invention. Some of the Empire’s “achievements” in the realm of surveillance include drones the size of bees, an immense database of citizen images useful for facial recognition purposes and the ability to track every keystroke of a an individual’s computer. Then there’s the much-heralded smart home. Someone has darkly joked that in the future, our refrigerators could provide critical evidence that could convict us of a crime. But, I’m not laughing. Add the fact that research work is underway to figure how to hack human consciousness, and you have the makings of a dystopian future even more oppressive than the harried existence of Watson portrayed in 1984.
 
Recently, sixteen year Congressman, Dennis Kucinich offered this analysis regarding the significance of the leak of the contents of Vault 7.
 
It is bad enough that the government spies on its own people. It is equally bad that the CIA, through its incompetence, has opened the cyberdoor to anyone with the technological skills and connections to spy on anyone else. The constant erosion of privacy at the hands of the government and corporations has annihilated the concept of a “right to privacy,” which is embedded in the rationale of the First, Third, Fourth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are sliding down the slippery slope toward totalitarianism, where private lives do not exist.40
 
The march toward total surveillance of citizens’ movements, communication, commercial and financial activity has been unrelenting, despite critics’ concerns. It’s noteworthy that the expansion of government access to private information continued right through Obama’s last days in office.41 The next assault on our privacy is on the horizon. It’s been reported that US border agents have demanded access to the computers and social media accounts of visitors affected by President Trump’s limited travel ban. And on a related note, the head of the Department of Homeland Security has proposed forcing all “non-U.S. citizens to surrender their web browsing history, devices, and social media passwords before entering the country.”42
 
Among its peers in the West, Britain leads the way in imposing the most intrusive of surveillance systems on it own citizens. Seemingly, the government has assumed it has the right to monitor and surveil the live communication of British citizens at will. Legislation was passed in April of 2017 that enables police to shut down mobile phone communications at will of anyone even suspected of being associated with a crime. Graham Vanbergen, contributing editor at TruePublica.Org (UK) contends civil liberties and human rights are being systematically dismantled in his country under the false pretext of improving security.43
 
Such intrusions have consequences. Kali Holloway, writing in AlterNet, describes the measurable effects of increased surveillance of Americans. She reports that a Washington Post researcher, Jonathon Penny found that traffic to Wikipedia pages dealing with terrorism declined markedly after the Snowden files revealed the extent of NSA spying on Americans. The researcher concluded that ordinary citizens are less likely to engage in perfectly legal activities for fear of drawing unwanted government attention. The same chilling effect can be seen in the practices of professionals. It appears that journalists and lawyers are increasingly adopting methods of communicating with their sources that are less likely to leave a digital trail.
 
All the indicators are pointing to declining freedom in America. Professor Elizabeth Stoycheff points out that America now ranks 49th globally in press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders. Ponder the fact that Burkina Faso and Niger scored higher. Stoycheff’s research on the impact of government surveillance on citizens reveals that in general people holding minority opinions are less likely to speak out on-line if they held minority opinions.
 
Holloway’s troubling conclusion is that government surveillance tamps down personal expression, squelches dissent and promotes groupthink.44 It’s not exactly what the world needs now.
 
So there are concrete reasons then why democracy is dying. It’s not just that extreme surveillance that has hobbled our curiosity, suffocated political discourse and herded us into the corral of groupthink. There’s been a concerted effort by the PTB to constrain dissent. And, as you may recall, Robert Parry attributed the loss of professional objectivity and the decline of trust to careerism. Based on what I’ve seen so far, it’s a powerful and deadly combination.
 
Canada, the US, Britain, Australia and New Zealand are members of an international spies club, the Five Eyes Alliance (FVEY). Edward Snowden leaked documents in 2013 which revealed that the FVEY had been spying on one another’s citizens and sharing the information with each other. This was a way of getting around domestic regulations that limited an agency’s spying on its citizens.45
 
Canada’s spy agency, CSIS was rebuked by the federal court, in 2016, for illegally retaining since 2001, what is called “associated data.” This is data from people not linked to particular investigations. CSIS obscured details of its operations from the court on two previous occasions.46 Critics suggest that the ruling demonstrates that CSIS is largely unaccountable. On a somewhat related note, it was reported in November 2016  that police in the Province of Quebec had secretly tracked the phone calls of at least six reporters in 2013.47 Scratch beneath the surface and you are likely to find spy and policing cultures are equally susceptible to the seductive of the “end-justifies-the-means” thinking.
 
There’s a general pattern that seems to play out in the testy relationship between security agencies and their government overseers. The agencies breach their boundaries, are caught, appear penitent and commit to play within their sandbox. Some time elapses, the incident fades in the public memory and then the cycle repeats itself with the agency pushing the boundaries out farther each time.
 
We once had a dog that played a game like this like on the farm. When he was rarely allowed in the house, he was restricted to the kitchen. When the family went to the living room, he naturally wanted to follow. But he was smart enough to strategically position himself half way across the threshold of the door to the living room and ever so gradually inch his way forward when no one was looking. When he was spotted, he would inch back but never quite go back to his starting point. Two inches forward and one back. That’s the formula.
 
This pattern has been playing out for decades. In 1975, a committee chaired by US Senator Frank Church investigated intelligence abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).48 Senator Church prophetically warned that at some future point, the security apparatus of the state could turn on the American people.
 
[The National Security Agency's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is their capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.49
 
To address the concerns surfaced by the committee, the US Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. The Act was intended to provide oversight of covert intelligence activities while providing the secrecy necessary to protect national security.
 
Blogger, Scott Alfred describes the erosion of the protections provided to American citizens by FISA. Among other things, the NSA compromised Fourth Amendment protections in the name of combating terrorism. In recent years, the evidence has emerged that the NSA has engaged in “over collection” of domestic communications of Americans. While previous evidence suggested the surveillance was incidental, the NSA’s new wiretapping and spying was described by officials and briefed lawyers as “significant and systemic.”
 
An amendment to FISA in 2008 formally allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on phone calls and emails of ordinary Americans without properly justified warrants. And companies that co-operated with the government were absolved from liability. This meant that telecommunications companies could grant the government access to their private records of customer data with impunity.
 
In 2013, Americans learned that the NSA forced Verizon to release all phone records on an “ongoing, daily basis.” It was shortly after, news of the NSA’s PRISM, a program  designed to tap companies for extensive email and electronic communication records, became public.50
 
In retrospect, it’s clear that 9/11 was a gift to Big Brother, if not a false flag of its own orchestration. The presumed terrorist attack provided fresh justification for an expansion and intensification of domestic surveillance. The very concerns outlined by Senator Church have now been realized. The protections of the FISA have been stripped away, and America’s security apparatus has turned directly on the country’s citizens.
 
You might be wondering if there are honest men and women employed by these agencies. Undoubtedly, there are. The routine partitioning of assignments given to those working in the lower ranks of these services effectively means they are blind to the causes they are serving. Increasingly, those that are aware their efforts are being stalled and stymied by superiors, are leaking information to the independent media. They see where the figurative train is headed and they don’t like it. It may be that or in some cases, the individual has had a pang of conscience. These folks are the allies of truth seekers in the truth revolution. If America and the world is to enjoy a peaceful and secure future, the rogue elements of the security complex must be exposed and confronted. The evidence provided by the whistleblowers and leakers is indispensable in this mission.
 
Rigged elections
Ah, but you may be thinking, at least, US citizens can have some confidence in America’s electoral process. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, but the mythology persists.
 
When it comes to electoral integrity, the US was ranked dead last among developed nations in a report from the Electoral Integrity Project. The report compiles the assessments of experts called upon to evaluate “the perceived integrity of 180 national parliamentary and presidential contests held between July 1, 2012 and December 31, 2015 in 39 countries worldwide.” The United States scored 62 in comparison with Estonia (79) Rwanda (64) and the Republic of Korea (77)51
 
Political analyst and independent journalist, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts contends that rigged, and thus stolen, elections are in fact an American tradition. He adds that electronic balloting makes it easy. Roberts cites some examples.
 
Elections are stolen at every level—state, local, and federal. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s theft of the Chicago and, thereby, Illinois vote for John F. Kennedy is legendary. The Republican US Supreme Court’s theft of the 2000 presidential election from Al Gore by preventing the Florida vote recount is another legendary example.52
 
Investigative reporter, Robert Parry, highlights some of the more flagrant political maneuvers and fraudulent election activities in US history starting with the enactment of the US constitution. 
 
1787: Enactment of US constitution: Slaves counted as three fifths of a person.
 
1800: Votes of Southern slave owners like Thomas Jefferson counted for more than the votes of Northern slave owners.
 
Post civil war: blacks given right to vote but whites in Confederate states concocted subterfuges to keep blacks away from poles, a factor until 1965.
 
1972: Richard Nixon’s Watergate break-in.
 
1960 election: challenger creates foreign crisis to create advantage over incumbent.
 
1968: Richard Nixon conspired to sabotage Johnson’s Viet Nam piece talks.
 
1980: Reagan covertly made deal with Iran to not release hostages during Carter’s bid for re-election.
 
2000: Citizen’s judgment overturned by judges to give a win to George Bush versus real winner, Al Gore.53
 
Parry concludes that contrary to popular belief, the US political process is “not democracy’s “gold standard.” He adds that the failure to honestly face up to its failures and to impose accountability on the cheaters ensures more of the same.
 
Finally, no account of the abuses of US electoral politics is complete without some reference to the impact of the 2010 Citizens United court decision on campaign funding. The US Supreme Court ruled that freedom of speech prohibited the government from restricting political expenditures by companies, labor unions and certain types of non-profit corporations. It appears that this decision opened up the financing of US elections, to a large degree, to US oligarchs. According to some observers, one of the most significant developments was a reported surge of “dark money” – secret cash funneled into US elections via politically active non-profit organizations.54  
  
Thus far, our analysis of the state of the Empire has revealed that beneath the surface of the Empire, there is evidence of advanced corruption and decay. Thus, the reference to an Empire of Lies.” To summarize, this investigations has revealed:

• An imaginary democracy;

• An unelected Deep State government;
• Treasonous, war criminal presidents;
• Compromised puppet politicians;
• A police state variety of policing;
• Extreme surveillance; and
• Rigged elections.

 
It may not be apparent on the surface, but thus far the evidence reveals a "conquered" American Empire. A thinly-disguised totalitarian order masquerades as democracy. America has been sold out by compromised, treasonous leaders. Like a once healthy, but now sickly tree, it is severely infested by powerful parasitic interests and in an advanced state of rot. The invaders are slowly but surely killing the host. Paul Craig Roberts, who served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, punctures the "America" illusion. 
 
 “America is a lost country. The total corruption of every public and private institution is complete. Nothing remains but tyranny. And lies. Endless lies.”55

It’s time to take a long walk.
 
 

1 Fabricating the American worldview, May 15, 2017, Counterpunch, http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/15/fabricating-the-american-worldview
 
2 Princeton Study: U.S. no longer a democracy, TPM Livewire, April 18, 2014, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/princeton-experts-say-us-no-longer-democracy  
 
3 Citibank chose Obama’s 2008 cabinet – Wikileaks, October 31, 2016, http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2016/10/31/1010556-citigroup-bank-chose-obamas-2008-cabinet-wikileaks/ 
 
4 Where have all the lobbyists gone, The Nation, February 19, 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/shadow-lobbying-complex/  
 
5 Banks lobbyists help in drafting financial bills, Dealbook, May 23, 2013, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/banks-lobbyists-help-in-drafting-financial-bills/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130524
 
6 Can Capitalism and Democracy co-exist, Interview with S. Wolin, The Real News, YouTube, October 21, 2014, http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9175.html   
 
7 American democracy: a dead man walking, Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for political economy, May 2, 2017, http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/05/02/american-democracy-dead-man-walking/
 
8 Aristocracy deceive public about Deep State, Strategic Culture, February 23, 2017, http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/02/23/aristocracy-deceives-public-about-deep-state.html
 
9  The path to total dictatorship: America’s shadow government and its silent coup, The Rutherford Institute, October 24, 2016, https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_path_to_total_dictatorship_americas_shadow_government_and_its_sile
 
10 JFK: The last president to tell the truth about Illuminati, YouTube, February 26-12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JdrhJKfNq0
 
11 JFK was murdered by the Deep State, LewRockwell.com, October 3, 2014, https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/10/no_author/jfk-was-murdered-by-the-deep-state/
 
12 Deep State members and their agents are slowly revealing themselves, Veterans News Now, April 1, 2017, http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2017/04/01/deep-state-members-and-their-agents-are-slowly-revealing-themselves/
 
13 Deep State control of American courts and judiciary, Veterans Today, January 2, 2017, http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2017/01/02/deep-state-control-of-the-american-courts-and-judiciary/ 
 
14 Syria’s Assad just explained how the U.S. really works,
Information Clearing House, May 27, 2017, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47138.htm
 
15 The world war on democracy – John Pilger, TruPublica, March 26-16, http://truepublica.org.uk/global/world-war-democracy-john-pilger/
 
16 A government of morons, Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for political economy, April 15, 2017, http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/04/15/a-government-of-morons/
 
17 Lawyers serve indictment on NATO leaders for war crimes, The Global Politics, May 13, 2017, http://global-politics.eu/2017/05/13/lawyers-serve-indictment-nato-leaders-war-crimes/ 
 
18 Fabricating the American worldview, Counterpunch, May 15, 2017, http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/15/fabricating-the-american-worldview/
 
19 Stop taking Saudi money, Washington, Observer, September 29, 2014, http://observer.com/2014/09/stop-taking-saudi-money-washington/
 
20 Saudi Arabia has funded 20% of Hillary’s presidential campaign, Saudi crown prince claims, Zerohedge, June 14, 2016, http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-13/saudi-arabia-has-funded-20-hillarys-presidential-campaign-saudi-crown-prince-claims
 
21 Want to be a ‘foreign agent’? Serve in Congress first, Politico, February 10, 2015, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/congress-foreign-lobbying-228982  
 
22 AICPAC vetoes UN resolution on Israeli settlements, Veterans Today, February 23, 2011,  http://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2011/02/23/philip-giraldi-aipac-vetos-u-n-resolution-on-israeli-settlements-u-s-casts-the-actual-ballot/   
 
23 Israel control of USA (and Canadian) government, http://whale.to/c/israel_control_usa.html
 
24 Netanyahu in 2001: ‘America is a thing you can move very easily, Huffington Post, July 16, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/16/netanyahu-in-2001-america_n_649427.html
 
25 Cynthia McKinney drops bombshell: Candidates to sign pledges of support for “Israel”, ronaldwederfoort, November 19, 2012, https://ronaldwederfoort.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/cynthia-mckinney-drops-bombshell-candidates-to-sign-pledges-of-support-for-israel/
 
26 Power, pedophilia and the US government, Veteran’s Today, February 7, 2015, http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/02/07/power-pedophilia-and-the-us-government/
 
27 Huge interview with DHS insider, talks about #PedoGate and much more (with transcript),  The Event Chronicle, February 17, 2017, http://www.theeventchronicle.com/breaking-news/breaking-huge-exclusive-interview-dhs-insider-talks-pedogate-much-transcript/# 

28 27 FBI: 30% of Washington DC part of elite pedo ring, The Event Chronicle, February 6, 2017,  http://www.theeventchronicle.com/cabal-exposed/fbi-30-washington-dc-part-elite-pedo-ring/  

29 Run for your life: The American police state is coming to get you, Strategic Culture Foundation, April 22, 2017, http://m.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/04/22/run-your-life-american-police-state-coming-get-you.html
 
30 The iron jaws of the police state, Trump’s America is a constitution free zone, Newsbud, April 27, 2017, https://www.newsbud.com/2017/04/27/the-iron-jaws-of-the-police-state-trumps-america-is-a-constitution-free-zone/
 
31  US emergency department encounters for law enforcement-associated injury, 2006-2012, The Jama Network, April 19, 2017, http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/2619243
 
32 Ferguson: No justice in the American police State, Paul Craig Roberts, August 21, 2014, http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/08/21/ferguson-justice-american-police-state-paul-craig-roberts/
 
33 Fatal force, The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/
 
34 American cops just killed more people in March than the UK did in the entire 20th Century, The Free Thought Project, April 6, 2015, http://thefreethoughtproject.com/american-cops-killed-people-month-march-uk-entire-20th-century/
 
35 The iron jaws of the police state: Trump’s America is a constitution-free zone, Newsbud, April 17, 2017, https://www.newsbud.com/2017/04/27/the-iron-jaws-of-the-police-state-trumps-america-is-a-constitution-free-zone/
 
36 Police murder because they are trained to murder, Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for a political economy, July 11, 2016, http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/07/11/police-murder-because-they-are-trained-to-murder-paul-craig-roberts/
 
37 If this is freedom and democracy, what is tyranny, Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for political economy, April 20, 2017, http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/04/20/freedom-democracy-tyranny/
 
38 The iron jaws of the police state: Trump’s America is a constitution-free zone, The Rutherford Institute, April 25, 2017, https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_iron_jaws_of_the_police_state_trumps_america_is_a_constitution_fre
 
39 1984, George Orwell, Penguin Books, 1949, P. 29.
 
40 16 year congressman: CIA leak shows we’re “sliding down the slippery slope toward Totalitarianism, where private lives do not exist, Blacklisted News, March 9, 2017, http://www.blacklistednews.com/16_Year_Congressman%3A_CIA_Leak_Shows_We%E2%80%99re_%E2%80%9CSliding_Down_the_Slippery_Slope_Toward_Totalitarianism%2C_Where_Private_Lives_Do_Not_Exist%E2%80%9D/57232/0/38/38/Y/M.html
 
41 Obama expands spy agencies’ access to private data – just in time for Trump, Common Dreams, January 13, 2017, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/01/13/obama-expands-spy-agencies-access-private-data-just-time-trump  
 
42 Homeland security chief wants US visitors to surrender passwords, Vocativ, February 8, 2017, http://www.vocativ.com/400896/trump-homeland-security-passwords/
 
43 Britain’s intrusive surveillance system. Threat to civil liberties and human rights, Global Research, May 9, 2017, http://www.globalresearch.ca/britains-intrusive-surveillance-system-threat-to-civil-liberties-and-human-rights/5589275
 
44 The nefarious surveillance state dangerously inhibits self-expression and a healthy democracy, AlterNet, May 21, 2016, http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/nefarious-surveillance-state-dangerously-inhibits-self-expression-and-healthy       
 
45 Five Eyes, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
 
46 In scathing ruling, Federal Court says CSIS bulk data collection illegal, The Globe and Mail, November 3, 2016, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/in-scathing-ruling-federal-court-says-csis-bulk-data-collection-illegal/article32669448/
 
47 Six reporters spied on by Quebec provincial police, CBC News, November 2, 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-journalists-police-spying-1.3833507
 
48 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, (the Church Committee), United States Senate, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/investigations/ChurchCommittee.htm
 
49 Senator Church’s prophetic warning, Washington’s Blog, April 22, 2012, http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/04/influential-senator-warned-in-1975-the-national-security-agencys-capability-at-any-time-could-be-turned-around-on-the-american-people-and-no-american-would-have-any-privacy-left.html
 
50 NSA domestic spying: A history of abuse. FreedomWorks, October 7, 2013, http://www.freedomworks.org/content/nsa-domestic-spying-history-abuse
 
51 The electoral integrity report, New year in elections report, 2015, https://sites.google.com/site/electoralintegrityproject4/projects/expert-survey-2/the-year-in-elections-2015
 
52 Rigged elections are an American tradition, Paul Craig Roberts Institute for political economy, October 21-16, http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/10/21/rigged-elections-are-an-american-tradition-paul-craig-roberts/
 
53 The modern history of “rigged” US elections, Consortiumnews, October 27, 2016, https://consortiumnews.com/2016/10/27/the-modern-history-of-rigged-us-elections/
 
54 12 ways ‘Citizens United’ changed politics, Moyers and Company, January 22, 2015, http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/22/12-ways-citizens-united-changed-politics/
 
55 America destroyed, Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for Political Economy, July 3, 2016, http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/07/03/america-destroyed-paul-craig-roberts/

Futurescapes21C, 2018 All Rights Reserved

Our dizzying descent into a post-truth world
written May 12, 2017
© Futurescapes 21C, 2018 All rights reserved
Posted January 7, 2018, rev. January 10, 11, 2018 

“In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” (often attributed to George Orwell)
 
Untruth in US politics
There have been many signs over the years that our society’s grip on the truth was weakening. The Mitt Romney- Barack Obama election campaign of 2011-12 represented a new low water mark in terms of our collective embrace of objective truth. The truth-deficient negative campaign ads elevated half-truths, backhand smears, and innuendos to an art form. Their truth twisting distortions were sufficient to make the matter a subject of discussion in the media.
 
I recall randomly stumbling across a radio interview circa 2012 with a leading edge PR specialist. The interviewer invited his perspective regarding his profession's handling of truth. The truth, in his view, was something that could be approached creatively as one ingredient in shaping the desired product. While that was pretty consistent with the post-modern view that truth is a social construct versus objective reality, it was no less troubling. Nor was I alone in my assessment that truth-twisting had reached a new extreme.
 
Robert Loevy, a political science professor at Colorado College, said the level of truth-stretching and distortion in that campaign was "the worst” he had ever seen. At the same time, he doubted the fact-checkers would have much influence on undecided voters. Nor did it seem to me that there was any attempt by voters to punish abusers of the truth. Perhaps they simply concluded that there was a moral equivalency wherein the sins of one were balanced by the sins of the other political party.
 
Loevy was right in that campaign officials for both Romney and Obama were undeterred by the fact checkers. Romney’s pollster told ABC news that his campaign “won't be swayed by outside complaints of inaccuracy. Fact-checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and you know what? We're not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers," he said.” He almost sounded heroic, as if he were resisting some kind of facts-mad tyranny.
 
Obama’s campaign manger was a bit subtler, introducing the audience to a concept that would reappear years later in the Trump era, the concept of “alternative facts”. As he put it:  "We look at the facts. We vet what we say. We really do try hard to get it right… So there are some times when there are different sets of facts out there. The campaign highlights a set of facts. You may find a different set of facts and make that point."1
 
Truth-twisting in Canadian politics
US politics isn't unique in its disregard for truth. Federal politics in Canada also had its practitioners of truth- management. A Canadian journalist recalled his own experience with the aversion toward inconvenient facts; the kind that don’t fit the political narrative. He happened to be standing off stage where a government communication specialist was briefing a cabinet minister about to give a public statement in his campaign for re-election. Overhearing the minister seizing on a statement to the effect that the opposition party was proposing to introduce an abhorrent new tax, the journalist spoke up. He told the two that he could confirm that the opposition had flatly stated that no such tax was being considered. Alas, It didn’t matter, the show must go on and no opportunity to smear the opposition could be wasted. 
 
The incident reminded me of a speech given by Canadian pollster Allen Gregg who also witnessed the decline of political authenticity. Gregg observed an accompanying lack of self-awareness on the part of those engaging in performance politics.
 
“For most of my adult life, I have worked with political and business leaders and have never ceased to be amazed at how different they can be in private compared to their public personae. Time and time again, I have witnessed otherwise funny, thoughtful, caring men and women walk from the wings of the auditorium to the podium, only to be transformed into nothing less than a big, blustering (well, there isn’t a polite way of saying it) bullshitter – in effect, offering up a “performance” and a caricature they think they should be playing.
 
Typically, these performances range from pillorying opponents with hyperventilated allegations of failings; feigned outrage at what others would consider modest grievances; taking exaggerated credit for accomplishments that are better shared; and avoiding any direct and honest engagement of difficult subject matter that has the potential to cause media controversy.
 
What made these performances unbearably grimace-making however, was not the content of the remarks so much as the speaker’s complete lack of self-awareness or appreciation that they were the only person in the room who found their narrative believable.”2
 
While there were lots of rationalizations for the phenomenon of truth manipulation, I hear little discussion regarding the longer-term implications for society. Aren't politicians engaging in gratuitous fabrications aware of what they were doing? Don't they realize that their indulgences in spin and untruth amount to poisoning the public well of confidence in politics and government? Don't they realize that their peeing in the pool of public trust has now come back to haunt them, and ultimately all of us far into the future?
 
The corrupting influence of post-truth thinking
Over the course of a forty years plus career of in various public and private sector settings, I have had multiple perspectives on the decline of truth and authenticity in professional and organizational circles. For a part of my career, I held communication, marketing and PR roles. In other instances, I worked in close proximity with marketing, communication and PR professionals. Neither of these perspectives revealed  a trend toward more responsible stewardship of objective truth or accountability in this regard. It's certainly not in fashion today. Communications and PR professionals remain remarkably inured to the habits of an industry which treats truth as an ingredient in communications messaging, one to be employed when it suits the purpose. 
 
In time I began to wonder if the public relations profession had a hole in its soul. It was the "fake Kuwaiti nurse” war-making incident that led me to this analysis. When it comes to war-making, it’s understood that securing the consent of the citizenry requires a powerful emotional hook. The case of the Persian Gulf War was no exception. Some kind of atrocity was needed to arouse sufficient public outrage that American citizens would consent to military intervention.
 
The daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, coached by a major US-based PR firm, and masquerading as a nurse offered the perfect atrocity. She testified that she had witnessed invading Iraqi soldiers tossing babies from their incubators to die on the cold floor of her hospital.3 The naive among us expect communication professionals to hold to an enduring standard of objective truth. But somehow this hired gun PR agency could justify manufacturing a deception that would directly lead to the authorization of warfare and the untold death and destruction that inevitably followed. It seems that selling out on your profession for war profits is a completely survivable crime. The firm continues to do a thriving business. I wonder how providing this kind of “service” aligns with the agency’s stated core values and presumed commitment to making the world a better place. Or does its mission statement read: Deceiving millions to bring death and destruction to humanity. 
 
The see-no-evil syndrome
The Persian Gulf War sell out is far from an isolated case. You don’t have to look very hard to see the not-so-invisible hand of the corporate mass media and PR agencies in selling other  wars in the 20th century. And, as illustrated, this partnership continues to profitably manufacture public consent for war-making in the 21st century. As I write, there are hired gun PR agencies cashing in on lucrative contracts to paint lipstick on war criminals, demonize foreign governments targeted for regime change by the West and manufacture pro war propaganda.4 5 I may have missed it, but I haven’t yet heard of any high profile PR agencies being blacklisted, ostracized or excommunicated from professional PR associations for their abhorrent crimes against humanity. 
 
The PR profession itself may be the last to express outrage or call to account the war-makers within its ranks. A “see no evil” mindset seems to prevail. When, on occasion, I so much as called attention to the pervasiveness of PR spin and marketing excesses, I encountered three types of responses. They ranged from silence to resignation as in that’s just the way it is and the third, self-righteous denial to the effect that no communication professional worth his or her salt would ever engage in such a thing. 
 
The see-no-evil syndrome also prevails among my agriculture industry peers. They appear to be even less aware of or concerned with the manipulative use of corporate propaganda by members of the “Big Ag” and the “Big Food” sectors. They certainly appear oblivious to its negative consequences among conscious consumers who see corporate PR whitewash for what it is. Rather than call out the corporate abusers of consumer trust, professional "aggies" tend to run to their defense. As a result,  the more conscientious members of the agriculture and agrifood sectors (and ag producers themselves) are left to absorb any reputational damage resulting from consumer blowback.
 
Monsanto has distinguished itself as “the world’s most hated corporation” and in some respects, among the least trusted when it comes to its product claims and conduct.6 In the past, even as its PR-coated machinations were being exposed, agricultural professionals dutifully defended it. It seems that this kind of enabling relationship demands “solidarity forever,” or in this case unblinking ag industry advocacy for ever. Is it not disingenuous to relentlessly advocate on behalf of the industry and its members and then go silent or play dumb when obvious abuses of public or consumer trust occur? Surely, something more than the reflex: "We take this matter very seriously..." line is required.

The best explanation that I can find for the predictable “see no evil” syndrome afflicting  professionals and their industry allies comes from Upton Sinclair who explained: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”7 Unfortunately, willful ignorance has become an inherent part of the unspoken code defining the relationship between business professionals in the service sector and their industry customers and often described as value chain "partners." 
 
Robert Parry would agree with Sinclair as he attributes the failure to speak truth to power within the professional class to careerism. And careerism dangerously begets groupthink.
 
“In other words, many professionals who are counted on for digging out the facts and speaking truth to power have sold themselves to those same powerful interests in order to keep high-paying jobs and to not get tossed out onto the street. Many of these self-aggrandizing professionals – caught up in the many accoutrements of success – don’t even seem to recognize how far they’ve drifted from principled professionalism.”8
 
There is a price to pay for self-imposed blindness. One is the cost to the reputation of your profession. I recall an incident during the E. coli outbreak at XL Foods in Brooks, Alberta in 2012. The agriculture minister was in the process of answering questions from reporters about the situation. The exchange was abruptly cut short by one of his communications advisors intent preventing him from going further off script. The intervention wasn’t appreciated by at least one observer who in a subsequent story referred to the minister’s communication handler as a ‘”junior fart catcher”. On the scale of reputational rankings, I’m guessing that one falls significantly below that of used car salesman.
 
More recently, during the Trump campaign, a war broke out between mainstream corporate media and independent media. It centres on the issue of their respective trustworthiness and competing claims to truthful reporting of the news. The lengthy history of mainstream media (MSM) infiltration by and collaboration with the CIA and the controlled nature of news reporting had now became a central issue of the day.9 In the wake of its exposure as CIA infiltrated, the MSM attempted a kind of figurative jui jitsu  declaring itself the guardian of the truth on behalf of a public assaulted by "fake news." Even if fakes news was a real problem,  such nanny state paternalism has no place in a democracy. Foxes so love guarding chicken houses.
 
Around the same time, a secret group, PropOrNot and some academic institutions generated lists of alleged publishers of “fake news”.10 This was followed by smearing and censoring  targeted members of the independent media on their list. The outrage within the ranks of the independent media still boils. As a result of their role in propagandizing, the members of the MSM have been collectively labeled “presstitutes” and media “whores.”11 In a similar vein, CNN was derisively named the “Clinton News Network” for the obvious political bias it demonstrated throughout the presidential campaign. 
 
Dangers in propaganda excesses
The oft named “father” of public relations, Edward Bernays was more forthright about the manipulative nature of public relations and its excesses than his modern day disciples. Bernays observed in his book, Propaganda (1928):
 
“In World War One it was the propaganda of our side that first made “propaganda” so opprobrious a term. Fouled by close association with “the Hun,” the word did not regain its innocence—not even when the Allied propaganda used to tar “the Hun” had been belatedly exposed to the American and British people. Indeed, as they learned more and more about the outright lies, exaggerations and half-truths used on them by their own governments, both populations came, understandably, to see “propaganda” as a weapon even more perfidious than they had thought when they had not perceived themselves as its real target. Thus did the word’s demonic implications only harden through the Twenties, in spite of certain random efforts to redeem it.” 

It seems that Bernays suspected that continued exploitive use of “lies, exaggerations and half truths” on the citizenry would backfire at some point as the population became better informed. He once remarked: “The only propaganda which will ever tend to weaken itself as the world becomes more sophisticated and intelligent, is propaganda that is untrue or unsocial.”12 Modern day practitioners and their business customers, however remain largely indifferent to the reality of growing public cynicism. 
 
Unsurprisingly, recent survey numbers tell us that the trust of Americans in government and trust in themselves has reached a new low. According to a September 2016 survey:

• 42% have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in political leaders;
• 56% trust American people to make decisions under democratic system; and
• trust in both groups is down about 20 percentage points since 2004, new lows in Gallup trends.13

 
A September 2016 survey found that Americans’ trust and confidence in mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” had dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history. Thirty-two percent said they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media (down eight points from last year).14
 
The making of a trust crisis
The numbers fail to tell the larger story of a trust crisis of global proportions. Leaders can’t endlessly mine the reserves of public trust. Nor can they callously engineer public deceptions like false flag psy ops in support of policy objectives without consequences. They can’t lie forever with impunity. And they can’t forever paper over their deceits and fabrications with ever more generous applications of “PR solutions.” But they haven’t stopped trying.
 
It’s all coming to a head, and the real world implications are sobering. In article entitled, “The existential question of who to trust”, Robert Parry describes the life or death implications of the trust crisis.
 
“The looming threat of World War III, a potential extermination event for the human species, is made more likely because the world’s public can’t count on supposedly objective experts to ascertain and evaluate facts. Instead, careerism is the order of the day among journalists, intelligence analysts and international monitors – meaning that almost no one who might normally be relied on to tell the truth can be trusted.”15
 
In 2016, the characterization of our times became official. That year, Oxford Dictionaries selected post-truth as the word of the year. It was also the year that the Trump-Clinton campaigns and their media allies took lying and deception to new heights. The post truth diagnosis came from author, Ralph Keyes who in 2004, asked, “Have we now reached a stage of social evolution that is “beyond honesty?” (Keyes credits Steve Tesich with coining the term.) Keyes flatly states, “Honesty is on the ropes.” One of the signs of the truth malaise described by Keyes is our dishonesty about our dishonesty. People don’t say they lied, they say that they “exaggerated,” or “misspoke” – something Keyes calls “Euphemasia.”16 It seems that prevarication and equivocation are equally significant features of the Post-Truth era. 
 
There’s a tangible sense of relief that comes with receiving a long awaited diagnosis. Perhaps it’s the assurance that the pain you have been experiencing is real, not a figment of your imagination. But at the same time, the identification of a health condition also raises new concerns. What additional symptoms are likely to develop? What’s the prognosis? Is there a cure or  recommended treatment? These are all legitimate questions regarding the post truth-trust crisis.
 
To get to the larger implications, I start from the premise that truthfulness and trust are fundamental requirements of a healthy society. The acknowledgement that we have entered a post truth era suggests that there will be growing tensions straining our social fabric. Our once shared common ground is shrinking. The ties that bind us together in common cause are fraying. In the wake of the November 2016 US presidential election, I confided to my family that it wasn’t at all clear to me that the divides in America would heal in the foreseeable future. The trust divide may be too wide.
 
My sense is that differing segments of our society have begun a spiralling descent into truth-deficient parallel universes. Declining truth and trust is likely to give way to further degradation. 

• Decline of truth = destruction of trust
• Destruction of trust = erosion of social cohesion
• Erosion of social cohesion = isolation
• Isolation = collapse of community 
• Collapse of community = rise of a survivalist ethic and deception as a means of survival

 
Keyes sees similar dynamics at play weakening community connections and eroding the fabric of society.
 
“Keyes acknowledges a link between post-truthfulness and the loss of community. “When it comes to post-truthfulness, the fraying of human connections is both cause and effect. Not feeling connected to others makes it easier to lie, which in turn makes it harder to reconnect. Eroded communities foster dishonesty. Dishonesty contributes to the further erosion of communities. As communal bonds wither, unfettered self-interest is unleashed.”17
 
There are lines in William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming” that eerily resonate with darker future scenarios one can envision.
 
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.18
 
In summary, the dynamics of a downward spiral are in play. Untruth and deception are fuelling distrust; growing distrust in turn, is fostering disconnection and isolation; which in turn creates conditions conducive to more lies and deception. Truth has always had its enemies and deceit its loyal friends. Only the most naive would conclude we arrived at this point as a society by happenstance.
 
Beware the hidden hand of the PTB that subtly guides the the naive and well-intentioned into the seductive grasp of "end justifies the means" thinking. Can we now see the outlines of a new dark ages taking shape in the fading light? The shadows have always served the purposes of the PTB well, providing cover for their enormous crimes against humanity. Darkness keeps their captives fearful, uncertain and susceptible to manufactured illusions. Like sheep, we can be easily led down precipitous side paths to war or other destinations of our faux shepherds' choosing. The PTB's mastery of the art and science of perception management means that they can now sell us anything, including our own destruction. 
 
It will likely be some time before we see the light of new dawn. The appetite for truth is too small, and the power of enforced massive untruths overwhelming. There are too few brave souls resisting the tides of the post truth era. That said, the truth remains a threat to the elites governing our inverted Orwellian world. Consequently, they must hunt it down, capture it and ultimately destroy it. 
 
This isn’t a time for despair, however; it’s a time for new resolve of the calibre of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the resilient Russian author and survivor of the Gulag Archipelago. It’s time for a revolution. This is a call for a generation of bold truth-tellers, freedom fighters of the Post-Truth Era. Our revolution begins with our rejection the hypnotic illusions and lies of the PTB and defiant truth-telling capable of exposing their deceptions. We can be light amid the darkness of the Post truth era.  
 
"Believe in the light while you have the light, so that you may become children of the light." (John 12:36)

​
1 Politics and truth: Uneasy partners, easy enemies, Yahoo News, September 6, 2012, https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics-truth-uneasy-partners-easy-enemies-222056435--election.html
 
2 A short history of the erosion of trust, the 2011 Gordon Osbaldeston lecture by Allan R. Gregg, http://allangregg.com/on-authenticity-%E2%80%93-how-the-truth-can-restore-faith-in-politics-and-government/
 
3 How PR sold the war in the Persian Gulf, Excerpted from Toxic Sludge is Good for You, Chapter 10, PR Watch.org, http://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html
 
4 The Pentagon paid a PR firm $500 million for top secret Iraq propaganda, Mint News, October 3, 2016, http://www.mintpressnews.com/the-pentagon-paid-a-pr-firm-500-million-for-top-secret-iraq-propaganda/221035/
 
5 Saudi’s hire world’s biggest PR firm to push ‘Muslim Nato’, Middle East Eye, April 26, 2017, http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/pr-firm-draws-criticism-over-saudi-deal-represent-muslim-nato-1485534964
 
6 Monsanto, the world’s poster child for corporate manipulation and deceit, GMONews, March 26, 2017,
http://www.gmo.news/2015-08-20-monsanto-the-worlds-poster-child-for-corporate-manipulation-and-deceit.html
 
7 Upton Sinclair quotes, Brainywords.com, http://www.brainywords.com/authors/upton_sinclair-quotes.html#l0TqJKm53F2FHPdq.99
 
8 The existential question of who to trust, Strategic Culture Foundation, May 1, 2017, http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/05/01/existential-question-who-trust.html
 
9 Declassified CIA documents show agency’s control over mainstream media and academia, collective evolution, May 11, 2017, http://www.collective-evolution.com/2017/05/11/declassified-cia-documents-shows-agencies-control-over-mainstream-media-academia/
 
10 Harvard’s fake guide to fake news sites. America’s 21st Century  “Index Librorum Prohibitorum”, Global Research, March 14, 2017,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/harvards-fake-guide-to-fake-news-sites-americas-21st-century-index-librorum-prohibitorum/5579697
 
11 Paul Craig Roberts: Mainstream media in total collapse, SOTT, March 20, 2017, https://www.sott.net/article/345952-Paul-Craig-Roberts-Mainstream-media-in-total-collapse
 
12 Propaganda, 1928, Edward Bernays, History is a weapon, http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/bernprop.html
 
13 Americans’ trust in political leaders, public at new lows, Gallop.com, September 21, 2016,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/195716/americans-trust-political-leaders-public-new-lows.aspx
 
14 Americans’ trust in mass media sinks to new low, True Pundit, September 15, 2016, http://truepundit.com/americans-trust-in-mass-media-sinks-to-new-low/
 
15 The existential question of who to trust, The Strategic Culture Foundation, May 1, 2015, http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/05/01/existential-question-who-trust.html
 
16 The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, 2004, Ralph Keyes, as quoted in “Welcome to the Post-truth era – Welcome to the age of dishonesty, Albert Mohler, July 19, 2005, http://www.albertmohler.com/2005/07/19/the-post-truth-era-welcome-to-the-age-of-dishonesty/
 
17 The Post-Truth Era – Welcome to the Age of Democracy, Albert Mohler, July 19, 2005, http://www.albertmohler.com/2005/07/19/the-post-truth-era-welcome-to-the-age-of-dishonesty/
 
18 The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), potw.org, http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html
 
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