Stephen Lendman

It’s standard practice in banana republics and elsewhere.

The late Edward Herman explained how it works in his book titled “Demonstration Elections,” covering sham ones in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Vietnam.

They occur regularly elsewhere in countries like Egypt and nations America occupies.

Herman explained “elections held under conditions of military occupation and extensive pre-election ‘pacification’ ” aren’t free at all.

Their aim is getting an occupying force’s puppet choice installed to rule with influence wielded more by bullets than ballots to create “stability.”

Electoral fraud occurs in Western nations, notably in past US elections. Most recently, GW Bush lost to Al Gore and John Kerry, yet served two terms as an illegitimate US president.

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James Petras

Introduction

Major changes are roiling the states, societies and ruling classes of the biggest industrial economies, oil regimes and military complexes.

China is re-allocating its economic wealth toward building the most extensive modern infrastructure system in history, linking four continents.

Saudi Arabia is transferring a trillion dollars of pillage from princes to princes, from old business parasites to up-to-date versions, from austere desert mirages to fantasies of new mega-cities.

The United States is emptying the swamp of the Capital’s corruption and immediately replenishing it with the scandal of the day.

One Cabinet Secretary is fired; another Secretary is hired; one enemy is embraced; an ally denounced; the stock market flourishes and trade agreements are abandoned. One tax is sliced and pleases the powerful; another is spliced and chokes the consumers.

Turmoil, some would say; chaos, others would claim. And the stouthearted argue, that’s the way the world turns round.

But for all the world’s current ‘shaking’, there is substance and direction: There are models for the shaking-up and paradigms for the shaking down.

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Eric Zuesse

In U.S. elections between the two political Parties for federal offices — Congress, and the Presidency — the choice that’s offered to the voters is almost invariably between two fascists; so, the meaning of “fascism” is first crucial to understand, in order to understand today’s America, and that it’s fascist:

Benito Mussolini, who originated fascism and named his Party after that ideology, alternatively referred to it as “corporationism,” and meant by that term, as he explained it (quoted in George Seldes’s excellent 1935 book, Sawdust Caesar, about Mussolini and fascism) Corporationism is disciplined economy, and from that comes control, because one cannot imagine a discipline without a director. Corporationism is above socialism and above liberalism. A new synthesis is created. It is a symptomatic fact that the decadence of capitalism coincides with the decadence of socialism. All the Socialist parties of Europe are in fragments.

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Robert Singer

North Korea is back in the news and even if “Wednesday’s launch has now almost certainly put all major European targets within Pyongyang’s reach,” we will not be having a nuclear confrontation EVER.

In 2008 I published World War III wasn’t going to happen:

In August, F.W. Engdahl wrote, “The signing on August 14th of an agreement between the governments of the United States and Poland to deploy on Polish soil US ‘interceptor missiles’ is the most dangerous move towards nuclear war the world has seen since the 1962 Cuba Missile crisis.”

Now, I don’t like being in a position where I have to contradict the leading analyst of the New World Order, but there is no chance we are any closer to a nuclear war than we were in the 1950s, 1962, or any time in the last 58 years. I can’t speak for Mr. Engdahl but most NWO conspiracy theorists expect a depopulation event to rid the planet of 5 billion useless eaters. The Illuminati, they say, need only 500 million of us for slaves when they take over the world. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying there couldn’t be a depopulation event before 2012 but a nuclear war is not in the cards. Nuclear World War III would make too much of the planet uninhabitable and that would include the One World governors as well as the 500 million humans they need for slaves. [From World War III wasn’t going to happen.

If there is a World War III then it will be a hand to hand combat.

Did I mention that Albert Pike in his Letter to Mazzini – The Illuminati Plan for World War 3 in 1871, agrees with me?

The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the ‘agentur’ of the ‘Illuminati’ between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion. We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time.

You might also be interested in the email I sent to my list on November 12, 2017, subject: A Military Confrontation with Yemen, Syria and Iran WILL NOT HAPPEN! [1]

Robert Singer writes about Secrets, Sentient Creatures and The Federal Reserve at stateofthenation2012, The Peoples Voice and The Market Oracle
Footnotes
[1] From: Robert Singer To: Robert Singer Sent: Sunday, November 12, 2017 9:22 AM Subject: A Military Confrontation with Yemen, Syria and Iran WILL NOT HAPPEN! I am going on record: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Israel and the United States will not be igniting the powder keg in the Middle East anytime in the near future. Saudi foreign minister Adel Jubair forcefully condemned the firing of a missile by Yemen into Riyadh over the weekend as an act of war by Iran, “Iran cannot lob missiles at Saudi cities and towns and expect us not to take steps.” It is the most extreme escalation of hostility between the two countries in their decades old conflict Iran denied the accusation, which came on the heels of a wave of arrests in Saudi Arabia that has been perceived as a consolidation of power by the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Taken together, the two actions signaled a new aggressiveness by the prince both at home and abroad, as well as a new and more dangerous stage in the Saudi cold war with Iran for dominance in the region. “Today confrontation is the name of the game,” said Joseph A. Kechichian, a scholar at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, who is close to the royal family. “This young man, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is not willing to roll over and play dead. If you challenge him, he is saying, he is going to respond.” I am going on record: This young man, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is going to roll over and play dead. August of this year (email below) I went on record that North Korea would back down. Are you aware that an “expert” warned us a few weeks ago that Donald Trump’s “belligerent” approach to North Korea could end in World War 3 and kill millions of people. The “expert” claimed that the “tensions were at an all-time high between the hermit kingdom and US amid fears an all-out war could be just days away.” Two weeks have gone by and … nothing has happened. Disclosure: On October 12, 2017, I went on record predicting that the government and/or the mainstream media is going to admit to a conspiracy surrounding the Las Vegas Shooting. Few people know that the upper floors of the Mandalay Bay resort is owned by the Saudi Prince Al Waleed, including the 32nd floor where the shooter is alleged to have choreographed his carnage. The Mandalay Bay has a helipad on the roof for easy access to the upper levels. Was Las Vegas a Saudi Crown Prince Salman Assassination Attempt? – American Digital News There is such little information forthcoming concerning the shooting at the Mandalay Bay that the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets file lawsuits to obtain Las Vegas shooting records – LA Times The other news organizations involved in the lawsuits don’t include The Las Vegas Review-Journal. The owner of the Journal is Sheldon Adelson. Adelson doesn’t need a lawsuit to get access to the law enforcement records. Another curious fact that has gone largely unnoticed since the Las Vegas shooting, several eyewitnesses to the massacre have been found deceased under unexpected mysterious circumstances. As the Inquisitr reports, 28-year-old Kymberley Suchomel of Apple Valley, California, was found dead in her bed of natural causes just days after the Las Vegas shooting. She had previously and very publicly claimed that multiple shooters had been involved in the deadly massacre. According to the official story, she died in her sleep after surviving the Vegas shooting uninjured. Orville Almon Jr., a prominent Nashville attorney who represented country music singer Jason Aldean and the Route 91 music festival involved in the October 1 Las Vegas shooting also died unexpectedly in his sleep at the age of 66. His cause of death is similar to Ms. Kymberley Suchomel’s, and both have been officially declared to have died of “natural causes,” but according to local Nashville media, Aldean passed away from an unexpected “seizure during sleep.” Almon Jr. enjoyed a successful relationship with law enforcement, but had faced serious issues trying to collect information on the Las Vegas shooting, referring to his interactions and interviews with the FBI, MGM, and Las Vegas Police Department as “incredibly strange and complex.” While Almon Jr.’s posts have recently been made private, it is widely known that he was privy to so-called “inside information,” and that many departments involved in the Las Vegas shooting investigation have ceased holding press conferences and responding to the public about the ongoing investigation into the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. I have been writing about a “game being orchestrated off planet, in an alternate reality “ that I claims ended on December 2015 when Ban-Ki Moon made it impossible for Barack Obama to be the Secretary General of the UN, and that would also explain how it came about that The Donald ended up as President of the United States. Feel free to send your comments or ask to be unsubscribed. Robert Singer Email I sent October 12, 2017 Subject: Disclosure is Coming Soon to a Mainstream media outlet Near You! In 2008 I wrote that the World War III wasn’t going to happen. August of this year I went on record that North Korea would back down [1] and February 2017 I said that Pizzagate would go away. [2] I published the article What Happened to the MCI’s? on August 1, 2017. Las Vegas is not an MCCI under my definition. A number of other writers have written that the Las Vegas Shooting is very different and fits the profile of the JFK assassination and 9/11. And now we have the Santa Rosa fire in Northern CA that defies THE LAWS of PHYSICS. I am going on record today predicting that the government and/or the mainstream media is going to admit to a conspiracy surrounding the Las Vegas Shooting or the Santa Rosa fire. I have been writing for years about a game that I believe is going on between TGFE and the Earth. I claim the game was over December 2015 when Ban-Ki Moon made it impossible for Barack Obama to be the Secretary General of the UN, and that would explain the Donald (Duck) being President of the United States. Look forward to your comments. Robert Singer [1] From: Robert Singer To: Robert Singer Sent: Friday, August 11, 2017 6:17 PM Subject: A Military Confrontation with North Korea WILL NOT HAPPEN! According to Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C), “a military confrontation with North Korea may now be “inevitable.” All that you can be sure of when the “Donald” threatens “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” and then says maybe his language “wasn’t tough enough,” is that we are in chaos and TPTB, TGFE, The Cabal or the Puppet Masters are not in control of the World or Donald Trump. I am going on record, North Korea will back down. I am writing an article that explains we are in chaos because Barack Obama could not be the Secretary-General of the UN. Let me know if you would like to read a draft of “Is Mankind’s Destiny Foretold?” [Extract below:] What follows is a fictional interview and reflects my views on the future of mankind and the planet. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely intentional. Listen to the interview by Ian Gurney, considered to be one of the foremost authorities on the Biblical Books of Daniel and Revelation, with the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon (Moon), to discover why Donald Trump is POTUS. There are no more mass casualty conspiracy incident (MCCI). An MCCI is an MCI incident that conspiracy theorists label as false flags or hoaxes, and right after the event gun control always takes center stage. Ian Gurney (IG) no longer believes mankind’s destiny as written in the Book of Revelation is foretold. IG: Hello, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed today about your role in saving millions of innocent lives. Email me if you would like to read the entire draft of “Is Mankind’s Destiny Foretold?” [2] I might write something but right now this is just cut and paste research to support my claim that Pizzagate is the distraction. Looking back it’s obvious that child sex trafficking and pedophilia is a reality and the public doesn’t care. https://robertsingerauthor.wordpress.com/2017/02/06/do-not-post-this/

James Petras

Introduction

The US political and economic elites have always bragged that capitalism is far superior to socialism in terms of providing people’s personal welfare. They claim that citizens live longer, healthier and happier lives under capitalism.

The debate between the supporters of the US Affordable Care Act or ‘Obamacare’ and its most vehement opponents under President Trump is not part of any larger system debate since both ‘sides’ base their vision and plans for medical care on private, for-profit corporate insurance schemes. This source of funding would ‘harness market forces’ to deliver quality medical care…in a marketplace of ‘free competition’, in which every American, even the most fragile, cancer-ridden patient, would be an engaged stakeholder, weighing a huge menu of free choices…

The real comparison of how these economic systems provide basic health care should be based on showing which provides the best population outcomes, personal satisfaction and community security across national boundaries. National health systems top the chaotic private system in these parameters.

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Eric Zuesse

Billionaires, both liberal and conservative ones, own, and their corporations advertise in and their ‘charities’ donate to, America’s mainstream (and also many ‘alternative news’) media. They do this not so as to profit directly from the national ‘news’media (a money-losing business, in itself), but so as to control the ’news’ that the voting public (right and left) are exposed to and thus will accept as being “mainstream” and will reject all else as being “fringe” or even ‘fake news’, even if what’s actually fake is, in fact, the billionaires' own mainstream ’news’, such as their ’news'media had most famously ‘reported’ about ’Saddam’s WMD’ (but the’news’media never changed after that scandal — even after having pumped uncritically that blatant lie to the public).

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Eric Zuesse

While I happened to be researching another subject, a central question in the investigation came to be how Iran — which supplied none of the 9/11 terrorists and no financing to them and no organizing of them, and which hasn’t been connected with nearly as many terrorist incidents globally as Saudi Arabia has — came to be officially called by the U.S. “the top state sponsor of terrorism.” The following is the portion of my resulting article that happens to concern this very question, and it’s modified slightly here, so as to focus only on this exact question:

The lie about this matter began, actually, with the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex in the Saudi city of Khobar, which killed 19 U.S. military, who worked at the Dharan air base three miles away.

Prior to that incident, I am not able to find any such reference as “Iran is the top state sponsor of terrorism” or “Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism” or anything like it.

This incident — the Khobar Towers bombing — became the lynchpin of the accusation by the Saudi royal family, the U.S. State Department, and the CIA, that Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Both Robert Mueller and his longtime ally James Comey (the latter of whose firing as the FBI chief, by U.S. President Trump, had sparked the appointment of Mueller to become the Special Counsel investigating the U.S. President) had performed crucial roles in establishing that the Khobar Towers bombing was a Hezbollah operation run by the Iranian Government — and, starting upon this basis, in helping to develop the case that Iran “is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism.” However, as has been made clear by several great independent investigative journalists, on the basis of far more-solid documentation than the official account, the Khobar Towers bombing was instead entirely a fundamentalist-Sunni operation, specifically perpetrated by Al Qaeda, which hates Shia and which also hates America’s military presence in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden’s claim of the bombing's having been done by Al Qaeda, was, in fact, entirely honest and accurate.

America’s “Deep State,” which extends to Saudi Arabia and to a number of other Governments — it’s an international network — is deeply committed to supporting the fundamentalist-Sunni war to conquer and destroy Shia Islam, and not merely to conquer the leading Shia nation, which is Iran. The U.S. Government has intensely taken a side in the Sunni-Shia religious war. That war is comparable in some respects to the 30 Years’ War (1618-1648) between Catholics and Protestants, which killed an estimated eight million Europeans; and, both the United States and Israel have clearly joined with the fundamentalist-Sunni leaders, against Iran, and against Shia generally.

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Stephen Lendman

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova (MZ below) believes the “presence of ISIS in Syria is coming to an end” - maybe so but the US-supported terrorist threat in the country remains, not ending as long as Washington wants war, not peace.

MZ stressed that US-led forces “provid(e) cover to the extremists, ISIS in particular.” Surprisingly, the BBC reported their evacuation from Raqqa under US-led “supervision.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry accused Washington of supporting ISIS and other terrorists while claiming to be combating them.

“(N)ot only (did US-led aerial operations refuse) to launch strikes on the terrorists, but also created obstacles for the Russian Aerospace Forces as they tried to attack the targets in the specified area,” MZ explained.

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Stephen Lendman

On Monday, both leaders met in Sochi, Russia, not announced for 24 hours to assure Assad’s safe return to Damascus.

Knowledge of his travels outside Syria would risk his assassination, perhaps by a US air-to-air or ground-to-air missile, targeting his aircraft.

Washington ignores rule of law principles, pursuing its imperial agenda extrajudicially, including by assassinating independent foreign leaders. Post-WW II, the US tried to assassinate dozens of foreign leaders. Many attempts succeeded. Others failed, notably hundreds of failed attempts to kill Fidel Castro.

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Stephen Lendman

America, NATO, Israel, Saudi Arabia and their rogue partners in high crimes are the world’s leading state sponsors of terrorism - not Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemeni Houthis or North Korea.

They support world peace and stability, their agendas polar opposite what America and its rogue allies pursue.

On Monday, Trump said “(w)e will be instituting a very critical step and that will start right now. Today, the United States is designating North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism. Should have happened a long time ago. Should have happened years ago.”

US sanctions against the DPRK will be elevated to “the highest level.” North Korea was earlier designated a state sponsor of terrorism, rescinded by the State Department in 2008.

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