CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—It really couldn’t be more fitting that the US now has an actual, literal torturer as the head of the CIA. It also couldn’t be more fitting that it has a reality TV star billionaire President, an Iraq-raping Bush-era neoconservative psychopath as National Security Advisor, a former defense industry director as Secretary of Defense, a former Goldman Sachs executive as Secretary Treasurer, and a former Rothschild, Inc. executive as Secretary of Commerce. These positions have always facilitated torture, oppression, war profiteering and Wall Street greed; the only thing that has changed is that they now have a more honest face on them.
PLUTOCRATIC POWER
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ERIC ZUESSE—We are now getting closer and closer to what, quite possibly, could turn out to be a war between U.S. and Russia — a world-ending World War III — and, therefore, I, as an investigative historian, am trying to understand, as accurately as I can, the historical origins of this potentially world-ending conflict, the ‘new Cold War’. In this regard, I am examining the event, the 2012 Magnitsky Act, in the United States (and then copied in the EU), which imposed the first set of economic sanctions against Russia, and thus may reasonably be said to have sparked ‘the new Cold War’.
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FRANK SCOTT—“We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.”- Report to SCLC Staff, May 1967.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Because let’s be honest, it’s not like you really have a choice anyway. If you don’t play along we’ll just be forced to brutalize your psyches with even more aggressive psyops while still doing what we want behind your backs. We will get our wars, we will get our internet censorship, we will get our social engineering projects, we will succeed in hoarding all the money to ourselves to deprive you of power and political influence while you suffer and die. And you slaves will learn your place. So don’t ruin this for us, understand?
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DAVE LINDORFF—Now that McMaster has been pushed out by Trump, with his appointment of the truly bloody-minded John Bolton, we’re back to 1991. While Trump may have, back during the campaign and during his early months as president, genuinely favored ending the US policy of permanent war that has seen the US military budget grow to where it annually consumes well over half the total federal discretionary budget, and though he may have intended to seek friendlier relations with Russia, with his Bolton appointment as head of the NSC, we’re back in the darkest days of the Cold War.