The Tectonic Plates of Geopolitics Are Starting to Shift

The United States is currently waging economic warfare against one tenth of the world’s countries with cumulative population of nearly 2 billion people and combined gross domestic product (GDP) of more than $15 trillion.

These include Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, North Korea and others on which Washington has imposed sanctions over the years, but also countries like China, Pakistan and Turkey which are not under full sanctions but rather targets of other punitive economic measures.

In addition, thousands of individuals from scores of countries are included in the Treasury Department’s list of Specially Designated Nationals who are effectively blocked from the U.S.-dominated global financial system. Many of those designated are either part of or closely linked to their countries’ leadership…

But in recent months it seems that America’s unwavering commitment to fight all of the world’s scourges has brought all those governments and the wealthy individuals who support them to a critical mass, joining forces to create a parallel financial system which would be out of reach of America’s long arm. Should they succeed, the impact on America’s global posture would be transformational.

– From the recent article: The Anti-Dollar Awakening Could Be Ruder and Sooner Than Most Economists Predict

The peak of American empire has already come and gone, but this reality is not yet widely understood due to the continued dominance of the global financial system by the U.S. dollar, still the world’s preeminent reserve currency. U.S. leaders have always used the USD as a weapon, but it’s only in recent years that geopolitical rivals and long-standing allies alike have started to come to an increasingly vocal understanding that the unipolar role played by the U.S. in the world’s centralized financial system is well past its expiration date.

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Liberty Links 8/25/18 – More in U.S. Favor Diplomacy Over Sanctions for Russia

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Top Links

More in U.S. Favor Diplomacy Over Sanctions for Russia (Gallup)

Democratic Party Says It Thwarted Attempted Hack of Voter Database (Hysterical article which ended up being fake news, The New York Times)

Democrats Now Say Hacking Attempt Was Test From Within (The true story behind the fake news story above, Voice of America)

Meet the Most Insidious #Resistance Grifters (The Outline)

Facebook Is Rating the Trustworthiness of Its Users on a Scale from Zero to 1 (Please stop using this garbage platform, The Washington Post)

Facebook Removes ‘Multiple Pages’ Linked to ‘Inauthentic Behavior’ in Russia, Iran (ABC News)

Jeremy Hunt Silent as Saudi Arabia Plans Its First Execution of a Female Human Rights Activist (There’s nothing the Saudis can do that’ll get corrupt Western governments to care, The Canary)

China’s Xi Says Propaganda Work ‘Absolutely Correct’ Amid Trade Row Criticism (China continues to get increasingly aggressive with its clampdown, Reuters)

Google, Apple and 13 Other Companies That No Longer Require Employees to Have a College Degree (Wave of the future, CNBC)

Yemen School Bus Bombing ‘One of 50 Strikes on Civilian Vehicles This Year’ (Oh well, nobody cares since the Saudis buy lots and lots of bombs, The Guardian)

Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix. (Caitlin Johnstone, Medium)

Looking Beyond the Millennials: A Brief Discussion with My Son Zev Weinstein at 13 (YouTube)

Shark Attack on Spear Fisherman for Yellowfin Tuna at Ascension Island (Amazing footage, YouTube)

U.S. News/Politics

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It’s Time to Focus on Localism, Decentralization and Community

Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s “Theory of Relativity” to serve. You don’t have to know the Second Theory of Thermal Dynamics in Physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.

– From “The Drum Major Instinct”, a sermon by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968.

The following piece is based on a vision for the U.S., but I suspect the concepts apply equally to most nation-states encompassing large land masses and populations over a few million. Most of us have been conditioned to believe human life is best organized at scale. In other words, we’ve been convinced it’s best to have as many people as possible operating under a single overarching centralized government structure in charge of micromanaging society from the top down. I consider this paradigm outdated, unnatural and increasingly dangerous.

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Liberty Links 8/18/18 – Has Bezos Become More Powerful in D.C. Than Trump?

Before we get to links, I wanted to let everyone know that Tucker Carlson read an excerpt from my latest post at the very beginning  of his very popular Fox News show last evening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEZGaWaLe-Q&feature=youtu.be

Here’s the post he referenced in case you missed it the first time: Censorship Is What Happens When Powerful People Get Scared.

Thanks to Tucker and everyone who reads and shares my work, it seems to be reaching a wider audience.

As always, if you appreciate my work and want to contribute to independent media, consider becoming a monthly Patron, or visit the Support Page.

Top Links

“Everybody Immediately Knew That It Was for Amazon”: Has Bezos Become More Powerful in D.C. Than Trump? (Must read and share, Vanity Fair)

AP Exclusive: Google Tracks Your Movements, Like It or Not (AP)

Google Staff Tell Bosses China Censorship Is “Moral and Ethical” Crisis (The Intercept)

Taibbi: Censorship Does Not End Well (RollingStone)

U.S. Think Tank’s Tiny Lab Helps Facebook Battle Fake Social Media (This is the military-industrial-complex think tank censoring for Facebook, Reuters)

People Are Raising $650 Million On GoFundMe Each Year To Attack Rising Healthcare Costs (Totally normal, Forbes)

What If Banks Were Publicly Owned? In LA, This May Soon Be A Reality. (Localism is the future, Huffington Post)

Roundup Ingredient Found in Cheerios, Quaker Oats, and Other Cereals (Fox32 Chicago)

Billionaires Reach for the Stars While World Suffers (CNN)

RBS Bankers Joked About Destroying the U.S. Housing Market (The Guardian)

Whistleblower Makes Shocking IRS, Insider Trading Allegations (If this is true, holy s…, The New York Post)

Meet Cody Wilson, the Austin Man Behind the Fight over 3D-Printed Guns (Austin American-Statesman)

Take Control of Your Learning at Work (Harvard Business Review)

U.S. News/Politics

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Censorship Is What Happens When Powerful People Get Scared

“Only the weak hit the fly with a hammer”

– Bangambiki Habyarimana

Anyone who tells you the recent escalation of censorship by U.S. tech giants is merely a reflection of private companies making independent decisions is either lying or dangerously ignorant.

In the case of Facebook, the road from pseudo-platform to willing and enthusiastic tool of establishment power players is fairly straightforward. It really got going earlier this year when issues surrounding egregious privacy violations in the case of Cambridge Analytica (stuff that had been going on for years) could finally be linked to the Trump campaign.  It was at this point that powerful and nefarious forces spotted an opportunity to leverage the company’s gigantic influence in distributing news and opinion for their own ends. Rather than actually hold executives to account and break up the company, the choice was made to commandeer and weaponize the platform. This is where we stand today.

Let’s not whitewash history though. These tech companies have been compliant, out of control government snitches for a long time. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we’re aware of the deep and longstanding cooperation between these lackeys and U.S. intelligence agencies in the realm of mass surveillance. As such, the most recent transformation of these companies into full fledged information gatekeepers should be seen in its proper context; merely as a dangerous continuation and expansion of an already entrenched reality.

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Liberty Links 8/11/18 – How to Permanently DELETE Your Facebook Account

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How to Permanently DELETE Your Facebook Account – 2018 Update (Just do it, VPN Mentor)

AP Investigation: Us Allies, Al-Qaida Battle Rebels in Yemen (Must read and share, U.S. foreign policy is a fraudulent nightmare, AP)

Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jordan Peterson (Really good window into why cultural imperialists are panicking to censor content, The Atlantic)

‘Terrifying’: Poll Shows 43% of Republicans Think Trump Should Have Power to Shutter News Outlets for ‘Bad Behavior’ (Common Dreams)

Tech Companies Banned Infowars. Now, Its App Is Trending. (Backfiring big time, The New York Times)

The No-Platforming of Infowars Is a Watershed Moment for the Information Age (Big Brother Watch, Medium)

Facebook to Banks: Give Us Your Data, We’ll Give You Our Users (Absolutely horrible idea, WSJ)

Inside Google’s Effort to Develop a Censored Search Engine in China (This remains very concerning, The Intercept)

Behind The Scenes At The Twitter Purge – With Peter Van Buren and Scott Horton (Must watch if you haven’t seen, YouTube)

That Time Trump’s Iran Advisor Threatened To Murder An Official’s Children To Start The Iraq War (Caitlin Johnstone, Medium)

What is Mastodon? (A decentralized Twitter alternative for those interested, Github)

U.S. News/Politics

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Must Watch Interview – Iraq War Whistleblower Banned from Twitter Tells His Story

During my time in Iraq working for the State Department, a time that I initially was a red, white and blue government official, I frequently lied to the media. I lied to them about how things were going, I lied to them about how successful we were. My colleagues and I were contemptuous of them, most of the people we talked to in the media didn’t know enough to ask important questions, most of them didn’t care enough to ask questions and simply jotted down whatever we told them, and it was just remarkably easy to fool them. It’s almost as if they wanted to play along with us. At one point I described it as they weren’t looking for “the story,” just “a story.” I made some remarks about how many of them were more concerned about looking good in their stand-ups, getting their makeup on straight than looking for details or questioning the lies that the government put forward. 

– Peter Van Buren, Iraq War Whistleblower, banned from Twitter a few days ago

The above quote is from an extraordinary discussion between Daniel McAdams, Scott Horton and Peter Van Buren that occurred yesterday.

Stop whatever you’re doing right now and watch this, it’s that important.

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Is Democratic Senator Mark Warner the Mastermind Behind Move to Further Weaponize U.S. Tech Giants?

In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Because legalized bribery in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations has given wealthy Americans the ability to control the US government’s policy and behavior while ordinary Americans have no effective influence whatsoever, the US unquestionably has a corporatist system of government. Large, influential corporations are inseparable from the state, so their use of censorship is inseparable from state censorship.

This is especially true of the vast megacorporations of Silicon Valley, whose extensive ties to US intelligence agencies are well-documented. Once you’re assisting with the construction of the US military’s drone program, receiving grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance, or having your site’s content regulated by NATO’s propaganda arm, you don’t get to pretend you’re a private, independent corporation that is separate from government power. It is possible in the current system to have a normal business worth a few million dollars, but if you want to get to billions of dollars in wealth control in a system where money translates directly to political power, you need to work with existing power structures like the CIA and the Pentagon, or else they’ll work with your competitors instead of you.

– From the Caitlin Johnstone post: In A Corporatist System Of Government, Corporate Censorship Is State Censorship

Let’s be clear about something up front because it’s extremely important. This narrative that three tech giants, Apple, Google and Facebook all decided independently and simultaneously to de-platform Alex Jones without any threats or pressure from U.S. politicians and other powerful forces behind the scenes is pure fantasy. This isn’t private companies doing that private company thing, this is Silicon Valley oligarchs making a decision to appease politicians and the status quo system which made them billionaires in order to avoid regulation.

I’ve been warning about this for a long time, but let’s revisit something the late Robert Parry noted in September of last year.

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Stop Complaining and Just Delete Facebook

I wrote just one post last week and it centered around the dangers posed to society by U.S. tech giants. I specifically called out Facebook, pointing out how company executives are currently groveling to politicians in order to prevent legislation that might deem it a monopoly and curtail its power.

I explained how U.S. politicians prefer to use the power and reach of tech giants for their own ends rather than take them down a notch. Politicians aren’t at all concerned about the outsized influence of centralized tech behemoths engineering society using secret algorithms, they just want to be in control of how this power is abused.

Meanwhile, today’s biggest news is the uniform move by three U.S. tech giants to de-platform Alex Jones and his Infowars website. The main companies involved are Apple, Facebook and Google (via YouTube), as reported in The Guardian:

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Liberty Links 8/4/18 – Intercontinental Exchange Announces Bakkt, a Global Platform and Ecosystem for Digital Assets

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Intercontinental Exchange Announces Bakkt, a Global Platform and Ecosystem for Digital Assets (This is a big deal, Intercontinental Exchange)

‘We Are Not Bots’: Facebook Censors U.S. Activists After Falsely Claiming They ‘Unwittingly’ Planned Protest(Facebook is out of control, Gizmodo)

Taibbi: Beware the Slippery Slope of Facebook Censorship (What Facebook is up to is very, very dangerous, RollingStone)

Legendary Journalist Seymour Hersh on Novichok, Russian Links to Donald Trump and 9/11 (The Independent)

I Traced Missile Casings in Syria Back to Their Original Sellers, so It’s Time for the West to Reveal Who They Sell Arms to (Very important article, The Independent)

Details Surface About Chinese Spy Who Worked For Sen. Feinstein (Not Russia so who cares? CBS SF BayArea)

Welcome to the Quiet Skies (More creepy, secret surveillance by the U.S. government, (The Boston Globe)

As China’s Woes Mount, Xi Jinping Faces Rare Rebuke at Home (The New York Times

The Allure of Small Towns for Big City Freelancers (This is a big trend which will continue, Bloomberg)

The Ubiquity of Evil (Great short piece, Craig Murray)

Be Suspicious Of Everyone Who Habitually Defends The Powerful From The Weak (Caitlin Johnstone, Medium)

U.S. News/Politics

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