- Turkish Government Wages War With "Price-Gouging Terrorist, Traitors" As Food Inflation Soars
Food prices in Turkey have been soaring since the lira’s sharp, violent depreciation last summer. The rise in prices is not only a result of the currency’s depreciation which made the Turkish lira one of the worst performing currencies in the world, but is also a result of price gouging that has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, feeding on itself, over the last 6 months.
According to Bloomberg, the price of eggplants, cucumbers and tomatoes in Turkey has jumped 81%, 53% and 39% monthly, respectively. Overall, food inflation in Turkey is at 31% annualized.
These soaring prices haven’t gone unnoticed by the Erdogan regime, and instead of focusing on the underlying economic deterioration, the Turkish government has instead started targeting vendors who raise prices, labeling price gougers “traitors” and “terrorists”.
But this rhetoric isn’t working, so Erdogan is backing up threats with fines: and so, the Turkish government has started cracking down and issuing fines after raiding wholesale food markets in five provinces on February 6, uncovering exorbitant price increases of up to 800%.
To avoid price manipulation, the administration is seeking to eliminate (not literally, yet) middlemen by purchasing vegetables directly from farmers and selling them at lower prices in major cities. Government run vendor tents are up and running at numerous locations as of Monday and sales will soon be expanded to include cleaning products.
Meanwhile, in addition to the depreciation of the Lira, flash floods in Antalya have also contributed to food shortages, pushing prices even higher. Despite this, Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak dismissed the idea that weather is in any way to blame.
“The inflation reduction campaign is perceived to distort relative prices and to be unsustainable,” a recent Bank of America report read.
One potential wild card: municipal elections in Turkey are just two months away and the fight against inflation will be the hallmark issue, as surging food costs have disproportionately hit poorer sections of the 82 million people that live in Turkey – many of whom have traditionally been supporters of the President’s party. In taking the fight to local areas and warehouses, President Erdogan is trying to make a statement that he is going to fight inflation with the same vigor that the country has used to defend itself militarily in the past. In fact, this being Erdogan, it is probably not a surprise that the Turkish president compared food producers and retailers to terrorists.
Erdogan said Sunday: “The government will finish off those terrorizing wholesale food markets in no time, the way it finished off those terrorists in caves.”
“Our inspections will continue across Turkey at full steam to give no respite to opportunists,” Trade Minister Ruhsar Pekcan said.
Of course, since none of the government’s actions will have any tangible impact, it is only a matter of time before social discontent hits a plateau, and what until recently has been the most stable middle-eastern regime suddenly finds itself scrambling to preserve control. In fact just yesterday, the first hints of instability emerged, when during Erdogan’s first election rally, voters interrupted the Turkish president demanding job contracts. His reply: “Dont expect anything from us. We gave everything. Don’t provocate. I’m not an ordinary leader.” We soon may find out just how extraordinary Turkey’s freshly-heckled leader truly is.
Voters interrupt #Erdogan‘s first local election rally, demanding job contracts. His reply: ‘Dont expect anything from us. We gave everything. Don’t provocate. I’m not an ordinary leader.’
Is the man of the people losing touch? #Turkey pic.twitter.com/fs5TjTsOm8
— Melvyn Ingleby (@MelvynIngleby) February 10, 2019
- "A Coup Is A Coup" – Why Venezuela's Guaido Doesn't Have A Constitutional Leg To Stand On
Authored by Roger Harris via Counterpunch.org,
Donald Trump imagines Juan Guaidó is the rightful president of Venezuela. Mr. Guaidó, a man of impeccable illegitimacy, was exposed by Cohen and Blumenthal as “a product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s elite regime change trainers.”
Argentinian sociologist Marco Teruggi described Guaidó in the same article as “a character that has been created for this circumstance” of regime change.
Here, his constitutional credentials to be interim president of Venezuela are deconstructed.
Educated at George Washington University in DC, Guaidó was virtually unknown in his native Venezuela before being thrust on to the world stage in a rapidly unfolding series of events. In a poll conducted a little more than a week before Guaidó appointed himself president of the country, 81% of Venezuelans had never even heard of the 35-year-old.
To make a short story shorter, US Vice President Pence phoned Guaidó on the evening of January 22rd and presumably asked him how’d he like to be made president of Venezuela. The next day, Guaidó announced that he considered himself president of Venezuela, followed within minutes by US President Trump confirming the self-appointment.
A few weeks before on January 5, Guaidó had been installed as president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, their unicameral legislature. He had been elected to the assembly from a coastal district with 26% of the vote. It was his party’s turn for the presidency of the body, and he was hand-picked for the position. Guaidó, even within his own party, was not in the top leadership.
Guaidó’s party, Popular Will, is a far-right marginal group whose most enthusiastic boosters are John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, and Mike Pompeo. Popular Will had adopted a strategy of regime change by extra-parliamentary means rather than engage in the democratic electoral process and had not participated in recent Venezuelan elections.
Although anointed by Trump and company, Guaidó’s Popular Will Party is not representative of the “Venezuelan opposition,” which is a fractious bunch whose hatred of Maduro is only matched by their abhorrence of each other. Leading opposition candidate Henri Falcón, who ran against Maduro in 2018 on a neoliberal austerity platform, had been vehemently opposed by Popular Will who demanded that he join their US-backed boycott of the election.
The Venezuelan news outlet, Ultimas Noticias, reported that prominent opposition politician Henrique Capriles, who had run against Maduro in 2013, “affirmed during an interview that the majority of opposition parties did not agree with the self-swearing in of Juan Guaidó as interim president of the country.” Claudio Fermin, president of the party Solutions for Venezuela, wrote “we believe in the vote, in dialogue, we believe in coming to an understanding, we believe Venezuelans need to part ways with the extremist sectors that only offer hatred, revenge, lynching.” Key opposition governor of the State of Táchira, Laidy Gómez, has rejected Guaidó’s support of intervention by the US, warning that it “would generate death of Venezuelans.”
The Guaidó/Trump cabal does not reflect the democratic consensus in Venezuela, where polls consistently show super majorities oppose outside intervention. Popular opinion in Venezuela supports negotiations between the government and the opposition as proposed by Mexico, Uruguay, and the Vatican. The Maduro administration has embraced the negotiations as a peaceful solution to the crisis facing Venezuela.
The US government rejects a negotiated solution, in the words of Vice President Pence: “This is no time for dialogue; this is time for action.” This intransigent position is faithfully echoed by Guaidó. So while most Venezuelans want peace, the self-appointed president, backed by the full force of US military power, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that it was possible to “end the Maduro regime with a minimum of bloodshed.”
The Guaidó/Trump cabal’s fig leaf for legitimacy is based on the bogus argument that Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution gives the National Assembly the power to declare a national president’s “abandonment” of the office. In which case, the president of the National Assembly can serve as an interim national president, until presidential elections are held. The inconvenient truth is that Maduro has shown no inclination to abandon his post, and the constitution says no such thing.
In fact, the grounds for replacing a president are very clearly laid out in the first paragraph of Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution and do not include fraudulent or illegitimate election, which is what the cabal has been claiming. In the convoluted logic of the US government and its epigones, if the people elect someone the cabal doesn’t like, the election is by definition fraudulent and the democratically elected winner is ipso facto a dictator.
The function of adjudicating the validity of an election, as in any country, is to be dealt with through court challenges, not by turning to Donald Trump for his approval.
And certainly not by anointing an individual from a party that could have run in the 2018 election but decided to boycott.
The Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ), which is the separate supreme court branch of the Venezuelan government has certified Maduro’s reelection, as have independent international observers. Further, no appeal was filed by any of the boycotting parties, while all participating parties – including opposition ones – signed off on the validity of the election after the polls closed.
The far-right opposition has boycotted the high court as well as the electoral process. They contest the legitimacy of the TSJ because some members of the TSJ were appointed by a lame duck National Assembly favorable to Maduro, after a new National Assembly with a majority in opposition had been elected in December 2015 but not yet seated.
Even if President Maduro were somehow deemed to have experienced what is termed a falta absoluta (i.e., some sort of void in the presidency due to death, insanity, absence, etc.), the National Assembly president is only authorized to take over if the falta absoluta occurs before the lawful president “takes possession.” However, Maduro was already “in possession” before the January 10, 2019 presidential inauguration and even before the May 10, 2018 presidential election. Maduro had won the presidency in the 2013 election and ran and won reelection last May.
If the falta absoluta is deemed to have occurred during the first four years of the presidential term, the vice president takes over. Then the constitution decrees that a snap election for the presidency must be held within 30 days. This is what happened when President Hugo Chávez died while in office in 2013. Then Vice President Nicolás Maduro succeeded to the presidency, called for new elections, and was elected by the people of Venezuela.
If it is deemed that the falta absoluta occurred during the last two years of the six-year presidential term, the vice president serves until the end of the term, according to the Venezuelan constitution. And if the time of the alleged falta absoluta is unclear – when Maduro presided over “illegitimate” elections in 2018, as is claimed by the far-right opposition – it is up to the TSJ to decide, not the head of the National Assembly or even such an august authority as US Senator Marco Rubio. Or the craven US press (too numerous to cite), which without bothering to read the plain language of the Bolivarian Constitution, repeatedly refers to Guaidó as the “constitutionally authorized” or “legitimate” president.
As Alfred de Zayas, United Nations independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, tweeted: “Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution is inapplicable and cannot be twisted into legitimizing Guaidó’s self-proclamation as interim President. A coup is a coup.”
- Russia Declares State Of Emergency After Northern Islands Invaded… By Polar Bears
A state of emergency has been declared in a remote Russian settlement on the Polar archipelago of Novaya Zemla after more than 50 polar bears recently rolled into town in search of food, and started wreaking havoc for the locals.
People are fearful of going outside since the aggressive bears are more than capable of mauling a human to death.
This has made daily life in the arctic village even more difficult.
Residents of the remote village are “afraid to go outside” and “daily life is in turmoil”, according to Aleksandr Minayev, deputy head of the local administration.
“Parents are wary of letting children to go to schools and kindergartens,” he made clear.
However, locals cannot shoot the bears because they are an endangered species. The Russian agency tasked with protecting natural resources denied a request by local officials to shoot the bears.
Zigansha Musin, the head of the local government authority, said “I have been in Novaya Zemlya since 1983, yet I’ve never seen such a massive polar bear invasion.”
He added that the polar bears are “literally chasing people and even entering the entrances of residential buildings” as one of the videos posted to YouTube shows.
In the village, 52 polar bears have been spotted entering settlements occupied by people. There have been numerous reports of the wild animals attacking people, entering residences and offices buildings, and rooting through trash.
One official said that six to ten bears can regularly be spotted in the village proper. Schools and nurseries have filed statements saying they are worried about their security.
One resident said the bears are no longer afraid of people and have become “insolent.”
“There are no more enemies. That is they became insolent. This is scary. When they walk under your window at night, it is creepy.”
The town, which boasts about 2,000 residents, is mostly occupied by Russian military personnel. So far, the government in Moscow has promised to send in a team of specialists to deal with the bears.
- Rethinking America's Military Industrial Complex
Authored by Tim Kirby via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The US Military Industrial Complex no longer needs neither actual wars nor the threat of war for its own survival. This factor could actually change dynamic of this institution/bureaucracy in our lifetimes and it may actually be changing as we speak.
Very often something will evolve and become ubiquitous to the degree that we forget its origin. Putting a dead tree in your house on Christmas is a good example, few people think of why this is done, they just do it because it has been done for a long time and thus seems completely natural and important to do so every year. A justification for doing it is no longer needed, it is something done by default. In some ways the necessity to start questionable wars of luxury is much like that Christmas tree – an odd tradition that is not of an importance or value anymore.
In order to break this down we need to go back to the start.
It is hard for people in our times, especially foreign people to understand the fact that the United States was not a massive military power until WWII. Today sole hyperpower was at a time not that long ago a much different nation militarily and foreign policy speaking. In 1914 at the start of the Great War in Europe the territorially massive United States had a total armed forces of around 166,000 men. From 1776 until that point the manpower of US forces was minimal by European standards. That America of those times was an isolated self-focused America that many today long for. When the US entered WWI shedding the binds of its isolationist tendencies it bulked up to nearly 3,000,000 soldiers by the end of 1918. However, directly after the Great War finally ended the military severely deflated itself back down much closer to its original size.
“The Good War” in the 1940’s was the final nail in the isolationist coffin as American forces would forever remain in the millions of men after the defeat of Germany and Japan by the Allies.
The 1940s are the point where the permanent military industrial complex that we know of today starts to take hold. Slightly later it got the name by which we call it today thanks to a speech by President Eisenhower at the very tail end of his presidency in 1961. Sadly Mr. Eisenhower did nothing to stop the growth of the war-machine only choosing to warn us about it with nearly no time left in office. One would have expected bold action from a man known for his bravery and cunning.
The ideological justification for retaining a massive US military in peacetime was Communism. A global Communist threat seemed like something grand enough to be worth throwing away a large portion of America’s traditional (and very successful) identity.
As time went on wars of questionable origins in Korea and Vietnam continued to provide proof of the need for massive military spending and continued expansion.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90’s American forces could have (in theory) reduced in size as there was no longer any real geopolitical competitor to the US. This was a “turning point” moment when America could possibly have gone back to being the America that was and scaled down to a few hundred thousand men under the umbrella of a few thousand nuclear warheads and enough billions of dollars to make sure that the US would never “fall behind” from a weapons standpoint.
But this was not to be. Washington chose to go with “Global Hegemon” America and has not looked back. But at this point massive military spending still required some sort of reason to spend hundreds of billions per year. Iraq and Afghanistan were enough justification to keep millions of men in uniforms on bases all over the world mostly doing pushups and cleaning the toilets in a “global war on terror”.
Now there is a new “Russian threat” that is hard for politicians to define or prove exists but is just juicy enough for them it is still call for increasing defense spending or build system X in European country Y that they can’t find on a map.
As we can see since WWII, the US military has gone from dealing with direct threats (Germany, Japan) to direct threats via proxy (The Soviet Union in Korea/Vietnam) to overinflated threats (Iraq, Afghanistan) to fake threats (today’s Russia). I would argue and even offer that at this point there is no political means nor will to ever go “back” to the isolated America. That America as a concept is dead and both the politicians and the public understand and support the US having a massive military. No threat is needed any more as having a massive military is no longer even a question. It is a default position like seeing the world as round – only a tiny handful of lunatics of zero influence could argue otherwise and debating with them is pointless.
Furthermore as we have seen any politician who goes against the military industrial complex (MIC) is deemed a traitor and “against the troops”.
This current state of things is actually very good from the standpoint of peace and America’s reputation. Since war is no longer necessary to justify the MIC the US is much more free to not engage in warfare. In fact war is completely unnecessary. At some point advertisements for automobiles had to stop mentioning their superiority to horses. We are at the same point with the MIC. Politicians and the mainstream media do not need to search for/create enemies because they are no longer needed. The US military is to be forever massive and expensive and profitable and it may even become very peaceful because of this. Why work when you can make billions doing virtually nothing?
- Walter Jones, Congressman Behind "Freedom Fries" Who Turned Anti-War Firebrand, Dies At 76
Rep. Walter Jones, Jr. died at the age of 76 on Sunday after an extended illness for which was a granted a leave of absence from Congress last year.
The Republican representative for North Carolina’s 3rd congressional district since 1995 had initially been a strong supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and even became well-known for getting french fries renamed as “freedom fries” in the House cafeteria as a protest against French condemnation of the US invasion.
Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C. in his office on Capitol Hill, October 2017, via the AP/Military Times However, he was one of the few politicians initially supporting the Iraq invasion to later express profound public regret over his decision, and went on to become a consistent advocate for ending regime change wars and Washington’s military adventurism abroad. As part of these efforts, he was an original Board Member of the Ron Paul Institute.
Remembering Jones as a tireless advocate of peace, Ron Paul notes that he “turned from pro-war to an antiwar firebrand after he discovered how Administrations lie us into war. His passing yesterday is deeply mourned by all who value peace and honesty over war and deception.” The Ron Paul Institute has also called him “a Hero of Peace” for both his voting record and efforts at shutting down the “endless wars”.
And Antiwar.com also describes Jones as having been among the “most consistently antiwar members of Congress” and a huge supporter of their work:
By 2005, Jones had reversed his position on the Iraq War. Jones called on President George W. Bush to apologize for misinforming Congress to win authorization for the war. Jones said, “If I had known then what I know today, I wouldn’t have voted for that resolution.”
Jones went on to become one of the most antiwar members of Congress, fighting for ending US involvement in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
Also the BBC describes Rep. Jones’ “dramatic change of heart” concerning the Iraq war starting in 2005, after which he began reaching out to thousands of people who had lost loves ones in combat.
Rep. Walter Jones led an effort in the House to call French Fries “Freedom Fries” instead, but came to profoundly regret his role in supporting Bush’s war.
Image via Vice Media Noting that “no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq” and that the war was justified by the Bush administration based entirely on lies and false intelligence, the BBC describes:
At the same time, Mr Jones met grieving families whose loved ones were killed in the war. This caused him to have a dramatic change of heart, and in 2005 he called for the troops to be brought home.
He spoke candidly on several occasions about how deeply he regretted supporting the war, which led to the deaths of more than 140,000 Iraqi and American people.
“I have signed over 12,000 letters to families and extended families who’ve lost loved ones in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,” he told NPR in 2017. “That was, for me, asking God to forgive me for my mistake.”
In total he represented his district for 34 years, first in the North Carolina state legislature, then in Congress. He took a leave of absence last year after a number of missed House votes due to declining health.
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Rep. Walter Jones, Jr. turned from pro-war to an antiwar firebrand after he discovered how Administrations lie us into war. His passing yesterday is deeply mourned by all who value peace and honesty over war and deception. He was an original Board Member of the Ron Paul Institute. What kind of a man was he? We remember Walter Jones in today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report.
- Johnstone: How To Tell If Someone Is Controlled Opposition
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
Every day in my article comments and social media I get people warning me that this or that journalist, activist or politician is “controlled opposition”, meaning someone who pretends to oppose the establishment while covertly serving it. These warnings usually come after I’ve shared or written about something a dissident figure has said or done, and are usually accompanied by an admonishment not to ever do so again lest I spread their malign influence. If you’ve been involved in any kind of anti-establishment activism for any length of time, you’ve probably encountered this yourself.
Paranoia pervades dissident circles of all sorts, and it’s not entirely without merit, since establishment infiltration of political movements is the norm, not the exception. This article by Truthout documents multiple instances in which movements like the 1968 Chicago DNC protest and Peter Camejo’s 1976 anti-establishment presidential campaign were so heavily infiltrated by opaque government agencies that one out of every six people involved in them were secretly working for the feds. This trend of infiltration is known to have continued into the current day with movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and we’d be ignorant not to assume that this has been at least as rampant in online circles where people organize and disseminate ideas and information.
So it’s understandable that people are extremely vigilant about prominent figures in dissident circles, and it’s understandable that people feel paranoid. Over and over again we see shining anti-establishment movements fizzle or rendered impotent, often seemingly with the help of people we once trusted, and it’s hard not to get frustrated and become suspicious of anyone who starts shining bright in antiwar, leftist, or other dissident circles.
The trouble with this paranoia and suspicion is that it doesn’t seem to function with any kind of intelligence. I have received such “controlled opposition” warnings about pretty much every prominent dissident figure in the English-speaking world at one time or another, and if I believed them all there’d be no one in the world whose words I could share or write about, including my own. I myself have been accused at different times of being a “plant” for the CIA, the Russians, Assad, the Chinese Communist Party, the Iranian mullahs, the alt-right, Trump, Pyongyang, and the Palestinians, which if all true would make me a very busy girl indeed. Since I know I’m not a plant for anybody, I know for myself that such accusations don’t come from a place of insight with any degree of reliability, and I’ve therefore had to find my own way to navigate this confusing landscape.
So since I know that infiltration and manipulation happens, but I don’t find other people’s whisperings about “controlled opposition” useful, how do I figure out who’s trustworthy and who isn’t? How do I figure out who it’s safe to cite in my work and who to avoid? How do I separate the fool’s gold from the genuine article? The shit from the Shinola?
Here is my answer: I don’t.
I spend no mental energy whatsoever concerning myself with who may or may not be a secret pro-establishment influencer, and for good reason. There’s no way to know for sure if an individual is secretly scheming to sheep dog the populace into support for the status quo, and as long as government agencies remain opaque and unaccountable there will never be a way to know who might be secretly working for them. What I can know is (A) what I’ve learned about the world, (B) the ways the political/media class is lying about what I know about the world, and (C) when someone says something which highlights those lies. I therefore pay attention solely to the message, and no attention to what may or may not be the hidden underlying agenda of the messenger.
In other words, if someone says something which disrupts establishment narratives, I help elevate what they’re saying in that specific instance. I do this not because I know that the speaker is legit and uncorrupted, but because their message in that moment is worthy of elevation. You can navigate the entire political/media landscape in this way.
Since society is made of narrative and power ultimately rests in the hands of those who are able to control those narratives, it makes no sense to fixate on individuals and it makes perfect sense to focus on narrative. What narratives are being pushed by those in power? How are those narratives being disrupted, undermined and debunked by things that are being said by dissident voices? This is the most effective lens through which to view the battle against the unelected power establishment which is crushing us all to death, not some childish fixation on who should or shouldn’t be our hero.
Have no heroes. Trust nobody but your own inner sense-maker. If someone says something that disrupts establishment narratives based on what you understand those narratives to be, go ahead and help throw what they’re saying into the gears of the machine. Don’t make a religion out of it, don’t get attached to it, just use it as a weapon to attack the narrative matrix.
This by the way is also a useful lens to look through in spiritual development, if you’re into that sort of thing. When you enter spiritual circles concerned with enlightenment, you’ll see all sorts of debates about what teachers are really enlightened and which ones are just pretending, and these conversations mimic precisely the exact kinds of debates you’ll see in marginalized political circles about who’s the real deal and who’s controlled opposition. But the truth is there’s no way to know with certainty what’s going on in someone else’s head, and the best thing to do is to stop concerning yourself with who has and has not attained some special realization or whatever and just focus on what they’re saying. If a spiritual teacher says something which helps you notice something you’d never noticed before about consciousness or perception, then use what they said and maybe stick around to see if they have anything else useful to say. If not, move on.
There’s no reason to worry about what journalists, activists and politicians are coming from a place of authenticity if you know yourself to be coming from a place of authenticity. As you learn more about the world and get better at distinguishing fact from narrative, you will get better and better at seeing the narrative matrix clearly, and you’ll come to see all the things that are being said about what’s going on in the world as weapons in the battle of narrative control. Pick up whatever weapons seem useful to you and use them in whatever ways they’ll be useful, without wasting energy concerning yourself with the individuals who created them. Call the bullshit what it is and use the truth for what it is.
Or maybe I’m fulla shit! Maybe I myself am being paid to say these things by some powerful influencer; you can’t know for sure. All you can know is what’s useful for you. If you really find it useful to try and organize individual dissident figures into “hero” and “controlled opposition” boxes, if that genuinely helps you take apart the system that’s hurting us all, you’d know that better than I would. But if you find what I’m saying here useful, pick it up and add it to your toolbox.
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- Reddit Users Wage 'Meme War' Against Beijing After Tencent Investment
Reddit have responded with alarm following reports that Chinese tech giant Tencent participated in a $300 million funding round for the website, with users fearing that the company might push Reddit to start censoring content on behalf of Beijing.
And they’re responding in the best way they know how: Making memes mocking the Chinese government.
According to Bloomberg, Tencent Holdings invested in the funding round, which valued the site at $3 billion, despite the fact that Reddit is banned in China. And, in typical Reddit fashion, users of the site responded by publishing images that are banned in China, like Winnie the Pooh (banned because users have mocked its resemblance to President Xi) and images of the famous “tank man” from the Tiananmen Square massacre. A concerted effort by a small group of Reddit users helped push the memes on to Reddit’s vaunted front page.
Winnie the Pooh
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told BBG that Reddit’s focus on the video game community is part of what drew the two companies together.
“Video games are one category that’s really popular on Reddit,” Huffman told CNBC.
A spokeswoman for Reddit declined to comment on the controversy to Bloomberg.
One Reddit user quipped, “I thought it would be nice to post this picture of “Tank Man” at Tienanmen Square before our new glorious overlords decide we cannot post it anymore.”
But if Reddit users decided to abandon the site en masse, where, exactly would they go?
Back to 4Chan?
- Making Globalism Great Again – Did Trump Fold To The Deep State?
Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Unz Review,
Maybe Donald Trump isn’t as stupid as I thought. I’d hate to have to admit that publicly, but it does kind of seem like he has put one over on the liberal corporate media this time. Scanning the recent Trump-related news, I couldn’t help but notice a significant decline in the number of references to Weimar, Germany, Adolf Hitler, and “the brink of fascism” that America has supposedly been teetering on since Hillary Clinton lost the election. I googled around pretty well, I think, but I couldn’t find a single editorial warning that Trump is about to summarily cancel the U.S. Constitution, dissolve Congress, and proclaim himself Führer. Nor did I see any mention of Auschwitz, or any other Nazi stuff … which is weird, considering that the Hitler hysteria has been a standard feature of the official narrative we’ve been subjected to for the last two years.
So how did Trump finally get the liberal corporate media to stop calling him a fascist? He did that by acting like a fascist (i.e., like a “normal” president). Which is to say he did the bidding of the deep state goons and corporate mandarins that manage the global capitalist empire … the smiley, happy, democracy-spreading, post-fascist version of fascism we live under.
I’m referring, of course, to Venezuela, which is one of a handful of uncooperative countries that are not playing ball with global capitalism and which haven’t been “regime changed” yet. Trump green-lit the attempted coup purportedly being staged by the Venezuelan “opposition,” but which is obviously a U.S. operation, or, rather, a global capitalist operation. As soon as he did, the corporate media immediately suspended calling him a fascist, and comparing him to Adolf Hitler, and so on, and started spewing out blatant propaganda supporting his effort to overthrow the elected government of a sovereign country.
Overthrowing the governments of sovereign countries, destroying their economies, stealing their gold, and otherwise bringing them into the fold of the global capitalist “international community” is not exactly what most folks thought Trump meant by “Make America Great Again.” Many Americans have never been to Venezuela, or Syria, or anywhere else the global capitalist empire has been ruthlessly restructuring since shortly after the end of the Cold War. They have not been lying awake at night worrying about Venezuelan democracy, or Syrian democracy, or Ukrainian democracy.
This is not because Americans are a heartless people, or an ignorant or a selfish people. It is because, well, it is because they are Americans (or, rather, because they believe they are Americans), and thus are more interested in the problems of Americans than in the problems of people in faraway lands that have nothing whatsoever to do with America. Notwithstanding what the corporate media will tell you, Americans elected Donald Trump, a preposterous, self-aggrandizing ass clown, not because they were latent Nazis, or because they were brainwashed by Russian hackers, but, primarily, because they wanted to believe that he sincerely cared about America, and was going to try to “make it great again” (whatever that was supposed to mean, exactly).
Unfortunately, there is no America. There is nothing to make great again. “America” is a fiction, a fantasy, a nostalgia that hucksters like Donald Trump (and other, marginally less buffoonish hucksters) use to sell whatever they are selling … themselves, wars, cars, whatever. What there is, in reality, instead of America, is a supranational global capitalist empire, a decentralized, interdependent network of global corporations, financial institutions, national governments, intelligence agencies, supranational governmental entities, military forces, media, and so on. If that sounds far-fetched or conspiratorial, look at what is going on in Venezuela.
The entire global capitalist empire is working in concert to force the elected president of the country out of office. The US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Poland, the Netherlands, Israel, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Argentina have officially recognized Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, in spite of the fact that no one elected him. Only the empire’s official evil enemies (i.e., Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and other uncooperative countries) are objecting to this “democratic” coup. The global financial system (i.e., banks) has frozen (i.e., stolen) Venezuela’s assets, and is attempting to transfer them to Guaido so he can buy the Venezuelan military. The corporate media are hammering out the official narrative like a Goebbelsian piano in an effort to convince the general public that all this has something to do with democracy. You would have to be a total moron or hopelessly brainwashed not to recognize what is happening.
What is happening has nothing to do with America … the “America” that Americans believe they live in and that many of them want to “make great again.” What is happening is exactly what has been happening around the world since the end of the Cold War, albeit most dramatically in the Middle East. The de facto global capitalist empire is restructuring the planet with virtual impunity. It is methodically eliminating any and all impediments to the hegemony of global capitalism, and the privatization and commodification of everything.
Venezuela is one of these impediments. Overthrowing its government has nothing to do with America, or the lives of actual Americans. “America” is not to going conquer Venezuela and plant an American flag on its soil. “America” is not going to steal its oil, ship it “home,” and parcel it out to “Americans” in their pickups in the parking lot of Walmart.
What what about those American oil corporations? They want that Venezuelan oil, don’t they? Well, sure they do, but here’s the thing … there are no “American” oil corporations. Corporations, especially multi-billion dollar transnational corporations (e.g., Chevron, ExxonMobil, et al.) have no nationalities, nor any real allegiances, other than to their major shareholders. Chevron, for example, whose major shareholders are asset management and mutual fund companies like Black Rock, The Vanguard Group, SSgA Funds Management, Geode Capital Management, Wellington Management, and other transnational, multi-trillion dollar outfits. Do you really believe that being nominally headquartered in Boston or New York makes these companies “American,” or that Deutsche Bank is a “German” bank, or that BP is a “British” company?
And Venezuela is just the most recent blatant example of the empire in action. Ask yourself, honestly, what have the “American” regime change ops throughout the Greater Middle East done for any actual Americans, other than get a lot of them killed? Oh, and how about those bailouts for all those transnational “American” investment banks? Or the billions “America” provides to Israel? Someone please explain how enriching the shareholders of transnational corporations like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin by selling billions in weapons to Saudi Arabian Islamists is benefiting “the American people.” How much of that Saudi money are you seeing? And, wait, I’ve got another one for you. Call up your friendly 401K manager, ask how your Pfizer shares are doing, then compare that to what you’re paying some “American” insurance corporation to not really cover you.
For the last two-hundred years or so, we have been conditioned to think of ourselves as the citizens of a collection of sovereign nation states, as “Americans,” “Germans,” “Greeks,” and so on. There are no more sovereign nation states. Global capitalism has done away with them. Which is why we are experiencing a “neo-nationalist” backlash. Trump, Brexit, the so-called “new populism” … these are the death throes of national sovereignty, like the thrashing of a suffocating fish before you whack it and drop it in the cooler. The battle is over, but the fish doesn’t know that. It didn’t even realize there was a battle until it suddenly got jerked up out of the water.
In any event, here we are, at the advent of the global capitalist empire. We are not going back to the 19th Century, nor even to the early 20th Century. Neither Donald Trump nor anyone else is going to “Make America Great Again.” Global capitalism will continue to remake the world into one gigantic marketplace where we work ourselves to death at bullshit jobs in order to buy things we don’t need, accumulating debts we can never pay back, the interest on which will further enrich the global capitalist ruling classes, who, as you may have noticed, are preparing for the future by purchasing luxury underground bunkers and post-apocalyptic compounds in New Zealand. That, and militarizing the police, who they will need to maintain “public order” … you know, like they are doing in France at the moment, by beating, blinding, and hideously maiming those Gilets Jaunes (i.e., Yellow Vest) protesters that the corporate media are doing their best to demonize and/or render invisible.
Or, who knows, Americans (and other Western consumers) might take a page from those Yellow Vests, set aside their political differences (or at least ignore their hatred of each other long enough to actually try to achieve something), and focus their anger at the politicians and corporations that actually run the empire, as opposed to, you know, illegal immigrants and imaginary legions of Nazis and Russians. In the immortal words of General Buck Turgidson, “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed,” but, heck, it might be worth a try, especially since, the way things are going, we are probably going end up out there anyway.
- Target App Lured Customers With Lower Prices, Which Mysteriously Increased As Users Approached Store
Target updated its smartphone app last Wednesday after a two-month investigation by Minneapolis TV station KARE-TV discovered the retail giant was advertising certain items for one price outside of stores, only to hike the price when a person entered a Target – in one case, by as much as nearly $150.
The station dubbed it the “parking lot price switch.”
For instance, Target’s app price for a particular Samsung 55-inch Smart TV was $499.99, but when we pulled into the parking lot of the Minnetonka store that price suddenly increased to $599.99 on the app.
To test this further, we selected 10 products on the Target app at random, ranging from toys to bottled water to vacuum cleaners. We found that when we entered the store, four of the 10 products jumped up in price on the app.
An Apple Watch band went up $2, a Shark vacuum went up $40, a Graco child car seat jumped $72 and a Dyson vacuum shot up $148 on the app while inside the store.
Our list of 10 items was a total of $262 cheaper in the back of the parking lot on the app with no indication that the prices had changed. –KARE-TV
The difference boiled down to Target offering a lower price online vs. in-store, however the online-only pricing wasn’t made clear. As KARE-TV noted, “Even if you scan the bar codes of the products on the shelves, which Target suggests customers do to see Cartwheel coupon offers on the app, the app gives no indication that certain prices were far cheaper at Target.com.”
In a statement emailed to the station, Target said: “The Target app shows in-store pricing while in store, and online pricing while on the go. If a guest finds any item for a lower price across any of the ways they can shop Target, we’ll price match it.”
Oh really?
George John – a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management thinks Target’s explanation is lacking.
“That particular experiment reveals so many interesting facts about our retail environment,” said John. “Somebody at Target programmed in an algorithm which says someone who is 50 feet within the store is willing to pay more. The most reasonable explanation is that you just revealed your commitment to buying the product, you’re in the store, or in the parking lot. If you are further away, you haven’t quite committed, so I’m going to give you a juicier deal. That’s why the price went up when you got closer to the store.”
How does the app know you’ve entered a store?
When you download the Target app, it asks you if it can access your location. Enabling this allows you to see stores near you, and when you are inside a store it will show you where to go for specific items and deals. What Target does not clearly tell customers is it appears this function also triggers price changes as you approach the store. –KARE-TV
KARE-TV was first alerted to the “parking lot price switch” by Target shopper Miranda Artz, who noticed the phenomenon while buying an electric razor last spring.
“It was $99.99 in the store, so I bought it,” said Artz – only to find that the product was $69.99 on her Target app in the parking lot.
Artz went back in the store to deal with customer service, and noticed that the price had jumped back to $99.99. When she went back out to the parking lot, she noticed the price drop again, so she took a screenshot to show customer service, which then refunded the difference.
“I think it’s a little deceptive,” said Artz.
Artz said there was a time when Target’s app would alert you to a lower online price, if available, when you scanned a product in store. She said that seemed to change last spring.
Target would not confirm if it used to do this, nor would it confirm when its in-store vs. online price switches started taking effect on the app.
“You should meet the expectations of the customer. If the customer believes they are getting an in-store price, say it is the in-store price,” said John.
There is one quick and easy way to ensure your Target app does not switch any prices when you walk into the store. In the app, click on your name icon in the bottom right of the screen and scroll down to “app settings.” Click “Location” and switch it to “Never.” This switch will no longer permit the app to see your geolocation, and in this setting the app will always show the online prices of products, even if you are standing inside the store. –KARE-TV
KARE-TV repeated the experiment at Best Buy, Walmart and Macy’s, however none of them were found to alter prices between inside and outside of stores.
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