The Prisoner Says No To Big Brother,,, March 04, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Whenever I visit Julian
Assange, we meet in a room he knows too well. There is a bare table and
pictures of Ecuador on the walls. There is a bookcase where the books never
change. The curtains are always drawn and there is no natural light. The air is
still and fetid.
This is Room 101.
Before I enter Room 101, I must surrender my passport and phone. My pockets and
possessions are examined. The food I bring is inspected.
The man who guards Room 101 sits in what looks like an old-fashioned telephone
box. He watches a screen, watching Julian. There are others unseen, agents of
the state, watching and listening.
Cameras are everywhere in Room 101. To avoid them, Julian manoeuvres us both
into a corner, side by side, flat up against the wall. This is how we catch up:
whispering and writing to each other on a notepad, which he shields from the
cameras. Sometimes we laugh.
I have my designated time slot. When that expires, the door in Room 101 bursts
open and the guard says, "Time is up!" On New Year's Eve, I was
allowed an extra 30 minutes and the man in the phone box wished me a happy new
year, but not Julian.
Of course, Room 101 is the room in George Orwell's prophetic novel, 1984, where
the thought police watched and tormented their prisoners, and worse, until
people surrendered their humanity and principles and obeyed Big Brother. Julian Assange will never obey Big Brother. His resilience
and courage are astonishing, even though his physical health struggles to keep
up.
Julian is a distinguished Australian, who has changed the way many people think
about duplicitous governments. For this, he is a political refugee subjected to
what the United Nations calls "arbitrary detention".
The UN says he has the right of free passage to freedom, but this is denied. He
has the right to medical treatment without fear of arrest, but this is denied.
He has the right to compensation, but this is denied.
As founder and editor of WikiLeaks, his crime has been to make sense of dark
times. WikiLeaks has an impeccable record of accuracy and authenticity which no
newspaper, no TV channel, no radio station, no BBC, no New York Times, no
Washington Post, no Guardian can equal. Indeed, it shames them.
That explains why he is being punished.
For example:
Last week, the International Court of Justice ruled that the British Government
had no legal powers over the Chagos Islanders, who in the 1960s and 70s, were
expelled in secret from their homeland on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and
sent into exile and poverty. Countless children died, many of them, from
sadness. It was an epic crime few knew about.
For almost 50 years, the British have denied the islanders' the right to return
to their homeland, which they had given to the Americans for a major military
base.
In 2009, the British Foreign Office concocted a "marine reserve"
around the Chagos archipelago.
This touching concern for the environment was exposed as a fraud when WikiLeaks
published a secret cable from the British Government reassuring the Americans
that "the former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible,
to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos
Archipelago were a marine reserve."
The truth of the conspiracy clearly influenced the momentous decision of the
International Court of Justice.
WikiLeaks has also revealed how the United States spies on its allies; how the
CIA can watch you through your I-phone; how Presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton took vast sums of money from Wall Street for secret speeches that
reassured the bankers that if she was elected, she would be their friend.
In 2016, WikiLeaks revealed a direct connection between Clinton and organised
jihadism in the Middle East: terrorists, in other words. One email disclosed
that when Clinton was US Secretary of State, she knew that Saudi Arabia and
Qatar were funding Islamic State, yet she accepted huge donations for her
foundation from both governments.
She then approved the world's biggest ever arms sale to her Saudi benefactors:
arms that are currently being used against the stricken people of Yemen.
That explains why he is being punished.
WikiLeaks has also published more than 800,000 secret files from Russia,
including the Kremlin, telling us more about the machinations of power in that
country than the specious hysterics of the Russiagate pantomime in Washington.
This is real journalism -- journalism of a kind now considered exotic: the
antithesis of Vichy journalism, which speaks for the enemy of the people and
takes its sobriquet from the Vichy government that occupied France on behalf of
the Nazis.
Vichy journalism is censorship by omission, such as the untold scandal of the
collusion between Australian governments and the United States to deny Julian
Assange his rights as an Australian citizen and to silence him.
In 2010, Prime Minister Julia Gillard went as far as ordering the Australian
Federal Police to investigate and hopefully prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks --
until she was informed by the AFP that no crime had been committed.
Last weekend, the Sydney Morning Herald published a lavish supplement promoting
a celebration of "Me Too" at the Sydney Opera House on 10 March.
Among the leading participants is the recently retired Minister of Foreign
Affairs, Julie Bishop.
Bishop has been on show in the local media lately, lauded as a loss to
politics: an "icon", someone called her, to be admired.
The elevation to celebrity feminism of one so politically primitive as Bishop
tells us how much so-called identity politics have subverted an essential,
objective truth: that what matters, above all, is not your gender but the class
you serve.
Before she entered politics, Julie Bishop was a lawyer who served the notorious
asbestos miner James Hardie which fought claims by men and their families dying
horribly with asbestosis.
Lawyer Peter Gordon recalls Bishop "rhetorically asking the court why
workers should be entitled to jump court queues just because they were
dying."
Bishop says she "acted on instructions ... professionally and
ethically".
Perhaps she was merely "acting on instructions" when she flew to
London and Washington last year with her ministerial chief of staff, who had
indicated that the Australian Foreign Minister would raise Julian's case and
hopefully begin the diplomatic process of bringing him home.
Julian's father had written a moving letter to the then Prime Minister Malcolm
Turnbull, asking the government to intervene diplomatically to free his son. He
told Turnbull that he was worried Julian might not leave the embassy alive.
Julie Bishop had every opportunity in the UK and the US to present a diplomatic
solution that would bring Julian home. But this required the courage of one
proud to represent a sovereign, independent state, not a vassal.
Instead, she made no attempt to contradict the British Foreign Secretary,
Jeremy Hunt, when he said outrageously that Julian "faced serious charges".
What charges? There were no charges.
Australia's Foreign Minister abandoned her duty to speak up for an Australian
citizen, prosecuted with nothing, charged with nothing, guilty of nothing.
Will those feminists who fawn over this false icon at the Opera House next
Sunday be reminded of her role in colluding with foreign forces to punish an
Australian journalist, one whose work has revealed that rapacious militarism
has smashed the lives of millions of ordinary women in many countries: in Iraq
alone, the US-led invasion of that country, in which Australia participated,
left 700,000 widows.
So what can be done? An Australian government that was prepared to act in
response to a public campaign to rescue the refugee football player, Hakeem
al-Araibi, from torture and persecution in Bahrain, is capable of bringing
Julian Assange home.
Yet the refusal by the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra to honour the
United Nations' declaration that Julian is the victim of "arbitrary
detention" and has a fundamental right to his freedom is a shameful breach
of the spirit of international law.
Why has the Australian government made no serious attempt to free Assange? Why
did Julie Bishop bow to the wishes of two foreign powers? Why is this democracy
traduced by its servile relationships, and integrated with lawless foreign
power?
The persecution of Julian Assange is the conquest of us all: of our
independence, our self respect, our intellect, our compassion, our politics,
our culture.
So stop scrolling. Organise. Occupy. Insist. Persist. Make a noise. Take direct
action. Be brave and stay brave. Defy the thought police.
War is not peace, freedom is not slavery, ignorance is not strength. If Julian
can stand up to Big Brother, so can you: so can all of us.
John Pilger gave this speech at a rally in Sydney for Julian Assange, organised
by the Socialist Equality Party. 18 Really Big Numbers That Show
That The U.S. Economy Is Starting To Fall Apart Very Rapidly
Michael Snyder is a
nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is
publisher of The Most Important News and
the author of four books including The
Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.
Virtually every piece of hard economic data is telling us that the U.S. economy is slowing down dramatically. Many of the pundits have been warning that we could officially enter recession territory later this year or next year, but these numbers seem to indicate that it could happen a whole lot sooner than that. But the stock market has been surging over the last two months, and at this point stocks are off to their best start to a year since 1987, and as long as stock prices are rising a lot of people are simply not going to pay much attention to the economic alarm bells that are ringing. But everyone should be paying attention, because things are really starting to get bad out there. The following are 18 really big numbers that show that the U.S. economy is starting to fall apart very rapidly…
#1 Farm loan delinquencies just hit the highest level that we have seen in 9 years.
#2 We just learned that U.S. exports declined by 4 billion dollars during the month of December.
#3 J.C. Penney just announced that they will be closing another 24 stores.
#4 Victoria’s Secret has just announced plans to close 53 stores.
#5 On Thursday, Gap announced that it will be closing 230 stores over the next two years.
#6 Payless ShoeSource has declared bankruptcy and is closing all 2,100 stores.
#7 Tesla is also closing all of their physical sales locations and will now only sell vehicles online.
#8 PepsiCo has started laying off workers and has committed to “millions of dollars in severance pay”.
#9 The Baltic Dry Index has dropped to the lowest level in more than two years.
#10 This is the worst slump for core U.S. factory orders in three years.
#11 We just witnessed the largest decline in the Philly Fed Business Index in more than 7 years.
#12 In January, sales of existing homes fell 8.9 percent from a year earlier. That was the third month in a row that we have seen a decline of at least 8 percent. This is an absolutely catastrophic trend for the real estate industry.
#13 U.S. housing starts were down 11.2 percent in December compared to the previous month.
#14 Compared to a year earlier, home sales in southern California were down 17 percent in January.
#15 In December, home sales in Sacramento County fell a whopping 22.5 percentcompared to a year earlier.
#16 Pending home sales in the United States have now fallen on a year over year basis for 13 months in a row.
#17 More than 166 billion dollars in student loan debt is now “seriously delinquent”. That is an all-time record.
#18 More than 7 million Americans are behind on their auto loan payments. That is also a new all-time record, and it is far higher than anything that we witnessed during the last recession.
It appears that “the recovery” has finally come to an end. After seeing all of those numbers, there is no way that anyone can possibly claim that economic conditions are “getting better”.
And even though the official government numbers are highly manipulated, we never even had one “boom year” throughout the entire “recovery”.
The final numbers for 2018 are now in, and last year was the 13th year in a rowwhen U.S. GDP growth was below 3 percent.
The last time we had a “boom year” when economic growth was above 3 percent was all the way back in 2005. That was in the middle of the Bush administration.
We have never seen a bad streak like this before in modern American history. The following comes from CNS News…
But prior to the current 13-year period when real GDP has failed
to grow by 3.0 percent in any year, there has been no stretch (in the years
since 1930) when the United States went as long as five straight years with
real GDP failing to grow by at least 3 percent.
Even
though the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of dollars into the financial
system over the last decade, and even though we added nearly 12 trillion
dollars to the national debt, the best that the authorities have been able to
do is to stabilize the system for a while. Now it is starting to sputter
once again, and many believe that the next crisis will be far worse than the
last one.By contrast, the Great Depression of the 1930s featured some really bad years, but following those bad years the U.S. experienced a tremendous economic boom…
By contrast, after the stock market crash in 1929, the United
States saw four years of negative annual GDP—1930 (-8.5), 1931 (-6.4), 1932
(-12.9) and 1933 (-1.2). But then in the nine full years from 1934 through
1942, real GDP grew by an average of 9.75 percent.
We
should have had some boom years too, but we didn’t, and now things are going to
get bad again.The Democrats are going to blame the Republicans and the Republicans are going to blame the Democrats, but all of that arguing isn’t going to solve anything.
What is coming next has been a central focus of my work for a very long time. The last recession was very painful, but it did not fundamentally alter life in America.
This next crisis will.
The “Everything Bubble” is bursting, the “Perfect Storm” is coming, and all of our lives will never be the same again.
But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t hope. In fact, once things really start getting crazy hope is going to be one of the major themes in my work because people are really going to need it.
There will be great challenges, and life will be very different, but that doesn’t mean that life is over.
America is about to experience the consequences of decades of exceedingly foolish decisions, and the pain will be extreme. But difficult times also offer an opportunity for dramatic change, and that is something that we will need to embrace.
Former U.S. Official: Trump Is An
“Unhinged MADMAN” Who’s “Conducting 4 Wars On The Economy”
A
former United States Budget Director has said that president Donald Trump is an
“unhinged madman” who is now “conducting four wars on the economy.” David
Stockman, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
under President Ronald Reagan, told Yahoo Finance’s The
Ticker that there is just no way Trump will ever make America great
again.Stockman, who just published Peak Trump: The Undrainable Swamp And The Fantasy Of MAGA, argued that Trump is waging a trade war, a border war, a political war against the Fed, and a war on the nation’s solvency.“We have a delusional, unhinged madman in the Oval Office, and anything is possible,” David Stockman said. “He’s conducting four wars on the American economy, and it’s not going to make it great again.”
The trade war, which Stockman accurately describes as a “war on consumers” seems to have already done untold damage. Farmers are suffering and our food supply could have been irreversibly changed. “The trade war is a war on consumers,” Stockman said. “If it goes from 10% — which is already costing $30 billion a year just on Chinese imports — to higher, that is only going to be that much worse.”
As far as the “border war,” Stockman referred to, he believes that the American workforce is shrinking and unskilled and illegal immigrants are necessary workers. Because of shifting demographics, “the domestic labor force is shrinking,” Stockman explained. “We need immigrant labor. We shouldn’t be having a, you know, silly battle over a wall in a border where there isn’t a crisis.”
Trump’s third war, against the Fed, is the only one that’s actually good. The Federal Reserve is the United States’ central bank and has been the cause and “savior” of every major financial crisis since the Great Depression. But Stockman is upset that Trump expressed concerns that interest rates would rise, ending the “easy money” era. Now borrowing money is more expensive and less are tempted to do so. “He’s [Trump] conducting a political war on the Fed that finally was getting enough courage up to normalize interest rates,” Stockman explained. “For crying out loud, 10 years, interest rates have been below the inflation rate, which means zero money market costs. It’s been a boon like never before to speculators. It’s done nothing for Main Street.”
Stockman’s final gripe with Trump is over the national debt. However, it’s important to note that many of those now concerned expressed little to no desire to reign in Obama’s over the top spending. The national debt is of huge concern to many who simply don’t want to see a societal collapse. But with all politicians on all sides unwilling to cut spending to address the problem, it is all but inevitable. “He’s conducting a war on the nation’s solvency with a fiscal policy that is more out to lunch than anything I’ve seen since 1970 when I started on Capitol Hill,” Stockman fumed. The big challenge was that even though the economy has been expanding at a rapid pace, “we’re in the last months… you don’t raise the deficit to $1.2 trillion at the very tippy top of a business cycle and expect anything but bad results,” said Stockman.
Stockman argued that “we’re going to go into the 2020s with a
massive retirement wave from the baby boom, a deficit that is beyond belief in
size, and a national debt that’s out of control. It will be a nonstop crisis
for the entire decade unless we do something big and quick. And I think it’s
too late.”
