Saturday, March 9, 2024

Obama-Biden Administration Was Creeping Fascism


The similarities between the Obama administration and Italian fascism have been pointed out many times. Over a dozen articles about this are on this site alone (1234). It is usually said that fascism is a strain of socialism in which the means of production are beneficially owned by private persons but controlled by the government.

Both the Obama administration and Mussolini used a financial crisis to take over banks and industry. Mussolini openly assumed complete control of them, even though partial private ownership was allowed to remain. The U.S. government bailed out banks and the auto industry in 2008, before Obama was inaugurated. It did not own the banks, but the bailout created public sentiment in favor of government control of the banks and more regulation of all businesses. Obama used this sentiment to its full extent. Elizabeth Warren led the creation of the partisan Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which wielded unprecedented powers and was unaccountable to Congress. By 2016, the corporate world was already subverted and controlled by the Democrat administration. For example, all banks refused to deal with Donald Trump in 2016. The democrat-controlled media misrepresented the cause of this discrimination. Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau effectively allowed the ruling administration to strangle its opposition financially.

Citizens United v. FECdecided by the Supreme Court in January 2010, very likely radicalized Democrats even further into total fascism. The Supreme Court confirmed that private corporations have the First Amendment right to use their money to support political candidates; Democrats concluded that they would have to control corporations to win elections.

Starting in 2010, the Obama administration viciously targeted any effective opposition, including the Tea Party movement, which was obliterated. The IRS was most notorious for targeting Tea Party organizations, but the DOJ (Eric Holder) and the FBI (Robert Mueller) also participated. What do we call regimes that destroy non-violent opposition movements?

A few months before the 2012 elections, Obama’s DOJ sued Gallup for hinting that the government had manipulated unemployment numbers. Additionally, Obama’s DOJ sued Standard & Poor’s for $5 billion for downgrading the federal debt, Treasurys. As a result, nobody challenges the false current inflation numbers, and the credit rating agencies do not dare downgrade the Treasurys below their current AA+/AAA rating.

The Obama administration also waged and eventually won the war on Fox News. It also chilled media criticism of Obama and the administration’s agenda. The DOJ and FBI (Robert Mueller and James Comey) criminally prosecuted and imprisoned filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza and lied about the initiation and predication of that investigation. (D’Souza had produced a film criticizing and mocking Obama.)

Similarly, climate scientists who opposed the administration's climate dogma were defunded and silenced. Then, the Obama administration intimidated businesses into not donating to nonprofits linked to climate dissent, essentially stifling corporate donations to almost all right-of-center think tanks.

Much of this information was not known during the Obama administration, and most of the public missed it. How could this happen? Where was the media—the self-appointed guard dog of democracy? In the beginning, the mainstream media was enamored with Obama. By the time it realized the severity of Obama’s abuses of power, it was no longer able to mount any opposition.

How did this happen? The Obama administration started by hand-picking tech corporations, who then quickly and consequently became what we now call “Big Tech.” Combined with other measures, this effectively gave the administration control over the flow of information, including the news.

As newspapers, journals, and magazines transitioned to the Internet, Google and Microsoft took authors’ copyrighted content without compensation and offered access to it through their search engines. Improvements in Google’s search engine meant exploiting other people’s work more efficiently.

The Obama administration failed to enforce copyright laws on written works, in violation of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution which reads:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries[.]

By 2009, the news media was able to connect its financial difficulties to Google. Rupert Murdoch attempted to work out a compromise with Big Tech, but the administration waged war on him.

Instead of enforcing copyright laws, the Democrats arranged for Big Tech, specifically Google, to pay only selected outlets, such as The New York Times. This resulted in the media becoming entirely dependent on the Big Tech corporations Obama chose. The administration also signed special agreements with these Big Tech corporations and patronized them with thousands of government accounts, effectively eliminating all other competitors.

Democrats also disregarded the second part of the above clause regarding Inventors and Discoveries. The seemingly bipartisan “America Invents Act”, passed under intense lobbying by Big Tech, made most patents unenforceable retroactively. Although there was a legitimate controversy about software patents, the leading cause for this reform was that the tech companies picked by the Obama administration were young and entirely based on inventions made by others. For example, Facebook was founded in 2004, after inventions that led to the creation of the interactive web had already been made. So, for Big Tech to not pay royalties or give credit to the original inventors, the government re-distributed wealth from the pioneers of the Internet to the multi-billion dollar corporations of its choice.

Obamanet was another major strike against freedom, forcing all publishers and authors to go through Google and other internet gatekeepers.

Thus, the opposition press was muzzled and driven almost to extinction without the public noticing. The Big Tech winners, cherry-picked by the Obama administration, became the administration’s most enthusiastic supporters. In addition to its monopoly of information, Big Tech also provided Democrats troves of private data and the capacity for mass surveillance and economic marginalization of dissenters. By 2013, Twitter was suspending accounts criticizing Obamacare.

Trump’s victory in 2016 came as a shock for Democrats who thought they had a firm grip on both the corporations and the media. It was as if Mussolini decided to allow sham elections and suddenly lost them. While Obama expected to quit after his two terms, the corporations who had developed this symbiotic relationship with the ruling Democrat party needed it to remain in power. Together with young and hungry Democrat operatives, they launched the resistance.

In 2016, the Democrat government apparatus, which had destroyed the Tea Party, jailed Dinesh D’Souza, hounded dissenting voices from Fox News to the Associated Press (some articles), and had now set its sights on Donald Trump. In hindsight, this was predictable.

In 2021, Biden confirmed what many had suspected — Democrats wanted the Republican party as a controlled opposition. In January 2021, Biden was telling the public what the Republican party should be. By March 2021, Biden was already saying that he is not sure whether there will be a Republican party in 2024.

Obamaism and Italian fascism have more in common than ideological similarities. Before WWI, Mussolini was a non-fascist socialist; socialists were anti-war. What turned Mussolini against anti-war socialism was Marx’s observation that wars are followed by revolutions. If wars cause revolutions, let’s join the war! Notice how easy this switch was?



On the Fringe, Red Pill News, and more- March 9

 




Chinese Firm Looks to Acquire Vancouver Lithium Company Shares Despite Ottawa’s Toughening Stance

 


Another Chinese firm is seeking to acquire shares of a Vancouver-based lithium company, a move that defies Ottawa’s efforts to safeguard the sensitive critical mineral sector from China’s involvement.

In 2022, Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne directed three Chinese companies to divest from Canadian lithium firms, aiming to restrict foreign government investments in the critical minerals supply chain, saying that he would only allow Chinese state-owned firms to invest in Canadian critical minerals companies under exceptional circumstances.
The federal government reiterated this stance in an August 2023 statement, clarifying the application of the Investment Canada Act for foreign state-owned enterprises seeking to invest in Canada’s critical minerals sector.

Despite Ottawa’s efforts to tighten regulations, Chinese companies persist in pursuing opportunities in the sector. The most recent example is a US$70 million investment by China-based Ganfeng Lithium in Vancouver-based Lithium Argentina.

On March 5, Lithium Argentina revealed an agreement with Ganfeng for the acquisition of a 15 percent stake in its indirectly wholly-owned subsidiary, Proyecto Pastos Grandes. This subsidiary manages an advanced-stage lithium brine project, Pastos Grandes, in the northwest city of Salta, Argentina.
Ganfeng has the right to acquire an additional 50 percent of the Argentine lithium project for US$330 million in case of a change in control of Lithium Argentina, the release said.
This is the second time in recent years that a Chinese company has tried to take control of Pastos Grandes. In 2021, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL), a major electric car battery manufacturer, tried to buy Canada’s Millennial Lithium Corp., which owned Pastos Grandes at that time.
However, Lithium Americas, the predecessor to Lithium Argentina, outbid CATL’s offer for Millennial Lithium. Lithium Argentina said in the March 5 release that it later acquired the Pastos Grandes project through its acquisition of Millennial in early 2022.
Lithium Argentina stated that its agreement with Ganfeng is “subject to certain conditions,” including regulatory approvals from the People’s Republic of China and settlement of relevant transaction agreements.

Chinese Investments

China currently dominates the global critical minerals supply chain, holding an 80 percent market share in some cases. Major players from the country have continued to make investments in Canada over the past few years.
US House Oversight Committee’s Hearing on Securing the Critical Mineral Supply Chain
https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/house-oversight-committees-hearing-on-securing-the-critical-mineral-supply-chain-5538907?ea_src=author_manual&ea_med=related_videos

In another recent investment in the Canadian critical mineral sector, China-based Zijin Mining Group entered a subscription agreement with Vancouver’s Solaris Resources Inc.

On Jan. 11, Solaris disclosed the $130 million deal, involving Zijin’s private placement of Solaris common shares at $4.55 per share by a Zijin affiliate. A private placement is the sale of stock shares or bonds to selected investors and institutions rather than on the open market.
In December, Conservative MPs also expressed concerns about another Chinese investment. Tory innovation critic MP Rick Perkins and MP Shuvaloy Majumdar called for a national security review of Shenghe Resources, a partially state-owned Chinese rare-earth miner, acquiring substantial shares in Vital Metals.
Vital Metals, headquartered in Sydney, Australia, says on its website that it is Canada’s first rare earths mining company. It began mining at the Nechalacho rare earth mine in the Northwest Territories in 2021 and has another project at Wigu Hill, Tanzania.
In April 2022, China-based company Sichuan Yahua Industrial Group Co. Ltd. announced its plan to acquire 13.2 percent of Ultra Lithium Inc., a Vancouver-based lithium and gold exploration firm.
Both lithium and rare earths are among the 31 minerals classified by the Canadian government as “critical” for national security, innovation and economic development, and various “green energy” applications.




It Is Time for Europe to Stop the Fearmongering About a Second Trump Presidency

Europe was better off under Trump's presidency than it is today, and a second Trump term likely will reverse the global instability caused by the weakness and incompetence of the Biden administration.


Griping by the European elite about a second Trump presidency has reached a fever pitch that is so bad that it borders on attempts to influence the 2024 presidential election.

The UK’s Economist magazine is in full panic mode about the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House, calling Trump “the biggest danger to the world in 2024” and lamenting that Democrats do not have a “plan B” to stop Trump.

London’s Guardian newspaper has called Trump “a clear and present danger to the UK’s vital interests in a way no previous US president has ever been.”

France’s LeMonde newspaper has called Trump’s comeback “as embarrassing as it is worrying for American democracy.”

Other Europeans have called for “Trump-proofing” European foreign policy before Mr. Trump possibly takes office next January.

European elitists despised Donald Trump as president because he was a populist who bucked conventional wisdom and challenged Europe. He pressured European states for fair trade with the U.S. and to meet their NATO treaty obligations on defense spending. He justifiably ridiculed European states—especially Germany—for becoming dependent on Russian energy and withdrew from the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline. European states were irate with Trump for withdrawing from bad agreements and treaties, such as the deeply flawed 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the JCPOA) and the Paris Climate Accord.

European leaders have always hated brash American presidents who act unilaterally without the consent of Europe and the United Nations. This was especially true concerning Donald Trump, whose strong leadership and America First foreign policies drove them crazy.

Europe was therefore greatly relieved when Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election because he shared their liberal ideologies and establishment views on foreign policy. Biden would work through the UN and defer to Europe. There would be no foreign policy surprises. Europe knew it could control Biden.

The European elite was initially ecstatic with the Biden presidency. Biden immediately rejoined the Paris Climate Accord and designated climate change as the primary threat to U.S. national security. The Biden Administration aggressively promoted the far-left “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology and forced it on the U.S. military. Biden initiated talks to revive the JCPOA. European leaders were delighted by Biden’s sophomoric declarations in 2021 that “America is back” under his presidency. French President Macron happily welcomed Biden to the “European Club.”

But since the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021—ordered by Biden over the objections of top U.S. military officials and coalition leaders—European elites have been in denial about the Biden Administration’s extreme foreign policy incompetence.

They said nothing about how the Afghanistan withdrawal seriously undermined America’s credibility as a strong and reliable great power.

Europe didn’t object to Biden’s mishandling of U.S. relations with Russia and NATO membership for Ukraine, which led Russian President Putin to launch the largest attack on a European nation since World War II. They supported Biden’s position of restricting weapons sent to Ukraine before and during the early months of the war—arms that probably would have enabled the Ukrainian army to expel Russia from its country before the war became a stalemate in late 2022.

European elites don’t want to talk about how a sharp decline in American deterrence due to President Biden’s foreign policy incompetence emboldened China, North Korea, Iran, and Iran’s proxies to stage attacks and provocations that they would not have attempted if America had a strong and decisive Commander-in-Chief.

You will never read an article in The Economist suggesting that the deadly October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack against Israel and the recent surge in missile and drone attacks against Red Sea shipping by Yemen’s Houthi rebels were likely caused by a sharp drop in American deterrence during the Biden presidency. You will never see a LeMonde editorial posit that Putin might not have invaded Ukraine if President Biden had agreed to take NATO membership for Ukraine off the table for 25 years.

Like their American counterparts, the horror that European elites are expressing over the prospect of a second Trump presidency puts politics and ideology ahead of their national interests. America and Europe were far safer and more prosperous under the Trump presidency. Global stability was significantly better. But none of this matters for U.S. and European liberal elites or the Western mainstream media. They refuse to admit that Trump’s foreign policies worked and that Biden’s have been dangerous failures.

Two European elitists recently told the truth about the Trump and Biden foreign policy records: former UK Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Johnson said in February that a return of Trump to the White House “could be a big win for the world” and that there is “little doubt that the world felt safer and calmer and more stable” when Trump was in office.

Truss told a UK newspaper in February, “The United States under Biden has projected weakness.”

Johnson and Truss were exactly right. Europe was far better off under the Trump presidency than it is today, and a second Trump term likely will reverse the global instability caused by the weakness and incompetence of the Biden administration. It is time for European elitists to admit this and prepare for a possible second Trump term rather than trying to prevent it with fanatical criticism of Mr. Trump and predictions of doom if Trump wins the 2024 presidential election.

Europe’s elites should also admit that the biggest danger to the world in 2024 is not the election of Donald Trump but the continuation of the Biden presidency.



A fascist, totalitarian future awaits us – my testimony to Congress

 A fascist, totalitarian future awaits us – my testimony to Congress (msn.com)



here are now 700 million CCTV cameras in Communist China. Those electronic eyes are attached to the most complete state apparatus of surveillance yet imagined. It has the ability not only to recognise faces at a distance, but gait itself when facial features are hidden or obscured. 

Such capability can, and soon will, be augmented to the point where the movements of eyes themselves, monitored by intelligent cameras, will be sufficient to identify any active party. 

The demented, naïve engineers who so enthusiastically helped build this system call it “SkyNet”, after the rogue and all-seeing technology that take such a dreadful wrong turn in the science fiction Terminator series, where artificially-intelligent robot minds hell-bent on protecting themselves end up destroying humanity as a consequence. The name also references a well-known Chinese phrase describing the reach of the divine itself – “the net of heaven is vast, yet it misses nothing” – which aptly describes the capabilities of the new state apparatus. 

This system is integrated with the so-called Chinese Social Credit System which awards its involuntary participants with a score indicating their compliance with the dictates of the Party, allowing for full control over access to everything they possess electronically – most ominously their savings and access to travel, including, as more electronic gates appear, walking. 

If you are Chinese, or even just a visitor, if your Social Credit Score falls beyond an arbitrary minimum your access to the world can be reduced to zero. This allows you to be shut out of all activities that can be virtualised: driving, shopping, working, eating, finding shelter; even fraternising with friends and family (as merely being in the presence of someone with a low Social Credit Score means that your own score can be lowered). 

This has opened up the opportunity for the government to extract slave-like labour from its citizens. The donation of free work to the state constitutes one means whereby erring men and women citizens can increase their score and remain part of society. This is precisely the payment system most desired by the most tyrannical: not the “work for me and benefit thereby” that constitutes the contractual arrangement undertaken by free citizens, but the “work for me and I will lift the deprivation I imposed”  that has always been the leit-motif of the slaver.

A dystopian world of our own creation

Why is any of this relevant to people in the West?

Because the technology that the Chinese Communist Party employs is an extension of Western technology. 

Because we already recently fell prey to the terrible temptation of lockdowns employed by that state in the face of a hypothetical crisis. 

Because we are walking, step by step, in the same direction –  partly because of the hypothetical ‘convenience’ of universal and automatic recognition of identity, partly because any problem whatsoever that now confronts us can easily be used to justify the increasing reach of the security and nanny state.

It is said that stone-age people, first confronted with cameras and their resultant photographs by modern anthropologists, objected to having their images captured, as they feared the captivity of their souls. It turns out that such fear was prescient: the images that we leave behind while navigating virtual space are such close duplicates of our actual selves that the capture of our essence is, at this point, all but guaranteed. 

We all now have our doppelgangers. We all live so much in the virtual world, thanks to our purchasing habits and modes of electronically-mediated communication, that our very selves have become reducible to a frightening degree as mere ‘data’, the modern equivalent of our footprint, with that same data making up an image of our identity. This identity can be – and is increasingly – bought and sold by invisible corporate brokers that use it to sell us what we so desperately and carelessly and conveniently want, but that can also be used to track, monitor and punish everything we do and say. 

Behavioral scientists facilitate this process with their reprehensible nudging: the practice of pushing people in a given ideologically-determined direction by manipulating invisible incentives behind the scenes. Corporations track purchasing decisions, developing algorithms that with increasing accuracy track our patterns of attention and action, allowing for the prediction of what might next be most enticing, doing so not only to offer us what we want, but to determine and shape what we need

Governments can, and are, colluding with these corporate agents to develop a picture not only of our actions but of our thought and words so that deviation from the desired end can be mapped, rewarded, and punished. The development of such a digital identity and currency is nothing more than the likely end consequence of such inclinations – and the combination of both will facilitate the development of a surveillance state the scope of which optimistic pessimists of totalitarianism such as George Orwell could scarcely imagine.

The ultimate fascist collusion

The rapidly emerging new AI systems do nothing but increase this danger, providing for the possibility of a super-surveillance whose scope exceeds anything that mere unaugmented humans could imagine. They could ensure that our attitudes, conduct and personalities can be manipulated to the degree that we will not even be able to see a reality outside that which has been constructed by the superstate: the ultimate fascist collusion between gigantic self-interested corporations and paranoid security-obsessed anti-human governments.

We are already selling our souls to the superstate for the purposes of immediate gratification and convenience, while being enticed to do so by fear-mongering ideologues, guaranteeing to us the security which we so desperately and increasingly crave. 

This is by no means a partisan matter. In my country, Canada, the most egregious over-reach of the superstate occurred in the aftermath of a working-class protest against – ironically – state over-reach during the Covid lockdowns, when our increasingly delusional and totalitarian federal government determined that it was appropriate to suspend the access of protestors and their supporters, however minor, to their own assets, in collusion with Canada’s big banks. 

Such an event did, and should, send a chill down the spines of anyone concerned with the maintenance of personal security, privacy and autonomy, signalling the increasingly ability and willingness of state and corporate agents to act in sync with regard to the data they now possess and means of control at their fingertips, and to punish their customers and citizens for their political views, however widespread those views might be. What views are deemed unacceptable will be precisely determined as those that oppose the interests of whomever is currently wielding the baton of power, left or right, corporate or governmental. 

It was recently determined in Canada that such a move was literally unconstitutional. But that has not stopped the over-reach of the state. New legislation proposed by the same government mandates the generation of a soon-to-be giant bureaucracy to monitor and punish in an extra-judicial manner so-called “crimes of hate”, soon defined as any speech or act that the bureaucrats and corporations in charge of the definition themselves object to. 

The same legislation now even defines what might be well regarded as pre-crime: if a court agent now judges that a Canadian citizen might perpetrate a so-called hate crime in the future, that person can be fitted with an electronic surveillance device, restricted in his or her ability to move or communicate, all to monitor their compliance with the dictates of the state. 

With increasing ability to monitor not only the actual attention patterns and behaviors of its citizens, but to predict those that are most likely, the persecution of such potential crime becomes ever more likely. “If you have nothing to hide, you will have nothing to fear,” will be the slogan commandeered by those most likely to turn to surveillance to protect and to control. 

What was the famous Soviet totalitarian joke, attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, head of the secret police?  “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Those words were true enough in the time of Joseph Stalin’s terror – and the police were secret enough then, as well. But that’s nothing compared to what we can and likely will produce now: a police so secret that we will not even be able to detect their comprehensive and subtle activity, monitoring crime so pervasive that everyone under the dictates of the system will have something to hide and much to fear. 

You can watch The Telegraph’s most recent interview with Jordan Peterson via this link.