The Hur report said the same thing Jon Stewart said. What is different?
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2024 US Presidential Election
EastCoastGambit
Well-known member
The more I think about this it really doesn't matter who the POTUS will be. Both paths lead to the same end, the further demise and uncoupling of the US. One might be a quick path and another slower but they both end in the same place. Furthermore, whatever the outcome around 20% of the US population will be pissed off and not accept it.
‘Cash in Envelopes’: How the US and UN Are Funding the Border Crisis
The Biden administration gave the UN migration agency nearly $1.3 billion in 2023, which it uses to help migrants on their journey to enter the US illegally.
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February 13, 2024
Updated:
February 14, 2024
The United States is bankrolling its own “invasion” by funding the United Nations and its partners, which, in turn, give hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and aid to migrants who eventually cross the U.S. southern border illegally.
While the U.N. has aided migrants for decades, the scope of its operation has dramatically expanded as the number of illegal immigrants—from at least 160 countries—into the United States has surged.
That expansion has been fueled by more than $1 billion in funding from the U.S. government to the U.N. and other agencies assisting migrants, according to a government spending database.
“We’re actually funding our own border crisis,” Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a “pro-immigrant, low-immigration” think tank, told The Epoch Times.
“And it’s provided by, ultimately, the United States taxpayer.”
Until President Joe Biden took office, the United States had obligated about a half-billion dollars per year to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the U.N.’s migration arm.
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But that funding has skyrocketed under the Biden administration to nearly $1.3 billion in 2023—more than double what it had been under the Trump administration, according to USASpending.gov.The government spending database shows that most of the money comes from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Two of the largest government giveaways were voluntary contributions to the U.N.’s IOM from the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration totaling $547 million over two years ending in 2023.
The bureau’s objective was “to fund processing individuals requesting refugee status and resettlement in the United States and arrange their movement.”
Illegal immigrants cross the Rio Grande from Mexico into Eagle Pass, Texas, on Sept. 30, 2023. (John Moore/Getty Images)
‘Aiding and Abetting’
The U.N. is pouring a staggering amount of money—partially stemming from U.S. taxpayers—into the illegal immigration crisis.The U.N.-orchestrated Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan update for 2024 calls for distributing $1.6 billion in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries with the help of 248 partner agencies, which are also receiving U.S. grants.
Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, in Costa Mesa, Calif., on May 24, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
The plan allocated $372 million in “cash and vouchers” and “multipurpose cash assistance” during 2024 for 624,300 migrants—the population of Detroit—in Central and South America who are headed for the U.S. border.
Mr. Bensman, who has been at the forefront of investigating the causes of the migrant surge, believes that the U.N. is “aiding and abetting mass migration.”
People who might not have taken the risk to travel to the U.S. border because they were worried about food or safety now have help, he said.
That help comes in the form of prepaid debit cards, food, water, shelter, medical care, and transportation, according to the U.N.
Migrants can also directly receive cash, what the U.N. emergency manual calls “cash in envelopes.”
And they know that the U.S. border is wide open.
The U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security shows 6.2 million encounters at the southern border, in addition to 1.7 million known gotaways since President Biden took office.
“They say, ‘Well, you know, we’re coming now because Biden’s letting us in,’” Mr. Bensman said.
As illegal immigration ramped up in 2021, he went to investigate what was happening firsthand.
A Haitian migrant shows his cash card provided by the United Nations. He said his 3,500 peso payment (about $175 US) didn’t deposit this month, in Tapachula, Mexico, on Jan. 14, 2022. (Todd Bensman/Center for Immigration Studies)
What he found was IOM and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) helping migrants make the dangerous trek from South and Central America.
Workers at an IOM migrant camp in Reynosa, Mexico, in 2021 told him that families of four were receiving about $800 per month on a debit card. His viral post on X, formerly known as Twitter, noted long lines of migrants waiting to receive the cards.
An IOM Mexico spokesperson quibbled over terminology and the amount of aid but confirmed that the migrants were getting monetary assistance, according to an Agence France-Presse news agency “fact check.”
The spokesman said the maximum amount for a family is about $395 on an “e-wallet,” noting that the cards could not be exchanged for cash.
He said workers at the migrant station giving them out were from a nonprofit organization that works with the IOM, not the IOM itself.
‘A Force for Good’
Documents show that IOM facilitates global migration and has strong ties to the Biden administration.IOM Director General Amy Pope served as President Biden’s senior adviser on migration. She also served as deputy Homeland Security adviser to President Barack Obama.
(L–R) Amy Pope, deputy Homeland Security advisor, Vice President Joe Biden, President Barack Obama, and other officials meet in the Oval Office on May 21, 2016. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
In January, the IOM announced its first “annual appeal,” seeking a massive $7.9 billion to tackle the “migrant crisis” and “[realize] migration’s promise as a force for good throughout the world.”
“The evidence is overwhelming that migration, when well-managed, is a major contributor to global prosperity and progress,” Ms. Pope said in her appeal for money to assist migration.
The U.N. agency stated that it needs money for humanitarian reasons to “save lives” and provide “regular pathways for migration.”
It also wants to use the money to deal with the “displacement” of people because of the “impacts of climate change.”
U.N. documents linked to Ms. Pope’s announcement show that in 2024, the U.N. wants to spend $70 million in Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico—all countries on the most common migration route to the United States.
Documents state that in 2023 a record 500,000 migrants had traveled through the dense jungle known as the Darien Gap from Colombia into Panama.
Michael Yon, a war correspondent appearing on Epoch TV’s American Thought Leaders in 2021, told The Epoch Times’ Jan Jekielek that he had taken other journalists and congressmen to the Darien Gap to see the mass migration firsthand.
He estimated that some 10 percent of migrants traveling through the Darien Gap are murdered or die because of the harsh environment, but even that’s not enough of a deterrent to stop the flow.
Migrants from around the world are flying into South and Central America to start their journey because countries such as Suriname and Ecuador don’t require a visa to enter, Mr. Yon said.
Many then travel by foot through the Darien Gap, through Central America, and into Mexico, where they wait for the Mexican government to clear them to travel north, where they eventually cross illegally into the United States.
Migrants walk through the jungle near Bajo Chiquito village, the first border control of the Darien Province in Panama, on Sept. 22, 2023. The journey through the Darien Gap usually takes five or six days, at the mercy of all kinds of bad weather. (Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images)
After successfully entering the United States, they text their friends, which encourages more migration, he said. Most don’t communicate how difficult or dangerous the journey is.
“As long as those incentives are there to come to the United States, they’re going to come,” said Mr. Yon, who has interviewed a large number of migrants.
He said most come to the United States for economic reasons.
“Almost all of them have no case for asylum.” Mr. Yon said.
To stop illegal immigration, countries need to have a border barrier, such as a wall, enforcement, and political will, he said.
Ian Mehlman is a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an immigration reform nonprofit group that has been studying U.S. immigration since 1979.
Like Mr. Bensman, he believes that the U.N. is instrumental in the surge at U.S. borders.
“This is a way for the U.N. to get money from the donor countries to carry out their programs,” Mr. Mehlman told The Epoch Times.
Researchers at FAIR noted in a recent article that “cash-based intervention” programs at the U.N. increased by 77 percent between 2019 and 2020, although some of that was attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mr. Mehlman said migration is big business under the Biden administration.
“There’s no question that we saw a vast increase in migration to the United States, starting from the day that Joe Biden took office,” he said.
President Biden rescinded former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which would-be asylum seekers stayed in Mexico while awaiting adjudication on their immigration court case. The vast majority of illegal immigrants don’t qualify for asylum because they’re entering the United States for economic reasons and not fleeing political persecution.
Migrants walk toward Canaan Membrillo village, in the Darien Province in Panama, on Oct. 13, 2022. (Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images)
President Biden also halted border wall construction on his first day, halted deportations for 100 days, and rescinded the travel ban on terror-prone countries.
“People respond to the signals that are being sent,” Mr. Mehlman said.
“If they believe that there is a good chance that they’re going to be able to get to the United States and be allowed to remain here, then they will go through all the things that they have to go through.”
“Failing state” economies benefit from illegal immigrants working in the United States or other wealthy Western countries and sending money back to their families.
Smuggling people across multiple countries is coordinated, Mr. Mehlman said.
“It’s happening because people are allowing it to happen,” he said. “It is being facilitated every step along the way.”
The U.N. appears to have taken the position that people should be able to move to any country that they desire, which is problematic, not only to countries such as the United States but also to the countries migrants are fleeing, according to Mr. Mehlman.
“If the incentive is to leave rather than to reform and change things where you are, then those failed societies continue,” he said.
Migration Nation
Some on the left favor immigration as a way for the United States to bolster declining birth rates with noncitizens and provide cheap labor.
“We need immigrants in this country,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in January during a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on immigration.
He said vegetables “would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by immigrants, illegal immigrants.”
“The fact is the birth rate in this country is way below replacement level,” Mr. Nadler said.
But some conservative pundits say mass immigration is part of the Great Replacement Theory, which speculates that immigrants are replacing citizens of countries with mainly white European ancestry.
Others believe that Democrats want open borders because if illegal immigrants become citizens, they would likely vote to keep Democrats in power for generations.
Members of CHIRLA Action Fund, an immigrant advocacy organization, gather near the entrance to the Ronald Reagan Library prior to a GOP presidential debate in Simi Valley, Calif., on Sept. 27, 2023. (Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images)
But Mr. Bensman has a more straightforward explanation for what’s fueling the border crisis: a cash bonanza.
Migrant advocates from the left are now becoming political appointees, leading him to believe that the migrant crisis is “engineered.”
In Mr. Bensman’s 2023 book “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History,” he contended that mass migration has become a cottage industry, with many migrant-centered NGOs getting fat off taxpayer dollars.
He pointed to one group called HIAS, a migration assistance group initially founded to help Jews fleeing Eastern Europe. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas once served on the group’s board.
It’s one of several groups that has received millions of dollars in federal grants, according to Mr. Bensman.
HIAS has received most of the $11 million from two recent grants awarded by the U.S. government and earmarked for Latin American migrants, according to USASpending.gov.
The group, working in concert with the U.N., has pledged $17 million to help immigrants in 2024, according to Refugee and Migrant Response Plan documents.
“Their organizations are the ones that are just getting filthy rich, building their endowment, and paying their executives and just getting federal contracts,” Mr. Bensman said.
Defunding the UN
With the border crisis becoming the No. 1 issue in the 2024 presidential race, Republicans on Capitol Hill have already blocked a bipartisan border bill that many see as doing more harm than good in stopping illegal immigration.They argue that President Biden already has the power to stop the border crisis that he created.
With attention squarely on the border, House Republicans used the opportunity to reintroduce a bill that would eliminate U.N. migrant funding.
H.R. 6166, the Tax Dollars for the U.N.’s Immigration Invasion Act, would prohibit contributions to the IOM and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, as well as the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
The bill also requires the Government Accountability Office to conduct an audit of all federal funding previously appropriated to U.N. agencies that have financed the migrant crisis to force repayment of that funding to the U.S. Treasury.
U.N. agencies are “financing the ongoing U.S. border crisis,” Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) said in a Jan. 26 statement.
“The United Nations is using our own tax dollars against us, and U.S. policymakers can no longer stand by while elites in the U.N. and Davos actively finance an invasion of our sovereign territory.
“It’s time to say enough and cut off funding to these corrupt globalist institutions until respect for our territorial integrity and appreciation for our generosity is restored.”
The IOM didn’t respond to an email seeking comment from The Epoch Times.
‘Cash in Envelopes’: How the US and UN Are Funding the Border Crisis
The Biden administration gave the UN migration agency nearly $1.3 billion in 2023, which it uses to help migrants on their journey to enter the US illegally.
www.theepochtimes.com
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One is a comedian who has a long history of pointing out objective truths as uncomfortable as they may be. The other was supposed to be an impersonal detailed accounting of facts without any personal bias or opinions contained therein.
Both were done for performance reasons.
and one more morsel for today...so the light weights can say they don't read it anyway...
Thursday, Feb 15, 2024 - 01:20 PM
Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the federal budget, the United States still spends more on foreign aid than any other nation.
The latest foreign aid spending bill includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
Since World War II, the U.S. has given more foreign aid to Israel than any other country ($318 billion), with the bulk of those funds designated for Israel’s military efforts.
Even so, more than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance.
As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”
Whether or not that some of that foreign aid is used for legitimate purposes, the global welfare system itself is riddled with corruption and waste. As Adam Andrzejewski rightly asks, “Do taxpayers instinctively know that they are funding choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, aid for poultry farmers Tanzania, and sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia?”
The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter.
We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.
This financial tyranny persists whether it’s a Democrat or Republican at the helm.
At a time when the government is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the national debt continues to grow, our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached.
What is going on?
The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has been overtaken by a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.
This powerful international cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations—let’s call it the Global Deep State—is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.
Clearly, we have entered into a new world order: fascism on a global scale.
It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.
Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and in recent years, the pharmaceutical-health sector.
All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.
Our ability to access, engage and move about in the world has now become dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against whatever the powers-that-be deem to be the latest Disease X versus those who have not.
This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.
“It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”
Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.
Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:
Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).
Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.
The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.
Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.
It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.
Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.
There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.
For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Intercept sums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”
This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.
The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.
Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.
Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
Are you starting to get the picture now?
The government and its global partners have struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.
On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, our freedoms are being eroded while the Global Deep State becomes more entrenched.
We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward slope now, and things are moving fast.
Given the dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.
The Global Deep State: A Fascist World Order Funded By The American Taxpayer
Thursday, Feb 15, 2024 - 01:20 PM
Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
The debate over U.S. foreign aid is a distraction.
That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the federal budget, the United States still spends more on foreign aid than any other nation.
The latest foreign aid spending bill includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
Since World War II, the U.S. has given more foreign aid to Israel than any other country ($318 billion), with the bulk of those funds designated for Israel’s military efforts.
Even so, more than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance.
As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”
Whether or not that some of that foreign aid is used for legitimate purposes, the global welfare system itself is riddled with corruption and waste. As Adam Andrzejewski rightly asks, “Do taxpayers instinctively know that they are funding choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, aid for poultry farmers Tanzania, and sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia?”
The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter.
We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.
This financial tyranny persists whether it’s a Democrat or Republican at the helm.
At a time when the government is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the national debt continues to grow, our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached.
What is going on?
The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has been overtaken by a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.
This powerful international cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations—let’s call it the Global Deep State—is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.
Clearly, we have entered into a new world order: fascism on a global scale.
It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.
Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and in recent years, the pharmaceutical-health sector.
All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.
Global Disease
The COVID-19 pandemic propelled us into a whole new global frontier in which those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.Our ability to access, engage and move about in the world has now become dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against whatever the powers-that-be deem to be the latest Disease X versus those who have not.
This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.
“It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”
Global Surveillance
Spearheaded by the National Security Agency, which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.
Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:
Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).
Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.
Global War Profiteering
War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).
Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.
The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.
Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.
It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.
Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.
Global Policing
Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.
For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Intercept sums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”
This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.
The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.
Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.
Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
Are you starting to get the picture now?
The government and its global partners have struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.
On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, our freedoms are being eroded while the Global Deep State becomes more entrenched.
We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward slope now, and things are moving fast.
Given the dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.
Hiddenjems
Well-known member
I thought everyone saw this movie with Ronald Reagan. Do lots of shady stuff, then off into dementia land with him, and nobody else in trouble.
It was the biggest bestest most perfectest phone call
Just because he stole his slogan doesn't mean that he is going to be the same guy...
Let me guess... Deep State covering for Biden?
thehill.com
FBI informant at heart of GOP’s Biden bribery allegations indicted over false statements
The confidential source at the center of allegations being promoted by House Republicans that President Biden accepted a bribe has been arrested and charged with making false statements to the FBI.…
thehill.com
Hoax! Witch hunt! Fake news!
RickLafleur
Well-known member
‘Cash in Envelopes’: How the US and UN Are Funding the Border Crisis
The Biden administration gave the UN migration agency nearly $1.3 billion in 2023, which it uses to help migrants on their journey to enter the US illegally.
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February 13, 2024
Updated:
February 14, 2024
The United States is bankrolling its own “invasion” by funding the United Nations and its partners, which, in turn, give hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and aid to migrants who eventually cross the U.S. southern border illegally.
While the U.N. has aided migrants for decades, the scope of its operation has dramatically expanded as the number of illegal immigrants—from at least 160 countries—into the United States has surged.
That expansion has been fueled by more than $1 billion in funding from the U.S. government to the U.N. and other agencies assisting migrants, according to a government spending database.
“We’re actually funding our own border crisis,” Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a “pro-immigrant, low-immigration” think tank, told The Epoch Times.
“And it’s provided by, ultimately, the United States taxpayer.”
Until President Joe Biden took office, the United States had obligated about a half-billion dollars per year to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the U.N.’s migration arm.
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But that funding has skyrocketed under the Biden administration to nearly $1.3 billion in 2023—more than double what it had been under the Trump administration, according to USASpending.gov.
The government spending database shows that most of the money comes from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Two of the largest government giveaways were voluntary contributions to the U.N.’s IOM from the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration totaling $547 million over two years ending in 2023.
The bureau’s objective was “to fund processing individuals requesting refugee status and resettlement in the United States and arrange their movement.”
Illegal immigrants cross the Rio Grande from Mexico into Eagle Pass, Texas, on Sept. 30, 2023. (John Moore/Getty Images)
‘Aiding and Abetting’
The U.N. is pouring a staggering amount of money—partially stemming from U.S. taxpayers—into the illegal immigration crisis.
The U.N.-orchestrated Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan update for 2024 calls for distributing $1.6 billion in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries with the help of 248 partner agencies, which are also receiving U.S. grants.
Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, in Costa Mesa, Calif., on May 24, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
The plan allocated $372 million in “cash and vouchers” and “multipurpose cash assistance” during 2024 for 624,300 migrants—the population of Detroit—in Central and South America who are headed for the U.S. border.
Mr. Bensman, who has been at the forefront of investigating the causes of the migrant surge, believes that the U.N. is “aiding and abetting mass migration.”
People who might not have taken the risk to travel to the U.S. border because they were worried about food or safety now have help, he said.
That help comes in the form of prepaid debit cards, food, water, shelter, medical care, and transportation, according to the U.N.
Migrants can also directly receive cash, what the U.N. emergency manual calls “cash in envelopes.”
And they know that the U.S. border is wide open.
The U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security shows 6.2 million encounters at the southern border, in addition to 1.7 million known gotaways since President Biden took office.
“They say, ‘Well, you know, we’re coming now because Biden’s letting us in,’” Mr. Bensman said.
As illegal immigration ramped up in 2021, he went to investigate what was happening firsthand.
A Haitian migrant shows his cash card provided by the United Nations. He said his 3,500 peso payment (about $175 US) didn’t deposit this month, in Tapachula, Mexico, on Jan. 14, 2022. (Todd Bensman/Center for Immigration Studies)
What he found was IOM and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) helping migrants make the dangerous trek from South and Central America.
Workers at an IOM migrant camp in Reynosa, Mexico, in 2021 told him that families of four were receiving about $800 per month on a debit card. His viral post on X, formerly known as Twitter, noted long lines of migrants waiting to receive the cards.
An IOM Mexico spokesperson quibbled over terminology and the amount of aid but confirmed that the migrants were getting monetary assistance, according to an Agence France-Presse news agency “fact check.”
The spokesman said the maximum amount for a family is about $395 on an “e-wallet,” noting that the cards could not be exchanged for cash.
He said workers at the migrant station giving them out were from a nonprofit organization that works with the IOM, not the IOM itself.
‘A Force for Good’
Documents show that IOM facilitates global migration and has strong ties to the Biden administration.
IOM Director General Amy Pope served as President Biden’s senior adviser on migration. She also served as deputy Homeland Security adviser to President Barack Obama.
(L–R) Amy Pope, deputy Homeland Security advisor, Vice President Joe Biden, President Barack Obama, and other officials meet in the Oval Office on May 21, 2016. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
In January, the IOM announced its first “annual appeal,” seeking a massive $7.9 billion to tackle the “migrant crisis” and “[realize] migration’s promise as a force for good throughout the world.”
“The evidence is overwhelming that migration, when well-managed, is a major contributor to global prosperity and progress,” Ms. Pope said in her appeal for money to assist migration.
The U.N. agency stated that it needs money for humanitarian reasons to “save lives” and provide “regular pathways for migration.”
It also wants to use the money to deal with the “displacement” of people because of the “impacts of climate change.”
U.N. documents linked to Ms. Pope’s announcement show that in 2024, the U.N. wants to spend $70 million in Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico—all countries on the most common migration route to the United States.
Documents state that in 2023 a record 500,000 migrants had traveled through the dense jungle known as the Darien Gap from Colombia into Panama.
Michael Yon, a war correspondent appearing on Epoch TV’s American Thought Leaders in 2021, told The Epoch Times’ Jan Jekielek that he had taken other journalists and congressmen to the Darien Gap to see the mass migration firsthand.
He estimated that some 10 percent of migrants traveling through the Darien Gap are murdered or die because of the harsh environment, but even that’s not enough of a deterrent to stop the flow.
Migrants from around the world are flying into South and Central America to start their journey because countries such as Suriname and Ecuador don’t require a visa to enter, Mr. Yon said.
Many then travel by foot through the Darien Gap, through Central America, and into Mexico, where they wait for the Mexican government to clear them to travel north, where they eventually cross illegally into the United States.
Migrants walk through the jungle near Bajo Chiquito village, the first border control of the Darien Province in Panama, on Sept. 22, 2023. The journey through the Darien Gap usually takes five or six days, at the mercy of all kinds of bad weather. (Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images)
After successfully entering the United States, they text their friends, which encourages more migration, he said. Most don’t communicate how difficult or dangerous the journey is.
“As long as those incentives are there to come to the United States, they’re going to come,” said Mr. Yon, who has interviewed a large number of migrants.
He said most come to the United States for economic reasons.
“Almost all of them have no case for asylum.” Mr. Yon said.
To stop illegal immigration, countries need to have a border barrier, such as a wall, enforcement, and political will, he said.
Ian Mehlman is a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an immigration reform nonprofit group that has been studying U.S. immigration since 1979.
Like Mr. Bensman, he believes that the U.N. is instrumental in the surge at U.S. borders.
“This is a way for the U.N. to get money from the donor countries to carry out their programs,” Mr. Mehlman told The Epoch Times.
Researchers at FAIR noted in a recent article that “cash-based intervention” programs at the U.N. increased by 77 percent between 2019 and 2020, although some of that was attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mr. Mehlman said migration is big business under the Biden administration.
“There’s no question that we saw a vast increase in migration to the United States, starting from the day that Joe Biden took office,” he said.
President Biden rescinded former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which would-be asylum seekers stayed in Mexico while awaiting adjudication on their immigration court case. The vast majority of illegal immigrants don’t qualify for asylum because they’re entering the United States for economic reasons and not fleeing political persecution.
Migrants walk toward Canaan Membrillo village, in the Darien Province in Panama, on Oct. 13, 2022. (Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images)
President Biden also halted border wall construction on his first day, halted deportations for 100 days, and rescinded the travel ban on terror-prone countries.
“People respond to the signals that are being sent,” Mr. Mehlman said.
“If they believe that there is a good chance that they’re going to be able to get to the United States and be allowed to remain here, then they will go through all the things that they have to go through.”
“Failing state” economies benefit from illegal immigrants working in the United States or other wealthy Western countries and sending money back to their families.
Smuggling people across multiple countries is coordinated, Mr. Mehlman said.
“It’s happening because people are allowing it to happen,” he said. “It is being facilitated every step along the way.”
The U.N. appears to have taken the position that people should be able to move to any country that they desire, which is problematic, not only to countries such as the United States but also to the countries migrants are fleeing, according to Mr. Mehlman.
“If the incentive is to leave rather than to reform and change things where you are, then those failed societies continue,” he said.
Migration Nation
Some on the left favor immigration as a way for the United States to bolster declining birth rates with noncitizens and provide cheap labor.
“We need immigrants in this country,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in January during a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on immigration.
He said vegetables “would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by immigrants, illegal immigrants.”
“The fact is the birth rate in this country is way below replacement level,” Mr. Nadler said.
But some conservative pundits say mass immigration is part of the Great Replacement Theory, which speculates that immigrants are replacing citizens of countries with mainly white European ancestry.
Others believe that Democrats want open borders because if illegal immigrants become citizens, they would likely vote to keep Democrats in power for generations.
Members of CHIRLA Action Fund, an immigrant advocacy organization, gather near the entrance to the Ronald Reagan Library prior to a GOP presidential debate in Simi Valley, Calif., on Sept. 27, 2023. (Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images)
But Mr. Bensman has a more straightforward explanation for what’s fueling the border crisis: a cash bonanza.
Migrant advocates from the left are now becoming political appointees, leading him to believe that the migrant crisis is “engineered.”
In Mr. Bensman’s 2023 book “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History,” he contended that mass migration has become a cottage industry, with many migrant-centered NGOs getting fat off taxpayer dollars.
He pointed to one group called HIAS, a migration assistance group initially founded to help Jews fleeing Eastern Europe. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas once served on the group’s board.
It’s one of several groups that has received millions of dollars in federal grants, according to Mr. Bensman.
HIAS has received most of the $11 million from two recent grants awarded by the U.S. government and earmarked for Latin American migrants, according to USASpending.gov.
The group, working in concert with the U.N., has pledged $17 million to help immigrants in 2024, according to Refugee and Migrant Response Plan documents.
“Their organizations are the ones that are just getting filthy rich, building their endowment, and paying their executives and just getting federal contracts,” Mr. Bensman said.
The United Nations office in Geneva, Switzerland, in this file photo. The Biden administration gave the U.N.'s migration agency nearly $1.3 billion in 2023. (Johannes Simon/Getty Images)
Defunding the UN
With the border crisis becoming the No. 1 issue in the 2024 presidential race, Republicans on Capitol Hill have already blocked a bipartisan border bill that many see as doing more harm than good in stopping illegal immigration.
They argue that President Biden already has the power to stop the border crisis that he created.
With attention squarely on the border, House Republicans used the opportunity to reintroduce a bill that would eliminate U.N. migrant funding.
H.R. 6166, the Tax Dollars for the U.N.’s Immigration Invasion Act, would prohibit contributions to the IOM and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, as well as the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
The bill also requires the Government Accountability Office to conduct an audit of all federal funding previously appropriated to U.N. agencies that have financed the migrant crisis to force repayment of that funding to the U.S. Treasury.
U.N. agencies are “financing the ongoing U.S. border crisis,” Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) said in a Jan. 26 statement.
“The United Nations is using our own tax dollars against us, and U.S. policymakers can no longer stand by while elites in the U.N. and Davos actively finance an invasion of our sovereign territory.
“It’s time to say enough and cut off funding to these corrupt globalist institutions until respect for our territorial integrity and appreciation for our generosity is restored.”
The IOM didn’t respond to an email seeking comment from The Epoch Times.
‘Cash in Envelopes’: How the US and UN Are Funding the Border Crisis
The Biden administration gave the UN migration agency nearly $1.3 billion in 2023, which it uses to help migrants on their journey to enter the US illegally.
RickLafleur
Well-known member
Readers Digest condensed version of the above:and one more morsel for today...so the light weights can say they don't read it anyway...
The Global Deep State: A Fascist World Order Funded By The American Taxpayer
Thursday, Feb 15, 2024 - 01:20 PM
Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
The debate over U.S. foreign aid is a distraction.
That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the federal budget, the United States still spends more on foreign aid than any other nation.
The latest foreign aid spending bill includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
Since World War II, the U.S. has given more foreign aid to Israel than any other country ($318 billion), with the bulk of those funds designated for Israel’s military efforts.
Even so, more than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance.
As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”
Whether or not that some of that foreign aid is used for legitimate purposes, the global welfare system itself is riddled with corruption and waste. As Adam Andrzejewski rightly asks, “Do taxpayers instinctively know that they are funding choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, aid for poultry farmers Tanzania, and sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia?”
The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter.
We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.
This financial tyranny persists whether it’s a Democrat or Republican at the helm.
At a time when the government is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the national debt continues to grow, our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached.
What is going on?
The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has been overtaken by a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.
This powerful international cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations—let’s call it the Global Deep State—is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.
Clearly, we have entered into a new world order: fascism on a global scale.
It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.
Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and in recent years, the pharmaceutical-health sector.
All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.
Global Disease
The COVID-19 pandemic propelled us into a whole new global frontier in which those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.
Our ability to access, engage and move about in the world has now become dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against whatever the powers-that-be deem to be the latest Disease X versus those who have not.
This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.
“It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”
Global Surveillance
Spearheaded by the National Security Agency, which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.
Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.
Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:
Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).
Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.
Global War Profiteering
War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).
Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.
The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.
Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.
It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.
Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.
Global Policing
Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.
There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.
For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Intercept sums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”
This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.
The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.
Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.
Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
Are you starting to get the picture now?
The government and its global partners have struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.
On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, our freedoms are being eroded while the Global Deep State becomes more entrenched.
We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward slope now, and things are moving fast.
Given the dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.
“The gubment is bad”
RickLafleur
Well-known member
greyfader
Well-known member
is that a graph of his presidency? four years of nothing but bullshit, going around in circles and telling himself and everybody else how great he his.
he has left one meaningful piece of legislation as his legacy and that is a tax break for the rich!
RickLafleur
Well-known member
The sad thing about it all, it won’t change a thing.
Maybe? Apparently there's talk about investigating James Comer over his handling of the the Biden Crime Family investigation.
