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SOTT Focus: Americans Are Living in a World of Lies

Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
Fri, 03 Aug 2018 08:54 UTC
News Lies
© The Right Angle
The US government and the presstitutes that serve it continue to lie to us about everything. Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics told us that the unemployment rate was 3.9%. How can this be when the BLS also reports that the labor force participation rate has declined for a decade throughout the length of the alleged economic recovery and there is no upward pressure on wages from full employment. When jobs are plentiful, people enter the labor force to take advantage of the work opportunities. This raises the labor force participation rate. When employment is full - which is what a 3.9% unemlpoyment rate means - wages are bid up as employers compete for scarce labor. Full employment with no wage pressure and no rise in the labor force participation rate is impossible.

The 3.9% unemployment rate is not due to employment. It results from not counting discouraged workers who have ceased to search for jobs because there are no jobs to be had. If an unemployed person is not actively searching for a job, he is not counted as being in the labor force. The way the unemployment rate is measured makes it a hoax.

The government tells us that there is essentially no inflation despite the fact that prices have been rising strongly - the price of food, the price of home repairs, the price of drugs, the price of almost everything. Two years ago the American Association of Retired People's Public Policy Institute reported that the average retail drug price has been increasing "at a worrying pace of 10 percent a year, and about 20 drugs have astoundingly had their prices quadruple since just December. Sixty drugs doubled over the same period. Turing Pharmaceuticals, headed by Martin Shkreli, is one of the most pronounced examples of this kind of behavior. The company bought a lifesaving cancer medication only to increase its price from $13.50 to $750 per pill."

Comment: See also:

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Gingerbread

SOTT Focus: How Identity Politics Divides The Left And Has Caused it to Lose Sight of Its Collective Identity And Purpose in The West

Tomasz Pierscionek
RT
Thu, 02 Aug 2018 12:36 UTC
protestors
© Stefan Wermuth / Reuters
The identity politics phenomenon sweeping across the Western world is a divide and conquer strategy that prevents the emergence of a genuine resistance to the elites.

A core principle of socialism is the idea of an overarching supra-national solidarity that unites the international working class and overrides any factor that might divide it, such as nation, race, or gender. Workers of all nations are partners, having equal worth and responsibility in a struggle against those who profit from their brain and muscle.

Capitalism, especially in its most evolved, exploitative and heartless form - imperialism - has wronged certain groups of people more than others. Colonial empires tended to reserve their greatest brutality for subjugated peoples whilst the working class of these imperialist nations fared better in comparison, being closer to the crumbs that fell from the table of empire. The international class struggle aims to liberate all people everywhere from the drudgery of capitalism regardless of their past or present degree of oppression. The phrase 'an injury to one is an injury to all' encapsulates this mindset and conflicts with the idea of prioritising the interests of one faction of the working class over the entire collective.
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Russian Flag

SOTT Focus: Grand Deception: The 1990s Russian Catastrophe Could Have Been Avoided

Alex Krainer
The Naked Hedgie
Fri, 03 Aug 2018 22:09 UTC
It is commonly accepted that, after 70 years of Communist dictatorship, Russia's 1990s transition was inevitably going to be a massive train wreck. This is yet another convenient misconception that western intellectuals like to embrace. The foregoing article seeks to dispel this notion and set the historical record straight. It is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of my book, Grand Deception: the Truth About Bill Browder, the Magnitsky Act, and Anti-Russia Sanctions. The book's previous incarnation was banned last summer.

This is the last in a six-part series on Russia's 1990s transition from communism to capitalism. Links to previous posts: introduction, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.
"Americans, who thought their money was helping a stricken land, have been dishonored; and the Russian people who trusted us are now in debt twice what they were in 1991 and rightly feel themselves betrayed."

¬ Reporter Anne Williamson before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the U.S. House of Representatives, 21 September 1999
bush yeltsin harvard
Was there a better way for Russia to move from communism to capitalism? Was her traumatic experience under the Yeltsin regime inevitable, or was the pain intentionally inflicted? To this day many intellectuals in the West maintain that the transition could not have gone otherwise, arguing that Russia had emerged from 70 years of communist rule with a state-controlled economy, with private property outlawed and a nonexistent culture of entrepreneurship. The shift between two drastically different economic systems together with the most complex privatization project ever undertaken could never have gone smoothly. The Russians themselves are usually assumed to have been ignorant about the workings of free markets and unprepared for the transition's challenges. However, this is simply not true.

Well before the Soviet Union began to unravel, it was clear to most of its thinking citizens that their system would capsize unless it drastically changed.
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SOTT Focus: The Health & Wellness Show: Is Talking About Racism Racist?


Sott.net
Fri, 03 Aug 2018 15:00 UTC
four babies
Race is a hotbed topic that many people continue to tiptoe around (mainly out of fear of being labeled a racist or an Uncle Tom). White privilege, police shootings, the Black Lives Matter movement, strident calls for 'diversity' and 'inclusion', race-baiting, seeing racism everywhere, affirmative action, racial sensitivity training, racial equity policies -- in today's political and social environment issues surrounding race have become more polarizing than ever.

We're not living in a post-racial world but does race have the impact that left-leaning racial scholars would have us believe? Is racism hard-wired into human beings or is seeing the world through a racial lens part of evolutionary adaptation? On this episode of The Health and Wellness Show we discuss these topics and risk being labeled racist by talking about racism.

And stay tuned for Zoya's Pet Health Segment, where she talks about raccoons - cute, but destructive!

Running Time: 01:22:54

Download: MP3

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Toys

SOTT Focus: Brexit Has Exposed The Rotten Foundations of Britain's Political System

John Wight
RT
Tue, 31 Jul 2018 13:57 UTC
trump next brexit
© Dinendra Haria / Global Look Press
Brexit has exposed the rotten foundations of Britain's political system, corroded by that most pernicious of maladies: rank opportunism.

Khrushchev's logic and democracy as a zero sum game

With the kind of homespun logic for which he was famous, and which never failed to cut through the fog of theoretical obfuscations spouted by ideologues for whom reality is often a foreign land, Nikita Khrushchev once sagely opined that "you can't make soup out of an idea." Yet if the former Soviet premier dared offered this opinion to proponents of a 'hard Brexit' today he would be accused of attempting to betray the will of the British people, of subverting democracy - of being a shill for Brussels.

Regardless, Khrushchev's words do more to place in perspective the most far reaching political crisis to engulf Westminster since the Second World War than any of the ideologically-heavy but reality-light arguments that have been swirling around Brexit since the British people, by a small majority proportionate to turnout, elected to leave the EU in the referendum that was held on the question back in 2016.

It reminds us that when democracy lapses into a zero sum game of winner-take-all it becomes a tyranny of the majority, attacking the bonds of social cohesion that are essential to stability - without this kind of stability nothing exists, including democracy. Just ask people in Russia, those who went through the hell of the 1990s, if democracy should be regarded as an end rather than the means to an end. Ask them if you can make soup out of an idea.

Comment: The UK is just one of many countries that realises it needs to take control of its own future. But the author needn't worry: Britain will remain in the EU: Why 'Brexit' outcome is a foregone conclusion

See also:


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Gold Seal

SOTT Focus: McCarthyism 2.0: Real skill of US 'disinformation experts' is spreading disinformation

Bryan MacDonald
RT
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 21:00 UTC
An obscure blogger's hit-job on an American writer and his associates amounts to small beans. In the bigger picture, however, it exposes a cancer spreading through present American discourse on Russia and the wider world...
Russians meddling meme
Once again it was Molly McKew. "Putin is waging an information assault on Americans - yet many supposedly anti-Putin experts want you to believe there's nothing you can do to stop it," she tweeted. "Why? Stellar wknd (sic) longread by @JamesFourM (Jay McKenzie) on understanding how the Kremlin takes down its critics."


And with that, a group of American thinkers and writers with no obvious sympathies towards Russia, had their reputations attacked. Some days later, Medium, which hosted the smear, took the piece down - but the damage had been done.

Comment: As the complete sh*tshow that it is.

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USA

SOTT Focus: American Post-exceptionalism: Trump Betrays Elites' Belief That US is Always Pure And Democracy-loving

Michael Tracey
The Spectator
Sun, 29 Jul 2018 14:26 UTC
Welcome to American post-exceptionalism
Trump
Now that the all-consuming, head-exploding media meltdown over Donald Trump's performance in Helsinki has subsided somewhat, it is worth attempting to examine what, exactly, inspired the frenzy. Virtually the entire elite press corps and large swaths of the political class united in denouncing the sitting president not just as incompetent, but as an active, knowing traitor. Given the interminable quality of the Trump/Russia saga, such furor is likely to bubble up again in the near future. So what's at the root of it?

In the popular telling, Trump's subservience to Vladimir Putin - coupled with his rejection of his own Intelligence Community's conclusions on purported Russian "meddling" in the 2016 election - caused the apoplexy. This is true, as far as it goes. But there is a more fundamental level on which Trump stokes such angst: he departs from the traditional American exceptionalism script. The one which holds that America's motives are always democracy-loving and pure, its spy agencies are infallible, and its moral superiority goes without saying. Trump evidently believes none of these things, and, as such, is not so much a duly-elected head of state, but a saboteur whom the political and media class can never countenance.

Comment:

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USA

SOTT Focus: American society would collapse if it weren't for these 8 myths

Lee Camp
Truthdig
Tue, 31 Jul 2018 11:45 UTC
USA flag diggers
Our society should've collapsed by now. You know that, right?

No society should function with this level of inequality (with the possible exception of one of those prison planets in a "Star Wars" movie). Sixty-three percent of Americans can't afford a $500 emergency. Yet Amazon head Jeff Bezos is now worth a record $141 billion. He could literally end world hunger for multiple years and still have more money left over than he could ever spend on himself.
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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: NewsReal: What's The Problem With Nationalism?


Sott.net
Sun, 29 Jul 2018 16:00 UTC
imran khan
The election last week of Imran Khan as Pakistan's new prime minister is the latest political upset to rock 'the establishment' across many countries in recent years. Derided as a 'populist', Khan leads a new movement that is socially conservative, economically 'leftist', and ultimately nationalist.

From Mexico's AMLO to Malaysia's Mahathir, 'Trumps' are coming to power all over the world. Whatever their political background, the one thing they have in common is an essential patriotism that runs counter to the pro-Western, pro-Globalist 'open borders' regime that has ruled most countries since WW2.

This week on NewsReal, Joe & Niall discuss why the Western media routinely compares these diverse new political leaders with US president Donald Trump. Live audio broadcast from 12-1:30pm EST / 6-7:30pm CET.


Running Time: 01:28:31

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SOTT Focus: The Truth Perspective: The Great Debate: Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson's Epic 4-Night Battle of Ideas

Harrison Koehli and Corey Schink
Sott.net
Sat, 28 Jul 2018 16:00 UTC
Jordan Peterson speaks to an audience of nearly 3,000 in Portland on June 25, 2018
Jordan Peterson speaks to an audience of nearly 3,000 in Portland on June 25, 2018
Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris meet to debate what it would take to create universal morality. Brett Weinstein joins as moderator, putting the entire discussion into context. That context? That society's 'sense-making mechanisms' are breaking down. The worldview offered by the news media, universities, churches, and government has proven to be a house of cards that cannot stand scrutiny. Inquiring minds find only more and greater confusion. Moral chaos has ensued. How can we find our way out?

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape, argues that humanity, caught between dogmatic fundamentalism on one side and postmodern nihilism on the other, must forge a new morality based on facts derived from science. Jordan Peterson argues that the very human psyche, evolutionarily, neurobiologically, and only then culturally speaking, has a specific structure, and that this is the 'beast' we must contend before defining any sort of universal moral theory.

Today on the Truth Perspective we share our thoughts on the first two nights of debate, what we think each speaker gets right, where they're vague, and what might provide the solution to their disagreements.

Listen to the Harris/Peterson talks here: night 1, night 2, night 3, night 4.

Running Time: 01:28:33

Download: MP3

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