From The Ramparts

The Gaslighting and Lies Contiune

                                                    The Gaslighting and Lies Continue

                                                             Junious Ricardo Stanton

            This month we have been subjected to a mountain of lies, disinformation, flip flopping and insults to our intelligence by the powers who shouldn’t be. On June 13th the renegade nation of Israel launched unprovoked attacks on Iran and the United States joined them is this blatant violation of international law, morality and common sense. The attack was based upon unsubstantiated claims that Iran was months within fulfilling its nuclear weapons ambitions and they needed to be stopped. No evidence of this was ever manufactured or presented just Netanyahu’s word.

            This is an old canard mouthed by Benjamin Netanyahu for thirty years, his personal Chicken Little claim much like the claims and lies of the American Neocons stating Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Asad gassed his own people and Gadhafi posed a security threat to the region. Thin about this, we’ve been subjected to this non-stop for thirty years. We’ve heard it whether Netanyahu was in power, or out of power, his relentless lies, “Iran is making nuclear weapons, Iran possess an existential threat to Israel, the Ayatollahs dress funny and they smell bad” etc. There has been no letup, no one checked his lies then and no one checked his most recent lies.

            Netanyahu is such a blatant liar with so much confidence he could influence the US to do his bidding, he didn’t even do what Bu$h the lesser did in his run up to the invasion of Iraq. While Netanyahu has made presentations to the UN before like Colin Powell did what he kept doing was use a fear mongering campaign to imply Iran posed an immediate threat to Israel’s safety. This is how confident the rabid Zionists were that they could launch an unprovoked attack against Iran with impunity and there would be no blowback because Uncle Sam had their back.

            This did not turn out well for Israel because Iran hit back, hard and Israel was not prepared for such a retaliation. Israel suffered major damage to its infrastructure, its war making capabilities and its intelligence headquarters. Plus, US intervention did not deter Iranian responses. In fact Iran demonstrated it could if it wanted to, directly attack US military bases. Iran warned Qatar it was going to attack US facilities ahead of time so they could warn the US, then the US could adequately prepare, thus lessening the damage.

This was pure Kabuki theater. But it demonstrated Iran’s resolve, it showed Israel is a paper tiger and the US isn’t as mighty and lethal as they project themselves to be because their attack on Iranian facilities failed. It did not I repeat did not achieve their objective which was to neutralize Iran’s nuclear program. Trump in his usual bombast claimed complete success, which was a lie and now the world knows the US failed to knock out Iran’s facilities and Iran kicked the Zionists’ behind to the point they had to run to Trump to beg him to call for a cease fire!

Next Trump continued his on again off, on again tariff and trade wars and Congress passed his misnomered One Beautiful Big Bill Act which really is a boondoggle give away to his billionaire buddies, special interests and the military, but does relatively little for the lower classes. All this means is we are in a protracted class war and the lower classes are losing.

After the Israeli-Iran war we were subjected to the ongoing Epstein fiasco. First the FBI and Justice Department (sic) announced the Epstein files were on the desk of the US Attorney General and would be released momentarily. Then Netanyahu visited Trump in Washington for a closed-door meeting, and voila the Epstein files disappeared. The DOJ and FBI say there was no client list so just fogetaboutit. No more talk about Epstein and Maxell being Israeli operatives. Ignore the fact Maxwell is in jail, sentenced to twenty years for sex trafficking, prostitution and a  slew of related charges and Epstein supposedly died in custody awaiting trial on similar charges or that he has been under investigation for fraud and money laundering! They’ve all been memory holed, business as usual.

This unleashed a firestorm within MAGA, with large segments of Trump’s base calling Bondi, Patel, Bongino and Trump sell outs. Trump hit back against his MAGA acolytes which made things worse.  Elon Musk who is feuding with Trump said out loud, Trump was on the list and denounced Trump’s team for deep-sixing the files. This made the MAGAites more furious, Trump was caught in a precarious position.

Tensions got high and hot, Trump knew he had to do something to deflect attention away from this issue and distract his base because this issue was not going away.  So, he told AG Bondi to release the MLK assassination files and “coincidently” out of the blue Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard whom Trump overruled about Iran having nuclear weapons revealed Obama was neck deep in the Russiagate attacks on Trump. Plus, the Republicans shut down Congress prematurely for the summer so there would/could be no vote to investigate the Epstein files or the FBI DOJ handling of this debacle! Man, what if the government worked together this cohesively for the people?!

Trump distracted people from Epstein by releasing the MLK files and cunningly brought up Barack Obama who is persona non grata in MAGA circles reputation by blaming him for the attempted coup against Trump! Well done, brilliant! So, the gaslighing and lies continue.  

                                                                -30-

posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 10:21 AM 0 comments

The Holiday Respite Is Over, Now What

                                              The Holiday Respite Is Over, Now What?

                                                           Junious Ricardo Stanton

The Fourth of July Holiday is over, people took off from work, they had their family gatherings their barbecues, pool parties and communities, towns and municipalities held their parades, festivities and parties, so now what? Folks have or they are in the process of returning home getting back into their normal routines. The supreme irony is most Americans have no real idea what the holiday supposedly stands for, or most importantly how the “freedoms and rights” this country boasts so much about are being whittled away and usurped by government and corporate collusion on a daily basis!

Freedom of speech, civil open public debate, freedom of assembly, the right to petition the government and protest are being snatched away with each passing day/year. Yet only a few are making a fuss about it. Censorship, suppression, intimidation and force are being used by the government and its corporate partners to undermine the so called democratic ideals and freedoms this nation boasts and brags so much about. Incivility, hostility, ideological division, racial and ethnic discord are driving a deepening wedge among the populous.

The American Empire is morphing from the United States into the divided states and divided consciousness. The fact of the matter is, this nation was forged in internecine warfare among Europeans, their genocide against the indigenous inhabitants, the bondage and forced enslavement of Europeans and Africans and the harsh exploitation of subsequent immigrants by the ruling class and plutocrats. The hypocrisy and mendacity of America are overwhelming in scope and intensity. But the truth is coming to light as the consequences of the actions and policies of this government and their corporate associates become recognized by more and more people.

Special interests groups and powerful oligarchs are making a mockery of what this country says it stands for and few people are willing to address this situation. Few are willing to put down their hot dogs, hamburgers and barbecue to even talk about the direction this nation is heading and the subsequent consequences we will experience if these patterns continue.

This holiday offers a brief respite from the daily grind and the stresses and tension of socially engineered changes we’ve enduring the past five years. We are living in a period of mass gas lighting, mass deception and Orwellian doublespeak. For example Donald Trump supports blatant genocide in Gaza, he participated in unlawful and unprovoked attacks on Iran a nation that has done the US or its neighbors no harm in since the Iraq-Iran war decades ago and Trump helps Israel a renegade settler nation that has consistently waged war and expropriated land from the surrounding nations. They have done this from its very inception as a carved out apartheid state in the misnamed “Middle East”.

But Trump campaigned as the peace candidate! And the US government says it is doing this in the name of peace and saying it with a straight face! Just like they said this was the land of the free and home of the brave while enslaving Blacks, exterminating and debasing the indigenous inhabitants.

Look at a map of Israel in 1948 then look at a map of all the territory this rogue nation has stolen and expropriated since then. Its neighbors did not approve or acquiesce the taking of their lands, the taking was done by violence and force, often backed by the US and its Western allies! Yet the US is an active partner in the theft, displacement, genocide and disruption of a whole region in support of its “ally” The US is supporting the Zionist state as it does there what the Europeans did in this hemisphere and elsewhere to the indigenous people they encountered. History is repeating itself once again.

The holiday weekend is over, it’s back to the regular grind: the gaslighting, the lies, the doublespeak, the forever wars, the reckless spending, the ridiculous bombast, the cronyism and grift. This is our norm now. Where do we go from here?

The American Empire is in rapid decline, the moral bankruptcy, the social, ideological and economic divide, the widening wealth gaps, the animus, nihilism, depression and incivility are all symptoms; a manifestation of the rot that is metastasizing throughout the nation eroding what little stability is left.

The thing is, we don’t have to go out like this, we can still pull up, we can still decide to manifest redemption and forge a renaissance; but we have to really really want it for all of us, not just a few the majority! The choice is up to us if we don’t do it no one will.

posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 9:40 AM 0 comments