The War On Social Media

In the 60s and 70s, for a brief time, Americans experimented with freedom and rebellion, with movements for peace and civil rights, as well as women, gays, African Americans and Native American rights, until the Empire fought back with repression. The left never recovered. The increasing austerity meant that very few had the time to engage in political activity and the solidarity of the freedom struggles was turned into identity politics, which served to divide instead of unite.

But then, for a few years in the 2010s, social media allowed a kind of networking the world had never before known. People from all over the world used the platforms of the social media companies to share information and news with each other, horizontally, without running it through the filter of the major "news" corporation of the imperial world media.
Ever since radio, and then TV, were invented, the "news" was beamed into each house or car, individually, top down, with no way for each recipient to fact check the information, or to find out what other people thought it. There was no way to share our feelings, our skepticism or our ridicule, with anyone but the people around us, who probably would say "Shut up! I can't hear what they are saying".

But with Facebook and Twitter, we could post our take on whatever talking points the talking heads were spewing each day. We could counter it with facts from other sources, point out flaws in logic or common sense, and laugh at the memes that clever people immediately made when the "news" was particularly scorn-worthy. Google made it possible to easily find other information and YouTube made it possible for anyone to become a talking head, and intelligent and informed people gained large followings.

I think that social media was supported by our rulers, at first, as a way to monitor our reactions and finetune ways to make their propaganda more believable. They were shocked, shocked! when people turned it around and used it to overcome the propaganda and spread counter-information.

They began complaining about the freedom of the internet, increasing exponentially during the 2016 election season, when people in the US began compiling evidence of the stolen Democrat primaries, and posting it online, where others spread it to their friends.

People in high places began talking about "Fake News" and "undermining democracy". It is an impudent reversal of the truth for our rulers to tell us that access to information and lively debate about issues of importance are undermining democracy, when it has been understood for centuries that democracy is impossible without access to all facts and opinions, hashed out in the marketplace of ideas.

The Democrats were particularly incensed when Wikileaks published DNC emails, leaked to them by a DNC insider, Seth Rich, who was murdered shortly afterward.
Clearly, social media cannot actually overcome the power of the legacy imperial media, with its worldwide reach, still into each house and car, as well as public places. Even my gas station pump feeds me propaganda, as I wait for the gas to flow.

The imperial media, (as Chris Hedges points out in the meme beginning my post), told us that Russia was responsible for the leaked information, and the 24/7 Mighty Wurlitzer of propaganda managed to turn the vast majority of Americans' attention away from the contents of the leaks (which showed that the primaries were stolen from Bernie Sanders). More seriously, they used the fake news of Russiagate to push for censorship of social media, which started in early 2017, with the changing of Google algorithms to push mainstream sources and censor sources which offered countervailing information. Alternative news sources reported an immediate drop in traffic to their sites.
But that was not enough for our ruling overlords. (I didn't invent that term, I got it from the Onion, which shows how irreverent memes can be spread horizontally).
People still insisted on rebelling against the constant pro-war propaganda spread by the imperial media. The attack on Syria, for instance, was stymied by ordinary people sharing information from the citizens of Syria, as well as westerners who traveled to Syria and reported from there. The imperial reporters, who stayed in hotels in Lebanon and "reported" what press releases were given to them by NATO sources, were being undermined by citizens of the world sharing the truth horizontally, instantly and without censorship.
Furious, the ruling class stamped its feet and put out lists of Forbidden Truth Websites. The more compliant among the subjects obediently refused to even look at the heresy, but the rebellious deliberately checked out that they were told to avoid.
So, in 2018, the censors struck harder, and entire libraries of information were struck from YouTube, pages with millions of followers were removed from Facebook, and people were banned from Twitter.

When they came for Alex Jones, you knew they were serious. He had a vast following, which started even before social media. Taking down Alex was a major free speech test. It was like the Niemoller saying "First they came for the socialists...." Only the most hardcore First Amendment people spoke out.

Now Facebook is banning more and more people from posting for long periods of time. The purpose is to strike fear into the others, and encourage self-censorship.

They have tried, for over two years now, to stop people from using social media to spread news horizontally. They have warned us of dire consequences, harangued us about Fake News, told us it was our Moral Duty to Quit, dragged out "Hi, I'm a Facebook Founder, but now I have seen the Light, and I want you to stop", and still we persist.

They have disappeared whole pages, with millions of followers, and permanently banned influential voices.

What is the point of the capricious enforcement of Secret Rules? To spread fear and paranoia, no doubt.

This is Cointelpro Two, in action.
Conintel Pro used murder and imprisonment to silence people, but they also used suspicion and paranoia.
And that is what these bans do, sow suspicion and paranoia, as well as cause people to endlessly speculate about what magic words or phrases or ideas triggers the censorship.

Rather than spell it out, they encourage us to self-censor, trying to ward off the punishment arbitrarily handed out to skeptics and truth-spreaders.

Like knocking on wood, or throwing salt over our shoulders, or never, ever saying the words "It sure is quiet" in the ER, we avoid certain ideas, certain words and certain pushbacks to ruling class agendas and propaganda. But we have no way of knowing why some individuals are targeted and some are not, even if they post the same things. Therefore, I can only conclude that it is arbitrary, like snipers picking off random people in a crowd in Ukraine or Syria, in order to sow terror among the survivors.

The US Makes The Rules

What I have learned about governments, from the media.

1) It is the responsibility of the government and the leaders of a country to make sure that everyone in the country has food and shelter.
This rule applies even if food silos, supply lines and homes are being bombed by outside forces.

2) It is the responsibility of the government to allow peaceful protest, and to negotiate concessions to protesters. If they don't do that, they should step down, and hold new elections, even if they were just elected last year.

3) No government can defend its borders from invasion, even by soldiers or weapons, as long as the invaders say the Magic Words "We are humanitarian invaders". If the soldiers set up military bases inside the country, it is OK, as long as they are Humanitarian Military Bases.

4) If a government uses police, or tear gas, or anything else to stop protesters, the leader must immediately step down, and the leader of the protesters becomes president.

6) The resources of a country must be used for the good of its citizens, not siphoned off to increase the wealth of a few oligarchs.

6) These rules do not apply to the US or any of its vassal states.

Psychopath in the Senate -where is the Outrage? Rubio Should be Thrown Out

It's still Black History month, so here is some history. Libya had the highest standard of living of any country in Africa, and Ghaddafi was using oil money to lift other countries out of debt and poverty.

So the US and NATO attacked Libya, first with their armed jihadi death squad terrorists, and then with bombs and tanks.
Ghaddafi was caught by terrorists, and beaten in the streets. They sodomized him with a bayonet, and he died.

Hillary Clinton thought this was hilarious, and was caught on video cackling "We came, we saw, he died".

Libya is no longer the African country with the highest standard of living. It is now a terrorist-infested hellhole, with poverty and misery driving hundreds of thousands to try to escape.

Yesterday, Marco Rubio, a US Senator, formerly a Republican candidate for president, tweeted out a picture of Ghaddafi being tortured in the street, and threatened Maduro with the same treatment.

Where is the outrage? We have a flaming psychopath in the Senate. Why is the imperial media silent about this?

Now you can see why they are so determined to silence social media. Except for the psychopaths, of course. Rubio has not been banned from Twitter for breaking Community Standards. It really makes you wonder what those standards are, right?

Sanctions VS Aid

There is no word strong enough to describe the current imperial propaganda onslaught directed at the world's population.

Imagine people so brazen that they steal billions of dollars from a sovereign country, who take billions given them to provide food, insulin and dialysis materials and then refuse to deliver the goods, who refuse to return banked gold, who steal oil profits....

and then those same criminals cry that their targets are suffering from a lack of food and medicine, so must accept a man they've never heard of as the president, appointed by their tormentors. And they must accept American trucks coming into their country, in a sick reenactment of the age-old story of the Trojan Horse. The imperial media does not mention that aid from other countries is pouring into Venezuela. On Thursday, 7.5 tonnes of medicines from Russia arrived. China, Cuba, India, Palestine and Turkey were also among the states that provided medicines and medical equipment to Venezuela. The only aid that Venezuela is refusing are the trucks lined up on the border which have been stocked by the US.


Chutzpah? Gall? Balls?
There is simply no word capable of describing such incredible Evil.

The UN and the Red Cross, usually accomplices of US treachery, refuse to go along with this one, which is more blatant than usual.

The UN Rapporteur who blew the whistle on the sanctions and the farce of the "humanitarian aid" speaks out. Please note that only alternative media covers his words, although this should be headline news all over the US. The "reputable media" is too busy covering the Oscars and sex scandals to bother covering the latest US atrocity in South America. This is why our ruling overlords are targeting social media. We can share forbidden truths which the "reputable media" refuses to cover.

The Empire Files...

The Trojan Horse

For thousands of years, our culture has told us the story of the Trojan Horse, and how the Greeks tricked the Trojans into taking a giant horse, stuffed with soldiers, into their city. "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts" is a frequently used cliché.

And yet, somehow, the imperial media is trumpeting the story that the US, (which has impounded billions of dollar of Venezuelan assets, and is stopping food and medicine from reaching Venezuela), is now sending trucks full of "humanitarian aid" to the border and demanding that Venezuela allow it into their country, and the densest among us are parroting that line.

Do people not know the most basic of history?

And Cassandra points out the truth, and is ignored.

No Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy

According to the WSJ (behind a paywall), American planners were dumfounded when their spectacular plan to overthrow the government of Venezuela failed.
Vice President Pence (suddenly in the limelight...are the regime change plans in the US moving along?) calls up that Juan guy and tells him to announce himself president of Venezuela. "We've got your back, Juan!". The plan was for the US to immediately recognize him (unlike the 81% of Venezuelans who had no idea who he was), and then get their vassals to recognize him, and then the military would back him and Presto! The US has itself a New Puppet in Venezuela!

Except it didn't work like that. The military was not amused, and the ensuing bribery offers interspersed with threats to them and their families are not making them any more amused, or submissive.

Meanwhile, supine governments in South America and Europe are allowing Venezuelan Embassies to be overthrown by the US-backed pretender, as if putting puppets in an office in London would help the coup along in Caracas.

The US is gathering "aid" in an impoverished area of Colombia, on the border with Venezuela. Clearly, the correct thing for the Colombians to do is to confiscate that aid for their hungry children. Venezuelans have gathered on the bridge to show support for their elected government.

The US will most likely use snipers to kill soldiers and protesters, blame Maduro for all deaths and launch a "humanitarian bombing" campaign. This script has played out in numerous past coups, including Libya, Ukraine and Syria, so it takes no psychic ability to predict. Venezuela has more oil reserves left than any other country on Earth, and the US wants it.

As John Bolton explained on Fox News: "“We’re looking at the oil assets,” Bolton said. “That’s the single most important income stream to the government of Venezuela. We’re looking at what to do to that.”
“We’re in conversation with major American companies now,” he continued. “I think we’re trying to get to the same end result here.”
“It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela,” Bolton admitted."

Americans are being primed by the media as in every other US attack on a sovereign country. Evil Dictator, Starving People, US Savior, Humanitarian Assistance....etc., etc., etc. Nothing ever changes, including the amazing ability of Americans to watch as their government destroys yet another country (65 since WW2) and kills more people (over 20,000,000 since WW2), and still believe, deep in their hearts, that we are the Good Guys.

Maybe "amazing" is the wrong word to use for this. "Disgusting" may be more apropos.

Western Media Has Meltdown Over Putin Threatening Fair Fight

For years, the US has been making open war plans (not hidden, but not reported and therefore ignored) targeting China and Russia.
The plans were both were basically "Let's you and him fight".
For China, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea and Australia, among others, were chosen to be the countries where the battles would take place.

For Russia, it was the usual, Europe. The US planned to stay Over Here, fomenting the destruction, but not having any actual damage to the Homeland (as it is now called), just like the last times, in WW1 and WW2.

The plan was for the US to come out on top, again, just like the last two times. What could possibly go wrong with the plans?

The war plans against China had some small setbacks when South Korea and the Philippines elected leaders who did not go along, but the US is working on that.

Today, however, Putin gave a speech in which he announced that Russia wasn't going to be the setting of the forthcoming destruction, as they were last time, when 27,000,0000 million Russians died defeating the Nazis. The massive destruction of farms, homes and industry meant that rebuilding Russia (without the help of the Marshall Plan given to the Germans) after the US moved into western Europe, was a struggle. Putin announced that if NATO (US and its vassal countries) starts a war with Russia from Europe (as planned), Russia will also respond to the US.

So, Russia ain't gonna play the game of "we and them fight" again. And the western media screams with outrage! Even the European media, which shows how braindead the vassals are.

The US pulled out of the ABM Treaty in 2001 and the INF Treaty this year, while plans have been in the works since at least 2014 to "modernize" the US nuclear weapon arsenal.

But guess who is getting blamed for the "new arms race"? Too easy? Yeah, they are blaming Russia.

More Double Think

Our propaganda apparatus, the world-wide media, including newspapers, TV, radio and internet-based news, was called by one of the founders of the CIA, Frank Wisner, the Mighty Wurlitzer (and he was speaking 60 years ago).

It is interesting that the Mighty Wurlitzer can play different tunes, but the targeted population never seems to notice.

For instance, we are told that Assad is a Bad Leader if he cannot provide new housing for people whose houses were bombed by the US or its allies, and if he cannot provide food for people the US has blockaded and corralled.

But our leaders are never called bad, no matter how many homeless people live in doorways and under bridges, begging on the street for money to buy food.

Why?

Now we are being told that Maduro is a Bad Leader because the US stealing billions of dollars from Venezuela and putting sanctions on Venezuela to stop food and medicine from being sold to Venezuela is interfering with the Venezuelan government's efforts to make sure that their people have food and medicine.

But an estimated 45,000 Americans die every year from lack of health care, and the mass media never blames the US government for these deaths.

Why are other governments expected to make sure that their citizens have food, water, shelter and health care, even if the US is bombing grain siloes, water treatment plants, houses, schools, hospitals and clinics, but our government is not expected to make sure that every US citizen has access to the basics of life?

Double Think.

Election Interference

Bernie Sanders had the 2016 Democrat primaries stolen from him. Seth Rich died to bring the truth out. Bernie then refused to fight at the convention, endorsed Clinton and blamed it on the Russians.


"Sanders offered steps he said the U.S. should pursue in response to the mounting evidence of Russian interference in 2016 and the potential for further meddling in the 2018 election.

In the absence of strong action from Trump, Sanders said, Congress must outline “strong repercussions” awaiting Russia if the country attempts similar tactics in 2018.

“We should lay out those repercussions to make it clear that there will be sanctions far more severe than what has already been passed,” Sanders said. “They’ve got to know that we regard this cyberwarfare against the most important aspect of American life, our democracy, as something that is very, very serious.”

Additionally, Sanders said, the federal government should provide additional election security resources to states and hold internet platforms like Facebook and Twitter accountable if they’re again used by hostile foreign powers to disrupt elections." https://www.desmoinesregister.com/.../berni.../356453002/...

It seems to be the same people who scream, like Bernie, about "Russian interference" in the election (by buying Facebook ads), who have no problem with the USA interfering in Venezuela's election.

The same people who wore pussy hats to a massive anti-Trump rally the day after the Inauguration in 2017, do not criticize Trump when he issued this mafia-like threat yesterday "“You cannot hide from the choice that now confronts you. You can choose to accept President Guaido’s offer of amnesty, and live your life in peace with your country. But you must not block humanitarian aid.
“Or you can choose the second path; continuing to support Maduro. You will find no safe harbour, no easy exit, no way out. You will lose everything.”

(The Venezuelan military, of course, is not blocking humanitarian aid. Tons of humanitarian aid from Russia, China, Iran and Palestine, among others, arrived the other day. Trying to find a link on censored search engines, interestingly, only turns up "US aid". How do the search words "Russia", "China", and "humanitarian aid" translate to "US sends humanitarian aid"?)

The hypocrisy, as usual, is stunning. How is it even possible for people who scream that Facebook ads are "election interference" and an "act of war" to be fine with literally appointing a man president? In a country in which 80% of the citizens had never heard of him, who was not on the ballot, and when there is already an elected president in office? How can they tolerate their own president, who they hate with a red hot passion, making thuggish threats to Venezuelan military officers AND their families?

Are they crazy or just stupid?

Elliot Abrams is a War Criminal

Although I support the confrontation by one Representative to the war criminal, Elliot Abrams, I cannot dance in jubilation. Why only one? Why has he even been dragged out of whatever hole he was living in, to set up new death squads? Why is he not in prison?

The man is an open and unrepentant mass murderer. He knew what he was doing before the deaths started.

From the NY Times of 1985 "In the United States, he said, ''there are going to be a lot of people who are fairly fainthearted'' about responding to such developments. ''As they see, in some of these cases, the amount of violence increase - and it will, because the purpose of our aid is to permit people who are fighting on our side to use more violence - a lot of people are going to get scared off,'' Mr. Abrams said."

A lot of weapons were delivered in the 80s using the ruse of "humanitarian aid". How ignorant do Americans have to be to not notice that Abrams was put into place right before the US announced that it was going to give $20 million in "aid" (after stealing $6 billion, at least, from Venezuela)?

In the last few years, FARC, the peasant group, was disarmed, in return for being allowed political representation in Colombia. Colombia is where the US is shipping the "aid", in preparation for forcing their way into Venezuela. Colombians are poorer, on average, than Venezuelans. The obvious solution is for FARC to confiscate the US "aid" and distribute it to hungry peasants in Colombia, since the Venezuelan government is committed to feeding its people, and the Colombian government is not. I see no downside to this.

During the 70s and 80s, Congressional members and committees investigated the crimes of the CIA and the Executive branch. We haven't had anyone like that in Congress since Cynthia McKinney was forced out.
We are ruled by criminals, who lie to us, and pass laws to enrich corporations (and lobbyists write those laws).
Bribery is grounds for impeachment, but our ruling criminals openly and brazenly accept bribes and the American people seem to accept it.
No wonder we are in such dire straits.

Doublethink

Although most people are familiar with the concept of cognitive dissonance, the postulation that a person confronted with facts that are contrary to their deeply held beliefs will feel uncomfortable, it seems obvious that George Orwell's concept of Doublethink is more common, by far.

Doublethink means that people can hold two contradictory beliefs, at the same time, and it troubles them not at all.

For instance, Americans who have been throwing a two year snit fit over unproved allegations that the Russians bought $45,000 worth of Facebook ads which caused millions of people to vote for Trump, are now, with no obvious signs of realizing their hypocrisy, fully supporting Trump's immediate recognition of an unelected dude in Venezuela declaring himself president, and the pressuring of the Empire's vassal states into doing the same.

How can you simultaneously believe that buying ads is an act of war on a nation, and that the US can overthrow an election and appoint a new president and that is perfectly fine? Doublethink, that's how.

How can you know that your country has stolen billions of dollars from Venezuela and is enforcing a blockade on food and supplies from entering that country and simultaneously self-righteously point fingers at them for not allowing "aid" from entering the country ( organized by a convicted war criminal who was busted for shipping weapons in "humanitarian aid" in 1986) ? How is it possible to believe that your country is simultaneously stealing from and starving people, and still believe that your country wants to send them "humanitarian aid"?

Doublethink, that is how.

We would be much better off if people had cognitive dissonance, instead.

Bad Drug Companies/ Good Drug Companies

For a couple of hundred years, Americans celebrated the genocide of the original inhabitants of this continent. Native Americans were called savages, and other names, and the slogan was "The only Good Indian is a Dead Indian". Dozens of movies were made celebrating their deaths. After the 19th century Indian Wars, only 200,000 survivors remained by 1900, delegated to reservations in the most inhospitable parts of the US, living in poor conditions and discriminated against by the rest of America. (Even today, the average life expectancy of a man living on Pine Ridge is lower than men living in much poorer countries. Many people still do not have running water or electricity).


During the 60s, though, after WW2, it suddenly occurred to Americans that, just maybe, celebrating genocide was not the most politically attractive stance for a country to take. So, the story changed. As it turns out, in the revisionist history we are now fed, no indigenous people were actually killed in the making of this country. They died of smallpox, you see, and measles. (Be sure to get your shots!). The massacres never happened, there were no Indian wars, no broken treaties, and Custer? Who is Custer? When the Europeans traveled across the continent, they came upon whole tribes dead of the measles, and simply moved onto that empty land.

We are now going through a similar historical revisionism with the heroin epidemic. In 2001, when the US invaded Afghanistan, they emptied the Taliban prisons of drug warlords, and let them plant opium poppies. Since 2001, heroin production has skyrocketed and Afghanistan now supplies over 90% of the world's market. There are now heroin users in every city, small town and rural area in the US, and drug overdoses are rampant.

Thanks to social media, many people have seen pictures of heavily armed US soldiers guarding poppy fields in Afghanistan, and many, many people were drawing the obvious connections. Our ruling overlords were starting to get nervous. Time for some revisionism.

Hey, guess what? It turns out that the "opiate" problem in the US, and the overdoses, have nothing to do with the tons and tons of heroin coming from US-controlled Afghanistan. Nope. It is your doctor, and Big Pharma that are the problem, not the CIA and its documented drug running.

I can't remember when this revisionism started, but it seems to me to have been in the last year. And it is interesting. It turns out that they are counting on the fact that most Americans hate the drug companies that profit so handsomely from illness, both acute and chronic. And so they are turning the blame onto them, secure in the knowledge that we are impotent to do anything about the sickness profiteers.

Odd, though, that they are fanning the flames of resentment and anger against the greed and lack of humanity of the drug companies while at the SAME TIME assuring us that the vaccines they provide us are safe and effective. No matter that a 1986 law immunizes them from lawsuits if their products are not safe and effective. No matter that the drug companies have produced dozens of new vaccines since the law was passed, with no requirement of safety or efficacy required. No matter that the reaction of the government to the reluctance of the people to use their children as guinea pigs to new vaccines is to mandate them by law.

They count on our societal-wide sense of learned helplessness, and lack of any sense of hypocrisy, to push the idea that drug companies are simultaneously greedy mass murdering pushers of dangerous opiate drugs AND also selfless benefactors of mankind, manufacturing money-losing vaccines in a benevolent attempt to save lives and make a difference. This is Double Think.

Carlin Explains the Attack on Venezuela

Hypocrisy on Sanctions and Protests

Sanctions are an act of war, a way to besiege a population to starve it into submission. This was acknowledged as recently as last November by Sec. of State Pompeo, who said, referring to new US sanctions on Iran - “ the leadership has to make a decision that they want their people to eat.”

But this very same Pompeo got up in front of the UNSC last Saturday and told the world that a baby who starved to death in Venezuela was the fault of President Maduro. It takes a lot of nerve for a person trying to starve people in multiple countries around the world to hold up one of his successes as the fault of someone else!
In Pompeo's world, apparently there is such a thing as Schrödinger's Sanctions, in which they can starve and not starve, depending on Pompeo's spin.

In the 90s, as the US tried to starve the Iraqis into submission, a news anchor, Lesley Stahl, asked the Sec. of State of Clinton, Madeline Albright - "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright didn't deny that sanctions caused children to starve. She replied - " I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it."



But, of course, people who have screamed about election interference for two years, who turn around and openly back a coup of an elected government in another country, clearly have no concept of logic or morality, and cannot be shamed into not lying.

Representatives of a government which has millions of people living on the streets should not be able to stand at the UNSC, (during a cold snap in which their citizens are freezing to death), and brazenly pronounce that another government should be overthrown because it is not "meeting the needs of its people".


Representatives of a government which uses tear gas, rubber bullets and water hoses in their country to shut down protests should not announce that protests in a foreign country should be followed immediately resignation of the government. (This goes double for France, which, not to be outdone in sheer mind-blowing brazenness, echoed their US bosses in condemning the refusal of Maduro to step down, and called for "negotiations" to take place. France, of course, has had ongoing Yellow Vest protests for 3 months now, and has met them with violent crackdowns, including the deaths of at least 8 people. These protests go unreported in the worldwide imperial media.)

The "Resistance" of the Democrats to Trump has temporarily stopped, as Democrats join with their war-mongering Republican brethren to praise the overthrow of yet another sovereign country. (In the last 20 years, the Dems and Reps, tag-teaming, have overthrown the governments of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Sudan, Honduras, Libya and Ukraine, and made the good old college try to overthrow the last secular government in the Middle East, Syria. I might have missed a couple.)


But of course the Democrats are familiar with the effect of sanctions. They shut down the government for a month (except for the regime change parts, of course) and refused to vote for a bill which would have paid government workers while the government was shut down. As a Democrat explained, if workers were paid (and not suffering), there wouldn't be any leverage for the Democrats to oppose Trump's wall. Of course, it was striking airport workers who put a stop to the posturing and the shutdown. Oh, wait, not the posturing. Nancy Pelosi strutted around claiming that she personally had caused Trump to back down. In any case, sanctions were applied to 800,000 American workers, so that the millionaires in Washington, DC could make their soundbite appearances on the TV "news".