Lies and Spies

Welfare:

The Europeans would also love to shift more of that burden to the wealthy, but experiments with things such as wealth taxes have largely failed, and their governments have clearly concluded that big welfare states can be funded only with a big, broad tax base that includes the middle class.--wash po

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Chicago's spending on public schools (more than $24,000 per student, not counting debt service and capital expenditures) has increased 107 percent since 2012, but proficiency in reading and math in grades 3-8 plummeted 63 percent and 78 percent, respectively. Only 22 percent of 11th-graders can read at grade level, only 19 percent do math at grade level. Black students’ percentages are 11 and 8. While school enrollment declined 9 percent in 2020-2022, spending increased 35.7 percent, with one unionized employee for every eight students.

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Lies and Spies

What is the purpose of a national intelligence agency? Information and disinformation. To perceive the truth or create a mythology that benefits the agency's nation-state.
So, believing Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz a threat to the stability of America's region, the CIA armed, funded, and trained a force of 480 men led by Carlos Castillo Armas. The force invaded Guatemala on June 18, 1954, backed by a heavy campaign of psychological warfare, including bombings of Guatemala City and an anti-Árbenz radio station claiming to be genuine news of rebellion success. The invasion force actually fared poorly militarily, but the psychological warfare and the possibility of a U.S. invasion intimidated the Guatemalan army, which refused to fight. Árbenz resigned on 27 June, and following negotiations in San Salvador, Carlos Castillo Armas became President on 7 July 1954. (There is a rumor that the CIA, flushed with the success of this project, was encouraged to try a similar project in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs.)

Similarly, in the Second War, the Allies ordered heavy clothing for their troops with the hope of convincing Hitler's spies the Allies would attack Europe in the north, at least further north than Normandy.

The Russians are famous for this. They infiltrated an American church group and through them created a completely fraudulent history of African-American church burnings that embarrassed the Americans internationally. During the Second War they created an elaborate hoax implicating Churchill himself in the death of the Polish patriot, General Wladyslaw Sikorski. (This hoax was so successful it appeared as a London stage play.)

So....the Americans get information that Saddam Hussein has the plans and wherewithal to develop weapons of mass destruction. The Americans and their friends invade Iraq. What self respecting intelligence agency would not create the evidence to justify the invasion whether the WMDs were there or not? How is it possible that in our culture of insincerity and mendacity, with shameless commercial hucksterism and mortifyingly dishonest politicians, we have to have an outbreak of honesty in the Intelligence agency?