Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez moves into a luxury apartment complex that boasts infinity pool, Steinway piano and nearby Whole Foods, but has NO affordable housing units – and sits at the center of a neighborhood 'gentrification' fight

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has moved into a luxury Washington D.C. apartment building with an infinity pool and a nearby Whole Foods, it was revealed Tuesday.

What it doesn't offer is affordable housing - a platform the self-described socialist campaigned on in her bid to become the youngest female member of Congress.

Ocasio-Cortez makes $174,000 annually with her congressional salary and has used the funds to move into the posh Navy Yard neighborhood in Washington D.C. that, ironically, is also a favorite of President Donald Trump's staffers, the Washington Examiner revealed.

Last year Forbes magazine named the Navy Yard neighborhood one of the 12 coolest in the world.

It's the fast growing area in the nation's capitol and features the Nationals Ball Park; District Winery, the only winery in the city; beer gardens; posh restaurants and expensive workout studios like SolidCore and Pure Barre.

The Yards Park - situated on the banks of the Potomac River - contains a fountain, outdoor concerts, outdoor workout classes, restaurants, and speciality shops.

And the city is building a soccer stadium in the area.

The neighborhood also contains a Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, the company Ocasio-Cortez has railed against for its corporate practices.

She celebrated when Amazon announced it would not be building a second headquarters in Queens, New York, near her congressional district.

'Today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers and their neighbors defeated Amazon's corporate greed, its worker exploitation and the power of the richest man in the world,' Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter last week.

But that doesn't mean she doesn't use the company's services.

She was spotted shopping in the Whole Foods in her new D.C. neighborhood on Thursday night, Politico's Playbook reported.

But housing affordability was a major campaign issue for rising Democratic star and helped her defeat Democrat Rep. Joe Crowley in the June primary, a victory that shocked the Democratic establishment.

http://www.hideoutnow.com/2019/02/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-moves-into.html

Recent censorship throughout the Internet is not left vs. right, but instead pro-establishment vs. anti-establishment

Kyle breaks down the recent Facebook censorship. While many believe the censorship is simply going on against conservatives and those leaning right, this is far from the truth. The truth is that anti-establishment posts in general on Facebook, channels on YouTube and Twitter posts and accounts are being taken down – this is the case for those on the left and on the right.

In the case of the first example of the video, Rania Khalek, a left-wing journalist with anti-war and general anti-establishment sentiments has been censored and attacked by CNN.

From the YouTube description box:

Facebook has removed – in what some are calling the “Facebook purge”- more than 800 pages and accounts. Although the social media giant says those deleted were rule breakers engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” some of their defenders have claimed the sweeping action amounts to an attack on independent media, both representing left and right-wing political views.

Some of the sites – like “Right Wing News” and “The Anti Media” – were well-known and had millions of likes. The founders of some of the sites have taken to other platforms to deny Facebook’s claims. You can read some of their responses later in this article…

https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/anti-war-journalist-censored-by-facebook-for-bs-reason-various-examples-plus-a-great-general-breakdown-on-how-the-recent-censorship-throughout-the-internet-is-not-left-vs-right-but-instead-pro-es/

Seeking Legal Cover for War, Trump Administration Attempts to Tie Iran, al-Qaeda

2001 AUMF could be broadened to include a new Iran war

Dominated by those hawkish against Iran, the Trump Administration has a sizeable contingent that has been itching to start a war with Iran. It is a big enough concern that Congress has let this inform the language of bills.

Numerous bills, including sanctions-related bills and recent National Defense Authorization Acts, have included language declaring that nothing in the bill may be construed as authorizing the use of force against Iran. Some bills have had language to this effect as far back as 2012.

This suggests that Congress is unlikely to sign off if the administration just asks for a new war authorization specifically aimed at Iran. Instead, the administration is looking to again try to broaden the decades-old authorization they already have, hoping to squeeze one last big, plainly unintended war out of it.

To that end, officials have begun trying to advance a preposterous claim that Iran is secretly backing “high-level al-Qaeda operatives.” Iran has been at war with al-Qaeda since the group’s founding, and the Shi’ite Iranian government is fundamentally incompatible with the Salafist terrorist group.

Tying the two groups together is so absurd that US officials have rarely tried to argue for doing so, instead presenting the possibility as little more than a notion. Officials seem now to hope that this notion, repeated often enough and with enough alarmist tone, will just become widely accepted, or at least not challenged enough to be rejected out-of-hand.

It is at that point the hawks’ favorite gift that keeps on giving, the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) starts to matter. That AUMF authorized a war against al-Qaeda, and has been broadened since to include anything remotely al-Qaeda-affiliated, even groups that didn’t exist in 2001.

It was obvious the 2001 AUMF was never meant to apply to Iran, but even a plainly flimsy argument has tended to be enough to support America’s assorted other wars to come out of that authorization. Once a president picks a fight, Congressional leadership rarely has any interest in reviewing it.

https://news.antiwar.com/2019/02/19/seeking-legal-cover-for-war-trump-administration-attempts-to-tie-iran-al-qaeda/

Pierre Omidyar’s Funding of Pro-Regime-Change Networks and Partnerships with CIA Cutouts

To [Omidyar] it’s … about … integrating things together to give technocrats, business executives and government officials a God’s-eye view of the world — to manage and control society more efficiently.” — Yasha Levine, author of “Surveillance Valley: The Military History of the Internet”

As we have seen in part one of this investigation, billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has partnered closely with many of the U.S.-funded outfits that fulfill the role the CIA used to play during the Cold War in backing opposition media and civil society in countries targeted for regime change. However, Omidyar has also sought state-of-the-art design solutions from a shady U.S. government national security consulting firm with a myriad of ties to the hawkish D.C. foreign policy establishment.

In February of last year, USAID’s Global Development Lab published a series of reports furnished for it by a small, Arlington, Virginia-based company focused on design solutions for national security problems, with a mere 10 employees listed on its website and eight on its LinkedIn page. Those reports caught the attention of journalist Michael Igoe at Devex on Tuesday.

The company, Frontier Design Group, analyzed the feasibility of essentially militarizing USAID. The report proposals like “Rapid Expeditionary Development” (RED) teams. Those teams would be embedded with U.S. Special Forces, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration outside of typical USAID areas of operation. They would be “trained and authorized to conduct themselves as a force-multiplier able to contribute a full suite of security skills as needed,” the documents suggested. RED team officers would also be trained for “survival, evasion, resistance, and escape,” negotiations, civil reconnaissance, “and weapons qualification courses.”

The report also analyzed the possibility of creating a “Civilian Response Groups” — an organization that sounds like the White Helmets if they were directly controlled by Washington.

Frontier interviewed 36 experts for its report, including a 15-year USAID veteran who told them, “we have to be involved in national security or USAID will not be relevant.” The issue identified by many in the report was that USAID was losing its cutting edge and was hamstrung because it was not allowed to operate in conflict zones.

USAID told Devex that it is “still working on the details in formulating the Rapid Expeditionary Development Teams initiative.”

Another Frontier Design Group client is the Omidyar Group, further demonstrating the eBay founder’s proximity to shady government contractors.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/pierre-omidyar-funding-of-pro-regime-change-networks-and-partnerships-with-cia-cutouts/255337/

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Shaping media to gain “a God’s eye view of the world”

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a group that claims to defend press freedom on behalf of media around the world, has also been a major beneficiary of Omidyar’s fortune.

At this year’s CPJ International Press Freedom Awards, the Filipina journalist Maria Ressa received the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award. Ressa happens to be the editor of a newspaper, Rappler, that is heavily funded by Omidyar. It was another case of logrolling between two members of the billionaire’s media empire.

In the Philippines, Rappler has dedicated itself to ousting President Rodrigo Duterte, a demagogic politician whose inflammatory rhetoric and occasional entreaties to Russia and China have spawned anxiety in Washington. Duterte’s allies have struck back at the outlet, accusing it in court of violating the Philippine constitution with its foreign support. On February 12, Ressa was arrested and accused of “cyber-libel” for a 2012 article, which was later corrected, accusing a Duterte ally of human trafficking and drug smuggling. “These legal acrobatics show how far the government will go to silence journalists, including the pettiness of forcing me to spend the night in jail,” Ressa said in a press release.

Educated at Princeton, Ressa maintains powerful American allies. Just hours after her arrest and release, the Omidyar Network and the Omidyar-funded CPJ rustled up a $500,000 legal defense fund for Ressa.

Last October, Ressa appeared at the NATO-backed Atlantic Council’s Stratcom conference in Washington to detail what she described as a concerted campaign of legal intimidation and online trolling by supporters of Duterte. The Atlantic Council was hired by Facebook last year to purge its platform of so-called foreign interference and “fake news,” leading to allegations that it had presided over the removal of numerous popular alternative news sites. Before the think-tank audience, Ressa demanded that social media platforms like Facebook impose new algorithms that prioritize what she calls “traditional media” — referring presumably to outlets like her own.

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Everyone Has Fallen for the Lies About Venezuela

It turns out sociopathy is addictive. Our American empire knows no bounds to its nation-building (after nation-destroying).

There are three things I know for sure in this fanciful, sometimes inglorious experience we call life:

1 You will never have a safety pin when you need one, and you will have thousands when you don’t need one.

2 Wild animals are breathtakingly majestic until they’re crawling up your pant leg.

3 A U.S. presidential administration will never admit that it invaded another country or backed a coup attempt in order to essentially steal the natural resources (oil) of said country.

This is why it was so very shocking last week when members of the Trump administration admitted they were backing a coup attempt in order to essentially steal the natural resources (oil) of another country.

That country is Venezuela. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

Let’s take a second to go over the big three. There are three things that seem to provoke the ornery United States into overthrowing or bringing down a foreign government, no matter how many innocent civilians may die in the process. (If enough die, the perpetrators often get nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.) If your country has one of these things, the U.S. might screw with you. If your country has two of these things, the U.S. will definitely screw with you. If your country has three of these things, then look behind you, because the U.S. is currently screwing you:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/everyone-has-fallen-for-the-lies-about-venezuela/255317/

Military, Deep State and the American Innocence

Like fish in the water, Americans have lost the ability to notice the pervasive and omnipresent propaganda.

Incisive and timely article first posted by Global Research on July 22, 2018

While only 11% of Americans trust Congress, a whopping 74% have a “great deal or quite a lot of” trust in the military, which also vastly outperforms newspapers (23%) and even the U.S. Supreme Court (37%). Similarly, the CIA and the FBI get an “excellent” rating from 58% of Americans. While reverence to military is quite common all over the world – perhaps related to evolutionary fear – it behooves us to be a bit more critical and objective. Like the Old Testament characters who never asked Moses for evidence regarding the burning bush, Americans blindly accept all verdicts from the intelligence agencies. The rise of the colossal military and the “Deep State” are new phenomenons in American history, and a dispassionate scrutiny underscores the need for more vigilance on our part.

Military-industrial complex – Eisenhower

While many Americans consider it heretical to question the U.S. military, none other than a five-star military general and U.S. president did just that. In an extraordinary farewell speech in 1961, Eisenhower went on national TV and said, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Such a speech would now be derided as a conspiracy theory and even labeled as treasonous.

CIA – Truman

Guess who thought that the CIA had turned into an American Gestapo? Harry Truman, the US president who created the CIA. He said in his biography, “Those fellows in the CIA don’t just report on wars, they go out and make their own (wars), and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble. The CIA has become a government all of its own.”

Former Director of the CIA, William Colby, described CIA’s culture in his memoiras follows: “cult of intelligence … that held itself to be above the normal processes of society, with its own rationale and justification, beyond the restraints of the Constitution …”

Election meddling and coups by the CIA

Since World War II, the CIA has meddled in more than 80 foreign elections around the world (doesn’t include coups and regime changes!).

The US Senate’s Church Committee in 1975 documented several instances of US meddling in other nations. The operations included suitcases of cash to bribe politicians and voters, manuals for psychological warfare, sensational fake news, organized mass protests, armed violent oppositions etc.

Starting in the 1980’s, the Deep State refined its plans for regime changes, resorting to the use of sophisticated NGO’s such as the USAID, NED and Open Society Foundations of George Soros, which all specialize in mass propaganda and color revolutions.

When asked a few months ago, if we still meddle in other countries’ elections, CIA director James Woolsey grinned and responded, “myum, myum, myum.”

There are incontrovertible proofs for some of the coups, thanks to declassified CIA documents – for example, the overthrow of democratically elected leaders in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.

Assassinations

Recently released “JFK Files” from the CIA archives show detailed plans to assassinate Fidel Castro that included exploding cigars and tuberculosis-laced diving suit. Other leaders targeted in these documents include General Trujillo of Dominican Republic and Patrice Lumumba of Congo.

William Blum has done extensive research and documented numerous foreign assassinations – successful and attempted – by the CIA and/or the US military.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/military-deep-state-and-the-american-innocence/5648122

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Political Correctness Demands Diversity in Everything but Thought

For 50 years I’ve been painstakingly cataloguing the brutal militarism and human-rights violations of US foreign policy, building up in the process a very loyal audience.

To my great surprise, when I recently wrote about the brutal militarism and human-rights violations of the Islamic State, I received more criticism from my readers than I’ve gotten for anything I’ve ever written. Dozens of them asked to be removed from my mailing list, as many as I’d normally get in a full year. Others were convinced that it couldn’t actually be me who was the author of such words, that I must have been hacked. Some wondered whether my recent illness had affected my mind. Literally! And almost all of the Internet magazines which regularly print me did not do so with this article.

Now why should this be?

My crime was being politically incorrect. The Islamic State, you see, is composed of Muslims, and the United States and its Western allies have bombed many Muslim countries in the recent past killing thousands of Muslims and causing widespread horror. Therefore, whatever ISIS and its allies do is “revenge”, simple revenge, and should not be condemned by anyone calling himself a progressive; least of all should violence be carried out against these poor aggrieved jihadists.

Moreover, inasmuch as ISIS is the offspring of religion, this adds to my political incorrectness: I’m attacking religion, God forgive me.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/political-correctness-demands-diversity-in-everything-but-thought/5669164

Now in 80 Countries, The American War on Terror Couldn’t Be More Global

By the end of 2019, Washington’s global war will cost American taxpayers no less than $5.9 trillion already spent and in commitments to caring for veterans of the war throughout their lifetimes.

In September 2001, the Bush administration launched the “Global War on Terror.” Though “global” has long since been dropped from the name, as it turns out, they weren’t kidding.

When I first set out to map all the places in the world where the United States is still fighting terrorism so many years later, I didn’t think it would be that hard to do. This was before the 2017 incident in Niger in which four American soldiers were killed on a counterterror mission and Americans were given an inkling of how far-reaching the war on terrorism might really be. I imagined a map that would highlight Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria — the places many Americans automatically think of in association with the war on terror — as well as perhaps a dozen less-noticed countries like the Philippines and Somalia. I had no idea that I was embarking on a research odyssey that would, in its second annual update, map U.S. counterterror missions in 80 countries in 2017 and 2018, or 40% of the nations on this planet (a map first featured in Smithsonian magazine).

As co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, I’m all too aware of the costs that accompany such a sprawling overseas presence. Our project’s research shows that, since 2001, the U.S. war on terror has resulted in the loss — conservatively estimated — of almost half a million lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone. By the end of 2019, we also estimate that Washington’s global war will cost American taxpayers no less than $5.9 trillion already spent and in commitments to caring for veterans of the war throughout their lifetimes.

In general, the American public has largely ignored these post-9/11 wars and their costs. But the vastness of Washington’s counterterror activities suggests, now more than ever, that it’s time to pay attention. Recently, the Trump administration has been talking of withdrawing from Syria and negotiating peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet, unbeknownst to many Americans, the war on terror reaches far beyond such lands and under Trump is actually ramping up in a number of places. That our counterterror missions are so extensive and their costs so staggeringly high should prompt Americans to demand answers to a few obvious and urgent questions: Is this global war truly making Americans safer? Is it reducing violence against civilians in the U.S. and other places? If, as I believe, the answer to both those questions is no, then isn’t there a more effective way to accomplish such goals?

https://www.mintpressnews.com/now-in-80-countries-the-american-war-on-terror-couldnt-be-more-global/255325/

>>5286932

Meanwhile killing for Israel and the cabal continues WW