As the corporate media focuses international attention on the 50-year anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, our knowledge of modern technological limitations forces us to ask how a live television broadcast was possible from 240,000 miles away in 1969. We’ve all seen live broadcasts where parties experience significant delay time between question and response as the live signal crawls thousands of miles between them, then back to viewers. Yet, we’re expected to believe that CBS was capable of broadcasting live footage from the moon, fifty years ago, without any delay whatsoever. Unfortunately most who question the official narrative of the Apollo program insist that the image alteration and obviously faked television footage are evidence enough to prove NASA never went to the moon. Is it possible that NASA did successfully complete its mission, but concealed the truth with the magic of the silver screen by showing the world staged movie sets instead of the authentic mission footage?

In his classic, A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean writes, “The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.” Though historians don’t agree unanimously on the exact translation of the word “Missoula”, the trading post that started out as the “Hellgate Village” has come to be known by many names over the decades, including the City-with-Soul, Zootown, the Hub of Five Valleys, and the Garden City. It’s also been referred to as the Little Bigtown, not only in reference to the Custer Battleground in eastern Montana, but because Missoula is the best of both worlds. It’s a bustling urban area with deer frolicking in the streets and Osprey hovering over Missoula’s many rivers, all teaming with fish. This emerald of the Rockies is the Golden Mean between urban and rural; progressive and classical. Missoula’s modern influence is world renowned, attracting worldwide attention from a wide range of audiences for it’s university, biodiversity, artistic relevance, outdoor enthusiasm, cultural tolerance, community focus, and stunning beauty. And while the community has been compared to places like Berkeley and Amsterdam, there really is nowhere quite as weird or as free as Missoula, Montana.

How is it possible that amid a $94-Trillion economy, median wages are in decline? America’s economic policy constitutes a kind of structural genocide, killing 18 million people per year worldwide through the violence of poverty and socioeconomic inequality. Economic busts are good for the rich because they create cheap labor and allow banks to seize properties the poor can’t pay for anymore. All that wealth consolidates at the top to the point where 70% of the population can no longer generate enough income to afford basic necessities without taking on ever-increasing levels of debt that they will never be able to pay back under current economic policy because the financial opportunities necessary to generate the income do not exist. The entire economy is based on unnecessary consumption that relies on advertising to create artificial demand, and rewards manufactured scarcity, be it arbitrarily priced pharmaceuticals or polluting watersheds to increase bottled water sales.

Of the 213 million working-age Americans, there are only 100.6 million full-time workers, leaving 107 million people to fight over 28 million part-time jobs, usually without benefits and usually at minimum wage.

The stock market is so big it’s now worth $30 trillion, but there is only $3.8 Trillion of hard cash circulating in the US economy. And any money you make from stocks comes from other investors pumping new money in.

The SEC defines a Ponzi Scheme as:

“an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors”

The goal is to make money out of nothing, sell it to people, and then when the people can’t pay, to take their property. 83% of the stocks are owned by 1% of the population and constitute nothing but speculative gambling. The $700-Billion float of Apple has nothing to do with what that company actually produces at all. It’s simply a figure representing the speculations of traders. And for some reason, retirement funds are connected to this inflationary-driven market, coercing the whole society into participating in a siphoning machine that takes money from the lower class and delivers it to the upper class through different mechanisms.

Words have the power to shape thought. They form the basis of society from everyday interactions to our highest ideals. Since our ability to think and communicate clearly is what most directly separates egalitarian nations from totalitarian dictatorships, attacks on language always constitute attempts toward authoritarian overreach. The Corporate mercenaries running our world get away with their pillaging by burying their crimes in euphemism and convoluted sentence structures, thereby making terrible atrocities sound acceptable. The word torture becomes Enhanced Interrogation; theft becomes Civil Asset Forfeiture; genocide becomes Ethnic Cleansing; kidnapping becomes Extraordinary Rendition; assassinations becomes Extrajudicial Killing; military invasions are deemed Humanitarian Interventions; provoking a war is termed Crisis Initiation; and the list goes on an on. Such deliberate irony corrupts the very ideas our words refer to, leaving us in a hypnotic state of cognitive dissonance in which we are compelled to disregard our own perception in place of the officially dictated version of events. The result is a world in which even the privacy of one’s own thought process is violated.

Until now, the Justice Department has always distinguished between government employees who leak classified information and outlets that publish it, due to protections guaranteed by the First Amendment. The purpose of the First Amendment was never to lionize The Press into a privileged institution. It protects all persons in their right to print, speak, write, report and publish what they will. But the DOJ’s unprecedented decision to indict Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange for violating the Espionage Act seeks to penalize Assange for simply “Encouraging and Inducing” Chelsea Manning’s disclosures. Despite rampant innuendo from the corporate media, the charges against Assange have nothing to do with Wikileaks’ publication of Emails from the DNC and Hillary’s private server, but for revealing the war crimes of the Bush Administration. The Espionage Act has always been used as a weapon used to attack free speech and dissent, but now threatens to finally bring about Orwellian censorship. We are all Julian Assange.