Off His Onion

Iran is a great country for kebab; their pretty if well-covered girls are fine; but sense of humour is just not their forte. Their state media repeatedly broadcasted items lifted from the Onion, a satirical magazine taking them for literal truth. The Onion ran a story about American farmers who would rather have a drink with Ahmadinejad than with Obama, and their Fars news agency duly reprinted it. The Onion faked an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, and Iranian state-owned Press TV took it for a real thing.

And now, a new faux-pas. The same Iranian state-owned Press TV published an attack on Julian Assange with a bombastic claim: “Exclusive: Assange-Mossad ties unveiled”. A brief check shows an identical piece appeared onThe Veterans Today site. Both pieces are identical, both “exclusive” and both written by the same person, a Gordon Duff, wearing two hats, that of “the chief editor of VT” and that of a “columnist of Press TV”. Oy, it would be better to stick to the Onion.

Not only it is not “exclusive”, there is no “revelation” either. In his column, Duff claims that “Assange, an intelligence asset of Israel, as Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out on December 2, 2010 on National Public Radio in an interview with Judy Woodruff, one tasked with supplying a platform for Israeli intelligence to insert carefully crafted “pointed intelligence” wrapped in “Wikileaks.” A very strong claim! Who would know better than Zbigniew Brzezinski, whether Assange is an intelligence asset or not? If he says so, it is certainly true. But alas, it is not so. In the interview, or anywhere else, or on any other occasion Zbigniew Brzezinski did not say anything similar about Julian Assange.

So, does Duff brazenly lie? No, he cheats the reader. Brzezinski explained what is “intelligence asset”, and Duff built the sentence so a careless reader would think Brzezinski related to Assange. Crafty trick! He could say: Assange, a vile paedophile, as the head of London police said, one who lusts after small children, and we would think that the Head of Scotland Yard confirmed criminality of Assange. He should be a lawyer, this Duff, and make good money.

The centrepiece is the absurd claim that by accusing President Obama of seeking to exploit the Arab spring revolutions for political gain, Assange “supported Romney, just like Netanyahu”. This is too silly even for the Onion! Julian Assange called upon Obama   to cease persecution of Wikileaks and of Sergeant Manning, and he said that Obama’s vocal support for freedom of expression had not been translated into action. All that is true: Obama was and is a big disappointment for his voters. He uses drones to kill people more often than any US president. He used and derailed the Arab Spring for the imperial benefit. He was beastly to the Wikileaks. But nothing whatsoever would justify Duff’s daffy assertion that “along with Netanyahu, Assange has tried to insert his way into the American election on the side of a losing candidate whose platform is simply war with Iran.”

He could say the same about any critic of Obama, including theCounterpunch late co-editor Alex Cockburn. Duff goes on: “this week, from his balcony at the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange unleashed his program, carefully coordinated with the world’s druglords, his “bankster” friends and, closest of all, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, his strongest supporter, one to interfere in the American election on behalf of Mitt Romney.” Is there any basis for this wild accusation? None whatsoever. Neither druglords, nor banksters nor Netanyahu neither Romney never expressed a single positive assessment of Julian, neither he of them. Probably Romney would kill Assange by now if he could, and so would bankers, as he published some Bank of America data.

Every line in this lengthy article is zanier than the preceding one. Duff writes: “We got to know Assange initially with his video of a US helicopter killing civilians in Iraq.  The problem is, of course, Assange supported the war in Iraq, supported a US attack on Iran for Iraq (whatever this means – ISH), supported war with Pakistan, supports US interference in Syria and, where he stands apart from most well informed people of the world, is a lead figure in suppressing an investigation of 9/11.”

Duff forgot to mention that Assange started World War One and World War Two, supported the Inquisition and is a leading figure behind the global warming (or cooling, or both). For the sake of innocent readers who just now hatched from an egg in rural Kentucky, let it be added, that Assange was and is strongly anti-war, and his publications were instrumental in recognising the sheer criminality of the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

“Assange, living as a princeling for years” – he writes of a man who is locked up for two years for no crime and who hardly had had money for a bus ride. “Assange is a pure Islamophobe” – no reasons given, but believe Duff, he knows. Or even better one: “Julian Assange is the darling of Europe’s ultra-nationalists and “anti-immigration” crowd, seemingly a genetic twin to Andrew Breveik, the Norwegian mass murderer who killed 77 children of party members who supported the Israeli boycott.” Any proof? A quote from Julian, or a quote from Breivik, or at least a quote from “anti-immigration crowd”? Expectedly, none whatsoever. Assange is very far removed from all the nationalist scene, he never was interested in them, or they in him. I do not know why Duff failed to mention that Assange is Jack the Ripper.

Here is another daffy assertion: “When, back in early 2011, it was exposed to the world that all Wikileaks were filtered through Israel and then the “pop culture” mainstream media before release, meaning there is no more censored source of information than Wikileaks, he fell from grace.” Was it exposed? By whom, I pray? From whose grace Julian fell? Actually, I know the answer. It is Duff, who wrote that Wikileaks work from Israel. And then, I presume, Julian fell from grace with Duff’s readers. Was there any basis for it? Again, for the same Kentucky’s chicken benefit, none whatsoever. Julian Assange did not write the cables: the US diplomats did. As I explained on the Counterpunch site, the State Department cables are not overtly critical to Israel, for the US diplomats know that it would jeopardise their career.

One can go on forever, for every single sentence in the lengthy article is a sheer lie and baseless invention. So it was a year ago, and two years ago; as long as I am aware of Mr Duff’s daffy writing. As a man who professionally works on the very edge of the loonies’ cyberspace, I know of him, of his ilk and of his readers. They are mainly the guys who see the Mossad behind everything, including sunset and sunrise. They are the softest target for cheating, Duff style. Just tell them “It is Mossad”, and they will ask no questions. Tell them Ahmadinejad or Putin is a Jew, they would never doubt it.

I am rather fond of the loonies and almost-loonies: they are seeking answers, and it is not their fault that they can’t find them. It does not matter for me what makes Mr Duff tick. Is it a result of his many wounds and contusions acquired during his military service, or is it his innate daffiness, or his friendship with some Pakistani intelligence officers, or does he cover the loony edge for the careful CIA operators who think that even the loonies should be infected with hate to Julian Assange like the feminists were thanks to Anna Ardin and the Jews thanks to the Private Eye? Who knows, who cares…

It never occurred to me to debunk his nonsense, like one does not debunk Grey Aliens and Lizards. So why now?

It is because Iran should be taken seriously, and it should take itself seriously. Whether they want to have a nuclear weapon or not, if such a possibility is ever been pondered, they should watch over what they say and over what their state media reports. Judging by this publication, Iranians profoundly failed, and this failure is worse than one of Siemens booby-trapped equipment. Their discourse can’t rely upon the Onion nor upon those who are gone off their onion.

Syria, The Story Thus Far

“Today, many Americans are asking — indeed I ask myself,” Hillary Clinton said, “how can this happen? How can this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This question reflects just how complicated, and at times, how confounding the world can be.” ¹

The Secretary of State was referring to the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya September 11 that killed the US ambassador and three other Americans. US intelligence agencies have now stated that the attackers had ties to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.²

Yes, the world can indeed be complicated and confounding. But we have learned a few things. The United States began blasting Libya with missiles with the full knowledge that they were fighting on the same side as the al-Qaeda types. Benghazi was and is the headquarters for Muslim fundamentalists of various stripes in North Africa. However, it’s incorrect to claim that the United States (aka NATO) saved the city from destruction. The story of the “imminent” invasion of Benghazi by Moammar Gaddafi’s forces last year was only propaganda to justify Western intervention. And now the United States is intervening — at present without actual gunfire, as far as is known — against the government of Syria, with the full knowledge that they’re again on the same side as the al-Qaeda types. A rash of suicide bombings against Syrian government targets is sufficient by itself to dispel any doubts about that. And once again, the United States is participating in the overthrow of a secular Mideast government.

At the same time, the Muslim fundamentalists in Syria, as in Libya, can have no illusions that America loves them. A half century of US assaults on Mideast countries, the establishment of American military bases in the holy land of Saudi Arabia, and US support for dictatorships and for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians have relieved them of such fanciful thoughts. So why is the United States looking to forcefully intervene once again? A tale told many times — world domination, oil, Israel, ideology, etc. Assad of Syria, like Gaddafi of Libya, has shown little promise as a reliable client state so vital to the American Empire.

It’s only the barrier set up by Russia and China on the UN Security Council that keeps NATO (aka the United States) from unleashing thousands of airborne missiles to “liberate” Syria as they did Libya. Russian and Chinese leaders claim that they were misled about Libya by the United States, that all they had agreed to was enforcing a “no-fly zone”, not seven months of almost daily missile attacks against the land and people of Libya. Although it’s very fortunate that the two powers refuse to give the US another green light, it’s difficult to believe that they were actually deceived last spring in regard to Libya. NATO doesn’t do peacekeeping or humanitarian interventions; it does war; bloody, awful war; and regime change. And they would undoubtedly be itching to show off their specialty in Syria — perhaps even without Security Council blessing — except that NATO and the US always prefer to attack people who are exceptionally defenseless, and Syria has ballistic missile capabilities and chemical weapons.

It’s likely that the American elections also serve to keep Obama from expanding the US role in Syria. He may have concluded that there are more votes in the Democratic Party base for peace this time than for waging war against his eighth (sic) country.

The propaganda bias in the Western media has been extreme. Day after day, month after month, we’ve been told of Syrian government attacks, using horrible means, almost invariably with the victims described as unarmed civilians; without any proof, often without any logic, that it was actually the government behind a particular attack, with the story’s source turning out to be an anti-government organization; rarely informing us of similar behavior on the part of the rebel forces. In May, the BBC included pictures of mass graves in Iraq in their coverage of an alleged Syrian government massacre in Houla, Syria. The station later apologized for the pictures saying that they had been submitted to the BBC by a rebel group. ³ On June 7, Germany’s leading daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, citing opponents of Assad, reported that the Houla massacre was in fact committed by anti-Assad Sunni militants, and that the bulk of the victims were members of the Alawi and Shia minorities, which have been largely supportive of Assad.

According to a report of Stratfor, the private and conservative American intelligence firm with high-level connections, many of whose emails were obtained by Wikileaks: “most of the [Syrian] opposition’s more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue.” They claimed “that regime forces besieged Homs and imposed a 72-hour deadline for Syrian defectors to surrender themselves and their weapons or face a potential massacre.” That news made international headlines. Stratfor’s investigation, however, found “no signs of a massacre”, and warned that “opposition forces have an interest in portraying an impending massacre, hoping to mimic the conditions that propelled a foreign military intervention in Libya.” Stratfor then stated that any suggestions of massacres were unlikely because the Syrian “regime has calibrated its crackdowns to avoid just such a scenario … that could lead to an intervention based on humanitarian grounds.”⁴

Democracy Now — long a standard of progressive radio-TV news — has been almost as bad as CNN and al Jazeera (the latter owned by Qatar, an active military participant in both Libya and Syria). The heavy bias ofDemocracy Now in this area goes back to the very beginning of the Arab Spring. The program made some unfortunate choices in its mideast news correspondents, seemingly only because they spoke Arabic and/or had contacts in the region. Where have you gone Amy Goodman? RT (Russia Today) has stood almost alone amongst English-language television news sources in offering an alternative to the official Western line.

Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research, notes that “Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now Syria are but a sequence of stops on a global roadmap of permanent war that also swings through Iran. Russia and China are the terminal targets.” When the Syrian government is overthrown — and in all likelihood the Western forces will not relent until that happens — the al Qaeda types will be dominant in the Syrian version of Benghazi. The American ambassador would be well advised to not visit.

Can you believe that I almost feel sorry for the American military?

In Afghanistan, the US military has tried training sessions, embedded cultural advisers, recommended reading lists, and even a video game designed to school American troops in local custom. But 11 years into the war, NATO troops and Afghan soldiers are still beset by a dangerous lack of cultural awareness, officials say, contributing to a string of attacks by Afghan police and soldiers against their military partners. Fifty-one coalition troops have been killed this year by their Afghan counterparts. While some insider attacks have been attributed to Taliban infiltrators, military officials say the majority stem from personal disputes and misunderstandings.

So the Afghan army is trying something new, most likely with American input: a guide to the strange ways of the American soldier. The goal is to convince Afghan troops that when their Western counterparts do something deeply insulting, it’s likely a product of cultural ignorance and not worthy of revenge. The pamphlet they’ve produced includes the following advice:

• “Please do not get offended if you see a NATO member blowing his/her nose in front of you.”
• “When Coalition members get excited, they may show their excitement by patting one another on the back or the behind. They may even do this to you if they are proud of the job you’ve done. Once again, they don’t mean to offend you.”
• “When someone feels comfortable in your presence, they may even put their feet on their own desk while speaking with you. They are by no means trying to offend you. They simply don’t know or have forgotten the Afghan custom.” (Pointing the soles of one’s shoes at someone is considered a grievous insult in Afghanistan.)
• The guide also warns Afghan soldiers that Western troops might wink at them or inquire about their female relatives or expose their private parts while showering — all inappropriate actions by Afghan standards.⁵

Hmmm. I wonder if the manual advises telling Afghan soldiers that urinating on dead Afghan bodies, cutting off fingers, and burning the Koran are all nothing more than good ol’ Yankee customs, meaning no offense of course.

And does it point out that no Afghan should be insulted by being tortured in an American military prison since the same is done at home to American prisoners.

Most importantly, the Afghan people must be made to understand that bombing them, invading them, and occupying them for 11 years are all for their own good. It’s called “freedom and democracy”.

I almost feel sorry for the American military in Afghanistan. As I’ve written about the US soldiers in Iraq, they’re “can-do” Americans, accustomed to getting their way, habituated to thinking of themselves as the best, expecting the world to share that sentiment, and they’re frustrated as hell, unable to figure out “why they hate us”, why we can’t win them over, why we can’t at least wipe them out. Don’t they want freedom and democracy? … They’re can-do Americans, using good ol’ American know-how and Madison Avenue savvy, sales campaigns, public relations, advertising, selling the US brand, just like they do it back home; employing media experts, psychologists, even anthropologists … and nothing helps. And how can it if the product you’re selling is toxic, inherently, from birth, if you’re ruining your customers’ lives, with no regard for any kind of law or morality, health or environment. They’re can-do Americans, used to playing by the rules — theirs; and they’re frustrated as hell.

In case you’re distressed about the possibility of a Romney-Ryan government, here’s some good news:

There are many people in the United States who are reluctant to be active against US foreign policy, or even seriously criticize it, because a Democrat is in the White House, a man promising lots of hope and change. Some of them, however, might become part of the anti-war movement if a Republican were in the White House, even though pursuing the same foreign policy. And we can be sure the policy would be the same for there’s no difference between the two parties when it comes to foreign policy. There’s simply no difference, period, though each party changes its rhetoric a bit depending on whether it’s in the White House or on the outside looking in.

Similarly, the movement for a national single-payer health insurance program has been set back because of President Obama. His health program is like prescribing an aspirin for cancer, but the few baby steps the program takes toward bringing the United States into the 21st century amongst developed nations is enough to keep many American health-care activists content for the time being, especially with Obama facing a tough election. They are satisfied with so little. With a Republican in the White House, however, there might be a resurgence of a more militant health-care activism.

Moreover, if the Republicans had been in power the past three years and done EXACTLY what Obama has done in the sphere of civil liberties and human rights, many Obamaites would have no problem calling the United States by its right name: a police state. I mean that literally. Not the worst police state in the history of the world. Not even the worst police state in the world today. But, nonetheless, a police state. Just read the news each day, carefully.

Sam Smith, editor of the Progressive Review, has written: “Barack Obama is the most conservative Democratic president we’ve ever had. In an earlier time, there would have been a name for him: Republican.”

Oh but there’s Social Security and Medicare, you say. Can Romney be trusted to not make serious cuts to these vital programs? His choice of running mate, Paul Ryan, is practically a poster child for such cuts.

Well, can Obama be trusted to not make such cuts? Consider this recent comment in the New York Times: “[Obama] particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security.” ⁶

As somebody once said, the United States doesn’t need a third party. It needs a second party.

The only important cause that might significantly benefit from a Democratic administration is appointments to the Supreme Court, if there is in fact an opening. But does this fully override the benefits of Obama being out of office as outlined above?

Dear Reader: I truthfully do not want to be so cynical. Despite the quips, it’s not really fun. But how else can one react to the Republicans and Democrats given their behavior at their recent conventions? If they can so obviously ignore the wishes of their own delegates, what can the average American citizen expect? Have a look at these remarkable scenes caught on video or read this account of the voice votes at the recent conventions.

How many voters does it take to change a light bulb?

None. Because voters can’t change anything.

So what to do?

As I’ve said before: Inasmuch as I can’t see violent revolution succeeding in the United States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn’t quite match the government’s firepower, not to mention its viciousness), I can offer no solution to stopping the imperial beast other than this: Educate yourself and as many others as you can, raising their political and ideological consciousness, providing them with the factual ammunition and arguments needed to sway others, increasing the number of those in the opposition until it raises the political price for those in power, until it reaches a critical mass, at which point … I can’t predict the form the explosion will take or what might be the trigger … But you have to have faith. And courage.

Some further thoughts on American elections and democracy:

Richard Reeves: “The American political system is essentially a contract between the Republican and Democratic parties, enforced by federal and state two-party laws, all designed to guarantee the survival of both no matter how many people despise or ignore them.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): “In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from one side to the other, thinking they will be more comfortable.”

Alexander Cockburn: “There was a time once when ‘lesser of two evils’ actually meant something momentous, like the choice between starving to death on a lifeboat, or eating the first mate.”

U.N. Human Development Report, 1993: “Elections are a necessary, but certainly not a sufficient, condition for democracy. Political participation is not just a casting of votes. It is a way of life.”

Gore Vidal: “How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It’s the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It’s been 200 years at it. It’s superb.”

Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius: “The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.”

Michael Parenti: “As demonstrated in Russia and numerous other countries, when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.”

Notes

1. USA Today, September 12, 2012
2. Washington Post, September 28, 2012
3. BBC News, May 29, 2012
4. Huffington Post, December 19, 2011
5. Washington Post, September 28, 2012
6. New York Times, “Obama Is an Avid Reader, and Critic, of the News“, Amy Chozick, August 8, 2012

The Republicans Cross The Rubicon

Does anyone remember when National Public Radio was an independent voice?

During the 1980s NPR was continually on the case of the Reagan administration. NPR certainly had a Democratic slant, and a lot of its reporting about the Reagan administration was one-sided. Yet, NPR was an independent voice, and it sometimes got things correct.

In the 21st century that voice has disappeared, which was the intention of the George W. Bush regime. Bush put a Republican woman in charge who made it clear to NPR producers and show hosts that the federal part of their funding was at risk.

Money often over-rules principle, and when corporations added their really big money NPR collapsed. Today the local stations still pretend to be funded by listeners, but if you have noticed, as I have, there are now a large number of corporate advertisements, disguised in the traditional terms “with support from . . .” If you are not listening to classical music, you are listening to corporate advertisements.

Today the entire “mainstream media” is closed to truth-tellers. The US media is Washington’s propaganda ministry. The US media has only one function–to lie for Washington.

What reminded me of NPR’s surrender was NPR’s August 31 report with its two regular talking voice political pundits discussing the Republican Convention and Romney’s speech. After witnessing the Republicans at their nominating convention at Tampa violate all their own rules and ride roughshod over the Ron Paul delegates, one expected some discussion of the Republican Party’s refusal to allow Ron Paul to be placed in nomination or his delegate account to be announced.

The operative question was obvious: How can the American people trust the Republicans with the awesome power of the executive branch when the Republican Party just finished demonstrating for all to see its Stalinist qualities by crushing the anti-war, anti-police state wing of its party?

The authoritarianism was gratuitous. Romney had a sufficient number of delegates to be nominated. It would have cost Romney nothing to follow the rules and allow Ron Paul to be placed in nomination and his delegate numbers to be reported. Instead, Romney wrote off the liberty contingent of the Republican Party. The Brownshirts demonstrated their power.

The last Republican who wrote off a chunk of his own party was Barry Goldwater, and he went down to crushing defeat. Makes one wonder if the Republicans are relying on those electronic voting machines programed with proprietary Republican software that leave no paper trail. The Democrats have acquiesced to Republican election theft. There have been numerous cases where exit polls indicate that voters chose a different candidate than the one chosen by the Republican programmed voting machines.

One would have thought that NPR and its pundits would have found the parallel with Goldwater worth comment, but the suppression of the Ron Paul delegates was already down the memory hole.

One would also have thought that NPR and its pundits would have found Clint Eastwood’s speech a fascinating topic of discussion. Eastwood had a Republican National Committee approved speech, but discarded it. Instead, Eastwood stood beside an empty chair and pretended to be talking to Obama, but it could just as well have been Romney in the chair. By pretending to be talking to Obama, Eastwood made his points without eliciting boos from the Republican audience.

Not many in the Republican audience caught on, but there were some stony faces when Eastwood said “I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there are 23 million unemployed people in this country.” More stony Republican faces when Eastwood showed his opposition to the Iraq and Afghan wars and asks the chair, “why don’t you just bring them [the troops] home tomorrow morning?” Those who thought he was digging at Obama cheered; those who realized he was criticizing hardline Republican positions were displeased.

But NPR and the US media in general are uncomfortable with such real news as a political party being told off by one of its heroes and a political party sufficiently stupid to repeat Barry Goldwater’s mistake. The establishment might complain. The money might dry up or employees be fired for permitting such a story to be aired. The Democrats lost their independent financing when jobs offshoring destroyed the unions. There are no longer countervailing powers to Wall Street and the corporations, which have been endowed by the Republican US Supreme Court with First Amendment rights to purchase US elections, and placed in charge of the US Treasury, the regulatory agencies and the Federal Reserve.

In Tampa the Republicans wrote off the Ron Paul vote, because they are enamored of power and its gratuitous demonstration. Can people so desirous of power and the thrill of its use be trusted to let go of power when they lose the next election? There are enough presidential executive orders and national security orders, even some signed by the Democrat Obama, that any president can assert them and refuse to face election.

Once Rome accepted Julius Caesar’s coup, the Roman Republic was gone. Those who tried to save the Roman Republic by assassinating Caesar failed, because the majority of the legions had gone over to the dictatorship, which promised them more money than the Republic had. Caesar’s name became the title for Rome’s dictators.

In the US, even your friendly local police have gone over to dictatorship. And they are armed with its tools. A friend, a competitive shooter for accuracy, told me that as he left his gun club on August 27, a local sheriff department entered in a military armored vehicle, something one would expect to see on a battlefield, followed by a large sheriff’s department truck full of military equipment. He says that the gun club allows local police to use the club’s facilities so that club members are not stopped and harassed about their firearms as they go to and from the club. He reports that the police will line up 30 abreast, with automatic weapons, not allowed to club members, and fire at one target, with 30 police emptying 30-round magazines at the same target.

He once asked our protectors if they were practicing for some competition. The answer was, “No, we are preparing to control the outcome when there is trouble.”

Control is the operative word. We have seen for a number of years now that the Republican Party is power-addicted. Remember when the Bush administration fired the US Attorneys who refused the order to indict only Democrats? Remember the Republican Party’s transparent frame-up of popular Alabama Democratic governor Don Siegelman? Evidence indicates that the Republican operative Karl Rove took advantage of a Republican federal judge, vulnerable according to news reports to corruption charges, and a compliant Republican US attorney in Alabama to railroad Governor Siegelman. The message to Democrats was: if you get elected in our Southern Territory, we will get you.

But never fear, we have “freedom and democracy.” George W. Bush told us so himself.

The weak, chicken-hearted Obama administration has not commuted Siegelman’s outrageous sentence. The inability of the Democrats to stand up for their own members and their own principles is the best indication we have that Republican tyranny will prevail.

It didn’t take Caesar George W. Bush 10 minutes to wipe out the prison sentence of vice president Dick Cheney’s chief aid for revealing the identity of a CIA operative, a felony under US law. But the Obama Justice (sic) Department supports Karl Rove’s destruction of one of its most popular governors.

It was the German left-wing’s weak opposition to the National Socialists that gave the world Hitler.

The Republican Party has become the Party of Hate. Decades of frustration have made Republicans mean. They object to everything that has happened since the Great Depression in the 1930s to make the US a more just and humane society.

The Republican Party wants power so that it can smash all vestiges of regulation and welfare and all those of whom Republicans disapprove: the poor, the minorities, liberals, the imagined “foreign enemies,” war protestors and others who challenge authority, those American weaklings who have compassion for the unfortunate, the US Constitution, that pinko-liberal-commie document that coddles criminals, illegal aliens, and terrorists, and all dissenters from the policy of enriching the one percent at the expense of the 99 percent.

Above all else, the Republicans want to turn Social Security and Medicare into profit centers for private corporations.

Would the world be surprised if Republicans donned brown shirts? America has declared itself to be “the indispensable nation,” justifying its hegemony over the world. Any country that does not submit to Washington is “a foe.” The neoconservative propaganda that America is the indispensable nation with a right to world hegemony sounds a lot like “Deutschland uber alles.”

A decade ago the Bush regime demonstrated that it could over-ride US statutory law, the US Constitution, and the constitutional separation of powers in order to concentrate unaccountable power in the office of the president.

The Democrats, when they gained control of Congress in the mid-term elections, did nothing about the unprecedented legal and constitutional crimes of George W. Bush. The Democratic Speaker of the US House of Representatives, who could easily have impeached George W. Bush for his obvious crimes against US law and the US Constitution, announced that “impeachment is off the table.” Money was more important to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi than the rule of law.

When a people have no political party that represents them, they are doomed to tyranny.

And to war.

Russia and China are in the way of Washington’s hegemony. Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, has declared Russia to be “our number one geopolitical foe” for opposing Washington’s plans to overthrow by violence the Syrian government. Why is overthrowing the Syrian government so advantageous to Washington that Romney in a fit of pique recklessly brought the United States into direct confrontation with Russia?

Arrogance and hubris lead to wars. Do Americans really want a person as president who is so reckless as to gratuitously declare a large nuclear-armed country to be our number one enemy? The American and Israeli trained Georgian army did not last an hour when the former Soviet republic foolishly, on Washington’s encouragement, provoked the Russian bear.

Meanwhile the Obama regime, concerned with China’s rapid economic rise, has indicated that it thinks China is the number one enemy. The Obama regime has forgot that China, when a primitive, backward country, fought the US to a stalemate in Korea more than a half century ago.

The Obama regime has announced that the US Navy is being repositioned to the Eastern Pacific, that the US regards the South China Sea as America’s national interest, and that new naval, air, and troop bases are being established in the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere in the region. The purpose of these bases is to block China’s access to energy and raw materials, which is what Washington did to Japan in the 1930s.

Are Americans aware that the hubris and idiocy of their political leaders have now saddled Americans with the burden of two number one enemies, both well equipped with armies and nuclear weapons? Only Iran can be happy about this as it moves Iran off the front burner.

Washington is putting its forward military bases in place, and the propaganda war is being cranked up. The subservient British press was quick to fall in line with Washington. A British reader of my column reports that the Guardian/Observer and New Statesman are at Putin’s throat: “Every day this week we’ve had Russia/Putin hate stories. Headlines such as ‘medieval dictatorship’ as we saw in last Sunday’s Observer [August 26] are common. In this week’s New Statesman we have a front page picture of Putin with the headline ‘Putin’s reign of terror.’ They’ve got Putin with a crown on his head and dressed as a Tsar-like figure. It’s a relentless information battlefield assault on Russia.”

Another line of Washington’s attack on Russia is Washington’s covert backing of Chechnya terrorist groups in the Caucasus and funding of front groups in Russia for protest and terrorist organizations. Allegations of corruption and stolen elections come primarily from Washington-funded groups operating in Russia. See http://www.globalresearch.ca/al-qaeda-blitzkrieg-wests-terror-battalions-eye-russia-next/ and http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/08/bombshell-us-neo-cons-state-department.html Through these methods, Washington hopes to destabilize the Russian government and to isolate it internationally in order to remove a barrier to Washington’s hegemony.

Two of Romney’s right-wing neoconservative advisors said that Romney as president would “confront Moscow on its poor record on democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” The western media will not comment on the irony of these propagandistic allegations against Russia issuing from the US, the country that has destroyed habeas corpus and due process protections of the accused, tortured detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and its own statutory law, kidnaps, tortures, and assassinates foreign nationals as well as its own citizens, supports terrorism against Libya, Syria, Iran, and Russia, runs roughshod over international law, never submitting to law itself but using law as a weapon against governments that it has demonized, while it carries on military operations against seven Muslim countries without a declaration of war.

The Nuremberg Trials of Germans after World War II established that naked aggression is a war crime. Naked aggression, renamed by Washington, “preemptive war,” has become the operative principle of US foreign policy.

As Putin remarked, Washington is guilty of the crimes of which it accuses others, but Washington permits all things to “the indispensable nation.”

Amerika uber alles!

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

The Political Significance of Gore Vidal

The Gore Vidal legacy encompasses his numerous novels, literary writings, plays and essays. Few 20th century authors can match the volume of his compositions and consistency in the quality of his thoughts. If one can ignore his anti-religious beliefs and get past his complex sexuality, one can justly focus on the significance within his political viewpoints. Not since Oscar Wilde, has there been a man of letter with comparable wit and ridicule, that capsulated the age of his lifetime. Based upon a keen command of history and a flare for original insights, Vidal was the master of political punditry.

The New York Times obituary tribute provides a comprehensive account of his controversial life.

“Mr. Vidal sometimes claimed to be a populist — in theory, anyway — but he was not convincing as one. Both by temperament and by birth he was an aristocrat.

Some of his political positions were similarly quarrelsome and provocative. Mr. Vidal was an outspoken critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and once called Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, and his wife, the journalist Midge Decter, “Israeli Fifth Columnists.”

America is “rotting away at a funereal pace,” he told The Times of London in 2009. “We’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together.”

Mr. Vidal’s lifelong interest in politics began to stir back then, and from his grandfather (Thomas Pryor Gore, the Democratic senator from Oklahoma), an America Firster, he probably also inherited his unwavering isolationist beliefs.”The anti-war stance and vigorous criticism of American foreign policy is reflected in his works.

David Smith in Reflections on the life and work of Gore Vidal expands upon this theme.

“He kept up this position all the way through the Vietnam War and the Iraq war. And what’s interesting is he would talk about the historical background to this position as well. He was a very strong defender of the America First Committee, which is a largely demonised organisation that had opposed American intervention in WWII. And going back even further, he criticised Abraham Lincoln and his role in the civil war. So he was very much against militarism and against United States intervention abroad.”

Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr sums up that institutional heritage in the following:

“Vidal embodied an anti-imperial tradition that went back to fellow writer Mark Twain, Senator Carr said.

“Representing an isolationist viewpoint that once ran deep in America,” he said.

“Gore Vidal believed no foreign war justified a single American life and this view was his fundamental political commitment.”

Gore Vidal and William Buckley Debate of the Titans

 

Contrast that original value system at the founding of the country with the NeoCon perversion embodied in the counterfeit conservative conman, William F. Buckley. It is difficult to have any sympathy for the CIA operative that lead so many Americans astray. View the famous  video where Vidal accurately called Buckley a “Crypto-Nazi”. Such clarity has seldom been expressed on national television.In order to achieve a proper understanding of the political magnitude of Vidal, one needs to go beyond his celebrated play and movie, the “Best Man“, and deal with the deep seeded concern that he mournfully envisioned for America. In

Reflections on the legacy of an intellectual and political lion a most significant question is answered. Appreciate this no-holds-barred interview with The Nation’s Marc Cooper in late 2005.

MC: Are you predicting a coming military dictatorship? And that the American people would stand for that?

GV: They’ll stand for anything. And they will stand for nothing. I deal with a lot of European journalists who are very well versed in American politics. But they will ask me silly questions like, “So, Kerry didn’t turn out very well. So who’s the next leader of the opposition who can become President?” I answer, Well, first the New York Times won’t interview him. He won’t get on prime-time television if he looks like a winner. That’s out. Or he will be made a fool of, like they did with Howard Dean when they amplified his famous cry. That was all done at CBS to make him look like a maniac. They are very resourceful! So if you have a media that is completely controlled by corporate America–or whatever phrase you want to use to describe our rulers–no information is getting through that is useful to the public. No White Knight is going to be acknowledged in the press or seen on television. He would have no way of connecting with the people. And this a permanent fact in our situation…. If there could be a viable opposition to the oil and gas junta that has seized power–all three branches of government, I think–it will have to be at the grassroots. Then you will have to find a way of publicizing through the Internet the White Knight–or the Black Knight, whoever comes along to save us.

Such dramatic and bold pronunciations are common from this master of the sublime. However, consider the running feud Vidal carried on with the media, especially the venerable Grey Lady. From the same interview, Vidal sets the record straight.

“For forty years The New York Times has, from time to time, put its collective “mind” to work in trying to find ways of coping with my disturbing presence on the American scene. When my novel Lincoln was recently turned into a miniseries by NBC, I wondered what the fun paper would do to try to kill the project. Richard Nixon’s “the easy way” would be to allow the neoconservative reviewer John Corry to give it a bad review; after all, he has even attacked me for my appearance as a guest on the Today show. But wouldn’t that be too little, too late? Why not assign a journalist to make a preemptive strike a week before the television program in order to assure the potential audience that Lincoln was a false portrayal based on a book that had been “faulted by historians,” to put it in Timesese. This is what happened in the Sunday New York Times of March 20…”

Gore Vidal 9/11, war, etc. Part 1	Gore Vidal 9/11, war, etc. Part 2

 

For more examples of a later Vidal mindset, watch the next two videos,  and , that deals with the “so called” war of terror.Characterizing Gore Vidal as simply a liberal misses the essence of his political perception. Some may call him a court jester in the JFK “Camelot” royal entourage, but no one ever claimed he was a fool. His remarks on Barack Obama illustrate his recent attitude. In Obama ‘Dreadful’ as President he admits.

“I was hopeful,” Vidal says of an Obama presidency. “He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time.” Now, Vidal says in an interview published in the British paper, The Times, he was wrong and Obama is performing “dreadfully” as president.”

It is difficult to surpass the significance of his politics, stated in the Vanity Fair Gore Vidal’s essay, “The End of Liberty“. The linkage of a failed imperialistic foreign policy has left the nation bleeding from the loss of freedom and constitutional liberties.

“Meanwhile, a NYT-CBS poll notes that only 6% now oppose military action while a substantial majority favor war ‘even if many thousands of innocent civilians are killed’. Most of this majority are far too young to recall World War II, Korea, even Vietnam. Simultaneously, Bush’s approval rating has soared from the around 50% to 91%.

Traditionally, in war, the President is totemic like the flag. When Kennedy got his highest rating after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs he observed, characteristically, ‘It would seem that the worse you fuck up in this job the more popular you get.’ Bush, father and son, may yet make it to Mount Rushmore though it might be cheaper to redo the handsome Barbara Bush’s look-alike, George Washington, by adding two strings of Teclas to his limestone neck, in memoriam, as it were. Finally, [DQ] the physical damage Osama and friends can do us – terrible as it has been thus far – is as nothing as to what he is doing to our liberties.”

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal embodied the marrow of 19th century liberalism, which in today’s world would be labeled radical reactionary values. An anachronism defending principle in an era of relativity, Vidal’s patrician style, spoke for the common person. Populism is implicit in his thinking; the essential American philosophy he expressed, so well. Few have been a more consistent advocate of the nation’s conscience.His death marks a passing of an epoch. The reason why the future is so bleak rests upon the incoherence of the body politic to perceive the nature of the eternal struggle. Liberty is the antithesis of an all-powerful despotism. Until the people learn this lesson and act to eliminate the tyrannical system that combats an America First country, the country will flounder. As a long time expatriate living aboard, Vidal practiced Americanism from the sanctuary of his Italian swallow’s nest. Coming home for his final years represents an analogy for the terminal stages of a dying country. Do not let his political message expire.

“The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven’t seen them since.” Gore Vidal

Ordinary Citizens: The Silent Victims of Anti-Iranian Sanctions

While the United States and European Union are vehemently competing with each other in the seemingly endless race of imposing sanctions on Iran, the ordinary Iranian citizens are experiencing the most breathtaking, agonizing impacts of the crippling embargoes.

On July 31, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) sent a letter to all members of the U.S. Congress, demanding a concerted action to approve The Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act which imposes a new set of sanctions on Iran’s energy and transportation sector.

On August 1, the media reported that the Congress has ratified the bill and it’s waiting to be signed by the president.

Iran is already under 6 rounds of sanctions endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. The sanctions are purportedly aimed at preventing Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The UNSC sanctions stipulate a freezing of Iran’s international assets, the closure of branches of Iranian banks in other countries, barring the export of nuclear and military facilities to Iran, a ban on investment in Iran’s oil, gas and Petrochemistry sector, business dealings with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, banking and insurance transactions and traveling restrictions for high-ranking governmental and military officials.

The United States, Israel and EU countries have long accused Iran of trying to build nuclear bombs, a charge which Iran has persistently and categorically denied. Iran says that it needs civilian nuclear power to meet its growing energy needs, especially since Iran is a country mostly reliant on fossil fuels for its energy demands and oil revenues to keep its economy alive. The United States and its allies, in response, have penalized Iran with excruciating economic sanctions to derail the possible chances of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons capability.

On January 23, 2012, the European Union foreign ministers agreed upon imposing a multilateral oil embargo against Iran. The oil embargo which bans the European countries from buying crude from Iran went into effect on July 1.

What the Western officials say in public is that the sanctions are aimed at punishing the Iranian government and dissuading it from working toward acquiring nuclear weapons. What takes place in reality, however, is that the “smart” sanctions have directly come down like a ton of bricks on the Iranian people, making their life an arduous odyssey of struggling for survival in an ailing economy.

The sanctions have devastated the daily life of ordinary Iranian people by bringing the price of goods to a skyrocketing height, making the students abroad unable to get financial assistance from their parents in Iran, rendering it impossible for the private companies to do international transactions and making it extremely difficult for Iranians to get visa for traveling to foreign countries. The “smart sanctions” even include a ban on the importing of medicine and foodstuff from the other nations to Iran.

In the previous weeks, I have been arguing with my editors in some of the American political journals to convince them that certain sensitive medicines as well as agricultural goods could not make their way to Iran as a result of sanctions. They wouldn’t accept, telling me that such transactions were smoothly taking place. But now, I think they have credible evidence available, confirming that the hard-hitting sanctions are destroying the daily life of the poor, defenseless Iranians who should pay the price for the West’s and Israel’s animosity with their government.

On May 6, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty quoted Iran’s reformist daily Shargh as writing that the exportation of a great deal of vital medicines to Iran has been banned as a result of the sanctions. These medicines which Iran is not capable of producing include drugs for the treatment of cancer, heart and breathing problems, thalassemia, and multiple sclerosis.

Hamid Reza Emadi, an Iran-based political commentator also confirms that the latest round of sanctions imposed on Iran just a few days ago directly affect the lives of average Iranians who have nothing to do with the country’s nuclear program. “This latest move by the U.S. Congress shows the extent to which Washington has become frustrated and now it is going to step up their pressure on Iranian civilians by preventing the country from importing agricultural products… Iran is a grain importer and the U.S. knows that and by creating obstacles in the way of grain exports to Iran, the U.S. is clearly committing crimes against humanity because it only affects ordinary Iranians who have got nothing to do with the country’s nuclear energy program,” Emadi said in an interview with Press TV.

“Do not forget that it is not just agricultural products; the U.S. is putting maximum pressure on international banks doing business with Iran, therefore Iranian medical companies cannot import some vital medicines,” he added.

The board of directors of the Iranian Hemophilia Society has informed the World Federation of Hemophilia that the lives of tens of thousands of children are being endangered by the lack of proper drugs, a consequence of international economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic.

Dr. Ron Paul, a Texas Congressman has called the recent sanctions an “act of war,” saying that the bill had better be named “Obsession with Iran Act 2012.”

“When you put on sanctions on a country, it’s an act of war and that’s what this is all about,” he said.

Some anti-war advocacy groups and organizations in the United States such as Veterans for Peace and Friends Committee on National Legislation have called on the U.S. government to put an end to its sanctions game with Iran which is seen by these groups a total declaration of war against Iran; however, it seems that these pro-peace groups will face a tough job to have their voice heard by the U.S. Congressmen and people in the White House who seem to be hell bent on delivering a lethal blow to Iran.

“Veterans for Peace” has just released a statement, saying that sanctions and threats of military strike are not viable and logical solutions to the nuclear crisis with Iran.

“The United States, European Union and Israel are using Iran’s civilian nuclear program as an excuse to impose devastating economic sanctions against the people of Iran. According to various sources, the sanctions have already wreaked havoc on the Iranian economy, leading to inflation rates of 50 to 100 percent, youth unemployment rate of over 22 percent, drastic reduction of Iran’s domestic production to 40 percent of its capacity, massive closure of economic enterprises and widespread layoffs, and 40 percent drop in the Iranian oil exports during 2012, resulting in a loss of $32 billion in oil income since last year alone,” the statement reads.

The group has called for a nuclear free Middle East in an apparent allusion to Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Along with India and Pakistan, Israel is the only country in the world which is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. By the late 1990s the U.S. Intelligence Community estimated that Israel possessed between 75-130 weapons, based on production estimates.

When all’s said and done, Iran is currently experiencing difficult times, and its people are under mounting pressure in their daily affairs. Iran’s economy is on the brink of bankruptcy as a result of the biting economic sanctions and the international community is calmly and silently witnessing the painful suffering of the Iranian people. The anti-Iranian sanctions clearly run counter to the principles of human rights, but it seems that those who advocate such values don’t believe that Iranians are also “humans” who might perchance have some “rights” including the right of access to medicine, foodstuff, employment and above all, respect and human dignity.

Climate Change and the Next U.S. Revolution

The U.S. heat wave is slowly shaking the foundations of American politics. It may take years for the deep rumble to evolve into an above ground, institution-shattering earthquake, but U.S. society has changed for good.

The heat wave has helped convince tens of millions of Americans that climate change is real, overpowering the fake science and right-wing media – funded by corporate cash – to convince Americans otherwise.

Republicans and Democrats alike also erect roadblocks to understanding climate change. By the politicians’ complete lack of action towards addressing the issue, the “climate change is fake” movement was strengthened, since Americans presumed that any sane government would be actively trying to address an issue that had the potential to destroy civilization.

But working people have finally made up their mind. A recent poll showed that70 percent of Americans now believe that climate change is real, up from 52 percent in 2010. And a growing number of people are recognizing that the warming of the planet is caused by human activity.

Business Week explains: “A record heat wave, drought and catastrophic wildfires are accomplishing what climate scientists could not: convincing a wide swath of Americans that global temperatures are rising.”

This means that working class families throughout the Midwest and southern states simply don’t believe what their media and politicians are telling them.

It also implies that these millions of Americans are being further politicized in a deeper sense.

Believing that climate change exists implies that you are somewhat aware about the massive consequences to humanity if the global economy doesn’t drastically change, and fast.

This awareness has revolutionary implications. As millions of Americans watch the environment destroyed – for their grandchildren or themselves – while politicians do absolutely nothing in response, or make tiny token gestures – a growing number of Americans will demand political alternatives, and fight to see them created. The American political system as it exists today cannot cope with this inevitable happening.

The New York Times explains why: “…the American political system is not ready to agree to a [climate] treaty that would force the United States, over time, to accept profound changes in its energy [coal, oil], transport [trucking and airline industry] and manufacturing [corporate] sectors.”

In short, the U.S. government will not force corporations to make less profit by behaving more eco-friendly. This is the essence of the problem.

In order for humanity to survive climate change, the economy must be radically transformed; massive investments must be made in renewable energy, public transportation, and recycling, while dirty energy sources must be quickly swept into the dustbin of history.

But the economy is currently owned by giant, privately run corporations, that will continue destroying the earth if it earns them huge profits, and they make massive “contributions” to political parties to ensure this remains so. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that government inaction on climate change is directly linked to the “special interests” of corporations that dominate these governments.

This fact of U.S. politics is present in every other capitalist country as well, which means that international agreements on reducing greenhouse gasses will remain impossible, as each country’s corporations vie for market domination, reducing pollution simply puts them at a competitive disadvantage.

This dynamic has already caused massive delays in the UN’s already inadequate efforts at addressing climate change. The Kyoto climate agreement was the by-product of years of cooperation and planning between many nations that included legally binding agreements to reduce greenhouse gasses. The Bush and Obama administrations helped destroy these efforts.

For example, Instead of building upon the foundation of the Kyoto Protocol, the Obama administration demanded a whole new structure, something that would take years to achieve. The Kyoto framework (itself insufficient) was abandoned because it included legally binding agreements, and was based on multilateral, agreed-upon reductions of greenhouse gasses.

In an article by the Guardian entitled “US Planning to Weaken Copenhagen Climate Deal,” the Obama administration’s UN position is exposed, as he dismisses the Kyoto Protocol by proposing that “…each country set its own rules and to decide unilaterally how to meet its target.”

Obama’s proposal came straight from the mouth of U.S. corporations, who wanted to ensure that there was zero accountability, zero oversight, zero climate progress, and therefore no dent to their profits. Instead of using its massive international leverage for climate justice, the U.S. has used it to promote divisiveness and inaction, to the potential detriment of billions of people globally.

The stakes are too high to hold out any hope that governments will act boldly. The Business Week article below explains the profound changes happening to the climate:

“The average temperature for the U.S. during June was 71.2 degrees Fahrenheit (21.7 Celsius), which is 2 degrees higher than the average for the 20th century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The June temperatures made the preceding 12 months the warmest since record-keeping began in 1895, the government agency said.”

Activists who are radicalized by this global problem face a crisis of what to do about it. It is difficult to put forth a positive climate change demand, since the problem is global.  Demanding that governments “act boldly” to address climate change hasn’t worked, and lesser demands seem inadequate.

The environmental rights movement continues to go through a variety of phases: individual and small group eco-“terrorism,” causing property damage to environmentally damaging companies; corporate campaigns that target especially bad polluters with high-profile direct action; and massive education programs that have been highly successful, but fall short when it comes to winning change.

Ultimately, climate activists must come face to face with political and corporate power. Corporate-owned governments are the ones with the power to adequately address the climate change issue, and they will not be swayed by good science, common sense, basic decency, or even a torched planet.

Those in power only respond to power, and the only power capable of displacing corporate power is when people unite and act collectively, as was done in Egypt, Tunisia, and is still developing throughout Europe.

Climate groups cannot view their issue as separate from other groups that are organizing against corporate power. The social movements that have emerged to battle austerity measures are natural allies, as are anti-war and labor activists. The climate solution will inevitably require revolutionary measures, which first requires that alliances and demands are put forward that unite Labor, working people in general, community, and student groups towards collective action.

One possible immediate demand is for environmental activists to unite with Labor groups over a federal jobs program, paid  for by taxing the rich, that makes massive investments in jobs that are climate related, such as solar panel production, transportation, building recycling centers, home retro-fitting, etc.

Another demand could be to insist that the government convene the most knowledgeable scientists in the area of clean energy. These scientists should be given all the resources they need in order to collectively create alternative sources of clean energy that would allow for a realistic alternative to the current polluting and toxic sources of energy.

However, any type of immediate demand will meet giant corporate resistance from both political parties. Fighting for a uniting demand will thus strengthen the movement, and for this reason it is important to link climate solutions to the creation of jobs, which are the number one concern of most Americans. This unity will in turn lead allies toward a deeper understanding of the problem, and therefore deeper solutions will emerge that challenge the whole economic structure that is deaf to the needs of humans and the climate and sacrifices everything to the private profit of a few.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-18/record-heat-wave-pushes-u-dot-s-dot-belief-in-climate-change-to-70-percent

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/weekinreview/13broder.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/15/europe-us-copenhagen

Democrats Delusional Worldview

Democratic politics is a false premise experiment. The foundation of modern liberalism, based upon an erroneous worldview, is a dead end ideology. Compared to the mad NeoCon war-mongering alternative, the fatal attraction of progressives, allures weak minded and desperate people into thinking government can provide solutions. Step back from the false left-right political discussions and focus upon the principles that make up sound and balanced standards for a civil society.

Basic contrasts between Conservatives and Liberals defined by Christian Walker seem plausible.

“At the core of it, Conservatives base their ideology on what they see as reason and logic and it is individualistic by nature, whereas a liberal’s ideology is based on emotion and ideals and is collective by nature. A liberal is interested in curing society’s ills by social engineering. A conservative is interested in curing society’s ills by individuals exercising their own choices to better themselves. Because of this, conservatives view centralized power with deep suspicion. Liberals on the other hand see centralized power as an opportunity to affect great change for good.”

The central precept that separates and differentiates democratic politics from traditional conservative advocacy rests upon moral doctrine. However, scholars are determined to avoid this requirement with theories such as Realism V. Liberalism. Understanding International Relations Theory, “how the world works IR scholars usually subscribe to one of two dominant theories, realism or liberalism. One, classical/neo-realist thought, is more pessimistic about the prospects of peace, cooperation, and human progress whilst the other, liberalism/idealism, is more upbeat and sanguine about human nature and human possibilities.”Modern Liberalism is based upon the following set of assumptions:

1.Human nature is essentially “good”

2.The fundamental human concern for others’ welfare makes progress possible

3.Sinful or wicked human behavior such as violence is not the product of flawed people but of evil institutions

4.War and international anarchy are NOT inevitable

5.War is a global problem requiring collective rather than national efforts to control it

6.Reforms must be inspired by a compassionate ethical concern for the welfare and security of all people

7.International society must reorganize itself in order to eliminate the institutions that make war likely

The America First foreign policy viewpoint is anti-war and anti-empire. Foreign intervention to make the world safe for democracy is pure poppycock. The premises of democratic liberalism suffer from the illusion that humanity, as a whole, is able to build a global alignment of institutions, treaties and interconnections that can result in international harmony.

The notion, which discredits democratic bias and governmental programs that surround us, is all around. The utter catastrophe of the Obama administration is not simply a failure of a partisan regime. It is systemic of a system that has abandoned time-honored principles.

The inspiring and late Dr. Schaeffer preached the following message back in 1982.

“I want to say to you, those of you who are Christians or even if you are not a Christian and you are troubled about the direction that our society is going in, that we must not concentrate merely on the bits and pieces. But we must understand that all of these dilemmas come on the basis of moving from the Judeo-Christian world view — that the final reality is an infinite creator God — over into this other reality which is that the final reality is only energy or material in some mixture or form which has existed forever and which has taken its present shape by pure chance.”

Can any person argue with sincerity that fundamental improvement in the plight of humanity has improved in the last three decades?

Facing up to the decline in Western Civilization is hard for many people. Most prefer the comfort of illusionary denial. Justin Raimondo offers a cogent insight in TheDemocratic Delusion.

“Rooted in the old-fashioned idea that people are merely the playthings of all-powerful and highly abstract forces, Soviet socialism was a throwback to the reactionary mechanistic doctrines that had ruled the earth and its peoples since time immemorial. Human beings, in this view, are passive lumps of clay whose fate is determined by History, the gods, or, perhaps, the gods of history.”

This looming conflict for the democratic liberal is unsettling, since their beloved governmental authority structure, is their presupposed answer to resolve intrinsic power struggles. After stripping away all the political posturing and propaganda, the Obama cohorts are left with an empty intellectual defense of their pernicious and intrusive tyranny.

LIBERALISM IS A MENTAL ILLNESS – MAXINE WATERS	MICHAEL SAVAGE EXPLAINS THE MENTAL DISORDER LIBERALISM

 

Those who identify themselves as part of the Democratic Party or supporters of liberal policies really do suffer from a mental disease. The Maxine Waters’  illustrates, while caring the bucket for the cause. Move over and watch , Herb Denenberg is giving you a run for top honors.

“You can look at almost any plan and policy of Obama, and more often than not find it runs contrary to common sense and logical thinking. He more often than not does the opposite of what common sense would dictate.”

Apply the following Obama traits to your favorite liberal. Do they also suffer from the same symptoms?

A. NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER. If that’s not enough, consider the Mayo Clinic’s definition of narcissistic personality disorder: “Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance and a deep need for admiration. They believe that they’re superior to others and have little regard for other people’s feelings. But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem, vulnerable to the slightest criticism.”

B. PATHOLOGICAL LIAR. I think the most obvious disorder to add to all of the above is being a pathological liar. That condition is defined by the Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary as follows: “an individual who habitually tells lies so exaggerated or bizarre that they are suggestive of mental disorder.”

C. THE TALKING DISEASE. I’ve spoken of another mental disorder, which I don’t think psychiatry has yet named. It is the talking disease. He thinks his words are magical, and that all he has to do is talk to solve problems.

Liberals and progressives want to feel your pain, while inflicting misery from the consequences of their policies. The Manchurian Candidate president champions Marxist pillaging as a badge of pride. The crux of the rationale that drives such plunder is humanism. Dr. Schaeffer warns, “A conservative Humanism is no better than a liberal Humanism. It’s the Humanism that is wrong, not merely the coloration.” The point made is that the liberal sickness infects “so called” conservatives with the integrations of the progressive disease into all levels and stratums of a dependent society.Utopian delusions are the prevalent and dominate political mindset. This infection forbids a serious and substantial contraction of government deficit spending or useless programs. As long as Democrats swallow the social poison of multicultural nirvana, in a futile attempt to create a worldly paradise, the planet is doomed.

The few remaining conventional Democrats bear little similarity with the ultratotalitarian collectivists that currently hold the majority in the U.S. Senate. Abdicating the responsibility of passing a federal budget may seem trivial to the hordes of dependent addicts that vote the liberal/progressive slate. Nevertheless, the results from the next election, the prospect of instituting a sober and comprehensive reform of government is but a pipe dream for wishful escapists.

The final indisputable proof of neurotic perspective is that the electorate may likely vote Barry Soetoro to another term. The reason for such an irrational prospect is that the infected public is plagued by modern liberalism. Is it possible to dialogue with institutionalized progressives? Can cogent arguments penetrate the locked doors in their palatial asylum suites or are they so committed to their medicated state of denial that the destruction of the country is viewed as a mere academic speculation?

Radical Reactionaries understand that co-existence with essentially decadent bottom feeders is a suicidal prospect. America’s collapse is a certainty on much more than an economic level. Political dialogue or activist immersion is a most painful exercise for the average person. The depths of the “Politically Correct” culture disallow a serene separation from federal supremacy. Individual state sovereignty is the only practical response to central despotism. Democrats refused to run a primary challenge to a sitting President in their own party. That error renounced any assertion of the high ground or argument claiming the role of an honest opposition.

The legacy of FDR haunts the socialists that strive to empower the nanny state. H.L. Mencken had it correct, “The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.”

Still the demographics, especially in several swing states like Virginia and Wisconsin, may rally the government employed or the entitled reliant to rise up the dead and vote for Democrats in November. To these kind of voters, the democratic view of the world, transforms into digging graves for the dynamic producers, who create all the wealth.

The progressive malady that shapes public policy is the ultimate superstition. I am from the government and here to help you.

Banksters Have Stolen The American Dream

In the line for the free bus from New York to Chicago, which will not only play host to this weekend’s Nato summit, but also to a series of Occupy protests, an 18-year-old homeless boy called Sean has money to burn. Specifically, he has a dollar.

Sean touches a flame to the note and uses it to light a cigarette. “That’s debt, and that’s what we do with it,” he says, grinning to his fellow Occupy Wall Street protesters.

It’s one of those braggadocio gestures that probably has as much to do with the presence of an unfamiliar young woman as it does to hatred of the super-rich “1 per cent” whom this ramshackle global anti-capitalist movement set themselves against when they started camping out in Manhattan’s financial district last September.

Smoke streams from Sean’s fingers. He doesn’t listen to other activists, who are already checking the internet on their phones to see if burning money is a federal crime. “I just hate money for what it did to my family,” he says. Then it’s time to get on the bus.

Funded by the union National Nurses United at a cost of $10,000, this coach is taking Sean, 40 protesters and me on a sweaty 16-hour journey to Chicago. The Nato summit will begin there in two days (after the G8 conference at Camp David, the presidential hideaway in Maryland), and city police have spent millions tooling up in anticipation of major protests against austerity and the global military-industrial complex.

Delegates are protected by ground troops, riot cops. The so-called 99 per cent have a ragtag bunch of high school college drop-outs, wide-eyed activists and war veterans, who spend the journey live streaming to their Twitter followers and making makeshift defensive weaponry out of bits of old junk.

Chris, 21, describes himself as “the electrician”. Tucking his hair into a bandana, he explains how simple it is to defeat the Chicago police’s infamous LRAD, designed to deter protesters with excruciating sound waves, with balloons full of shaving foam.

Chris is ripping the backs off instant cameras and turning them into temporary flares, designed to peacefully disable police flashlights. It’s all a little bit Home Alone. Most of these young protesters have rarely been anything else.

“I saw my grandma struggle for dollars her whole life,” says dollar-burning Sean, a high school drop-out who is softly spoken as soon as you get him alone. “My best friends believe that the only way they can make money now is to sell drugs. One of them got killed, dumb s**t like that.”

Sean’s mother was a drug addict, and he got involved in the anti-capitalist Occupy protests in Philadelphia soon after he left his grandmother’s house and failed to find a job, in a nation where 45 per cent of 16- to 29-year-olds are out of work.

“Grandma said I’d never survive on my own,” he says, “but I’m not a bad person, I mean, I do what any other boy would do. I’m still here. Being out here [with Occupy] made me a lot more happy, like I wasn’t so alone.”

Behind me, the only other reporter on the bus is reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Anyone comparing this journey to Tom Wolfe’s famous jaunt across America with a busload of melodramatically wasted hippies will be disappointed. This bus, with its bland grey seats and built-in TV screens, could be any old National Express coach, whilst furtive fumblings on the back seats and sneaky spliffs shared out around the back of highway service stations make the Occupy Wall Street fleet rather like a high school field trip for a post-hope generation.

The people on this bus have little in common except poverty. They are racially diverse, and range in age from 62-year-old Barbara, who worked on Wall Street in the 1970s, lost her job in September and feels “angrier than ever” about “corporate money controlling government”, to 18-year-old Laura from rural Pennsylvania.

Childlike Laura, hopping over the railings at rest-stops to collect creepy-crawlies in jam jars, is travelling with her elder brother Brandon, a long-time Occupier who was in and out of foster care before he became homeless, and who spends the trip annoying people in nearby seats with those modified flare-cameras.

Laura came to New York to bail Brandon out of jail, and they’ve both been living “on the streets” ever since. You can’t help being reminded that there are many ways of being on the streets, and all of them are political.

One of the great arts to being young and broke in America is learning how to sleep on a bus. Folded around and on top of one another or sprawled on the floor, most of these occupiers look rather older than they are.

An activist from Pittsburgh who likes to be known as Fluffy could be 35 but is in fact 20, squinting behind piercings, a thick beard and arms covered in scars from self-inflicted cuts and burns.

“What first got me into Occupy is my mum lost her house to the bank, and she ended up having to go live in a shelter with my 11-year-old sister,” he says. “I’ve been on the street for the past three, four years.”

Ask Fluffy about economic injustice and taxation and you’ll get a smart answer, but he becomes truly animated when discussing how Occupy has become his new, safe home. “I love the whole family outlook on everything. It’s generally family oriented; you grow to love these people as if they were your own flesh and blood.”

If the Flower Power generation was reacting against the buttoned-down sexual prudery of its parents, the post-hope generation is engaged in rejecting a culture that promised opportunity, family and security and delivered nothing but hurt, loneliness and debt. If the 1960s were about confronting hypocrisy with hedonism, the 2010s are about confronting alienation with community.

Sometimes all that community spirit can get grating. After three hours of listening to 40 by-now-rather-smelly bus passengers singing a medley of Disney songs and old protest hymns, all that youthful exuberance starts to cross the line from infectious to infuriating. These people have smartphones, but no homes or job prospects. They’re on their way to a peace rally where most of them fully expect to be beaten and arrested. What on earth do they have to sing about?

Connection. That’s what it’s about. From the live streamers chatting with people following the online stream all over the world to the new friendships I see being formed around me, it’s all about connection. It’s about information shared, about building new codes of care and community where the old ones, the jobs and families and pension plans, have proved unreliable.

“We got a lot of good people in this country,” says a 32-year-old who likes to be known as Sparkle, from Brooklyn. “All we want to do is work and be able to support ourselves and be able to live a decent life, and, thanks to the rich being greedy, we can’t even have that. So it’s not a case of ‘You stupid hippies, get a job’. Really? Check my resume. Give me a job.”

I hear very little on this trip about Nato itself. Although most of the Occupiers are well-informed on matters of military spending, US interventionism and economic injustice, they are also simply grateful for the free pizza and a warm bus to sleep in.

Up front, the “bus captains”, self-appointed team leaders from the nurses’ union and other groups, attempt to keep the gang on-message with little rallying speeches. Shen Tong, one of them, is largely ignored when he steps up with a prepared list of talking points for the media – until he leads them in a call of “We are the 99 per cent”, at which point the whole bus chants as one.

“We are the 99 per cent.” Neither the presidential candidates struggling to incorporate this sudden cultural shift into their message nor the global police forces that have beaten the Occupy movement back with violent evictions, arrests and surveillance really understand what that statement means for people with nothing to lose.

It is a cry for inclusion, for recognition. It is about demanding your place in a society that you thought had nothing to offer you.

A little help from the old guard never hurts. In 1970, labour organisers had so little common ground with anti-war, anti-capitalist hippies that they came to blows, but in 2012, these young people sleeping tangled in blankets in the aisles find themselves burdened with the expectations of the entire American left. So much so that union donors have funded 17 buses from across the country at a cost of $250,000, hoping that Occupiers in Chicago will reinvigorate what remains of resistance to financial feudalism in the United States.

It’s a tall order for a fleet of 200 political outsiders and homeless kids. Whatever the Disney songs say, millions of dollars’ worth of policing have historically been more than a match for courage and true friendship.

The bus pulls into Chicago. Hot soup and sleeping spaces have been arranged in a local church for the exhausted travellers. Watching them file off the bus into a crowd of waiting journalists, Shen Tong looks satisfied.

Tong has seen all of this before, in China, his country of birth. In 1989, he was imprisoned and exiled after working as a student leader during the Tiananmen Square uprisings. This is not the first time he has watched young people almost broken by society growing up to change it.

“I happen to think,” he says quietly, “that this is the most important thing in the world right now”.

Source: The Independent

Shady Companies With Ties To Israel Wiretap The U.S. For The NSA

Army General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, is having a busy year — hopping around the country, cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency’s greatly expanded eavesdropping network.

In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.

Designed to house about 4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators, analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private contractors, it will have a 2,800-square-foot fitness center open 24/7, 47 conference rooms and VTCs, and “22 caves,” according to an NSA brochure from the event. No television news cameras were allowed within two miles of the ceremony.

Overseas, Menwith Hill, the NSA’s giant satellite listening post in Yorkshire, England that sports 33 giant dome-covered eavesdropping dishes, is also undergoing a multi-million-dollar expansion, with $68 million alone being spent on a generator plant to provide power for new supercomputers. And the number of people employed on the base, many of them employees of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, is due to increase from 1,800 to 2,500 in 2015, according to a study done in Britain. Closer to home, in May, Fort Meade will close its 27-hole golf course to make room for a massive $2 billion, 1.8-million-square-foot expansion of the NSA’s headquarters, including a cybercommand complex and a new supercomputer center expected to cost nearly $1 billion.

The climax, however, will be the opening next year of the NSA’s mammoth 1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center. The centerpiece in the agency’s decade-long building boom, it will be the “cloud” where the trillions of millions of intercepted phone calls, e-mails, and data trails will reside, to be scrutinized by distant analysts over highly encrypted fiber-optic links.

 

Despite the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the NSA says that citizens should trust it not to abuse its growing power and that it takes the Constitution and the nation’s privacy laws seriously.

But one of the agency’s biggest secrets is just how careless it is with that ocean of very private and very personal communications, much of it to and from Americans. Increasingly, obscure and questionable contractors — not government employees — install the taps, run the agency’s eavesdropping infrastructure, and do the listening and analysis.

And with some of the key companies building the U.S.’s surveillance infrastructure for the digital age employing unstable employees, crooked executives, and having troubling ties to foreign intelligence services, it’s not clear that Americans should trust the secretive agency, even if its current agency chief claims he doesn’t approve of extrajudicial spying on Americans. His predecessor, General Michael V. Hayden, made similar claims while secretly conducting the warrantless wiretapping program.

Until now, the actual mechanics of how the agency constructed its highly secret U.S. eavesdropping net, code-named Stellar Wind, has never been revealed. But in the weeks following 9/11, as the agency and the White House agreed to secretly ignore U.S. privacy laws and bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, J. Kirk Wiebe noticed something odd. A senior analyst, he was serving as chief of staff for the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC), a sort of skunkworks within the agency where bureaucratic rules were broken, red tape was cut, and innovation was expected.

“One day I notice out in the hallway, stacks and stacks of new servers in boxes just lined up,” he said.

Passing by the piles of new Dell 1750 servers, Wiebe, as he often did, headed for the Situation Room, which dealt with threat warnings. It was located within the SARC’s Lab, on the third floor of Operations Building 2B, a few floors directly below the director’s office. “I walk in and I almost get thrown out by a guy that we knew named Ben Gunn,” he said. It was the launch of Stellar Wind and only a handful of agency officials were let in on the secret.

“He was the one who organized it,” said Bill Binney of Gunn. A former founder and co-director of SARC, Binney was the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks. Troubled by the unconstitutional nature of tapping into the vast domestic communications system without a warrant, he decided to quit the agency in late 2001 after nearly forty years.

Gunn, said Binney, was a Scotsman and naturalized U.S. citizen who had formerly worked for GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, and later become a senior analyst at the NSA. The NSA declined Wired’s request to interview Gunn, saying that, as policy, it doesn’t confirm or deny if a person is employed by the agency.

Shortly after the secret meeting, the racks of Dell servers were moved to a room down the hall, behind a door with a red seal indicating only those specially cleared for the highly compartmented project could enter. But rather than having NSA employees putting the hardware and software together and setting up walls of monitors showing suspected terrorism threats and their U.S. communications, the spying room was filled with a half-dozen employees of a tiny mom-and-pop company with a bizarre and troubling history.

“It was Technology Development Corporation,” said Binney.

The agency went to TDC, he says, because the company had helped him set up a similar network in SARC — albeit one that was focused on foreign and international communications — the kind of spying the NSA is chartered to undertake.

 

“They needed to have somebody who knew how the code works to set it up,” he said. “And then it was just a matter of feeding in the attributes [U.S. phone numbers, e-mail addresses and personal data] and any of the content you want.” Those “attributes” came from secret rooms established in large telecom switches around the country. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says.

Formed in April 1984, TDC was owned by two brothers, Randall and Paul Jacobson, and largely run out of Randall’s Clarkesville, Maryland house, with his wife acting as bookkeeper. But its listed address is a post office box in Annapolis Junction, across the Baltimore-Washington Parkway from the NSA, and thecompany’s phone number in various business directories is actually an NSA number in Binney’s old office.

The company’s troubles began in June 1992 when Paul lost his security clearance. “If you ever met this guy, you would know he’s a really strange guy,” Binney said of Paul. “He did crazy stuff. I think they thought he was unstable.” At the time, Paul was working on a contract at the NSA alongside a rival contractor, Unisys Corporation. He later blamed Unisys for his security problems and sued it, claiming that Unisys employees complained about him to his NSA supervisors. According to the suit, Unisys employees referred to him as “weird” and that he “acted like a robot,” “never wore decent clothes,” and was mentally and emotionally unstable. About that time, he also began changing his name, first to Jimmy Carter, and later to Alfred Olympus von Ronsdorf.

With “von Ronsdorf’s” clearance gone and no longer able to work at the NSA, Randy Jacobson ran the company alone, though he kept his brother and fellow shareholder employed in the company, which led to additional problems.

“What happened was Randy still let him have access to the funds of the company and he squandered them,” according to Binney. “It was so bad, Randy couldn’t pay the people who were working for him.” According to court records, Ronsdorf allegedly withdrew about $100,000 in unauthorized payments. But Jacobson had troubles of his own, having failed to file any income tax statements for three years in the 1990s, according to tax court records. Then in March 2002, around the time the company was completing Stellar Wind, Jacobson fired his brother for improper billing and conversion of company funds. That led to years of suits and countersuits over mismanagement and company ownership.

Despite that drama, Jacobson and his people appeared to have serious misgivings about the NSA’s program once they discovered its true nature, according to Binney. “They came and said, ‘Do you realize what these people are doing?’” he said. “‘They’re feeding us other stuff [U.S.] in there.’ I mean they knew it was unconstitutional right away.” Binney added that once the job was finished, the NSA turned to still another contractor to run the tapping operation. “They made it pretty well known, so after they got it up and running they [the NSA] brought in the SAIC people to run it after that.” Jacobsen was then shifted to other work at the NSA, where he and his company are still employed.

Randall Jacobsen answered his phone inside the NSA but asked for time to respond. He never called back.

In addition to constructing the Stellar Wind center, and then running the operation, secretive contractors with questionable histories and little oversight were also used to do the actual bugging of the entire U.S. telecommunications network.

According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon, which I first reported in my book The Shadow Factory in 2008. Verint did not return a call seeking comment, while Verizon said it does not comment on such matters.

At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004. Narus did not return a call seeking comment.

What is especially troubling is that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of spying on the U.S.

In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country. The employee, a technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a very strong supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to us, he gave the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the Israelis.”

Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn’t.

“In addition to being the technical director,” he said, “I was the chair of the TAP, it’s the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign relations council. We’re supposed to know what all these foreign countries, technically what they’re doing…. They didn’t do this that way, it was under the table.” After discovering the secret transfer of the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to communications terminals. “So we gave it to them for switches,” he said. “For access.”

But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic and diplomatic information back to them. “And then five years later, four or five years later, you see a Narus device,” he said. “I think there’s a connection there, we don’t know for sure.”

Narus was formed in Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel’sFortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was , a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the chief technology officer.

A few years ago, Narus boasted that it is “known for its ability to capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world.” The company says its equipment is capable of “providing unparalleled monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and government organizations around the world” and that “Anything that comes through [an Internet protocol network], we can record. We can reconstruct all of their e-mails, along with attachments, see what Web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice over Internet Protocol] calls.”

Like Narus, Verint was founded by in Israel by Israelis, including Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800 employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel, primarily working in research and development and operations, according to the Jerusalem Post. Among its products is STAR-GATE, which according to the company’s sales literature, lets “service providers … access communications on virtually any type of network, retain communication data for as long as required, and query and deliver content and data …” and was “[d]esigned to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications.”

In a rare and candid admission to Forbes, Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. “Take NICE, Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,” said Gefen. “Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.”

According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. “Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years,” he told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’artez in 2000, “Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”

Equally troubling is the issue of corruption. Kobi Alexander, the founder and former chairman of Verint, is now a fugitive, wanted by the FBI on nearly three dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering and other crimes. And two of his top associates at Comverse, Chief Financial Officer David Kreinberg and former General Counsel William F. Sorin, were also indicted in the scheme and later pleaded guilty, with both serving time in prison and paying millions of dollars in fines and penalties.

When asked about these contractors, the NSA declined to “verify the allegations made.”

But the NSA did “eagerly offer” that it “ensures deliberate and appropriate measures are taken to thoroughly investigate and resolve any legitimate complaints or allegations of misconduct or illegal activity” and “takes seriously its obligation to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and comply with the U.S. laws and regulations that govern our activities.”

The NSA also added that “we are proud of the work we do to protect the nation, and allegations implying that there is inappropriate monitoring of American communications are a disservice to the American public and to the NSA civilian and military personnel who are dedicated to serving their country.”

However, that statement elides the voluminous reporting by the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Wired on the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. Also not reflected is that in the only anti-warrantless wiretapping lawsuit to survive the government’s use of the “state secrets” privilege to throw them out, a federal judge ruled that two American lawyers had been spied on illegally by the government and were entitled to compensation.

So take the NSA’s assurances as you will.

But as NSA director Alexander flies around the country, scissors in hand, opening one top-secret, outsourced eavesdropping center after another, someone might want to ask the question no one in Congress seems willing to ask: Who’s listening to the listeners?

Source: Wired

Political Dissent in the Land of the Sheeple

The long and sometime turbulent drama of political dissent in America is a continued theme in history of the country. Born out of a revolution and based on social principles of self-determination, the nation rustles with the internal conflict between individual liberty and the power of tyrannical elites. This struggle is the natural condition in any nation. How a society treats dissenters is a primary test for any government. Most states fail this assessment miserably. America’s tolerance for peaceful dissent is in jeopardy, not solely from the current despotic regime in power, but from the flock of hungry government parasites that graze upon the public benefit programs that herd citizens into a crowd controlled environment.

The liberal left adopts a mindset that is deficient in understanding of this most important reality. When people become dependent on government, the effective ability for meaningful dissent diminishes. Progressives are innately believers in the “Good Society”. Their assessment that government improves the plight of citizens is a false conclusion. The greatest degree of suffering and despotism comes directly from the chambers of the State. Yet, the Democratic sentiments that echoes the welfare role of central government, causes the apathy and acquiescence that allows for even more consolidation among the oligarchs.

However, there is a more comprehensive description of this circumstance; an “Ineptocracy“.

(in-ep-toc’-ra-cy) – a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

 

By this definition, the advocates for more inclusive government practice the very elements that make the situation worse. Watch the video  and observe this disconnect that leftist dissenters often express.

Movements like Occupy Wall Street become co-opted over time in a like manner as the Tea Party organizations that adopt mainstream Republican sentiments. Encouraging are instances when ordinary people pressure the corrupt political class. Notwithstanding, heightened activism, there must be a rational basis for a practical alternative. Sadly, in most instances, no matter how many demands petitioners make to restore immutable civil liberties, the establishment refuses to relinquish their tyrannical dictates.

This fact keeps the vast majority in self-induced incarceration. Nearly half of potential voters never cast a ballot. It is reasonable to conclude the tired old cliché that it does not matter to vote because there is no a difference between the parties, is accurate. Nonetheless, dissent is far more profound than being a duped victim to a rigged voting system. Dissent requires total emersion into the entire political process.

Lobbying officials and confrontation with bureaucracies are necessary elements that every citizen has a duty to engage. Yet, the lesson of history is that only the few ever risk being burned by challenging the status quo. Well, that kind of resignation will never defeat a coercive political dynasty bent on expanding an ever-greater diabolical regime.

The Sheeple mentality produces walking zombies. You know the type. They are your neighbors and relatives. They come from ever kind of background or employment. Most just are afraid to get involved. They are the first to wave the flag, but will never attend a government public hearing, much less express their discontent. Their motto, “go along to get along” symbolizes the decay of the nation.

Add in the legions of public employees with their union entitlement extortion demands and you have a formula for a terminable society.

Our natural tendency is to trust authority provides a feeble excuse into the dysfunctional Sheeple DNA. Only the conclusion “Our tendency to trust authority is allowing mentally incompetent people to remain as leaders in government, universities, business, and news reporting” provides the accurate insight.

One reason we resist improving our world is that we resist facing the possibility that our leaders are corrupt or incompetent. Our natural tendency is to trust people in positions of authority; to assume they are protecting us and providing guidance to us.

Children offer the most extreme example of this. The natural tendency of a child is to assume his parents are wonderful people. A child will trust his life with his parents, and he will resist accusations that his parents are bad people.

This tendency to trust authority persists even in adults. In fact, some people have noticed that simply by pretending that they are important they can get people to regard them as an authority. People who are promoted to management positions are sometimes advised by other managers to put on an aura of being a leader. The reason is simply because we don’t judge a leader by his ability to lead. Rather, like an animal, and like a child, we judge a leader by his visual appearance, posture, tone of voice, and — most important — according to whether other people consider him to be a leader.

Another viewpoint expands upon the true motives of the “Leaders” that reaches the fundamental lesson.

So you ask why Operation condition the sheeple the title to this article, because many are being manipulated by those that would control the masses for their own greedy purposes. The elite of this country and the World are simple unwilling to share their knowledge and are afraid of the ever awakening populace and rightfully so!So by keeping the populace of the one remaining Super Power left in the World in the dark, distracted with electronic entertainment and tracked by the very same devices, The Powers That Be have put themselves in a position to Condition the Sheeple in anyway they see fit.

You know in your heart the system conditions the public to become mindless obedient serfs. Every act of obeying institutional corruption and rationalizing, that you are a good citizen for conforming to the subliminal conditioning, is the response of a mentally disturbed person.

 

Leave it to Alex Jones to crystallize the plight of a submissive country in the video . Does this analysis conflict with the Ineptocracy definition? While this concept describes the compliant public, do not dismiss the malicious nature of the manipulators that actually control the phony political process and create the environment that fosters a brain dead society.Denial is not a defense for abdicating your civic responsibility. If you are one of the avid cheerleaders of State adoration and practice the ritual sentiment – “America Love It or Leave It“, you are a prime Sheeple follower.

Because there are so many docile disciples ready to forgo their natural rights in order to gain a perceived favor from the jackboot thugs who chime the slogan “rally around the flag boys”, the country deteriorates.

Dissent is necessary for any chance of survival. You know this to be true. But where will the opposition appear or around what issues will they gain critical mass? Under the Amerika Empire, foreign involvement and unremitting war is always a prime target for a mass movement resistance. Just where is the anti-war opposition? There is no monopoly of the left that objects to permanent warfare.

Traditional PaleoConservatives detest NeoCon and NeoLib internationalists. Patriots from all ideologies are alive and eager to stop the madness. So what is the excuse for indifference or lack of coordination? As World War III approaches, what will it take for a national response against the lunacy that guarantees massive human suffering?

The despotism that advances daily will not cease by passing additional repressive laws. National security begins in the minds and souls of the people and ends in the coercive dictates of a police state. Protest and resistance is the true patriotism.

If you are content to be a mere animal subservient to a cruel master, the Sheeple mentality resonates within your defective psyche. PsyOps are at the core of suppression and government education. The normal behavior for the average supporter of the tyrannical system requires condemnation for any dissent that seeks to restore a genuine Republic. If you oppose corruption and advocate accountability, the government flunkies and proponents will label you a domestic terrorist.

It comes as no surprise that the welfare state is now viewed as a right, while the Bill of Rights is trampled into the trash heap of a previous age. Political evolution, for the Sheeple is seen as lowing your head for the clipper that wants to shear your hair. Dissent for creatures absent of courage relegates the society to a fundamental split and confrontation.

Only fidelity to principle and bravery of spirit will transform this disturbed society into a nation worthy of allegiance. Until that day arrives, join the proud legacy of peaceful dissent and civil disobedience. Leadership is different from imposition. Gather the fortitude of risking public ridicule and fight for your country. Start with open resistance to any unlawful or immoral dictate. There is no where left to hide. Become a Patriot in the Patrick Henry tradition.

Iraq. Began With Big Lies. Ending With Big Lies. Never forget

“Most people don’t understand what they have been part of here,” said Command Sgt. Major Ron Kelley as he and other American troops prepared to leave Iraq in mid-December. “We have done a great thing as a nation. We freed a people and gave their country back to them.”

“It is pretty exciting,” said another young American soldier in Iraq. “We are going down in the history books, you might say.” (Washington Post, December 18, 2011)

Ah yes, the history books, the multi-volume leather-bound set of “The Greatest Destructions of One Country by Another.” The newest volume can relate, with numerous graphic photos, how the modern, educated, advanced nation of Iraq was reduced to a quasi failed state; how the Americans, beginning in 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one dubious excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, tortured without inhibition, killed wantonly, … how the people of that unhappy land lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile … The air, soil, water, blood, and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lying anywhere in wait for children to pick them up … a river of blood running alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again.

“It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003,” reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

No matter … drum roll, please … Stand tall American GI hero! And don’t even think of ever apologizing or paying any reparations. Iraq is forced by Washington to continue paying reparations to Kuwait for Iraq’s invasion in 1990 (an invasion instigated in no small measure by the United States). And — deep breath here! — Vietnam has been compensating the United States. Since 1997 Hanoi has been paying off about $145 million in debts left by the defeated South Vietnamese government for American food and infrastructure aid. Thus, Hanoi is reimbursing the United States for part of the cost of the war waged against it. (William Blum, Rogue State, p.304) How much will the United States pay the people of Iraq?

On December 14, at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina military base, Barack Obama stood before an audience of soldiers to speak about the Iraq war. It was a moment in which the president of the United States found it within his heart and soul — as well as within his oft-praised (supposed) intellect — to proclaim:

This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making. And today, we remember everything that you did to make it possible. … Years from now, your legacy will endure. In the names of your fallen comrades etched on headstones at Arlington, and the quiet memorials across our country. In the whispered words of admiration as you march in parades, and in the freedom of our children and grandchildren. … So God bless you all, God bless your families, and God bless the United States of America. … You have earned your place in history because you sacrificed so much for people you have never met.

Does Mr. Obama, the Peace Laureate, believe the words that come out of his mouth?

Barack H. Obama believes only in being the President of the United States. It is the only strong belief the man holds.

Items of interest from a journal I’ve kept for 40 years, part VI

• If the US really believed in 2002-3 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction why did they send in more than 100,000 troops, who were certain to be annihilated?
• In a letter released August 17, 2006, 21 former generals and high ranking national security officials called on President George W. Bush to reverse course and embrace a new area of negotiation with Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The group told reporters Bush’s “hard line” policies had undermined national security and made America less safe.
• Throughout most of the 20th century, the Catholic Church in Latin America taught its flocks of the poor that there was no need to do battle with the ruling elite because the poor would get their just rewards in the afterlife.
• The US overthrew the Sandinistas in Nicaragua because the Sandinistas “intended to create a country where there was only a colony before.” — Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer
• “[George W.] Bush said last week that part of the purpose of the Indonesia trip ‘is to make sure that the people who are suspicious of our country understand our motives are pure’.” (Washington Post, October 22, 2003)
• “Wars may be aberrant experiences in the lives of most human individuals, but some nations are serial aggressors. American society is unique in having been formed almost wholly by processes of aggression against external and internal Others.” — The Black Commentator, June 8, 2006
• President Obama should accompany the military people when they inform parents that their child has died in the latest of America’s never-ending wars. And maybe ask George W. to come along as well.
• During the Vietnam War some University of Michigan students created a brouhaha when they threatened to napalm a puppy dog on the steps of a campus building. The uproar of indignation at their cruelty was heard nationwide. Of course, when the time came they didn’t do it, having successfully made the point that people cared more about napalming a dog than they did about napalming people.
• “It’s a lie and an illusion that we have an inefficient government. This government is only inefficient if you think its job is, as stated in the Constitution, ‘to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.’ These objectives are beyond our government’s talents only because they are beyond its intentions.” — Michael Ventura
• “Get some new lawyers” – US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook when he told her he was informed that the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 (which Albright championed) was illegal under international law.
• The two countries of the world, along with the United States, which have the greatest national obsession with baseball are two of the main targets of US foreign policy: Venezuela and Cuba.
• The Cuban Five case: This is the first case in American history of alleged spying and espionage without a single page from a secret document. The government never presented any evidence of a stolen official document or any attempt to steal an official document. This is the first spy case without secrets from the government. (Read more)
• “If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a ‘suspected terrorist’ is inside, the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is ‘inevitable’. So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians.” — Howard Zinn
• “The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Saturday to impose limited sanctions on North Korea for its recent missile tests, and demanded that the reclusive communist nation suspend its ballistic missile program.” (Associated Press, July 15, 2006) … Internet commentator: “Test some missiles that land harmlessly in the ocean? Unanimous condemnation. Fire some missiles at targets on land, kill hundreds of people, and destroy hundreds of civilian targets including power plants, airports, roads, bridges, TV stations, etc., all in violation of the Geneva Convention? Hey, no problem.”
• For some nine years, American B-52 bombers relentlessly dropped tons of ordnance on a southeast Asian country (Vietnam) that still cultivated rice fields using draft animals.
• “The messianism of American foreign policy is a remarkable thing. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks it seems like Khrushchev reporting to the party congress: ‘The whole world is marching triumphantly toward democracy but some rogue states prefer to stay aside from that road, etc. etc’.” — Natalia Narochnitskaya, vice chairman of the international affairs committee in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament. (Washington Post, April 3, 2006)
• Washington … Propagandistan
• The bulldozer, driven by an Israeli army soldier on assignment to demolish a home, rolled over Rachel Corrie, who was 23 years old. She had taken a nonviolent position for human rights; she lost her life as a result. But she was rarely praised in the same US media outlets that had gone into raptures over the image of a solitary unarmed man standing in front of Chinese tanks at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre. — Norman Solomon
• American sovereignty hasn’t faced a legitimate foreign threat to its existence since the British in 1812.
• There are two major patterns in foreign policy: the rule of force or the rule of law. On February 8, 1819 the US decided, after a very long debate in the House, to reject the rule of law in foreign policy. The vote was 100 to 70 against requiring the Congress to approve illegal invasions of other countries or peoples. This pertained to the “Seminole War”, actually the invasion of Florida. Since then every president has had the right to “defend America”, code words for the use of force against whomever he chooses. — Kelly Gelgering

Happy New Year. Here’s what to look forward to.

JANUARY 22: Congress passes a law requiring that all persons arrested in anti-war demonstrations be sterilized. House Speaker John Boehner declares it is “God’s will”. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says she supports the law but that she has some reservation because there’s no provision for a right of appeal.

FEBRUARY 15: Ron Paul assassinated by man named Oswald Harvey.

FEBRUARY 18: Oswald Harvey, while in solitary confinement and guarded round the clock by 1200 policemen and the entire 3rd Army Brigade, is killed by man named Ruby Jackson.

FEBRUARY 26: Ruby Jackson suddenly dies in prison of a rare Asian disease heretofore unknown in the Western Hemisphere.

MARCH 6: US President Hopey Changey announces new draconian sanctions against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba, declaring that they all possess weapons of mass destruction, are an imminent threat to the United States, have close ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban, are aiding Islamic terrorists in Somalia, were involved in 9-11, played a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the attack on Pearl Harbor, do not believe in God or American Exceptionalism, and are all “really bad guys”.

APRIL 1: Military forces overthrow Evo Morales in Bolivia. US State Department decries the loss of democracy.

APRIL 2: US recognizes the new Bolivian military junta, sells it 100 jet fighters and 200 tanks.

APRIL 3: Revolution breaks out in Bolivia endangering the military junta; 40,000 American marines are sent to La Paz to quell the uprising.

APRIL 8: Dick Cheney announces from his hospital bed that the United States has finally discovered caches of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — “So all those doubters can now just go ‘F’ themselves.” The former vice-president, however, refuses to provide any details of the find because, he says, to do so might reveal intelligence sources or methods.

APRIL 10: ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, General Electric, General Motors, AT&T, Ford, and IBM merge to form “Free Enterprise, Inc.”

APRIL 16: Free Enterprise, Inc. seeks to purchase Guatemala and Haiti. Citigroup refuses to sell.

APRIL 18: Free Enterprise, Inc. purchases Citigroup.

MAY 5: The Democratic Party changes its name to the Republican Lite Party, and announces the opening of a joint bank account with the Republicans so that corporate lobbyists need make out only one check. In celebration of the change the new party calls for eliminating the sales tax on yachts.

MAY 11: China claims to have shot down an American spy plane over the center of China. State Department categorically denies the story.

MAY 12: State Department admits that an American plane may have “inadvertently” strayed 2,000 miles into China, but denies that it was a spy plane.

MAY 13: State Department admits that the plane may have been a spy plane but denies that it was piloted by a US government employee.

MAY 14: State Department admits that the pilot was a civilian employee of a Defense Department contractor but denies that China exists.

JUNE 11: Homeland Security announces plan to collect the DNA at birth of every child born in the United States.

JULY 1: The air in Los Angeles reaches so bad a pollution level that the rich begin to hire undocumented workers to breathe for them.

AUGUST 6: The Justice Department announces that six people have been arrested in New York in connection with a plan to bomb the United Nations, the Empire State Building, the Times Square subway station, Madison Square Garden, and Lincoln Center.

AUGUST 7: Charges are dropped against four of “The New York Six” when it is determined that they are FBI agents.

AUGUST 16: At a major demonstration in Washington, the Tea Party demands an end to all government expenditures. They also warn Congress not to touch Social Security or Medicare.

AUGUST 26: Texas executes a 16-year-old girl for having an abortion and a 12-year-old boy for possession of marijuana.

SEPTEMBER 3: The Labor Department announces that Labor Day will become a celebration of America’s gratitude to its corporations, a day dedicated to the memory of J.P. Morgan and Pinkerton strike breakers killed in the line of duty.

SEPTEMBER 12: The draft is reinstated for males and females, ages 16 to 45. Those who are missing a limb or are blind can apply for non-combat roles.

SEPTEMBER 14: Riots breaks out in 24 American cities in protest of the new draft. 200,000 American troops are brought home from Afghanistan, Iraq, and 25 other countries to put down the riots.

SEPTEMBER 28: The Tea Party calls for giving embryos the vote.

OCTOBER 19: Cops the world over form a new association, Policemen’s International Governing Society. PIGS announces that its first goal will be to mount a campaign against the notion that a person is innocent until proven guilty, in those countries where the quaint notion still dwells.

NOVEMBER 8: The turnout for the US presidential election is 9.6%. The voting ballots are all imprinted: “From one person, one vote, to one dollar, one vote.” The winner is “None of the above”.

NOVEMBER 11: US prison population reaches 2.5 million. It is determined that at least 70 percent of the prisoners would not have been incarcerated a century ago, for the acts they committed were then not criminal violations.

DECEMBER 3: Supreme Court rules that police may search anyone if they have reasonable grounds for believing that the person has pockets.

DECEMBER 16: The Occupy Movement sets up a tent on the White House lawn. An hour later a missile fired from a drone leaves but a thin wisp of smoke.

The Iowa Caucus: A Ron Paul Win or a GOP Heist?

A caucus selection process is a much fairer method than party controlled primaries. That is why the GOP establishment fears the voice of the public. A caucus that could actually influence or determine a nomination must be stopped. Party operated election commissions are a central cause for illegitimate elections. If your anointed candidate wins, the process reflects the will of the people, but if a true reformer wins, like Ron Paul; the caucus does not really matter. Just how stupid are these Republican stooges?

The GOP cretins, who long ago, sold out the Republic are willing to foster any lie and sling whatever slime they can make up to prevent Ron Paul from winning the nomination. Front and center is the nitwit Newt. The National Journal reports in, Gingrich Unloads on Paul: Worse Than Obama: “I think Barack Obama is very destructive to the future of the United States. I think Ron Paul’s views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American,” Gingrich said Tuesday in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer. Could he vote for Paul? “No.

“In Iowa push, ABC News reports, Bachmann Targets Paul.

 

In order to understand the nature of the Gingrich, Bachmann, Santorum, Perry and Romney attacks on Ron Paul, you must face the reality that their Israel First loyalty trumps their oath to protect the true interests of America.

The bold viewpoint of Brother Nathanael will never gain mainstream attention. However, in his YouTube,  a born Jew witnesses what other Americans would be condemned for saying.

In Smear Job, Michael Collins Piper provides another example of attempts to destroy Ron Paul.

What Some Black People Think	The Compassion of Dr. Ron Paul

 

Steve Watson on InfoWars offers us this summary:

 

Watch The Vote – Iowa Caucus 2012	Ron Paul: Iowa Vote Fraud

 

It is clear that the foreign affairs establishment of the bipartisan War Party will make every effort to prevent Ron Paul from becoming President. The rush for perfecting voter fraud is on. The announcement that the Iowa GOP is moving vote-count to ‘undisclosed location’ is outrageous.

Occupy Portland Is Born with Ten Thousand Strong

It should be no surprise that a city dubbed “Little Beirut” by President Bush Senior — due to the large protests against him — began its “occupation” on a level on par with Wall Street.

On October 6th, in Portland, Oregon, ten thousand people assembled at noon at Waterfront Park on a workday in anticipation of the non-permitted march, which would make a pit stop before ending at its official, secret “Occupation” spot.

The buzz for the event had permeated all sectors of Portland society. People who had never shown a political urge in their lives were suddenly convulsing. Hundreds of people started showing up at the organizing meetings, many of them younger people unknown by the “usual suspects” of Portland activism. A refreshing sign, since new blood is a key ingredient to all social movements.

Although people were warned of police violence during the non-permitted march, nothing came of it. This isn’t surprising, given the close spotlight on Portland’s police (the Justice Department is investigating them for police brutality and having heavy trigger fingers). Also, Portland’s Mayor has a reputation for being Mr. Liberal, and cracking heads in broad daylight must not have sounded appealing to him. Most importantly, the march was large enough to defend itself, permits or not.

The atmosphere at Occupy Portland is one that forms the nucleus of any successful social movement: solidarity. Young and old from all backgrounds holding signs, chanting, and forming bonds with complete strangers over the issues that naturally bind all working people together: jobs, inequality, anti-war, student loan forgiveness, defending Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (the social safety net), etc.

These are the demands of the movement, whether or not they are officially recognized. They are the organic demands that arise from the experience of working people, as showcased by the countless signs in Portland’s protest.

There were many “anti-system” signs as well; Portland has a healthy number of anarchists, socialists, etc. But many of these more-radical signs were held by working or unemployed families; some of the banners were vague or instinctive, while others were specifically anti-capitalist. The majority of signs were of immediate demands (tax the rich, etc.), but many were “system-based.” This is the dual nature of the protests, something that will be eventually reconciled during the life of the movement. One demand needn’t be sacrificed for another, but focusing on certain demands at critical times will be crucial to give the movement momentum after the initial of burst of energy has subsided.

For example, the majority of working people can instantly unite and be moved to action with a demand similar to “tax the rich to create jobs and save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” while only a minority of working people will unite indefinitely around the banner: “End Inequality” or “end capitalism.” This is the main reason why specific demands must eventually be put forth; working people are only powerful against their corporate competition when they are united. Indeed this is the very basis for the plight of working people today — we are ruled because 99 percent are divided against the 1 percent.

Linked with unity is organization. The Occupy movement has shown an expert use of organizational tools such as social media. The day that Occupy Portland began, one could watch the protest live at www.occupyportland.org. Linked with organization is leadership, and although the Occupy movement rejects the word, there are already obvious leaders emerging.

For example, the organizers who knew the end location of the march are leaders, as are the organizers who committed to doing the most legwork towards outreach and communication. The leaders also decided that this march was to be non-violent, which angered a minority of protesters in Portland. Leaders also control the use of the web page. Democracy is crucially important, the majority must make the decisions for the movement. But leaders emerge with any organizational effort. They are the people who contribute most and create the space for others to occupy.

After the non-permitted march, protesters gathered in “Portland’s Living Room,” Pioneer Square, where the festivities continued. Later, the march continued to its overnight venue, a public park across from the county courthouse. As of this writing the Mayor had officially approved the occupation space until 9am the following morning, when the police would evict the occupants in favor of the Portland Marathon run, who had the park reserved. The occupiers hadn’t yet decided whether to pack up and move elsewhere or test the power of the police. The optimism and numbers of protesters made the crowd courageous, but the 10,000 high mark had dwindled over the course of the night to a couple of thousand, especially after the drizzle began.

If Portland is any indication, there is plenty of energy ready to be funneled into victories for working people. It is up to the Occupy movement to find ways to best funnel this energy, since people will not indefinitely occupy something without a clear goal in mind, or without a barometer to measure their success. In Egypt, protesters proudly declared “I will occupy Tahrir Square until the dictator has fallen.” As it stands now, nobody in Portland can make a similar statement. Demands and goals do matter; wanting general change is not enough, as the Obama campaign clearly proved: vagueness invites political opportunists and their offspring, which ends in disappointment.

But for now occupying is enough. We are entering the infant stage of a new social movement, and once the newborn’s excitement of being alive passes away, real life must be dealt with: the infant must learn to walk; must learn what to value and how to achieve its goals while clearing obstacles out of its path. Although there is no telling how this baby will mature, we can only hope that adulthood will be successful.

Our Spiritual Leadership Stumbles and Falls

A Lesson in Betrayal and Trust…

The world is standing at a crossroads.  Many believe that the world has, in fact, already chosen its path and has now tunneled deep into the darkness.  Like many who are working to bring to light the truth of our collective predicament, I prefer to believe there is still time for corrective action, and that the headlong rush towards self destruction can be reversed. In order for this to take place, the disturbing and deplorable facts about what we are going up against need to be revealed. The very first step on the way to substantive change is that the truth must come out.

Ideally, religious leaders carry a moral imperative to bring us to the truth.  But while it is true that certain congregations are headed up by leaders who may rail against war, or may advise against taking part in certain government programs—homeschooling and vaccines come to mind—there are other, critically important issues concerning which our religious leaders remain silent.

Many of us  have come to  realize that there is a dark impetus that has emerged, an ever more powerful section of the body politic which advocates for eugenics.  In plain words, this means that certain sectors of the population are facing elimination.  But even in the most “progressive” of congregations, you won’t hear the pastor pounding the Sunday pulpit and asserting that geneticists within the government have developed chemical compounds which are right now being leaked into most processed foods, bonding with melanin and resulting in the epidemic of hypertension and diabetes among the African American population (who have the most melanin in their systems). You won’t hear the  rabbi explaining to his congregation during Friday night Shabbat services that the double line water system has the capability of wiping off the face of the earth every Jew, or every political activist, or every Jehovah’s witness, or every red haired, freckle faced single mother of three on welfare, for that matter. Pick your demographic and the water weapon can hone in on any segment of the population that is selected.

One can argue endlessly which groups are targeted for the clean sweep. To my way of thinking, it doesn’t matter who Mother Government has decided to cull. We are all American citizens; we all allegedly have rights under the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees us “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  Please note that the primary word here is “life.” The fact remains that the eugenics movement within the U.S. government—a movement which boasts a long history of advocating the desirability of killing people (proponents include the Bush family and their well-documented support of Adolph Hitler)—has privately and covertly made decisions and plans which defy every constitutional and moral principle upon which our country is founded.  Add to this the fact that those “scientifically” promoting mass covert eugenics programs have risen to ascendancy in our country and we have a recipe for a crisis which religious leadership has a moral obligation to address.

But they don’t.  Some churches may organize anti-war demonstrations and others may serve soup to homeless folks. But the dark train is moving forward and our religious leaders are keeping their own counsel.

I would like to think they are merely frightened.  It would be easiest to excuse the roaring silence, the enormous gap between what is at play and what is said about it as cowardice.  I would like to think that the rash of unsolved murders of scientists working on biowarfare/eugenics programs has not escaped the attention of our esteemed religious leadership and that they are collectively quaking in their silk-lined, tasseled robes at the thought of what might happen to them, personally, should they speak out about where this train is going. I would like to think it is merely spinelessness which keeps our spiritual leaders bound to silence.  This is the most generous conclusion I can reach.  But I suspect that the truth may be much, much worse.

CASE IN POINT—WHAT’S GOING ON WITH THE RABBIS?

It is an uncomfortable and seldom discussed historical fact that much of the rabbinate escaped Hitler’s extermination agenda and were able to emigrate out of Eastern Europe, to safety elsewhere.  It is also a matter of historical record that the Jewish leadership in the U.S. , through the American Jewish Congress, lobbied against lifting immigration restrictions on European Jews, thus ensuring that they would be trapped in Eastern Europe and perish.  One third of the Jews on the planet were eliminated due to Hitler’s efforts, as were many other targeted groups.  These efforts were enabled by the likes of such Jewish luminaries as Stephen Wise, who helped establish the American Jewish Congress back in 1918.

In Los Angeles, a synagogue is adorned with the name of Stephen Wise.  The Wise Temple is one of the largest in Los Angeles, with a congregation of over 3200 member families.  The betrayal of his fellow Jews by Stephen Wise, who through his lobbying against lifting immigration restrictions contributed to the mass murder of untold numbers of Jews, is not fodder for sermons at the temple which bears his name.  Nor, in my experience, is this ghastly fact discussed elsewhere in Los Angeles synagogues.

I first began attending Temple Beth Shir Shalom in Santa Monica in 2004.  I had already begun researching the double line water system in   Los Angeles, spending long afternoons  scouting out city work crews, ingratiating myself with the laborers and finding ways to get a peek at (and snapshot of)  the water system blueprints.  I had already received input, albeit somewhat reluctantly so, from several rabbis indicating that they knew something was afoot with the water.

I decided to meet with the rabbi at Beth Shir Shalom, Rabbi Neil Comess- Daniels, and ask him some direct questions.

Beth Shir Shalom is an attractive, modern building on a quiet street in Santa Monica.  It is home to a Reform congregation, which has been headed up by Comess-Daniels for many years. Much of the service is conducted in English, a boon for me as I do not speak Hebrew and at Beth Shir Shalom much of it is conducted in song, as Comess- Daniels plays guitar and sings. He is also a well known anti-war activist and social justice advocate.

I met with the rabbi in his study at the temple. We chatted for a bit then I got down to business. I began pulling out of my knapsack photographs of water crews, hard at work on busy Los Angeles Streets. I pointed out to him the double lines that appeared in the blueprints and asked him if he understood what I was working on. He turned pale and gulped.

“I know what is going to happen,” I stated. “I want to know when deployment is planned. I want to know how much longer I have to get the word out.”

Daniels looked away. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. Realizing that I wasn’t getting anywhere, I thanked him for his time and said I looked forward to returning on Friday for Shabbat services. We chatted a few more minutes and I left.

I got to Temple a few minutes before services started that Friday and slipped into a pew near the back.  Within two minutes, a large dark- suited man sidled up to me.  Leaning down, he whispered that he would like to have a word with me. Would I mind coming with him for a moment?

We went outside and he told me to leave. Leave, and don’t come back. Bewildered, I asked why. “You threatened the rabbi,” he said. “I did not!” I protested.

The rabbi felt threatened, I was told. I was to leave or the police would be called.

I made a number of attempts, over the next several weeks, to speak with the President of the Temple, a large noisy red haired woman. She declined to return any of my calls.

I then spoke with some friends who also attended Beth Shir Shalom. One of them spoke to the President on my behalf and she assured him there was a mistake. I was free to return anytime, she told him.

About two months passed by and I showed up again. I had told my friends that I was returning and to look for me. I also called the President and left a message thanking her for clarifying my status and letting her know I would be returning on Friday night.

I walked into the hall of worship, searching for my friends. Not seeing them initially, I seated myself near the rear.  It only took thirty seconds for several security guards to swoop down on me. And this time, they weren’t issuing warnings.

I was escorted outside. My ID was demanded of me.  I began to search my pockets for it, then changed my mind and declined.  Three more people showed up, two of them women whom I recognized  as temple management. One of them mumbled something…sounded like “keep her here while I call” and went back in side.  Oh great, I thought. They are calling the police.

I did nothing wrong. I said. I started to walk off. My suspicions were confirmed. Wait, said one of the women, coyly. We just want to talk to you. I could hear her voice trailing off…”come back…” as I walked away.

WHAT IF?

I have chosen to relay this story about what happened at Beth Shir Shalom. I could just have easily imparted an equally troubling story about the Catholic diocese in St. Louis or a squirrelly Methodist minister in Sandpoint, Idaho.  While I find it hard to believe that every man of God has gone to the devil, it has become clear to me that the spiritual leadership in our country has fallen into grave disrepair. We have too many chefs trying to keep the lid on a pot that is clearly set to blow.

It is unsettling enough to know that our government cannot be trusted.  Let down, we begin to look elsewhere. The first stop is usually the media. It doesn’t take too long to realize that the Fourth Estate has become an arm of government, there to protect rather than watchdog those in power. Betrayed again, we turn off the tube and boot up the computer, and begin to search the web for what we cannot find from traditionally trusted sources. And many of us look for spiritual guidance.

If I have learned anything through this passage, it is how critical it is to develop discernment. Wolves abound dressed like Grandma, offering all kinds of diversions and temptations.  It is incumbent upon each and every one of us to develop our own internal warning systems and to learn to listen to that small still voice of God which is in each and every one of us, and to learn to trust that voice. Our very future, together and separately, depends upon this.

Stealing Truth: The John Fund Back Story (updated)

If the media had followed the clear rules they had written for themselves, would we now be on the express down elevator to a meltdown of global proportions? Likely not. We would have problems, but we would have seen them more clearly. We needed the truth. We did not get it, for perhaps as many reasons as there are individuals in journalism.

The first problem was that journalists so blithely ignored the standards of their profession.

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has established a code of ethics. The tenets of this code are short, clear, concise, and well-founded. But there is no means of enforcement. If journalists would follow them, we could trust the media. Today most of us do not. If a journalist ignores their ethical obligations, either from sloth or a desire to profit, nothing can be done. If raiding the cookie jar can be carried out with impunity, then there will be no cookies. I know this, having raised several children.

The SPJ has existed since 1909, four years before the Federal Reserve Bank came into being. Their founders could have included Ida Tarbell, the journalist who caused the break up of Standard Oil, though the site does not mention her – an indomitable truth teller. Tarbell told the truth, but a handful of years later the dispersed Standard Oil was larger than ever and still carried out the same exploitive pattern of business.

The takeaway: having the truth does not automatically solve the problem. You need to use the truth to build the cultural tools that enact accountability. We need that accountability today as the world melts down around our ears. Those responsible for the economic collapse are getting bailouts. Those who will be forced to pay are losing everything.

It was not just banks or oil companies or the “military-industrial complex” of which Ike warned us, though the sense of immunity to accountability these corporate-cultural structures enjoy is another part of the problem. Many individuals made decisions they knew to be wrong. Along with those heading corporations, journalists were a pivotal part of this failure. They had ample opportunity to act ethically and make a decision that would have influenced the values by which all of us live, building the world through those uncounted separate choices. Unfortunately, they chose unwisely and unethically – and their bad choices drove out the good.

Large media (and non-media) corporations have swallowed up newspapers and other media outlets during the last few decades with alarming speed, with the goal being the use of these outlets as an extension of their control. Individual journalists did not have to cooperate – but they did, in large part. The lack of dispassionate, objective reporting in journalism morphed the profession towards use as a perpetual public relations service for those in power. The question became not “What is the truth?” but “What do you want the truth to be?” Power and profit became the unassailable be-all and end-all of corporate journalism.

Consider, for example, the case of John Fund.

Sex, Lies, and Journalism

As a member of the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal for 18 years, Fund was on a trajectory toward greater power in 1998, and that power provided him with a feeling of invincibility. Already accustomed to sexual access to many women who were attracted to him as a figure possessing power and money, he became accustomed to ignoring the consequences of behavior that was deceitful and ugly. He was also accustomed to lying politically. His personal and professional life matched. He knew no matter what he did he would be protected.

In October of 1998, he began a sexual relationship with the daughter of a long-time friend he had once dated. The woman’s name was Morgan Pillsbury, my biological daughter. I had known Fund since 1980 when we met at a Libertarian Party Convention, where he came across as nerdy and bumbling but likable. The impression stuck. Over the years we kept in touch.

When I heard a rumor that Fund was involved with Morgan, I called him directly. He lied to me, telling me she lived nearby. He claimed that he had been feeding her cat for her while she had been away. I believed him. Having had experience with Morgan over many years, I knew she could be dishonest . She would need strong evidence to disprove Fund’s claims to me. That is why the audio tape often referred to as the “Weaselsearch tape” was made. If you listen to the tape, it becomes immediately apparent that Fund did not want me to know the truth. He lied and pressured Morgan to lie about their relationship. There was no reason for this; if he had told me he was in a relationship with Morgan, I would have been surprised and appalled, but it had been many years since we had been more than friends. My time was occupied caring for my handicapped son and by my own health needs, not with his love life. And Morgan was no child. She was born July 5, 1967. John was born April 8, 1956.

If this had remained merely a case of a man lying about his love life, journalism would never have been an issue. But Fund wanted to continue the relationship with Morgan covertly so he could also have relations with other women. He did not want his professional life impacted.

Unfortunately for Fund, Morgan refused to be his dirty little secret. For much of the three years they were a couple, Fund used Morgan’s computer for professional purposes, but also to receive personal e-mail. Why Fund would have overlooked the chain of evidence thus produced is perhaps explained by the fact that at that time he knew next to nothing about computers. During that time, Fund consistently lied about his relationship with Morgan and pursued other women. It was a strange relationship, and I do not pretend to entirely understand it. But at each point, I demanded proof from Morgan for just that reason. I talked to Fund over dinner, on the phone from the apartment the couple shared. I received e-mails from him and other proof that could not have been falsified, for instance this IM conversation on AOLbetween Matt Drudge and Morgan. Drudge had been IMing with Fund on Morgan’s computer earlier. Fund went to bed, leaving the window up. And so Morgan continued the conversation.

Around January, 2002, Fund – despite claims to the contrary by himself and others – was fired from the Wall Street Journal, probably because of the scandal that exploded over his own behavior. Morgan told me he had battered her on multiple occasions, first in New Jersey and then after he stalked her back to Manhattan and insisted on moving in with her in her new apartment. I heard several of those incidents via phone – as did others.

She finally decided to file charges in both New Jersey and New York..

A letter from Fidelity Investments advised him to, “make a decision about what to do with the savings you have accumulated in your former employer’s retirement plan.” That employer was the Wall Street Journal. The letter is in Morgan’s possession. Fund opened it in her living room and, as Morgan told me, left it laying on the floor.

The lies then escalated.

Morgan told me that Fund coerced a false confession from her to hide his acts. He used threats of violence to get the confession. Morgan sent this email to me and others immediately to refute what she had been forced to sign. Documentation exists to support the truth.

Fund solicited and received the cooperation of other journalists to spin what had taken place. One can only conclude that Fund was very willing to make it worth their while or misrepresent the facts. Evidence almost immediately surfaced that Fund was sexually involved with at least one journalist who then lied for him in print. Some journalists knew the truth. Others were clearly taken in by Fund’s lies. All were guilty of a lack of due diligence. If they had followed the tenets set out for journalists today might be different for all of us.

Black Box Road to the Rove White House

Fund’s relationship with the Bush White House and the purpose of the book he was then writing, Stealing Elections, were less obvious in 2002. Fund has since admitted he has been routinely briefed by the White House, before and after he was fired from the WSJ. His road to being a willing tool of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was long and, in many ways, meteoric.

Fund first worked as a political operative in 1979, according to Justin Raimondo. His services were secured to ensure the nomination of Ed Clark for the Libertarian Presidential Nomination for 1980 by Ed Crane. Far from having an interest in stopping voter or election fraud, Fund himself committed a curious specie of fraud by claiming to be a candidate by taking out papers that year but never turning them in while claiming to be running for office and getting 46% of the vote. Justin Raimondo characterized Fund as “an expert lying propagandist of the sleazier sort.”

Never in all the years I knew him did I hear Fund express any interest in the issues of election or voter fraud. His political interests were more sensational; his personal interests run to Star Wars and Star Trek. If you really knew him, this sudden change in principal interests should have raised questions about his role with those associated with the administration. It did for me. The book he wrote is now considered by those in the clean elections movement to be a misdirective tool intended to muddy the water on the issue of voter fraud. It focuses in on purported fraud by individuals, ignoring the enormous issues of fraud now ascribed to such companies as Diebold and ES&S. Fund proposed centralizing control over elections as a solution – an idea completely in line with the big and well-connected “black box” mongers – and is nearly successful in undermining the issue by injecting his spin.

Bev Harris of Black Box Voting said of Fund’s position, “It is amazing that this bogus solution is still being put forth. His solutions take us directly to ever more centralized control by a small group of insiders. What is needed is for the people to have local control and access to the results. Complete transparency.”

Mark Crispin Miller was even more explicit, saying, “Despite his pose as an impartial expert on American elections, John Fund is in fact a dedicated party operative, who for many years has turned out rightist propaganda for the GOP. Specifically, he has abetted the Republicans’ election theft by helping to promote the myth of widespread Democratic ‘voter fraud’–a fiction that has been disproved by every reputable study, but one which Fund has pushed at every opportunity. And so whatever he may recommend to help ‘reform’ US elections should be rejected out of hand, as on this crucial subject he enjoys no credibility at all.”

Vickie Karp and others involved in the clean elections movement also agree about Fund and his role as a propagandist and deceiver. All of the agree that Fund’s “solutions,” which provide cover for ever more centralization and displace real reform, are the opposite of transparency.

Inserting himself into that dialog would have been severely hampered had he been in jail for domestic violence. Yet Fund remains a high level political operative. Understanding how he accomplished his goals provides a clear understanding of the covert operation we know as the Bush Administration.

Fund’s “Nuts and Sluts” Strategy

Fund solicited several articles attacking both Morgan and myself.

Eric Alterman, a New York based writer known for his partisan political writing, generally perceived as on the left, authored an article for the May 15, 2003 edition of The Nation, Who Framed John Fund? Morgan and I attempted to contact Alterman. On Mother’s Day morning, June 11^th, Morgan received an email from Alterman urgently requesting a response to a list of questions. Alterman received her response within three hours. He used none of the material supplied, did not call to follow up on her reply, and did not ask for the further documents that Morgan had offered. On June 25, 2003 a response from another liberal, Mark Crispin Miller, was published with another from Alterman in The Nation. The exchange is titled, ‘Ugly Tactics Make for Ugly People.’ Alterman sent Morgan a dismissive E-mail on July 4^th.

According to Fred Brown, vice chair of the ethics committee for the Society for Professional Journalists, many journalists would pause before writing an article requested by someone in Fund’s circumstances. A journalist who followed the tenets of ethics would also be careful to ensure that all principals had fully aired their cases. Alterman violated every tenet of the code as outlined by SPJ.

Fund was at that time working to have the charges against him in New York dropped. To accomplish that, he had been told he needed to destroy our credibility – Morgan’s as the victim, and my own as a witness. Along with soliciting journalists with whom he had relationships or could compensate in some way, he solicited libelous letters from at least two individuals, each with a motive for wanting either myself or Pillsbury silenced.

A perfunctory search of the journalists involved also leads to linkages between journalists to be pointed out. Alterman states in articles he has written that he is a friend of Katie Rosman, about whom you will read more below.  of their names shows they often appear at the same events and cite each other. Alterman “adores gossip,” by his own report, and admits to being an avid reader of Page Six, a gossip column run by Richard Johnson with associates such as Doug Dechert.

Dechert was a regular attendee at the Fabiani Society, which meets the second Tuesday at the Princeton Club, a place where Fund also regularly showed up. The first time I was introduced to Dechert at one of these events, he asked me for $10,000 to be in Page Six. I did not know what Page Six was and would have declined even more rapidly if I had known. Selling print in this fashion is not news, it is not journalism, and it is not public relations, a profession having its own tenets for ethics. Discussing the matter with Fred Brown, we agreed that the term “Slime Journalism” worked to describe it (with apologies to slime, which is an important part of the ecosystem). Reading Alterman’s enthusiastic reports on the operation leads one to believe he expects dishonesty and scandal as standard. Certainly that is how his reports read.

The Fabiani Society is jointly sponsored by two NeoCon think-tanks, the Cato Institute and the Manhattan Institute. The speakers usually represent the opinions marketed by those institutions. Many come only for the opportunity to network or the excellent canapés and ample bar.

Fund sent this email to Morgan at the same time these articles would have been in the works, once again demonstrating his lack not only of professionalism but maturity.

An article solicited by Katie Rosman, then at Elle, in the autumn of 2003 presents a strategy also intended to silence us using another tack. We met with Katie Rosman at a coffee shop in Manhattan where she asked for an exclusive on the story. We agreed. Soon her contact with us became sporadic. The story was stalled for months, during a critical time period, and then quashed (see correspondence).

Rosman received a job offer at the Wall Street Journal simultaneous to the article being dropped. Rosman is still working at the WSJ and is a friend of Eric Alterman’s, according to Alterman.

Fund solicited a woman law professor, Gail Heriot (who was having a sexual relationship with Fund) to assist him. The site, John H. Fund,was originally registered at her address in San Diego, 4830 Hart Drive, San Diego, CA 92116. That has now been changed. Heriot put herself in the category of journalist when she wrote to Gene Gaudette, the editor of APJ, with a letter she sent across the Internet, effectively publishing it. Its content is libelous. (You can read that e-mail from Heriot to American Politics Journal and their demolishing response here).

Heriot had written an email to Fund on January 13, 2002 that reveals the source of her support for Fund: at that time Morgan and Fund were still living together she wrote, “So allow me to introduce myself.  I am Gail Heriot, the woman whose hotel room you’ve found yourself in a few times over the last six weeks.” See the full letter here.

Fund solicited other attacks. Wendy McElroy, who wrote “False Rape Charges Hurt Real Victims” for FOXnews.com (published July 22, 2003), also violated the tenets of journalism, evidently profiting thereby.

Journalists are required to ensure the principals are heard. McElroy failed to call either Morgan or myself. Since I had known her personally since the 1970s, this was a shock. Despite my best efforts I could not even get McElroy on the phone after she published. There was no notice given in advance what so ever.

Instead of carrying out her ethical obligation to seek the facts she wrote the article exonerating Fund and was within weeks hired at FOX News, a media outlet long associated with Fund and his fellow NeoCons. McElroy has made her living for decades writing effective spin for niche groups that want to hear justifications for their positions. These include why women need pornography and why women are as likely to be batterers as men, among other unsupportable assertions.

Wendy McElroy had made her living selling this kind of garbage to men’s groups for years. One was left asking why Fox, a major media outlet, would suddenly decide to hire her on. Soon, we were calling it the John Fund Jobs Program for Needy Journalists.

Fund was offered support from a female journalist with whom he was evidently conducting an affair at Christian Broadcast Network. Her name was Christine Hall-Reis. Here is a semi-nude photo that she sent to Fund, which he downloaded to Morgan’s computer and became her property. Fund and Morgan were living together at the time the photo was sent along with the accompanying email.

One can reach no other conclusion that each and every one of these articles was clearly solicited by Fund.

One also has to relish the irony of Fund using women with whom he was intimately involved to deploy a “nuts and sluts” smear campaign.

Fund also received help from individuals hoping to benefit from the opportunity presented who were not compensated. Two such individuals were Eric Garris and Justin Raimondo, now of Anti-War.com. Both individuals had known Fund and myself for many years. Both were members of a small but self-consciously radical group associated with the Libertarian Party and Murray Rothbard, a highly respected free market economist who died in 1995. I made a call to Eric Garris in 2002 asking for help. Morgan was in hiding, in fear of her life. Fund was using every avenue to destroy my reputation and credibility. Eric refused to help. In 2006 Justin Raimondo wrote this article that appeared on Anti-War.com. I responded in 24 hours with this article.

Soon afterward I talked to Lew Rockwell, who employs Eric Garris as a webmaster. Eric had read my assertion that the hit piece on Fund was motivated by the realization neither he or Raimondo would never profit by covering for Fund. Lew told me he talked to Garris right after he read my article. Eric, he said, affirmed I was exactly right.

Among journalists on the right, the left and the libertarian realm, Fund had succeeded in persuading journalists to write in his defense.

In each instance they ignored the truth.

In all cases each of the individuals above achieved, or hoped to achieve for some benefit for themselves by using the appearance of journalism to sell lies.

Propaganda Prison

Seventy years ago, when the United States media still reported news with a semblance of accuracy, we had sympathy for the citizens of countries like Russia and Germany where the news was censored and distorted with propaganda.  In that era we were the good guys fighting a war against evil, our society was free and we thought were working to keep it that way.  In human terms it was a long time ago.

Today, the former “city on a hill” is behaving is a way that has caused its worldwide reputation to plummet. (Click here to see what the world thinks of us.)

The United States of America has become a rogue nation; an empire building, imperialistic dictatorship without integrity or loyalty.  Our amoral government controls its’ citizens with propaganda and false flag events; it supports torture and the collateral murder of innocent civilians.

The press and media are complicit in this tyranny.

World War II was the last major attempt by a tyrant to rule the world by invading and occupying nations.  Control without invasion is just as effective and less expensive.  Until the NeoCons manipulated the United States into the war in the Middle East the United States was able to exert international hegemony by stationing small quantities of troops in over a hundred nations; all without overt armed conflict.

Control of the Media has been achieved in a similar fashion.   Instead of nationalizing the means of communication our government has allowed a series of mergers that has put the majority of communication in the hands of a tiny minority of like minded, controllable individuals.

Genuine news reporters and editors would headline government mendacity; they would shout it from television screens, and present its defeat in exciting motion picture stories.  Instead, sources of information in the United States of America are subject to the screening of entire segments of information.  The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is blacked out and the inhuman treatment of Palestinians is censored.  The relationship between Whites, Jews, and Blacks in America is carefully omitted making an honest discussion impossible.

Although Arabs had nothing to do with the Holocaust with the arrogance of racial superiority Jews maintain the Holocaust entitles them to steal Middle East Land.  Arabs lived peacefully with Jews before the massive Jewish incursion into their homes, businesses and properties.   This serious evil is supported by hordes of brainwashed American Dispensationalists led by prominent ministers and respected leaders like Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.  Honest coverage of the plight of the Palestinians is missing.

Elite Jews, who control our media, seek to destroy freedom of speech and enact laws that make honest discussion a crime. The New York Times claims to ink all the news that’s fit to print. But they often fail to include the “how” and “why”.  They may tell us who, what, when, and where, but seldom how and why.  What we get is dishonest spin, distortions, and manipulative fantasies.  What is not distorted is omitted, real truth is scarce.

We are not told about the devastating loss of wealth resulting from trade treaties our government promised would make us wealthy.  Our factories lost 3 million jobs between 2000 and 2004 and an additional 2.2 million jobs from 2007 to 2010. These jobs are not likely to return and the service sector jobs that are touted as replacements pay far less.  You will not see or hear this discussed on your local media.   Read about it here.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s last book “Two Hundred Years Together” has been available in Russia for several year but is banned from the United States.  Not because it is immoral or dishonest but because it exposes some of the unsavory historical underside of our power structure.

Clothed in politically correct terms efforts to divide and debauch our nation have been going on for decades.  Racial integration, multiculturalism, and open homosexuality have been promoted by our Universities and our Media as natural and desirable when in reality they are divisive, aberrant, and dangerous.  They destroy unanimity, create antagonism, and decimate the culture.

We live in a small town in Florida.  Our only daily newspaper is owned by the New York Times.  This was a recent headline: “Gas, food prices are expected to end rise”.  The story came from the Associated Press,  a monopolistic news organization that dispenses news throughout the world.  It reported a decrease in the price of several commodities but did not mention the relationship between the value of the dollar and the price of commodities.  It failed to report that increases in the quantity of dollars in circulation decreases the value of the currency.  Not only was a key element in the story missing but the headline itself is misleading.  In the long run the chance that the prices of consumer staples will decrease or remain stable is remote.   Instead of bringing real news to the public forum the media brings us propaganda.  They manipulate us by telling us things are getting better when in reality they are worse.

For the past several years television and motion pictures have inserted Blacks into all of their programming.  Hosts for television programs are bi-racial, social settings are bi-racial, love affairs are bi-racial, and miscegenation is often presented or inferred.   From a personal perspective casual mingling of the races is perfectly acceptable but when it is served up to the public as common when in reality it is infrequent it is an cunning manipulation.

Jared Taylor has written a book entitled “White Identity” (Finding a publisher was difficult!)  about the failure of multiculturalism to achieve racial integration and the disastrous results of that quest on the White race.  He maintains, and reality supports him, that different races prefer their own kind and left to their own devices will tend toward clannishness.  He points out that there is no NAAWP; no organized support for the White Race.  Instead Whites have given up much of their culture to satisfy the quest for integration.  This capitulation has resulted in an almost pathetic White weakness and has done nothing to improve race relations.

My exercise routine takes me around our local shopping Mall once each day.  Taylor is correct in pointing to the failure of racial integration but, in spite of that failure, among those who marry there has been a tremendous increase in mixed marriages.   The decline in the institution of marriage is characterized by an increase in single white females with dark skinned children. Women marry into other races more frequently than men.  Over 70 percent of the interracial unions are between Black men and White women. See the statistics here.

Most people in our rebellious generation do not want to be reminded that God separated the races to prevent the temptation to challenge Him by joining together against His authority.  Nevertheless, it is a fact and because it is His Will to keep the races separate they will continue to prefer to be that way in spite of human resistance.

When news sources became businesses instead of purveyors of truth, the world lost an important check against tyrannical government.

Truth always angers some, often angers many, and sometimes angers everyone.  Businesses depend on revenue.  They do not want angry customers.  The era of the struggling newspaper editor who decides to publish the article that will bring the wrath of the power structure down on his small enterprise is gone.  Since revenue has become the main intent newspaper editors carefully avoid indicting the government or any of their major advertisers.

There is unanimity in the small group that controls the majority of the world media.  They have an agenda which they connive to impose on their diverse recipients. Their methods are skillfully subtle and often the manipulation goes unnoticed.  Direct controversy is avoided but an unwritten censorship is strictly enforced.  There are three groups that cannot be critiqued: Jews, Blacks, and homosexuals.  The Holocaust is sacrosanct.  The existence of conspiracies cannot be broached and the illegitimate nation of Israel cannot be honestly addressed.  The frightening power of this elite group of manipulators can be seen in their ability to turn a lie into truth.  Conspiracies are common in society and evident in governments throughout history.  The existence of conspiracies is both logical and supported by evidence.   However, the media has been able to convince many Americans that anyone who believes there is a conspiracy is mentally unbalanced.  Think of the skill involved in that brain washing; they have succeeded in convincing millions of people that black is white!

Currently there is a massive media effort to get President Barak Obama elected to a second term.   He and his family are being depicted with affable familiarity.  The contrived story of the killing of Osama bin Laden raised his popularity rating by 25 percent and he will continue to get favorable publicity.  The media oligarchs can create or destroy political candidates.

The condition of the Christian Church is closely related to the media manipulators and their agenda.

Christian leaders in America no longer endorse the sovereignty of God.  They may give it lip service but their actions belie their lips.  It is difficult to get two Christians to agree on anything but there is consensus that our nation is quickly deteriorating.  For a couple of generations Christians have been defying Jesus statement that only God, The Father, knows the exact time by lazily waiting for the Second Coming while righteousness is being decimated around them.  They look to the profligate, illegitimate nation of Israel for signs of Jesus return.   This emotionally satisfying perspective has allowed the evil plans of their enemies to progress without resistance.

Another group of Judeo-Christians, who likewise do not realize that Zionism is the remnant of the Pharisaical theology that Jesus hated, still support Israel and the foreign religion of Judaism.   Different from their acquiescent brothers and sisters; they seek to fight the deterioration of our nation through the Democratic political process.

Yet another group seeks spiritual perfection.  They record long prophecies that outline the spiritual sins of the Church and seek to remedy that condition by perfecting its members.  They trash two thirds of the Bible and assume the New Covenant marked a change in God’s requirement for specific obedience and that He is now only interested in spiritual perfection.

The condition of the Christian Church has been so badly depleted that it no longer considers the deterioration of our culture and restriction of our freedom to be related to the One True God.  Instead, ignoring God’s sovereignty, it attributes the coming tyranny to human politicians and energetically seeks a political solution.  God is so remote in its thinking that its leaders forget He is a jealous God.  In defiance of His jealously they champion the religious freedom encoded in our Constitution.  I recently received an email from a local Doctor, a very intelligent, patriotic man, decrying the exclusivity of the Muslim religion.  In spite of massive Biblical evidence to the contrary Americans seem convinced that a “jealous God” is pleased and will bless a nation that legalizes the worship of other gods.

Actually, truth and the electoral process are incompatible.  Voting culminates with the election of the candidate that gains a favorable impression with the largest number of voters.  Since truth is always unpopular, inevitably, popular lies and distortions replace it.

We are so far away from pleasing God that when someone explains what God requires it is shocking.  The drift that has created this condition is not only sinful but in defiance of God’s gift of a reasonable mind.  We were told that a Muslim court that sentenced a Muslim woman to death by stoning for the sin of adultery reconsidered its decision in response to major protests from the United States government; a government that has killed millions of Arabs with bombs and missiles.  Sin has so badly distorted the minds of American Christians that they are not able to recognize the massive dissonance in that protest and even more distressing they do not realize that the Bible they profess to believe contains similar punishments.

Mark Crovelli has written an excellent piece for the Lou Rockwell page entitled “Where Are the Christian Churches When We Need Them Most?  Mark agrees with the Bible that Christian laymen are dumb, like sheep, and need to have the “foundations of Christian ethics beaten into their dense skulls”.  They need to have their leaders to remind them not to “kill, torture, imprison, beat, or otherwise physically abuse other human beings”; that they are prohibited from “stealing” and from creating “counterfeit” money.  “One hopes that the Christian churches will begin to lay seeds in the minds of their followers that will counteract these deadly immoral trends. With economic conditions deteriorating and political “leaders” plumbing new moral depths, the need has never been greater for the Christian churches to lead their herds back to the ethical path laid by Jesus and His Father. And that means, first and foremost, that the Christian churches must do their best to stop Christians from killing and robbing other people. One shudders to think that the Christian Churches even need to be reminded of something as fundamental as this.”  Read the entire article here.

Lou Rockwell edits a page that is home to several Christian writers.  The Libertarian span runs from  Ayn Rand, an atheistic Jewish intellectual, to Gary North, a Christian thinker and Rushdoony disciple.  Rothbard and Mises, both Jewish intellectuals, are heroes.  There are excellent critiques of our culture and lots of well thought out, well written essays.  The page heading professes “Anti-war, Anti-state, Pro-market” – all good, but where is the objective?  Is it anarchy, a complete destruction of government?  Or, is it Theonomy that Gary North might seek but fails to express?  I agree with and enjoy reading many of the articles but there is a reverence for intellectualism and for Mises and Rothbard that far surpasses the dominion of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  The objective may be vague but it is clearly not obedience to our Lord Jesus Christ.

I have often written that man was not created to govern himself and no amount of mental brilliance will change that fact.  We are living under the propaganda prison of a controlled media because our churches have failed, and still fail to teach their members the truth.

“Because God’s law is the expression of His nature, there is total congruity between his nature or being and His law.  This is not true of men.  A man may affirm the necessity for a nondiscriminatory society and yet discriminate in spite of his profession; or, he may believe in love as the solution and yet show hatred toward those who cross him or disagree with him. Man makes a dangerous sovereign, because such power and authority enable him to play god when he is only a sinful man.”  Dr. R. J. Rushdoony

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