Indoctrinating A New Generation

Is there anyone out there who still believes that Barack Obama, when he’s speaking about American foreign policy, is capable of being anything like an honest man? In a March 26 talk in Belgium to “European youth”, the president fed his audience one falsehood, half-truth, blatant omission, or hypocrisy after another. If George W. Bush had made some of these statements, Obama supporters would not hesitate to shake their head, roll their eyes, or smirk. Here’s a sample:

– “In defending its actions, Russian leaders have further claimed Kosovo as a precedent – an example they say of the West interfering in the affairs of a smaller country, just as they’re doing now. But NATO only intervened after the people of Kosovo were systematically brutalized and killed for years.”

Most people who follow such things are convinced that the 1999 US/NATO bombing of the Serbian province of Kosovo took place only after the Serbian-forced deportation of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo was well underway; which is to say that the bombing was launched to stop this “ethnic cleansing”. In actuality, the systematic deportations of large numbers of people did not begin until a few days after the bombing began, and was clearly a reaction to it, born of Serbia’s extreme anger and powerlessness over the bombing. This is easily verified by looking at a daily newspaper for the few days before the bombing began the night of March 23/24, 1999, and the few days following. Or simply look at the New York Times of March 26, page 1, which reads:

… with the NATO bombing already begun, a deepening sense of fear took hold in Pristina [the main city of Kosovo] that the Serbs would now vent their rage against ethnic Albanian civilians in retaliation. [emphasis added]

On March 27, we find the first reference to a “forced march” or anything of that nature.

But the propaganda version is already set in marble.

– “And Kosovo only left Serbia after a referendum was organized, not outside the boundaries of international law, but in careful cooperation with the United Nations and with Kosovo’s neighbors. None of that even came close to happening in Crimea.”

None of that even came close to happening in Kosovo either. The story is false. The referendum the president speaks of never happened. Did the mainstream media pick up on this or on the previous example? If any reader comes across such I’d appreciate being informed.

Crimea, by the way, did have a referendum. A real one.

– “Workers and engineers gave life to the Marshall Plan … As the Iron Curtain fell here in Europe, the iron fist of apartheid was unclenched, and Nelson Mandela emerged upright, proud, from prison to lead a multiracial democracy. Latin American nations rejected dictatorship and built new democracies … “

The president might have mentioned that the main beneficiary of the Marshall Plan was US corporations  , that the United States played an indispensable role in Mandela being caught and imprisoned, and that virtually all the Latin American dictatorships owed their very existence to Washington. Instead, the European youth were fed the same party line that their parents were fed, as were all Americans.

– “Yes, we believe in democracy – with elections that are free and fair.”

In this talk, the main purpose of which was to lambaste the Russians for their actions concerning Ukraine, there was no mention that the government overthrown in that country with the clear support of the United States had been democratically elected.

– “Moreover, Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an example of Western hypocrisy. … But even in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory. We did not grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people and a fully sovereign Iraqi state that could make decisions about its own future.”

The US did not get UN Security Council approval for its invasion, the only approval that could legitimize the action. It occupied Iraq from one end of the country to the other for 8 years, forcing the government to privatize the oil industry and accept multinational – largely U.S.-based, oil companies’ – ownership. This endeavor was less than successful because of the violence unleashed by the invasion. The US military finally was forced to leave because the Iraqi government refused to give immunity to American soldiers for their many crimes.

Here is a brief summary of what Barack Obama is attempting to present as America’s moral superiority to the Russians:

The modern, educated, advanced nation of Iraq was reduced to a quasi failed state … 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 … 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 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. (May 5, 2007)

How can all these mistakes, such arrogance, hypocrisy and absurdity find their way into a single international speech by the president of the United States? Is the White House budget not sufficient to hire a decent fact checker? Someone with an intellect and a social conscience? Or does the desire to score propaganda points trump everything else? Is this another symptom of the Banana-Republicization of America?

Long live the Cold War

In 1933 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union after some 15 years of severed relations following the Bolshevik Revolution. On a day in December of that year, a train was passing through Poland carrying the first American diplomats dispatched to Moscow. Amongst their number was a 29 year-old Foreign Service Officer, later to become famous as a diplomat and scholar, George Kennan. Though he was already deemed a government expert on Russia, the train provided Kennan’s first actual exposure to the Soviet Union. As he listened to his group’s escort, Russian Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, reminisce about growing up in a village the train was passing close by, and his dreams of becoming a librarian, the Princeton-educated Kennan was astonished: “We suddenly realized, or at least I did, that these people we were dealing with were human beings like ourselves, that they had been born somewhere, that they had their childhood ambitions as we had. It seemed for a brief moment we could break through and embrace these people.”

It hasn’t happened yet.

One would think that the absence in Russia of communism, of socialism, of the basic threat or challenge to the capitalist system, would be sufficient to write finis to the 70-year Cold War mentality. But the United States is virtually as hostile to 21st-century Russia as it was to 20th-century Soviet Union, surrounding Moscow with military bases, missile sites, and NATO members. Why should that be? Ideology is no longer a factor. But power remains one, specifically America’s perpetual lust for world hegemony. Russia is the only nation that (a) is a military powerhouse, and (b) doesn’t believe that the United States has a god-given-American-exceptionalism right to rule the world, and says so. By these criteria, China might qualify as a poor second. But there are no others.

Washington pretends that it doesn’t understand why Moscow should be upset by Western military encroachment, but it has no such problem when roles are reversed. Secretary of State John Kerry recently stated that Russian troops poised near eastern Ukraine are “creating a climate of fear and intimidation in Ukraine” and raising questions about Russia’s next moves and its commitment to diplomacy.

NATO – ever in need of finding a raison d’être – has now issued a declaration of [cold] war, which reads in part:

“NATO foreign ministers on Tuesday [April 1, 2014] reaffirmed their commitment to enhance the Alliance’s collective defence, agreed to further support Ukraine and to suspend NATO’s practical cooperation with Russia. ‘NATO’s greatest responsibility is to protect and defend our territory and our people. And make no mistake, this is what we will do,’ NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. … Ministers directed Allied military authorities to develop additional measures to strengthen collective defence and deterrence against any threat of aggression against the Alliance, Mr. Fogh Rasmussen said. ‘We will make sure we have updated military plans, enhanced exercises and appropriate deployments,’ he said. NATO has already reinforced its presence on the eastern border of the Alliance, including surveillance patrols over Poland and Romania and increased numbers of fighter aircraft allocated to the NATO air policing mission in the Baltic States. … NATO Foreign Ministers also agreed to suspend all of NATO’s practical cooperation with Russia.”

Does anyone recall what NATO said in 2003 when the United States bombed and invaded Iraq with “shock and awe”, compared to the Russians now not firing a single known shot at anyone? And neither Russia nor Ukraine is even a member of NATO. Does NATO have a word to say about the right-wing coup in Ukraine, openly supported by the United States, overthrowing the elected government? Did the hypocrisy get any worse during the Cold War? Imagine that NATO had not been created in 1949. Imagine that it has never existed. What reason could one give today for its creation? Other than to provide a multi-national cover for Washington’s interventions.

One of the main differences between now and the Cold War period is that Americans at home are (not yet) persecuted or prosecuted for supporting Russia or things Russian.

But don’t worry, folks, there won’t be a big US-Russian war. For the same reason there wasn’t one during the Cold War. The United States doesn’t pick on any country which can defend itself.

Cuba … Again … Still … Forever

Is there actually a limit? Will the United States ever stop trying to overthrow the Cuban government? Entire books have been written documenting the unrelenting ways Washington has tried to get rid of tiny Cuba’s horrid socialism – from military invasion to repeated assassination attempts to an embargo that President Clinton’s National Security Advisor called “the most pervasive sanctions ever imposed on a nation in the history of mankind”.  But nothing has ever come even close to succeeding. The horrid socialism keeps on inspiring people all over the world. It’s the darnedest thing. Can providing people free or remarkably affordable health care, education, housing, food and culture be all that important?

And now it’s “Cuban Twitter” – an elaborately complex system set up by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to disguise its American origins and financing, aiming to bring about a “Cuban Spring” uprising. USAID sought to first “build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then the plan was to push them toward dissent”, hoping the messaging network “would reach critical mass so that dissidents could organize ‘smart mobs’ – mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice – that might trigger political demonstrations or ‘renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society’.”  It’s too bad it’s now been exposed, because we all know how wonderful the Egyptian, Syrian, Libyan, and other “Arab Springs” have turned out.

Here’s USAID speaking after their scheme was revealed on April 3: “Cubans were able to talk among themselves, and we are proud of that.”  We are thus asked to believe that normally the poor downtrodden Cubans have no good or safe way to communicate with each other. Is the US National Security Agency working for the Cuban government now?

The Associated Press, which broke the story, asks us further to believe that the “truth” about most things important in the world is being kept from the Cuban people by the Castro regime, and that the “Cuban Twitter” would have opened people’s eyes. But what information might a Cuban citizen discover online that the government would not want him to know about? I can’t imagine. Cubans are in constant touch with relatives in the US, by mail and in person. They get US television programs from Miami and other southern cities; both CNN and Telesur (Venezuela, covering Latin America) are seen regularly on Cuban television”; international conferences on all manner of political, economic and social issues are held regularly in Cuba. I’ve spoken at more than one myself. What – it must be asked – does USAID, as well as the American media, think are the great dark secrets being kept from the Cuban people by the nasty commie government?

Those who push this line sometimes point to the serious difficulty of using the Internet in Cuba. The problem is that it’s extremely slow, making certain desired usages often impractical. From an American friend living in Havana: “It’s not a question of getting or not getting internet. I get internet here. The problem is downloading something or connecting to a link takes too long on the very slow connection that exists here, so usually I/we get ‘timed out’.” But the USAID’s “Cuban Twitter”, after all, could not have functioned at all without the Internet.

Places like universities, upscale hotels, and Internet cafés get better connections, at least some of the time; however, it’s rather expensive to use at the hotels and cafés.

In any event, this isn’t a government plot to hide dangerous information. It’s a matter of technical availability and prohibitive cost, both things at least partly in the hands of the United States and American corporations. Microsoft, for example, at one point, if not at present, barred Cuba from using its Messenger instant messaging service.

Cuba and Venezuela have jointly built a fiber optic underwater cable connection that they hope will make them less reliant on the gringos; the outcome of this has not yet been reported in much detail.

The grandly named Agency for International Development does not have an honorable history; this can perhaps be captured by a couple of examples: In 1981, the agency’s director, John Gilligan, stated: “At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”

On June 21, 2012, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) issued a resolution calling for the immediate expulsion of USAID from their nine member countries, “due to the fact that we consider their presence and actions to constitute an interference which threatens the sovereignty and stability of our nations.”

USAID, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (and the latter’s subsidiaries), together or singly, continue to be present at regime changes, or attempts at same, favorable to Washington, from “color revolutions” to “spring” uprisings, producing a large measure of chaos and suffering for our tired old world.

 

Notes

1. William Blum, America’s Deadliest Export – Democracy: The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else, p.22-5
2. Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas, The Wise Men (1986), p.158
3. Washington Post, March 31, 2014
4. “NATO takes measures to reinforce collective defence, agrees on support for Ukraine”, NATO website, April 1, 2014
5. Sandy Berger, White House press briefing, November 14, 1997, US Newswire transcript
6. Associated Press, April 3 & 4, 2014
7. Washington Post, April 4, 2014
8. Associated Press, June 2, 2009
9. George Cotter, “Spies, strings and missionaries”, The Christian Century (Chicago), March 25, 1981, p.321

Technology Impact On Privacy

Going offline or off the grid is not easy for everyone. Modern society has come to repudiate the very elements that make civilization possible. Living in cyber space is existence on life support at best. Until now, people had idiosyncratic relations, with intimate experiences and personal memories. Thoughts were internal and private conduct was confidential. Under a hi-tech environment, the system moves closer to an all knowing eye. But what happens, when the public becomes enlightened to the bondage of the tech prison, thanks to all the whistleblowers?

The irony befits the hypocrite techie class of privacy violators. Lamenting that their fiefdom of intrusive surveillance and data mining might be compromised, the high priests of SPY, Inc. are flustered. With the disclosure of a synergistic relationship of an intertwined nature, the high-tech prophets lay exposed. NSA Spying Risks $35 Billion in U.S. Technology Sales has the flagship government front companies in full damage control.

“News about U.S. surveillance disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has “the great potential for doing serious damage to the competitiveness” of U.S. companies such as Cupertino, California-based Apple, Facebook Inc., and Microsoft Corp., Richard Salgado, Google’s director for law enforcement and information security, told a U.S. Senate panel Nov. 13. “The trust that’s threatened is essential to these businesses.”

With the announcement that Facebook faces lawsuit for allegedly scanning private messages, the diminutive privacy on this social network just got smaller. “Facebook was one of the Web Services that was caught scanning URLs despite such activity remaining undisclosed to the user,” according to the complaint.Can your personal persona remain your own business? What exactly can be attempted to protect your identity and privacy?

Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger propose in Obscurity: A Better Way to Think About Your Data Than ‘Privacy’, adding layers of complexity guards against most of the ordinary risks of scrutinized personal data. However, this argument is trite since the cyber world of digital transmission uses the technological routing and coding systems, engineered as part of the total government retrieval society.

“Obscurity is the idea that when information is hard to obtain or understand, it is, to some degree, safe. Safety, here, doesn’t mean inaccessible. Competent and determined data hunters armed with the right tools can always find a way to get it. Less committed folks, however, experience great effort as a deterrent.

Online, obscurity is created through a combination of factors. Being invisible to search engines increases obscurity. So does using privacy settings and pseudonyms. Disclosing information in coded ways that only a limited audience will grasp enhances obscurity, too. Since few online disclosures are truly confidential or highly publicized, the lion’s share of communication on the social web falls along the expansive continuum of obscurity: a range that runs from completely hidden to totally obvious.”

Privacy is a hindrance to corporate marketing, while secrecy is a threat to the national security establishment that observes the basic rule of all technology. Use the optimum scientific hi-tech enhancement to maintain and further the interests of the ruling elites. Any technological development is viewed as a useful advancement if it works to expand control over the economy or social structure.

Supporting this conclusion is an article from the master of facture awareness. Michael Snyder provides an impactful list of 32 Privacy Destroying Technologies That Are Systematically Transforming America Into A Giant Prison.

“Many people speak of this as being the “Information Age”, but most Americans don’t really stop and think about what that really means. Most of the information that is considered to be so “valuable” is actually about all of us. Businesses want to know as much about all of us as possible so that they can sell us stuff. Government officials want to know as much about all of us as possible so that they can make sure that we are not doing anything that they don’t like.”

If you need more convincing, examine the 10 Privacy-Destroying Technologies That Are Turning America Into A Police State, by Daniel Jennings. How many of these devices or practices are monitoring your every move and thought?

1. Electric meters
2. Telematic devices on cars
3. Smartphones
4. RFID chips in drivers’ licenses, credit cards and other cards that allow the tracking of individuals
5. Data mining by local and federal government
6. Voice recognition. Russian scientists have invented software called Voice Grid Nation that can identify the voices of millions of different people
7. Fingerprint recognition
8. Chips that monitor your body functions
9. Behavior monitoring software
10. Next Generation surveillance systems such as Trapwire and Intellistreet

Popular consensus would have you believe that this infringement into your most personal behavior is inevitable and it is futile to resist. From an institutional perspective that viewpoint seems correct. Nonetheless, the preservation of your human dignity demands a vigorous reassessment of the numerous ways you have the ability to influence, if not, protect against this tech assault.

Before assuming that tech is great, reflect upon the culture of expected progress. Proponents of applied science automatically assume that advancement comes from such evolution. Conversely, the actual function of various innovations often brings the loss of personal solitude. Tech is not neutral. By definition new or different technology changes the landscape.

What does not change is human nature. Supercharging the velocity and speed of functions and the distribution of information, without guarding the integrity of personal consent is intrinsically immoral. While that statement may seem obsolete as the NSA constructs the largest digital computer memory center in the history of the world in Utah with the capability of storing 5 zettabytes of data, the principle of inherent autonomy still remains.Amitai Etzioni presents an academic postulation, attempting to answer the question, Are New Technologies the Enemy of Privacy?

“Privacy is one good among other goods and should be weighed as such. The relationship between technology and privacy is best viewed as an arms race between advancements that diminish privacy and those that better protect it, rather than the semi-Luddite view which sees technology as one-sided development enabling those who seek to invade privacy to overrun those who seek to protect it. The merits or defects of particular technologies are not inherent to the technologies, but rather, depend on how they are used and above all, on how closely their use is monitored and accounted for by the parties involved. In order to reassure the public and to ensure accountability and oversight, a civilian review board should be created to monitor the government’s use of surveillance and related technologies. Proper accountability requires multiple layers of oversight, and should not be left solely in the hands of the government.”

The problem with this arms race is that it is waged among equally corrupt globalist factions. When Mr. Etzioni asserts “How they are used” he interjects the moral imperative. The record of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, etc. respect and protection of personal confidentially is not exactly reassuring. Their government parent partner agencies in data mining use the telecommunication corporations like Verizon, AT&T and ISP providers as giant sucking machines that feed the secretive intelligence community.Understanding the drill is simple, secrecy resides within the ruling class, while all personal privacy is relegated to the museum of family archives. Just how can such a relationship be monitored by some kind of nebulous civil board to ensure non consensual privacy?

With the overwhelming wherewithal, increasing technological capacities allow, even greater levels of abuse and evil applications. If no other lesson is internalized from the Edward Snowden disclosures, society better admit that trust in the secure use of communication technology is near zero.

When privacy is surrendered so willingly, especially with no consequences for the offending government agencies or complicit corporatist associates, the future of civilized life comes into question. Yet, people are so easily induced to acclimate into using the next wizard device.

Life is a beach no longer. , is using the “Magic Bands” — which are currently optional — are part of a new MyMagic+ “vacation management system” that can track guests as they move throughout the park..Efficient? Perhaps. But post-Snowden, some worry that Magic Bands are nothing more than NSA-esque tracking devices.”

Oh, that voluntary choice lasts only as long as it is offered. This culture of “personal space” invasion is meant to indoctrinate the friendly likes into a sleeping death from poison apples. Being buried alive, in a snow job of tech that promises you will be the fairest in the land, will not make you a queen.That prince charming kiss only comes with resisting any snooping gear that diminishes the innate right for privacy. Taking protective measure against technological enslavement is the real national security mandate. The enemy is not some fairy tale monster; just look no further than to your own government. You have the right to your secrets. Dump the smart devices and go as low-tech as possible.

Monsanto, The TPP And Global Food Dominance

Control oil and you control nations,” said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s.  “Control food and you control the people.”

Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.

Profits Before Populations

Genetic engineering has made proprietary control possible over the seeds on which the world’s food supply depends. According to an Acres USA interview of plant pathologist Don Huber, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, two modified traits account for practically all of the genetically modified crops grown in the world today. One involves insect resistance. The other, more disturbing modification involves insensitivity to glyphosate-based herbicides (plant-killing chemicals). Often known as Roundup after the best-selling Monsanto product of that name, glyphosate poisons everything in its path except plants genetically modified to resist it.

Glyphosate-based herbicides are now the most commonly used herbicides in the world. Glyphosate is an essential partner to the GMOs that are the principal business of the burgeoning biotech industry. Glyphosate is a “broad-spectrum” herbicide that destroys indiscriminately, not by killing unwanted plants directly but by tying up access to critical nutrients.

Because of the insidious way in which it works, it has been sold as a relatively benign replacement for the devastating earlier dioxin-based herbicides. But a barrage of experimental data has now shown glyphosate and the GMO foods incorporating it to pose serious dangers to health. Compounding the risk is the toxicity of “inert” ingredients used to make glyphosate more potent. Researchers have found, for example, that the surfactant POEA can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells. But these risks have been conveniently ignored.

The widespread use of GMO foods and glyphosate herbicides helps explain the anomaly that the US spends over twice as much per capita on healthcare as the average developed country, yet it is rated far down the scale of the world’s healthiest populations. The World Health Organization has ranked the US LAST out of 17 developed nations for overall health.

 are now genetically modified. By contrast, in at least 26 other countries—including Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, Mexico and Russia—GMOs are totally or partially banned; and significant restrictions on GMOs exist in about sixty other countries.

A ban on GMO and glyphosate use might go far toward improving the health of Americans. But the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a global trade agreement for which the Obama Administration has sought Fast Track status, would block that sort of cause-focused approach to the healthcare crisis.

Roundup’s Insidious Effects

Roundup-resistant crops escape being killed by glyphosate, but they do not avoid absorbing it into their tissues. Herbicide-tolerant crops have substantially higher levels of herbicide residues than other crops. In fact, many countries have had to increase their legally allowable levels—by up to 50 times—in order to accommodate the introduction of GM crops. In the European Union, residues in food are set to rise 100-150 times if a new proposal by Monsanto is approved. Meanwhile, herbicide-tolerant “super-weeds” have adapted to the chemical, requiring even more toxic doses and new toxic chemicals to kill the plant.

Human enzymes are affected by glyphosate just as plant enzymes are: the chemical blocks the uptake of manganese and other essential minerals. Without those minerals, we cannot properly metabolize our food. That helps explain the rampant epidemic of obesity in the United States. People eat and eat in an attempt to acquire the nutrients that are simply not available in their food.

According to researchers Samsell and Seneff in Biosemiotic Entropy: Disorder, Disease, and Mortality (April 2013):

Glyphosate’s inhibition of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes is an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals. CYP enzymes play crucial roles in biology . . . . Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body. Consequences are most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

More than 40 diseases have been linked to glyphosate use, and more keep appearing. In September 2013, the National University of Rio Cuarto, Argentina, published research finding that glyphosate enhances the growth of fungi that produce aflatoxin B1, one of the most carcinogenic of substances. A doctor from Chaco, Argentina, told Associated Press, “We’ve gone from a pretty healthy population to one with a high rate of cancer, birth defects and illnesses seldom seen before.” Fungi growths have increased significantly in US corn crops.

Glyphosate has also done serious damage to the environment. According to an October 2012 report by the Institute of Science in Society:

Agribusiness claims that glyphosate and glyphosate-tolerant crops will improve crop yields, increase farmers’ profits and benefit the environment by reducing pesticide use. Exactly the opposite is the case. . . . [T]he evidence indicates that glyphosate herbicides and glyphosate-tolerant crops have had wide-ranging detrimental effects, including glyphosate resistant super weeds, virulent plant (and new livestock) pathogens, reduced crop health and yield, harm to off-target species from insects to amphibians and livestock, as well as reduced soil fertility.

Politics Trumps Science

In light of these adverse findings, why have Washington and the European Commission continued to endorse glyphosate as safe? Critics point to lax regulations, heavy influence from corporate lobbyists, and a political agenda that has more to do with power and control than protecting the health of the people.

In the ground-breaking 2007 book , William Engdahl states that global food control and depopulation became US strategic policy under Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger. Along with oil geopolitics, they were to be the new “solution” to the threats to US global power and continued US access to cheap raw materials from the developing world. In line with that agenda, the government has shown extreme partisanship in favor of the biotech agribusiness industry, opting for a system in which the industry “voluntarily” polices itself. Bio-engineered foods are treated as “natural food additives,” not needing any special testing.

Jeffrey M. Smith, Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, confirms that US Food and Drug Administration policy allows biotech companies to determine if their own foods are safe. Submission of data is completely voluntary. He concludes:

In the critical arena of food safety research, the biotech industry is without accountability, standards, or peer-review. They’ve got bad science down to a science.

Whether or not depopulation is an intentional part of the agenda,widespread use of GMO and glyphosate is having that result. The endocrine-disrupting properties of glyphosate have been linked to infertility, miscarriage, birth defects and arrested sexual development. In Russian experiments, animals fed GM soy were sterile by the third generation. Vast amounts of farmland soil are also being systematically ruined by the killing of beneficial microorganisms that allow plant roots to uptake soil nutrients.

In Gary Null’s eye-opening documentary , Dr. Bruce Lipton warns, “We are leading the world into the sixth mass extinction of life on this planet. . . . Human behavior is undermining the web of life.”

The TPP and International Corporate Control

As the devastating conclusions of these and other researchers awaken people globally to the dangers of Roundup and GMO foods, transnational corporations are working feverishly with the Obama administration to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that would strip governments of the power to regulate transnational corporate activities. Negotiations have been kept secret from Congress but not from corporate advisors, 600 of whom have been consulted and know the details. According to Barbara Chicherio in Nation of Change:

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has the potential to become the biggest regional Free Trade Agreement in history. . . .

The chief agricultural negotiator for the US is the former Monsanto lobbyist, Islam Siddique.  If ratified the TPP would impose punishing regulations that give multinational corporations unprecedented right to demand taxpayer compensation for policies that corporations deem a barrier to their profits.

. . . They are carefully crafting the TPP to insure that citizens of the involved countries have no control over food safety, what they will be eating, where it is grown, the conditions under which food is grown and the use of herbicides and pesticides.

Food safety is only one of many rights and protections liable to fall to this super-weapon of international corporate control. In an April 2013 interview on The Real News Network, Kevin Zeese called the TPP “NAFTA on steroids” and “a global corporate coup.” He warned:

No matter what issue you care about—whether its wages, jobs, protecting the environment . . . this issue is going to adversely affect it . . . .

If a country takes a step to try to regulate the financial industry or set up a public bank to represent the public interest, it can be sued . . . .

Return to Nature: Not Too Late

There is a safer, saner, more earth-friendly way to feed nations. While Monsanto and US regulators are forcing GM crops on American families, Russian families are showing what can be done with permaculture methods on simple garden plots. In 2011, 40% of Russia’s food was grown on dachas (cottage gardens or allotments). Dacha gardens produced over 80% of the country’s fruit and berries, over 66% of the vegetables, almost 80% of the potatoes and nearly 50% of the nation’s milk, much of it consumed raw. According to Vladimir Megre, author of the best-selling Ringing Cedars Series:

Essentially, what Russian gardeners do is demonstrate that gardeners can feed the world – and you do not need any GMOs, industrial farms, or any other technological gimmicks to guarantee everybody’s got enough food to eat. Bear in mind that Russia only has 110 days of growing season per year – so in the US, for example, gardeners’ output could be substantially greater. Today, however, the area taken up by lawns in the US is two times greater than that of Russia’s gardens – and it produces nothing but a multi-billion-dollar lawn care industry.

In the US, only about 0.6 percent of the total agricultural area is devoted to organic farming. This area needs to be vastly expanded if we are to avoid “the sixth mass extinction.” But first, we need to urge our representatives to stop Fast Track, vote no on the TPP, and pursue a global phase-out of glyphosate-based herbicides and GMO foods. Our health, our finances and our environment are at stake.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, president of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.

Source: Ellen Brown | CounterPunch

How To Enrich Or Impoverish A Nation

What has lifted more people out of poverty, charity or economic freedom? It’s not even close.

Charity is wonderful, and I’ll be the first to say we have an obligation to share our gifts, be they material, intellectual or talent oriented. Yet whether our redistributionist endeavor is charity — and charity is voluntary redistribution — or the less noble, coercive, outsourcing of charity known as government programs, there first must be wealth to redistribute. But where does wealth come from?

If we go back to biblical times and beyond, a man might be considered wealthy if he had 70 goats. In point of fact, the standard for wealth was so different that the US’s average middle-class person today — with his car, TVs, computer, refrigerator and many other luxuries — would have been considered wealthy for most of history. And our average “poor” man, who also usually has an old car and various creature comforts, likewise has a material lifestyle that would have been the envy of our forebears. The reason for this is simple: there is far, far more wealth in the world now than in ages past.

The first lesson this teaches is that wealth can be created. This happens when people find more efficient ways of raising livestock (so 70 goats becomes small potatoes) and growing crops, and when they extract raw materials from the Earth and use them to create the manifold necessities and luxuries we enjoy. In a word, it happens when people produce, which is why economists and businessmen will measure productivity. And how will people be encouraged to produce?

They must have an incentive, and this is where the profit motive comes into play. Ah, the much maligned profit motive. Let’s talk about that.

There are two extremes with respect to the profit motive. One is typified by some libertarian Ayn Rand acolytes who seem to treat it as the highest motivation; the other is far more prevalent today and is represented by another brand of “libs,” people who behave as if profit is something dirty (at least other people’s profit, anyway). But the balanced view is a bit different.

There is another kind of incentive. In America’s early Christian communes, for instance, residents’ belief that they were doing God’s will — and perhaps winning His favor — served as a great incentive to be productive; thus did the communal Oneida Colony create renowned flatware. And, truth be known, there’d be no need for profit if we lived in a sinless world, for there would be neither covetousness nor laziness. If there was an unfulfilled need — paper products, for example — people would readily volunteer to create them simply to serve others, and no one would be wasteful or undermine the system by taking more of anything than he needed. But in a sinless world we wouldn’t need a military, police or prisons, either.

Sane people live in the real world, however, where different rules apply. One of them is that since the spiritual/moral motive is the highest reason to serve your fellow man, it is also the rarest. And because of this, it cannot be relied upon to motivate people at the level of population. Enter the profit motive. To paraphrase economist Walter Williams, profit encourages your fellow man to serve you even if he doesn’t give a darn about you. After all, Domino’s didn’t start making pizza to relieve hunger; Ivory doesn’t make soap because “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” To have your needs and wants satisfied, would you rather rely on the charity of your fellow man or his profit-driven self-interest? For the answer, just look at all the wonders of science and medicine, all the luxuries around you, and ponder what percentage of them were created based on charitable motives versus the profit motive. Again, charity is wonderful — but it’s also relatively rare.

Of course, we should all strive to make it less rare in ourselves. But the lesson here is this: to minimize the profit motive personally is virtuous; to minimize it in public policy is vice. The motivation to serve others for a higher reason must come from within; a bureaucrat can decide to eliminate the profit motive via regulation, but he cannot replace it in the hearts and minds of the people with a more ethereal purpose. And this should be very easy for the bureaucrat to understand. Would he — or anyone else who sneers at profit — do his job for free? Precious few of us would. In fact, research has shown that those who protest the profit motive most are most driven by it (the likely explanation? Projection).

In fact, unnecessarily reducing the profit motive in civilization is evil. This is because productivity in a nation — which means wealth creation — will generally (at least) be proportional to the degree of profit to be had. Thus, a person who institutes unjust profit-reducers such as excessive taxes and regulations is a policy poverty pimp who can literally rob his society of billions in prosperity. A thief in an alley is less to be feared.

The fact that wealth is created teaches other lessons as well. For example, class-warfare demagogues encourage the notion that the poor have less because the rich have more. But unless the wealth has been stolen (which does happen; e.g., Bernie Madoff), this is utter nonsense. Consider: would it have made even one poor person richer if Microsoft’s Bill Gates hadn’t pursued his dreams and made his billions? It would in fact have made people poorer, as we wouldn’t have the jobs and productivity-enhancing products he created.

So how can nations become as prosperous as the culture and character of their people allow? There must be a powerful profit motive so that people produce as much wealth as possible. And there is a prerequisite for this: great economic freedom (most still call this “capitalism,” a grave mistake because the term was originated by socialists).

How important is this factor? In “Self-Inflicted Poverty,” Dr. Walter Williams points out that there is an extremely strong correlation between a nation’s level of economic freedom and its level of prosperity. He asks “Why is it that Egyptians do well in the U.S. but not Egypt?” After pointing out that the same could be said of others from poor nations who immigrate to the US, he points out that Egyptians are smothered with regulations and corruption. Providing one damning example, he writes, “To get legal title to a vacant piece of land would take more than 10 years of dealing with red tape. To do business in Egypt, an aspiring poor entrepreneur would have to deal with 56 government agencies and repetitive government inspections.” The result is that Egypt’s mummies have more life than its economy.

Given how important economic freedom is, we should note how it’s lost: through lack of appreciation. After all, cease to value something, and you may not preserve it — demonize it enough, and you’ll surely destroy it.

When appearing on a radio show some years ago on the heels of the financial crisis, the first question the host asked me was why economic freedom (she said “capitalism”) had failed. Her attitude was a staggering tribute to a lack of perspective, a spirit of entitlement and the tendency to count curses and not blessings.

Just walk into any American supermarket with the thousands of products from the world over available at affordable prices, and tell me economic freedom has failed. In fact, our whole modern world is a tribute to economic freedom. And what of the financial crisis? Well, people will talk about how it destroyed so many trillion dollars of wealth and place the blame on economic freedom. But remember the time when 70 goats made you wealthy? We only had trillions of dollars of wealth that could be destroyed to begin with because of economic freedom! In fact, economic freedom has provided a climate for such tremendous wealth creation that the trillions lost still represented only a small percentage of all the wealth in existence. Our “failure” is history’s raging success.

The problem here is that people tend to take what they have for granted and view wealth in relative terms. But returning to what I said about the poor, historically, being so meant that you didn’t have shoes on your feet or food on the table (if you had a table). In America today it generally means you have an older car, a TV, refrigerator, air conditioning and a host of other luxuries. The reality? Our government’s “poverty line” is a political ploy. In an absolute sense, there is very, very little poverty in the US — because of economic freedom.

Our great discoveries, inventions and innovations were not made by bureaucrats, nor generally at their direction. And while I encourage and support the charitable endeavors of my Catholic Church (the world’s largest private provider of aid to the poor), even its efforts to end poverty pale in comparison to economic freedom’s triumphs. This is no slight. Economic freedom unleashes the creative capacities of the common man, from border to border, transforming the populace into an army of wealth creators. And nothing can compete with that.

Without creation, there can be no distribution.

How Obedient Are You?

In the early 1960s, Yale professor Stanley Milgram conducted a serious of famous psychological experiments to measure people’s obedience to authority. A volunteer was instructed by an experimenter to help administer a simple test to a subject in another room. Cards were drawn to determine which of two “volunteers” would play each role, but the cards were rigged such that the actual volunteer was always given the same role each time, and the other role was played by an actor. This gave the volunteers the impression that the role they happened to be assigned was arbitrary.

The test subject (i.e. actor) could be heard but not seen by the volunteer. Whenever a test question was answered incorrectly by the subject-actor, the volunteer was instructed to administer a shock by pressing a button on a control panel. These shocks began at a negligibly low voltage, but with each wrong answer, the shocks were to be increased in 15-volt increments until eventually the final level of 450 volts was reached. The shocks were fake, so no one was physically harmed, but the volunteers didn’t know that the shocks were fake.

As these shocks were administered, the subject in the next room (who again could be heard but not seen by the volunteer), would express discomfort in a manner befitting the severity of the shock, including complaining of a heart condition, screaming louder and louder, and banging on the wall. After a certain voltage was passed, the shock-receiver eventually become completely silent (as if to simulate unconsciousness or death). Even after this point, the volunteer was instructed to continue administering shocks.

Milgram’s experiment was intended to test how far the average person would go. At what point would they refuse to give out any more shocks, despite being told by the experimenter to continue?

If you haven’t already heard of this experiment, what would your prediction be? What percentage of people would go all the way to the end?

Before the first experiment was run, senior psychology students polled by Milgram collectively predicted that only 1.2% of the test volunteers would go all the way to 450 volts. They expected that about 99% of people would stop before that point, figuring that most people are not so sadistic. Similar polling of professional psychiatrists yielded a prediction that about 0.1% would go all the way to 450 volts, meaning that 99.9% would stop before that point.

What was the actual result?

In reality, 65% of volunteers made it all the way to the end of the experiment, which required pushing the 450-volt button not just once but three times in a row.

This experiment has been repeated numerous times with highly consistent results, even when the experiment was updated to conform to today’s stricter experimental ethics guidelines. Compliance rates are generally in the 61-66% range, meaning that most people go all the way to administering the full 450 volts.

Milgram himself reported 19 variations on this experiment that he conducted. By tweaking different factors, such as whether a fellow volunteer participant (played by an actor) voiced strong objections and quit, or obeyed until the end, Milgram found that the compliance rate could be tweaked up or down. In one variation he was able to achieve a compliance rate of 92.5%, while in another he was able to get it down to 10%. The effect of peer pressure had a strong influence on the results.

Incidentally, the compliance rate was the same for men and women alike, so the female volunteers were no more or less obedient than the male ones.

Instead of being blindly obedient or downright sadistic, the volunteer would usually object to going further at some point, often around 135 volts. In response to each verbal objection voiced by the volunteer, the experimenter would instruct the volunteer to continue with the following statements:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice. You must go on.

If the volunteer objected a fifth time, then the experiment was halted. And of course the experiment would end if the volunteer objected more strongly at any point such as by getting up and walking out of the room. So the experimenter would eventually take no for an answer — but not right away.

There were also a few custom responses that the experimenter would give as replies to specific types of objections. For instance, if the objection was about doing irreparable harm to the subject, the experimenter would assure the volunteer that although the shocks were strong, no permanent tissue damage would occur.

As payment for participating in the experiment, which took about an hour, each volunteer received $4.

How Nazi Are You?

Milgram’s experiments were partly conceived in response to the trials of Nazi war criminals after WWII. Did the Nazis have to recruit unusually sadistic people to implement their plans? Did they have to use fear and force to get people to obey? Or is it actually much easier to get people to obey a perceived authority, even when it runs contrary to the person’s conscience?

I recently returned from a 30-day trip to Europe, during which I visited Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. This was an interesting progression as it relates to WWII since I went from the the aggressor (Germany) to an occupied country (Netherlands) to one of the victors (UK). I visited WWII-related museums and sights in each country and talked to locals about their perceptions of this phase of European history.

It was a compelling experience to visit some of the actual WWII-related locations I’d previously only read about in school or had seen in movies. I visited an old WWII bunker. I walked through the Secret Annex where  hid from the Nazis. I explored the underground war rooms used by Winston Churchill and his staff. I caught trains at some of the stations that were once used to transport Jewish people to concentration camps.

Other than Pearl Harbor (which I visited when I was a teenager) and various constructed memorials, the USA is largely devoid of significant WWII sights. I can’t just stroll around Las Vegas and point to places where bombings or battles occurred. But when walking around certain European cities, such locations are hard to miss.

In many American WWII films, the Nazis are depicted as a society of evil, inhuman sadists. A great example of this portrayal can be seen in the role of Amon Göth (played by Ralph Fiennes) in the movie . The real Amon Göth, who was the commandant of a concentration camp, would do things like make the Jews pay for their own executions, taxing them to compensate the Germans for the bullets used to kill them. After the war he was tried as a war criminal, found guilty, and executed by hanging at age 37. Apparently it took three tries to hang him before the execution was successful, due to a miscalculation of the rope length. As an SS Captain in charge of a concentration camp, Göth had plenty of people under his command to carry out his orders. So why did people obey him? More importantly, how many factors (like the threat of punishment) can we strip away and still see people obeying orders from someone like Göth?

Stanley Migram set out to discover some deeper truths. What would it take for a typical person to override his/her conscience and obey commands to hurt or kill others? As it turns out, for most people it doesn’t take much at all. If someone assumes an air of authority and tells people what to do, there will be plenty of people willing to obey, even if the commands contradict a person’s sense of ethics and morality.

According to Milgram,

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

Progressive Acquiescence

A key to the Milgram experiments is that a person is gradually eased into overriding their conscience. They aren’t instructed to give the 450-volt shock right away. Instead they begin with a voltage that isn’t even noticed. They progress from there in small increments.

The Nazis used a similar strategy. They didn’t immediately begin shipping Jews to gas chambers. They changed the climate and the culture slowly, such as by producing lots of propaganda, progressively restricting Jews’ rights, increasing Jews’ taxes, isolating the Jewish community in ghettos, and then moving them into camps. They started small and tuned the dial several notches each year. And people went along with each incremental step, which was a little stronger than the previous step.

It’s been interesting to observe some social changes that are happening today, which strike me as part of a gradual progression. For example, Microsoft recently announced the XBox One device, which comes with a Kinect camera system. This device actually watches you while you use it. It can closely monitor your eye movements, allowing it to determine exactly which part of the screen you’re looking at. It can register small shifts in your body movement. Supposedly it can even detect an increase in your heart rate, which tells it which part of a commercial may be affecting you emotionally.

Years ago a device like this would have seemed unconscionable and incredibly creepy. Some people will undoubtedly perceive it as such today, but as part of a progression towards greater personal surveillance and less privacy, this can also be viewed as just another incremental step. It’s only an entertainment system, right? But it also helps you get used to putting a surveillance device in your home, one that watches you, collects data about you, and rewards you in accordance with behavioral conditioning practices (such as by giving you points for watching commercials). If you object to some aspects of this, you may choose to disable those aspects initially, but of course not everyone will. Society will have time to get used to each progressive step, just like Milgram’s volunteers.

You may object verbally of course, but your verbal objections won’t be an issue if you still tolerate the outcome in the long run. As Milgram discovered, just about everyone objects at some point, but most of them still obey.

Another example is Google Glass, which is slated to be released next year. This device has already been banned by many businesses, including Las Vegas casinos, largely because it can function as an unwelcome surveillance device. Google claims that the privacy concerns regarding Glass are overblown. Cell phone cameras are already ubiquitous, and this is just one incremental step beyond that.

And of course if various authorities tell us these next steps are okay, nothing to worry about, then it shouldn’t be a big deal, right?

I’m not saying that this is a terrible thing per se. But I do think these are interesting examples of how progressive acquiescence can be used to change behavior, one incremental step at a time. When people object, it doesn’t necessarily kill the progression. It just means that people may need more time to get used to the current step before moving on to the next one. Verbal objections may slow the progression, but they aren’t sufficient to stop it.

Questionable Work

If Milgram could get people to issue painful/lethal electric shocks by having an authority figure tell them to do so, you might imagine that it’s even easier to get people to take less extreme (but still questionable) actions, such as working long hours for low pay doing meaningless busywork.

Even though many people would naturally object to throwing so much time at empty and unfulfilling work, they’ll still go ahead and do it if someone tells them to. Most people with jobs don’t like the work they do, but they still show up, even if the incentives aren’t very compelling.

What if you want to quit, but your boss, your parents, or some other perceived authority figure objects? Will you surrender and go back to work if they say something like this:

1. Please don’t quit.
2. We need you to keep working.
3. Many people are out of work. You should be glad that you have a job at all.
4. You have no choice. You have to go to work.

Getting people to do meaningless work is actually pretty easy. Most of the time, you can just have an authority figure like a boss command them to do it, and they will.

Is this a trap you’ve fallen into?

Questionable Relationships

Another place where people succumb to overrule-by-authority is their relationship life.

What if you want to split up, but your partner objects? Now what if your family objects? Or you partner’s family? Or your mutual friends? Or what if you sense that society at large objects to your desire to split up? What if you’re married? Do you have the inner resources to make this decision for yourself without being overruled by someone else?

What’s especially interesting about Milgram’s experiments is that just about every volunteer resisted in some way. They verbally questioned the experiment. They sweated, squirmed, groaned, or dug their nails into their skin. Some said they didn’t want the $4 payment. A few even had seizures. The experiment produced obvious signs of stress and discomfort in the volunteers. Yet the majority of them still obeyed all the way to the end.

We see these results all the time when people stay stuck in unfulfilling jobs or relationships. They show obvious signs of distress. Some complain. Some have nervous breakdowns. Some read self-help material incessantly, looking for a way out. Yet the majority still stay in those situations, lacking the inner strength to leave.

Do you allow anyone in your life to wield authority over your relationship decisions? Do you need anyone’s approval or fear their disapproval?

Students and Authority

Many students get suckered into high-stress situations at exam time. They’re told by authoritative professors and administrators that they must be tested and that exams are necessary. But the apparent necessity of exams is a manufactured illusion of academic life. Outside of such domains, the academic examination process is largely irrelevant. No one outside of school cares what exams you have or why you think you need them. In fact, many people consider the academic testing process ludicrous and dysfunctional.

During my first run at college, I disliked exams, so I declined to show up for many of them. A predictable consequence was that I failed many classes and was soon expelled. But I learned that the decision to take or not take any exam was mine to make. No one ever forced me to take a test — my permission was always required. I could see that behavioral conditioning techniques were being used to compel me to behave a certain way, such as rewards or punishments. Once I saw through this silly game, I became free to choose for myself whether to play the role of academic student, knowing that it was entirely my choice and that it was impossible for anyone to force me to be tested if I didn’t want to be tested. This turned out to be a powerful mental shift. When I returned to college later, I found it easy to ace my exams without undue stress and generally without needing to devote extra time to studying. I understood that submitting myself to testing was always my choice and never something I had to do. I could only be tested if I chose to be tested.

As a reward for taking and passing certain exams, you may receive a slip of paper that says you know something, but you’ve probably forgotten most of that material a week after the exams anyway. The purpose of the exam was to temporarily convince someone else that you know what they want you to know. What that slip of paper really says is that you’re obedient to authority and that you’ll do the assignments and take the tests that are given to you, and that in itself is something that many employers value. But if you don’t care to submit to another authority, then that slip of paper is of minimal utility. I have one in a box in my garage from my university days, and no one has ever asked to see it. In retrospect, I regard the effort required to earn it to be largely a waste of time, even though I did it faster than most people. (Incidentally, if you still want that slip of paper and you’d like to graduate faster than normal, read “10 Tips for College Students”.)

If you’re currently a student, recognize that no one has authority over you. You don’t actually have to show up to class, take exams, and do busywork. Participating is your choice, and no one can force to you play the role of academic student without your permission. The best they can do is apply behavioral conditioning techniques to try to get you to submit to their authority, but if you see through their silly games of rewards and punishments, those techniques lose a lot of their power. You may still choose to play the academic game for your own reasons, which is perfectly fine. Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking that any part of it is being forced upon you. The whole thing is your choice.

Awareness

Now that you know about this tendency of human beings to obey authority even when strong objections may be present, how shall you deal with this?

The first step is to become aware of any areas in your life where you may already be succumbing to the pressure of authority and allowing it to override your own morals, ethics, values, or desires.

If you value your time, then where are you feeling pressured to waste time or to invest in activities or responsibilities that aren’t actually important to you? For example, how much time did you invest in social media or web surfing this week? Was that a conscious decision on your part, or did you behave that way because someone or something else was conditioning your behavior with the promise of updates, information, or the illusion of pseudo-connection?

If you value freedom, where have you been encouraged to give up some of that freedom in ways that feel uncomfortable to you? What do you feel compelled or obligated to do this week? What are your have-tos? Are those genuine needs you’ve decided to fulfill, or were you progressively lured into a trap by giving your power away unnecessarily? For instance, did you choose to take on as much debt as you have now, or were you subtly enticed to go there, one easy step at a time?

What areas of your life are causing you signs of distress? Where are you sweating, squirming, complaining, or biting your nails? What parts of your life are causing you the equivalent of mild seizures?

Notice where some part of you is objecting to the state of your reality. Is this an area where you’re still obeying some kind of authority, even if you’re not happy with the results?

As you become aware of your tendency to submit to authority, even if it’s hard to stomach all the areas where you’ve been doing so, this will increase your alignment with truth. At first these realizations might sting a little. But please don’t allow yourself to sink back down to a place of denial and ignorance. Do your best to maintain this level of awareness, even if you don’t feel ready to act on it yet.

A run of one of Milgram’s experiments with a single volunteer took about an hour. That didn’t give people much time to think about their decisions — they were caught in a high-pressure situation. In real-life situations, however, you’re more likely to have some time to pause and reflect on your decisions. This is especially true when it comes to career and relationship decisions. Use this reflection time to your best advantage, and learn to trust yourself in those quiet spaces where the influence of a perceived external authority figure is minimal. For instance, pay attention to how you feel about your job when you’re not at work, and notice how you feel about your relationship when your partner is away — in these moments you’ll have access to a more accurate assessment of your feelings.

Seeking Support

Peer pressure certainly played a role in some of the Milgram experiments, either increasing or decreasing the compliance rate. The nice thing about peer pressure is that you can consciously create your own peer pressure to align with your desires.

When it’s possible to do so, seek out the support of others. When your inner voice is being squashed by the seemingly louder voice of some perceived authority, reach out to connect with others who’ve been in similar situations and have already moved beyond them. Especially target people who already have the results you desire, such as a fulfilling career, a happy relationship, or a stress-free academic life, and seek their counsel. Ask such people what they would do in your situation and why. See if their answers resonate with you.

You’ll often find when you talk to such people that they’ll have very different attitudes towards the same authorities that tend to overpower you. I experience this all the time from the opposite side when people share their current challenges with me. They constantly fall into the trap of giving away their power to some perceived outside authority. They often don’t even realize that they can choose to disobey, and that once they get past their resistance to doing so, everything will work out just fine. Disobeying may seem very difficult before you do it, but afterwards you’ll look back and kick yourself for making such a big deal out of it. In many cases it’s as simple as saying no and meaning it.

The student can’t change his/her major because Mom and Dad would be disappointed. The unhealthy relationship can’t end because the needy partner would be hurt. The crappy job can’t be quit because the bank wants to keep receiving the monthly loan payments.

You’re the authority in your life. Not your parents. Not your partner. Not your bank.

You can expect that other people will apply behavioral conditioning techniques to get you to comply with their wishes. Parents do it. Partners do it. Bosses do it. Banks do it. But in the end they’re all powerless to force you to do anything. The only way you obey is that you mistakenly believe that you have to obey. They tell you to obey, and you obey. But like the ornery volunteers in Milgram’s experiments who refused to go all the way to 450 volts, you always remain free to stop administering shocks at any time — especially to yourself.

The good news is that you’re not alone. Other people will be delighted to support you on this path, if you choose to invite their support. But they won’t be the same people who’ve benefitted from your obedience in the past, so don’t go looking for support from the authorities who are still giving you orders. If you go complaining to Amon Göth, you’ll get a bullet in the head for your troubles.

Shifting Gradually

Don’t feel you must make a dramatic shift overnight. You may find it more realistic to make gradual, step-by-step progress.

In the Milgram experiments, even the subjects who objected and quit didn’t generally do so immediately. Their resistance increased gradually as the experiment progressed. As the voice of their conscience grew louder, their willingness to blindly obey authority gradually diminished.

During the 5-year Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the Dutch didn’t immediately jump to maximum resistance. At first they tried to accept the occupation and adapt to it, but as the Nazis grew more oppressive, the Dutch pushed back with greater levels of resistance, including helping people go into hiding, printing underground newspapers, espionage, sabotage, and armed resistance.

Members of the Dutch resistance also sought to collaborate and coordinate their efforts, working together to support each other. Individually they were weaker, but collectively they could support each other in resisting the occupation on the long journey towards Liberation Day.

Demolishing Unauthorized Authority

Ultimately the task before you is to dismantle the external forms of authority in your life that you’re no longer willing to accept.

One memorable act of rebellion from my own life was when I was 17 years old and realized that I didn’t actually believe in the religious gobbledegook that had been fed to me throughout my childhood. For the first few months, I held this awareness only to myself, not having anyone in my life that I could safely confide in.

When I eventually shared my honest beliefs openly, the reaction from others was predictably negative. Initially this was a stressful time for me. What kept me going was the feeling of certainty that I was in the right, which was largely something created from within.

I experienced a powerful shift when I stopped giving my power away to the old perceived authority figures in my life. I stopped believing that they were smarter or wiser than I was. I finally allowed myself to believe that they could be wrong, mistaken, or deluded. By seeing them as fallible, I no longer held them up as worthy authorities over me.

In other words, I de-authorized those previous authorities. I rescinded permission for them to wield authority over me. Once I experienced that shift in my thinking, I then had the power to think and choose for myself, and no amount of behavioral conditioning tactics (i.e. rewards or punishments) would cause me to yield. As people recognized this shift in me and realized that they no longer had my permission to wield such authority over my thinking and behaviors, they soon gave up on trying to control me. Really I gave them no choice.

The power of Milgram’s experiment lies in the volunteers’ belief in the authority of the experimenter. By giving this person permission to wield authority over their decisions, they gave their power away and became capable of denying responsibility for the pain they may have caused. This allowed them to justify their participation as that of a cog in a machine.

One way to opt out of such an experiment before reaching the end is to place anyone who tries to claim authority over you on a lower rung than yourself on your mental ladder of authority. Don’t assume the experimenter is smarter or wiser than you. Realize that they may be mistaken, wrong, or unethical in their dealings and that you may be right. Stop doubting what your own mind is telling you.

Who or what have you authorized to be a greater authority than yourself in your life? If someone in a position of authority tells you that something is okay, but inside you feel creeped out by their actions, do you go along with them, or do you listen to yourself and say no? What if most of your friends and family go along for the ride? Will you succumb to that kind of peer pressure, even if you feel something isn’t right?

Note that the word authority includes the word author. To wield authority over your life is to become the author of your life. You can’t consciously author much of your life if you give someone or something else authority over you.

Objecting to the misapplied use of authority isn’t enough. Just about everyone objects at some point. People object yet still obey. At some point you have to be able to object and disobey, which means to obey your own inner guidance above the demands of any perceived external authority.

Subjectively speaking, there is no external authority. What’s happening internally (within your own mind) is that you’re stressing yourself out. The stress is a result of trying to deny your own power and authority, make yourself weak, and act like a cog in a machine. This is stressful because it contradicts your true nature. The reality is that you’re very powerful and creative, and if you desire to change some aspect of your reality that doesn’t suit you, you can do so. But in order to do so, you must recognize and accept your power. If you don’t like the way the world is right now, you can step up and do something about it. Pretending to be a powerless victim of circumstance doesn’t suit you.

Becoming an Authority

If you de-authorize the phony authorities in your life and become your own authority, you’ll begin to experience the flip side of Milgram’s experiment. Instead of being the hapless follower, you’ll soon find other people following your lead.

This is where the authority game becomes much more interesting. Instead of being a blind follower, you can transform yourself into a conscious leader. By authoring your own life more proactively, you’ll inspire others to follow your example.

I think that’s the secret fear that many people have when it comes to authority. Once you regain your personal authority, it’s an easy progression into the land of greater public responsibility. When you take charge of your life, you’ll attract others who want to follow your lead and do something similar. You won’t even have to try — those people will come to you.

If you know in advance that authoring your own life will result in others wanting to experience a similar story, is this something you can accept? Are you willing to step into the role of leader? Can you welcome that role into your life? Or would you rather keep playing the follower for a while?

You can follow, or you can lead, and there isn’t much of a space in between. If you’re not willing to lead, you’ll end up following by default.

If you’re willing to lead, then how are you going to lead? When people recognize the authority you have over yourself and become attracted to it, how will you deal with that? Will you try to ignore them? Will you accept that kind of responsibility and do your best? Will you abuse it and become a sadist?

One benefit of leadership is that you can learn a great deal more about your own path when you have a chance to see it reflected in those who seek to join you. Just as Milgram’s experimenters could observe when their volunteers were experiencing stress in response to the unethical demands placed upon them, you can also gauge the response to the authorship of your life from public feedback — but without giving your power away to that feedback. Allow the requests of others to serve as input, but make your own decisions from your personal sense of authority, wisdom, and conscience.

Reclaiming Your Power

Incidentally, Stanley Milgram was only 27 years old when he began conducting his famous experiments (he died at age 51), so don’t make the mistake of assuming that he was some wizened old senior professor. In his day he was quite the rabble-rouser, shaking up the status quo by challenging people’s beliefs.

As a result of going against the grain, Milgram had some authority-based pressure used against him as well. He moved from Yale to Harvard, but he was denied tenure at Harvard, probably because of the controversial nature of his experiments. His membership application to the American Psychological Association was also put on ice for a year.

Many of Milgram’s peers challenged the ethics of his experiments because the experiments caused significant stress to the volunteer participants. Yet most of the original participants, when interviewed about it later, were glad to have been part of the study. Some of them even wanted to work with Milgram. They understood the significance of his work, even though helping him with his research was stressful.

If Milgram’s experiments were indeed unethical, then wouldn’t it also be unethical for teachers to use their authority to stress out their students with exams and grades, for companies to control their employees with rewards and punishments, and for parents to demand that their children comply with family traditions and expectations? When is it okay to use stressful psychological tactics to control the behavior of another?

When stress-producing tactics are used on you in order to manipulate you into behaving a certain way, try to recognize these tactics for what they are — an invitation for you to give your power away. Realize that you can always decline this invitation, reclaim authority over your own life, and make your own conscious choices.

Even if most people continue to give their power away, you don’t have to be one of them. You can stop the shocks whenever you want. The shocks were never real to begin with.

Source:  Steve Pavlina

One-World Brain

Jim Keith (1949-1999)  |  Excerpt from the book Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness (Chapter 29). Kempton: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1999.

In the 1930s, British intelligence agent and one-world theoretician H.G. Wells proposed a mind control plan that is apparently coming to fruition now, at the turn of the 21st century, with the creation of the Internet. At a November, 1936 speech before the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Wells laid out his idea for what he called a “World Encyclopaedia.” Wells said:

“I want to suggest that something, a new social organization, a new institution—which for a time I shall call World Encyclopaedia… This World Encyclopaedia would be the mental background of every intelligent man in the world… Such an Encyclopaedia would play the role of an undogmatic Bible to world culture. It would do just what our scattered and disoriented intellectual organizations of today fall short of doing. It would hold the world together mentally… It would compel men to come to terms with one another… It is a super university. I am thinking of a World Brain; no less… Ultimately, if our dream is realized, it must exert a very great influence upon everyone who controls administrations, makes wars, directs mass behavior, feeds, moves, starves and kills populations… You see how such an Encyclopaedia organization could spread like a nervous network, a system of mental control about the globe, knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest and cooperating unity and a growing sense of their own dignity, informing without pressure or propaganda, directing without tyranny.”

Wells was a little more candid in a private memo written in the same month:

“The Universities and the associated intellectual organizations throughout the world should function as a police of the mind.” [1]

Policing of the mind is precisely the danger of the Internet. Although at first blush the possibility of a communications medium that is egalitarian in its ability to accommodate both individuals and media monoliths is exciting, the apparent freedom of the Internet may be transitory…and illusory.

One problem is that along with ability to disseminate information widely and almost instantaneously, due to its technical flexibility the Internet also has the potential for assimilating—for literally devouring—all of the major information sources on the planet. With high-tech linkages and interfaces it is quite probable that worldwide television, radio, computer, and print media will all be sucked into the maw of what is currently called the Internet. All of these information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.

The Internet provides the ability for almost instantaneous monitoring of the content of communications. It is possible that the ‘wide open information frontier’ of the Internet, as it currently exists, is going to be a temporary thing, and that a program of increased monitoring and regulation—as well as a more aggressive use of mind control, such as foreseen by Dr. Persinger—will emerge.

When NBC and Microsoft launched their joint venture MSNBC, in an attempt to link television and the Internet, newscaster and CFR member Tom Brokaw said,

“We can’t let that generation and a whole segment of the population just slide away out to the Internet and retrieve what information it wants without being in on it.” [2]

In China, they have also not held their tongues about what they see as the necessity of Internet control. Xia Hong, an advocate of government monitoring of the Net has said,

“The Internet has been an important technical innovator, but we need to add another element, and that is control. The new generation of information superhighway needs a traffic control center. It needs highway patrols: users will require driver’s licenses. These are the basic requirement for any controlled environment.” [3]

Is the idea that the Internet can be used for increasing surveillance on the public just paranoia on my part? Then we should examine who currently controls the medium: American intelligence agencies. At this time the major nexus of control of the Internet resides in the monopoly of “domain registration,” the keys to the broad Internet landscape. These domain names are registered as Internet Protocol numbers, and until recently were deeded by Network Solutions, Inc., a subsidiary of the government funded National Science Foundation. While Network Solutions registered the I.P. numbers, it was done as a free public service. This is no longer taking place.

Now the long arm of American intelligence agencies has hijacked the free flow of information—registration of domain names now starts at fifty dollars per year—since the purchase of Network Solutions by another company, Scientific Applications International Corp. (SAIC), a group previously mentioned circumstantially in this book in connection with the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide—or murder.

SAIC is an arm of the military industrial establishment, with twenty thousand employees and over 90% of its $1.9 billion in 1994 revenues obtained from government contracts. On the twenty-three person board of directors of SAIC are Admiral Bobby Inman, former deputy director of the CIA and head of the National Security Agency; President Nixon’s former defense secretary Melvin Laird; General Max Thurman, who commanded the invasion of Panama. Other board members of SAIC have included former CIA director Robert Gates; Secretary of Defense William Perry; and CIA director John Deutch.

Among the projects that Scientific Applications International Corp. has been engaged in recently have been the creation and implementation of technology for the Army Global Command and Control System—the renovation of the Pentagon’s computer and communication systems—and the upgrading of national, state, and local law enforcement databases. In other words, SAIC is involved in the upgrading and integration of the computerized infrastructure of the Establishment.

And now SAIC stands at the gate of the Internet.

According to researcher Jesse Hersh:

“The military-industrial complex was the name used to refer to the ruling power elite during the 1950s and 1960s. However, with the wide penetration of television during the ’60s, and the further proliferation of electronic media throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the complex has dissolved into the inner workings of almost all aspects of our society. The war economy has successfully been transformed into the information economy. Military technology, and military communications systems now control and operate almost all of our political-economic and social relations. This amalgamation of media, and conglomeration of power, is currently being presented to the ‘consumer’ as the Information Superhighway or ‘Internet’.” [4]

If it seems unlikely that Big Brother would concern himself with the communications of ordinary citizens on the Internet, then it should be realized that government is already engaged in monitoring civilian and business communications on an awesome scale. Around the world, electronic messages are intercepted by a collaboration amongst several spy agencies headed by the American NSA, termed ECHELON. Based upon a document known as the UKUSA Agreement, signed in 1948 by the U.S., Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, ECHELON is a system composed of receiving stations in Yakima, Washington; Sugar Grove, West Virginia; Norwenstow in Cornwall, England; Waihopai, New Zealand; and Geraldton, Australia.

The receiving stations of ECHELON sift through the output of the world’s electronic media. ECHELON primarily targets non-military domestic and business communications, including email, telephone, fax, and telex networks. This interception is primarily done through monitoring the communications of international phone company telecommunications satellites, civilian communications satellites, and communications as they are sent from undersea cables to microwave transmitters.

ECHELON uses computers that incorporate symbol and voice recognition systems to sift through millions of messages every minute, and to identify keywords and phrases, including business names, e-mail addresses, phone and fax numbers that are of interest to its participating member intelligence groups in the U.S., Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. After these phrases are located and the communications they are embodied in are culled, they are sent to analysts in whatever country requested the intercepts. According to one analyst, Amnesty International and Greenpeace have been among ECHELON’s targets.

“Let me put it this way,” a former NSA officer said. “Consider that anyone can type a keyword into a Net search engine and get back tens of thousands of hits in a few seconds. Assume that people working on the outer edges have capabilities far in excess of what you do.” [5]

The gradual assimilation and control of all communications—and ultimately all transactions entirely, including those of perception and thought—is a long term strategy of the controllers that has in recent years been facilitated through the creation of the interdisciplinary science of cybernetics. Now, with cybernetics, mass control is here, eating up our freedom on a day-to-day basis like a fast-acting viral organism.

The term cybernetics was invented by Norbert Wiener, a professor of mathematics at MIT who was involved with what was termed Operations Research as well as System Dynamics for the U.S. during World War II.

Cybernetics is primarily the science of information theory, and it is currently being applied to the world as a whole. Cybernetics theory was first envisioned as a way of precisely managing wars, but with experience it was seen that the disciplines and projections that were vital in the conduct of war were essentially the same as those utilized by government during peacetime. The cybernetic approach evolved such cross-disciplinary groups as the RAND Corporation, Mitre, and Ramo-Wooldridge (which became TRW), brainstorming the cybernetic approach to controlling society and nature itself. The cybernetics idea also provided the genus for the National Security Agency, which is at this time the largest intelligence agency on the planet. Such is the importance of information, according to the controllers.

According to cybernetic innovator Jay W. Forrester,

“The professional field known as system dynamics [or cybernetics] has been developing for the last 35 years and now has a world-wide and growing membership. System dynamics combines the theory, methods, and philosophy needed to analyze the behavior of systems in not only management, but also in environmental change, politics, economic behavior, medicine, engineering, and other fields. System dynamics provides a common foundation that can be applied where we want to understand and influence how things change through time.”

One experiment in cybernetics was conducted in 1971 after the Marxist-leaning Dr. Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile. As Castro had done earlier, Allende set about nationalizing the industry, banks, and major companies of Chile. But Allende was no agrarian primatif, and therein lay his danger to the Establishment world. He called in the British cyberneticist Stafford Beers to provide the means for micro-managing the country, which is rich in natural resources, but which has always been drained by the major industrial powers with little of its gelt left over for the country itself.

Beer gathered together a highly qualified group of cybernetics-savvy scientists and launched what he called Project Cybersyn, the objective of which was, according to Beers,

“To install a preliminary system of information and regulation for the industrial economy that will demonstrate the main features of cybernetic management and begin to help in the task of actual decision-making by March 1, 1972… It was a massive application of cybernetic feedback to help each industry and each factory keep track of itself through a central location. All communications flowed through the central location.”

Project Cybersyn utilized three primary components:

• Cybernet, which was something of a precursor to today’s Internet, a means by which businessmen and government could communicate and consult with anyone else in the web.
• Cyberstride, the programs necessary for monitoring individual companies as well as the economy as a whole, as well as providing alerts when specific areas needed enhancement or were in trouble.
• Chaco, a computerized model of the Chilean economy that provided effective simulations of potential scenarios.

The purpose of Cybersyn was to monitor, to dissect, and to predict the Chilean economy; to debug it in order to create a functioning machine, in much the same manner that is being done in many countries throughout the world today.

 

The problem is that Cybersyn may have worked too well and so posed a threat to the capitalist world. As the demonstration project that Allende and Beers foresaw, it might have provided a tremendous public relations coup for the Communist world. Henry Kissigner, it is said, was the one who intervened to put an end to the grand experiment. Salvador Allende was assassinated by Chileans who are reported to have been in the pay of the CIA, and Cybersyn went by the wayside.

The CIA seems to have known precisely what it was doing, since there are indications that the Agency at about the same time was focused on cybernetic concerns of its own. According to Anna Keeler in my Secret and Suppressed anthology,

“Richard Helms wrote of such a system in the mid-1960s while he was CIA Plans Director. He spoke of ‘Sophisticated approaches to the coding of information for transmittal to population targets’ in the ‘battle for the minds of men’ and of ‘an approach integrating biological, social and physical-mathematical research in an attempt to control human behavior.’ He found particularly notable ‘use of modern information theory, automata theory, and feedback concepts…for a technology controlling behavior…using information inputs as causative agents…”

Elsewhere Helms wrote,

“Cybernetics can be used in molding of a child’s character, the inculcation of knowledge and techniques, the amassing of experience, the establishment of social behavior patterns…all functions which can be summarized as control of the growth processes of the individual.”

Cybernetics and the Internet—otherwise, the one world brain envisioned by H.G. Wells—allows for a regulated, interventionist world, one so fine-tuned that much of the machinations that take place behind the scenes are not observed by the man in the street. Among the control strategies that can be and are employed by the elitists in a cybernetic world are the control of food, the control of the monetary supply, the control of energy, and the control of public opinion. The Clinton administration’s close attention to the media and opinion polls, and manipulation of same, are in essence a primitive cybernetic approach that has allowed for the institution in the U.S. of a “soft” cybernetic fascism where violent internal intervention is rarely needed, and then seemingly only for public relations purposes.

The techno-fascists are approaching closure, and may have already achieved it. Not only do governments and intelligence agencies currently have the ability to monitor computer and other media messages, as well as the emotional responses of the electorate via polling and other techniques, they have the ability and the will to use media to brainwash us, to change our opinions when they believe it is warranted, and to sell us on every step on the road to complete utilization. As satirized in works like Report From Iron Mountain andSilent Weapons for Quiet Wars, the cybernetics approach to world management can yield the ultimate in control. Extrapolating from the accelerating advances of the last century, it is obvious that unless lovers of freedom act, and act fast, within the next twenty years the ruling elite will have effectively realized total control over the minds and bodies of mankind.[6]

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Notes:

[1] Wells, H.G. Cited in White, Carol. The New Dark Ages Conspiracy. New York: The New Benjamin Franklin House, 1980.

[2] Brokaw, Tom, cited in Pouzzner, Daniel. “The Architecture of Modern Political Power,” http://www.mega.nu/ampp/

[3] “The Great Firewall of China” by Geramie R. Barme and Sang Ye, Wired Magazine.

[4] Hersh, Jesse, “The Internet Complex,” Prevailing Winds, number 4; King, Bradley J., “Doubleplusungood! The Specter of Telescreening,” [formerly] at www.parascope.com.

[5] Hagar, Nicky, “Exposing the Global Surveillance System,” Covert Action Quarterlyonline, http://www.projectcensored.org/4-exposing-the-global-surveillance-system/; “Spies Like Us,” Connected, 16 December, 1997, at www.telegraph.co.uk; Vest, Jason, “Listening In,” Village Voice, August 12-18, 1998.

[6] Helms, Richard, cited in Bowart, Walter. Operation Mind Control. New York: Dell Books, 1978; Friedman, George and Meridith. The Future of War — Power, Technology, and American World Dominance. 1996; Beer, Stafford. Brain of the Firm, 1986; Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings — Cybernetics and Society. 1954; “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars,” Secret and Suppressed, ed. Jim Keith, Feral House, 1993.

Source: War Is Crime

Neo-Feudalism

A Growing Precariat Class…

I knew a man whose wife divorced him and who never remarried.  He liked women and for the remainder of his life he had affairs with several.  His exuberant intentions were good but he was blind to the preferences of the people he intended to help (usually women friends) and they often resisted his plans.  He went through life intending to do good deeds that were often barely tolerated.

Public television recently ran a documentary on the Rockefeller family.  My friend and the Rockefeller family had a common goal of bettering the lives of others whether they like it or not.  David Rockefeller promotes the new world order because he sincerely believes world government benefits mankind.  He and other like minded individuals seem to have the power to move their goal forward but they are meeting heavy resistance from multitudes who cherish freedom, hate tyranny and prefer to make their own choices.

Competition is a fitting impetus to a healthy business environment. But competition produces winners and losers.  Unfortunately, all men are not created equal. (Jefferson’s claim in the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding).   Some men have superior abilities, allowing them an advantage over their fellows.  Men who win in the money war become wealthy while losers become relatively poor.  The libertarian nature of the early American business culture provided a realistic example of the outcome of free Capitalism.  Several families accumulated massive fortunes and were able to shelter their wealth allowing an extended influence on the culture.

John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937). was raised in poverty by a Christian mother.  His father was often absent. The family lived in Ohio during the birth of the oil industry.  He was an astute competitor who successfully used the freedom of Capitalist system to gain control of a majority of the industry.  In spite of government intervention he preserved the family fortune allowing his descendents to wield the power of great wealth through successive generations.

J. P. (John Pierpont) Morgan (1837-1913) was a key recipient of the bounty of Capitalism.  A Connecticut banker Morgan gained control over much of the country’s manufacturing base.  He formed U. S. Steel Corporation and on at least two occasions (one with Rothschild help) bailed out the U. S. government.

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)  came to the United States from Scotland in his early teens.  He was an astute businessman who enjoyed success in several different enterprises.  Ultimately he became extremely wealthy by creating the world’s largest steel mill.  The mill was finally sold to J. P. Morgan and became a major part of U. S. Steel Corporation.

Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) was an uneducated farm boy of Dutch and English extraction, his thrifty ways allowed him to prosper by moving goods by steamship around New York City.  As the railroads took over the freight moving business he used his profits to invest in the railroads.  Though uncouth in manner he was astute in business.

Henry Ford (1863-1947) made his fortune in a later era.  He reduced manufacturing costs and made products available to the general population by using an assembly line to mass produce automobiles. Mass production was the crown of the industrial revolution making its benefits available to everyone.

Bill Gates (1955 –   ) a contemporary “robber baron” started and nurtured software giant Microsoft into the world’s pre-eminent producer of computer software.  He was criticized for his business practices and called before congress but he warded off the government wolves and saved his company.   He and his wife Melinda are now busy managing their Foundation. .    

Hundreds of fortunes have been made in the United States.  These six are well known. All had the advantage of living in times when the conduct of their businesses was largely unencumbered and they could garner great riches from a wealthy nation.  They were criticized for cutting prices and buying up competition but both of these practices are legal in a free Capitalist system; they did it better than their competitors.

Corporations and Foundations are stores of wealth and power. They are artificial entities that function as individuals.  They can and often do grow into quasi-monopolies that can be controlled with a small percentage of the outstanding stock.  Real Estate appreciation and the steep rise in value of hard assets produces riches but the primary source of great wealth is the huge increase in value of the stock of a successful company.  Foundations are usually spawned with shares of stock.  They depend upon profits from stocks for their income.  Stocks are a store of wealth.

Bill Gates became one of the wealthiest men in the world through ownership of stock in Microsoft Corporation, a company he nurtured to greatness. Using that stock he and his wife Melinda have formed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest in United States and second largest in the world.

The stock market uncouples the cost of a stock from its real value as an ownership unit and allows speculation to determine value.  In a bull market a popular stock, as a fractional unit of owner ship, might have a real value of $10.00 but sell on the market for $100.00.  Owners of successful business enterprises who retain or purchase large blocks of stock can enjoy a massive increase in wealth that has no relation to value or effort.

We see this principle play out in the price of gasoline.  The real cost of oil at the well head might be $10.00 a bbl. but on the commodities market it sells for $100.00.  Consumers pay the inflated market price and the well owners enjoy a massive increase in income.

Before the revolution English Corporations had exploited the colonies and in its early years the United States government was wary of corporate power.  .  For decades, until the Civil War, corporations were strictly regulated.

The Internet page Reclaiming Democracy provides this information:

• Corporate charters (licenses to exist) were granted for a limited time and could be revoked promptly for violating laws.
• Corporations could engage only in activities necessary to fulfill their chartered purpose.
• Corporations could not own stock in other corporations nor own any property that was not essential to fulfilling their chartered purpose.
• Corporations were often terminated if they exceeded their authority or caused public harm.
• Owners and managers were responsible for criminal acts committed on the job.
• Corporations could not make any political or charitable contributions nor spend money to influence law-making.

The Civil War brought an end to restrictions on corporate power.  Corporate agents infested both state and federal governments; they bribed officials, enjoyed huge profits, gained limited liability, more autonomy, and extended charters.  The corporate demon was loosed!

Most Americans know of Foundations but few know much about them.  Foundations are tax-free instruments that allow the winners of the money war to protect their wealth from taxation and exert some control over how it is used    According to “The Non-Profit Times” private foundations have at least four characteristics:

• It is a charitable organization and thus subject to the rules applicable to charities generally;
• Its financial support came from one source, usually an individual, family, or company;
• Its annual expenditures are funded out of earnings from investment assets, rather than from an ongoing flow of contributions; and,
• It makes grants to other organizations for charitable purposes, rather than to its own programs

Foundations have few restrictions.  They are not dogged by the media or overseen by congress. Wealthy donors are seldom confronted by elected officials who might at some point seek their donations.

Billions of dollars are sheltered by Foundations and the income earned is frequently used to support an elite agenda.  The world is often impacted and sometimes altered by the organizations these Foundations support but people are usually unaware of the source of the change.  Foundations are big supporters of world government; they supported the Feminist Movement and donate heavily to woman’s rights, the homosexual agenda enjoys large grants, as does Planned Parenthood, there are also big efforts to influence other nations.  The Global Fund for women is a relatively new foundation but their U. S. giving provides a glimpse of the humanist agenda supported by the Foundation culture.

Writing in “” (Vol. 18, No. 2, 2003) Valerie Aubourg contends that the Bilderberg meetings were organized by European Elites with help from American sources as well as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the CIA.

The Foundation Center lists some past foundation grants, “dissidents and intellectuals in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, funded legal challenges to apartheid in South Africa starting in the 1970s, and helped human rights groups in Latin America in the 1970s and 80s. Foundations supported work on AIDS at home and abroad when those with the disease were stigmatized; they pushed for public policies to address climate change when the U.S. federal government denied there was a problem of global warming; and they established a dialogue with Iran when the U.S. and Iranian governments were not talking directly to each other. Building on the early vision and practice of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford, today’s foundation leaders see these problems in global, not just American terms; seek to address them on a worldwide scale; and directed considerable resources around the world to that end.”

In the Washington Post, Michael McFaul, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, describes Foundation interventions: “Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities — democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. — but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and several others to provide small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation did the same.”

Large amounts of U. S. Foundation money go to organizations located in Switzerland and England. Open the link, (wait for it to load) click on Switzerland and England and note the number of grants to International organizations.   While American citizens sign petitions and hold rallies, powerful U. S. Foundations often finance the programs concerned citizens groups are trying to prevent.

The Rockefeller Foundation is one of three funds supported by the Rockefeller family.  The other two are The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund.   The Rockefellers are famous for supporting studies on Eugenics.  here and here  They are also big supporters of Globalism and according to Andrew Gavin Marshall one of the most powerful families in the world.  He describes the breadth of Rockefeller influence: “Initially through the Standard Oil empire, which was broken up into corporations we now know as ExxonMobil, Chevron and others, Rockefeller influence was prominent in universities (notably the University of Chicago and Harvard), in finance, with Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase), in the creation and maintenance of major foundations (Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund) and in the establishment and leadership of major think tanks (Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg), all of which created access to political and social power that shaped institutions, ideologies and individuals on a vast scale.”

The Financial Times reported in May of 2012,”Two of the best-known business dynasties in Europe and the US will come together after Lord Jacob Rothschild’s listed investment trust and Rockefeller Financial Services agreed to form a strategic partnership, with the Rothschild-owned RIT Capital Partners purchasing a 37% stake in the Rockefeller family’s ‘wealth advisory and asset management group.’This ‘transatlantic union’, noted the Financial Times, ‘brings together David Rockefeller, 96, and Lord Rothschild, 76 – two family patriarchs whose personal relationship spans five decades.’”

I could not find a Foundation for the descendents of J. P. Morgan but Jamie Dimon, CEO of J. P. Morgan Chase, the world’s largest bank ($13 trillion assets), describes their current philosophy this way, “Diversity is a cornerstone of our global corporate culture, and we continue to build upon it by: Linking management rewards to progress in achieving diversity; identifying top talent and building development plans accordingly; seeking a diverse slate of candidates for all key job openings; building a pipeline for diverse talent by working closely with universities and key industry groups;  actively involving our people – through employee networking groups, annual forums, open discussions with senior leaders, seeking input on multicultural marketing efforts, and partnering on community activities; and, offering a comprehensive set of policies, programs and benefits to meet the changing needs of a wide spectrum of individuals”

The Carnegie Foundation lists many of its recipients in this database:  Most of the big Foundations support world peace and feminism.  Many make donations to the Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  The boards of directors of the large foundations and the major international corporations are made up of individuals who know each other, have a common agenda and often serve together on more than one board.

I did not find a contemporary Foundation for the Vanderbilt Family.  The Vanderbilt fortune suffered losses during the Twentieth Century but the family is still prominent; Gloria Vanderbilt and her son, Anderson Cooper, are well known descendents.

The Ford Foundation has an interesting history. John J. McCloy became president of the Ford Foundation in 1954.  McCloy, a consummate insider, used the foundation as a cover for CIA agents making it almost a subsidiary of the U. S. Government.   Henry Ford exposed the Talmudist Jewish conspiracy and when the Foundation gave some support to the Palestinians it was excoriated as an anti-Semitic organization.  It repented and ceased supporting Paletinian causes.  The Ford Foundation provides serious support for National Public Radio and like many others it helps finance the Council on Foreign Relations.  Both the Rockefeller Family Fund and the Ford Foundation support the Third Wave Foundation, a fast growing, fifteen year old organization that “supports young people creating new models of leadership that strengthen community efforts to resist oppression and ensure justice, that are led by and for young women, transgender, and gender non-conforming youth and queer youth of color.”

Please take time to click on the Foundation links and look over the recipients of grants.  A short study will help you understand the nature of the organizations they support.  Foundations hold billions of dollars in assets.  The common interests of those that control these assets allow them to support programs outside and sometimes against the governments of the nations of the world.  Not only can they go around governments but they can and often do control them.  They are a powerful force for the privileged one percent.

The addiction to wealth often culminates in a quest for power.  This hunger to control has become more evident in the Twenty-First Century as the world’s neo-Feudal Lords have begun to exert their power for world dominance in the public realm.  They have succeeded in gaining control of the world’s most powerful nation and are using it to insert their tentacles into all corners of the Globe.  The theft of knowledge has succeeded through control of public education and the theft of wealth is well underway. Failure to curtail the centralization of power has exposed the world to the domination of an amoral, cruel and Godless oligarchy that is well on the way to enslaving mankind.

World corporations have become fewer and fewer and bigger and bigger.  International corporations benefit from globalization by acquiring multiple new marketing opportunities.  Wealthy corporations and foundations exert influence on the governments of the nations of the world.  Their leaders are members of the secret elite groups that meet and determine policy.  So far David Rockefeller’s dreams are progressing at a formidable rate.

It is not unusual for Christians to ignore significant scriptures.  The Law of the Sabbath Year has been significantly neglected for centuries.  It is doubtful that even ancient Israel practiced it properly.   The Bible describes the year of Jubilee like this: “You shall thus consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim a release through the land to all its inhabitants.  It shall be a jubilee for you, and each of you shall return to his own property, and each of you shall return to his family.”  Land is to be returned to its original owners, debts are to be forgiven, and slaves are to be freed!

God created the world in six days and on the seventh day He rested.  Sunday, the Sabbath, is a day of rest.  God also applies this principle to years.  We are to plant and harvest for six consecutive years and on the seventh year the land is to lay fallow. Jubilee is to be celebrated in the year following seven Sabbaths of years – the fiftieth year.

There are several important principles contained in the 25^th Chapter of Leviticus: God makes a distinction between the people He has chosen and others. He supports competition but does not want permanent, burgeoning inequities of wealth among His people.  Benevolent slavery is condoned but His people are to be freed at jubilee. Foreigners do not enjoy the provisions of jubilee.  They can be used as slaves until their debts are paid.  Usury is forbidden among God’s people but not among foreigners.

Erroneous interpretations of scripture often nullify important principles.  Arminianism and modern methods of evangelism urge people to choose God destroying the Biblical doctrine of selection.  God’s chosen people are granted legal benefits that are lost in the doctrine of universal atonement.  The Bible teaches that Christians are a chosen people who have special legal rights that are not afforded to others.

Jubilee is God’s remedy for the inordinate accumulation of wealth and power.  It is a resource to correct the inequities that develop in a competitive society without depending on the arbitrary, emotion driven policies of frivolous politicians.

Today, in the United States the disparity between the wealthy and the remainder of our population is greater than ever before.  One percent of our population own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.  .  The Middle Class is being destroyed and a permanent underclass is growing.  In the 1970s the upper 1 percent received 8 percent of the nation’s income, in 2010 that figure had risen to 21 percent.  The 400 wealthiest Americans own more than the bottom 150 million.   According to Andrew Gavin Marshall almost all of the wealth gains over the previous decade went to the top 1%. In the mid-1970s, the top 1% earned 8% of all national income; this number rose to 21% by 2010.

We have ignored the Word of God and are in the process of suffering the consequences.  God provided The Law of Jubilee to protect His people from human tyranny.  There is a righteous way of rectifying the imbalance of wealth that results from a competitive economy.  God’s Law always trumps the imagination of His creatures.

Christians are often described as followers of Jesus.  This definition is inadequate because Jesus is a servant to His Father.  He sits on the right hand of His father and judges the world.  Those who truly follow Jesus follow the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  This concept brings the entire Bible into focus and sets up legal standards for Christian behavior.

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” – – Voltaire (1694-1778)

Edward Snowden

In the course of his professional life in the world of national security Edward Snowden must have gone through numerous probing interviews, lie detector examinations, and exceedingly detailed background checks, as well as filling out endless forms carefully designed to catch any kind of falsehood or inconsistency. The Washington Post (June 10) reported that “several officials said the CIA will now undoubtedly begin reviewing the process by which Snowden may have been hired, seeking to determine whether there were any missed signs that he might one day betray national secrets.”

Yes, there was a sign they missed – Edward Snowden had something inside him shaped like a conscience, just waiting for a cause.

It was the same with me. I went to work at the State Department, planning to become a Foreign Service Officer, with the best – the most patriotic – of intentions, going to do my best to slay the beast of the International Communist Conspiracy. But then the horror, on a daily basis, of what the United States was doing to the people of Vietnam was brought home to me in every form of media; it was making me sick at heart. My conscience had found its cause, and nothing that I could have been asked in a pre-employment interview would have alerted my interrogators of the possible danger I posed because I didn’t know of the danger myself. No questioning of my friends and relatives could have turned up the slightest hint of the radical anti-war activist I was to become. My friends and relatives were to be as surprised as I was to be. There was simply no way for the State Department security office to know that I should not be hired and given a Secret Clearance. 1

So what is a poor National Security State to do? Well, they might consider behaving themselves. Stop doing all the terrible things that grieve people like me and Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning and so many others. Stop the bombings, the invasions, the endless wars, the torture, the sanctions, the overthrows, the support of dictatorships, the unmitigated support of Israel; stop all the things that make the United States so hated, that create all the anti-American terrorists, that compel the National Security State – in pure self defense – to spy on the entire world.

Eavesdropping on the planet

The above is the title of an essay that I wrote in 2000 that appeared as a chapter in my book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Here are some excerpts that may help to put the current revelations surrounding Edward Snowden into perspective …

Can people in the 21st century imagine a greater invasion of privacy on all of earth, in all of history? If so, they merely have to wait for technology to catch up with their imagination.

Like a mammoth vacuum cleaner in the sky, the National Security Agency (NSA) sucks it all up: home phone, office phone, cellular phone, email, fax, telex … satellite transmissions, fiber-optic communications traffic, microwave links … voice, text, images … captured by satellites continuously orbiting the earth, then processed by high-powered computers … if it runs on electromagnetic energy, NSA is there, with high high tech. Twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps billions of messages sucked up each day. No one escapes. Not presidents, prime ministers, the UN Secretary-General, the pope, the Queen of England, embassies, transnational corporation CEOs, friend, foe, your Aunt Lena … if God has a phone, it’s being monitored … maybe your dog isn’t being tapped. The oceans will not protect you. American submarines have been attaching tapping pods to deep underwater cables for decades.

Under a system codenamed ECHELON, launched in the 1970s, the NSA and its junior partners in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada operate a network of massive, highly automated interception stations, covering the globe amongst them. Any of the partners can ask any of the others to intercept its own domestic communications. It can then truthfully say it does not spy on its own citizens.

Apart from specifically-targeted individuals and institutions, the ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting huge quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. Every intercepted message – all the embassy cables, the business deals, the sex talk, the birthday greetings – is searched for keywords, which could be anything the searchers think might be of interest. All it takes to flag a communication is for one of the parties to use a couple or so of the key words in the ECHELON “dictionary” – “He lives in a lovely old white house on Bush Street, right near me. I can shoot over there in two minutes.” Within limitations, computers can “listen” to telephone calls and recognize when keywords are spoken. Those calls are extracted and recorded separately, to be listened to in full by humans. The list of specific targets at any given time is undoubtedly wide ranging, at one point including the likes of Amnesty International and Christian Aid.

ECHELON is carried out without official acknowledgment of its existence, let alone any democratic oversight or public or legislative debate as to whether it serves a decent purpose. The extensiveness of the ECHELON global network is a product of decades of intense Cold War activity. Yet with the end of the Cold War, its budget – far from being greatly reduced – was increased, and the network has grown in both power and reach; yet another piece of evidence that the Cold War was not a battle against something called “the international communist conspiracy”.

The European Parliament in the late 1990s began to wake up to this intrusion into the continent’s affairs. The parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee commissioned a report, which appeared in 1998 and recommended a variety of measures for dealing with the increasing power of the technologies of surveillance. It bluntly advised: “The European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States for making private messages via the global communications network [Internet] accessible to US intelligence agencies.” The report denounced Britain’s role as a double-agent, spying on its own European partners.

Despite these concerns the US has continued to expand ECHELON surveillance in Europe, partly because of heightened interest in commercial espionage – to uncover industrial information that would provide American corporations with an advantage over foreign rivals.

German security experts discovered several years ago that ECHELON was engaged in heavy commercial spying in Europe. Victims included such German firms as the wind generator manufacturer Enercon. In 1998, Enercon developed what it thought was a secret invention, enabling it to generate electricity from wind power at a far cheaper rate than before. However, when the company tried to market its invention in the United States, it was confronted by its American rival, Kenetech, which announced that it had already patented a near-identical development. Kenetech then brought a court order against Enercon to ban the sale of its equipment in the US. In a rare public disclosure, an NSA employee, who refused to be named, agreed to appear in silhouette on German television to reveal how he had stolen Enercon’s secrets by tapping the telephone and computer link lines that ran between Enercon’s research laboratory and its production unit some 12 miles away. Detailed plans of the company’s invention were then passed on to Kenetech.

In 1994, Thomson S.A., located in Paris, and Airbus Industrie, based in Blagnac Cedex, France, also lost lucrative contracts, snatched away by American rivals aided by information covertly collected by NSA and CIA. The same agencies also eavesdropped on Japanese representatives during negotiations with the United States in 1995 over auto parts trade.

German industry has complained that it is in a particularly vulnerable position because the government forbids its security services from conducting similar industrial espionage. “German politicians still support the rather naive idea that political allies should not spy on each other’s businesses. The Americans and the British do not have such illusions,” said journalist Udo Ulfkotte, a specialist in European industrial espionage, in 1999.

That same year, Germany demanded that the United States recall three CIA operatives for their activities in Germany involving economic espionage. The news report stated that the Germans “have long been suspicious of the eavesdropping capabilities of the enormous U.S. radar and communications complex at Bad Aibling, near Munich”, which is in fact an NSA intercept station. “The Americans tell us it is used solely to monitor communications by potential enemies, but how can we be entirely sure that they are not picking up pieces of information that we think should remain completely secret?” asked a senior German official. Japanese officials most likely have been told a similar story by Washington about the more than a dozen signals intelligence bases which Japan has allowed to be located on its territory.

In their quest to gain access to more and more private information, the NSA, the FBI, and other components of the US national security establishment have been engaged for years in a campaign to require American telecommunications manufacturers and carriers to design their equipment and networks to optimize the authorities’ wiretapping ability. Some industry insiders say they believe that some US machines approved for export contain NSA “back doors” (also called “trap doors”).

The United States has been trying to persuade European Union countries as well to allow it “back-door” access to encryption programs, claiming that this was to serve the needs of law-enforcement agencies. However, a report released by the European Parliament in May 1999 asserted that Washington’s plans for controlling encryption software in Europe had nothing to do with law enforcement and everything to do with US industrial espionage. The NSA has also dispatched FBI agents on break-in missions to snatch code books from foreign facilities in the United States, and CIA officers to recruit foreign communications clerks abroad and buy their code secrets, according to veteran intelligence officials.

For decades, beginning in the 1950s, the Swiss company Crypto AG sold the world’s most sophisticated and secure encryption technology. The firm staked its reputation and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality in the Cold War or any other war. The purchasing nations, some 120 of them – including prime US intelligence targets such as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia – confident that their communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals to their embassies, military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around the world, via telex, radio, and fax. And all the while, because of a secret agreement between the company and NSA, these governments might as well have been hand delivering the messages to Washington, uncoded. For their Crypto AG machines had been rigged before being sold to them, so that when they used them the random encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted along with the enciphered message. NSA analysts could read the messages as easily as they could the morning newspaper.

In 1986, because of US public statements concerning the La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin, the Libyans began to suspect that something was rotten with Crypto AG’s machines and switched to another Swiss firm, Gretag Data Systems AG. But it appears that NSA had that base covered as well. In 1992, after a series of suspicious circumstances over the previous few years, Iran came to a conclusion similar to Libya’s, and arrested a Crypto AG employee who was in Iran on a business trip. He was eventually ransomed, but the incident became well known and the scam began to unravel in earnest.

In September 1999 it was revealed that NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special “keys” into Windows software, in all versions from 95-OSR2 onwards. An American computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym in North Carolina, had disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking gun – Microsoft’s developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for two keys. One was called “KEY”. The other was called “NSAKEY”. Fernandez presented his finding at a conference at which some Windows developers were also in attendance. The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users’ knowledge. Fernandez says that NSA’s “back door” in the world’s most commonly used operating system makes it “orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer.”

In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According to the DAS report, “it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same administration.” The report stated that there had been a “strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumors about the existence of spy programs on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates’ development teams.” The Pentagon, said the report, was Microsoft’s biggest client in the world.

Recent years have seen disclosures that in the countdown to their invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States had listened in on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, and all the members of the UN Security Council during a period when they were deliberating about what action to take in Iraq.

It’s as if the American national security establishment feels that it has an inalienable right to listen in; as if there had been a constitutional amendment, applicable to the entire world, stating that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the government to intercept the personal communications of anyone.” And the Fourth Amendment had been changed to read: “Persons shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, except in cases of national security, real or alleged.” 2

The leading whistleblower of all time: Philip Agee

Before there was Edward Snowden, William Binney and Thomas Drake … before there was Bradley Manning, Sibel Edmonds and Jesselyn Radack … there was Philip Agee. What Agee revealed is still the most startling and important information about US foreign policy that any American government whistleblower has ever revealed.

Philip Agee spent 12 years (1957-69) as a CIA case officer, most of it in Latin America. His first book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, published in 1974 – a pioneering work on the Agency’s methods and their devastating consequences – appeared in about 30 languages around the world and was a best seller in many countries; it included a 23-page appendix with the names of hundreds of undercover Agency operatives and organizations.

Under CIA manipulation, direction and, usually, their payroll, were past and present presidents of Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, “our minister of labor”, “our vice-president”, “my police”, journalists, labor leaders, student leaders, diplomats, and many others. If the Agency wished to disseminate anti-communist propaganda, cause dissension in leftist ranks, or have Communist embassy personnel expelled, it need only prepare some phoney documents, present them to the appropriate government ministers and journalists, and – presto! – instant scandal.

Agee’s goal in naming all these individuals, quite simply, was to make it as difficult as he could for the CIA to continue doing its dirty work.

A common Agency tactic was writing editorials and phoney news stories to be knowingly published by Latin American media with no indication of the CIA authorship or CIA payment to the media. The propaganda value of such a “news” item might be multiplied by being picked up by other CIA stations in Latin America who would disseminate it through a CIA-owned news agency or a CIA-owned radio station. Some of these stories made their way back to the United States to be read or heard by unknowing North Americans.

Wooing the working class came in for special treatment. Labor organizations by the dozen, sometimes hardly more than names on stationery, were created, altered, combined, liquidated, and new ones created again, in an almost frenzied attempt to find the right combination to compete with existing left-oriented unions and take national leadership away from them.

In 1975 these revelations were new and shocking; for many readers it was the first hint that American foreign policy was not quite what their high-school textbooks had told them nor what theNew York Times had reported.

“As complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere, an authentic account of how an ordinary American or British ‘case officer’ operates … All of it … presented with deadly accuracy,” wrote Miles Copeland, a former CIA station chief, and ardent foe of Agee. (There’s no former CIA officer more hated by members of the intelligence establishment than Agee; no one’s even close; due in part to his traveling to Cuba and having long-term contact with Cuban intelligence.)

In contrast to Agee, WikiLeaks withheld the names of hundreds of informants from the nearly 400,000 Iraq war documents it released.

In 1969, Agee resigned from the CIA (and colleagues who “long ago ceased to believe in what they are doing”).

While on the run from the CIA as he was writing Inside the Company – at times literally running for his life – Agee was expelled from, or refused admittance to, Italy, Britain, France, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway. (West Germany eventually gave him asylum because his wife was a leading ballerina in the country.) Agee’s account of his period on the run can be found detailed in his book On the Run (1987). It’s an exciting read.

Notes

1. To read about my State Department and other adventures, see my book West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold war Memoir (2002) ↩
2. See Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, chapter 21, for the notes for the above. ↩

Firefox Plug-In Warns Users of NSA Surveillance

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day? The government is likely logging even the most mundane day-to-day computer habits of millions of Americans, but there’s a way to stand up against surveillance while also rocking out.

According to leaked NSA documents published by The Guardian last week, the United States National Security Agency is conducting dragnet surveillance of the communications of Americans, regularly receiving phone records for millions of Verizon customers while also being capable of accessing the conversations that occur over Facebook, Google and several other major Internet names through a program called PRISM. Now a 28-year-old artist and developer from Brooklyn, New York has found a fun way of warning computer users about potential government surveillance, and he’s incorporated one of the best-selling rock albums ever in the process.

Justin Blinder released a plugin for the Web browser Firefox this week, and he’s already seeing a positive response in the press if not just based off of the idea alone. His “The Dark Side of the Prism” browser extension alerts Web surfers of possible surveillance by starting up a different song from Pink Floyd’s 1973 classic “The Dark Side of the Moon” each time a questionable site is crossed.

Blinder told the Guardian that he built the program over the course of four hours with the hopes he could “create some sort of ambient notification that you are on a site that is being surveiled by the NSA.”

“I was really interested in the fact that, although the PRISM leaks were a shock to many of us, we pretty much already kind of know we’re being surveiled a lot of the time and giving away so much data,” he said.

Upon news of the phone tracking program, even members of Congress said they couldn’t get over how much information was being shared between the telecoms and the government. Walking out of a briefing this Wednesday, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-California) said, “What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today,” and described her reaction as “astounded.” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said the program “represents an outrageous abuse of power and a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution,” and the American Civil Liberties Union has sued the government with a similar complaint filed in federal court.

Separate from leaking a document about the NSA’s access to phone records, former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden also gave The Guardian evidence of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL and others sharing private communications of customers with the government. When “The Dark Side of the Prism” is installed, users of those sites will be reminded with one of the most iconic albums of the twentieth century.

“I just Googled ‘Prism’ and the cover came up,” Blinder said. It just so happened that the long-time best-seller also fits the mood for exactly what the programmer was looking for.

“I didn’t want it to be too jarring because a lot of us seem to be giving in to being surveiled on a daily basis. I feel like people already know that. I didn’t want it to be alarming,” he said.

“The Dark Side of the Moon” was Pink Floyd’s eighth studio album and most commercially successfully, selling roughly 50 million copies and landing on the Billboard charts for 741 consecutive weeks. Surveillance, on the other hand, isn’t quite as popular: according to a Post/Washington Post poll released this week, 52 percent of Americans oppose the PRISM program.

With regards to Snowden, the American public is largely polarized on the issue. He’s been labeled as both a traitor and whistleblower and is currently the target of a Department of Justice investigation.

“He’s not a whistleblower, by the way, because a whistleblower actually wants the rule of law to be enforced,” Jeremy Bash, the former chief of staff for then-CIA Director Leon Panetta, told Politics Confidential this week. “He copied documents and he made a run for it. He may be actually aiding our enemies.”

On his part, Snowden said he leaked the documents because, “I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

Earlier this year, Pink Floyd lyricist Roger Waters lent his support to Army Private first class Bradley Manning, who is currently on trial for the largest intelligence leak in US history.

“We need more whistl blowers,” Waters wrote in a statement. “Blowing the whistle on our behalf is not just brave, it is heroic and it is our duty.”

Source: RT

7 Powerful Ways To Maintain Your Privacy And Integrity Online

The recent NSA leaks from whistleblower Ed Snowden have publicly confirmed that digital privacy does not exist.  The federal government and intelligence agencies have direct server access to the world’s most popular sites and services including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and more.  This means that all of your data when using these services including Skype, YouTube, etc has been compromised and can be used against you whenever strategically necessary.

Always remember, you are being recorded and monitored regardless of whether you have done anything wrong or not.  This includes your emails, internet activity, searches, banking activity, passwords, etc.  Basically everything to build a complete profile about who you are, how you think, how you live, etc.  This is very powerful data gathering and the goal of the intelligence agencies is nothing less thanTotal Information Awareness to be used to control and manage populations.

For these reasons, I have compiled some helpful tips to help you maintain your privacy and integrity when using the Internet.  These are by no means comprehensive, but they can be quite useful and give you some semblance of peace when browsing.

1. Use StartPage.com for all your searches. Known as “the world’s most private search engine”, StartPage will allow you to search anonymously and securely through Google.  It is probably the only search engine that does not collect or share any personal information about you.  You can even access pages through a proxy quickly and easily.  StartPage functionality can be easily added to your browser for all searches made through the address bar.  If you value your privacy, this is really a no-brainer.

If you use Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc then everything you search is logged to your IP address and is used to build a comprehensive profile about all your online activity.  This means that the government literally has the ability to know everything you’ve been interested in, how you type (thus, how you think), and much more.  Protect your searches!

2. Consider using an Anonymizer such as Tor to protect your identity. Tor prevents anyone from learning your location, browsing habits, and is an extremely effective tool against network surveillance and traffic analysis.  Tor is essentially a network of virtual tunnels run by volunteers that allows your real IP address to remain hidden and undetectable when browsing the Internet.  It is used by whistleblowers, hackers, and all those who value anonymity.  You can also use it to access sites that your ISP has blocked or banned.  Keep in mind, if you use Tor to access personally-identifying sites like Facebook then you pretty much lose your ability to remain anonymous.   Learn more about this powerful software and please use it responsibly! To get started quickly, please download the Tor Browser Bundle. Using this software wisely and effectively will likely require changing your browsing habits, so be aware of this.

3. Consider using a private and secure social network like Pidder.  This is a private social network that uses encrypted communication and offers the ability to remain anonymous.  If you are truly looking for ways to stay in touch with close ones in a uncompromised manner, this could be the site for you.  While it will not have the userbase of Facebook, this is still an excellent alternative for secure social networking.

4. Use a firewall and a secure wireless connection.  Protecting your inbound and outbound network traffic is essential.  There are many free software options available for this.  I cannot guarantee the integrity of these programs, but I personally recommend Little Snitch for Mac users.  It appears that Outpost may be a good alternative for Windows.  The key is to be able to see what services/sites are trying to send/receive data over your connection.  The more stringent your firewall rules are, the better.  Keep your computer clean by using some kind of anti-spam/spyware software and minimize your use of highly sketchy sites.

5. Delete your cookies regularly and log out of Facebook when you are not actively using it.  Almost everytime you visit a site, you download a cookie from that site, which is often used to track and collect data about you, the sites you visit, etc.  Therefore, deleting cookies and temporary internet files from your browser frequently is necessary.  I recommendCCleaner as an effective way to do this.  Most people leave a Facebook tab open and continue browsing, not realizing that every page that has a “Like” button actively logs and tracks their online activity.  Facebook collects all your browsing data and then sells it to third parties, including passing it onto intelligence agencies.  Therefore, when you are not actively using Facebook, be sure to log out!  Why should they know everything you’re up to online?

CORRECTION: It has now been confirmed that Facebook tracks your online activity even while you are logged out.  Thus, I highly recommend you install the browser plug-in called DoNotTrackMe.  The installation takes seconds and you don’t have to do anything once you’ve added it to your browser.  This extremely handy program will show you how many tracking attempts it has blocked in a small counter near your address bar.  Because all the trackers are rejected (even those other than Facebook), sites load up to 4x faster than usual!  A must-have for all privacy advocates if you don’t want your activity tracked!

6. Cover up or disconnect your webcam when you are not using it.  Did you know that your webcam can be secretly activated without you being aware of it?  Hackers and intelligence agencies have the ability to do this, so effective countermeasures must be taken here.  This can be done WITHOUT the indicator light coming on, so you won’t even know that you are being watched or recorded.  This is why I recommend taping over or covering up your webcam when you’re not using it.  Why take the risk?  Do you really want the government to have the ability to spy on you while you are in your bedroom?  The same thing can be done on cellphone cameras/microphones, so be aware of that too.  The only way your phone cannot be used to track/record you is if the battery is taken out, which is another reason why many new smartphones come with non-removable batteries these days.

7. Learn to use secure email services like HushMail or encrypted email.  Communicating using email is vital and part of our everyday lives.  If we use services like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo, those services are not secure and are compromised.  Therefore, switching over to a secure service such as Hushmail can be valuable.  Or learn how to use Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which is a way to send encrypted email and files that only a trusted third party can open and view. Essentially, PGP uses public-private key cryptography, where you will give out your public key to trusted recipients. Messages can only be decrypted by using your special private key file (that you keep safe) and the sender’s public key.  You can even encrypt files so that only a specific person can open them.  Learning to use PGP requires some technical knowledge but can be very useful for those who want to communicate securely and is well worth learning, in my opinion.  Please see this tutorial or  to get started. There are some excellent YouTube videos that can really help out with this.

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Be smart about how you communicate online.  If you take no precautionary measures, then you should assume that your communications are being recorded and monitored at all times.  Do not discuss illegal or secret activities on Facebook or through Skype or Gmail.  Ultimately, we should be greatly decreasing our use of these compromised services altogether!  Be aware of what you type and consider their ramifications if ever made public.  We must exercise great discretion and discernment when it comes to our online activities now.  The methods listed above are by no means comprehensive and are just a small way to boost your privacy.  If you have other privacy tips, please mention them here in the comments for all to see and benefit from.  In the end, it is all up to the user to do their part in maintaining their online integrity.  Safe browsing my friends!

Source: Eliot Estep | Collective Evolution

We DO Have Some Problems Here

Breitbart.com recently carried a report saying, “During his speech in San Jose, California on Friday, President Obama took one question from the press on national security monitoring of Americans. Without any sense of irony whatsoever in the aftermath of the IRS’ targeting of conservatives, the administration’s stonewalling on Benghazi, the Department of Justice’s targeting of reporters, the Department of Health and Human Services’ leveraging of private organizations for Obamacare public relations cash, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s secret email addresses, Obama unloaded this line:

“‘If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.’”

See the report here:

Obama: If People ‘Can’t Trust’ Government, ‘We’re Going To Have Some Problems Here’

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we DO have some problems here! And the culprits are exactly the ones whom President Obama identified: the executive branch, Congress, and federal judges, or in other words, the federal government in Washington, D.C. As I have said repeatedly, the American people have more to fear from Washington D.C., than they do Tehran, Kabul, Baghdad, or Pyongyang.

Foreign governments cannot strip the American people of their liberties; they cannot expunge our First Amendment rights; they cannot eviscerate our Second Amendment rights; they cannot extinguish our Fourth Amendment rights; etc. But Washington, D.C., can do those things. In fact, Washington, D.C., is in the process of doing those very things right now.

And it is obvious that Obama KNOWS that the federal government threatens the liberties of the American people. He knows it, because he is hell-bent on helping the federal government do it. He is also feeling the heat of freedom-loving people who refuse to submit to his Machiavellian machinations.

During the commencement speech at Ohio State University, Obama said, “You’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all of our problems. Some of these same voices do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.”

See the report at Fitsnews.com here:

Barack Obama’s Ohio State “Voices” Speech

The Fitsnews.com report goes on to say, “Obviously less than a week after uttering these words it was revealed that Obama’s State Department deliberately misled the public (and Congress) about a 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya (someplace America shouldn’t be, it’s worth noting). And officials at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) acknowledged targeting groups on the basis of their ideology. And Obama’s Justice Department secretly took two months of phone records from three Associated Press offices. And then there’s the comparatively underreported matter of Obama’s Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius–who has been shaking down private companies she regulates for ‘seven figure donations’ to help fund the implementation of Obama’s socialized medicine law.”

Yes, Mr. Obama, the federal government in Washington, D.C., has become a “sinister entity.” And, yes, the federal government is “at the root of all of our problems.” Furthermore, it is true that “tyranny is always lurking just around the corner.” And you are right about this, too, Mr. President: there are millions of us freedomists who are indeed determined to “gum up the works.”

This past Tuesday, the AP released a report that began, “When the federal government went looking for phone numbers tied to terrorists, it grabbed the records of just about everyone in America.

“Why every phone number?

“‘Well, you have to start someplace,’ Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told NBC News on Monday.

“That breadth, that willingness to sweep up enormous information on Americans with no ties to terrorists, is making it hard for the Obama administration to tamp down controversy over a separate program, called PRISM, to monitor Internet traffic.

“In short, critics ask, if looking for terrorists means collecting every American’s phone records, how can anyone believe the president when he says Americans aren’t being monitored on the Internet?”

See the AP report covered by Business Week at:

What’s The Problem With Prism

Well, now it is out in the open: the federal government is collecting the private communications of the American citizenry. All of the American citizenry! Some of us have been trying to warn the American people of these shenanigans for years.

Glenn Greenwald at the London Guardian recently filed a report in which he said, “The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

“The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an ‘ongoing, daily basis’ to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

“The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk–regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

“The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

“Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

“The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government’s domestic spying powers.

“Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.”

See the Guardian report at:

NSA Collecting Phone Records Of Millions Of Verizon Customers Daily

Folks, did you catch that last paragraph? All of this spying began under the G.W. Bush administration, and it has continued and expanded ever since. Both Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C., are equally culpable in dismantling the Bill of Rights, in trampling our liberties, and in bringing the United States to the precipice of a police state.

According to other published reports, “The US National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation have been harvesting data such as audio, video, photographs, emails, and documents from the internal servers of nine major technology companies, according to a leaked 41-slide security presentation obtained by The Washington Post and The Guardian.”

The report also said, “The program, codenamed PRISM, is considered highly classified and has never been made public before. The list of companies involved are the who’s who of Silicon Valley: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Dropbox, though not yet an official part of the program, is said to be joining it soon. These companies have all willingly participated in the program, says the Post.”

See the report at:

Secret Program Gives NSA, FBI Backdoor Access To Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft Data

So, let me ask readers a question: how is all of this different from what the Nazi government did in Germany, or what the communist government did in the former Soviet Union, or what the communist government is still doing in China? How is it different? It isn’t, and you and I both know it isn’t!

Well, now that the mainstream media has decided to actually cover the story, how will the American people react? How will pastors and Christians react?

For far too long the vast majority of Americans, including the vast majority of pastors and Christians, have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to this burgeoning police state that began in earnest under G.W. Bush. Until now, when one tried to talk to their pastor about these things, he or she was dismissed as a “conspiracy nut.” And when one would try to educate his or her friends and co-workers, they would get the same response. How many times did we hear the retort, “This is America; it can’t happen here”?

Well, IT IS HAPPENING HERE; and this is America in name only.

Years ago on my website, I began compiling those few media reports that would surface regarding America’s plunge into a surveillance state. I invite readers to peruse these reports here:

Emerging Police State

Again, the real question now is what are the American people going to do about it? With the exception of now-retired Congressman Ron Paul (and a few others), hardly anyone on Capitol Hill was interested in arresting this out-of-control federal government. What will Congress do now?

If Bill Clinton deserved to be impeached (and he did), Barack Obama certainly deserves to be impeached. And for that matter, G.W. Bush deserved to be impeached. Any President who deliberately and willfully tries to strip the American people of their Natural liberties by unleashing the spy agencies of the federal government against them should be impeached. They should also be tarred and feathered!

So, what is YOUR congressman or congresswoman doing? What is your senator doing? What are your State officials doing? What is YOUR pastor and church doing? What are YOU doing?

This issue transcends partisan politics. It should not matter to a tinker’s dam whether one is a Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, white or black, male or female, Christian or non-Christian, businessman or laborer. If we do not have the right to privacy, we have forever forfeited the right to call ourselves a free country.

Furthermore, shame on those corporations who, for the sake of money, are helping to turn our once free republic into a police state. Shame on them! And shame on those pastors and churches that have sat in their ivory palaces and refused to be the watchmen on the wall, the duty to which they have been called. Shame on them!

Yes, we DO have some problems here. The first problem is an arrogant, tyranny-prone, out-of-control federal government that, like a leviathan, is swallowing up our liberties. The second problem is the indifference, apathy, and greed of corporate America, the media (until lately), and America’s pastors and churches that refuse to do anything to resist it.

Make no mistake about it: what the federal government is doing by its wholesale spying on the American people is a blatant attack against our liberties, our homes, and our way of life. We (all of us) either fight off this insidious attack or forever are labeled as the cowards and traitors that we will have become. President John F. Kennedy is quoted as asking, “If not us, who? If not now, when?” Amen.

Freedom In America – Rest In Peace

Political philosopher Montesquieu (1989 – 1755) once said:

“There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.”

International, constitutional and US statute laws no longer matter. Obama declared them null and void. He does so by disregarding them.

He consigned them to the dustbin of history. They’ve been heading there for years. Post-9/11, state terror accelerated.

Bush administration rogues enacted numerous police state laws. Previous articles discussed them. Constitutionality was ignored. Obama added his own. Doing so exceeded the worst of his predecessor’s policies.

Unconstitutional mass surveillance is official US policy. What Bush began, Obama accelerated. He did so straightaway as president.

Free societies don’t tolerate these practices. Obama authorized them secretly. He subverted constitutional law. He violated the public trust. He broke a key campaign pledge.

On January 8, 2008, he promised to end Bush/Cheney practices. Under an Obama administration, he said, they’ll be no “wiretaps without warrants.”

Straightaway as president he authorized them. On Friday, he tried defending the indefensible. He fell short and then some. His comments belie his policies.

“When I came into this office,” he said, “I made two commitments that are more important than any commitment I made: number one to keep the American people safe, and number two to uphold the Constitution.”

Americans have never been less safe. Freedom is more illusion than reality. Obama’s done more to subvert constitutional law than any previous president. He made freedom a four-letter word.

“You can’t have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience,” he claimed.

“We’re going to have to make some choices as a society. I think that on balance, we have established a process and a procedure that the American people should feel comfortable about.”

Obama made all the wrong choices. He violated constitutional law doing so. America’s unsafe to live in. Police state priorities threaten everyone.

Obama claimed surveillance “help(s) prevent terrorist attacks.” He lied saying so. No terrorist threat whatever exists. It didn’t earlier. It doesn’t now.

Obama called what’s ongoing “modest encroachments on privacy.” It’s sweeping, pervasive and lawless.

He urged Americans to trust him, Congress and federal courts. Why anyone would do so, they’ll have to explain.

“When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he said. “That’s not what this program is about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls.”

“They are not looking at people’s names and they are not looking at content.” Permission to do so, he claimed, requires “go(ing) back to a federal judge just like (for) a criminal investigation.”

“With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to US citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States.”

False on all counts. Civil libertarians expressed outraged. John Simpson heads Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project. He calls what’s ongoing “a completely unwarranted violation of our constitutional rights.”

Obama authorized sweeping domestic spying. He did so unconstitutionally. He institutionalized it. It’s ongoing daily. It’s warrantless.

The 2012 FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act renewed warrantless spying for another five years. It violated constitutional protections doing so.

Phone calls, emails, and other communications may be monitored secretly without court authorization.

Probable cause isn’t needed. So-called “foreign intelligence information” sought means virtually anything. Vague language is all-embracing.

Hundreds of millions of Americans are targeted. Major telecom and Internet companies cooperate. They do so willingly.

All three branches of government are involved. They’re complicit in sweeping lawlessness. Congress is regularly briefly. Bipartisan leaders are fully on board. So are US courts.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) called what’s ongoing the most sweeping surveillance ever ordered. It’s challenging administration practices to stop them.

CCR v. Obama is currently pending before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Initially it was filed against Bush, NSA director General Keith Alexander, and heads of other major US security agencies.

At issue is lawless, secretive, warrantless surveillance. CCR sought a cease and desist injunction. In January 2007, Bush administration officials claimed the program ended. They lied saying so.

In August 2007, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) became law. Included is a Protect America Act (PAA) amendment. It permits unrestricted warrantless data-mining.

It claims to restrict surveillance to foreign nationals “reasonably believed to be outside the United States.”

Not so! The law targets virtually everyone domestically. It does so if the Attorney General or Director of National Intelligence claims they pose a potential terrorist or national security threat. No corroborating evidence is needed.

CCR challenged PAA in court. It did so in January 2006. It called NSA surveillance illegal. It lacks judicial approval or statutory authorization.

It violates “FISA’s clear criminal prohibitions.” It exceeds executive authority under the Constitution’s Article II. It breaches the First and Fourth Amendments. CCR wants data and other information collected under PAA destroyed.

On January 31, 2011, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed CCR’s case. In April, CCR appealed. The Ninth Circuit initially scheduled oral arguments on June 1, 2012.

On May 21, 2012, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a similar ACLU case. It challenged the 2008 FISA Amendments Act’s constitutionality.

The Ninth Circuit postponed arguments until the High Court ruled. On February 26, 2013, it dismissed ACLU’s case. It did so 5 – 4.

The Ninth Circuit requested supplemental CCR briefs by April 26, 2013. Previously it said it would reschedule oral arguments. On June 3, “the panel indicated that it would submit the case for resolution without oral argument.”

There’s more. Obama’s waging war on freedom globally. On June 7, London’s Guardian headlined “Obama orders US to draw up overseas target list for cyber-attacks.”

He did so by secret presidential directive. It was issued last October. A copy was leaked to The Guardian.

It says Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) “can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging.”

Washington will “identify potential targets of national importance where OCEO can offer a favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power.”

It suggests operating domestically the same way. Perhaps human rights organizations, anti-war activists, social justice advocates, independent journalists, alternative media web sites, and other individuals and organizations challenging lawless government practices will be targeted.

Everyone is vulnerable. Police states operate that way. America’s by far the worst. Obama’s waging war on freedom. It may not survive on his watch.

Unrestricted surveillance, other police state laws, and global cyber attacks constitute full-scale war to destroy it.

According to Professor Sean Lawson:

“When militarist cyber rhetoric results in use of offensive cyber attack it is likely that those attacks will escalate into physical, kinetic uses of force.”

Cyberwar is official US policy. An unnamed intelligence source told The Guardian that cyber attacks are commonplace. Foreign computer systems are hacked. Doing so seeks information wanted.

“We hack everyone everywhere,” the source said. “We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world.”

Obama bears full responsibility. He signed numerous police state laws on his watch. He authorized lawless surveillance and cyberwar. He did so unconstitutionally. Claiming otherwise doesn’t wash. Documents The Guardian obtained refute his claims. US policy is do what we say, not what we do.

According to The Guardian, Obama’s “move to establish a potentially aggressive cyber warfare doctrine will heighten fears over the increasing militarization of the internet.”

On June 7, Gizmodo.co.uk headlined “Anonymous Just Leaked a Trove of NSA Documents. Included are DOD plans for Internet control. Information on NSA’s Prism program were released.

A link provided (http://thedocs.hostzi.com/) fails to gain access. Perhaps Anonymous was hacked.

Information the Guardian posted relates to nine or more major online companies cooperating with lawless NSA spying. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, YouTube and others are involved.

Prism gives NSA access to search histories, emails, file transfers and live chats. It’s gotten directly from US provider servers. Doing so facilitates mass surveillance. Google denied involvement, saying:

It “cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully.”

“From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data.”

Previous articles discussed Google’s involvement with Bilderberg. CEO Eric Schmidt’s a regular conference attendee. He’s participating now in suburban London.

Infowars reporters Paul Joseph Watson and Jon Scobie said Google and Bilderberg are “merging.” Schmidt thinks “privacy is a relic of the past.”

He wants Google transformed into “the ultimate Big Brother.” Conspiring with Bilderberg and NSA are key ways to do it. Company deniability doesn’t wash. Google operations are very suspect.

CIA funding reportedly launched them. Allying with Bilderberg shows what’s at stake. Bilderberg wants Internet control through “cyber resistance.”

It wants a ministry of truth established. It wants all public information controlled. Google’s apparently on board to help. Obama’s very much involved. He’s waging full-scale war on freedom. It may not survive on his watch.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at.

His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War”

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

The Day That TV News Died

I am not sure exactly when the death of television news took place.

The descent was gradual—a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate news. But if I had to pick a date when commercial television decided amassing corporate money and providing entertainment were its central mission, when it consciously chose to become a carnival act, it would probably be Feb. 25, 2003, when MSNBC took Phil Donahue off the air because of his opposition to the calls for war in Iraq

Donahue and Bill Moyers, the last honest men on national television, were the only two major TV news personalities who presented the viewpoints of those of us who challenged the rush to war in Iraq. General Electric and Microsoft—MSNBC’s founders and defense contractors that went on to make tremendous profits from the war—were not about to tolerate a dissenting voice. Donahue was fired, and at PBS Moyers was subjected to tremendous pressure. An internal MSNBC memo leaked to the press stated that Donahue was hurting the image of the network. He would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” the memo read. Donahue never returned to the airwaves.

The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script. They spin the same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the structures of corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into our dead political system—to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans are not corporate pawns. The cable shows, whose hyperbolic hosts work to make us afraid self-identified liberals or self-identified conservatives, are part of a rigged political system, one in which it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, General Electric or ExxonMobil. These corporations, in return for the fear-based propaganda, pay the lavish salaries of celebrity news people, usually in the millions of dollars. They make their shows profitable. And when there is war these news personalities assume their “patriotic” roles as cheerleaders, as Chris Matthews—who makes an estimated $5 million a year—did, along with the other MSNBC and Fox hosts.

It does not matter that these celebrities and their guests, usually retired generals or government officials, got the war terribly wrong. Just as it does not matter that Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman were wrong on the wonders of unfettered corporate capitalism and globalization. What mattered then and what matters now is likability—known in television and advertising as the Q score—not honesty and truth. Television news celebrities are in the business of sales, not journalism. They peddle the ideology of the corporate state. And too many of us are buying.

The lie of omission is still a lie. It is what these news celebrities do not mention that exposes their complicity with corporate power. They do not speak about Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, a provision that allows the government to use the military to hold U.S. citizens and strip them of due process. They do not decry the trashing of our most basic civil liberties, allowing acts such as warrantless wiretapping and executive orders for the assassination of U.S. citizens. They do not devote significant time to climate scientists to explain the crisis that is enveloping our planet. They do not confront the reckless assault of the fossil fuel industry on the ecosystem. They very rarely produce long-form documentaries or news reports on our urban and rural poor, who have been rendered invisible, or on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or on corporate corruption on Wall Street. That is not why they are paid. They are paid to stymie meaningful debate. They are paid to discredit or ignore the nation’s most astute critics of corporatism, among them Cornel West, Medea Benjamin, Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky. They are paid to chatter mindlessly, hour after hour, filling our heads with the theater of the absurd. They play clips of their television rivals ridiculing them and ridicule their rivals in return. Television news looks as if it was lifted from Rudyard Kipling’s portrait of the Bandar-log monkeys in “The Jungle Book.” The Bandar-log, considered insane by the other animals in the jungle because of their complete self-absorption, lack of discipline and outsized vanity, chant in unison: “We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true.”

When I reached him by phone recently in New York, Donahue said of the pressure the network put on him near the end, “It evolved into an absurdity.” He continued: “We were told we had to have two conservatives for every liberal on the show. I was considered a liberal. I could have Richard Perle on alone but not Dennis Kucinich. You felt the tremendous fear corporate media had for being on an unpopular side during the ramp-up for a war. And let’s not forget that General Electric’s biggest customer at the time was Donald Rumsfeld [then the secretary of defense]. Elite media features elite power. No other voices are heard.”

Donahue spent four years after leaving MSNBC making the movie documentary “Body of War” with fellow director/producer Ellen Spiro, about the paralyzed Iraq War veteran Tomas Young. The film, which Donahue funded himself, began when he accompanied Nader to visit Young in the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

“Here is this kid lying there whacked on morphine,” Donahue said. “His mother, as we are standing by the bed looking down, explained his injuries. ‘He is a T-4. The bullet came through the collarbone and exited between the shoulder blades. He is paralyzed from the nipples down.’ He was emaciated. His cheekbones were sticking out. He was as white as the sheets he was lying on. He was 24 years old. … I thought, ‘People should see this. This is awful.’ ”

Donahue noted that only a very small percentage of Americans have a close relative who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan and an even smaller number make the personal sacrifice of a Tomas Young. “Nobody sees the pain,” he said. “The war is sanitized.”

“I said, ‘Tomas, I want to make a movie that shows the pain, I want to make a movie that shows up close what war really means, but I can’t do it without your permission,’ ” Donahue remembered. “Tomas said, ‘I do too.’ ”

But once again Donahue ran into the corporate monolith: Commercial distributors proved reluctant to pick up the film. Donahue was told that the film, although it had received great critical acclaim, was too depressing and not uplifting. Distributors asked him who would go to see a film about someone in a wheelchair. Donahue managed to get openings in Chicago, Seattle, Palm Springs, New York, Washington and Boston, but the runs were painfully brief.

“I didn’t have the money to run full-page ads,” he said. “Hollywood often spends more on promotion than it does on the movie. And so we died. What happens now is that peace groups are showing it. We opened the Veterans for Peace convention in Miami. Failure is not unfamiliar to me. And yet, I am stunned at how many Americans stand mute.”

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

Source: Truthdig

The “New Breed” of Christian Fashion

A couple of weeks ago, while I was surfing the net for articles to include in the Email Brigade News Report, I came across a piece entitled “Provocative Clothing Company Creates Tees to Help Christian Girls be ‘Playful’ for Jesus.” For obvious reasons the headline grabbed my attention.

Featured in the article is a picture of an attractive young woman in a sexy pose seated on a bed wearing a tank top with the words “God knows my secrets.”

From the Christian News Service story:

A California-based clothing company is targeting professing Christian girls who seek to be provocative and “playful” in the way that they dress, all in the name of Jesus Christ.

The company Heart OMG says that its line of clothing for girls is “heavenly inspired” and is “a delightful mix of fun, fashion, faith and love.”

“At Heart OMG, we believe in sharing our faith and love through fashion, while embracing our fun and characteristic lifestyle, as well as giving back to the ones in need,” the clothing company’s website states. “Every single irresistible Heart OMG piece is wonderfully made to complement those playful and fashion forward individuals who celebrate life, and are eager to make their faith and love a true influence to the world.”

If you visit Heart OMG’s website (although I don’t recommend it) you’ll discover the story of “New Love and True Love”:

Once upon a time three lovely girls found a new love in Jesus Christ.

God had gifted each girl with a special talent.  They gathered their gifts and became the worship crew at church.  Through music they expressed their faith & love.  This love grows stronger every moment.

The girls soon realize that this new love is definitely the “True Love” they had been looking for.

It all starts on a sunny Sunday morning.  Scroll down the page and you’ll see photos of the trio sitting in a convertible in front of a church.  Two girls are wearing off the shoulder t-shirts and, it appears, nothing is worn underneath.  On the front of one of the shirts is the graphic “Worship Crew.”

Another photo shows the titillating trio decked out in short shorts, four inch heels and a pound and a half of makeup on their faces as they stroll up the walk toward the church…looking like hookers.

Further down the page the girls are now lounging on a bed together in suggestive poses.  One of them is sporting a pink night shirt with a large graphic of an ice cream sundae with a cherry on top. “Sweet Jesus” adorns a purple cup.

Under the heading “When New Love Becomes True Love” one of the girls is reading a Bible (hopefully 1 John).  The shirt she’s wearing has a graphic of two large red apples.  You can guess where the apples are purposely placed.  What does this tell you about the creative minds that designed a whole collection of “Christian” t-shirts?

Another photo shows the trio in church perched on what appears to be the edge of the stage, hands clasped in prayer.  The girl wearing the “Worship Crew” shirt has an open Bible on her lap.  Two of the girls are wearing off the shoulder shirts that are, well, way off the shoulder…in church.

If the trashy apparel Heart OMG produces is “heavenly inspired” like they claim, I’m the Angel Gabriel.

As I investigated the website I discovered this tidbit in the “About” section:

EVERY SINGLE IRRESISTIBLE HEART OMG PIECE IS WONDERFULLY
MADE TO COMPLEMENT THOSE PLAYFUL & FASHION FORWARD
INDIVIDUALS WHO CELEBRATE LIFE, AND EAGER TO MAKE THEIR
FAITH & LOVE A TRUE INFLUENCE TO THE WORLD.

If the advertisements/photos on the site depict the fashion trend for the “new breed” of Christian women, then the visible Church is in far worse shape than I thought.

Before I move on I need to make something clear.  I’m not saying that the girls in the photos are Christians.  I came across an acknowledgment at the bottom of the page stating only that they’re models.  But that’s neither here nor there.  The fact of the matter is that whoever owns Heart OMG has hired models who presumably are Christians.  Certainly the girls who visit the site think they are!  And let’s not forget that a photographer is involved and perhaps a marketing person as well.  I’m going to presume these people are professing Christians.  And if that’s indeed the case, my question to them is, why do you choose to participate in pushing a clothing line that dishonors God?

For years I’ve reported on the ways Hollywood and the liberal elite have made it their goal to sexualize young girls (here, here, here, here and here).  However, this is the first time I’ve dedicated an entire article to so-called Christians who seem bent on sexualizing teens and tweens.

I first wrote about tawdry church attire in 2006 and conveyed how the pastor of my former church handled a sticky situation:

The church I attend once held outdoor services during the summer. Not anymore. The reason given by our pastor–with no apology–is the “inappropriate way people dress.” When it’s hot outside some folks show up pretty much undressed, and I am not prone to exaggeration. Women attend services dressed in short shorts, low-cut clingy tops, or crops. In some cases skintight low-rider jeans are worn as low as they go so that permanent artwork (tattoos) etched into backs and hips can be viewed by all. Excuse my bluntness, ladies, but exposing your butt crack in church is unacceptable, even if you’re sporting a Rembrandt across your back.

I also objected to the clothing worn by young guys, the ones who aren’t the least bit concerned with their grungy appearance.  But my point here is that Bible believing, God honoring Christian females mustn’t wear flashy, flamboyant, tight fitting, low cut, sexually explicit clothing to church – or anywhere else!  Being uninhibited and unreserved may be A-ok with “Sweet Jesus.”  But being “too sexy for my shirt” is not A-ok with the Jesus of the Bible.

In 1Timothy 2:9, 10 Paul reminds women:

In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness [modesty of appearance and manner] and sobriety [self-restraint].

Likewise, Peter had something to say to women in the early church:

But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price. (1 Peter 3:4)

Jesus Christ gives His followers this command:

As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts in your ignorance: But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy. (1 Peter 1:14-16)

Getting back to my’06 article, I pointed out that one of the problems with trying to be cool is that, followers of Jesus aren’t supposed to be cool; they’re supposed to be holy. But few pastors preach on holiness these days. Even though we serve a holy God and are called to be holy as He is holy, the message of sin and repentance has been diluted to appeal to the “felt needs” of today’s self-absorbed audience. People want to leave the church feeling good about themselves. No one wants to hear anything “negative” anymore. “That’s what liberalism is,” says Gene Edward Veith, “changing your theology to fit whatever the culture is.”  (Source)

Our younger generation is being preyed upon by adults that will do anything for a buck. Adults are the ones who peddle the raunchy products that hyper-sexualize the culture.  Young people, especially, are demeaned and exploited for profit.  A word of warning to sleaze peddling “Christians”: God deems what you’re doing a grave sin. Repent!

Back in 2008 I penned a piece entitled “Hyper-sexualizing girls.” In it I described how even professing Christians are participating in this terrible offense against God.  I asked,

And what, pray tell, is the Church doing to put a stop to the madness? The sad fact is that many Christians have yielded to the culture. And those that have are just as complicit in hyper-sexualizing youngsters as liberals are. So I pose this question to followers of Jesus Christ: Why do you suppose the world doesn’t believe what Christians have to say?

The answer is that Christians don’t live what they say they believe. Instead they live like the world.

“The Christian life,” says Warren Weirsbe, “is not a playground, but a battlefield.” [Read Eph. 6:11-12] Those who commit to follow Jesus Christ have got to get off the playground and make haste to the battlefield. Your children’s future is at stake. And I’m not talking to you nominal Christians. I’m talking to those who are serious about their commitment to Christ. Yes, fighting the culture is an uphill fight. But we can win some battles! “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). (Source)

In closing, I’ll restate what I said above. Bible believing Christians who really want to glorify God must steer clear of the “new breed” of Christian fashion and dress modestly.  Believers must pray that so-called Christians who are promoting trashy clothing to impressionable girls will have a change of heart.  What can change hearts and minds? The Gospel of Jesus Christ!

Recommended reading:
Should Christians “judge” others? You betcha!—By Marsha West

Race and Culture

Embedded in Creation…

Reformed theology is heavily flavored with intellectualism.  Scholastic achievements and college degrees are used to lend authenticity to theological positions and there are too many meritocratic mini-tomes written in support of what are sometimes nit-picky contentions.  These contentions sometimes blur and distort more important issues.

Regent University graduate Steve Halbrook, a talented young Christian scholar, has written a book entitled “God Is Just; A defense of Old Testament Civil Laws”.  I was attracted to the subtitle since I also support Old Testament Civil Law.  Following the Acknowledgements, in the pages preceding the narrative, Halbrook found it necessary to include a section entitled “A Disclaimer Regarding Sources”. Particularly concerned with the Federal Vision, and Kinism he penned the following footnote:

”Spiritually-speaking, there are two races—the elect and the reprobates. As God

told the serpent after the Fall: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and

between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall

bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). Thus the Fall didn’t produce racial

division along physical lines, but spiritual lines. This is why the Bible forbids

Christians from marrying non-Christians, but does not forbid blacks from marrying

whites, or Hispanics from marrying Asians, etc. For Christians, when it comes to

marriage the issue is whether the other person is a Christian, regardless of skin

color.”

There is no heresy in the paragraph but the verbiage and the emphasis are aberrant.  When the word “race” is used to differentiate between the elect and reprobates, there is nothing left to describe the numerous, physically and socially diverse, people that inhabit the various areas of God’s Creation. They are all made in His image and all have physical similarities.  They are all sinners and all candidates for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Nevertheless, there are substantial differences.  Cultures are distinct, sharing different sets of “attitudes, values, goals, and practices”.  Though there has been a concerted effort by multi-cultural, one-world, elitists to confuse and destroy the meaning of the words race and culture the distinctions remain.

Race and culture are related.  Different races live in different cultures and their behavior will exhibit their unique cultural influences.

While it is correct that there is nothing in the Bible condemning interracial marriage, neither is there anything that encourages it.  The God of the Bible did create diverse languages and scatter the people at Babel.  Though the historical connection between Babel and racial diversity is missing racial diversity is a fact in a universe governed by the Sovereign God whose dealings with various nations and races are recorded in the Bible narrative.

Christian marriage across racial lines is acceptable, but the diversity God created should be respected and efforts to ignore races and cultures with the intent of bringing about a one race pagan society with a single heretical state religion is a direct confrontation to the Will of God and a grievous sin.

The Bible supports the family.  It records genealogy and the relationships of family members.  Marriage not only creates a union between a man and women but also brings together two families.  Proper family relationships contribute to good marriages.  Cultural diversity hampers family relationships.

Attempts to destroy race and culture in the United States of America are major problems in this era. Pat Buchanan’s banishment from MSNBC (The MS is for Microsoft) is a case in point.

According to a tiny article in our paper NSNBC’s president Phil Griffin has banned Patrick Buchanan from the network because “he doesn’t think the book (Suicide of a Superpower) should be part of the national dialogue, much less discussed on MSNBC.  Buchanan argues that America is in the “Indian summer of our civilization”.  The book contains chapters entitled “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America”.  Apparently there are a least two major violations of the propaganda being promoted by our monopolistic media:  Racism – it is proper to promote many races but unpopular to promote the American racial majority.  Christianity – religious discussions of multiple religious faiths are allowed but Biblical Christianity is condemned and has been successfully discouraged.

 

The Media will argue that they are paying their commentators and therefore have a right to censor their opinions.  There is some truth to that position but it disregards the right of the public to hear all sides of every issue.  The American media is a monopoly at both the top and bottom.  At the top it is controlled by a handful of powerful, like minded elitists and at the bottom most cities have one newspaper and the usual plethora of television channels that spew out the same biased new coverage along with buckets of degradation

The internet is a refreshing alternative where media censored news is available along with excellent information on almost every subject.  It is a little like the old West with freewheeling gunfighters, outlaws, sheriffs, and preachers.  There are writers that attack the establishment; there are users that attack the writers; there are clubby unions of agreeable users; there are writers that provide guesses as fact and writers that present theory as reality; there is lots of false information, but through it all a discerning reader can become well informed.  Unfortunately, many of our citizens either do not have internet access or do not have time to use it properly.

Banning Pat Buchanan from the media because one does not agree with his book violates freedom of speech and freedom of the press; because of the public nature of news reporting, I believe it is a violation of the First Amendment and is illegal.  However, there are vigorous urgings to terminate Buchanan and Griffin seems to be heeding them.   Zionists demand free speech for their monopolistic media as long as they can control it.

Multi-culturalism has been promoted by the Zionist controlled networks and attempts to preserve the White European Culture are targets of this assault. Wikipedia describes immigration in the United State this way “American immigration history can be viewed in four epochs: the colonial period, the mid-nineteenth century, the turn of the twentieth, and post-1965. Each period brought distinct national groups, races, and ethnicities to the United States. During the seventeenth century, approximately 175,000 Englishmen migrated to Colonial America.^] Over half of all European immigrants to Colonial America during the 17th and 18th centuries arrived as indentured servants.  The mid-nineteenth century saw mainly an influx from northern Europe; the early twentieth-century mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe; post-1965 mostly from Latin America and Asia.”

In 1952 Senator Pat McCarran recorded this statement into the Congressional Record: “I believe that this nation is the last hope of Western civilization and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished. I take no issue with those who would praise the contributions which have been made to our society by people of many races, of varied creeds and colors. America is indeed a joining together of many streams which go to form a mighty river which we call the American way. However, we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain. The solution of the problems of Europe and Asia will not come through a transplanting of those problems en masse to the United States…. I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation’s downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation.”

In a comprehensive book (available on line) entitled “Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881-1965: A Historical Review” Professor Kevin MacDonald writes: “The defeats of 1924 and 1952 did not prevent the ultimate victory of the Jewish interest in combating the cultural, political, and demographic dominance of the European-derived peoples of the United States. What is truly remarkable is the tenacity with which Jewish ethnic interests were pursued for a period of close to 100 years. Also remarkable was the ability to frame the argument of immigration-restrictionists in terms of racial superiority in the period from 1924-1965 rather than in such positive terms as the ethnic interests of the peoples of northern and western Europe in maintaining a status quo as of 1924.”

United States was never a Christian Nation but it was a nation with a predominantly Christian population.  Today, Christians are censored, mocked, vilified, and confined to the interior of their churches.  The Zionist controlled media regularly trashes Christianity and Zionist controlled organizations like the ACLU tirelessly strive to destroy the Christian religion.  Laws are being encoded that require Christians to defy the edicts of their God making obedience to God a crime against the state.  Demographics tells us that in a few short decades the European Christian culture that produced our nation will be a minority

Many Americans wonder how this has happened.  One of the sentences from the preceding paragraph by Professor Kevin MacDonald helps one understand.  “What is truly remarkable is the tenacity with which Jewish ethnic interests were pursued for a period of close to 100 years.”   Jewish ethnic interests worked for decades to expand immigration and remove requirements for new residents.  They worked to bring this about with a vigor that would convince a dispassionate observer that they were bent on destroying the nation.   In 1965, a new immigration act was passed that dropped skill requirements, opened the door to Asian cultures and allowed immigrants to bring in their families.  This new immigration bill introduced in the House by Congressman Emanuel Cellar and promoted in the Senate by Senator Jacob Javits, both Jewish, forever changed the culture and character of our nation.

Zion is a Biblical term that carries a favorable connotation for most Christians.  Unfortunately, today’s Zionism has little in common with the Bible, the Torah, ancient Israel, or the Law of Moses.  Israel is a secular state and the considerable Zionist world hegemony is secular and amoral.  With the lawless heresy of Dispensationalism providing an exploding Christian support Zionism has succeeded in a bloodless coup in the United States.  Ariel Sharon said, “We, the Jewish People, Control America, and the Americans Know it”!

There are real and important social distinctions resulting from diverse races and cultures.  These distinctions cannot be ignored.  White European immigrants were the founders of the United States of America; they brought Christianity, the essential ingredient for peace and freedom.   Prior to the 1965 immigration fiasco serious consideration was given to the race and culture of immigrants.

Interracial marriage is not a sin but it creates problems that unions within race and culture avoid.

The significance of the Jewish race in United States is a case in point.  A race that makes up about one percent of our population makes up over thirty percent of students at Harvard.  They control our media, own many of your major corporations, and hold significant sway over our government.  They consider their race superior and their accumulation of power confirmation of their superiority.  They hate Christianity and with the support of hordes of naïve Christians are in the process of using their considerable power to replace it.

Our schizophrenic society has made harming species of animals a crime while at the same time passing other laws that allow human species to destroy themselves.  Recognizing races and nations as God given entities does not translate into White supremacy nor does the recognition of racial differences.  These are realities that we need to be recognized and confronted.

The Apostle Paul said Christian workers were better to remain single.  He did not condemn marriage but believe being single allowed more time to spread the Gospel.  Marriage across racial lines is similar; interracial marriage is not a sin but marriage within ones race and culture is superior.

Hollywood Unraveling the Fabric of Society

Liberal Hollywood is intentionally corrupting children’s morals via the movies and TV programs they produce for public consumption.  Dictionary.com defines the word intentional in this way: done with intention or on purpose.  In my opinion the harm Hollywood is doing to the minds and hearts of the next generation, which includes people of faith, is on purpose — and it’s criminal.

In my last article, Kids are being exposed to shocking levels of sexual content, I alerted parents to one of the plot lines in the popular TV show ‘Glee.’:

Fox Entertainment’s prime time Emmy nominated musical series ‘Glee’ is viewed by tens of thousands of teens, especially girls.  On November 8 the hit show featured two high school age couples losing their virginity.  One couple was heterosexual, the other homosexual.  Not surprisingly the ‘gay’ couple was featured on the cover of Entertainment Weekly with the headline: Gay Teens On TV – How a bold new class of young gay characters on shows like ‘Glee’ is changing hearts, minds and Hollywood.” The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) nominated ‘Glee’ for best TV comedy series that promotes homosexuality. 

The Parents TV Council recently alerted the public to the Worst TV Show of the Week. Guess which TV show they picked?  Yep, ‘Glee.’  Here’s why:

In a previous episode, Puck expressed his infatuation for Shelby in a fantasy-musical number of Van Halen’s “Hot for the Teacher.” In this episode, he basically serenades her with his classroom rendition of Melissa Etheridge’s “I’m the Only One.” Shelby rebuffs his advances until a medical emergency sends her reeling. Puck comes to her rescue, comforting her at the hospital after her adopted daughter (Puck and Quinn’s child) needs stitches due to an accidental fall. Suddenly, in Shelby’s vulnerable state, Puck ends up in her bed. Post coitus, Puck tells her, “You know, the advantage of a relationship with a younger dude is that I still got four more rounds in me before I need a steak sandwich and a Coke Zero.” Shelby immediately regrets what they’ve done and ushers him out.

Student-teacher sexual abuse has been spotlighted in the news lately due to recent legislation passed in Missouri designed to curtail contact between students and teachers via social networking. The Amy Hestir Student Protection Act, named after a student who was repeatedly assaulted by a middle school teacher, was signed into law in July, and has prompted school districts across the country to reconsider their social networking policies amid a rash of high-profile allegations of sexual misconduct between teachers and students. Just this past October an Ohio gym teacher, Stacy Schuler, was convicted of sexual battery for having sex with five male students.

Against this backdrop, the Puck-Shelby storyline is the height of irresponsibility. The show tries to skirt the legal issues by stating that Puck is 18 years old. But the show glosses over the inherent power imbalance of a student-teacher relationship. Regardless of who is the aggressor, any sexual relationship between a high-school student and a teacher is exploitative. (Online source) 

You ask, why would the producers/writers of ‘Glee’ make light of a teacher and a student having casual sex?  The answer is obvious.  These people have no scruples!  They couldn’t care less if young people in middle school have sex.  The producers/writers simply lack a moral compass.  You’d think adults would be aware of the downside of immature teens engaging in sexual relations.  Does it not occur to them that market share and advertising revenue isn’t worth a story line that potentially will result in girls 15 and younger becoming pregnant?

At a very young age an unwed pregnant girl whose lover wants no part of the mess they’re in is forced to make some life changing decisions that require maturity beyond her years.  Decisions such as: 1) Should I abort my baby; 2) Should I go through with the pregnancy; 3) If I go through with the pregnancy should I then allow a couple to adopt my baby;  4) Should I keep my baby and raise it myself; 5) Should I drop out of school.

Is it possible that this actually does occur to Hollywood elites but for them it’s all about pushing the envelope, making oodles of money, receiving awards — and most importantly, becoming famous.  After all, it’s famous faces that get splashed across the covers of magazines, right?

There are other ramifications when teens engage in casual sex.  For example, the ones who have loose morals are far more likely to contract diseases such as HIV/AIDS, human papillomavirus (genital warts or HPV), genital herpes, Chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis.

Instead of encouraging young people to abstain from having sex, Tinseltown’s message to them is to practice ‘safe sex.’  In other words, use a condom.  Problem is most teens (and a large number of adults) are unaware that condoms do not provide 100% effectiveness against some STDs.

So – is it any wonder that 25% of American teenage girls ages 14-19 have at least one STD?  Currently there’s no cure for HPV.  Moreover, this dreadful virus can lead to cervical cancer!  Girls who have sexual intercourse before the age of 18 are unaware that they have an increased risk for developing cervical dysplasia which can lead to cervical cancer.  That’s not all.  Giving birth before the age of 16 increases the risk of developing cervical dysplasia.  And for all you Gardasil fans, the vaccine protects against the types of HPV infection that cause most cervical cancers but it does not protect against all infections.  Here’s more bad news.  Many STDs have vague or no symptoms.

As if the health risks aren’t bad enough a recent study conducted by Ohio State University College of Medicine reports that teen sex may impair brain development!   The study reveals, how social experiences during adolescence when the brain is still developing can have broad consequences. … Specifically, the animals that mated earlier in life had higher levels of depressive behaviors, changes to the brain and smaller reproductive tissues compared to those that had intercourse later or not at all.

“Having a sexual experience during this time point, early in life, is not without consequence,” study co-author John Morris, a doctoral student in psychology at Ohio State, said in a statement. (Online source)

Those who work in the entertainment industry are most responsible for sexualizing young people so I find it ironic that they promote safe sex!  Earth to Tinseltown !  The so-called safety measures are not all that safe. And we now learn that teen sex may affect brain development!

Brent Bozell wrote a piece titled Hollywood’s Soda-Pop Statism.  Bozell informs us that on a far left blog, former entertainment executive Laurie David offered this pre-holiday piece of encouragement:

“Thanksgiving Conversation Starter: Is It Time to Ban Soda Ads on Prime Time Television?”At the same time that the broadcast networks are allowing – even advocating – the removal of all limitations on nudity or profanity on TV, at any hour of the day, David is most upset about those old polar bear ads for Coca-Cola:

“Knowing what I know now about the effects of sugary drinks on children, the image of kids chugging down a Coke (or in this case polar bear cubs) evokes the same feelings I’d get if they were taking a deep drag on cigarettes.”

One wonders if a high school student engaging in sex with his/her history teacher would evoke a raised eyebrow from Laurie David.  One also wonders if she’s concerned that students are learning about ‘gay’ sex despite the fact that sodomy is a high risk behavior.

Instead of children learning reading, writing and arithmetic in our tax funded public schools, teachers all across America are mandated to teach children that sodomy is “normal and natural.”  Many Students graduate from high school unable to spell simple words or write a basic sentence, yet valuable class time is taken up to teach them the ends and outs of oral and anal sex?

Borrowing again from my last article, some of the health risks I pointed out inherent in ‘gay’ sex bear repeating.  For one thing, the homosexual community is the most severely affected by HIV/AIDS and are the only risk group in which new HIV infections have been steadily increasing since the early 1990s.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report titled HIV among Gay, Bisexual and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men, in 2006 homosexuals accounted for 53% of all new HIV infections in the U.S.  And Lorie David worries about youngsters imbibing soft drinks?

Getting back to ‘Glee’ the executives and sponsors of the show need to tune into the news once in a while. The program that spotlighted a teenage student having sex with his adult teacher was aired about the time that the story of former football coach Jerry Sandusky’s arrest for alleged child rape was making headlines.   Which begs the question: Why is ‘Glee’ playing with fire by showing teacher-student sex?  Okay, the student was 18. But a senior in high school nonetheless.

Hollywood…pushing the envelope…breaking taboos… desensitizing the public…tearing down the moral construct this country was built on…mocking the traditional family…rewriting history…disrespecting Judeo-Christian values…even blaspheming God.  Where do they plan to go next?  Could it be the normalization of pedophilia?   No, they wouldn’t go that far, would they?  Former child star Cory Feldman told CBS that pedophilia is Hollywood’s biggest problem.   (Online source)

The larger question is why do people, especially those who self-identify as Christians, allow the entertainment industry and product advertiser’s filth into their homes?   I believe it is because many parents are clueless as to what their children are being exposed to.

The apostle Paul wrote, And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Rom 12:2)

There’s not enough space to cover what perverts are doing behind the scenes to normalize pedophilia.  For those who want to know more about what the pervs are up to read Janet Shaw Crowse’s article Normalizing Penn State Pedophilia.

Being an outspoken Bible-believing Christian I’m bound to receive a flood of emails from pedophiles who feel the need to point out that Jesus Christ never mentioned the sick twisted perversion of man-boy sex (homosexuals use this argument too) so I’ll address what the Bible says here.

First off, the Apostle John states that Jesus said many things that were not written down (John 21:25).  For example, our Lord didn’t mention abortion, homosexuality, rape, incest, or cannibalism.  However, just because he didn’t address every sin throughout the Bible doesn’t mean He would approve.  Secondly, Jesus considered the writings of the Old Testament to be both trustworthy and authoritative.  Thirdly, Jesus addressed sex outside of marriage in Matthew 19:4-6.  He said marriage is between one man, the husband and one woman, the wife.  The bottom line is that the Bible condemns sex outside of marriage.

That said, anyone with an ounce of common sense understands that adult-child sex is an egregious sin.  Men and women who rob children of their innocence for their deviant self gratification should not be free to prowl school yards for innocent victims.  Moreover, anyone with an ounce of common sense will acknowledge that child rapists must be incarcerated.

I’ll close with some sage advice from Sam Blumenfeld in ‘Does God Exist?’:

“Imagine an America in which every child has a Bible and can study it in school! Do you think we’d have the moral chaos among teens we have today? That ought to be the great task of Christian missionaries today: to put a Bible in the hands of every child in America. Some won’t read it. But many others will.”

Recommended Reading:

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