Occupy Extreme and Establishment Moderate

So much written about the Occupy Wall Street is pure BS. If this street theater was a spontaneous and independent movement, where is the outrage towards the high priest of monetary manipulation, George Soros?

From the outset, civil disobedience is the most sincere method of dissent. Breaking All the Rules is based upon a healthy and judicious resistance towards all levels of false authority and systemic corruption. Therefore, it is with a heavy heart, that the careerist organizers and front groups for the establishment sweep away the noble intentions of earnest radicals. Those enablers and facilitators of fraudulent financial institutions makes a mockery of authentic protection.

Long ago, the glory of tangible free enterprise was destroyed under the boot of State Capitalism. When the confused populace rails against demonstrations and defend the crooks that perverted economic M A R K E T S, it becomes clear why the public has a habit of losing money with brokerage houses. In order to take the going broke out of the “so called” investments, one had better learn early that paper assets, often come with future liabilities, when entrusted to the establishment.Occupy Wall Street is smeared as extreme by those who benefit from a diversion away from their own wrongdoings. Once upon a time, a stock exchange functioned as a clearinghouse medium for raising capital. The investment funds financed new ventures that would produce useful products and employ labor. This bygone era was the engine of creating true wealth. Today, gambling is the primary activity conducted under a rigged casino wheel.

How much history do you recall? The incompatible Antony C. Sutton documents in Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution how the monopolists of finance funded Lenin. George Soros plays the Schiff role in this modern day version of a Goldman Sachs impersonation of Kuhn, Loeb and Company. If you do not know this pesky fact of the last century, one cannot be expected to make sense out of current events.A simple comparison between OWS and TE (The Establishment) is in order.

Occupy Extreme	Establishment Moderate
Blame Wall Street for Economic Woes	Make OWS the Issue to Deflect Scrutiny
Gain Media Attention for Misdeeds of the Rich	Shift Public Outrage to OWS – Protect System
Argue that 99% vs. 1% is Unjust and Immoral	Use Class Warfare to Demigod OWS Radicals
Demand Redistribution from the Wealthy Rich	Champion Benefits of Capitalism of the Few
Call for Bigger Government and Intervention	Strict Regulation for Benefit of Big Business
Abolish Market System – Expand Socialism	Expand Collectivism – More People Control

 
During the Old Regime under the reign of Louis XVI, the aristocracy lost their heads under the guillotine. In the 21th Century, the masters of the universe, spread breadcrumbs by way of food stamps to a society relegated to systemic government poverty and dependency. The only cake consumed these days requires a hedge fund account to pay for the icing and toppings.

French Libertine Tradition

What realistic likelihood is there for a people’s revolution to replace the titans of finance, when the robber barons are playing CHOPIN :  for the occupied nation? What chance is there for a replay of the French Libertine Tradition to play out when the theme of anti-clericalism, anti-establishment and eroticism have had their run and the establishment just gets more bold and powerful?A novel counter approach to guns and pitchforks is the video camera that documents the police state. Deplorably the ordinary exploited bystander is characterized as an extremist and soon will be incarcerated into internment camps, built by the Uber Elite. What many naive observers see is not the brutality of the Gestapo police, but the disrespect of the unclean protestors of the Capitalist kingdom.

Most Americans refuse to face the facts of their enslavement and rather condemn the social rebel. Bringing true social justice to an economic system that has eliminated all vestiges of real Free Market enterprise is viewed as a betrayal.

When that hideous dinosaur of establishment journalism, Time Magazine, wraps the symbolism of the protestor in the garb of a terrorist, the message is clear for even the most brain dead striver for more government largess.

Time distorts the significance with more deflection and confusion.

“Massive and effective street protest” was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.

The Washington Post adds to the illusion.

“In this year’s report, Time pieced together what all these revolutions have in common, why they protest, and what the legacy of the year’s protests will be. The magazine profiles a citizen journalist who started the live stream for Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park.”

What both Time and the Washington Post want you to accept is that these protests are composed of radical inspiration and democratic design. No doubt, many demonstrators believe they are acting out of pure intentions, but most are so deluded by inept viewpoints, absent of any consistent or comprehensive philosophy, that they are clueless about goals, objectives and have no viable substitute economic system.

Wall Street only uses money accumulation for keeping score. The underlying objective of the power elite is to control the political process and write all the rules. Nothing has changed from the days of installing Marxist ideology in Russia to the present stage of completing the task of instituting totalitarian collectivism in our country. Another establishment media purveyor of disinformation is MSNBC. In an article by the perennial social outlaw and opportunist, Jesse Jackson compares the global anti-capitalist movement to the U.S. civil rights struggle, the battle against apartheid in South Africa and the fight for Indian independence.

“Jesus was an Occupier, born under a death warrant, a Jew by religion, born in poverty under Roman occupation,” the two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination told a crowd near Saint Paul’s Cathedral. “Gandhi was an Occupier, Martin Luther King was an Occupier, (Nelson) Mandela was an Occupier.”

Coming from an extortionist posing as a minister of faith, this charlatan plays a bit role in the overall scheme to destroy the legitimate foundations of raising capital for worthwhile business endeavors. He insults the significance of Jesus’ ministry and Gandhi’s example. His role is to lead more people into even greater mental confusion.

The establishment refines the elements of mass propaganda and psychological indoctrination to create image campaigns that the system is a moderate and stable force, and must be maintained. As with most left or progressive oriented mindsets, the articulation of social wrongs and injustices are often well stated. However, when it comes to providing meaningful alternatives, the peasants just demand a larger sliced of bread because they are unable to learn the skills to bake their own cake.

Until society embraces the insight that the establishment is behind most radical social movements, they will just keep falling into a dark coffin, designed for them by the very elites that they protect. Economic conditions and business endeavors are on the mind of everyone, especially those who are on the edge of survival. OWS will never provide moneymaking guidance for the average citizen. Even so, do not condemn all forms of protest. Actually genuine resistance accompanied with practical time proven principles of monetary and business wealth creation is the desired option.

In order to explore the nature of financial alternatives and present rational choices for a replacement of the corporatist system of monetary tyranny and transnational globalism, BATR will be starting the Negotium series of weekly business columns.Blending functional economics with political realism is the mission of this endeavor. The overriding principle to achieve a prosperous society requires building upon a solid foundation of Western Civilization and traditional heritage. Understanding the extent that the establishment is willing to go and the degree of deceit that bonds the various corrupt institutions is an essential goal for this collection of essays.

Appreciating the need for extreme encounters with the moderate establishment is a concept that some will challenge. However, given the current state of economic ruin, the plights of the former middle class will only deteriorate at a faster pace under the rule of the Wall Street banksters.

There is an alternative, and you are invited to join the spontaneous rebellion of the real America. Someday the OWS proponents may mature and gain the wisdom to know who is benefiting from their manufactured and controlled protests. Until that time, the task resides with you. Register your opposition to the Wall Street enslavers who stage-manage righteous outrage as an opportunity to misdirect legitimate rebellion. Time is short, act soon.

2012 Armageddon Redux

Before the hype about the forthcoming of the end of the world inundates the ether zone, it is best to examine the paranoia about the paranormal that is prophesied about 2012. One fact is indisputable. No one can prove what will happen until the time comes for the Armageddon finale. That inconvenient detail does not prevent speculators from bringing up all kinds of scenarios and interpretations about expectations. The pervasive drive to forecast the approaching future is perennial throughout all of history. With that said, there is one sure prediction that is rock solid.

Place a bet, with all your cash, that the end of the world will happen in 2012. All you have to do is fine a Jon S. Corzine type to book the wager. Or why become the bookmaker and front such a gamble? You grab all the loot upfront and when the due date passes and the sun still rises in the East, you can go bankrupt like MF Global. If the gaming commission deems it is required to have sufficient guarantees or funding to pay off, all you have to do is plea “too big to fail” and turn over the debt to the Federal Reserve for settlement. Such a play script is not that far removed from the real world. It makes the prospects of an actual total devastation of the planet, far more attractive, than the mental torture of enduring the suffering of interminable hell under the banksters’ matrix.

Conceding to the History Channel devotees, the Maya version of earth shattering shifts in 2012 deserve a short analysis. “Perhaps I should add that most 2012 Mayan predictions seem to be based upon Western interpretation of the calendar and Mayan drawings as opposed to what the Mayans themselves have ever publicly taught throughout history.”On The History Channel, Steve Alten, author of Domain, stated:

The four prior cycles all ended in destruction. So when we talk about the Mayan doomsday prophecy, we’re talking about the end of the fifth cycle, the very last day, which equates to December 21, 2012 (Mayan Doomsday Prophecy, Decoding the Past. Original air date 08/03/06).

Mr. Alten offers his conclusion that seems to be the rational viewpoint.

While I do not believe that the end will come then, I do believe that we are getting close to the time of the destruction of civilization, as we know it.

Even so, what does rational thinking have to do with prophetic prognostication? In the absence of empirical proof and verifiable data, no computer model can demonstrate with certitude the future. Belief however, can and offer does motivate human behavior. It is evident that conditions and events are speeding up at a pace that is hard to comprehend, much less, understand the linkage and ultimate consequences.

Now do not draw from the above assessment that it is imprudent to reject prophecy in all forms. The mere association of seeking the meaning within the term Armageddon possesses biblical propositions of end times. Nevertheless, the essential reality that faces each of us independently and humanity collectively is that we are not in control of the celestial universe. What may or what eventually will happen results in the aftermath of our current perception of existence. Our acceptance of fate is a healthy surrender to the forces beyond out mastery.

While this recognition is sensible, many still want to live in a world of speculation and stargazing. The  series on the YouTube atlanticobr channel provides fertile ground for self-indulgence. Pushing the time for the end to a date already past is no reason to criticize the presentations. To the many, what we do not know is preferable to the facts that are already established, and the areas that we actually can effect meaningful change.If the finality of a 2012 AD year has any specific significance, entering into a new Age of Aquarius, would be as distant from current global strife as the light years it takes to exist our Milky Way galaxy.

What is incontestable about the record of human conduct is that the procession of the equinox, continually gravitates toward inhuman conflicts that raise the level of abuse and pain. The gradual incrementalism that was once the pattern is now on a collision trajectory at warp speed. Showers of asteroids or impacts of comets could be seen as a welcome resolution to terminate the absurdity of the political orders that via for total control. No wonder, a planet of the Apes seems preferable to the rule of the international community.Consider the message of a man who was haunted by the incongruity of his fellow human species.

Remembering Kurt Vonnegut’s viewpoint, Maria Popova writes about this work that addresses the subject of war. She concludes from this anthology of posthumous collection of stories:

“But, also as usual, it’s underpinned by an honest hope for humanity’s future, for our capacity to change and better ourselves, which makes  — and his work in general — as sticky and powerful as it is.”

Roy Blount Jr, in a New York Times item, offers an instance about the resilience of humanity in the continual apocalyptic rush to judgment. Dated May 29, 1945, a letter headed “FROM: Pfc. K. Vonnegut, Jr., TO: Kurt Vonnegut.”

It begins: “Dear people.” It closes: “Love, Kurt – Jr.” It informs his family that he is in an American repatriation camp in Le Havre after having been held prisoner by the German Army. It tells “in précis” how he was captured, transported in a cattle car and “herded … through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after 10 days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn’t.”

And how he was a captive in Dresden when Allied bombers “killed 250,000 people in 24 hours and destroyed all of Dresden — possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.”

And how his captors put him to work carrying corpses. “Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres.”

Now how can one compare the mere bombing of an ancient city to the destruction of the entire world? Clearly, the former can be said to be a prevented tragedy, while the later is a cosmic natural event. If there is an ethical equation connected with the loss of life from raining bombs from the sky, what is the moral imperative standard that arises from the devastation of the end times?

The Native American Prophecy of the Hopi nation suggests.

“Overall, the theme of Hopi prophecy is that the Earth is going to soon go through a great purification and that humanity can make the decision as to how extreme this purification will be. Their belief is that the world goes through a period of destruction and renewal and that we are about to enter into a new age.”

You do not have to be a protégé of Nostradamus to understand the insanity of the global financial system or the maturations that push factions toward total global war. Nor do you have to be able to translate the double speak quatrains of the power elite to interpret that you are slated to be sacrificed, so that the New World Order can purify itself into a technological global gulag.Armageddon redux is the destiny of the mentally deranged world leaders and their banksters’ master outlaws. 2012 looks like the culmination year on many levels.

Believers in the Book of Revelation await the end of times in order for the fulfillment of the Second Coming. Those who only see the conclusion of this age in cosmic obliteration, have little faith. The parallel to the destruction of the planet Vulcan with its six billion inhabitants may try a Star Trek mind melt explanation to forecast events. However, the better way to describe the risks of the coming year is in terms of the famous Jim Traficant catchphrase, “Beam me up Scotty”. Transport all of us back to reality and concentrate upon the very literal danger of an annihilation global war. The advocacies are not nations against countries, but must be viewed in terms of the Globalist Mattoids vs. the 99.9999% of the rest of us. The minions and enablers of the NWO cabal are all expendable, yet they serve their malevolent masters out of a false sense of duty, utter ignorance or a depraved yearning to be part of the evil empire.

The bible says that Armageddon is actually a battle. The eventuality that this conflict will come to pass is not within our ability to prevent, but we do have the “capacity to change and better ourselves” as Vonnegut believed. Both the atheist and the theists base their conviction on belief. Faith in their beliefs is not proof that they are correct. Nevertheless, the self-destruction tract that humanity is on leads now, cannot have a happy ending.

Look to the stars for your salvation or your destruction if you wish, but resist the oligarchs that are making your life a living hell. Only then will your final gasp of last breath have meaning.

Some Thoughts That OCCUPY My Mind

The Anti-Empire Report…

When the Vietnam War became history, and the protest signs and the bullhorns were put away, so too was the serious side of most protestors’ alienation and hostility toward the government. They returned, with minimal resistance, to the restless pursuit of success, and the belief that the choice facing the world was either “capitalist democracy” or “communist dictatorship”. The war had been an aberration, was the implicit verdict, a blemish on an otherwise humane American record. The fear felt by the powers-that-be that society’s fabric was unraveling and that the Republic was hanging by a thread turned out to be little more than media hype; it had been great copy.

I mention this to explain why I’ve been reluctant to jump with both feet on the Occupy bandwagon. I first thought that if nothing else the approaching winter would do them in; if not, it would be the demands of their lives — they have to make some money at some point, attend classes somewhere, lovers and friends and family they have to cater to somewhere; lately I’ve been thinking it’s the police that will do them in, writing finis to their marvelous movement adventure — if you hold the system up to a mirror the system can go crazy.

But now I don’t know. Those young people, and the old ones as well, keep surprising me, with their dedication and energy, their camaraderie and courage, their optimism and innovation, their non-violence and their keen awareness of the danger of being co-opted their focusing on the economic institutions more than on the politicians or political parties. There is also their splendid signs and slogans, walking from New York to Washington, and not falling apart following the despicable police destruction of the Occupy Wall Street encampment. They’ve given a million young people other ideas about how to spend the rest of their lives, and commandeered a remarkable amount of media space. The Washington Post on several occasions has devoted full page or near-full page sympathetic coverage. Occupy is being taken increasingly seriously by virtually all media.

Yet, the 1960s and 70s were also a marvelous movement adventure — for me as much as for anyone — but nothing actually changed in US foreign policy as a result of our endless protests, many of which were also innovative. American imperialism has continued to add to its brutal record right up to this very moment. We can’t even claim Vietnam as a victory. Most people believe that the US lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, Washington in fact achieved its primary purpose: preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model.

It has greatly helped Occupy’s growth and survival that they have seldom mentioned foreign policy. That’s much more sensitive ground than corporate abuse. Foreign policy gets into flag-waving, “our brave boys” risking their lives, American exceptionalism, nationalism, patriotism, loyalty, treason, terrorism, “anti-American”, “conspiracy theorist” … all those emotional icons that mainstream America uses to separate a Good American from one who ain’t really one of us.

Foreign policy cannot be ignored permanently of course, if for no other reason than that the nation’s wealth that’s wasted on war could be used to pay for anything Occupy calls for … or anything anyone calls for.

The education which Occupy has caused to be thrust upon the citizenry — about corporate abuse and criminality, political corruption, inequality, poverty, etc., virtually all unprosecuted — would be highly significant if America were a democracy. But as it is, more and more people can learn more and more about these matters, and get more and more angry, but have nowhere to turn to, to effectuate meaningful change. Money must be removed from the political process. Completely. It is my favorite Latin expression: sine qua non — “without which, nothing”.

USrael and Iran

There’s no letup, is there? The preparation of the American mind, the world mind, for the next gala performance of D&D — Death and Destruction. The Bunker Buster bombs are now 30,000 pounds each one, six times as heavy as the previous delightful model..

But the Masters of War still want to be loved; they need for you to believe them when they say they have no choice, that Iran is the latest threat to life as we know it, no time to waste.

The preparation of minds was just as fervent before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And when it turned out that Iraq did not have any kind of arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) … well, our power elite found other justifications for the invasion, and didn’t look back. Some berated Iraq: “Why didn’t they tell us that? Did they want us to bomb them?”

In actuality, before the US invasion high Iraqi officials had stated clearly on repeated occasions that they had no such weapons. In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: “We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.”¹

In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: “The fact is that we don’t have weapons of mass destruction. We don’t have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry.”²

Hussein himself told Rather in February 2003: “These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there.”³

Moreover, Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq’s secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.⁴

There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world that the WMD were non-existent.

And if there were still any uncertainty remaining, last year Hans Blix, former chief United Nations weapons inspector, who led a doomed hunt for WMD in Iraq, told a British inquiry into the 2003 invasion that those who were “100 percent certain there were weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq turned out to have “less than zero percent knowledge” of where the purported hidden caches might be. He testified that he had warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a February 2003 meeting — as well as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in separate talks — that Hussein might have no weapons of mass destruction.⁵

Those of who you don’t already have serious doubts about the American mainstream media’s knowledge and understanding of US foreign policy, should consider this: Despite the two revelations on Dan Rather’s CBS programs, and the other revelations noted above, in January 2008 we find CBS reporter Scott Pelley interviewing FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:

PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?

PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?

PIRO: Yes.

PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?⁶

The United States and Israel are preparing to attack Iran because of their alleged development of nuclear weapons, which Iran has denied on many occasions. Of the Iraqis who warned the United States that it was mistaken about the WMD — Saddam Hussein was executed, Tariq Aziz is awaiting execution. Which Iranian officials is USrael going to hang after their country is laid to waste?

Would it have mattered if the Bush administration had fully believed Iraq when it said it had no WMD? Probably not. There is ample evidence that Bush knew this to be the case, or at a minimum should have seriously suspected it; the same applies to Tony Blair. Saddam Hussein did not sufficiently appreciate just how psychopathic his two adversaries were. Bush was determined to vanquish Iraq, for the sake of Israel, for control of oil, and for expanding the empire with new bases, though in the end most of this didn’t work out as the empire expected; for some odd reason, it seems that the Iraqi people resented being bombed, invaded, occupied, demolished, and tortured.

But if Iran is in fact building nuclear weapons, we have to ask: Is there some international law that says that the US, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not? If the United States had known that the Japanese had deliverable atomic bombs, would Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been destroyed? Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld, has written: “The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.”⁷

It can not be repeated too often: The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that there is no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington’s policies fades away. Examine a map: Iran sits directly between two of the United States’ great obsessions — Iraq and Afghanistan … directly between two of the world’s greatest oil regions — the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea areas … it’s part of the encirclement of the two leading potential threats to American world domination — Russia and China … Tehran will never be a client state or obedient poodle to Washington. How could any good, self-respecting Washington imperialist resist such a target? Bombs Away!

American exceptionalism — A survey

The leaders of imperial powers have traditionally told themselves and their citizens that their country was exceptional and that their subjugation of a particular foreign land should be seen as a “civilizing mission”, a “liberation”, “God’s will”, and of course bringing “freedom and democracy” to the benighted and downtrodden. It is difficult to kill large numbers of people without a claim to virtue. I wonder if this sense of exceptionalism has been embedded anywhere more deeply than in the United States, where it is drilled into every cell and ganglion of American consciousness from kindergarten on. If we measure the degree of indoctrination (I’ll resist the temptation to use the word “brainwashing”) of a population as the gap between what the people believe their government has done in the world and what the actual (very sordid) facts are, the American people are clearly the most indoctrinated people on the planet. The role of the American media is of course indispensable to this process — Try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US attacks on Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against any two of them. How about one? Which of the mainstream media expressed real skepticism of The War on Terror in its early years?

Overloaded with a sense of America’s moral superiority, each year the State Department judges the world, issuing reports evaluating the behavior of all other nations, often accompanied by sanctions of one kind or another. There are different reports rating how each lesser nation has performed in the previous year in the areas of religious freedom, human rights, the war on drugs, trafficking in persons, and counterterrorism, as well as maintaining a list of international “terrorist” groups. The criteria used in these reports are mainly political, wherever applicable; Cuba, for example, is always listed as a supporter of terrorism whereas anti-Castro exile groups in Florida, which have committed literally hundreds of terrorist acts, are not listed as terrorist groups.

• “The causes of the malady are not entirely clear but its recurrence is one of the uniformities of history: power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image.” — Former US Senator William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (1966)
• “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people –– the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. … God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.” — Herman Melville, White-Jacket (1850)
• “God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.” — John le Carré, London Times, January 15, 2003
• “Neoconservatism … traded upon the historic American myths of innocence, exceptionalism, triumphalism and Manifest Destiny. It offered a vision of what the United States should do with its unrivaled global power. In its most rhetorically-seductive messianic versions, it conflated the expansion of American power with the dream of universal democracy. In all of this, it proclaimed that the maximal use of American power was good for both America and the world.” — Columbia University Professor Gary Dorrien, The Christian Centurymagazine, January 22, 2007
• “To most of its citizens, America is exceptional, and it’s only natural that it should take exception to certain international standards.” — Michael Ignatieff, Washington Post columnist, Legal Affairs, May-June, 2002
• Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, US Army War College, 1997: “Our country is a force for good without precedent”.Thomas Barnett, US Naval War College: “The US military is a force for global good that … has no equal.” —The Guardian (London), December 27, 2005
• John Bolton, future US ambassador to the United Nations, writing in 2000: Because of its unique status, the United States could not be “legally bound” or constrained in any way by its international treaty obligations. The U.S. needed to “be unashamed, unapologetic, uncompromising American constitutional hegemonists,” so that their “senior decision makers” could be free to use force unilaterally.Condoleezza Rice, future US Secretary of State, writing in 2000, was equally contemptuous of international law. She claimed that in the pursuit of its national security the United States no longer needed to be guided by “notions of international law and norms” or “institutions like the United Nations” because it was “on the right side of history.” — Z Magazine, July/August 2004
• “The president [George W. Bush] said he didn’t want other countries dictating terms or conditions for the war on terrorism. ‘At some point, we may be the only ones left. That’s okay with me. We are America’.” —Washington Post, January 31, 2002
• “Reinhold Niebuhr got it right a half-century ago: What persists — and promises no end of grief — is our conviction that Providence has summoned America to tutor all of humankind on its pilgrimage to perfection.” — Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations, Boston University
• In commenting on Woodrow Wilson’s moral lecturing of his European colleagues at the Versailles peace table following the First World War, Winston Churchill remarked that he found it hard to believe that the European emigrants, who brought to America the virtues of the lands from which they sprang, had left behind all their vices. — The World Crisis, Vol. V, The Aftermath, 1929
• “Behold a republic, gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor to the world’s progress and the accepted arbiter of the world’s disputes.” — William Jennings Bryan, US Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, In His Image (1922)
• Newsweek editor Michael Hirsch: “U.S. allies must accept that some U.S. unilateralism is inevitable, even desirable. This mainly involves accepting the reality of America’s supreme might — and truthfully, appreciating how historically lucky they are to be protected by such a relatively benign power.” — Foreign Affairs, November, 2002
• Colin Powell speaking before the Republican National Convention, August 13, 1996: The United States is “a country that exists by the grace of a divine providence.”
• “The US media always has an underlying acceptance of the mythology of American exceptionalism, that the US, in everything it does, is the last best hope of humanity.” — Rahul Mahajan, author of: The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism, and Full Spectrum Dominance
• “The fundamental problem is that the Americans do not respect anybody except themselves,” said Col. Mir Jan, a spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry. “They say, ‘We are the God of the world,’ and they don’t consult us.” —Washington Post, August 3, 2002
• “If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” — Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State, 1998

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

To my dear readers in the United States and around the world — In the spirit of the season, I wish each of you your choice of the following:

• Merry Christmas
• Happy Chanukah
• Joyous Eid
• Festive Kwanza
• Happy New Year
• Gleeful Occupy
• Erotic Pagan Rite
• Internet Virtual Holiday
• Heartwarming Satanic Sacrifice
• Devout Atheist Season’s Greetings
• Possessed Laying-on-of-Hands Ceremony
• Really Neat Reincarnation with Auras and Crystals

And may your name never appear on a Homeland Security “No-fly list”.

May you not vex a marginally literate high school graduate with a badge, a gun, and a can of pepper spray.

May your abuses at the hands of authority be only cruel, degrading and inhuman, nothing that Mr. Obama or Mr. Cheney would call torture.

May you or your country never experience a NATO or US humanitarian intervention, liberation, or involuntary suicide.

May neither your labor movement nor your elections be supported by the National Endowment for Democracy.

May the depleted uranium, cluster bombs, white phosphorous, and napalm which fall upon your land be as precisely guided and harmless as the State Department says they are.

May you receive for Christmas a copy of “An arsonist’s guide to the homes of Pentagon officials.”

May you not fall sick in the United States without health insurance, nor desire to go to an American university while being less than wealthy.

May you re-discover what the poor in 18th century France discovered, that rich people’s heads can be mechanically separated from their shoulders if they refuse to listen to reason.

May you be given the choice of euthanasia instead of having to watch Republican primary debates.

Notes

1. CBS Evening News, August 20, 2002 ^↩
2. ABC Nightline, December 4, 2002 ^↩
3. 60 Minutes II, February 26, 2003 ^↩
4. Washington Post, March 1, 2003 ^↩
5. Associated Press, July 28, 2010 ^↩
6. 60 Minutes, January 27, 2008. See also: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [FAIR] Action Alert, February 1, 2008 ^↩
7. New York Times, August 21, 2004^↩

The Arrogant Corruption of our U.S. Congress

This past Sunday night, Steve Croft of “60 Minutes” exposed how U.S. Congressional critters cheat, lie and benefit from insider trading on defense contracts. He cornered former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi with her investments gained from her inside knowledge of multi-billion dollar contracts.

Pelosi boasts multi-millionaire status. She responded that everything she had done as to investments was legal. In reality, she cheated before a law could be passed to stop the cheating.

For example, Tour de France bicyclists injected drugs for years to win the coveted title while the ones that played by the rules never had a chance at the victory podium. Once the cheating was deemed illegal, the cheaters had to play by the rules and not inject performance enhancing drugs.

In the same line, Croft interviewed a former U.S. senator who had introduced a “Stock bill” law to stop Pelosi and dozens if not hundreds of other congressional representatives from benefiting from insider trading knowledge as to defense contracts. That senator could only garner six other reps to sign on to the bill. It has languished in committee ever since.

In other words, the people elected to enforce our laws become the people that break our laws or don’t make laws to stop the cheating—in order to benefit themselves.

You wonder why we suffer 15 million unemployed while that same Congress insources, outsources and offshores American jobs. You may become distressed that 8 to 10 million illegal aliens work jobs in America with impunity. You may wonder how come our middle class continues vanishing right before our eyes.

Thomas Jefferson hated Great Britain because the landed gentry, the power elites—either by birth or class status, not talent, maintained a stranglehold on the financial wealth of the empire. The royalty enjoyed wealth by birthright, not by ability, education or personal effort. Even today, Prince Charles has not worked a day in his life. His mother Queen Elizabeth has not completed a single day of work to further her country’s well being. Prince William today walks around with his bride Kate on a free taxpayer ride through life. He is the lucky recipient of the sperm lottery and nothing more.

The common man did not and does not stand a chance against the power elite. Today, the power elite in Washington DC empower themselves to enrich themselves at the expense of our republic.

While Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues enrich themselves with insider information on defense contract business deals, we suffer 15 million unemployed Americans, 45.2 million Americans subsisting on food stamps, $12 billion in costs per month for endless wars, trade deficits and a $14 trillion national debt. Has Barack Obama accomplished anything to solve those problems? Answer: nothing in three years.

How can the common man fight back? Jefferson and the founding brothers gave us a method for dealing with gross incompetence and gross greed.

Vote the critters out of office in the next election!

The Irrelevance of the Republican Party

The first myth to dispense with is that the GOP is a conservative political party. The millions of registered Republican voters, that truly want a genuine conservative to lead this nation, are disappointed with every election cycle. The idiots that emerge as the standard-bearer of the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, are would be despots, wrapped in the flag of a failed empire. The comic performances in the arena of staged debates, just proves that the party of NeoCons, deserves trouncing into the ground of their blood stained soil. Only Ron Paul has the dignity and courage to claim the consent of the public and lead a revolution that dismantles centralized government. So why won’t rank and file Republicans demand that the Grand Old Party go to battle against the forces of the New World Order?

Who in the mug shots below will make a clear break from the tragic treasonous policies of the last three Republican administrations? Examine each, one at a time.

Michele Bachmann is a Christian Zionist. Her viewpoint that America must be the chief defender of Israel places her in the camp of the NeoCons. The question for her centers on her definition of what exactly is pro-American. Her version of an Israel-First course of action, is inconsistent with the traditional canons of national defense, established in Washington’sFarewell Address. “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?” – Rep. Michelle Bachmann, calling for a new McCarthyism, Oct. 2008.

Herman Cain plays the victim, while he champions the Federal Reserve as the crown jewel for the gatekeepers of the corporatist criminal syndicate. Yet, he claims his character is above charges of indiscretion, don’t blame me. “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you are not rich, blame yourself! ” When the erudite

Newt Gingrich proclaims himself a ““, he is really saying his neo-conservatism loyalty is to a government imperium that is efficient in its pillage and conquests. Newt supports the CIA sub-rosa government. “Frankly I believe that there’s too little funding for intelligence, we have too few assets and too few analysts. And I think if the Congress and others are going to demand a greater capacity in intelligence we’re going to have to be prepared to pay for a more sophisticated and a more intense structure of intelligence capabilities, and I think its wrong for some members of Congress to vote to cut intelligence spending, to vote to cut the number of intelligence analysts and then to set unrealistically high demands on the intelligence community.”

Jon Huntsman, Jr. accepts that government economic development is a necessary function. How conservative is it to institutionalize FDR socialism as a cornerstone of the corporate/state? “I was criticized at some level within the Republican Party by those who say government should not be in the economic development business at all. My response is that the only country I know that doesn’t have an economic development plan is Papa New Guinea.”

Ron Paul stands out from the crowd of candidates for several reasons. This quote reflects the insight lacking in the other GOP hopefuls. “As recent as the year 2000 we won elections by saying we shouldn’t be the policemen of the world, and that we should not be nation building. And its time we got those values back into this country.” It is because of this distinction that the elitist masters of the Republican Party are so scared to allow the Congressman from gaining the nomination.

 

 

, Oops . . what can you say about the governor? This video of Highlights of Rick Perry’s Bizarre (Drunk) Cornerstone Speech, explains a lot. Perry and Cain have much in common neither are ready for prime time.

How is Mitt Romney any different from the NeoCons? “We will strengthen our security by building missile defense, restoring our military might, and standing by and strengthening our intelligence officers.” Here is where Mitt and Newt become joined at the hip. Both are able to deliver an articulate message that seems to resonate to many, but when you dissect their actual methods for implementing policy, the similarities with the Bush era gang of internationalists, is exposed.

Rick Santorum bills himself as the most socially conservative among the latest gang of dwarfs. But, he buys hook line and sinker the phony war on terror. “This is a huge victory for the people of the 911th and the team we put together. Not only did they get the expanded mission, they get to keep what they’ve had, too. It’s more than a complete victory.”

With the exception of Ron Paul, the stature of the Republican candidates for President cannot hold a candle to the like of Congressman Hamilton Fish III, Senator Robert Taft, Senator Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan.

 

 

 

Read each article from the following list of remarks for a comprehensive overview, why the Republican Party is irrelevant.

1) The Identity Crisis For Conservatives

“We have heard the resounding voices of our patron saints from the Right lately that depart from the usual message of common sense and advocacy of Liberty. They have become the ‘new jingoist’, defender of the State and ‘revenging angel’. You know of who they are: David Horowitz, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. They all claim to be Conservative. But what does that really mean, especially in today’s crisis environment?”

2) What is Happening to Conservatives?

“Will our mainstream raconteurs experience an epiphany of a ‘Conscience of a Conservative’, to use Barry’s words; or will they run to the beat of the Jonah Goldberg’s?

Barry’s notion of Liberty is our prize! Transform the ‘War Party’ into an assemblage of Justice seekers, that promote Liberty.”

3) What is Conservative Populism?

“A person can’t be a real conservative if he rejects the primary populist message. The political solution is to become a populist and convince the uninformed that real conservatism is the best hope for promoting the maximum opportunity for the greatest number of people.”

4) What Makes a Republican – a REPUBLICAN?

“For Republicans knew what they were all about and had an example of a true champion of principle in one, Senator Robert A. Taft.”

5) The Republican Death Wish

“The vast apathetic hordes of the American public desperately want to follow a serious change in the status quo. The reason that so many have dropped out of the process is because the nature of the Republicans resemble the mirror image of a Democrat, only in a better suit.”

6) Betrayal of Republicanism

“The Republican Party has long pursued a path contrary from its heritage. Under President George W Bush, that direction has cumulated in a repudiation of traditional conservative principles. Any honest conservative maintains a core roster of values and policies that reflect their passionate support for the Republic.”

7) The Future of the Conservative Movement, evaluates Russell Kirk’s conservatism.

 A short reflection of Ten Conservative Principles by Russell Kirk is in order. Read the explanation of each.

8) That Republican 2010 Landslide and What It Means

“The Republican Party’s attempt to co-opt the spontaneous spirit of the Tea Party geneses illustrates the panic that both entrenched parties have from a true populist movement. The mind dead voters who continually vote for the lesser of two evils, or adhere to the squishy William Buckley rule guarantee perpetual servitude.”

9) The Reemergence of the NeoCons

“Paleoconservatives have their own message for the Congressional freshman class. Dump your leadership. Purge NeoCons from your party.”

10) Liberty for the Ron Paul Generation

“The stark reality about the Ron Paul revolution is that the power elites could not survive in a society based upon individual liberty.

Now the Ron Paul generation understands that liberty and genuine national security is never advanced under the military-industrial-homeland war party.”

These ten essays map out a clear distinction that the conservative tradition in American politics is virtually absent in the current Republican Party. If you believe you can work to take over the national GOP and restore time-honored principles, you are naive.

The only rational option is to create a true grass roots party that encompasses the disaffected middle class. NeoCons are traitors. Establishment proponents loyal to the two party farce, do not allow genuine conservative doctrines into public policy.

Explain how a sincere Republican can ignore Ron Paul and support any of the phony status quo clones for the nomination? The straightforward explanation is that the average GOP voter is just as dumb as a Democrat supporter. End the tyranny of the NeoCons and regain your own dignity.

Liberty for the Ron Paul Generation

The stark reality about the Ron Paul revolution is that the power elites could not survive in a society based upon individual liberty. Nevertheless, this statement does not imply that a Paul presidency would guarantee the elimination of the oligarchy. The faint memory of what a free nation could be or even what our country once was, could be revived under certain circumstances. Imagine the abolishment of the Federal Reserve and the fractional debt created money system. Consider a non-interventionist foreign policy that allows for actual national defense and secures the borders. Or, best of all, a limited government culture that is based upon the principle that government exists to serve citizens in their pursuit of freedom. Thomas Jefferson’s soul lives within the Ron Paul generation.

The barons of media exclusion, that spread a confederacy of silence around Ron Paul, are descendants of the same cabal that sent Jefferson to France during the drafting and debating at the Constitutional Convention. These latest cohorts want to continue the same dominance over the spirit of the revolution. This eternal battle is presently waged under an invigorant new awakening. The old game no longer works. Swept away are their lies, because their pseudo propaganda all point to the oz cult behind the curtain, and the destructive reality of their plots are visible for all to see.

No wonder, since he does not play their game, Ron Paul is such a threat to their control. Consider the insight of our long time friend and courageous advocate of an American First foreign policy, Mark Dankof. He gets to the core reason why the (FCM) Fawning Corporate Media wants to prevent Ron Paul from winning the GOP nomination.

“Israel, the Jewish Lobby worldwide, the Central Bankers, and the energy/gas consortiums, are the driving force behind making this war happen. Jay Solomon’s story (WSJ – Senators Press Obama On Iran’s Central Bank) indeed notes that Senator Mark Kirk (R., Illinois) and Senator Charles Schumer (D., New York), are the co-sponsors of the letter, in a “sign of bipartisan support for tougher financial measures against Iran. . . .” What the Wall Street Journal omits, of course, is that Kirk received more Israeli/Jewish PAC money for his initial election to the Senate, than any other candidate in the last election cycle, and that Schumer’s pockets have been lined historically with reams of the same levels of financial largesse for doing the bidding of the Zionist State. We might also draw the legitimate and documentable conclusion that Kirk, Schumer, and their colleagues in both houses of Congress, demonstrate the stranglehold that Israel has on both major political parties, as demonstrated each year by Hugh Galford and Janet McMahon of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in Washington. The numbers provided annually by Galford and McMahon provide the quantitative proof of what President Obama told Ha’aretz in his last trip to Israel: that Obama himself could not possibly have been elected to the U. S. Senate in Illinois (the seat now held by Kirk, by the way), or the American Presidency, without the amount of Jewish money and political support that came his way. Presumably, the President is saying something about the larger political system and the way it works systemically. Follow the money trail. And the Bankers. And the number of Israeli assets in the GOP Presidential sweepstakes (the exception is Ron Paul) who have never met a surrogate war they didn’t like, including the one on the drawing board now they will assiduously promote if The Masters should decide that Mr. Obama needs replacing in 2012 for insufficient sycophancy.”

Sadly, many Tea Party conservatives still accept the Neocon foreign policy deception. Ron Paul is a non-interventionist, not an isolationist. Watch the thinking man’s version of a strong leader in the video, : Media Blackout, Economic Freedom, Intellectual Revolution. Go beyond the sound bites and ads, then ask the hard questions.Once the presidential campaign heats up after Labor Day, the cast of characters will keep shucking out the phony common man populism, while cavorting with the same money interests, corporatists and banksters that select every other nominee. Have you forgotten the Skull and Bones ticket of 2004? Surely, the progressive McCain was no choice over the “bomber” Obama general.

Now the Ron Paul generation understands that liberty and genuine national security is never advanced under the military-industrial-homeland war party. Yet, usually the only candidates you get to vote for out of the duel party wag the dog parade is a kosher toady. The unremitting plans to eradicate Iran, drives the banking internationalists for the same reason that Libya became a bombing range target. No nation is allowed to challenge the money monopoly. Gaddafi’s gold and Ahmadinejad’s economic independence as cited in an IMF report, cannot stand the risk of any unorthodox ruler. How dare the Zionist controlled press make a rare slip up and reveal, “The IMF said it has revised its previous figures on Iran’s economy after a brief visit to the country, expressing admiration for some of the controversial plans introduced by the hardline president.”The entrenched GOP party facilitators want to marginalize Ron Paul as dangerous because he resists tribe orders and refuses to waste another generation of youth in the service of zealots. Liberty demands that our sons and daughters no longer be consumed as cannon fodder. Translate the “ON BEHALF OF A GRATEFUL NATION” sympathy statement to read – The defense department regrets to inform you that your sons are dead because they were stupid.

Now even the disappointed left have figured out that warmonger Barry Soetoro, is no different from George W. Bush. So when will the Republican faithful come to grips, that Bachmann and Cain are IRS and Federal Reserve cronies, respectively? As for Romney, anyone who is willing to champion person status for corporations deserves to file chapter 7 on his own campaign aspirations. New World Order Perry is the puppet of choice. His rhetoric will ring home to many, because he lifts it directly from the Ron Paul journal. However, Rick Perry is the next incarnate plastic doll, which will read the script from the banksters’ ledger sheet, once elected.

When was the last time you heard another Republican presidential candidate utter the words civil liberties? Or name another public figure that actually made his life’s work synonymous with LIBERTY? Only Ron Paul stands the test of performance.

So how can Paul win in the GOP primaries? The New York Times offers a salient chart and states, “On the Republican side, partisan self-identification peaked in the early 1990s – as did the percent of the electorate voting in Republican primaries – before declining.” Decrying the GOP hacks, every liberty Republican patriot needs to organize their universe of friends and acquaintances to get the vote out at the ballot box on primary day. Just a minimum increase and return to the 33% 1990 levels with Ron Paul voters will result is his victory for the nomination. The caveat does require a verifiable monitoring of any enhanced electronic voting count against liberty-minded voters or the sabotage by the party of the delegate certification process.Presidents are selected well before the general election. Ron Paul will generate significant support and votes from independents. Even disgruntled Democrats will rally in a general election; however, the Republican registered primary voter must resist the perennial Neocon treachery.

The frustration of discussing politics in an era of denial needs to be overcome. Enrolling a Republican voter into the cause of Liberty can be a daunting task. Those who believe that the party of Lincoln champions a proper conservative defense of liberty are wholly confused. Tea Party proponents must reject the GOP establishment and their – hijack express. Do not believe the hype. Accurate public Tea Party approval sentiment is not in decline. Simply, the only drink that Rick Perry partakes is an imported Camellia sinensis brew, while he worships another lord in the Bilderberg temple.

Lastly, those critics of Ron Paul’s Austrian economics usually oppose a return to a resurrection of a modified gold standard. Yet if you dig deeper, those same detractors maintain an apologist attitude for keeping a central banking system. Few disparagers view the preservation of liberty on the same scale as their return from compound interest.

The money elite may soon conduct another false flag to scare the uninformed and redirect one more staged diversion. The rush of enthusiasm for retaking our liberty is the essence of the Ron Paul message. The generation that tasted the joy in the establishment’s fear during the 1960’s appreciates just how a government can be broken, from conducting an exhausted and immoral war.

Today everyone needs to learn this lesson, apply traditional conservative populist principles, and eliminate the central banking tyranny that is the prime destroyer of our economy. The fascist state that follows orders and reports to this private bank-ruling cartel is the foremost enemy. Is Liberty more important to you or do you think a looser fit of your governance chains is achievable with your continued apathy?

This oldie  but goodie tune is still relevant today. Break out the band and get your neighbor to join in and sing the lyrics. Most important – get out the Republican Ron Paul primary vote.

Humanism: The Scourge of Humanity

It has never been popular to publically condemn evil actions.    When Jesus called the Pharisees whitewashed hypocrites he planted a seed that contributed to His own demise.  Today is the same. Writing truthful essays results in unexplained silences, quietly broken relationships, hate mail, and problems with publication.  Continuing to construct essays in the same vein is redundant, and though necessary to produce even tiny public change, it, too, is often condemned.

Truth gets occluded when donations are essential.  Ministries that depend on donations tend to defer to their major donors. Internet sites that hold to particular ideologies restrict truth.  One popular site will not publish anti-Zionist material, several others are dubious of any questions regarding the Constitution, some sites prefer erudition, credentials are preferred by others, elsewhere goring the Evangelical dog is forbidden, critical articles are never as popular as those that affirm, and good political writing will command a large but usually mislead audience.  Religious writing that titillates the intellect is still well received but confrontations involving the arrogance of ignoring orthodox Christianity and failure of popular Christian theologies to fulfill the Will of God are as poorly received as they were when Christ overthrew the money changers.

Like many Americans (The vast majority in my time.) I married, had children, and spent my middle years working to pay for the house, the car, and food for the family.  I voted Republican (a family tradition) and as a result felt I had done my patriotic duty.  Church attendance was fairly regular and though at the beginning the Gospel was not a personal matter, I did consider the church a “good” and socially beneficial institution.  This is the plight of most middle aged individuals in Western society.  Heavily influenced by massive amounts of propaganda and neither politically nor religiously astute decisions are made by rote and tradition.  Populations that are not educated in maintaining righteousness and are denied accurate information cannot remain free.

When God saved and converted me He kindled an interest in the relationship of my new Faith to society. Most American preachers agreed with God that He had created the world and everything in it but they seemed more concerned with building their church by attraction, conversion, manipulation, and exploitation than in bringing His creation under His control. “Love” was often quoted as a Christian objective.  But loving behavior was never accurately defined.  “Doing God’s Will” is a popular objective but in Pietistic circles God’s Will is the accumulation of myriads of esoteric personal impressions that are frequently idiotic and always anarchic.  Without the yardstick of God’s Law Christians become lost in a humanistic sea of competing and confusing personal opinion. There is no clear map to obedience and most congregations quickly find themselves lost in a chaotic quagmire of individuality that consumes time and energy in questionable behavior, renders the Gospel useless, and creates unnecessary derision.

It is the duty of the Christian Church to teach its members to behave in ways that please God and to support and correct the State so that Family, Church, and Government function righteously.  America has devolved into its present state because the church has utterly failed.

The vacuum created by the Church’s failure has been successfully filled by a cadre of humanistic power elite who sincerely believe they can govern better.  These are men and women with an unshakeable faith in their own beneficial hegemony. They have acquired wealth and power, are unencumbered by an overarching legal system, and are sincere in their belief that they can bring peace and prosperity to the world by imposing the product of their reasoning.

It is difficult for Americans to understand the extent to which pervasive propaganda has manipulated their behavior.  They are often unaware that seeing racial diversity day after day on television is a propaganda tool.  They fail to recognize that movies about war heroes promote illegal wars.  The constant barrage of Holocaust movies has distorted the reality that the murder of innocent Christians was much more pervasive than the murder of Jews.  Social chaos is created by pervasive immorality which is promoted by the media.  Wars are couched in false terms of necessity.  Hate is engendered by casting the target as evil and cruel.  Righteousness is pilloried, slandered, and made to seem foolish.  Evil propaganda is destroying the culture, distorting truth, creating strife, and debilitating our nation.

The idea that powerful forces would deliberately set the stage for poverty, riots, and irreconcilable conflict is unthinkable. Strife purposely fomented by setting up two controlled, contending forces is beyond the imagination.  We are a people nurtured on right and wrong.  It is hard for us to believe our fellow human beings would deliberately cultivate evil social behavior.  We are helpless in the flood of humanistic nihilism; unable to believe that the America we have known and loved is being intentionally destroyed by the government we have elected.

War, false flag operations, bankruptcy, illegal immigration, rampant public mendacity,  wealth destruction, family disintegration, homelessness, controlled violent weather, impure food sources, impediments to travel, arbitrary law enforcement, leakage of national sovereignty, aberrant sexuality, immoral and violent motion pictures and TV shows, multiculturalism, legal diarrhea, loss of lucrative middle class jobs, concentration of wealth and power, callus and impersonal corporations, hopeless unemployment, and galloping inflation are but a few of the hundreds of disintegrating forces tearing at our nation.  Very few Americans can comprehend that all this is being done on purpose.

It is time for Americans to understand that the political system cannot produce a solution.  It is part of the problem. Christians are wasting time in the political arena.  There will be no political solution!  Championing fringes of righteousness in Washington is like hoping the drowning man might save himself after he surfaces the third time.  United States has been under the thumb of controlled politicians for decades.  The problem is religious, not political.  Christians have allowed aberrant theology to neuter the Gospel thereby bringing God’s judgment on both themselves and the nation.  Striving to solve moral problems in a humanistic political system is foolishness.

Islam is more dangerous to the new world order then Christianity.  The invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and the vilification of Iran and Pakistan are all efforts to bring Islam to heel.  Islam has a legal system feared by the majority of Americans but practiced by Muslims and by their governments.  The humanist new world order prefers to dictate laws that are convenient for them and is intent on wiping out Islam.  Since Christians have nullified God’s Law they are without a legal system and are only able to create minor resistance to the Devil’s legal juggernaut.  Muslims with legal reverence to a higher authority present a more serious problem; they actually resist the evil laws of the new world order, Christians cannot.

What is left of Western Christianity is abysmally weak and those who participate in it are astonishingly intractable.  As the rotten social fruit of Christian ministries is reaped year after year one wonders if their leaders are sentient.

Western Christians fail to recognize the dichotomy of claiming to support a Christian God while offering as a solution a humanistic Constitution that bans Christian oaths and encodes religious plurality in direct violation of the Commandments of the God they claim to worship.  Christians have allowed this humanistic document to supersede and replace the Laws of the Creator.  Foolish Christian ministers actually laud “rich religious diversity”.   It is a sin that must be corrected for God cannot forgive such willfulness.

Christians have no authority to override the Constitution and impose God’s Laws but it is their duty to preach the superiority of the legal system God in His infinite Wisdom gave first to ancient Israel then to Christians.  As society comes to understand the superiority of Biblical Law and seeks to live in personal freedom under its mandates, then, and only then, would Christian dominion become viable.  It is impossible to impose a righteous legal system on an evil people.

Evangelical Christianity is a heresy.   Omitting God’s legal standards is tantamount to worshiping a false God.  It is impossible to understand the character and the Will of our God without understanding and obeying His Law.  Evil is disobedience to God’s Law.  When Pietism eschews the Law they make the definition of evil esoteric.  When we fail to carry out God’s punishments for evil behavior we fertilize and compound social sin.  When we fail to execute the murderer we bring God’s judgment on ourselves and burden society with our disobedience.  When we allow rebellious children to grow into adulthood we create civil unrest which contends with the peace God intends for His people.  When we wink at adultery and fornication we destroy the family and eliminate the order God set forth for His creation.  Homosexuality is a grievous sin; a precursor to the death of a nation.  But far more serious than specific disobedience is the pervasive fear of God’s Law and the punishment it requires.

The majority of American Christians prefer the Devil’s mandates to the perfect Law of God; many fail to support the death penalty.  In direct rebellion against the character and Will of the God they profess to worship they condemn stoning and support the use of sedatives.  They are so utterly ignorant of their God that they live in mortal fear of Shiria law which is in some ways similar to the Law of the Bible.  Fear of God’s Law is the essence of humanism.  Christianity without Law is a faith that puts man and his culture before God and His Word.

Humanism has infected the majority of contemporary Christian leadership.  Rare is the pulpit that respects the orthodox theology that was willed us by our forefathers.  Dispensationalism and other heretical humanistic theologies have infected the church creating an effete institution.  God’s sovereignty is attacked when pastors disregard His authority and emphasize human decisions for Christ.  If He is sovereign and you are a Christian you were chosen by God.  Even more dangerous is the massive human intervention into God’s Word.  Judaism’s Torah heretically truncates the Gospel.  Dispensationalism adds an order that God did not impose and dissects the Bible in human terms.  American Christians delight in prophecies and other errant ministries of fallen creatures – they prefer humanism to the God of the Bible.  Evangelical Christians claim to be Bible based but they ignore the legal standards that are the subject of the narrative of three quarters of the Book they claim to support.  Three fourths of the Bible describes the blessings of obedience and the curses of disobedience and a quarter of God’s Word describes His merciful solution to the sins of His created beings.  Since God has provided mercy for our disobedience should we then sin by ignoring His Law – God forbid!

When the Christian Church lost its Biblical foundation our courts followed.  American courts function under Admiralty Law.   Judges not bound by immutable standards become lord in their court rooms.  The Constitution is usually ignored. When the perfect law of God is absent the error filled laws of men replace it, freedom is lost and imperialism soon follows.  Man was not created to govern himself.  American courts send innocent men to jail and free the guilty.  It is a fearful thing to fall under the jurisdiction of our courts for they are neither fair nor just; justice and equity were long ago replaced by power and victory.

Few Americans act as if God is sovereign and Jesus is King.  Instead we continue to put our faith in human solutions bringing God’s continuous judgment.

We may be living in the End Times but when we become consumed with that prospect we fail to perform the task God has assigned to us.  Our business is to bring the ineffable message of salvation to the hearts God has chosen and righteousness to the world He has created for as long as His Grace allows us to live.

Many would contend that my essays overemphasize God’s Law.  That accusation is correct.  However, my overemphasis is but a drop in the dearth of legal information that afflicts the Christian Church.  Social righteousness is diminished to the extent that God’s Law is ignored and in America it is not only ignored but widely condemned.  When we ignore God’s Law we ignore righteousness.  Since sin has been covered by the Blood of Jesus we are forgiven but unfortunately Christians can be forgiven and eligible for Heaven from earthly societies that are sinful, chaotic, and Fascistic.  Sin, chaos, and Fascism result from disobedience and will remain and worsen until God’s people return to righteousness under His mandates.

Murdoch Heads For a Fall

Boy, this is about as sleazy as it gets…

Imagine that your 13-year old daughter has been kidnapped and you have no idea where she is. So you frantically call her cell phone over and over clinging to the faint hope that she might still be alive. And, then, a miracle happens; you notice that messages on her phone have been deleted signalling that she’s still alive but unable to call back.

What a relief! Suddenly, you are overcome with feelings of joy and gratitude knowing that your child is still alive.

But then something terrible happens. You find out that your daughter’s been dead all along. You only thought she was alive because some sleazeball working for a Murdoch tabloid had been fiddling around with her phone messages so he could get the inside story.

Here’s the story from The Guardian:

“….the journalists at The News of the World then encountered a problem. Milly’s voicemail box filled up and would accept no more messages. Apparently thirsty for more information from more voicemails, the paper intervened — and deleted the messages that had been left in the first few days after her disappearance. According to one source, this had a devastating effect: when her friends and family called again and discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Milly herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive. But she was not. The interference created false hope and extra agony for those who were misled by it.” (The Guradian)

Is that the most heartless thing you’ve ever heard or what?

And the Milly Dowler incident is just the tip of the iceberg. Investigators are now trying to figure out whether the News of the World tabloid (NoW) hacked the phones of relatives of dead soldiers, terrorist victims and other murder victims.

Get the picture? Murdoch is in the bereavement business; and business is good! Personal suffering doesn’t matter. What matters is eyeballs on the screen and papers sold. That’s what really counts; the bottom line.

Here’s a little background on the phone hacking charges from the UK Guardian:

“The Metropolitan police holds evidence that could prove hundreds of people had their phones hacked by News of the World, Scotland Yard told the high court, a far greater number than had previously been believed.

Barristers for the Metropolitan police said notes seized from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator on the paper’s books, showed he made a note of 149 mobile phone pin numbers and around 400 unique voicemail numbers. Both are used to access messages left on mobile phones.

Jason Beer QC, for the Metropolitan police, told a high court hearing the figures were: “a snap shot in time as of last week”. Until Friday, the police had maintained Mulcaire kept a record of just 91 pin numbers.

The true extent of the investigator’s activities is only now becoming apparent as Operation Wheeting, the new police investigation into phone-hacking at the News of the World which began in January, continues. Mulcaire’s targets included the actor Jude Law, who is suing the paper for breach of privacy.” (“Police uncover evidence of hundreds more hacked phones” Guardian)

And who is this Glenn Mulcaire character who was on the company payroll? Here’s a clip from the Associated Press that helps to fill in the blanks:

“Glenn Mulcaire, a private detective employed by News of the World, and former News of the World reporter Clive Goodman have already served prison sentences for hacking into the phones of royal officials. Mulcaire issued an apology Tuesday to anyone who had been hurt by his actions, but said there was no intention of interfering with a police investigation.

“Working for the News of the World was never easy. There was relentless pressure. There was a constant demand for results,” Mulcaire said.” (“UK phone hacking targets more slain schoolgirls”, Gregory Katz, AP)

Nice, eh? And this guy was getting paid by Murdoch’s NoW?

So the phone hacking goes way-back to 2002 (at the very least) and involves some very unsavory people like Mulcaire, right? Doesn’t that suggest that it was company policy?

For those who believe that Murdoch “didn’t know” what was going on at News of the World, take a look at this blurb from Bloomberg:

“Another Labour lawmaker, Tom Watson, demanded action against James Murdoch, Rupert’s 38-year-old son, who runs News Corp.’s European operations….

‘Cover-Up’

Watson referred to the News of the World’s statement to a parliamentary committee in 2009 that James Murdoch had approved a 700,000-pound payment to a phone-hacking victim that was accompanied by a non-disclosure agreement. The company had been trying to organize a “cover-up,” the lawmaker said.

“It is clear now that he personally, and without board approval, authorized money to be paid by his company to silence people who’d been hacked,” Watson said. “This is nothing short of an attempt to pervert the course of justice.” ( “Murdoch Gets Dangerous for Cameron”, Bloomberg)

“So, Rupert’s son James knew what was going on”, but Rupert did not? How believable is that?

What the public needs to know, is how far up the chain of command this goes, because that’s the only way to determine accountability. Is phone hacking and (possible) obstruction of justice company policy or not? That’s the question. If it is, there needs to be a thorough investigation and criminal penalties. That means jail-time.

The editors at News of the World should be required to sign depositions stating whether they knew that private investigators were being used to hack phone-lines or not. If they knew, then one can assume that it wasn’t merely overzealous reporting, but company policy. And if it was company policy, then whoever set the policy is guilty. Was it Murdoch?

The hacking scandal has sent shares in News Corporation tumbling and is now threatening to derail Murdoch’s bid to takeover BSkyB. Public revulsion has also forced the government to get involved. Prime Minister David Cameron, has called the hacking claims ”truly dreadful” but has been restrained in his criticism due to his connections to Murdoch. (He is now calling for an investigation) Others, like Tim Farron, the president of the Liberal Democrats, have been less diplomatic. According to the he Sydney Morning Herald, Farron, “said News executives had shown they were not ”fit and proper persons” to take over BSkyB and joined calls for a public inquiry into the hacking scandal….”This goes far deeper than one individual. It appears to have been about a culture and a complete lack of ethics,” he said.” (The Sydney Morning Herald)

“Labour MP Chris Bryant was even more strident in his criticism. Bryant said, “These were the “immoral and criminal deeds of organisation that was appallingly led,” he said. “Journalists and investigators should be ashamed of what happened, so too should the people who ran the paper. Editorial negligence is tantamount to complicity,” said Mr Bryant. (The Telegraph)

The News of the World phone hacking flap is a fast-breaking story that could go any number of ways. But one thing is certain, we’re going to find out a lot more about the intrusive (and, possibly, illegal) means the media uses to generate headlines. That may be good for the public, but very bad for Rupert Murdoch.

Part 2—Murdoch Update (Friday) Blood in the Water

It’s all beginning to unravel for Rupert Murdoch, the serpentine media tycoon, whose empire has been rocked by a phone hacking scandal that’s ballooned into a full-blown crisis. On Thursday, Murdoch shuddered the 168 year-old “News of the World” laying off 200 workers while retaining beleaguered NoW editor Rebekah Brooks. Brooks is at the center of the controversy, although she still maintains she knew nothing of the phone hacking. The facts are likely to prove otherwise. She will undoubtedly be questioned by the police in the near-future. If she is implicated, she could go to jail.

On Friday, the former editor of News of the World, Andy Coulson, and former royal editor, Clive Goodman, were arrested by the Metropolitan Police in connection to phone hacking allegations. The investigation is widening and more arrests are expected in the coming weeks.

The scandal has sent shares of News Corp. tumbling and taken a toll on Murdoch’s business interests. According to The Guardian, the prospects for the big BSkyB deal appear to be fading. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Rupert Murdoch’s plan to take full control of BSkyB have been scuppered by the political fallout from the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, the City believes.

Sam Hart, media analyst at broker Charles Stanley said: “Murdoch’s plan to bid for the satellite operator has been kicked into touch.

“Shareholders are discounting the possibility that this bid won’t happen for the foreseeable future. Some people wonder if it will happen at all. It could take years before the various inquiries have wound up, so the deal has been pushed much further back than anyone would have guessed a week ago.” (“BSkyB deal could collapse, City experts warn”, Guardian)

And here’s more on the selloff of Murdoch stocks:

“Investors in companies controlled by Rupert Murdoch have been dumping the shares amid fears on both sides of the Atlantic over the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World. Shares in broadcaster BSkyB are down 5% in the last week, wiping some £666m off the value of the business, while News Corp had lost 2.6% – slicing some $400m off the value of the News of the World’s ultimate parent company.” (The Guardian)

The phone hacking incident has helped to crystallize the public’s growing contempt for the media and its methods. In a matter of days, Rupert Murdoch has gone from a king-maker to pariah, a transformation that he has brought about for many of his victims. Murdoch knows how fickle people can be and how much they enjoy seeing the rich and powerful get skewered in the press. He probably wonders if he is next on the list. Here’s a clip from and interview with Nick Davies on Wallace’s blog:

“To me it isn’t a story about journalists behaving badly. It’s about the power elite. It’s about the most powerful news organisation in the world. It’s about the most powerful police force in the country. It’s about the most powerful political party in the country, and for good measure it’s about the press complaints commission and how they all spontaneously colluded together to make everybody’s life easier. It’s about how they casually assumed that the law didn’t apply to them, and how they equally casually assumed that it’s perfectly all right to lie to the rest of us..the little people.” (Wallace’s blog: Rupert Murdoch – destroying standards)

The phone hacking scandal has its tentacles everywhere, from NoW front offices to Scotland Yard to 10 Downing Street. How is Prime Minister David Cameron involved? Were the police taking payoffs for information? How high up the chain of command did they know about the hacking? Did Murdoch know what was going on?

This wasn’t some trifling, part-time hacking operation. Oh no. As former employee at the News of the World Paul McMullan told actor Hugh Grant:

(It was a) “High, extensive, industrial-scale phone-hacking went on at News of the World, particularly under Andy Coulson, (and) it wasn’t just the News of the World, it was all the tabloids, how money regularly passed hands between News International and offices of Metropolitan Police,” he said.” (“How Hugh Grant Helped Expose News Corp.’s Phone-hacking scandal”, Hollywood Reporter)

So, phone hacking is de rigeur in the sleaze business, mainly because it saves time and money on investigations. It’s also a good way to nab the big headline, which is the real goal. News of the World never would have uncovered the facts about 13-year old murder victim Milly Dowler if they hadn’t hacked her messages. That gave them a leg-up on the competition allowing them to break the Big Story and sell more papers. They probably never gave a second thought to the fact that their actions would cause more suffering for Dowler’s grieving parents. Why would they care anyway?

It’s going to be a bumpy few months for Murdoch. There are bound to be more arrests, more surprises, and more employees who leak their stories to the press. And, then, there’s always the possibility that another shoe will drop causing even more trouble; no one knows for sure.

This could all end very badly for Rupert Murdoch.

What “Humanitarian Intervention” Looks Like

Iraq: Let us not forget what “humanitarian intervention” looks like.

Libya: Let us not be confused as to why Libya alone has been singled out for “humanitarian intervention”.

On April 9, Condoleezza Rice delivered a talk in San Francisco. Or tried to. The former Secretary of State was interrupted repeatedly by cries from the audience of “war criminal” and “torturer”. (For which we can thank our comrades in Code Pink and World Can’t Wait.) As one of the protesters was being taken away by security guards, Rice made the kind of statement that has now become standard for high American officials under such circumstances: “Aren’t you glad this lady lives in a democracy where she can express her opinion?” She also threw in another line that’s become de rigueur since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, an argument that’s used when all other arguments fail: “The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God.” ¹

My response to such a line is this: If you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then remarked to you how nice it was that “you actually no longer have a knee problem, thank God.” … The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem.

Unfortunately, they’ve lost just about everything else as well. Twenty years of American bombing, invasion, occupation and torture have led to the people of that unhappy land losing their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, 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, disabled, in prison, or in foreign exile … the air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children … a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again.

In 2006, the UN special investigator on torture declared that reports from Iraq indicated that torture “is totally out of hand. The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein.” Another UN report of the same time disclosed a rise in “honor killings” of women. ²

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

“I am not a political person, but I know that under Saddam Hussein, we had electricity, clean drinking water, a healthcare system that was the envy of the Arab world and free education through college,” Iraqi pharmacist Dr. Entisar Al-Arabi told American peace activist Medea Benjamin in 2010. “I have five children and every time I had a baby, I was entitled to a year of paid maternity leave. I owned a pharmacy and I could close up shop as late as I chose because the streets were safe. Today there is no security and Iraqis have terrible shortages of everything — electricity, food, water, medicines, even gasoline. Most of the educated people have fled the country, and those who remain look back longingly to the days of Saddam Hussein.” ³

And this from two months ago:

“Protesters, human rights workers and security officials say the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has responded to Iraq’s demonstrations in much the same way as many of its more authoritarian neighbors: with force. Witnesses in Baghdad and as far north as Kirkuk described watching last week as security forces in black uniforms, tracksuits and T-shirts roared up in trucks and Humvees, attacked protesters, rounded up others from cafes and homes and hauled them off, blindfolded, to army detention centers. Entire neighborhoods … were blockaded to prevent residents from joining the demonstrations. Journalists were beaten.” ⁴

So … can we expect the United States and its fellow thugs in NATO to intervene militarily in Iraq as they’re doing in Libya? To protect the protesters in Iraq as they tell us they’re doing in Libya? To effect regime change in Iraq as they’re conspiring, but not admitting, in Libya?

Similarly Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria … all have been bursting with protest and vicious government crackdown in recent months, even to a degree in Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive societies in the world. Not one of these governments has been assaulted by the United States, the UK, or France as Libya has been assaulted; not one of these countries’ opposition is receiving military, financial, legal and moral support from the Western powers as the Libyan rebels are — despite the Libyan rebels’ brutal behavior, racist murders, and the clear jihadist ties of some of them. ⁵ The Libyan rebels are reminiscent of the Kosovo rebels — mafiosos famous for their trafficking in body parts and women, also unquestioningly supported by the Western powers against an Officially Designated Enemy, Serbia.

So why is only Libya the target for US/NATO missiles? Is there some principled or moral reason? Are the Libyans the worst abusers of their people in the region? In actuality, Libya offers its citizens a higher standard of living. (The 2010 UN Human Development Index, a composite measure of health, education and income ranked Libya first in Africa.) None of the other countries has a more secular government than Libya. (In contrast some of the Libyan rebels are in the habit of chanting that phrase we all know only too well: “Allah Akbar”.) None of the others has a human-rights record better than that of Libya, however imperfect that may be — in Egypt a government fact-finding mission has announced that during the recent uprising at least 846 protesters were killed as police forces shot them in the head and chest with live ammunition. ⁶ Similar horror stories have been reported in Syria, Yemen and other countries of the region during this period.

It should be noted that the ultra-conservative Fox News reported on February 28: “As the United Nations works feverishly to condemn Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi for cracking down on protesters, the body’s Human Rights Council is poised to adopt a report chock-full of praise for Libya’s human rights record. The review commends Libya for improving educational opportunities, for making human rights a “priority” and for bettering its “constitutional” framework. Several countries, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia but also Canada, give Libya positive marks for the legal protections afforded to its citizens — who are now revolting against the regime and facing bloody reprisal.”

Of all the accusations made against Gaddafi perhaps the most meaningless is the oft-repeated “He’s killing his own people.” It’s true, but that’s what happens in civil wars. Abraham Lincoln also killed his own people.

Muammar Gaddafi has been an Officially Designated Enemy of the US longer than any living world leader except Fidel Castro. The animosity began in 1970, one year after Gaddafi took power in a coup, when he closed down a US air force base. He then embarked on a career of supporting what he regarded as revolutionary groups. During the 1970s and ’80s, Gaddafi was accused of using his large oil revenues to support — with funds, arms, training, havens, diplomacy, etc — a wide array of radical/insurgent/terrorist organizations, particularly certain Palestinian factions and Muslim dissident and minority movements in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; the IRA and Basque and Corsican separatists in Europe; several groups engaged in struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa; various opposition groups and politicians in Latin America; the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigades, and Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang.

It was claimed as well that Libya was behind, or at least somehow linked to, an attempt to blow up the US Embassy in Cairo, various plane hijackings, a bomb explosion on an American airliner over Greece, the blowing up of a French airliner over Africa, blowing up a synagogue in Istanbul, and blowing up a disco in Berlin which killed some American soldiers. ⁷

In 1990, when the United States needed a country to (falsely) blame for the bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Libya was the easy choice.

Gaddafi’s principal crime in the eyes of US President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) was not that he supported terrorist groups, but that he supported thewrong terrorist groups; i.e., Gaddafi was not supporting the same terrorists that Washington was, such as the Nicaraguan Contras, UNITA in Angola, Cuban exiles in Miami, the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, and the US military in Grenada. The one band of terrorists the two men supported in common was the Moujahedeen in Afghanistan.

And if all this wasn’t enough to make Gaddafi Public Enemy Number One in Washington (Reagan referred to him as the “mad dog of the Middle East”), Gaddafi has been a frequent critic of US foreign policy, a serious anti-Zionist, pan-Africanist, and pan-Arabist (until the hypocrisy and conservatism of Arab governments proved a barrier). He also calls his government socialist. How much tolerance and patience can The Empire be expected to have? When widespread protests broke out in Tunisia and Egypt, could Washington have resisted instigating the same in the country sandwiched between those two? The CIA has been very busy supplying the rebels with arms, bombing support, money, and personnel.

It may well happen that the Western allies will succeed in forcing Gaddafi out of power. Then the world will look on innocently as the new Libyan government gives Washington what it has long sought: a host-country site for Africom, the US Africa Command, one of six regional commands the Pentagon has divided the world into. Many African countries approached to be the host have declined, at times in relatively strong terms. Africom at present is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. According to a State Department official: “We’ve got a big image problem down there. … Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the US. They just don’t trust the US.” ⁸ Another thing scarcely any African country would tolerate is an American military base. There’s only one such base in Africa, in Djibouti. Watch for one in Libya sometime after the dust has settled. It’ll be situated close to the American oil wells. Or perhaps the people of Libya will be given a choice — an American base or a NATO base.

And remember — in the context of recent history concerning Iraq, North Korea, and Iran — if Libya had nuclear weapons the United States would not be attacking it.

Or the United States could realize that Gaddafi is no radical threat simply because of his love for Condoleezza Rice. Here is the Libyan leader in a March 27, 2007 interview on al-Jazeera TV: “Leezza, Leezza, Leezza … I love her very much. I admire her, and I’m proud of her, because she’s a black woman of African origin.”

Over the years, the American government and media have fed us all a constant diet of scandalous Gaddafi stories: He took various drugs, was an extreme womanizer, was bisexual, dressed in women’s clothing, wore makeup, carried a teddy bear, had epileptic fits, and much more; some part of it may have been true. And now we have the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, telling us that Gaddafi’s forces are increasingly engaging in sexual violence and that they have been issued the impotency drug Viagra, presumably to enhance their ability to rape. ⁹ Remarkable. Who would have believed that the Libyan Army had so many men in their 60s and 70s?

As I write this, US/NATO missiles have slammed into a Libyan home killing a son and three young grandchildren of Gaddafi, this after repeated rejections of Gaddafi’s call for negotiations — another heartwarming milestone in the glorious history of humanitarian intervention, as well as a reminder of the US bombing of Libya in 1986 which killed a young daughter of Gaddafi.

Two more examples, if needed, of why capitalism can not be reformed

Transocean, the owner of the drilling rig that exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago, killing 11 workers and sending two hundred (200) million gallons of oil cascading over the shoreline of six American states, has announced that (through using some kind of arcane statistical method) it had “recorded the best year in safety performance in our Company’s history.” Accordingly, the company awarded obscene bonuses on top of obscene salaries to its top executives. ¹⁰

In Japan, even as it struggles to contain one of history’s worst nuclear disasters, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has proposed building two new nuclear reactors at its radiation-spewing power plant. The plan had taken shape before the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and TEPCO officials see no reason to change it. The Japanese government agency in charge of approving such a project has reacted in shocked horror. “It was just unbelievable,” said the director of the agency. ¹¹

Which leads us to A.W. Clausen, president of Bank of America, speaking to the Greater Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, in 1970:

“It may sound heretical to some in this room to say that business enterprise is not an absolute necessity to human culture … Ancient Egypt functioned more than 3000 years without anything resembling what we today understand by the term ‘corporate enterprise’ or even ‘money’. Within our span of years, we have witnessed the rise of the Soviet Socialist empire. It survives without anything you or I would call a private corporation and little that approaches our own monetary mechanism. It survives and is far stronger than anyone might have expected from watching its turbulent beginnings in 1917 … It is easy to mislead ourselves into thinking that there is something preordained about our profit-motivated, free-market, private-enterprise system — that is, as they used to say of gold, universal and immutable.”

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

• Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez memoir, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story, pages 349-350: April 6, 2004. Sanchez was in Iraq in video teleconference with President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. One major American offensive was in operation, another about to be launched. According to Sanchez, Powell was talking tough that day: “We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly, “Powell said. “There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power.” Then Bush spoke: “At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone. At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out. Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. … There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”
• Noam Chomsky: “If there is really authentic popular participation in the decision-making and the free association of communities, yeah, that could be tremendously important. In fact that’s essentially the traditional anarchist ideal. That’s what was realized the only time for about a year in Spain in 1936 before it was crushed by outside forces, in fact all outside forces, Stalinist Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussolini’s fascism and the Western democracies cooperated in crushing it. They were all afraid of it.”
• To Hitler, America was both the enemy and a role model, inspiring in its imperial seizure of great territories by force, its use of slave labor, its eradication of native populations.
• NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, made clear in a speech to the Brookings Institution in Washington in 2008 that western interests in Afghanistan went well beyond good governance to the strategic interest in having a permanent military presence in a state that borders central Asia, China, Iran and Pakistan.
• CIA Special Collections of documents; “Instances Of the Use of US Armed Forces Abroad, 1798 – 2010“
• Michael Collon: “Let’s replace the word ‘democratic’ by ‘with us’, and the word ‘terrorist’ by ‘against us’.”
• Ron Paul: “Those who caution that leaving Iraq would be a disaster are the same ones who promised the conflict would be a ‘cake-walk’.”
• Spc. Alex Horton, 22, writing in a blog while a marine in Iraq in 2007: “In the future, I want my children to grow up with the belief that what I did here was wrong, in a society that doesn’t deem that idea unpatriotic.”
• Henry Kissinger in a 1970 memo to Nixon: “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on –– and even precedent value for –– other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.”
• Paul Craig Roberts: “International polls show that the rest of the world regard the US and Israel as the greatest dangers to world peace. Americans claim that they are fighting wars against terrorism, but it is US and Israeli terrorism that worries everyone else.”
• Chris Hedges: “If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a spell in a fundamentalist ‘madrassa,’ or religious school, Homeland Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return. But if you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon on MySpace.”
• “The US has never had a ‘foreign policy’ but a fanatical domestic policy which, once it had bled through to the Pacific, sought new hosts on which to feed.” Patrick Wilkinson
• C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956): “The only seriously accepted plan for ‘peace’ is a fully loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.”
• The United States goes around the world sprinkling democracy dust.
• Iran, the latest threat to life as we know it.
• “Iran hit back at US allegations that it has failed to crack down on fugitive al-Qaeda members, calling on Washington to apologize to the world for its own past support of the network. ‘The Americans should present a full apology to the international community for the support they gave to al-Qaeda,’ said the foreign ministry, referring to a period in the 1980s when millions of dollars of covert US aid was channeled — through the Pakistani secret service — to Islamist groups battling the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.” (Agence France Presse, June 2, 2003)
• Tom Hayden: They believe that the exposure of the generals to a civilian academic atmosphere may humanize the process of war-making, not worrying that the actual danger may be the militarizing of the university.
• Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in his 2007 book, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World”: “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.”

  After an avalanche of commentary, Greenspan backpedaled and obfuscated in his comments. He insisted he was talking about “oil security” and “the global economy”. But this was just proving his own point that mentioning oil as a motivation for war is “politically inconvenient”. It’s no way to get young men to kill other young men who’ve never done them any harm.

• The American people have no more authentic control over their government than do people in countries that we call dictatorships, particularly on issues of foreign policy.

Notes

1. ^↩
2. Associated Press, September 21, 2006 ^↩
3. Common Dreams, August 20, 2010 ^↩
4. Washington Post, March 4, 2011^↩
5. Washington Times, February 24, 2011; The Telegraph (London), March 25, 2011; Alexander Cockburn, “Libya, Oh What a Stupid War; Fukushima, Cover-Up Amid Catastrophe”; “Al Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq” (PDF), Combating Terrorism Center, US Military Academy, West Point, NY, December 2007 ^↩
6. Associated Press, April 20, 2011 ^↩
7. Gaddafi’s history of supporting terrorism, real and alleged: William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 48 ^↩
8. The Guardian (London), June 25, 2007  ^↩
9. Reuters news agency, April 29, 2011 ^↩
10. Washington Post, April 1, 2011 ^↩
11. Washington Post, April 6, 2011

My Answers To A University Student

I often receive inquiries from college and university students. Contrary to the thinking of most older adults, I find a sizable number of today’s youth much more constitutionally aware than are their parents. I’ve traveled all over America and spoken to thousands of high school and college age young people. My observation is this: the youth of America have not rejected the message of liberty and constitutional government; they haven’t HEARD the message of liberty and constitutional government. When they do hear it, as often as not, they embrace the message enthusiastically. If the Ron Paul Revolution of 2008 proved anything, it proved that!

Recently, a student from a prestigious university wrote me with a short list of questions for a thesis he is writing, which is entitled, “The Effect of the Evangelical Movement on the 2008 Presidential Election.” He reads my columns and was motivated to ask me to contribute to his report. I am using today’s column to answer his questions.

Question: “What, in your opinion, is the best way for the government and religious organizations to interact?”

Answer: The best way for government and religious institutions to interact is the same way that government and virtually all institutions should interact: by the government staying the heck out of their business!

Unfortunately, government at every level has grown into a monstrous Nanny State that intimidates, coerces, and almost controls practically every institution and organization (public and private) in America. The number of government bureaucracies and enforcement agencies at the local, State, and federal levels is so gargantuan that it is impossible to accurately keep track of them all. And it seems each agency and department’s sole job is to justify its own existence by harassing, intimidating, and manipulating individuals and institutions. Nothing is different regarding religious institutions. In order to stay on the smiley side of government (especially the IRS), religious institutions have largely become the sheepish slaves of the state.

Question: “How do you think the government keeps religious organizations from affecting policy?”

Answer: I KNOW how the government keeps religious organizations from affecting policy: through the IRS 501(c)(3) non-profit corporate tax-exempt status that practically every church in America submits to.

The now infamous 501(c)(3) section of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) goes back to 1936 (the seeds of this Venus Fly Trap date back to 1872). But then-Senator Lyndon Johnson was the Dr. Frankenstein who, in 1954, unleashed this monster upon America. His motivation was: he did not like the way pastors and churches were opposing his liberal agenda, and he wanted to use the power of law to silence them. He, therefore, introduced verbiage to the IRC that churches were prohibited from influencing political legislation and supporting political campaigns, or risk losing their tax-exempt status.

Over time, fear of offending the 501(c)(3) criteria of the IRC has been used to intimidate pastors and church leaders to the point that, for all intents and purposes, they are “scared silly” to try and affect meaningful change to government policy. The result: 300,000 evangelical churches are almost totally impotent to impact or change American culture, societal conditions, or the political landscape.

Question: “Do you think an evangelical Christian organization should have a political extension (i.e. lobbyists) of itself on Capitol Hill?”

Answer: There are numerous organizations associated with the “Religious Right” that have political lobbyists on Capitol Hill. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. The problem comes when the organization and lobbyists themselves become part of the “good old boy” network that seems to be intricately associated with cavorting with the power elite. What normally happens is, in order to maintain the organization’s “seat at the table,” it quickly compromises the principles that originally created it. And pretty soon, instead of influencing Capitol Hill, the organization finds itself influenced and manipulated by Capitol Hill. In essence, that is the sordid story of how the Religious Right, which was so powerful back in the 1980s, has become the impotent entity that we see today.

Question: “How do you think Christians use their faith to make political decisions?”

Answer: Most Christians would have you believe that their faith is very instrumental in making their political decisions. However, just the opposite is true: the average Christian’s politics is void of any genuine Christian faith. It seems, therefore, most Christians base their political decisions on the principles of “pragmatism,” choosing the “lesser of two evils,” or based wholly on political partisanship. The last two Presidential elections are prime examples of this unfortunate reality.

Evangelical Christians overwhelmingly supported George W. Bush in his reelection bid in 2004, despite Bush’s egregious departure from conservative, constitutionalist principles throughout his first administration. They, then, continued to blindly support Bush throughout his second administration as he continued to promote globalist, big government policies and agendas.

During the election of 2008, Christians supported big government CFR candidate John McCain, even though McCain has a career track record of betrayal to true conservative principles. Notable Christian leaders such as Focus on the Family’s James Dobson supported McCain, even after publicly promising to “never” support him.

Over and over, election after election, Christians prove that they will not let their Christianity get in the way of their politics.

Question: “How did evangelicals and conservatives have an effect on the 2008 presidential election?”

Answer: As noted above, Christian conservatives, on the whole, supported John McCain, even though they knew he would never be faithful to conservative principles. However, in spite of the support of evangelical leaders, many grassroots conservatives and constitutionalists could not vote for McCain in good conscience. For example, many Ron Paul conservatives voted for third party candidates such as Bob Barr or myself, or didn’t vote at all. And this was true of many conservative independents, as well. As a result, Barack Obama won handily.

Question: “Why do evangelicals typically align themselves with the Republican Party?”

Answer: I was the Executive Director of the Florida Moral Majority back in the 1980s, and I witnessed the marriage between the GOP and Christian conservatives up close. Without a doubt, the two terms of President Ronald Reagan is the single biggest reason why Christian conservatives are so enamored with the Republican Party today. Before Reagan, the GOP was seen (properly) as a political extension of Big Business. The Democrat Party was seen (properly) as a political extension of Big Labor. Christians were critical of both parties and approached each candidate on a more individual and objective basis. Example: without a doubt, Christian conservatives elected Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976. Ronald Reagan changed all that. He obtained almost god-like status in the thinking of many evangelicals. Therefore, ever since Reagan, GOP stands for “God’s Own Party” in the minds of many evangelicals. As a result, no matter how liberal, socialist, or globalist a Republican Presidential nominee might be now, most evangelicals will support him or her, simply because there is an “R” behind the name. Mark it down: if the GOP nominates the big government globalist chameleon and serial adulterer Newt Gingrich as its Presidential candidate in 2012, most evangelicals will support him.

Question: “In your opinion, do you think it’s wrong for clergy to endorse politicians from the pulpit, or in another leading function within the congregation?”

Answer: Absolutely not! A clergyman did not lose his American citizenship when he was ordained to the ministry. Again, this goes back to Johnson’s 501(c)(3) monstrosity. Pastors have been duped and intimidated into believing that they have no right to express their personal opinions or convictions from the pulpit. This is historical and constitutional balderdash!

Can one imagine colonial preachers John Leland, Jonas Clark, or John Witherspoon being told by any State official what he could or could not say, or what his church could or could not do, or whom he could or could not support? What a joke! These men explained, extolled, extrapolated, and engrained the Biblical Natural Law principles of liberty so deeply into the minds and hearts of their congregants, that when the time came, those Christian patriots stood on Lexington Green and Concord Bridge and fired that shot heard ’round the world.

Question: “Is there a way that a church can become both a spiritual and political organization? If so, which path do you think is best?”

Answer: Churches are not political institutions; they should never desire to be. However, they are promoters of truth. And truth is truth, whether it finds itself in the political arena or any other arena. Pastors and churches are obligated to be faithful to the truth, and let the chips fall where they may! The problem is, many pastors and churches have purposely avoided truth when it butts up against politics. Their fear of the IRS, or of being considered “politically incorrect,” or of, perhaps, offending church members has made cowards out of many of them. And as a result, our country is in the calamitous condition that we see today.

The Rule of Gold after the Financial Collapse

“You can own silver and gold but never any fiat currency issued by someone else” ~ Peter Cajander

In a secular world, the operative “Golden Rule” is “He Who Has the Gold Makes the Rules”. The condition of the global financial banking system is untenable. The aggregate amount of debt worldwide is anyone’s guess. The introduction of derivatives and counter claims pushes the chain of obligations into the unknown. All that is left is for central banks to create mountains of uninterrupted counterfeit money to roll over and delay the inevitable. The IMF chart of World Currency Reserve is a skyrocket line to oblivion. It does not reflect a healthy stockpile of treasure, but certainly manifests a new debt machine running to infinity. The Bullion Vault explains this reality in the following manner.

“Sure, the Fed can create money. But it can’t create credit (from the Latin credere, “to trust, have faith”). And it sure as hell can’t let America’s outstanding debts – both private and public – simply get written off now, neither at home nor abroad. Not after all that crashing and banging in ER from 2007-09.

So never mind the record-large cash pile sitting at non-financial corporates. Never mind that their problem is too much debt, not the $1.8 trillion in cash they’ve already got. Never mind the 50-fold growth since 2007 to $1 trillion in US banks’ cash holdings either. Again, debt is their problem – not a lack of money – but it doesn’t matter. New money is the only fix Dr. Ben now has to hand (he’s all out of interest-rate cuts). So those foreign reserves, UScorporates and domestic banks already drowning in money will get flooded with more”.

Back in 1966 Alan Greenspan wrote in The Objectivist, Gold and Economic Freedom.

“Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy’s tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government’s promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets”.

Since the gold standard was abandoned worldwide, the banksters have run wild. So who owns all the gold? Part of the answer is that the official sector holds much less, than one might think.

Wealth Daily concurs with the Dollar Daze list of largest holders of bullion – United States, Germany, International Monetary Fund, Italy, France, SPDR Gold Shares, China, Switzerland, Japan and Netherland, rank as the top ten.

“Central banks and multinational organizations (such as the International Monetary Fund) currently hold just under one-fifth of global above-ground stocks of gold as reserve assets (amounting to around 30,500 tonnes, dispersed across 110 organisations). On average, governments hold around 10% of their official reserves as gold, although the proportion varies country-by-country”.

So how much gold is there above ground?

Total 165,600 metric tons above ground stock

1 metric tonne = 32,150.746 Troy ounces

Total 5,324,163,537 Troy ounces

Price Quote at $1,424.00 per ounce

Total value in U.S. Dollars = 7 Trillion, 581 Billion, 608 Million, 876 Thousand and 688 Hundred Dollars of all gold worldwide.

 

US Mint says there is 147.3 million troy ounces of gold in Fort Knox

IMF looting of US gold reserves, Fed’s illegal manipulation of gold market     IMF-controlled central banks are allowed to report their gold certificates (paper that represents the gold that they have “leased out” or dishoarded) in the same column on their balance sheets where the gold reserves themselves are reported.

What is never disclosed in official statistics of wealth ownership are the names of the true underworld bosses of the global controllers. The shadow manipulators conceal the extent of their money hordes. Most public lists painstakingly omit the master criminals. Their plan is to buy real assets with counterfeit notes obtained through illicit profits from rigged markets and phony financial derivative instruments.

Since 1999, the bulk of sales from central banks have been regulated by the Central Bank Gold Agreement/CBGAswhich have stabilised sales from 15 of the world’s biggest holders of gold. Significantly, gold sales from official sector sources have been diminishing in recent years. Net central bank sales amounted to just 41 tonnes in 2009.

 

A most revealing fact is that central banks and governments do not possess the bulk of gold supplies. The World Gold Council publishes an astounding pie chart, 83% of above ground stocks are in the hands of industry, investment and jewelry concerns. This overwhelming percentage points to an alternative to the fiat paper debt created banking tyranny.Only individual ownership of gold, directly in your own possession can preserve any store of value when the next Draconian level of the Totalitarian Collectivism system is imposed after the financial meltdown hits in earnest.

A Global Call for Sharing and Justice

In a dramatic series of events since late 2010, a new and intensified phase of public protest has erupted across both wealthy and poor regions of the world. Right across Europe, harsh programs of financial austerity have led to escalating protests and mass public campaigns; in the Middle East and North Africa, a revolutionary wave of civil unrest is gripping the international media; and less reported are countless smaller anti-government demonstrations taking place across diverse continents. As commentators struggle to keep up with the rapid unfolding of these events, it is worthwhile to reflect on the basic connections between these varied struggles, and to pose a simple question: are we witnessing the birth of a truly international public voice calling for wealth redistribution and wholesale political reform?

The pan-European protests were sparked by government plans to cut public spending, slash welfare benefits and freeze pay in response to economic recession and the debt crisis. With European Union finance ministers agreeing rules that would punish countries that fail to bring their debts under control, a new austerity drive swept across the 16-nation eurozone as governments struggled to trim their huge budget deficits. Both the German and UK coalition governments approved their biggest austerity plans since World War II; Italy and Spain joined Europe’s austerity club with massive cuts to public services; France announced its controversial plans to cut spending and raise its retirement and pension ages; while the most debt-stricken countries in the EU – Portugal, Greece and the Irish Republic – committed to draconian austerity packages to please international investors, not to mention the ongoing budget cuts in various other EU countries such as Hungary, Latvia, Romania and the Netherlands.

What’s most striking about the public outcry that followed is not only the vast scale of civic protests, but the sense that a majority of European people believe that government austerity measures are unnecessary and deeply unjust. On 29th September 2010, the European Trades Union Confederation (ETUC) organised coordinated demonstrations in European cities, with hundreds of thousands of union members across the region amassing under the banner ‘No to Austerity’. Countless new campaign groups and social movements have also highlighted the distorted priorities of governments who cut public spending as opposed to targeting the excesses of big corporations, bankers and international investors. This included the voices ofleading economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Christopher Pissarides who argued that austerity measures go in exactly the wrong direction, and are more likely to result in lower economic growth, worsening unemployment and protracted recession. In the words of Attac, the French campaign group who stood by the anti-austerity protesters across Europe: “The radical austerity policies now demanded by the EU are a solution in the interest of the wealthy and the financial actors alone. EU governments intend to implement austerity policies everywhere. …Their policies can only deepen social inequalities and the present crisis, while making the economic situation in Greece and the rest of the EU even worse.”

Out of the scores of anti-cuts groups still springing up at a local and national level across Europe, one that has captured the public imagination more than most is UK Uncut. In late October 2010, a group of London-based young activists thought up an ingenious way of highlighting an alternative to the British governments harsh austerity measures. Rather than simply protesting against public spending cuts, they focused upon the tax-avoidance strategies of rich individuals and big corporations. In a series of direct action protests organised spontaneously through the internet, the informal group has mobilised local protests and temporarily closed down more than a hundred stores in towns and cities across the country. The message of an alternative to austerity measures was brilliantly straight-forward: if the government clamped down on corporate tax avoidance, it would greatly reduce the need for public spending cuts. As the fastest-growing protest movement in the UK, its focus is now shifting to the greed and reckless practices of high street banks. And it’s now emerged that similar protests are being organised in North America under the banner US Uncut, with more than 30  demonstrations planned for 26 February – the date of UK Uncut’s second “day of action” against the banks.

No to Austerity and Ideology

Common to all the protests in Europe is a recognition of the pro-market ideology that is driving government policies to the detriment of the public good. Since the world stock market crash of 2008, it is increasingly evident that a number of governments are using the economic crisis as an excuse to re-shape the economy in the interests of business. In the UK, for example, George Monbiot recently wrote an article in the Guardian showing how the Chancellor of the Exchequer plans to allow money that has passed through tax havens to remain untaxed when it reaches the UK, accompanied by a rapid reduction in the official rate of corporation tax – the lowest rate of any major Western economy. At the same time, the British government is slashing social benefits and public-sector jobs, cutting budgets for government departments, transferring the onus for creating new jobs onto the private sector, and incrementally privatising the National Health Service and state education (with an attempt to privatise thousands of hectares of England’s national forests being recently defeated in Parliament). There is no shortage of commentary in the UK pointing out that such policies are ideologically-driven, opportunistic while the country is on the brink of bankruptcy, and even wider in scope than Margaret Thatcher’s swingeing program to cut government presence in the economy during the 1980s.

Meanwhile, Greece’s 110 bn euro rescue package was agreed on the back of a huge austerity drive, civil service and pension cuts, the easing of restrictions on private-sector layoffs, and a large privatisation and structural adjustment programme that is geared more to saving European banks than protecting the livelihoods of the Greek public. The Irish Republic is suffering a comparable fate in return for a joint EU-IMF bailout package worth 85 bn euros. Alongside the harshest tax hikes and budget cuts in the nation’s history, the terms of the bailout stipulate that Ireland must get its budget deficit to 3 percent of GDP by 2015 – promising further budget cuts year-on-year regardless of the effect on jobs, welfare rights or the living standards of the majority. Portugal, Spain and possibly Belgium are all lined up for similar treatment. The message is clear: it is not the nation’s people that must be bailed out but the financial plutocrats who hold the nation’s debt, even if this spells the destruction of the entire post-war European social welfare system.

As many analysts are now pointing out, these savage austerity packages being unleashed across Europe mirror the fate that many developing nations have faced for decades. Scores of indebted countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia have long endured the savage IMF structural adjustment programmes that Ireland, Greece and other EU countries are now suffering. A recent briefing by the Jubilee Debt Campaign (JDC) explains the similarities and differences between the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, and responses to the debt crisis in the Global South by international financial institutions since the late 1970s. Zambia, for example, made extreme cuts in government spending throughout the 1980s and 1990s under pressure from the IMF, yet the cuts failed to prevent the country’s debt from doubling while its economy plunged into recession.

A similar logic was applied to Asian countries following the financial crisis in 1998; foreign private lenders were bailed out, government spending was severely cut back, public companies were further privatised, yet the economy still continued to decline. According to JDC, a common theme is that the public face the costs, not private lenders. And not only is private debt paid for by the public, but the cut-backs in public spending by no means guarantees a reduction in national debt. In effect, ordinary people are forced to pay for the reckless behaviour and mistakes of the financial sector – a reality that is now shared and understood by citizens in both the Global North and South.

Growing gap between rich and poor

A major difference for people in the South is that there is often no guaranteed state provisions or social safety nets that exist for them in the first place. Even in those developing countries still experiencing economic prosperity, most notably in the globalisation “success stories” of India and China, rapid GDP growth is being matched by deepening inequalities and social insecurity. As we know from the World Bank’s global poverty statistics, at least 80 percent of the 1.1 billion people who live in India somehow manage to survive on less than $2 a day. In China, still 36 percent of its population survives on less than $2 a day, while the rural-urban income gap has continued to widen alongside increases in inequality of health and education outcomes. As what some call “the greatest migration in world history” continues across China, rural migrant workers arriving in industrial areas often find themselves trapped in abysmal working and living conditions, many without basic health and safety protections.

This definite growth in inequality and the lack of economic opportunity and social security that underpins it has long been a recurring theme across the world. A recent UNCTAD report that there are now twice as many low-income countries than there were 30-40 years ago, and twice as many poor people living in them. Even more indicative of this worrying trend in global inequality is the evidence that a new ‘bottom billion‘ of the world’s poor live in middle-income countries – a dramatic change from just two decades ago when the majority of the poor lived in low-income nations. A growing gulf between the rich and poor is also continuing in many high-income countries, not least in the United States where the top 20 percent of wealthy individuals own about 85 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 40 percent own very near 0 percent. As the Economist magazine is keen to point out in a special report, there is an ongoing rise in the share of income going to the very top – the highest 1 percent of earners – who constitute a global power elite or ‘superclass’ in many countries. At the other end of the scale, evidence suggests that the number of people living in relative poverty could possibly be 4 billion and rising.

This is the context in which we can better understand the sudden eruption of civil unrest across North Africa and the Middle East. Whilst much of the mainstream media focussed on the repression of public freedoms, corruption and a lack of democracy as the main cause of popular insurrection, common underlying factors also include the growing levels of inequality, ongoing hikes in the price of basic food and energy, and poor access to housing and welfare services. Whilst Mubarak left office in Egypt with a reported $70 bn dollars of stolen public money, citizens remain saddled with $30 bn of debts despite a poverty rate of 1 in 4 and a recurring food crisis. Tunisia, a regional poster child for the success of pro-market reforms, is in a similar predicament with crippling graduate unemployment rates of up to 46 percent, despite strong GDP growth. This underlying pattern of protest against social and economic deprivation alongside political repression is being repeated across Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Syria, Iran, Morocco, Oman, and a number of other countries in the region. All have been spearheaded by the countries’ youth, fuelled by social media and television, yet broadly supported by the middle class. In an unprecedented outpouring of goodwill and solidarity, these millions of people on the streets are claiming their democratic right to a fairer share of the vast wealth that their rulers have hoarded for decades.

The pan-Arab protests clearly have much in common with those reacting to austerity across Europe, as well as the millions who have mobilised in support of debt cancellation and an end to ‘economic adjustment’ in the South. In every country, the widespread outcomes of debt, austerity, poverty and inequality are the product of political choices – the consequences of a disastrous neoliberal approach to managing a nation and its finances. What we may be witnessing in the popular responses to these hardships is an emerging global consensus in favour of a fundamental reordering of government priorities. In the space of barely a few months, the rapid growth of anti-austerity demonstrations across Europe and massive anti-government protests all over the Middle East indicate the potential for public opinion to take on an international dimension. Given the determination of policymakers across the globe to continue with business as usual, the strengthening of a world public opinion in favour of a more equitable distribution of resources may constitute the first step toward meaningful reforms.

As this increasingly global call for justice unfolds across several continents, an underlying demand being voiced by protesters in different countries is the urgent need for redistribution. Calls for an end to austerity measures, more progressive taxation and the cancellation of debt in the developing world all reflect the need to redistribute wealth and political power downward. An implicit understanding common to all these demands is that governments are better able to secure basic human needs for their citizens through the provision of more effective welfare and social services. The question that remains is whether the need for redistribution can be recognised at the international level where the unequal distribution of power and resources manifests in extreme differences in living standards between the richest and poorest nations. If the case for international sharing captures the public imagination as quickly as the calls for distributive justice in individual countries, the elimination of global poverty could finally become a realistic possibility.

Illegal Immigration Crime Wave – Part 3

From An Officer’s Squad Car: Violent Third World Momentum…

The clergy and power elite used the word ‘heretic’ in the 16th century to brand anyone who spoke with an independent mind. The word ‘heretic’ shut off all discussion, debate or evolving thought. People feared being branded a ‘heretic’.

Today, the words ‘racism’ and ‘xenophobe’ are used to shut off all rational discussion on the accelerating illegal alien invasion facing America. Never mind that 20 million people stomp around our country and into our lives in ever increasingly detrimental ways.

This crisis features more illegals and specific ethnic groups pandering even greater numbers of their passage into our country to the detriment of us all. It’s now beyond dangerous for the continuation of this nation as a viable republic. Even more frightening, we are at risk as a sustainable society from the standpoint of clean air, energy, water and enough food—as we’re pushed to add 138 million more people by mid century.

Since the US media will not broach it and Congress sits twiddling its thumbs except for Tancredo, Ron Paul and Deal—much like the early history of our nation, patriots who live down in the streets of America—must awaken their fellow countrymen.

And so, a brave police officer tells it like it is. Doug Hamilton gives this report in Part III of a police officer’s story concerning the invasion of illegal aliens. “Just so you know, these incidents that I relate are from personal experience, so they are accurate,” he said. “I wish the public knew the massive problems these illegal aliens create.”

What Hamilton’s report brings to the surface is what the national media refuses to address. President Obama force feeds us into criminal chaos. The national media winks at the existence of 20 million people who illegally crossed our borders. Thus, the ‘fluff stories’ feature people who come here ‘to work for a better life’. Today, it’s not a few, it’s millions, and now, millions of us suffer—in every realm of American society.

“People like my sister, who just got her degree in social work, only get the media version or turn their blinders on,” Hamilton said. “They feel sorry for them. She will learn that she needs to feel sorry for legal Americans and the poverty this invasion is causing in the working classes. Americans can’t order a burger at McDonald’s because the cashiers can’t speak English. Then, if a person expresses his disapproval at this poor service a manager is called to inform the customer that his business is not desired because of his “racist” attitude.”

“One area that is frustrating is the lack of respect many of these illegal migrants have for members of American society,” Hamilton said. “As it is, they know there is little to fear from law enforcement officers. Because of the political stigma attached to speaking out against the numerous crimes these people commit, most administrations turn a blind eye to the growing problem of the lawless behavior these people exhibit. Yet, over the last week, most of the calls I have responded to, and arrests I have made, have been of illegal or legal immigrants.”

What officer Hamilton talks about is a general disregard for the rule of law. It is the same in the Third World. Laws are not obeyed as a natural aspect of a lack of respect for an ordered society. It’s why so many societies do not function with any kind of standards. It’s why chaos rules. It’s why people starve. It’s why for example, Mexico has no environmental laws. It’s why so much of Mexico suffers human degradation. It’s also why law enforcement in Mexico and Columbia is done without restraint or protocol. It’s why gangs and lawlessness thrive.

“We have had two cases where officers were physically resisted and assaulted, forcing them to call for emergency assistance,” Hamilton said. “The first case involved an illegal migrant family from Peru. The three male cousins, all of whom had Virginia driver’s licenses, were wanted for an assault they had committed earlier. Once the responding officers attempted to make the arrest, they were fought and the sister and mother also assaulted officers. All five were arrested.

Hamilton continued, “These incidents and statements are a cause for alarm because they are not isolated. They reflect the disdain for America and American citizens that these people have. These statements typify the feeling of entitlement that has been created because of our nation’s non-existent immigration policy. An illegal immigrant has enough working knowledge of our legal system to demand a warrant, yet openly flaunts those same laws, knowing he will not be held accountable. If he is held accountable, he can claim that there was a language barrier or that the responding officers were racist. I find it interesting that we, as law enforcement officers, must obey every rule and are held accountable for every action we take, yet there is no effort to hold these criminals accountable for their actions.”

The only reason law enforcement is effective is that law-abiding citizens fear being arrested for doing something illegal. They fear speeding tickets, because they may lose their license. If their licenses are suspended, most of these people will refrain from driving or at least be cautious if they decide to again break the law.

“This is not the way illegal immigrants react to an arrest,” Hamilton said. “In fact, many of these illegals go out of their way to draw attention to themselves. Speeding, running red lights, adorning your car with illegal lights, and blasting loud music are not the actions you would expect a person that has no license to take, but it is common.”

Jon Stewart and the left

The left in America is desperate; desperate for someone who can inspire them, if not lead them to a better world; or at least make them laugh. TV star Jon Stewart is sometimes funny, especially when he doesn’t try too hard to be funny, which is not often enough. But as a political leader, or simply political educator for the left, forget it. He’s not even what I would call a genuine, committed leftist. What does he have to teach the left? He himself would certainly not want you to entertain the thought that Jon Stewart is in any way a man of the left.

He billed his October 30 rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, as the Million Moderate March. Would a person with a real desire for important progressive social and political change, i.e, a “leftist”, so ostentatiously brand himself a “moderate”? Even if by “moderate” he refers mainly to tone of voice or choice of words why is that so important? If a politician strongly supports things which you are passionate about, why should it bother you if the politician is vehement in his arguments, even angry? And if the politician is strongly against what you’re passionate about does it make you feel any better about the guy if he never raises his voice or sharply criticizes those on the other side? What kind of cause is that to commit yourself to?

Stewart in fact appears to dislike the left, perhaps strongly. In the leadup to the rally he criticized the left for various things, including calling George W. Bush a “war criminal”. Wow! How immoderate of us. Do I have to list here the 500 war crimes committed by George W. Bush? If I did so, would that make me one of what Stewart calls the “crazies”? In his talk at the rally, Stewart spoke of our “real fears” — “of terrorists, racists, Stalinists, and theocrats”. Stalinists? Where did that come from, Glenn Beck? What decade is Stewart living in? What about capitalists or the corporations? Is there no reason to fear them? Is it Stalinists who are responsible for the collapse of our jobs and homes, our economy? Writer Chris Hedges asks: “Being nice and moderate will not help. These are corporate forces that are intent on reconfiguring the United States into a system of neofeudalism. These corporate forces will not be halted by funny signs, comics dressed up like Captain America or nice words.”

Stewart also grouped together “Marxists actively subverting our constitution, racists and homophobes”. Welcome to the Jon Stewart Tea Party. In his long interview last week of President Obama on his TV show, Stewart did not mention any of America’s wars. That would have been impolite and divisive; maybe even not nice.

He billed his rally as being “for people who are politically dissatisfied but who are not ideological”. (Democracy Now, November 1, 2010) Really, Jon? You have no ideology? To those who like to tell themselves and others that they don’t have any particular ideology I say this: If you have thoughts about why the world is the way it is, why society is the way it is, why people are the way they are, what a better way would look like, and if your thoughts are fairly well organized, then that’s your ideology, even if it’s not wholly conscious as such. Better to organize those thoughts as best you can, become very conscious of them, and then consciously avoid getting involved with individuals or political movements who have an incompatible ideology. It’s like a very bad marriage.

America’s press corps(e)

“Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel,” said Rabbi Ovadia Yosef in a sermon in Israel on October 16. Rabbi Yosef is the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel and the founder and spiritual leader of the Shas Party, one of the three major components of the current Israeli government. “Why are gentiles needed?” he continued. “They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi [master] and eat,” he said to some laughter.

Pretty shocking, right? Apparently not shocking enough for the free and independent American mainstream media. Not one daily newspaper has picked it up. Not one radio or TV station. Neither have the two leading US news agencies, Associated Press and United Press International, which usually pick up anything at all newsworthy. And the words of course did not cross the lips of any American politician or State Department official. Rabbi Yosef’s words were reported in English only by the Jewish Telegraph Agency, a US-based news service (October 18), and then picked up by a few relatively obscure news agencies or progressive websites. We can all imagine the news coverage if someone like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said something like “Jews have no place in the world but to serve Islam”.

On October 8, 2001, the second day of the US bombing of Afghanistan, the transmitters for the Taliban government’s Radio Shari were bombed and shortly after this the US bombed some 20 regional radio sites. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defended the targeting of these facilities, saying: “Naturally, they cannot be considered to be free media outlets. They are mouthpieces of the Taliban and those harboring terrorists.” ¹

In 1999, during the US/NATO 78-day bombing of the former Yugoslavia, state-owned Radio Television Serbia (RTS) was targeted because it was broadcasting things which the United States and NATO did not like (like how much horror the bombing was causing). The bombs took the lives of many of the station’s staff, and both legs of one of the survivors, which had to be amputated to free him from the wreckage. ² UK Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters that the bombing was “entirely justified” for the station was “part of the apparatus of dictatorship and power of Milosevic”. ³Threatening more such attacks on Serbian media, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon declared a few hours after the bombing: “Stay tuned. It is not difficult to track down where TV signals emanate from.” ⁴

Accordingly, and with all due forethought, I call for the bombing of the leading members of the United States mainstream media — from the New York Times to CNN, from NPR to Fox News — for, naturally, they cannot be considered to be free media outlets, and are part of the apparatus of imperialism and power of the United States.

Anti-communism 101: Hijacking history

We like to think of death as the time for truth. No matter how much the deceased may have lived a lie, when he goes to meet his presumed maker the real, sordid facts of his life will out. Or at least they should; the obituary being the final chance to set the record straight. But obituaries very seldom perform this function, certainly not obituaries of those who played an important role in American foreign policy; the myths surrounding foreign policy and the deceased individual’s role therein accompany him to the grave, and thence into Texas-approved American history textbooks.

In January of this year I commented in this report on the obituary of Lincoln Gordon ⁵, former ambassador to Brazil and State Department official. The obituary in the Washington Post painted him, as I put it, as a “boy wonder, intellectual shining light, distinguished leader of men, outstanding American patriot.” No mention whatsoever was made of the leading role played by Gordon in the military overthrow of a progressive Brazilian government in 1964, resulting in a very brutal dictatorship for the next 21 years. Later, Gordon blatantly lied about his role in testimony before Congress.

Now we have the death a few weeks ago of Phillips Talbot, who was appointed by President Kennedy to be Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs and later became ambassador to Greece. In 1967 the Greek military and intelligence service, both closely tied to the CIA, overthrew another progressive government, that of George Papandreou and his son, cabinet minister Andreas Papandreou. For the next seven years the Greek people suffered utterly grievous suppression and torture. Talbot’s obituary states: “Dr. Talbot was asleep in his bed while tanks rumbled through the streets of Athens and was completely surprised when Armed Forces radio announced at 6:10 a.m. that the military had taken control of the country. Dr. Talbot was adamant that the United States was impartial throughout the transition. ‘You may be assured that there has been no American involvement in or, in fact, prior knowledge of the climactic events that those residing in this country have lived through in the past couple of years,’ Dr. Talbot told the New York Times in 1969 shortly before he returned home.” ⁶

Andreas Papandreou had been arrested at the time of the coup and held in prison for eight months. Shortly after his release, he and his wife Margaret visited Ambassador Talbot in Athens. Papandreou later related the following:

I asked Talbot whether America could have intervened the night of the coup, to prevent the death of democracy in Greece. He denied that they could have done anything about it. Then Margaret asked a critical question: What if the coup had been a Communist or a Leftist coup? Talbot answered without hesitation. Then, of course, they would have intervened, and they would have crushed the coup. ⁷

In November 1999, during a visit to Greece, President Bill Clinton was moved to declare:

When the junta took over in 1967 here the United States allowed its interests in prosecuting the cold war to prevail over its interest — I should say its obligation — to support democracy, which was, after all, the cause for which we fought the cold war.(sic) It is important that we acknowledge that. ⁸

Clinton’s surprising admission prompted the retired Phillips Talbot to write to the New York Times: “With all due respect to President Clinton, he is wrong to imply that the United States supported the Greek coup in 1967. The coup was the product of Greek political rivalries and was contrary to American interests in every respect. … Some Greeks have asserted that the United States could have restored a civilian government. In fact, we had neither the right nor the means to overturn the junta, bad as it was.” ⁹

Or, as Bart Simpson would put it: “I didn’t do it, no one saw me do it, you can’t prove anything!”

After reading Talbot’s letter in the Times in 1999 I wrote to him at his New York address reminding him of what Andreas Papandreou had reported on this very subject. I received no reply.

The cases of Brazil and Greece were of course just two of many leftist governments overthrown, as well as revolutionary movements suppressed, by the United States during the Cold War on the grounds that America had a moral right and obligation to defeat the evil of Soviet communism that was — we were told — instigating these forces. It was always a myth. Bolshevism and Western liberalism were united in their opposition to popular revolution. Russia was a country with a revolutionary past, not a revolutionary present. Even in Cuba, the Soviets were always a little embarrassed by the Castro-Guevara radical fervor. Stalin would have had such men imprisoned. The Cold War was not actually a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was a struggle between the United States and the Third World. What there was, was people all over the Third World fighting for economic and political changes against US-supported repressive regimes, or setting up their own progressive governments. These acts of self-determination didn’t coincide with the needs of the American power elite, and so the United States moved to crush those governments and movements even though the Soviet Union was playing virtually no role at all in the scenarios. It is remarkable the number of people who make fun of conspiracy theories but who accept without question the existence of an International Communist Conspiracy. ¹⁰

The United States’ annual self-imposed humiliation

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah”. We don’t hear that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone (not including abstentions), this year being the strongest condemnation yet of Washington’s policy:

Year	Votes (Yes-No)	No Votes
1992	59-2	US, Israel
1993	88-4	US, Israel, Albania, Paraguay
1994	101-2	US, Israel
1995	117-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1996	138-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1997	143-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1998	157-2	US, Israel
1999	155-2	US, Israel
2000	167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2001	167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2002	173-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2003	179-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2004	179-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2005	182-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2006	183-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2007	184-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2008	185-3	US, Israel, Palau
2009	187-3	US, Israel, Palau
2010	187-2	US, Israel

Is the United States foreign policy establishment capable of being embarrassed?

Each fall, however, the UN vote is a welcome reminder that the world has not completely lost its senses and that the American empire does notcompletely control the opinion of other governments.

How it began: On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” ¹¹ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo against its eternally-declared enemy.

CovertAction Quarterly

From 1978 to 2005 one of the leading progressive print (Remember that word?) magazines in the world, dealing primarily with US foreign policy, the CIA/NSA/FBI, repression at home and abroad, and corporate crime. The magazine, initially called CovertAction Information Bulletin, regularly published the names and career histories around the globe of undercover CIA officers derived from careful research of open, public sources. This so infuriated the powers-that-be that Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 1982, which made the practice of revealing the name of an undercover officer illegal under US law. The law was a virtual bill of attainder — it is unconstitutional for Congress to enact legislation directed at a specific individual or organization. At the time, members of the House Intelligence Committee were telling journalists and lawyers that the legislation was aimed only at CovertAction Information Bulletin and its editors, but this was always said off the record and no one would confirm it on the record; although during the House debate Congressman William Young (R.-FL) declared: “What we’re after today are the Philip Agees of the world.”¹² Ironically, the law became the basis for the prosecution of George W. Bush special counsel Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, who outed CIA employee Valerie Plame.

Amongst the magazine’s numerous contributors were Philip Agee, John Stockwell, Ralph McGehee, Ellen Ray, William Schaap, Louis Wolf, Michael Parenti, Noam Chomsky, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Diana Johnstone, Sean Gervasi, Philip Wheaton, Immanuel Wallerstein, Kathy Kelly, Tony Benn, Ramsey Clark, David MacMichael, Edward Herman, William Blum (Whatever happened to him?), Michel Chossudovsky, Marjorie Cohn, James Petras, Gregory Elich, and many other prominent progressive writers.

A recent Washington Post story states: “The private papers of Philip Agee, the disaffected CIA operative whose unauthorized publication of agency secrets 35 years ago was arguably far more damaging than anything WikiLeaks has produced, have been obtained by New York University, which plans to make them public next spring.” ¹³

A partial Table of Contents for each of the issues can be found here.

Individual copies or the entire set of 78 issues (mostly original copies and about a dozen in quality photocopy format) are available for purchase: $3.00 per issue, 25 copies for $65.00, 50 for $115, or all 78 for $165, including postage in the United States. To place an order, write:

Louis Wolf
1500 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Room 732
Washington, DC 20005

… or e-mail 

Notes

1. Index on Censorship, the UK’s leading organization promoting freedom of expression, October 18, 2001 ^↩
2. The Independent (London), April 24, 1999, p.1 ^↩
3. Bristol (UK) Evening Post, April 24, 1999 ^↩
4. The Guardian (London), April 24, 1999 ^↩
5. Anti-Empire Report, January 2010 ^↩
6. Washington Post, October 7, 2010 ^↩
7. Andreas Papandreou, Democracy at Gunpoint: The Greek Front (1970), p.294. ^↩
8. New York Times, November 21, 1999 ^↩
9. New York Times, November 23, 1999 ^↩
10. See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II for details of the Cold War ^↩
11. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba (1991), p.885 ^↩
12. Wikipedia: Intelligence Identities Protection Act ^↩
13. Washington Post online, October 26, 2010, “Spytalk” by Jeff Stein ^↩

Know Nothing – The Reality of the American Experience

William Kristol attacked populist Republicans for not recognizing the danger of “turning the GOP into an anti-immigration, Know-Nothing party.”

Oh, remember those “good old days“. Discrimination and ethnic exclusion was the norm and a political party stood for “red meat” self-interest. The catcalls today ring with a “PC” note, how dare anyone even allude that restricting immigration can be part of open debate? The memory of the American Republican Party fades into vagueness of ignorance, knowing history is not a requirement of the modern Know Nothings. If you are one of these marginal historians, how can you be expected to appreciate the anti-immigrant sentiment that existed over a century and half ago?

Just how rewarding has, the long corrosive experiment of open border been to the average family and taxpayer! Ask the discerning author, Frosty Wooldridge, who is an unambiguous source of the topic. Debating the merits is long over for most people, the overwhelming consensus is build a fence high enough that ladders won’t reach. Ignoring and dismissing popular outrage are the underlying lessons the caretakers of the corporate/state smear in your face.

States’ Rights are anathema on the Georgetown salon circuit. The Tenth Amendment is a curse word among proponents that claim each additional abuse is fostered for the good of the children.

Know-Nothing members back in the mid 19th century did not suffer with this infliction. That is the reason they are so maligned in the history books, written by ivory tower cosmopolite thinkers. The will of the masses is repugnant to the superior vision of the masters of the universe. State legislatures stack up no better.

The State Sovereignty Movement is a response to Federal Government omnipresence. Dave Nalle writes,

“You may not have heard much about it, but there’s a quiet movement afoot to reassert state sovereignty and stop the uncontrolled expansion of federal government power. Almost half of the state legislatures are considering or have representatives preparing to introduce resolutions which reassert the principles of the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution and the idea that federal power is strictly limited to specific areas detailed in the Constitution and that all other governmental authority rests with the states.

The founding fathers believed in a balance between state and federal power. This state sovereignty movement clearly arises from the belief that the balance of power has tilted too far and for too long in the direction of the federal government and that it’s time to restore that lose balance.

The emergence of this movement is a hopeful sign of the people asserting their rights and the rights of the states and finally crying “enough” to runaway government. With the threat of increasingly out of control federal spending, some of these sovereignty bills may stand a fair chance of passage in the coming year”.

A list of links to proposed legislation is found on InfoWars.com.

Is it realistic that enacting State Sovereignty laws can succeed, when the obvious response from the Beltway Beast would be to ignore the attempt to exert lawful means to put a stop to federal tyranny?  And what would the Supreme “kangaroo court” Judiciary rule on such a basic constitutional precept? Are you a modern day know nothing, or do you understand the unmistakable answer to this question? Most are unable to make such a leap.

If reeling in the central government through the State legislative process seems a remote prospect, there must be other alternatives. Nullification is another approach that is getting populace support. “When a state ‘nullifies’ a federal law, it is proclaiming that the law in question is void and inoperative, or ‘non-effective,’ within the boundaries of that state; or, in other words, not a law as far as that state is concerned”.

Nullify Now! is a multi-city event tour focused on education and activism on a state level to say NO to unconstitutional federal “laws” – which, in reality, are not laws at all. The author of the book named simply, Nullification, firebrand Tom Woods makes a reasoned and passionate argument. Judge for yourself the logic in this .

Mr. Woods’ founding in Austrian Economics alone qualifies him to be on a homeland watch list, so adding the sacrilege of federal disobedience to his crimes and misdemeanors, surely warrants his burning at the stake.

Hence, the nullification method is a risky venture, what about calling a Constitutional Convention.

Philip Klein, in the American Spector, states, “Under Article V of the Constitution, “Congress… on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which… shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States.”

Now that’s an option that places the entire federal octopus at risk of revamping, or does it?

The reality of calling a convention is the practical consequence that the entire U.S. Constitution could be amended out of existence. Held bare and stripped of intended Bill of Right protections results in a naked corpse of original substance. Just think about all the political elites and careerists that would kill to be a delegate at the craving up of the remains of the Republic.

The sensible warning of the John Birch Society makes a clear argument against the Barnett approach. Watch the video for grounding in political acumen.

“On April 23 the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown University, “The Case for a Federalism Amendment: How the Tea Partiers can make Washington pay attention.” In this article, Barnett correctly observed that the Tenth Amendment “sovereignty resolutions,” under consideration by over half the states this year, are not likely to have the slightest impact on the federal courts. From this reasonable observation, Barnett proceeded to assert that “state legislatures have a real power under the Constitution by which to resist the growth of federal power: They can petition Congress for a convention to propose amendments to the Constitution.”

Barnett then went on to admit that “An amendments convention is feared because its scope cannot be limited in advance.” However, at this point he advocated a dangerous course. He proposed that the “tea-party enthusiasts” adopt the project of getting his Federalism Amendment added to the Constitution and also adopt his strategy of getting enough state legislatures to apply to Congress to call a constitutional convention, so that Congress becomes scared of the prospect of a con-con and agrees to endorse his amendment and present it to the states for ratification”.

After all these dead end options, what is left for a citizen to choose?

Enter the wisdom of the Know Nothings. Ridding the nation of heretical religious elements (secular humanism) and stopping “foreign” influences (Zionism) from destroying the essence of the nation, a proactive restoration of founding principles constitutes the best hope to establish a genuine NATIVISM.

For too long people fear being labeled as malcontents, bigots or anti-Semitics for speaking out about the real reasons why the Republic is in shambles. Secrecy does not cut it. Fifth Column traitors have hijacked our government. Safety concerns are pale in comparison to the enemy within. Catholic immigrants did not create the Federal Reserve. Destructive immigration is a symptom of the fatal disease that eagerly embraces the globalism of mass destruction.

A better name to adopt is that “we know too much” and we will no longer look the other way and acquiesce. We know that it is not an accident that despotism is the absolute objective of the ruling class.

The actual know nothings no longer are keeping secrets; they are passing laws to imprison an entire society. The “waving the bloody shirt” now is wrapped in the filth from the soiled treason of Government First storm troopers, working the system to eliminate patriotic citizens from their wealth, liberty and ultimately their lives.

Battalions of lawyers scorch the earth as Sherman pillaged Georgia. Legions of bureaucrats administer carpetbag dictates so that the slaves stay in line. The banksters steal the wealth and build more plantations, as they pollute the drinking water and fix the price of cotton. The federal master will not allow peaceful secession. State sovereignty conflicts with federal supremacy. If a dictatorial government promotes overseas drone extermination, just imagine how much more effective domestic slaughter would be.

What remnants left of constitutional law, a new constitutional convention will just supplant the “con job” coerced upon the States during the fraudulent 1787-1790 ratification process. Sorry folks, the system provides no resolution without the abolishment of the political culture that allows power elites control of their created federal monster.

As long as the public tolerates tyranny, claims they know nothing of such abuses, or refuses to acknowledge that the enemy of the nation is the STATE itself, nothing will improve. The only faint hope for a Nativist country is a renaissance of traditional American values and a repudiation of federal government allegiance. This kind of revolt is the best kind of nullification and secession, as the best path back, to States’ Rights.

Mind Control Theories and Techniques used by Mass Media

From: The Vigilant Citizen…

Mass media is the most powerful tool used by the ruling class to manipulate the masses. It shapes and molds opinions and attitudes and defines what is normal and acceptable. This article looks at the workings of mass media through the theories of its major thinkers, its power structure and the techniques it uses, in order to understand its true role in society.

Image source deesillustration.com

Most of the articles on this site discuss occult symbolism found in objects of popular culture. From these articles arise many legitimate questions relating to the purpose of those symbols and the motivations of those who place them there, but it is impossible for me to provide satisfactory answers to these questions without mentioning many other concepts and facts. I’ve therefore decided to write this article to supply the theoretical and methodological background of the analyzes presented on this site as well as introducing the main scholars of the field of mass communications. Some people read my articles and think I’m saying “Lady Gaga wants to control our minds”. That is not the case. She is simply a small part of the huge system that is the mass media.

Programming Through Mass Media

Mass media are media forms designed to reach the largest audience possible. They include television, movies, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, records, video games and the internet. Many studies have been conducted in the past century to measure the effects of mass media on the population in order to discover the best techniques to influence it. From those studies emerged the science of Communications, which is used in marketing, public relations and politics. Mass communication is a necessary tool the insure the functionality of a large democracy; it is also a necessary tool for a dictatorship. It all depends on its usage.

In the 1958 preface for A Brave New World, Aldous Huxley paints a rather grim portrait of society. He believes it is controlled by an “impersonal force”, a ruling elite, which manipulates the population using various methods.

“Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses.”
– Aldous Huxley, Preface to A Brave New World

His bleak outlook is not a simple hypothesis or a paranoid delusion. It is a documented fact, present in the world’s most important studies on mass media. Here are some of them:

Elite Thinkers

Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann, an American intellectual, writer and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner brought forth one of the first works concerning the usage of mass media in America. In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann compared the masses to a “great beast” and a “bewildered herd” that needed to be guided by a governing class. He described the ruling elite as “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality.” This class is composed of experts, specialists and bureaucrats. According to Lippmann, the experts, who often are referred to as “elites,” are to be a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the “omnicompetent citizen.” The trampling and roaring “bewildered herd” has its function: to be “the interested spectators of action,” i.e. not participants. Participation is the duty of “the responsible man”, which is not the regular citizen.

Mass media and propaganda are therefore tools that must be used by the elite to rule the public without physical coercion. One important concept presented by Lippmann is the “manufacture of consent”, which is, in short, the manipulation of public opinion to accept the elite’s agenda. It is Lippmann’s opinion that the general public is not qualified to reason and to decide on important issues. It is therefore important for the elite to decide ”for its own good” and then sell those decisions to the masses.

“That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. . . . as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. . . . Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.”
–Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

It might be interesting to note that Lippmann is one of the founding fathers of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the most influential foreign policy think tank in the world. This fact should give you a small hint of the mind state of the elite concerning the usage of media.

“Political and economic power in the United States is concentrated in the hands of a “ruling elite” that controls most of U.S.-based multinational corporations, major communication media, the most influential foundations, major private universities and most public utilities. Founded in 1921, the Council of Foreign Relations is the key link between the large corporations and the federal government. It has been called a “school for statesmen” and “comes close to being an organ of what C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite – a group of men, similar in interest and outlook shaping events from invulnerable positions behind the scenes. The creation of the United Nations was a Council project, as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.”
– Steve Jacobson, Mind Control in the United States

Some current members of the CFR include David Rockefeller, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, mega-church pastor Rick Warren and the CEOs of major corporations such as CBS, Nike, Coca-Cola and Visa.

Carl Jung

Carl Jung is the founder of analytical psychology (also known an Jungian psychology), which emphasizes understanding the psyche by exploring dreams, art, mythology, religion, symbols and philosophy. The Swiss therapist is at the origin of many psychological concepts used today such as the Archetype, the Complex, the Persona, the Introvert/Extrovert and Synchronicity. He was highly influenced by the occult background of his family. Carl Gustav, his grandfather, was an avid Freemason (he was Grand Master) and Jung himself discovered that some of his ancestors were Rosicrucians. This might explain his great interest in Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology and symbolism. One of  his most important (and misunderstood) concept was the Collective Unconscious.

“My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”
– Carl Jung, The Concept of the Collective Unconscious

The collective unconscious transpires through the existence of similar symbols and mythological figures in different civilizations. Archetypal symbols seem to be embedded in our collective subconscious, and, when exposed to them, we demonstrate natural attraction and fascination. Occult symbols can therefore exert a great impact on people, even if many individuals were never personally introduced to the symbol’s esoteric meaning. Mass media thinkers, such as Edward D. Bernays, found in this concept a great way to manipulate the public’s personal and collective unconscious.

1955 Time Magazine cover featuring Carl Jung. Looks a little like Avatar, doesn’t it?

Edward  Bernays

Edward Bernays is considered to be the “father of public relations” and used concepts discovered by his uncle Sigmund Freud to manipulate the public using the subconscious. He shared Walter Lippmann’s view of the general population by considering it irrational and subject to the “herd instinct”. In his opinion, the masses need to be manipulated by an invisible government to insure the survival of democracy.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.”
– Edward Bernays, Propaganda

Bernay’s trailblazing marketing campaigns profoundly changed the functioning of American society. He basically created “consumerism” by creating a culture wherein Americans bought for pleasure instead of buying for survival. For this reason, he was considered by Life Magazine to be in the Top 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century.

Harold Lasswell

In 1939-1940, the University of Chicago was the host of a series of secret seminars on communications. These think tanks were funded by the Rockefeller foundation and involved the most prominent researchers in the fields of communications and sociological studies. One of these scholars was Harold Lasswell, a leading American political scientist and communications theorist, specializing in the analysis of propaganda. He was also of the opinion that a democracy, a government ruled by the people, could not sustain itself without a specialized elite shaping and molding public opinion through propaganda.

In his Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Lasswell explained that when elites lack the requisite force to compel obedience, social managers must turn to “a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda.” He added the conventional justification: we must recognize the “ignorance and stupidity [of] … the masses and not succumb to democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.”

Lasswell extensively studied the field of content analysis in order to understand the effectiveness of different types of propaganda.  In his essay Contents of Communication, Lasswell explained that, in order to understand the meaning of a message (i.e. a movie, a speech, a book, etc.), one should take into account the frequency with which certain symbols appear in the message, the direction in which the symbols try to persuade the audience’s opinion, and the intensity of the symbols used.

Lasswell was famous for his media analysis model based on:

Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) What Channel (with) What Effect

By this model, Lasswell indicates that in order to properly analyze a media product, one must look at who produced the product (the people who ordered its creation),  who was it aimed at (the target audience) and what were the desired effects of this product (to inform, to convince, to sell, etc.) on the audience.

Using a Rihanna video as an example, the analysis would be as follows: WHO PRODUCED: Vivendi Universal; WHAT: pop artist Rihanna; TO WHOM: consumers between the ages of 9 and 25; WHAT CHANNEL: music video; and WHAT EFFECT: selling the artist, her song, her image and her message.

The analyzes of videos and movies on The Vigilant Citizen place a great importance on the “who is behind” the messages communicated to the public. The term “Illuminati” is often used to describe this small elite group covertly ruling the masses. Although the term sounds quite caricatured and conspiratorial, it aptly describes the elite’s affinities with secret societies and occult knowledge. However, I personally detest using the term “conspiracy theory” to describe what is happening in the mass media. If all the facts concerning the elitist nature of the industry are readily available to the public, can it still be considered a  “conspiracy theory”?

There used to be a variety of viewpoints, ideas and opinions in popular culture. The consolidation of media corporations has, however, produced a standardization of the cultural industry. Ever wondered why all recent music sounds the same and all recent movies look the same? The following is part of the answer:

Media Ownership

As depicted in the graph above, the number of corporations owning the majority of U.S. media outlets went from 50 to 5 in less than 20 years. Here are the top corporations evolving around the world and the assets they own.

“A list of the properties controlled by AOL Time Warner takes ten typed pages listing 292 separate companies and subsidiaries. Of these, twenty-two are joint ventures with other major corporations involved in varying degrees with media operations. These partners include 3Com, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, Citigroup, Ticketmaster, American Express, Homestore, Sony, Viva, Bertelsmann, Polygram, and Amazon.com. Some of the more familiar fully owned properties of Time Warner include Book-of-the-Month Club; Little, Brown publishers; HBO, with its seven channels; CNN; seven specialized and foreign-language channels; Road Runner; Warner Brothers Studios; Weight Watchers; Popular Science; and fifty-two different record labels.”
- Ben Bagdikan, The New Media Monopoly

AOL Time Warner owns:

• 64 magazines, including Time, Life, People, MAD Magazine and DC Comics
• Warner Bros, New Line and Fine Line Features in cinema
• More than 40 music labels including Warner Bros, Atlantic and Elektra
• Many television networks such as WB Networks, HBO, Cinemax, TNT, Cartoon Network and CNN
• Madonna, Sean Paul, The White Stripes

Viacom owns:

• CBS, MTV, MTV2, UPN, VH1, Showtime, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, TNN, CMT and BET
• Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon Movies, MTV Films
• Blockbuster Videos
• 1800 screens in theaters through Famous Players

“Disney ownership of a hockey team called The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim does not begin to describe the vastness of the kingdom. Hollywood is still its symbolic heart, with eight movie production studios and distributors: Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Miramax, Buena Vista Home Video, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Buena Vista International, Hollywood Pictures, and Caravan Pictures.

The Walt Disney Company controls eight book house imprints under Walt Disney Company Book Publishing and ABC Publishing Group; seventeen magazines; the ABC Television Network, with ten owned and operated stations of its own including in the five top markets; thirty radio stations, including all the major markets; eleven cable channels, including Disney, ESPN (jointly), A&E, and the History Channel; thirteen international broadcast channels stretching from Australia to Brazil; seven production and sports units around the world; and seventeen Internet sites, including the ABC group, ESPN.sportszone, NFL.com, NBAZ.com, and NASCAR.com. Its five music groups include the Buena Vista, Lyric Street, and Walt Disney labels, and live theater productions growing out of the movies The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and King David.”
– Ibid

The Walt Disney Company owns:

• ABC, Disney Channel, ESPN, A&E, History Channel
• Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Miramax Film Corp., Dimension and Buena Vista International
• Miley Cyrus/ Hannah Montana, Selena Gomez, Jonas Brothers

Vivendi Universal owns:

• 27% of US music sales, labels include: Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Island, Def Jam, MCA, Mercury, Motown and Universal
• Universal Studios, Studio Canal, Polygram Films, Canal +
• Numerous internet and cell phone companies
• Lady Gaga, The Black Eyed Peas, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, Mariah Carey, Jay-Z

Sony owns:

• Columbia Pictures, Screen Gems, Sony Pictures Classics
• 15% of US Music sales, labels include Columbia, Epic, Sony, Arista, Jive and RCA Records
• Beyonce, Shakira, Michael Jackson, Alicia Keys, Christina Aguilera

A limited number of actors in the cultural industry means a limited amount of viewpoints and ideas making their way to the general public. It also means that a single message can easily saturate all forms of media to generate consent (i.e. “there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq”).

The Standardization of Human Thought

The merger of media companies in the last decades generated a small oligarchy of media conglomerates. The TV shows we follow, the music we listen to, the movies we watch and the newspapers we read are all produced by FIVE corporations. The owners of those conglomerates have close ties with the world’s elite and, in many ways, they ARE the elite. By owning all of the possible outlets having the potential to reach the masses, these conglomerates have the power to create in the minds of the people a single and cohesive world view, engendering a “standardization of human thought”.

Even movements or styles that are considered marginal are, in fact, extensions of mainstream thinking. Mass medias produce their own rebels who definitely look the part but are still part of the establishment and do not question any of it. Artists, creations and ideas that do not fit the mainstream way of thinking are mercilessly rejected and forgotten by the conglomerates, which in turn makes them virtually disappear from society itself. However, ideas that are deemed to be valid and desirable to be accepted by society are skillfully marketed to the masses in order to make them become self-evident norm.

In 1928, Edward Bernays already saw the immense potential of motion pictures to standardize thought:

“The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it seeks to purvey entertainment.”
– Edward Bernays, Propaganda

These facts were flagged as dangers to human freedom in the 1930′s by thinkers of the school of Frankfurt such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. They identified three main problems with the cultural industry. The industry can:

1. reduce human beings to the state of mass by hindering the development of emancipated individuals, who are capable of making rational decisions;
2. replace the legitimate drive for autonomy and self-awareness by the safe laziness of conformism and passivity; and
3. validate the idea that men actually seek to escape the absurd and cruel world in which they live by losing themselves in a hypnotic state self-satisfaction.

The notion of escapism is even more relevant today with advent of online video games, 3D movies and home theaters. The masses, constantly seeking state-of-the-art entertainment, will resort to high-budget products that can only be produced by the biggest media corporations of the world. These products contain carefully calculated messages and symbols which are nothing more and nothing less than entertaining propaganda. The public have been trained to LOVE its propaganda to the extent that it spends its hard-earned money to be exposed to it. Propaganda (used in both political, cultural and commercial sense) is no longer the coercive or authoritative communication form found in dictatorships: it has become the synonym of entertainment and pleasure.

“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
– Aldous Huxley, Preface to A Brave New World

A single piece of media often does not have a lasting effect on the human psyche. Mass media, however, by its omnipresent nature, creates a living environment we evolve in on a daily basis. It defines the norm and excludes the undesirable. The same way carriage horses wear blinders so they can only see what is right in front of them, the masses can only see where they are supposed to go.

“It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment. Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society.”
– Jacques Ellul

One of the reasons mass media successfully influences society is due to the extensive amount of research on cognitive sciences and human nature that has been applied to it.

Manipulation Techniques

“Publicity is the deliberate attempt to manage the public’s perception of a subject. The subjects of publicity include people (for example, politicians and performing artists), goods and services, organizations of all kinds, and works of art or entertainment.”

The drive to sell products and ideas to the masses has lead to an unprecedented amount of research on human behavior and on the human psyche. Cognitive sciences, psychology, sociology, semiotics, linguistics and other related fields were and still are extensively researched through well-funded studies.

“No group of sociologists can approximate the ad teams in the gathering and processing of exploitable social data. The ad teams have billions to spend annually on research and testing of reactions, and their products are magnificent accumulations of material about the shared experience and feelings of the entire community.”

- Marshal McLuhan, The Extensions of Man

“It is with knowledge of the human being, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his automatisms as well as knowledge of social psychology and analytical psychology that propaganda refines its techniques.”
– Propagandes, Jacques Ellul (free translation)

Subliminal Perception

“Subliminal perception is a deliberate process created by communications technicians, by which you receive and respond to information and instructions without being consciously aware of the instructions”
– Steve Jacobson, Mind Control in the United States

“The techniques of psychotherapy, widely practiced and accepted as a means of curing psychological disorders, are also methods of controlling people. They can be used systematically to influence attitudes and behavior. Systematic desensitization is a method used to dissolve anxiety so the the patient (public) is no longer troubled by a specific fear, a fear of violence for example. [...] People adapt to frightening situations if they are exposed to them enough”.
– Steven Jacobson, Mind Control in the United States

Occult Symbolism in Pop Culture

Metropolis – a movie by the elite, for the elite?

Contrarily to the information presented above, documentation on occult symbolism is rather hard to find. This should not come as a surprise as the term “occult”, literally means “hidden”. It also means “reserved to those in the know” as it is only communicated to those who are deemed worthy of the knowledge. It is not taught in schools nor is it discussed in the media. It is thus considered marginal or even ridiculous by the general population.

Occult knowledge is NOT, however, considered ridiculous in occult circles. It is considered timeless and sacred. There is a long tradition of hermetic and occult knowledge being  taught through secret societies originating from ancient Egyptians, to Eastern Mystics, to the Knights Templar to modern day Freemasons. Even if the nature and the depth of this knowledge was most probably modified and altered throughout the centuries, mystery schools kept their main features, which are highly symbolic, ritualistic and metaphysical. Those characteristics, which were an intricate part of ancient civilizations, have totally been evacuated from modern society to be replaced by pragmatic materialism. For this reason, there lies an important gap of understanding between the pragmatic average person and the ritualistic establishment.

“If this inner doctrine were always concealed from the masses, for whom a simpler code had been devised, is it not highly probable that the exponents of every aspect of modern civilization – philosophic, ethical, religious, and scientific-are ignorant of the true meaning of the very theories and tenets on which their beliefs are founded? Do the arts and sciences that the race has inherited from older nations conceal beneath their fair exterior a mystery so great that only the most illumined intellect can grasp its import? Such is undoubtedly the case.”
– Manly P. Hall, Secret Teachings of All Ages

The “simpler code” devised for the masses used to be organized religions. It is now becoming the Temple of the Mass Media and it preaches on a daily basis extreme materialism, spiritual vacuosity and a self-centered, individualistic existence. This is exactly the opposite of the attributes required to become a truly free individual, as taught by all great philosophical schools of thought. Is a dumbed-down population easier to deceive and to manipulate?

“These blind slaves are told they are “free” and “highly educated” even as they march behind signs that would cause any medieval peasant to run screaming away from them in panic-stricken terror. The symbols that modern man embraces with the naive trust of an infant would be tantamount to billboards reading, ‘This way to your death and enslavement,’ to the understanding of the traditional peasant of antiquity”
– Michael A. Hoffman II, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

In Conclusion

This article examined the major thinkers in the field of mass media, the media power structure and the techniques used to manipulate the masses. I believe this information is vital to the understanding of  the “why” in the topics discussed on The Vigilant Citizen.  The  “mass population” versus “ruling class” dichotomy described in many articles is not a “conspiracy theory” (again, I hate that term), but a reality that has been clearly stated in the works of some of the 20th century’s most influential men.

Lippmann, Bernays and Lasswell have all declared that the public are not fit to decide their own fate, which is the inherent goal of democracy. Instead, they called for a cryptocracy, a hidden government, a ruling class in charge of the “bewildered herd.” As their ideas continue to be applied to society, it is increasingly apparent that an ignorant population is not an obstacle that the rulers must deal with: It is something that is DESIRABLE and, indeed, necessary, to insure total leadership. An ignorant population does not know its rights, does not seek a greater understanding of issues and does not question authorities. It simply follows trends. Popular culture caters to and nurtures ignorance by continually serving up brain-numbing entertainment and spotlighting degenerate celebrities to be idolized. Many people ask me: “Is there a way to stop this?” Yes, there is. STOP BUYING THEIR CRAP AND READ A BOOK.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.”
– Thomas Jefferson

Related Documentation

Download “Propaganda” By Edward L. Bernays free E-book in pdf from knowledgefiles.com

« Previous Page — Next Page »