BREAKING NEWS

The Geopolitics of World War III
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC3tINgWfQE

Monday, April 29, 2013

Barackodile Tears

Rainbows For The Ruling Class

By Randy Shields
Dissident Voice
April 29th, 2013

One of the great things about America is that it’s easy to be
psychic here. This is the land of psychic opportunity.

Anyone can hang out a shingle and predict the future. Anyone
can read a palm that’s greased.

If you want to know what’s going to happen next in America,
all you have to do is ask yourself: what’s the most outrageous,
ironic, perverted and soul-crushing thing that can happen in
any given situation?

Whatever that thing is, that’s what will happen. And you won’t
have to wait long to see your prediction come true.

So it was that last week San Francisco Pride announced that
jailed war crimes whistle blower Bradley Manning would be an
honorary grand marshal for this year’s LGBT Pride Celebration.

Before practically anyone had a chance to note how principled
and inspiring Manning’s selection was, the decision was rescinded.

Kevin Gosztola at firedoglake has an excellent overview and
Glenn Greenwald has a list of all the corporate criminals that
SF Pride takes money from and doesn’t find objectionable.

Most interesting to me was the slavish worship of authority in
SF Pride president Lisa L. Williams statement announcing that
Manning would not be an honorary grand marshal:

“Bradley Manning is facing the military justice system of this
country. We all await the decision of that system. However,
until that time, even the hint of support for actions which
placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in
uniform and countless others, military and civilian alike,
will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride.
It is, and would be, an insult to every one, gay and straight,
who has ever served in the military of this country.”

This is the same military “justice” system that gives out free
passes and wrist slaps to the torturers of Abu Ghraib and the
rapists and murderers of the children of Haditha, Iraq.

The same system of “justice” that discourages female soldiers from reporting rape and not a handful but the 20,000 servicewomen that
even the Pentagon estimates are sexually assaulted every year,
as noted in the 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary Invisible War.

So, yes, Ms. Williams, we eagerly await what the mass murdering
rape-friendly torture enterprise has to say about a brave young
person who blew the whistle on its crimes.

By exposing war crimes, Manning was actually doing his duty
and nothing he did put the lives of American troops in danger.

He caused embarrassment to the American empire because
he showed that war crimes are routine.

Everyone who raised hell with SF Pride’s original decision doesn’t,
and can’t, name one instance of Manning putting a soldier’s life in
danger because there weren’t any.

If anything, Manning helped hasten the departure of America from
Iraq and saved US soldiers’ lives.

When the working class finally vanquishes the capitalist class, there
will be monuments built to Manning — and molded clear plastic Bush
and Obama heads used as urinals in hospitals.

When you’re admitted to the hospital, a nurse will ask, similar to
paper or plastic: “Democrat or Republican?”

After the revolution, hospitals are gonna be fun places that keep
peoples’ spirits up.

When reading Williams’ statement, keep in mind what Manning did:

He made available to WikiLeaks an on-board video of American
helicopter gunners mowing down two Reuters news staffers and
several Iraqi civilians, including children and first responders and
then joking about it.

WikiLeaks released the film almost three years after the crime
occurred.

SF Pride is more incensed at Manning for exposing this atrocity
than the commission of it.

What wonderful Barackodile tears Williams cries for the “civilians”
that she falsely implies that Manning ever put in danger.

How repulsive can you get?

Barackodile tears are tears shed by America’s historic first black
president about dead, generally white, children gunned down in
massacres while he simultaneously murders brown-skinned children
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, etc.

Last week I wrote about unclass conscious people wandering around
nowhere and in emptiness and mistakenly believing that they’re on
the “left.”

I called them desolationists.

The dead end identity politics of SF Pride, which sells out a peace
hero like Bradley Manning to curry favor with the American ruling
class, is what I had in mind.

The empire loves your tameness, irrelevance and cowardice,
SF Pride.

You don’t bother the American ruling class.

A five foot two, 105 pound soldier does because he has a conscience
and because he didn’t make comfort the guiding principle of his life.

He went against the most powerful force on earth, the American
military, and knew that he would pay an annihilating price for it.

That’s why so many soldiers are so venomous toward Manning, he’s
got much more courage and honor than they do and they know it.

Pro-Manning comments are trouncing anti-Manning comments in
online LGBT publications like Washington, DC’s Metro Weekly and
the San Diego LGBT Weekly.

So who, exactly, is Ms. Williams representing?

Perhaps the Whitey House because, according to her bio, Williams
“organized satellite offices for the Obama campaign.”

The American empire, its resource wars and racist occupations, the
blow back it provokes and the inevitable reduction in civil liberties
these aren’t “issues” that have “two sides.”

Congratulations, SF Pride, you’re totally assimilated with the America
that is fearful and timid, the America that glorifies authority and
welcomes fascism, as we just saw in Boston.

Maybe you’ll feel better when a gay soldier’s boot is on your throat
and you’re hearing them assert their equality:

“I’m just doing my job. I’m just following orders.”

Perhaps SF Pride will go all the way and appoint a gay soldier critical
of Manning as the Grand Martial Law Marshal.

It would be awesome if thousands of participants at this year’s June
29-30 Pride Celebration wore Bradley Manning masks and kicked in a
dollar each to his defense fund.

SF Pride needs repudiated in a big way.

And now I feel a psychic vision coming on:

If SF Pride knew that thousands of participants were going to wear
Bradley Manning masks, they would ban all masks for “everyone’s security.”

They would say that they must be able to identify everyone and
that they have a responsibility to keep everyone “safe” — they,
like most Americans, just don’t feel any responsibility about
stopping their representative government from slaughtering
innocent Muslims.

Up against the wall, turn your head and cough, and have a great
time.

And don’t ever forget: constantly bombing people keeps you free
and safe.

Can’t you feel the freedom closing in around you?

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/04/rainbows-for-the-rulingclass
/#more-48647

Sunday, April 28, 2013

George Bush’s Library

George Bush’s Library

By Matt Carr
Information Clearing House
Sunday, April 28, 2013

One of the great things about being an American president
is the complete immunity that comes with the job.

No matter what you do or what laws you might break, you
will never pay more than a mild political price for it.

OK, your ratings might drop, people may say nasty things
about you in the press, you might even lose an election.

but in the end your crimes and follies will be forgotten or
airbrushed out of history with the effortless ease that would
make any ‘totalitarian’ leader green with envy – and all the
more so because there is no need to use force, coercion or
fear to obtain these results.

Today not many Americans really care too much that Richard Nixon
once ordered the illegal bombing of Cambodia and also blasted North
Vietnam and Hanoi just because he wanted to prove to the North
Vietnamese that he was a crazy guy who was capable of anything.

By the time Ronald Reagan died in 2004, hardly any Americans
remembered that his administration had overseen one of the
sleaziest foreign policy operations in US history.

Selling cocaine to fund the Contras and heroin for the Afghan ‘Muj’,
weapons-for-hostages, equipping both sides in the Iran-Iraq war,
bypassing Congressional scrutiny, running secret slush funds through
BCCI, funding the death squad regimes in Central America – hell,
what exactly is your problem?

This is the president we’re talking about.

Sometimes this process of rehabilitation can happen sooner than
you think.

Take George W. Bush.

Just four years ago he left office with the lowest approval ratings
in American history.

He left a country in financial free fall, with a level of wealth
inequality without parallel in US history, whose crumbling
infrastructure and institutional incompetence was epitomized
by Hurricane Katrina.

Abroad the reputation of the United States had been dragged through
the dirt by the disastrous response of his administration to the 9/11
attacks, that included Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the rendition of
suspected ‘enemy combatants’ to countries like Syria and Egypt to
be tortured, two major wars that had achieved nothing substantial
except to leave hundreds of thousands of people dead, one of which
was launched on blatantly false premises.

These are not things that you would expect a responsible democratic
society to want to forget in a hurry, from the point of self-interest if
nothing else.

But the good news for Bush is that the forgetting has already begun,
and everyone is doing their best to see that it continues.

Last week a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that Bush’s
approval ratings had risen from 33 percent positive and 66 percent
negative in 2009 to corresponding figures of 47 percent approval
and 50 percent disapproval today, almost on a par with Obama.

So absence clearly does make the heart grow fonder, and whatever
his abilities as an artist, it was probably a good move on Bush’s part
to spend the last few years away from the limelight mountain-biking,
golfing and painting dogs.

But an even better idea was to open a presidential library.

Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, George Bush Senior, all of them had
presidential libraries established in their lifetime, in an attempt
to shape the way they want their reputations to be remembered,
and last week Bush continued this illustrious tradition, with the
opening of The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum
on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

At an opening ceremony attended by 10,000 guests and all five
living presidents, Bush told his audience how ‘When our freedom
came under attack we made the tough decision required to keep
our people safe’ and promised that his library’s presidential
center would be ‘devoted to promoting freedom abroad.’

The library includes a steel beam from the World Trade Center,
and an interactive exhibit called Decision Points Theater, where
visitors can decide what actions they would have taken on issues
like Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis.

By coincidence, the opening of the library coincided with the
tenth anniversary of an event that tells us a great deal more
about the priorities of the Bush administration than visitors
are likely to discover through interactive exhibits.

On 14 April 2003, Iraq’s national library and archives were mostly
destroyed in a fire caused by the widespread looting that took
place in the aftermath of the Anglo-American invasion.

The fire destroyed priceless documents and manuscripts dating
back to the sixteenth century.

Others were looted.

The burning of the library followed the burning of a nearby library
of Korans at the National Endowment Museum, and the systematic
looting of the Baghdad Museum of Archeology in which artefacts
and manuscripts, some of them more than 5,000 years old, were
stolen, in what Iraqi curators described as premeditated and
deliberate actions carried out by expert thieves who knew what
they were doing, with an eye on the international market.

The Independent’s Robert Fisk observed these events at first hand,
and described how all over the filthy yard they blew, letters of
recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition
for troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims,
all in delicate hand-written Arabic script.

I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq’s
written history.

Fisk went to the US Marines Civil Affairs Bureau and tried to alert
them to what was happening in an attempt to save some of the
manuscripts, but nothing was done.

Only two days before the library fire, a grinning Donald Rumsfeld
had replied, when asked about the ongoing looting, that that
‘stuff happens’ and went on to add that ‘Freedom’s untidy, and
free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do
bad things.’

Only two buildings were protected throughout the looting: the
Ministry of the Interior and the Oil Ministry.

Apart from that the American occupiers did nothing to protect the
cultural and historical heritage from one of the oldest civilisations
on earth.

That was how Bush went about ‘promoting freedom’ abroad, and
the contempt for Iraqi culture was symptomatic of administration’s
contempt for its people, and of the breathtaking combination of
incompetence, corruption and Yahoo-ish thuggery that made the
occupation such a stunning debacle.

None of this is likely to appear in Bush’s ‘Decision Points Theater’,
and it was all politely forgotten last week during the star-studded
opening ceremony whose guests included Silvio Berlusconi and Tony
Blair.

Barack Obama praised Bush as a leader of ‘incredible strength
and resolve’ who led the US through some of its darkest days.

Bill Clinton described him as a great humanitarian.

Bush cried. Bush Senior said ‘God Bless America.’

Everyone felt good, because the presidency is in the end a feel good
institution, and being president not only means never having to say
you’re sorry, it means that no one will ever ask you to, except for the
handful of protesters outside.

No one can be surprised at the amnesia of the political elite, or by
the fact that Bush would insist that there is ‘No need to defend
myself’ such things go with the territory.

But why ordinary Americans would want to take a positive view
of a man who did so much to ruin their country is alarming, and
depressing.

Especially since there is another Bush with his eye on the presidency and maybe his own library too.



Matt Carr is the author of three published books: My Father’s House
(Penguin 1997), The Infernal Machine: a History of Terrorism (New
Press 2007), recently republished in the UK as The Infernal Machine:
an Alternative History of Terrorism (Hurst & Co 2011), and Blood
and Faith: the Purging of Muslim Spain (New Press 2009, Hurst 2010).

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34760.htm

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Fear as a Constant Companion

Within the National (In)Security State

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
― Søren Kierkegaard

By Phil Rockstroh
Dissident Voice
April 27th, 2013

Life, as lived, moment to moment, in the corporate/consumer state,
involves moving between states of tedium, stress, and swoons of
mass media and consumer distraction.

Therein, one spends a large portion of one’s economically
beleaguered life attempting to make ends meet and not
go mad from the pressure and the boredom.

Where does a nebulous concept such as freedom even enter the
picture, except to be a harbinger of an unfocused sense of unease,
that all too many look to authority to banish?

Finding a balance between anxiety and freedom is not something
that comes easy to us.

In a society beset with a lack of purpose and meaning, patriotism,
empty self-promotion and jingoism are mistaken for strength and
character, when, in fact, they are anathema.

Weakness compensates by affecting a cretinous swagger.

Those who lack a centering core crave power.

Beneath it all, quakes one who fears risking intimacy…is terror
stricken by the vulnerability attendant to risking love.

Those who fear the uncertainty inherent to intimacy and freedom
perceive a world fraught with ubiquitous danger.

They terrorize themselves; therefore, they see terrorists everywhere.

Recently, a U.S. city was placed in lockdown due to the search for a
solitary, nineteen year old suspect. Thirty different law enforcement
agencies were involved.

This is the sort of authoritarian overkill that is emblematic of a
police state i.e., all sense of proportion is lost, and conveniently
so…Why?

Because these bloated, over funded police agencies have a need to
justify their existence. And one means of doing so…is to maintain a
ramped-up level of fear, by creating a culture-wide, self-resonating
feedback loop of hysteria.

Hence, if there exists a perpetual, looming menace to all we hold
dear, the operatives of the police state can maintain their authority,
and the political class can operate sans public oversight.

The events that followed in the wake of the bombs set off at the
Boston Marathon have served as an object lesson in how the police
state/militarist madness of authoritarian excess becomes normalized.

How belligerently ignorant, sorehead nationalists and jumpy ninnies
will forfeit their rights for the illusion of safety.

Under the tedium, angst, and ennui of corporate state rule, people
get high on the adrenal rush induced by the mass media feedback
loop.

Also, there is the illusion of breaking the spell of alienation and
becoming part of a larger order.

It is troubling that the adrenaline-tweaked, news-as-mass-spectacle
audience/primed-for-authoritarianism citizenry of the U.S. seems
indifferent to, or oblivious of, the following:

The test of a free society comes when that society is put under
duress e.g., not allowing the power-besotted, authoritarian freaks
in charge to use the acts of a few violent, lost souls as a means to
curtail freedom and consolidate unaccountable power for themselves.

The flacks, operatives and enforcers of corporate state/militarist
imperium retail in fear, specifically, in false, displaced and
exaggerated fears.

The collective mind of empire is a house of distortion mirrors
wherein appearances cannot be trusted, all sense of proportion
is lost.

Perception is thrown askew; thus, the most wily, dangerous enemy
of all becomes one’s own mind. 



Minor threats are perceived as looming dangers, a Rumpelstiltskin
in Reverse Effect comes into play.

Pressing matters are neglected, as obsession with trivia trumps
all things.

An empire bristles with armaments, indiscriminately, aimed at
invisibles.

Misdirected fear is a phantom. You can attempt to strike him all
day long…but to no end, other than to leave you agitated and spent.

Keep at it and you will collapse from exhaustion. 

This is the way
empires meet their end.

A giant goes mad, addled by the buzzing of flies he hallucinates
are a squadron of dragons. 



Accordingly, meet your fears, look them in the eye, live among them
for a time. Discern whether they consist of an insect buzzing at your
windowpane or is a dragon on the roof.

After suffering or witnessing a traumatic event, long after the
painful event has passed, one will continue to fear a reoccurrence
of the incident.

All to often, one becomes locked in a state of hyper vigilance,
installing a police state of the mind, and, in so doing, a lockdown
of empathy and imagination comes to pass.

The legacy of a fear-ridden past denudes the future of possibility.

Time passes, yet one stands frozen in place, shackled to the singular
moment of a trauma that has long since passed.

The imagination atrophies; one’s ability to love fades.

This is the miserable legacy of occurrences such as the Boston
Marathon bombing and the subsequent police state siege of the
city.

If you are curious as to why U.S. culture has become increasingly
stultifying — why daily life in the nation has been drained of
resonance, inspiration, and bereft of a vital core — look no further
than the emotional blowback borne of the national (in)security state.

It is only when one chooses to dismiss the cracked brain guardians
of perpetual and displaced fear — personal and collective — does
one regain the ability to move freely in the world.

The shackles upon one’s incarcerated heart are broken. One is free
to be held in the embrace of the present moment.

The future, less circumscribed by an oppressive legacy, can unfold
like the dawn of a newborn day.

Experiencing fear does not amount to weakness; instead, when
buffeted by fear, courage entails putting one foot in front of the
other.

Attempting to banish fear from consciousness is not a viable option.
It is not possible to obliterate angst and trauma by an evocation of
will.

Even if they appear to be banished, they will return as kvetching
ghosts and keening demons of the mind. Your heart will be haunted
by their unaddressed grievances.

How can the U.S. not be a haunted land?

The country’s blood-soaked soil chants songs of lamentation.

Corpse choruses comprised of African slaves and Indigenous People
wail out imprecatory hymns from the tormented earth beneath us.

As, all the while, the voices of those slaughtered worldwide by
our pursuit of empire surround the nation in an enveloping,
raging nimbus of accusation.

Is it any wonder that we, as a people, are so prone to collective
panic?

You cannot outrun a ghost that has taken possession of your heart.

You must hear his grievances, grieve with him over the injustices
inflicted upon him, then sing him to the next world.

And to ensure he will not return to haunt you: You must tell his tale
and due it justice.

If you refuse, as we have on a collective basis in the U.S., you will
live out your days in a haze of nebulous dread, and the empire’s
vast armaments and the entire apparatus of the national
security/surveillance state will not serve to placate your unease.

Because what is lost to time can never be retrieved, memory is
a ghost. This is the reason the past is our constant companion.

We hear these ghosts within the melancholic sigh that brings
up short a moment of laughter, as ghosts within mourn things
irretrievable.

Secrets do not remain buried. Their voices, vaulted just beneath
the contours of one’s awareness, filter up from the underworld.

When we catch a snatch of their murmurings, inchoate longing
transforms into nebulous dread.

We panic in the market place at noonday; the heat of eros can
only be experienced in acrimony e.g., a nation with millions of
unacknowledged Indian dead buried in its soil finds an inexhaustible
supply of enemies abroad.

The ground is not solid, when it has been seeded with the restless
dead. At any moment, the earth beneath one’s feet threatens to
give way.

What you bury sans ceremony will in turn bury you. The dead
will bring you down to their level for a chthonic tête à tête.

Late empire is a charnel house. Within its confines, the dead
become one’s most ardent suitors. And this is the reason:

“Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts:
secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.”
- James Joyce, Ulysses

It is a dangerous thing to fear the uncertainty inherent to freedom;
this is the means by which freedom is exchanged for a sense of false
security.

As a consequence, one sense of proportion is thrown askew.

For example, an American is ten thousand times more likely to be
killed or injured at work than in an act of terrorism (and that does
not include the dangers involved in commuting back and forth to and
from the workplace and the stress related pathologies and premature
death resultant from life squandered as an economic animal).

How about let’s declare a War on Work. Let’s have a nationwide
mass mobilization for inspired leisure.

In this case the terrorists (i.e, the economic terrorists) truly do
hate us for our freedoms.

It is a given in human affairs that we will be guided by our
misapprehensions of one another.

We receive fragments of information through a lens of bias.

We stumble through life blinkered by preconceptions. We come upon
others whose self-deceptions match our own (in form, of course, but
not matching content) and we express bafflement at the extent of
their fatuousness.

So it goes with human interactions, from brief encounters to decades
in a marriage bed.

Yet, when you embrace the impossible nature of it all, a breakthrough
of sorts occurs.

When you become willing to admit fallibility, to bask in the warm
glow of your bafflement, another fallible soul is apt to be drawn to
you seeking a communion of restorative confusion.

Comforted by mutual, benign bafflement (a given when confronted
with the sublime) each relaxes enough to notice and be drawn close
to the mysterious heart of the other.

Although we are convinced we experience anxiety due to the
unpredictable nature of life and the impossibility of apprehending the
future, what we are often anxious about is the nettling knowledge
that the world we cling to is subject to ineluctable forces of change.

Often, the greater the imperative to view the world with new sight,
the more blinkered and myopic one’s vision becomes. We clutch a
handful of dust.

Rather than revisiting and remaking the world anew, we spend
our hours in desperate devotion to constructing and dwelling in
a crumbling mausoleum of doomed conceptions.

Late U.S. Empire is a cult of death.

The body count rises in direct proportion to the putrefying,
nationalist myths we insist on holding sacrosanct.

Ask me about my sense of patriotism, and you will receive
only silence … because what does not exist cannot speak.

But ask me about my sense of affinity with the whole of humanity
about the golden fire of our imagination that binds us to all things,
about the cathedral of our bones that binds us to the sorrows of the
earth — only if you desire to risk having your ear bent beyond repair
by my soliloquies.

Fate will favor those who maintain their dignity, retain their sense
of humor, and struggle to keep alive their sense of beauty, even in
ugly times.

Hold to your vital center, stay in the vivid moment, if only for
the sake of those you love.



Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in
New York City.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/04/fear-as-a-constant-companion

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

How To Win The War For Your Mind

How To Win The War For Your Mind

By Brandon Smith
Activist Post
April 24, 2013

All battles, all wars, all fistfights and bar brawls, all conflicts in every
place and in every time (except those conflicts in which both sides
answer to the same puppeteer) begin and end as battles of the mind.

No struggle is determined on strength of arms alone.

In fact, the technologically advanced adversary with all his fancy
firepower is often more vulnerable than his low-tech counterparts.

This fact is, of course, counterintuitive to our Western manner of
thinking, which teaches us to believe that the man with the bigger
gun (or the bigger predator drone) always wins.

Sadly, we have had to suffer through multiple defeats and overdrawn
occupations in Asia to learn otherwise.

One of the great unspoken truths of our era is the reality that the
modernization of warfare has changed little the manner in which wars
are won.

Since the beginning of history, intelligence, force of will, and
guiding principles are the dominant factors in any campaign.

Therefore, it only stands to reason that the most vital battle any of
us will ever face is the psychological battle, the battle within; for
success in the mind will determine success in all other endeavors.

Unfortunately, very few people ever consider the importance of
the mind war, let alone know how to defend themselves against
psychological attack.

As with any method of self-defense, constant training is required.

For the past century, at least in the United States, a subversive and
secret cold war has been waged against the people in the form of
psychological subjugation.

This cold war is designed to weaken our resolve, our heritage,
our self-belief, our confidence and our integrity in preparation
for a “hot war” against our time-honored Constitutional rights.

The power elite know well that the most effective strategy for victory
in any battle is to convince your enemy to surrender before the fight
even begins.

Today, the American populace is being conditioned to lie down and die
a mental death, to give up the inner war, so that when the outer war
comes, they will already be defeated.

Corrupt governments rely heavily on what they call “psyops,” which
are primarily propaganda initiatives meant to demoralize their target
(usually the citizenry).

In the case of a despotic regime, psyops involves the insinuation of
lies, half-truths, threats and brutality that is choreographed to elicit
a very specific reaction.

It is used to instigate strong emotional responses en masse that will
work in favor of the oligarchy.

The following guidelines can shield you from the arrows of deceit,
allowing you to maintain control and avoid being unconsciously
influenced to labor against your own cause...



Do Not Fear Hypothetical Dangers

Fear is the weapon of choice when it comes to totalitarian
proponents.

Conquering armies and bureaucracies are notorious for exaggerating
their strength and numbers in order to squelch the fighting spirit of
those they intend to rule.

Genghis Kahn, for instance, used the tactic of exaggerated numbers,
along with vicious genocide, to strike terror in regions he had not yet
attempted to overtake.

Upon his arrival, the Mongol hordes had received such a reputation
(some of it fabricated) that many regions surrendered immediately
without question.

When becoming an activist against a criminal establishment, it is
very common to be the target of fear campaigns.

Today, those of us in the liberty movement hear warnings from
“random” concerned parties constantly telling us that our efforts
are “all for nothing,” that we are “making ourselves targets.”

That the globalist system is far too strong and far too advanced
to be defeated.

That they have predator drones and NSA databases and soldiers
without empathy etc, etc.

Their hope is to make us afraid of hypothetical situations which
can neither be confirmed nor denied.

To make us obsess over the "odds" rather than the objective.

In other words, they hope to encourage a state of mass cowardice.

To undo this tactic, you must remain focused on your goal regardless
of the possible danger.

That is to say, the strength of the enemy, whether real or fantasy,
is irrelevant. It is meaningless.

Goliath is nothing but an obstacle, and all obstacles can be dealt
with.

Move forward toward the objective and never stop.



Do Not Be Distracted By Minor Inconveniences And Personal Problems

At the height of communist power in East Germany, the Stasi secret
police deployed a tactic which they called “Zersetzung,” which means
to “corrode” or “undermine.”

The Zersetzung policy involved the use of subtle manipulations
of a particular person’s life in order to interfere with his ability
to function normally and participate fully in dissenting activities.

The Stasi would send agents to a person’s home to rearrange
items or fake a break-in.

Often, they would attempt to create emotional conflicts between the
dissident and his wife, family and friends and to damage business
relationships.

The purpose was to force the target to divert his attention from
his political and social work over to more minor inconveniences.

Personal firestorms, whether engineered by Stasi or by natural
conflict, are destructive only when you give them too much
credence and attention.

Some people become utterly fixated with their own private soap
operas, and this weakness is often exploited by government
elements.

The truth is, our home lives and the tensions in them are secondary
when it comes to defending our principles and our culture against
enslavement and oblivion.

Woman troubles, family arguments and invasions into our private
lives are not important.

Only the mission is important; and in the Liberty Movement, our
mission is to awaken the public, disrupt the indoctrination of the
masses and, if necessary, physically remove the elites from power.

Family and friends who get in the way or are manipulated into
getting in the way should be ignored.



Do Not Be Seduced By Gifts

Tyrants love to offer gifts to the populace, especially at the
onset of their rise to dominance.

It may be the promise of new jobs, better infrastructure, free
healthcare, more food, more safety or even free cellphones.

They may offer payment for provocateuring or snitching.

The point is to entice citizens with something for nothing,
or at least the lie of something for nothing.

If a government official (or anyone else for that matter) is
pouring gifts into your lap, it is time to become suspicious.

Governments do not “pay” for the gifts you receive.

You pay for the gifts you receive either through taxation
or inflation.

Free goodies should never influence the mind warrior to
endear himself to any bureaucratic or corporate entity.

Never allow yourself to be bought.

The only treasures worth anything are our individualism
and self respect.



Never Trust The Media Machine - Always Verify Information

There is no such thing as “objective journalism” in the mainstream
media anymore.

What you see and hear is not the truth but a facsimile of the truth,
twisted to benefit the establishment alone.

Media outlets today do not investigate events.

Instead, they obstruct investigation by promoting only one side
of every story and attacking anyone who questions their asserted
narrative.

The “official version” of any news story is almost always a
convoluted fabrication that protects the oligarchy from harm.

No one who considers himself an intelligent human being
should accept the official narrative at face value.

It is important to question always that which we are told
and to investigate using independent or original sources.

Never allow yourself to be “taught.”

Always examine the facts on your own.

Demand that the establishment mouthpieces provide source
information, instead of acting as if we should accept everything
they say on blind faith.



Do Not Concern Yourself With Ridicule

Fighting disinformation is vital, but our personal pride is not
important.

Safeguarding our egos is not important.

Trying to please everyone all the time is impossible and also
not important.

Ridicule is used not only to discredit activists; it is also used
to make them question their own resolve.

If you cannot be embarrassed or browbeaten, then you cannot
be made afraid and you cannot be defeated by mere words.

Require your opponents to answer your legitimate questions.

Move past their distractions and push the issue of tangibility.

Make them produce a legitimate argument.

When they cannot, and continue to revert to Ad Hominem
attacks, they expose the frailty of their position, and you
have won.



Accept The Risk Before Confronting The Enemy

I am still amazed by those dissenters and freedom fighters who act
as though they are surprised when the potential wrath of the system
is directed at them.

Did they not understand the risk when entering into the battle?

Did they really believe it wouldn’t be all that bad?

In any conflict against a larger, ruthless, and immoral opponent,
always assume that you will have to go through hell to accomplish
anything.

Accept that your life will no longer be peaceful or comfortable.

Know that you may not survive to see the fruits of your efforts.

Realize that you may have to walk through fire and embrace pain.

Otherwise, you will remain a pathetic and laughably inadequate
soldier in the mind war.

Personal risk is not important.

Only the truth and the future are important.

Being effective means being "on the radar".

If you are making a difference, and you are a concrete threat,
then you should expect to have a target painted on your chest.



Understand Your Own Weaknesses

Pretending as if you have no weaknesses is the best way to help
your enemy.

If you are prideful, your overconfidence will be used against you.

If you are spiteful, your jealousy will be exploited to distract you.

If you are easily angered, your rage will be used to lure you into
destroying yourself.

Examine yourself as deeply and as thoroughly as you would the enemy.

Though it might sound like a cliché, you actually can become far
worse an enemy to your own cause than any army your opponent
can muster.

Ironically, by identifying our own limitations, we also can become
adept at seeing the weaknesses in others.

Unblinded by our own biases, the biases of the opponent become
starkly visible.



Do Not Buy Into Petty Authority

Perhaps it is in our tribal nature, but many people seem to suffer
from an insatiable desire for hierarchy and leadership — even if
that leadership is based on falsehoods.

The ultimate protection against corruption is to become one’s
own leader, rather than waiting around for a miraculously infallible
overseer (or a talented conman) to guide the way for you.

Relying on others to choose your path for you opens the door to
having your right to choose removed from the picture completely.

Petty authority is authority derived from false pretenses, rather
than earned respect and recognition.

No man, regardless of title, is above the truth; and he is certainly
not more worthwhile than you.

Like a title, a uniform is a symbol of an ideal, but the man inside
the uniform may not embrace that ideal.

Do not focus on the uniform. Focus on the man, and question whether or not he lives up to the uniform.

If anyone wants to determine whether you go left or right, he
should be put to the most stringent tests imaginable.

He should have to prove that he has your best interests at heart,
and that he has the wisdom to handle your future with care.



Acknowledge The Power Of Symbolism And Myth

Oligarchs use theater and pageantry to influence the collective
unconscious because the human mind gravitates toward rituals
that feed our inherent need for myth and symbol.

Psychologist Carl Jung often referred to the inborn symbolic
processes of the psyche as “archetypes,” which exist in the
art, dreams and spiritualism of every society regardless of
time, place, religion or culture.

Knowing these universal symbols and how we react to them
emotionally allows a person to prevent himself from being
conditioned or influenced by them.

Not all fantastic events in history are spontaneous.

Some are staged as a means to appeal to a particular side
of a nation’s collective psyche.

These “false flag” actions very often revolve around a
symbol that is culturally valued.

The construction or destruction of this symbolic edifice, famous
person, social mechanism or loved representation of the future
leaves a lasting and deep-rooted impression on thousands, if not
millions, of people.

They become emotionally invested in the event — frantic, fearful
or furious — without having the slightest inkling why.

In the end, they can be conned into acting in disastrous ways just
to appease the inner imbalance.

They can be led to war, to enslavement and to death — all on the
promise of preventing a myth from appearing or disappearing.

The secret is to explore our inner life with more vigor than we
waste on outer fantasy.

By discovering our own internal myth and, thus, our own individuality,
we make ourselves impervious to false-flag conditioning.

Our emotions remain within our control, our biases become
non-existent and our fears become irrelevant.

We do not become overly attached to images, to superficial
expectations, or to the collective.

The theater of the mind loses its power; and from that point on,
we choose our own destinies.



Never Forget Your Individualism

Collectivists consistently promote the idea that human beings are
empty vessels; blank slates to be molded by the environment, or
mere biological machines with rudimentary animal instincts that
we "mistake for a soul".

As I pointed out above, Carl Jung's work on inborn psychological
archetypes proves that we are in fact NOT empty vessels.

Each of us is born with common qualities, like conscience and
insight, as well as distinctive qualities that make us unique.

We are born with dual concepts of good and evil. Right and wrong.

Because of this duality, we are given the power to choose. To ignore
conscience, or embrace it.

Collectivists pander their blank slate propaganda because they want
us to believe that we have no inherent qualities, and therefore, no
conscience.

They want us to ignore our intuition and adopt moral relativism.

For if every man is empty, then there is no right or wrong,
and nothing the elites do can be qualified as "criminal".

If every man is convinced that he is purely a product of his
environment, then he can also be convinced to turn over his
free will to those who appear to have the most control over
the environment.

If he believes he is not in possession of individual determination,
then he may assume the role of a robot, waiting to be programmed
by the outside world.

This is the ultimate collectivist dream: to become the "great
providers and makers" of the masses.

To feed us what they like, clothe us in what they like, teach us
what they like, and to tell us what we are to think and when we
are to think it.

They wish to see themselves as the painters, and us as the
canvas.

Only then, in their minds, will our society reach "perfection".

If mankind loses track of his individuality and accepts the blank
slate ideology, he will surrender the mind war, perhaps without
even knowing it.



Mind Over Matter

Facing down an adversary with firearms or with fists is an
easy thing to grasp.

Facing down a lie, or an idea meant to destroy one’s mental
capacity for resistance, is incredibly complex.

When an opponent attempts to play mind games, though, it
is a sure sign that he does not have the capacity to thwart
you with physical strength alone.

The fact that our government and the power structure behind
it has so desperately relied on such strategies for so many
years shows that they believe they cannot enact centralized
authority over our nation and undo our free imperative simply
by the momentum of military might.

No gun, no matter how big, will get them what they want.

So they continue to play the game until our resolve is broken
and our ability to fight diminished.

In order to prevail, we must make ourselves immune to the
game.

We must walk away, separating ourselves from it completely.

We must relinquish all unnecessary fear, doubt, and hatred,
and do what we know needs to be done.

We must ignore the rhetoric of defeat and nihilism.

We must take that long solemn step beyond the veil of doubt,
knowing that all great men before us fought their own battles
despite the so called "certainty of death".

If we cannot take lordship of our own psychological world, we
are doomed to failure in every other fight that envelops us.

Without impervious will, we cannot overcome, and we cannot
find peace.

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/01/how-to-win-war-for-your-
mind.html

Monday, April 22, 2013

Obama and the Class War

Obama and the Class War

“You know, I suspect that on Social Security we’ve got a somewhat
similar position.” – Barack Obama in debate with Mitt Romney

By Margaret Kimberley
The Black Agenda Report
Monday, April 22, 2013

Yes Virginia, there is a class war going on in America.

There always has been, and the tide for working people ebbs and
flows depending upon their own level of activism, world events, or
economic conditions.

For the past several decades working people have been losing and
by growing margins with every successive presidential administration.

Despite the phony wars between Democrats and Republicans, there
is consistency at the top.

Ever since the Ronald Reagan presidency Democrats and Republicans
have done their best to put and keep the malefactors of great
wealth, the 1%, on top.

Barack Obama has done nothing to alter this awful trend.

Like all of his predecessors he would never have become president
if he hadn’t sided with the ruling classes.

That simple fact explains everything the president has done to
date and eliminates any pretense of mystery surrounding his
actions regarding budget negotiations.

His decisions to convene a deficit cutting cat food commission and
to propose austerity measures including cuts to Social Security and
Medicare are easily understood when the foundations of our system
are understood.

We do not live in a true democracy. We live in a country controlled
by corporate interests and wealthy individuals.

They are the rulers and they determine who does and doesn’t
serve in public office and what those people can and cannot do.

They choose the politicians before we know their names and
Barack Obama is exhibit A in that regard.

There is a nationwide casting call made up of rich, influential people
who give a thumbs up or down to potential presidential candidates.

The people who promise to work on their behalf get the yea vote
before anyone votes in Iowa or New Hampshire. That is how the
ruling class works.

Barack Obama’s name was new to most Americans when he spoke at
the 2004 Democratic convention but his presence there was proof
that he already had buy-in from the movers and shakers and that he
was planning his run for the presidency even then.

The ambitious senator knew where his bread was buttered and showed his acumen and his loyalties early.

In 2006 Obama was only in his second year in the senate when he
spoke at an event convened by the Brooking’s Institution’s Hamilton
Project, a neo-liberal think tank created by Clinton administration
treasury secretary Robert Rubin and deputy secretary Roger Altman.

The video of Obama’s speech shows us that the austerity measures
being carried out today were being planned even then and the Rubins
and Altmans of the world knew they had someone who could get away
with doing what Republicans could only dream about.

The speech is a cornucopia of right wing fantasy made palatable
by the supposedly liberal black man.

“Too many of us have been interested in defending programs
the way they were written in 1938.”

“The forces of globalization have changed the rules of the game.”

“The coming baby boomer retirement will only add to the
challenges.”

“Most of us are strong free traders.”

Like every smooth talking politician Obama knows how to use the
right language for each audience and the audience was larger than
those present in the room during his speech.

Barack Obama became president because he told the Rubins and Altmans of the world that he was on their side while simultaneously convincing millions of voters that he was on theirs.

That is a recipe for electoral success. Americans are uninformed
and deluded in many ways but they are not complete fools.

Telling them that their Social Security benefits will be slashed is
not a way to win votes.

Convincing them that the other side is more evil and responsible
for all the bad choices in a winner and Obama has mastered that
art.

The fight against our own demise is not a hopeless one but it
does require a level of analysis that is foreign to most people.

Our system will always produce political leaders who work
against our interests.

It should be obvious that supporting the Democratic Party
is to act against oneself.

When a Democrat gets away with austerity and wars of aggression
it is truly time to admit that a new paradigm is needed.

The plea to stick with the Democrats should by now be
completely discredited.

Barack Obama has become the teflon president like his
idol Ronald Reagan.

The next Democratic president may not be as gifted at dissembling
but will definitely be as beholden to the rulers as Obama is.

Changing the name at the top is not the solution.

Changing all the assumptions about politics is the solution.

Voting for the green party or other parties will be the answer
for some.

Others will disengage from the political process and choose
other avenues of activism.

Yes, there is a ruling class and they will tell this president what
to do before they choose the next one.

It is time for everyone to decide where they stand, with the rulers
or with the ruled.



Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR,
and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently
updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-obama-and-class-war

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Is it time to call “Capitalism” an Existential Threat yet?

Is it time to call “Capitalism” an Existential Threat yet?

By Khannea Suntzu
Disinformation.com
April 18, 2013

A few years ago I argued that rampant disparity in terms of affluence
and poverty (or opportunity versus marginalization) in the world
might be interpreted as an existential risk.

In other words, a very large number of human beings might literally
be pushed in to premature death by the combination of (a) disparity
and (b) accelerating technologies.

My point in 2007 was that technology is increasingly something that
more rich people “purchase” (or invest in), and reap benefits from.

So in effect I argued that at some point in the none too distant
future technology might create products only for people who have
money; lots of people would be without jobs and effectively unable
to generate any meaningful income, and be displaced from the
basic range of essential goods and services to literally survive.

This point was in some other form made by Jeremy Rifkin, Marshall
Brain, Thomas Frey, Frederico Pistono and several others, and each
placed the emphasis a little differently.

Essentially this is already happening.

Millions of human beings die prematurely as a result of being unable
to generate a sufficient income, and in some extreme cases these
people starve to death, or otherwise live unacceptably undignified
lives.

Strikingly, we live in a world where this form of severe disparity does
not bother the people in “developed” countries to a sufficient degree
as to demand immediate action.

It is worse – even very moral people around me will knowingly
purchase articles that were made in third world nations under
unambiguously severe conditions of slave labour, or severe
exploitation. And nobody regards this as morally wrong.

In fact many would offer arguments that this is a “good” thing.

My earlier argument didn’t include a range of secondary problems,
such as resource depletion, the quickly encroaching state fascism in
all “developed” countries (including the EU and US), the secession of
rich people from society in to effectively a plutonomy, the collapse of
biodiversity, the collapse of quality of goods in the western world
(specifically food), global weirding and terrorism.

My argument was about the combination of disparity and
‘exponentially advancing technologies’ (assuming the latter
is actually occurring).

Fast forward to 2013. The occupy movement has come and gone.

The Zeitgeist and Venus project movements have come and gone,
and even serious and intelligent people I know wouldn’t even watch
the informational videos of these movements, “by and large because
they were busy”.

I have shared in the last years a nonstop barrage of arguments that
at least something is very wrong, and this could end up biting us in
the ass as a planetary species.

My 2013 argument goes a little further. I would place the practice of
capitalism itself in the spotlight, and argue that the kind of (flawed?
Inconsistent?) Capitalism we have world wide today is in effect
becoming an existential risk.

In other words, IF this can be argued, should we ask as a
technoprogressive (transhumanist/extropian,whatever)
community what would be moral to say or do?

We can all consent in the status quo and just bide our time
and maximize our private opportunities, but the end point of
“a complacency of the educated” might be a very bleak future
indeed.

My question (and accusation) is fairly simple – Capitalism
is introducing a very large number of failure modes in the
functionality of the world, and yes we do have reasonable
alternatives other than “latter day” Capitalism (I can offer
you a few if you insist) that might be better than the mess
we have today.

Capitalism is causing massive problems, far more in number or
complexity than I’d care list, and these consequences can very
well be argued to cause massive (and absolutely unnecessary)
human suffering and premature death well in our lifetimes
(before 2050).

What would be even worse, a functional collapse of western society
(to say it in critical alarmist speech) has become thinkable just a
few years ago, and in 2013 is regarded by many not just as plausible,
but inescapable.

I wouldn’t go as far, but we should avoid the more severe
consequences, since we could, and the world has become
very small.

Apathy today might result in lethal forms of instability,
mass-migrations and blowback just a few years down
the road.

My question is very straightforward – can Capitalism be reasonably
argued to be an existential risk, and if so, what action should we
take to negate this risk?

And can we agree on any such action, or are we cast helplessly adrift?

Capitalism is about maximizing resource depletion and leveraging
costs to external parties. Do not underestimate the destructive
potential of this.

Also do not underestimate the potential of people to religiously cling
to capitalism.

As I have come to analyze it, what we regard as Capitalism (which is
a fairly arbitrary cloud of confused and inconsistent conceptions by
and large) is a mechanism that *in practice* gets as much ore from
the ground, in as short a time, at as low a cost, turning it in to the
most breakable and cheap products, shipping them everywhere at
cost cutting trade deals, while keeping wages as low as possible,
by playing countries against each other in a race to the bottom of
dismantling anything resembling civilization, while bypassing as many
possible environmental and health code regulations (or dismantling
them), all the time while corrupting whatever passes for a political
process.

Sure I GET IT, some people benefit from this. But that benefiting
will turn pretty goddamn sour very soon.

This is a predatory, entropy maximizing system.

And in its current form it doesn’t just stagnate progress or research,
it is HOSTILE to science and progress. And it is hostile to anything
resembling fair competition.

Have a walk in any highly capitalist third world country.

You’ll spot slaves within minutes. You’ll spot environmental collapse
in minutes. You’ll spot resource depletion in minutes, all of these
mostly irreversible.

Sure *some* people are benefiting in any game of chairs. It won’t
last however.

http://disinfo.com/2013/04/is-it-time-to-call-capitalism-an-
existential-threat/#sthash.jWSPxnxc.YcVkgfcf.dpbs

Friday, April 12, 2013

Dr. King’s Warning of ‘Two Americas’

Dr. King’s Warning of ‘Two Americas’

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Consortiumnews.com
Friday, April 12, 2013

You may think you know about Martin Luther King, Jr., but there
is much about the man and his message we have conveniently
forgotten.

He was a prophet, like Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah of old, calling
kings and plutocrats to account — speaking truth to power.

King was only 39 when he was murdered in Memphis 45 years ago,
on April 4, 1968.

The 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 March from Selma
to Montgomery were behind him. So was the successful passage
of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

In the last year of his life, as he moved toward Memphis and his
death, he announced what he called the Poor People’s Campaign,
a, “multi-racial army” that would come to Washington, build an
encampment and demand from Congress an, “Economic Bill of
Rights” for all Americans — black, white, or brown.

He had long known that the fight for racial equality could not
be separated from the need for economic equity, fairness for
all, including working people and the poor.

Martin Luther King, Jr., had more than a dream – he envisioned what
America could be, if only it lived up to its promise of life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness for each and every citizen.

That’s what we have conveniently forgotten as the years have passed
and his reality has slowly been shrouded in the marble monuments of
sainthood.

But read part of the speech Dr. King made at Stanford University in
1967, a year before his assassination and marvel at how relevant his
words remain:

“There are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful for
situation. And in a sense this America is overflowing with the milk of
prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat
of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their
bodies, and culture and education for their minds; and freedom and
dignity for their spirits. …

“Tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other
America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms
the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America
millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for
jobs that do not exist. In this America millions of people find
themselves living in rat-infected vermin-filled slums. In this
America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves
perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean
of material prosperity.”

Breathtakingly prescient words as we look around us at a society
where the chasm between the super rich and poor is wider and
deeper than ever.

According to a Department of Housing and Urban Development
press release, “On a single night last January, 633,782 people
were homeless in the United States.”

The Institute for Policy Studies’ online weekly “Too Much”
notes that single-room-occupancy shelter rates run about
$558 per month and quotes analyst Paul Buchheit, who says
that at that rate, “Any one of America’s ten richest collected
enough in 2012 income to pay an entire year’s rent for all of
America’s homeless.”

But why rent when you can buy?

“Too Much” also reports that the widow of recently deceased
financier Martin Zweig “amid a Manhattan luxury boom” has
placed their apartment at the top of the posh Pierre Hotel on
the market for $125 million:

“A sale at that price would set a new New York record for a luxury
personal residence, more than $30 million over the current real
estate high marks.”

Meanwhile, a new briefing paper from the advocacy group
National Employment Law Project (NELP) finds there are
27 million unemployed or underemployed workers in the U.S.
labor force, including “not only the unemployed counted by
official jobs reports, but also the eight million part-time
workers who would rather be working full-time and the 6.8
million discouraged workers who want to work but who have
stopped looking altogether.”

Five years after the financial meltdown, “the average
duration of unemployment remains at least twice that
of any other recession since the 1950s.”

And if you think austerity’s a good idea, NELP estimates that,
“Taken together, the ‘sequester’ and other budget cutting
policies will likely slow GDP this year by 2.1 percentage
points, costing the U.S. economy over 2.4 million jobs.”

Walmart’s one of those companies laying people off, but
according to the website Business Insider, the mega chain’s
CEO Michael Duke gets paid 1,034 times more than his
average worker.

Matter of fact, “In the past 30 years, compensation for chief
executives in America has increased 127 times faster than the
average worker’s salary.”

Two Americas indeed.



Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship, senior writer
at the think tank Demos, is senior writer of the weekly public
affairs program, Moyers & Company, airing on public television.

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/04/11/dr-kings-warning-of-
two-americas

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

U.S. Militarism and Perpetual War

U.S. Militarism and Perpetual War

By Jeff Cohen
Counterpunch
April 10, 2013

I spent years as a political pundit on mainstream TV – at CNN, Fox
News and MSNBC.

I was outnumbered, outshouted, red-baited and finally terminated.

Inside mainstream media, I saw that major issues were not only
dodged, but sometimes not even acknowledged to exist.

Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue
that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping
block. And why other industrialized countries have free college
education and universal healthcare, but we don’t.

It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem – a problem that
Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated
45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the
height of the Vietnam War).

That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war.

In 1967, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today” – and said, “A nation that continues
year after year to spend more money on military defense than on
programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Nowadays MSNBC hosts yell at Fox News hosts, and vice versa, about
all sorts of issues – but when the Obama administration expanded the
bloody war in Afghanistan, the shouting heads at both channels went
almost silent.

When Obama’s drone war expanded, there was little shouting.
Not at MSNBC, not at Fox. Nor at CNN, CBS, ABC or so-called
public broadcasting.

We can have raging debates in mainstream media about issues
like gun control and gay marriage and minimum wage, but when
the elites of both parties agree on military intervention, as they
so often do, debate is nearly nonexistent.

Anyone in the mainstream who goes out on a limb to loudly
question this oversized creature in the middle of the room
known as militarism or interventionism is likely to disappear
faster than you can say ‘Phil Donahue.’

I know something about mainstream journalists being silenced for
questioning bipartisan military adventures because I worked with
Phil Donahue at MSNBC in 2002/03 when Bush was revving up the
Iraq invasion with the support of Democratic leaders like Joe Biden,
John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid. That’s when MSNBC
terminated us for the crime of JWI.

Not DWI, but JWI – Journalism during Wartime while Independent.

JWI may be a crime in mainstream media, but it’s exactly the
kind of unauthorized, unofficial coverage you get from quality
independent media today and from un-embedded journalists like
Jeremy Scahill, Dahr Jamail and Glenn Greenwald.

Unfortunately, many liberal journalists who were vocal about war,
human rights and civil liberties during the Bush era lost their voices
as Obama continued and, in some cases, expanded Bush’s “War on
Terror” policies.

It says something about the lack of serious national debate on
so-called national security that last month one of the loudest
mainstream TV news questioners of the president’s right to
assassinate Americans was Sean Hannity on Fox.

That’s obscene.

And it says something about mainstream TV that the toughest, most
consistent questioners of militarism and defenders of civil liberties
are not on a news channel, they’re on the comedy channel.

A few weeks ago, I watched a passionate Jon Stewart taking on
the U.S. military budget:

“We already spend more on defense than the next 12 countries
combined, including China, including Russia. We’re like the lady
on Jerry Springer who can’t stop getting breast implants.”

What our mainstream media so obediently call the “War on Terror” is
experienced in other countries as a U.S. war OF terror, kidnappings,
night raids, torture, drone strikes, killing and maiming of innocent
civilians, that creates new enemies for our country.

Interestingly, you can easily find that reality in mainstream media
of allied countries in Europe, but not in the mainstream media of
our country.

Needless to say, it’s our country that’s waging this global perpetual
war.

In a democracy, war must be subjected to questioning and debate.

And not just on the comedy channel.



Jeff Cohen is founding director of the Park Center for Independent
Media at Ithaca College and an associate professor of journalism
there. His latest book is “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures
in Corporate Media.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/10/u-s-militarism-and-
perpetual-war

Thursday, April 4, 2013

A Message From The Hopi Elders

A Message From The Hopi Elders

You have been telling the people that this is the
Eleventh Hour.

Now you must go back and tell people that THIS
is the hour.

And there are things to be considered:

Where are you living?

What are you doing?

What are your relationships?

Are you in right relation?

Where is your water?

Know your garden.

It is time to speak your truth.

Create your community.

Be good to each other.

And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

This could be a good time!

There is a river flowing now very fast.

It is so great and swift that there are those who
will be afraid.

They will try to hold onto the shore.

They will feel they are being torn apart, and they
will suffer greatly.

Know the river has its destination.

The elders say we must let go of the shore,
Push off into the river.

Keep our eyes open,
And our heads above the water.

See who is in there with you and celebrate.

At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally,
Least of all ourselves.

For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey,
Comes to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over.

Gather yourselves!

Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary.

All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the One’s we’ve been waiting for.

The Elders
Oraibi, Arizona
Hopi Nation

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Truth Is Offensive

Truth Is Offensive

By Paul Craig Roberts
Information Clearing House
Tuesday, April 02, 2013

In America truth is offensive. If you tell the truth, you are offensive.

I am offensive. Michael Hudson is offensive. Gerald Celente is
offensive. Herman Daly is offensive. Nomi Prins is offensive.

Pam Martens is offensive. Chris Hedges is offensive. Chris Floyd
is offensive. John Pilger is offensive. Noam Chomsky is offensive.

Harvey Silverglate is offensive. Naomi Wolf is offensive. Stephen
Lendman is offensive. David Ray Griffin is offensive. Ellen Brown
is offensive.

Fortunately, many others are offensive. But how long before being
offensive becomes being “an enemy of the state”?

Throughout history truth tellers have suffered and court historians
have prospered. It is the same today.

Gerald Celente illustrates this brilliantly in the next issue of the
Trends Journal.

Over the past 35 years I have learned this lesson as a columnist. If
you tell readers what is really going on, they want to know why you
can’t be positive.

Why are you telling us that there are bad happenings that can’t be
remedied? Don’t you know that God gave Americans the power to
fix all wrongs?

What are you? Some kind of idiot, an anti-American, a pinko-liberal-
commie? If you hate America so much, why don’t you move to Cuba,
Iran or China (or to wherever the current bogyman is located)?

The ancient Greeks understood this well. In Greek mythology,
Cassandra was the prophetess who no one believed despite her
100 percent record of being right.

Telling the truth to Americans or to Europeans is just as expensive
as telling the truth to the Greeks in ancient mythology.

In America and everywhere in the Western world or the entire world,
telling the truth is unpopular. Indeed, in the USA telling the truth has
been criminalized.

Look for example at Bradley Manning, held for two years in prison
without bail and without a trial in violation of the US Constitution,
tortured for one year of his illegal confinement in violation of US
and international law, and now put on trial by corrupt prosecutors
for aiding “enemies of the US” by revealing the truth, as required
of him by the US military code. US soldiers are required to report
war crimes.

When Bradley Manning’s superiors showed themselves to be
indifferent to war crimes, Manning reported the crimes via
WikiLeaks.

What else does a soldier with a sense of duty and a moral
conscience do when the chain of command is corrupt?

Julian Assange is another example. WikiLeaks has taken up
the reporting function that the Western media has abandoned.

Remember, the New York Times did publish the Pentagon Papers
in 1971, which undermined the lies Washington had told both to
the public and to Congress to justify the costly Vietnam War.

But today no newspaper or TV channel any longer accepts
the responsibility to truthfully inform the public.

Julian Assange stepped into the vacuum and was immediately
demonized, not merely by Washington but also by left-wing
and right-wing media, including Internet.

It was a combination of jealousy, ignorance, and doing
Washington’s bidding.

Without WikiLeaks and Assange the world would know
essentially nothing.

Spin from Washington, the presstitute media, and the
puppet state medias would prevail.

So the word went out to destroy Julian Assange.

It is amazing how many people and Internet sites obeyed
Washington’s command.

Assange has been so demonized that even though he has
been granted political asylum by Ecuador, the British
government, obeying its Washington master, refuses to
allow him safe passage out of the London Ecuador Embassy.

Is Assange destined to live out his life inside the Ecuador
Embassy in London?

Will Assange be a replay of Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty who
on November 4, 1956, sought asylum in the US embassy in
Budapest as Soviet tanks poured into Hungary to put down
the anti-communist revolution?

Cardinal Mindszenty lived for 15 years in the US embassy.

Today it is “freedom and democracy” Amerika that is copying
Soviet practices during the cold war.

In contrast with “freedom and democracy” US and UK,
the “authoritarian” “communist” “oppressive” Chinese
government when confronted with Chinese dissident Chen
Guangcheng’s defection to the US embassy in Beijing, let
him go.

It is an upside down world when America and the British refuse
to obey international law, but the Chinese communists uphold
international law.

Insouciant americans are undisturbed that alleged terrorists
are tortured, held indefinitely in prison without due process,
and executed on the whim of some executive branch official
without due process of law.

Most americans go along with unaccountable murder, torture,
and detention without evidence, which proclaims their gullibility
to the entire world.

There has never in history been a population as unaware as
Americans.

The world is amazed that an insouciant people became, if only
for a short time, a superpower.

The world needs intelligence and leadership in order to avoid
catastrophe, but america can provide neither intelligence nor
leadership.

America is a lost land where nuclear weapons are in the hands
of those who are concerned only with their own power.

Washington is the enemy of the entire world and encompasses
the largest concentration of evil on the planet.

Where is the good to rise up against the evil?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34490.htm