R7

America Is A Country In Debt

2011-08-04T20:24:00.000-04:00

12 U.S.-related Human Rights Stories the Press is Missing

2011-08-01T23:34:00.001-04:00

The United States is, fortunately and unfortunately, the best friend and the worst friend of human rights all at the same time. Our leaders champion human rights across the globe, but at the same time they mold their concept of human rights to our national interests and make them not apply to us. This has become particularly true in this age of the so-called war on terrorism.

Our leaders preach obedience by others to rules we choose not to follow, and criticize other countries for violating treaty norms that we have not accepted to become bound by ourselves. When accused of acting inconsistently with human rights, our leaders employ plausible deniability, diplomatic doublespeak and spin, or the trump card of national or even global security.

Then those leaders ask people around the world -- as well as their own people -- to trust them, even though they resist any oversight of their own actions.

And they can count on getting away with it because of the American public's profound ignorance of what human rights really are.

Human rights are not a few vague liberal-sounding concepts. They are the fundamental rights of all men and women, articulated in the Declaration of Independence and, since World War II, established as 30-plus different normative standards in international treaties and customary international law.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, proclaims that all humans -- just because they are humans -- have the inherent right to such things as equal protection under the law, freedom of expression,and the freedom to work and form labor unions; to freedom from slavery, forced labor, torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and arbitrary arrest or detention; to a standard of living adequate for health and well being; and to be recognised as a person before the law. And all these rights are inalienable and have as their goal the protection of human dignity and fullest development of the human personality.

They are a distinct part of the body of international law. Their purpose is to limit the power of government vis a vis the individual human being to protect inherent human dignity and equality.

Human rights are the reason why America was established. They form a complete, though new, independent field of academic study in the world of education -- not only relating to law, but to philosophy, history, religion, anthropology and, of course, political science and international relations.

Here are 12 stories that the American press should be covering more aggressively:

1. Americans are human rights illiterate, even though we go all over the world killing and dying to protect human rights elsewhere.

The American public lacks sufficient understanding of international human rights -- what they are, how they are interpreted, and how to use them -- to gauge compliance by its own government.

What the U.S. government needs to do is establish a national human rights education policy and program to assure that states teach international human rights at all academic levels, not just law schools. Few state education systems, lost in the culture of “meeting the test standards”, teach human rights at all, and those that do don't do it well.

In California it is state law that students in grades 7-12 of all public schools be taught human rights in their history-social science curriculum. There is a state curriculum framework that which includes the teaching of human rights, and a model curriculum. But even there, the schools are not teaching human rights, because of lack of money to implement the curriculum, lack of teachers educated in the subject of human rights, and fear of parental or political backlash.

2. The U.S. has refused to establish a national human rights institution.

We need a non governmental focal point for international human rights compliance by the U.S. government and states. Right now, there is no central location of power and authority, no objective non-partisan agency or government or ombudsman or "human rights czar" to monitor the government to see that it is complying on an ongoing basis with its international legal obligations regarding human rights. Neither the State Department nor the Department of Justice fulfills this function.

America needs an independent institution based on the U.N. Paris Principles to help Americans feel that the protector of freedom, justice and peace in the world is itself being watched and held accountable. This was one of the recommendation of the Universal Review Process of the U.N. Human Rights Council recently, and U.S. officials just said "no thanks" -- after all, the U.S. military and intelligence communities in particular do not want anybody looking over their shoulders. But the creation of such an institution would greatly increase our credibility on the international stage, as well as at home.

3. Article VI of the U.S. Constitution makes international human rights treaties binding on states "any thing in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwith-standing" -- but you might not know it from the way the states act.

Earlier this month, for instance, the State of Texas executed a Mexican national who had been deprived of his right under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations to contact his consulate for help. Texas acted despite the U.S. Department of Justice's insistence that doing so "would place the United States in irreparable breach of its international-law obligation."

Harold Koh, legal adviser at the State Department, wrote to the state governors last year reminding them about their obligations under the human rights treaties the U.S. has ratified. The department also last year reissued its rules for federal, state and local officials regarding compliance with the Vienna Convention in particular. State noncompliance had already led to the U.S. losing two cases before the International Criminal Court of Justice -- to Germany in 2001 and Mexico in 2004 -- for violating its duty under the treaty.

4. There is far too little coverage of the U.S. activity in relation to the U.N. human rights treaty bodies such as the U.N. Human Rights Committee, Committee against Torture and Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination and Committee on the Rights of the Child.

In the periodic state reports to these organizations, the U.S. tells the international community in detail what it is doing and what obstacles it faces in implementing international human rights legal obligations Few journalists have read those reports and the feedback provided by those committees regarding where the U.S. is falling short or violating human rights. Those reports are gold mines of information; but more than anything, they express the give and take, push-pull between the U.S. and the international community with regard to specific legal obligations the U.S. has voluntarily accepted to fulfill. That includes issues related to the human rights legitimacy of counter-terrorism measures such as extraordinary renditions and limited detainee access to justice; the international legality of drone assassinations (which led U.N. Special Rapporteur Philip Alston to warn of "a risk of developing a 'Playstation' mentality to killing"); whether chain gangs constitute cruel and inhuman treatment; whether immigration detention violates human rights.

5. Similarly, there is too little coverage of the visits and reports of various U.N. Special Rapporteurs who have come to the U.S. on fact finding missions.

These rapporteurs have submitted official, detailed reports about subjects such as counterterrorism measures, public housing, migrant workers, racism and racial discrimination, and religious freedom. These are part of what are known as the Special Procedures , or mechanisms, of the Human Rights Council. The U.N. uses these reports in the Council to understand the specifics of U.S. law and practice in light of human rights norms. These reports help shape how the international community sees us in these areas. But little is ever written about them.

6. There is actually no U.S. law criminalizing torture committed within the United States.

The U.S. Code criminalizes only torture committed outside the U.S. The criminal provision is mainly aimed at giving our courts jurisdiction to try foreigners who commit torture against Americans, though it could also cover Americans who committed such acts abroad. The U.N. Convention against Torture , signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988, requires that each state party "shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law". The U.S. says that any act of torture could be prosecuted under other federal or state laws, such as those regarding assault and battery. But there needs to be a separate criminal torture statute covering domestic torture, particularly to dissuade those in government to commit such acts here.

Moreover, the U.S. definition of torture is narrower than the internationally accepted definition in the Torture Convention. This allows the U.S. to claim that acts falling in that gap are not legally torture. The U.S. needs to expand its definition torture to be consistent with the international definition. When we say we are totally against torture, we apparently mean torture as we define it, not as the rest of the world defines it. (I call this the exceptionalist fallacy, others call the U.S. standard “torture light”).

7. The U.S. has never ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

If it had, the debates on such issues as health care and the minimum wage might well be dramatically different, because those issues would be seen as involving basic human rights, not simply decisions about private markets. The U.S. recognizes a human right to own property, but not a human right to not die for lack of medical treatment. In the absence of this recognition, the debate within U.S. is based on economic and public-private sector issues pitting major financial interests against the rest of us. The debate needs to be human rights based instead of market based. Jimmy Carter signed the covenant in 1979, but the U.S. Senate never ratified it, so it does not have the force of law. It also established as basic human rights the right to self-determination, to a living wage, to equal pay for equal work, adequate housing, to equal opportunity for advancement, to form trade unions, to strike, to get parental leave, and so on. This is a gaping hole in the U.S. human rights tapestry.

8. The U.S. has also not yet ratified many other important international human rights treaties.

These include the Convention on Discrimination against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, (though it has ratified two amendments to that treaty), the Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, Convention for the Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, American Convention on Human Rights, and the Statute of the International Criminal Court, which makes the worst violations of human rights and humanitarian law subject to punishment at the international level. This creates an area of great moral-political weakness in our own attempt to promote human rights internationally.

9. The U.S. is in denial about the human rights considerations involved in the issue of global climate change.

Within the international community, there is a growing recognition that dealing with climate change is not just a matter of environmental law, but human rights law. The U.S. 's resistance is understandable, as bringing in human rights considerations could lead to international demands to act, and even to make reparations for damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions. But environmental law only deals with the impact of man-made global warming on the air, land, and sea. It's important for Americans to start appreciating the profound humanitarian effects and the applicability of human rights law.

10. American journalism offered far too little coverage of the U.S.'s own Universal Periodic Review before the U.N.'s Human Rights Council in Geneva last year.

What little attention there was appeared to be largely from the conservative press, expressing outrage that countries with deeply troubled human rights records (e.g. Libya) were judging us, rather than the other way around, and decrying the fact that anyone would dare question the perfection of our human rights record and that we would admit to the world that we are flawed. It was the first time in history the U.S. has stood before an international body to present and defend its general human rights record.

U.S. officials said that we have room to improve, that input from others was welcome, and that the U.S. considers itself bound by the same standards as other states. But at the same time, the members of the 47 states sitting in judgment knew that not to be true -- and made a record 228 recommendations, many of them related to the U.S.'s continued failure to ratify the above referenced human rights conventions, especially the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The U.S. will appear for its next UPR in four years and will be expected to describe what it did to meet the recommendations it accepted.

11. Aliens, both legal and illegal, have human rights.

In the discussion of the treatment of aliens such as non-citizen terror suspects and the undocumented. there is seldom ever any reference to what their human rights are. At most, their U.S. Constitutional rights and rights under immigration law will be discussed. But tere are also international human rights norms that apply to aliens. There is a U.N. Declaration on the Human Rights of Individuals who are not Nationals of the .Country in Which they Live (1985) and a brilliant study from the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on that issue, written by Minnesota Law Professor David Weissbrodt on The Rights of Non Citizens . These issues should figure into any debate about how aliens are treated.

12. No state -- not even the United States -- can grant immunity from international law.

The failure to seriously investigate and prosecute acts of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment committed by U.S. government officials, both as perpetrators and under the doctrine of command responsibility, was a huge blow to the rule of law in this country. But these acts didn't just violate U.S. law, they were human rights violations, and more importantly individual criminal violations of International Criminal Law. As the latter they constitute crimes against all of humankind and give rise to Universal Jurisdiction, meaning that every country in the world can prosecute those individuals who commit them, and there is no statute of limitations. (George W. Bush canceled a trip abroad in February amid threats of protests and legal actions for his anti terrorism acts).

The attempted grant of complete criminal and civil immunity in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 is invalid under international law. Political calculations led both parties to reject any attempt at accountability, depriving the public of an opportunity to come to terms with the wrongs that were committed, perpetuating a culture of impunity for the rich and powerful, and validating the international accusation the U.S. has different rules for itself. But we cannot let politics deprive us and the rest of the world of justice.

H. Victor Condé (hvchumnrts@aol.com) is an international human rights lawyer and educator and author of An Encyclopedia of Human Rights in the United Statehttp://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28713.htm

Why Gaddafi must die!

2011-08-01T05:16:00.000-04:00

The Mask of Zorro

2011-07-25T10:07:00.000-04:00

The Charlie Chaplin Festival

2011-07-25T05:15:00.000-04:00

The Oslo attacks

2011-07-23T01:40:00.001-04:00

A powerful bomb exploded in Oslo, Norway today near the office of that nation's Prime Minister, killing at least 7 people, and that was followed by a shooting attack at a camp of young leaders of the ruling Labour Party where the Prime Minister was scheduled to appear. It should go without saying that such violent attacks aimed at civilians are inherently unjustified, and the attack on the camp, which wounded several teenagers, is particularly vile and tragic. The perpetrators of these attacks are unknown, as is their motives, though one self-described "jihadi" group claimed responsibility.

It is, however, worth commenting on both the prevailing descriptions of Norway as well as the reaction to these attacks, as they reveal some important points. Most media accounts express bafflement that Norway would be the target of such an attack given how peaceful it is; The New York Times, for instance, said "the attacks appeared to be part of a coordinated assault on the ordinarily peaceful Scandinavian nation." This is simply inaccurate. Norway is a nation at war -- in more than just one country. For instance:

The NATO force of which Norway is a part has explicitly declared Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi to be a "legitimate target" and has repeatedly attempted to kill him; one attempt on Gadaffi's life -- a bombing attack on his son's residence -- resulted in the death of the dictator's son and three grandchildren. In response, Gadaffi "vowed to attack 'homes, offices and families' in Europe in revenge for NATO airstrikes," adding that "your homes, your offices and your families, which will become military targets just as you have transformed our offices, headquarters, houses and children into what you regards as legitimate military targets." The semantic games of the Obama administration notwithstanding, that is not a "peaceful" situation; those are nations at war.

Then in Afghanistan, there is this (click on image to enlarge):

Again, nobody knows who perpetrated these attacks or why (though the self-described jihadi group claiming responsibility said, as the NYT put it, that it "was a response to Norwegian forces’ presence in Afghanistan and to unspecified insults to the Prophet Muhammad"). But whether these attacks are related to those wars or not, I simply do not understand this bafflement being expressed that Norway -- of all countries -- would be targeted with violence.

Regardless of the justifications of these wars -- and Norway is in both countries as part of a U.N. action -- it is simply a fact that Norway has sent its military to two foreign countries where it is attacking people, dropping bombs, and killing civilians. Historically, one reason not to invade and attack other countries is because doing so often prompts one's own country to be attacked. Western nations typically only attack countries that are incapable of responding in kind, but those nations and their sympathizers are capable of perpetrating asymmetrical attacks of the sort that Oslo just suffered.

This has nothing to do with justification, as these kinds of civilian-targeting attacks are, as I said, inherently unjustifiable (though if NATO declares the leader of Libya a "legitimate military target" and air bombs his residence, what's the argument as to why the office of the Prime Minister whose country is at war with Libya is not a legitimate target?). The point is that it's completely unsurprising that a nation at war -- whether Norway or the U.S. -- is going to be targeted with violent attacks. That's what "being at war" means, and it's usually what it provokes. And the way this fact is suppressed ("a coordinated assault on the ordinarily peaceful Scandinavian nation" = the post-9/11 why do they hate us?) highlights how we view violence as something only those Others commit, but not we.

That relates to the second point I want to make: the reaction to the attacks in Oslo. Ever since news of the attacks emerged this morning (U.S. time), the interest in them has been intense, as has media coverage of them and the disgust expressed toward them. That's understandable: the destruction and carnage quickly visible from photographs online should make any decent person recoil in disgust.

Still, I can't help noticing, and being quite bothered by, the vast difference in reaction to the violence visited on Western nations such as Norway and the violence visited by Western nations (particularly our own) on non-Western nations. The violence and indiscriminate death brought today to Oslo is routinely and constantly imposed by the U.S. and its closest allies in a large and growing list of Muslim nations. On a weekly basis -- literally -- the U.S. and its Western allies explode homes, mangle children, extinguish the lives of innocent people, disrupt communities, kill community and government leaders, and bring violence and terror to large numbers of people -- those are just facts. And yet a tiny, tiny fraction of attention, interest and anger is generated by such violence as compared to that generated by the violence in Oslo today. What explains that mammoth discrepancy in interest, discussion, and media coverage?

Whatever accounts for it, the impact is to minimize and suppress the consequences of our own violence while focusing almost exclusively on the violence of others. The solution is not to dismiss or justify acts such as the Oslo bombing. It's to realize that our own country and those in alliance with it -- unintentionally or otherwise -- replicate the horror that took place in Oslo in countless places around the world with great regularity, and that requires at least as much attention and discussion as the Oslo attacks are sure to receive.

UPDATE: The New York Times headline was quick to suggest responsibility for these attacks:

Yet some reports now say that Norwegian police believe the perpetrator was a native Norwegian driven by domestic opposition to the government. As I wrote three different times here, both the perpetrators and their motives are unknown, and none of the points I made -- which relate exclusively to the reaction to these attacks -- are changed in any way based on the identity of the perpetrators. Except that I would add one point about Western reaction if indeed it turns out to be a domestic rather than "terrorist" (i.e., Muslim) attack: American interest in these attacks and the desire to be seen publicly denouncing them will quickly diminish -- almost to the point of non-existence -- if the perpetrators are not Muslim. Add that to the list of revealing aspects of the reaction to this story.

By Glen Greenwald

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/22/oslo/index.html

Haggard - Per Aspera Ad Astra

2011-07-19T00:41:00.000-04:00

Father Roy: Inside the School of Assassins

2011-07-18T22:53:00.000-04:00

Trained for Pain: Get your Torture Degree from School of the Americas

2011-07-18T22:19:00.001-04:00

NATO's Debacle in Libya

2011-07-18T04:57:00.001-04:00

After three and a half months of bombing and arms supply to various rebel factions, NATO's failure in its efforts to promote "regime change" in Libya is now glaring.

Obviously NATO's commanders are still hoping that a lucky bomb may kill Gaddafi, but to date the staying power has been with the Libyan leader, whereas it is the relevant NATO powers who are fighting among themselves.

The reports from Istanbul of the deliberations of NATO’s Contact Group have a surreal quality, as Secretary of State Clinton and British foreign minister Hague gravely re-emphasize their commitment to regime change and the strengthening of ties to the Transitional Council in Benghazi, while the humiliation of the entire NATO expedition is entering the history books as an advertisement of the dangers of political fantasy in the service of “humanitarian interventionism”, appalling intelligence work, illusions about bombing and air power, and some of the worst press coverage in living memory.

Take British prime minister David Cameron. He can thank Rupert Murdoch, even the wretched Andy Coulson for one ironic blessing. His appalling misjudgment and obstinacy in hiring former News of the world editor Coulson has so dominated British headlines these past days that an equally staggering misjudgment in the international theater is escaping well-merited ridicule and rebuke.

When Cameron vied with French president Sarkozy in early March in heading the charge against Qaddafi, no murmur of caution seems to have disturbed the blithe mood of confidence in Downing St. It was as though Blair’s blunders and miscalculations in Iraq, endlessly disinterred in subsequent years, had never been.

Cameron, like Sarkozy, Clinton and Obama presumably had intelligence assessments of the situation in Libya Did any of them say that Gaddafi might be a tougher nut to crack than the presidents of Tunisia or Egypt, might even command some popular support in Tripoli and western Libya, historically at odds with Benghazi and the eastern region? If they did, did they pay any attention?

The Western press, along with al-Jazeera, was no help. The early charges of Gaddafi committing “genocide” against his own people or ordering mass rapes were based on unverified rumor or propaganda bulletins from Benghazi and have now been decisively discredited by reputable organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Any pretensions the International Criminal Court might have had to judicial impartiality has been undermined by the ICC’s role as NATO’s creature, rushing out indictments of Gaddafi and his closest associates whenever NATO’s propaganda agenda has demanded it.

The journalists in Benghazi became cheerleaders for what was from the start plainly a disorganized rabble of disparate factions. The journalists in Tripoli were reluctant to file copy which might be deemed by their editors as “soft” on Gaddafi, a devil figure in the West for most of his four decades in power. America’s pwogwessives exulted that at last they had on their hands a “just war” and could cheer on NATO’s bombardiers with a clear conscience and entertain fantasies about the revolutionary purity of the rebels.

All history shows that the dropping of thousands of bombs and missiles, with whatever supposed standards of “pin point accuracy”, never elicits the enthusiastic support of civilians on the receiving end, even if a certificate of humanitarian assistance and merciful intent is stamped on every projectile. Recent pro-government rallies in Tripoli have been vast. Libya has a population of about six million, with four million in Tripoli. Gaddafi barrels around the city in an open jeep. Large amounts of AK-47s have been distributed to civilian defense committees. Were they all compelled to demonstrate by Gaddafi’s enforcers? It seems unlikely.

This last week the western press excitedly relayed the news that a handful of prisoners were denouncing Gaddafi. Well, if you were a prisoner with rebel guns pointed at your head, would you proclaim your fidelity to the prime target of their fury, or murmur that you had been dragooned into unwilling service? Isn’t this an item from Journalism 101. Are they “black mercenaries” or Libyans from the south who happen to be black and members of Gaddafi’s militias?

Another pointer to NATO’s misjudgments has been the heavy-handed dismissal of charges from African, Russian and even leaders of NATO countries such as Germany that the mandates of two UN security council resolutions passed in February and then March 17 – protection of civilian populations – were being brazenly distorted in favor of efforts to kill Gaddafi and install the ramshackle “provisional government” in Benghazi – a shady bunch from the getgo.

In early March, Sarkozy, languishing in the polls, believed the counsel of “new philosopher” Bernard-Henri Lévy, after the latter’s March 6 excursion to Benghazi, that Libya and its oil were up for grabs. On March 11 Sarkozy took the precipitate step of recognizing the Benghazi gang as the legitimate government of Libya and awaited Gaddafi’s collapse with a confident heart.

In a hilarious inside account of the NATO debacle, Vincent Jauvert of Le Nouvel Observateur has recently disclosed that French intelligence services assured Sarkozy and foreign minister Juppe “from the first [air] strike, thousands of soldiers would defect from Gaddafi. They also predicted that the rebels would move quickly to Sirte, the hometown of the Qaddafi and force him to flee the country. This was triumphantly and erroneously trumpeted by the NATO powers which even proclaimed that he had flown to Venezuela. By all means opt for the Big Lie as a propaganda ploy, but not if it is inevitably going to be discredited 24 hours later.

“We underestimated al-Gaddafi ,” one French officer told Jauvert. “He was preparing for forty-one years for an invasion. We did not imagine he would adapt as quickly. No one expects, for example, to transport its troops and missile batteries, Gaddafi will go out and buy hundreds of Toyota pick-up in Niger and Mali. It is a stroke of genius: the trucks are identical to those used by the rebels. NATO is paralyzed. It delays its strikes. Before bombing the vehicles, drivers need to be sure they are whose forces are Gaddafi’s. ‘We asked the rebels to a particular signal on the roof of their pickup truck, said a soldier, but we were never sure. They are so disorganized ...’"

When collapse did not arrive on schedule the French government breezily confirmed earlier this month it was shipping and air-dropping dropping arms supplies to Libyan rebel groups. We can safely assume Britain has its own clandestine operations in train, though the capture of the SAS/MI6 unit by Libyan farmers was not an inspiring augury.

The NATO coalition is now falling apart, though disclosure of this development has been muted to non-existent in the US press. French defense minister Gerard Longuet gave an interview at the end of last week to a French tv station saying that military action against Libya has failed , and it is time for diplomacy: “We must now sit around a table. We will stop bombing as soon as the Libyans start talking to one another and the military on both sides go back to their bases.’ Longuet suggested that Gaddafi might be able to remain in Libya, ‘in another room of the palace, with another title’.”

If Longuet’s startling remarks were for local consumption on the eve of an Assembly vote, it clearly came as a shock to Cameron and Secretary of State Clinton. To heighten the impression of a civil war in NATO Cameron and Clinton rushed out statements asserting the ongoing goal of regime change, and that Gaddafi’s departure was a sine qua non, as demanded by the Benghazi gang.

But Berlusconi, his country the objective of tens of thousands of refugees from the fighting and from economic dislocation in Libya is now saying he was against the whole NATO adventure from the start. He may decline to renew in the fall current basing agreements in Italy for the NATO intervening powers. Germany has always been unenthusiastic. Initially, France and Britain nourished hopes of close military liaison but that soon collapsed for all the usual reasons -- inertia, suspicion and simple incompetence.

Sarkozy’s suspicions of Germany and Turkey were apparently so intense, according to Le Nouvel Observateur, that he called for the sidelining the Turkish and German officers present in the command structure of NATO, on the grounds that they could undermine the war given Berlin and Ankara’s distaste for the whole exercise. Normal guidelines dictate that when the supreme commander of NATO, an American general and his No. 2, a Briton, are on leave, the No. 3, is to be a German. Sarkozy had this sequence nixed.

Obama has been playing a double game, reflective of domestic pressures and political priorities. At the start, the rush to the UN Security Council was very much Secretary of State Clinton’s initiative. In political stature early to mid-February Obama was at his nadir. There was growing talk of a one-term presidency. Clinton rushed into what she perceived as a tempting vacuum, perhaps even began to entertain some hopes of accelerating Obama’s decline and proffering herself as a potential contender in 2012. Obama, still fighting the “wimp” label, swiftly endorsed the NATO mission and defied challenges as to its constitutional propriety. Clinton soon thereafter announced she was not particularly interested in staying in national politics after 2012.

In terms of equipment the US has been crucial. According to one French general cited by Le Nouvel Observateur, “33 of 41 tanker aircraft used in the operation are American, most of the AWACS as well, all the drones as well, as 100 per cent of anti-radar missile and laser guidance kits for bombs. And that's not all. The main means of command and control of NATO as the huge bandwidth for transmitting all the data is American.” The Director of Military Intelligence, General Didier Bolelli, revealed that over 80 per cent of the targets assigned to the French pilots in Libya was designated by U.S.! "They give us just enough so that we do not figure we were breaking," says one diplomat.

Those whose memories stretch back to the Suez debacle of 1956 might recall that Eisenhower simply ordered the British, French and Israeli forces to abandon the effort to overthrow Nasser. We could well be seeing a less overt rerun of that conclusive demonstration of post World War II US dominance, with the Obama administration making the point that any effort at asserting European primacy in the Mediterranean region is doomed to failure.

Before his retirement Defense Secretary Gates took the opportunity to twist the knife in a speech in Brussels: “The mightiest military alliance in history, is . . . into an operation against a poorly-armed regime in a sparsely populated country — yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference.” He said ominously, “future U.S. political leaders . . . may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.”

Even if Obama is in fact wholeheartedly for regime change in Libya the political temperature here does not favor the sort of escalation – hugely costly and much against the public mood -- required in the wake of the failure of the bombing campaign.

There’s no evidence that Labor’s leader, Ed Miliband, lion-like in his eagerness to seize the reins of the anti-Murdoch bandwagon, has the political agility to toast Cameron for the Libyan farce. By disposition he’s probably keener on “humanitarian interventions” than Cameron and can only reproach him for not trying hard enough.

In sum, we on the left should rejoice that a simple colonial smash and grab is currently in a shambles, with serious long-term consequences for NATO’s credibility and pretenses to respect for international law . The kangaroo cage known as the International Criminal Court has been even further discredited, another cause for joy.

What next? The air is thick with speculations about a brokered settlement, salted with hopeful bleats from the Americans and British that Gaddafi is on the verge of collapse, that he is running out of fuel, that the rebels are tightening the noose around Tripoli, that the Russians re brokering some sort of a face-saving deal. It seems a better bet to recognize that after four and a half months, NATO and the interventionists are being humiliated. Throw in the humiliation of Rupert Murdoch and we can legitimately raise our champagne glasses even higher.

By Alexander Cockburn

http://www.counterpunch.org/

Lara Fabian - Je suis Malade

2011-07-16T10:56:00.000-04:00

Codex Alimentarius - The End Of Healthy Food, Minerals and Vitamins

2011-07-16T09:16:00.000-04:00

Getting Used to Life Without Food: Wall Street, BP, Bio-ethanol and the Death of Millions

2011-07-04T00:58:00.001-04:00

My late grandfather, a man of sturdy Norwegian-American farm stock, who later became a newspaper editor and political activist during the First World War, used to say, 'A man can get used to pretty much anything with time, except dying...and even that with some practice.' Well, as fate has it, it seems we, the vast majority of the human race, are about to test that adage in regard to the availability of our daily bread itself.

Food is one of those funny things it's hard to live without. We all tend to take it for granted that our local supermarket will continue to offer whatever we wish, in abundance, at affordable prices or nearly so. Yet living without adequate food is the growing prospect facing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of us over the coming years.

In a sense it's a genuine paradox. Our planet has everything we need to produce nutritious natural food to feed the entire world population many times over. This is the case, despite the ravages of industrialized agriculture over the past half century or more.

Then, how can it be that our world faces, according to some predictions, the prospect of a decade or more of famine on a global scale? The answer lies in the forces and interest groups that have decided to artificially create a scarcity of nutritious food. The problem has several important dimensions.

Eliminating emergency reserves

The ability to manipulate the price of essential foods worldwide at will -- almost irrespective of today’s physical supply and demand for grains -- is quite recent. It is also scarcely understood.

Up until the grain crisis of the mid-1970s there was no single "world price" for grain, the benchmark for the price of all foods and food products. Grain prices were determined locally in thousands of market places where buyer and seller met. The onset of economic globalization was to change that radically to the worse as the tiny percent of grains traded internationally were able to set the global price for the bulk of grains grown..

From the time of the earliest traces left by Sumerian civilization some two thousand years before Christ, in the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in today's Iraq, almost every culture had the practice of storing a reserve stock of a grain harvest – right up to the most recent times. Wars, droughts and famines were the reason. When properly stored, grain can be safely stored over a period of about seven years, enabling reserve stocks in case of an emergency.

After the Second World War, Washington created a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to serve as a wedge to push free trade among major industrial nations, especially the European Community. During initial negotiations, agriculture was deliberately kept off the table at the insistence of the Europeans, especially the French, who regarded political defense of Europe’s Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) and European agriculture protections as non-negotiable.

Beginning in the 1980s with the political crusades of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the extremist free market views of Chicago's Milton Friedman became increasingly accepted by leading European power circles. Step-by-step the resistance to the Washington agriculture free trade agenda dissolved.

After more than seven years of intense horse-trading, lobbying and pressure, the European Union finally agreed in 1993 to the GATT Uruguay Round, requiring a major reduction of national agriculture protection. Central to the Uruguay Round deal was agreement on one major change: national grain reserves as a government responsibility were to be ended.

Under the new 1993 GATT agreement, formalized with the creation of a World Trade Organization to police the agreements with enforceable sanctions against violators, ‘free trade’ in agriculture products was for the first time an agreed priority of the world's major trading nations, a fateful decision to put it mildly.

Henceforth, grain reserves were to be managed by the ‘free market,’ by private companies, greatest among them the US Grain Cartel giants, the behemoths of American agribusiness. The grain companies argued that they would be able to fill any emergency gaps more efficiently and save governments the cost. That ill-advised decision would open the floodgates to unprecedented grain market shenanigans and manipulations.
ADM (Archer Daniels Midland), Continental Grain, Bunge and the primus inter pares, Cargill—the largest privately-held grain and agribusiness trading company in the world—emerged the great winners of the WTO process.
The outcome of the GATT agriculture talks was very much to the liking of the people at Cargill. That was no surprise to insiders. Former Cargill executive Dan Amstutz played the key role in drafting the agriculture trade section of the GATT Uruguay Round.i In 1985 D. Gale Johnson of the University of Chicago, a colleague of Milton Friedman, co-authored a seminal report for David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission that was the blueprint for what they called "market-oriented" agricultural reform. It provided the framework for the US position in the coming GATT Uruguay Round negotiations. The Rockefeller group and its think tanks were the architects of ‘agricultural reform,’ as with so much in our post-1945 world.

The process of eliminating government grain reserves in major producing countries took time, but with the passage of the 1996 Farm Bill, the US had virtually eliminated its grain reserves. The EU followed soon after. Today, among major agriculture producing countries, only China and India still hold to a strategic security policy of nationally held grain reserves. ii

Wall Street smells blood

The elimination of national grain reserves in the USA and EU and other major OECD industrial countries set the stage for the next step in the process—elimination of agricultural commodity derivatives regulation, allowing unbridled unchecked speculative manipulations.

Under the Clinton Treasury (1999 – 2000) the deregulation of government controls over agriculture commodity speculation was formalized by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)—the government body charged with supervising derivatives trade in exchanges such as the Chicago Board of Trade or NYMEX— and in legislation drafted by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers at Treasury. As described below, it was no accident that Wall Street pushed Geithner, former President of the NY Federal Reserve, to become Obama’s Treasury Secretary in 2008, amid the worst financial debacle in history. Something to do with having foxes guard henhouses.

When Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State in 1972-1973, acting in league with the Department of Agriculture and major US grain trading companies, he orchestrated an unprecedented 200% jump in the price of grain. The price hike was triggered at that time by the US signing a three-year contract with the Soviet Union that had just gone through a disastrous harvest failure.

The US-Soviet deal hit amid global drought and severely reduced harvests worldwide, hardly a prudent time to sell the entire US grain cupboard to an ostensible Cold War opponent. The sale took place amid a major world grain harvest shortfall leading to the explosive price rise. Critical voices in US press at the time appropriately dubbed it the Great Grain Robbery. Kissinger had even arranged for much of the cost of shipping US grain to the Soviets to be paid by US taxpayers. Cargill and company laughed all the way to the bank. iii

Around the same time, the big American grain companies—Cargill, Continental Grain, ADM, Bunge—began what would be a twenty-year process of transforming world grain markets into venues for controlling essential human and animal nutrition by manipulating grain prices regardless of supply.

The twenty-year process of the US’ gaining control of world grain markets and prices took a giant leap forward in the 1980s with the advent of financial commodity index trading and other derivatives.
The Summers-Geithner-Wall Street new version of the earlier grain robbery especially after 2006 would eventually pale anything Kissinger and friends had engineered in the 1970s.

In 1999, at the urging of major Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Chase Manhattan and Citibank, the Clinton Administration drafted a statute that would fundamentally alter grain-trading history. It was called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and was made law in 2000.

The two key architects of Clinton’s new law were a former Goldman Sachs consultant and Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and his Assistant at Treasury Tim Geithner, friend of Wall Street and today Obama’s Treasury Secretary. Secretary Summers was also a key player in preventing efforts to regulate financial derivatives in commodities and financial products.iv
The Summers-Geithner recommendations were contained in a November 1999 Report to Congress from the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, the infamous "Plunge Protection Team." v
At the time, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) proposed also to deregulate trading in derivatives between major banks or financial institutions, including derivatives of grain and other agricultural commodities.vi
The historic and unprecedented deregulation opened a massive hole in Government supervision of derivatives trading, a gaping hole that ultimately facilitated the derivatives games leading to the 2007 financial collapse. It also formed the deregulation free-for-all that is behind much of the recent explosion in grain prices.

Some years earlier in 1991 Goldman Sachs had rolled out its own commodity "index," which was to go on to become the global benchmark for derivatives trading of all commodities, including food and oil. The Goldman Sachs Commodity Index or GSCI was a new derivative that tracked the prices of some 24 commodities -- from corn to hogs to coffee to wheat to precious metals and energy. From the point of view of Wall Street, the idea was brilliant. It let speculators gamble on the future price of an entire range of raw materials in one step, a kind of Wall Street version of a “one-step” gambling mall…

With the CFTC deregulation of commodity trading in 1999 Goldman Sachs was positioned to reap sweet financial rewards with its GSCI. Now bankers and hedge funds and other high-profile speculators were able to take huge positions or bets on the future grain price with no need to take delivery of actual wheat or corn at the end.

The price of grain was now run by the new casino masters of grain supplies -- from Wall Street to London and beyond -- who traded grain futures and options in Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City. No longer was future price a form of hedging limited to knowledgeable active participants in the grain industry, whether farmers or millers or large grain end-users – the individual traders who had relied on futures contracts for more than a century to insulate themselves from risks of harvest failure or disasters.

Grain had become a new speculative field for anyone willing to risk investors' capital, high stakes gamblers such as Goldman Sachs or Deutsche Bank or high-risk offshore hedge funds. Grain, like oil before it, had now been almost entirely decoupled from everyday supply and demand in the short term. The price could be manipulated for brief periods through rumor rather than fact. vii

Unlike directly involved parties like millers or farmers or large restaurant chains, speculators neither produced nor took delivery of the corn or wheat they gambled with. They could hardly take delivery of 10 tons of hard red winter wheat and store it. Their game was a complex new form of arbitrage where the only rule was to buy low and sell high. Derivative instruments and US Government laissez faire regulatory negligence allowed the players’ potential profits from the game to be leveraged often many-fold.

But there was another perverse twist: Goldman Sachs' GSCI was structured so that investors could only buy the contract. It was, as the industry calls it, "long only." No one could bet on a fall in grain prices with it. You only stood to profit from an ever-rising grain price and that happened as ever more innocent investors were suckered into high-risk commodity speculation creating a kind-of self-fulfilling prophesy.viii

That long-only feature was done to encourage bank clients to leave their money with the bank or fund for the long term and let the bankers play with other people’s money, with huge potential windfall profits to the bankers -- while any losses fell to the clients.

The fatal flaw was that the GSCI structure did not allow "short selling" that would force prices down in times of grain surplus. Investors were lured into a system that required them to buy and keep buying once grain prices rose for whatever reason. Soon other banks, including Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Pimco, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, floated their own commodity index funds.ix For the first time, high-risk commodity investing -- including into grain and other agriculture products -- became a financial product for the "little man" who knew little if anything about what he was getting into, just that his banker or fund adviser was urging him to invest in it. The banks as usual played with "other people’s money" – at the expense of ‘other people.’

In a detailed analysis of the grain price bubble of 2007-2008, Olivier de Schutter, a UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, recently concluded that "a significant portion of the increases in price and volatility of essential food commodities can only be explained by the emergence of a speculative bubble." x The timing of that bubble was notable as it conveniently offset huge losses of those same mega-banks that were under water with their excesses in securitized home mortgages and other Wall Street casino madness. Schutter added,

In particular, there is a reason to believe that a significant role was played by the entry into markets for derivatives based on food commodities of large, powerful institutional investors such as hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks, all of which are generally unconcerned with agricultural market fundamentals. Such entry was made possible because of deregulation in important commodity derivatives markets beginning in 2000. xi
Following the collapse of the dot.com stock bubble in 2000, as Wall Street and other major financial players began seeking alternatives, commodities and high-risk derivatives based on baskets of commodities became a major speculative investment theme for the first time.

Since 2000 the totality of dollars invested in various commodity index funds --Goldman Sachs’ GSCI being the largest -- has risen from some $13 billion in 2003 to a staggering $317 billion during the oil and grain speculation bubble in 2008. This was documented in a study by Lehman Brothers shortly before Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made them a sacrificial lamb in order to bail out his Wall Street cronies.xii

Since 2008 with some fluctuation, investor funds have continued to pour into various commodity funds, keeping food prices high and rising. From 2005 to 2008, the worldwide price of food rose 80 percent -- and has kept rising. In the period from May 2010 through May 2011 the price of wheat rose again some 85%. "It's unprecedented how much investment capital we've seen in commodity markets," said Kendell Keith, president of the National Grain and Feed Association, in a recent interview. xiii

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN estimates that since 2004, world food prices on average have soared by an unprecedented 240%. The offering of food commodities as a speculative alternative by the large banks and hedge funds exploded in 2007 when the US sub-prime financial tsunami first hit. Since then, speculation in food commodities has only gathered more momentum as other investments in stocks and bonds became highly dangerous. One result has been a predictably rapid rise in starvation, hunger and malnutrition in poorer populations around the world.

The FAO calculates that food-deficit countries will be forced to spend fully 30% more on importing food -- with a world value of a staggering $1.3 trillion. Three decades ago, that international market was tiny; today it is overwhelmingly dominated by a small handful of US agribusiness giants. Agribusiness, like military exports, is a core US strategic sector, long supported to extraordinary lengths by Washington. It is part of a larger and rather private agenda shaped decades ago under the aegis of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and their eugenics advocates. xiv

Importing food is today the rule rather than the exception as cheap, globalized agribusiness products, often under IMF pressure, are being forced onto populations across the developing world, including formerly self-sufficient food-producing societies now rendered dependant on imported food. This is done in the name of ‘free trade’ or what is often called ‘market-oriented agriculture.’ Left unsaid is that the so-called ‘market’ is colossally inefficient and unhealthy, literally and financially. Imported food dependency is artificially created by huge multinational conglomerates such as Tyson Foods, Smithfield, Cargill or Nestle, corporate giants whose last concern seems to be the health and well-being of those of us who must consume their industrial food products.

The cheap agribusiness imports often undercut the prices of locally grown crops, driving millions from their land into overcrowded cities in desperate search of jobs.

Today the price of wheat derivatives, or ‘paper wheat,’ controls the price of real wheat as speculators like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, Barclays or numerous offshore hedge funds -- with little interest in grains other than as a profit source -- now outnumber bona-fide agriculture industry hedgers four-to-one.

That is a complete reversal of the situation that dominated grain prices for the past hundred years or more. For some 75 years, the CFTC had imposed limits on how much of certain agricultural commodities -- including wheat, cotton, soybeans, soybean meal, corn, and oats -- can be traded by non-commercial players who are not part of the food industry. So-called ‘commercial hedgers,’ like farmers or food processors, previously could trade unlimited amounts in order to manage their risk. Not so with pure speculators.

Those limits were designed to prevent manipulation and distortion in what are relatively small markets. With the passage of the Summers-Geithner Commodity Modernization Act of 2000 and the infamous ‘Enron Loophole’ -- allowing exemption from government regulation -- the fast and loose trading in energy derivatives was rapidly expanded to include food commodities. The dam broke in 2006 when Deutsche Bank asked for and was granted CFTC permission to be exempt from all trading limits. The regulatory authorities assured them that there would be no penalties for exceeding the limits. Others followed, lemming like. xv

For some two billion people in the world who spend more than half of their income on food, the effects have been horrifying. During the speculation-driven grain price explosion in 2008, more than a quarter billion people became what the UN terms "food insecure," or a total of one billion human beings, a new record. xvi

That need never have occurred had it not been for the diabolical consequences of the US Government deregulating grain speculation, with support from the US Congress over the past decade or more. By early 2008, upwards of 35% of all US arable land was being planted with corn to be burned as biofuel under the new Bush Administration incentives. In 2011 the total is more than 40%. Thus, the stage was set for the slightest minor market shock to detonate a massive speculative bubble in grain markets, as was then being done by the use of the same GSCI index games as are played with oil.

Agribusiness as a long-term strategy

The record rise in grain and food prices in recent years is not a mere Wall Street profit gimmick, although obscene profits are being made. Rather, it is apparently an integral part of a long-term strategy whose roots go back to the years just after World War Two when Nelson Rockefeller and his brothers tried to organize the global food chain along the same monopoly model they had used for world oil. Food would henceforth become just another commodity like oil or tin or silver whose scarcity and price could ultimately be controlled by a small group of powerful trading insiders.

At the same time the Rockefeller brothers were expanding their global business reach from oil to agriculture in the developing world through their technology-driven Green Revolution scheme after the war, they were also financing a little-noticed project at Harvard University. The project would form the infrastructure for their plan to globalize world food production under the central control of a handful of private corporations.

Its creators gave it the name ‘agribusiness,’ in order to differentiate it from traditional farmer-based agriculture -- the cultivation of crops for human sustenance and nutrition. The push to place world national governments’ emergency grain reserves into private hands was merely a logical expansion of the original Rockefeller agribusiness strategy, as was their highly mis-represented “Green Revolution” which at day’s end merely promoted a huge sale of US agriculture products from John Deere tractors (using large volumes of Standard Oil Rockefeller products) to US chemical fertilizers made by other companies in the Rockefeller orbit—forcing a trend to large scale farming and forcing millions off the land into cities where they former a cheap labor pool for large multinationals. The highly-touted harvest yields turned out to be actual losses after several harvests. xvii

Agribusiness and the Green Revolution went hand-in-glove. They were part of a grandiose strategy which included Rockefeller Foundation financing of research for development of genetic alteration of plants a few years later.

John H. Davis had been Assistant Agriculture Secretary under President Dwight Eisenhower in the early 1950s. He left Washington in 1955 and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business, an unusual place for an agriculture expert in those days. Davis had a clear strategy. In 1956 he wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review in which he declared, “the only way to solve the so-called farm problem once and for all, and avoid cumbersome government programs, is to progress from agriculture to agribusiness.” He knew precisely what he had in mind, though few observers had a clue back then.xviii

Davis, together with another Harvard Business School professor, Ray Goldberg, formed a Harvard team with Russian-born economist Wassily Leontief, who was then mapping the entire US economy, in a project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. During the war, the US Government had hired Leontief to develop a method of dynamic analysis of the total economy that he referred to as ‘input-output’ analysis. Leontief worked for the US Labor Department as well as for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the CIA.xix

In 1948 Leontief got a major four-year $100,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up the Harvard ‘Economic Research Project on the Structure of the American Economy.’ A year later the US Air Force joined the Harvard project, a curious engagement for one of the prime US military branches. The transistor and electronic computers had just been developed along with methods of linear programming that would allow the processing of vast amounts of statistical data on the economy. Soon the Ford Foundation joined in to fund the Harvard project.xx

The Harvard project and its agribusiness component were part of a major attempt to revolutionize US and later, global food production. It was to take four decades before it dominated the food industry. Professor Goldberg later referred to the agribusiness revolution and the development of genetically-modified agribusiness as ‘changing our global economy and society more dramatically than any other single event in the history of mankind.’ xxi He just might have been right as we are now likely about to witness over the coming decade.

As Ray Goldberg boasted years later, the core idea driving their agribusiness project was the re-introduction of ‘vertical integration’ into US food production. By the 1970s most Americans had forgotten that bitter battles had been fought before World War I and during the 1920's to pass laws in Congress to prohibit vertical integration by giant conglomerates, and to break up trusts such as Standard Oil, in order to prevent them from monopolizing whole sectors of vital industries.

It wasn’t until the David Rockefeller-backed Presidency of Jimmy Carter in the late 1970’s that US multinational business was able to begin the rollback of decades of carefully constructed US Government regulations of health, food safety and consumer protection laws, and open the doors to a new wave of vertical integration of agriculture. The vertical integration process was sold to unaware citizens under the banner of ‘economic efficiency’ and ‘economy of scale.’ xxii

A return to vertical integration and the accompanying agribusiness were introduced amid a publicity campaign in mainstream media and from industry claiming that government had encroached far too much into the daily lives of its citizens and had to be cut back to give ordinary Americans ‘freedom.’ The war cry of the campaigners was ‘deregulation.’ Of course, de-regulation by government merely opened the door to private control – another form of regulation -- by the largest and most powerful corporate groups in any given industry. That was certainly the case for agriculture -- the big four grain cartel companies dominated world grain markets from the 1970s to today. They worked hand-in-glove with big Wall Street derivative players such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup.

By the latter part of 2007, trading in food derivatives was fully deregulated by Washington, and US government grain reserves gone. The way was clear for dramatic food price rises.

The speculative machine that had been put into place by Wall Street and its banker friends was creating the potential for significant, long-term food inflation. But the inflation needed a major ‘venting’ to get the ball really rolling. That was to come from George W. Bush.

The Killer Punch—BP, Bioethanol and Genocide

In 2007, just as the US real estate crisis was causing the first tsunami shock waves through Wall Street, the Bush Administration made a major public relations push to convince the world that the US had turned into a "better steward of the environment." Too many fell for the hype.

The center of the Bush program, announced in his January 2007 State of the Union Address, was something called '20 in 10'—cutting US gasoline use 20% by 2010. The official reason given to the public was to "reduce dependency on imported oil," as well as cutting unwanted "greenhouse gas" emissions. That wasn't the case, of course, but it made good PR. Repeat it often enough and maybe most people will believe it. Maybe they won't realize that their taxpayer subsidies are being used to grow ethanol corn instead of feed corn and are also driving the price of their daily bread through the roof.

The heart of the Bush plan was a huge taxpayer-subsidized expansion of the use of bio-ethanol for transport fuel. President Bush's first plan required production of 35 billion gallons (about 133 billion liters) of ethanol a year by 2017. Congress had already mandated, via the Energy Policy Act of 2005, that corn ethanol for fuel must rise from 4 billion gallons in 2006 to 7.5 billion gallons in 2012.

To make certain it would happen, farmers and big agribusiness giants like ADM were given generous taxpayer subsidies to grow corn for fuel instead of for food. David Rockefeller’s corporate farms were one of the largest recipients of US Government agriculture subsidies. Currently ethanol producers in the US get a subsidy of 51 cents per gallon of ethanol. The subsidy is paid to the blender, usually an oil company, that blends it with gasoline for sale. In the 2011 harvest year, an estimated 40% of all corn acreage in the United States is expected to be grown for biofuel.

As a result of these generous US Government subsidies to produce bio-ethanol fuels, and the new legislative mandate, the US refinery industry has been investing big time in building special new ethanol distilleries, similar to oil refineries, except they produce ethanol fuel. The number currently under construction exceeds the total number of oil refineries built in the US over the past 25 years. When finished in the next 2-3 years, the demand for corn and other grain to make ethanol for car fuel will double from present levels.

Not wanting to be left behind, the EU bureaucrats in Brussels -- no doubt generously encouraged by the likes of BP, Cargill, ADM and the major biofuel lobby -- came up with its own scheme for "10 in 20" or a mandate that 10% of all road fuel in the EU by 2020 be from biofuel. Shockingly, they did so despite the existence of a report by the same EU Commission on the damaging impact of such a massive turn to subsidized biofuels. The London Times reported,

A study by the Commission on the land use implications of sourcing only 5.6 per cent of Europe’s transport fuel from biofuels concluded that any significant rise beyond 5.6 per cent would 'rapidly' increase carbon emissions and 'erode the environmental sustainability of biofuels'... Like most political diktats, the figure of 10 per cent was plucked out of the air and no one at the Commission had a clue, when the policy was adopted, how the fuel industry was to meet the one in ten mandate without a huge rise in biofuel planting in the tropics. xxiii

In short, the use of farmland worldwide for bio-ethanol and other biofuels—burning the food product rather than using it for human or animal feed—is being treated in Washington, the EU, Brazil and other major centers as a major new growth industry. The impact on human beings, however, is quite the opposite. It is rapidly becoming a death industry, death of millions of innocent human beings unable to afford adequate nourishment for themselves or their families.

The United States today is far and away the world's largest producer of ethanol biofuel for transportation fuel. In 2010 the US produced 13 billion gallons (US) or 50 billion liters of ethanol biofuel, amounting to near 60% of the world’s total. The EU added some 6% to the global total as number three behind Brazil in a macabre contest to see which country can destroy the most food by burning toxic biofuels. xxiv

The most alarming aspect of the entire biofuel scam is the fact that three full years after the grain price explosion of 2008 was demonstrated to be directly tied to the biofuels removal of millions of acres of US farmland -- from corn for feed to corn for fuel -- no action has been taken either in the US Congress or in the EU or anywhere else to reverse that insane policy. The stunning inaction seems testimony to the political power of the biofuels lobby. Who are they? Not surprisingly, they are the same agri and oil giants behind US and EU food and energy policy. Major players include BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ADM, Cargill and the like. It is a powerful lobby and sees a goose that can literally lay multiple golden eggs in the form of mandated biofuels requirements of the EU and USA and elsewhere.

This January the Institute for European Environment Policy (IEEP), an independent body, issued a report on the role of bioenergy in EU governments' "renewable energy action plans." Recent proclamations by the German government that renewables will replace nuclear electric generation by 2020, and similar pledges by other EU governments, all rely on a fantastic delusion that the electriic power being generated by large nuclear plants can come from biodiesel. The January IEEP study notes that:

More than half of the renewable energy which EU Member States expect to consume annually by 2020 will consist of bioenergy, e.g. biomass, bioliquids and biofuels. This is revealed in a first evaluation of the proposed scale of deployment of bioenergy by the EU Member States in the period to 2020 as forecast in their National Renewable Energy Action Plans (NREAPs)...A significant increase in absolute consumption of bioenergy is anticipated. In the 23 plans examined, bioenergy will thus remain the main contributor to the renewable energy sector. Overall, the bioenergy contribution to final energy consumption is expected to more than double, from 5.4% in 2005 to almost 12% (124Mtoe) in 2020. Bioenergy will have a quasi-dominant role in the renewable portion of the EU heating and cooling sector, and is foreseen to contribute more than 80% to the sectoral target. In the electricity sector the bioenergy share will be relatively low but in the transport sector it is expected to reach nearly 90% of total renewable energy by the year 2020. xxv

The IEEP conducted an analysis of required land acreage needed for the cultivation of such a huge increase of biofuels by 2020. They estimated, after all factors are properly calculated, that an additional "4.1 to 6.9 million hectares" in the European Union will be needed for biofuel, acreage more than three times the entire state of Kansas.

Further, belying the EU myth that biofuels give a reduction of CO2 (even were CO2 a problem -- which is highly contested among serious scientists), the IEEP calculates that the enormous rise in biofuel use will lead to more CO2 emissions from vehicles, equivalent to adding as many as 26 million additional vehicles on European roads. xxvi

Biofuels are highly undesirable for countless reasons, as many serious environmental organizations have begun to realize. The corn ethanol industry has grown, largely due to powerful corn and oil lobbies. High demand will likely increase corn ethanol and gas prices as corn ethanol is mixed with gasoline.

Ethanol energy gets poor fuel-economy with standard engines. And most importantly, it simply is not possible to produce the amount of corn required to make the fuel a viable alternative to oil or a serious supplier of energy. xxvii

New Global Dustbowls?

What biofuels and their pushers—from BP to agribusiness, combined with the mad decisions of governments from Washington to Berlin to Paris and beyond – have accomplished is the elimination of grain security reserves worldwide. This has been vigorously mixed with a cocktail of deregulated free commodity derivatives trading to create the ingredients for the worst potential food crisis in human history.

The testing of that hypothesis may unfortunately already be underway at the hands of forces far beyond the ability of man to control. At the recent annual meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society, scientists from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) presented results of studies of recent solar flare activity, by far the greatest factor influencing climate change on Earth. Flares occur in periodic cycles such as 11-year, 22-year and longer ones. The solar studies indicate that the Earth is now at the beginning of what might be a decade or longer period of greatly reduced solar activity.

Reduced solar sunspot activity means a less active sun. As Dutch physicist Gijs B. Graafland puts it, “It will affect severely the evaporation of ocean water and by that the amount of rain. This results in lower water for agriculture and therefore in less growth and more severe blowing away of dry fertile top soil layers which gives a decade of high food prices.” xxviii

Translated to us, that could mean climate catastrophes, harvest failures, droughts and dust storms -- such as those that swept the US Midwest during the Great Depression of the 1930s -- in fertile regions across the planet, not just once but over a span of years. If the solar physicists as well as earlier Russian astrophysicist, Habibullo Abdussamatov, the head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia who predicted similar onset of a new “Little Ice Age”xxix beginning 2014, are right, we may soon face a food crisis on a scale our planet never in history has faced.xxx

F. William Engdahl is author of Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century; A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order and Full Spectrum Dominance : Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. He may be contacted via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net. Reproduction of all or significant parts of this article, as well as foreign translations, require the author’s prior permission.

NOTES

[1] F. William Engdahl, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, www.GlobalResearch.ca, Montreal, 2007, pp. 216-219.
[2] Sophia Murphy, Strategic Grain Reserves In an Era of Volatility, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Minneapolis, October 2009.
[3] Anon., "Another Soviet Grain Sting", Time, November 28, 1977.
[4] "The Warning", Public Broadcasting System, October 20, 2009.
[5] Lawrence Summers et al, "Over-the-Counter Derivatives Markets and the Commodity Exchange Act: Report of The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets", Washington, D.C., November 1999.
[6] Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, "CFTC Releases Plan for Market Deregulation", March 1, 2000.
[7] Frederick Kaufman, "How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis", Foreign Policy, April 27, 2011.
[8] Amine Bouchentouf et al, "Investing in Commodities via the Futures Markets", dummies.com.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Olivier de Scheutter, "Food Commodities Speculation and Food Price Crises", Briefing Note 02, September 2010.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Frederick Kaufman, "The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it", July 2010, Harper’s Magazine, pp. 32, 24.
[13] Frederick Kaufman, "How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis", Foreign Policy, April 27, 2011.
[14] Neena Rai, et al, "High Food Prices Pose Threat to Poor Nations", The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2011.
[15] Global Labour Institute, Food Crisis—Financializing Food: Deregulation, Commodity Markets and the Rising Cost of Food, Geneva, June 7, 2008.
[16] Ibid.
[17] See F. William Engdahl, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, 2007, Montreal, www.GlobalResearch.ca, pp.123-151 for a more detailed analysis of the fraud of the Green Revolution and its so-called "wonder wheat" from Norman Borlaug, himself a product of the Rockefeller research organization.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Current Biography, 1967, Wassily Leontief; and Ray Goldberg.
[21] Ray Goldberg, The Evolution of Agribusiness, Harvard Business School Executive Education Faculty Interviews. W. Leontief, Studies in the Structure of the American Economy, 1953. International Science Press Inc., White Plains, New York. In its 1956 Annual Report, the Ford Foundation noted the following grant: "Harvard Economic Research Project": In addition to these over-all programs, a grant of $240,000 was made to support the activities of the Harvard Economic Research Project over a six-year period. This center, under the direction of Professor Wassily Leontief, was engaged in a series of quantitative studies of the structure of the American economy, focusing mainly on inter-industry relationships and the interconnections between industry and other sectors of the economy. Equal support was contributed by the Rockefeller Foundation. See also Ray Goldberg, The Genetic Revolution: Transforming our Industry, Its Institutions, and Its Functions, an address to The International Food and Agribusiness Management Association (IAMA). Chicago, June 26, 2000. Goldberg founded and headed the IAMA as well as holding seats on the boards of agribusiness giants Archer Daniels Midland, Smithfield Foods and DuPont Pioneer Hi-Bred. He practiced what he preached.
[22] F. William Engdahl, op. cit.
[23] Carl Mortished, "We’re on a green road to hell," The London Times, April 10, 2010.
[24] F.O. Lichts, "Industry Statistics: 2010 World Fuel Ethanol Production", Renewable Fuels Association.
[25] IEEP Study, "The Role of Bioenergy in the National Renewable Energy Action Plans: A First Identification of Issues and Uncertainties", January 31, 2011.
[26] IEEP Press Release, "New Report Concludes that Indirect Impacts of EU Biofuel Policy will Create Major Environmental Pressure", November 8, 2010.
[27] P. Gosselin, "German Ethanol Requirement Turns Into A Debacle", March 4, 2011.
[28] Gijs B. Graafland, "Effects of low sunspot levels on evaporation…," May 9, 2011, private email to the author.
[29] Jerome R. Corsi, "New Ice Age to begin in 2014—Russian scientist to alarmists: ’Sun heats Earth!’", May 17, 2010, WorldNetDaily.
[30] Solar Science Staff Writers, "Major Drop In Solar Activity Predicted", June 15, 2011, Boulder Colorado.

By F. William Engdahl

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28463.htm

The Best of W.C. Fields

2011-06-22T22:47:00.000-04:00

Not the Queen's speech, Brian Haw's

2011-06-20T23:41:00.000-04:00

Brian Haw : Jan 7th 1949 - June 18th 2011- A Real Man

2011-06-20T23:28:00.000-04:00

UK peace activist Brian Haw dies of cancer

2011-06-20T23:11:00.000-04:00

'Unsung hero' Brian Haw, 1949-2011

2011-06-20T23:00:00.001-04:00

British anti-war activist will be remembered for his unyielding protest on behalf of children killed in conflict.

Brian Haw left his work and family to set up camp and campaign in front of the British parliament building, in a colourful - and often noisy - demonstration against the killing of children in through sanctions and war [GALLO/GETTY]

On Sunday June 19, 2011, Brian Haw died peacefully in his sleep following a long fight against lung cancer.

Brian's death ends his decade-long challenge to the British establishment and his constant reminder to Members of Parliament and civil servants entering the Houses of Parliament in London of the brutal effects on ordinary people of economic sanctions and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On June 2, 2001, Brian Haw left his wife and seven children and his work as a carpenter to live day and night outside parliament, to focus attention on the devastating impact of the economic sanctions on Iraq and the plight of children born with birth defects attributed to the use of depleted uranium munitions in the 1991 Gulf war.

An unrelenting campaign

Brian endured threats, violence and abuse for the duration of his protest. "I want to go back to my own kids and look them in the face again," he wrote in 2002, "knowing that I've done all I can to try and save the children of Iraq and other countries who are dying because of my government's unjust, amoral, fear- and money-driven policies. These children and people of other countries are every bit as valuable and worthy of love as my precious wife and children."

In 2003, when the UK and US commenced their war against Iraq, Brian began fasting and praying with other protesters who joined him in sleeping rough in Parliament Square. Laws were drafted and passed attempting to remove Brian - but he manage to remain.

Member of Parliament John McDonnell recalls how, with fellow-MP Tony Benn, he acted as a character witness for Brian during his many appearances in court, including some brought by the Metropolitan Police on accusations of aggression and assault. "Brian was bearing witness to the horrendous war crimes in Iraq, reminding MPs of their own guilt," McDonnell says. "He was always willing to engage in debate but was continually harassed by the state. He remained a pacifist and a true democrat. Argument and debate were the only tools that he would use in his fight against injustice. He won repeatedly in court against the police."

A formidable presence

Watch Al Jazeera's report on the death of one of the most recognisable figures in the British anti-war movement

"Brian was in the British tradition of protest against great injustices," McDonnell adds, "alongside the long-term picket outside the South African embassy against Apartheid."

Jeremy Corbyn MP says Haw "single-handedly managed to irritate the British establishment simply by his presence in Parliament Square, every day reminding MPs of their preference for lies and deceit regarding Iraq and Afghanistan over the truth that British weapons and arms have destroyed thousands of innocent lives".

Rikki Blue is an independent film-maker who covered many of the protests and events that spiralled out of Brian's long struggle to remain in Parliament Square. He recalls that Brian "always worried about the kids. Everything that is wrong about war is that innocents die - and the biggest symbol of innocence are children."

"Brian demanded that the world stops killing kids." Blue expands: "He was such an angry man but when he smiled it was like the heavens opened. He suffered so much persecution and violence during his time in the square - but nothing could shake his belief that killing kids is wrong."

Emma Sangster, of the Voices in the Wilderness campaign against sanctions in Iraq, recalls how she first met Brian ten years ago: "Initially he had just three little placards - but he created a space where people could learn about the world in a way that was very formative before he was beleaguered by all the legal pressures from the laws especially drafted to get rid of him."

The authorities' determination to remove him became more entrenched but, Sangster says, "truth was stranger than fiction in the ways he managed to survive and remain. In 2002 he won the case that made his protest lawful: he stood his ground but he was under lots of pressure day after day".

A likeable figure

"In 2004," Sangster recalls, "I took my newborn son to meet Brian at a vigil at Downing Street. It was very special. Brian had great affection for my son Tom as well as all the children he met in Parliament Square."

Sanger concludes:

His legacy will be one of inspiration that people can stand up as individuals against the great wrongs. That was his message and it went all over the world. He was iconic, inspired by the Christian tradition of people who stand up and speak out: this was what drove him during the early period of his protest and is what I remember him most for.

Milan Rai, an author and editor of Peace News also pays tribute: "We first met Brian while holding our Friday vigils in Parliament Square on the Iraq sanctions. We used to enjoy speaking with him and supporting him."

Rai added:

[He became] a symbol for people in Britain who treasured him for speaking out against the lies that were told about the invasion of Iraq. He became a channel for people's anger. Brian was motivated by a very deep love of children: he felt so fiercely about the plight of the children in Iraq, he was going to stand up for those children as if they were his own. He was a man of uncompromising principles who touched a chord.

In 2004, I filmed Brian Haw welcoming US peace campaigner Cindy Sheehan, whose son had been killed in Iraq. Brian and Cindy threw their arms around each other and wept over the grim images of mutilated children arranged over Brian's protest display. They both kept saying, "see what they are doing to the kids, see what they are doing to the kids". Crowds of people followed them to the Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street, where they continued to protest for the rest of the day.

After the first year of his protest Brian had amassed a large number of placards denouncing US and British bombing of Iraq: the local authority, Westminster City Council, went to court to end the vigil. The judge, Mr Justice Gray declined, finding that:

This application raises questions as to the interaction between the right and the duty of a local authority to remove obstructions from its highways on the one hand, and the right of the individual citizen to use those highways to exercise his or her right to freedom of expression on the other hand … I am not satisfied in the circumstances of this case that there is any pressing social need to interfere with the display of placards so as to protect the right of others to pass and re-pass [the highway].

'God sends good judges'

One significant aspect of the case was an individual's right under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of speech. Mr Justice Gray added that he was "not persuaded" the defendant's placards could be considered advertising. "Looking at the issue of reasonableness in the round and taking account of the duration, place and purpose and the effect of the obstruction, as well as the fact that the defendant is exercising his Convention right," Mr Justice Gray came to the conclusion "that the obstruction for which the defendant is responsible is not unreasonable: I decline to grant the injunction".

After the ruling, Brian raced outside the courts and embraced a Buddhist monk and nun who had held a vigil outside the Royal Courts of Justice and told them: "God sends us good judges." He pointed to pictures of sick Iraqi children, declaring: "This has been hidden from our people for so long. This is an abomination. If the people knew what is being done in their name in Iraq, they would be horrified." Asked how long he would continue his protest he said: "As long as it takes. When do you give up on the kids?"

With the death of Brian Haw, London has lost one its most unusual and distinctive landmarks. Anyone who passed the Houses of Parliament could hardly miss him. Another indicator of his wide impact was Britain's most coveted art award, the Turner Prize, being won by Mark Wallinger for rebuilding Brian's Parliament Square protest in the Tate Britain gallery.

John McDonnell MP now plans to put a resolution (an "Early Day Motion") before the Houses of Parliament calling for the erection of "a monument to Brian Haw that celebrates peace, rather than celebrating war - as do many of London's great monuments".

By Pennie R. Quinton

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/201162081348694801.html

Censorship: Facebook Bars Users From Posting Intel Hub Articles

2011-06-19T01:34:00.001-04:00

Author: Brian D. Hill

Confirmed as Fact! Facebook blocks certain links from being posted by all Facebook users unless enough complaints are sent to Facebook to get them to unblock certain links from TheIntelHub.

We have decided to confirm whether Facebook is actually barring article postings from TheIntelHub or not, but our research has confirmed it, plus we are verifying this fact with a few other Facebook users as well.

TheIntelHub is an Alternative News website that brings out the truth in exclusive news articles not covered by the mainstream media. Alternative News sites has been the target for hacker attacks [1,2,3], lawsuit threats [1], slander attacks to try to discredit them, targeted by Canadian Government agents monitoring online forums and social networking sites to combat what they deem as ‘Disinformation’, and Alternative News sites had been blocked by some ISPs due to their Governments block lists under the guise of stopping children from watching porn. Alternative News sites have poked a hole through the once-secretive New World Order agenda and now because of this the elite are looking to destroy any information that further damages their reign of any power that they still have left, then will highly likely destroy dissidents to conduct damage control for the PR people.

Alexander Higgins site that was hacked, forced him to have a one-page where he gets donations to try to bring his home-based server website back up, is also a contributing writer of TheIntelHub.

As it turns out Facebook has blocked these articles from TheIntelHub according to my research (The list will grow as more censorship is discovered):

Certain Information has been redacted for privacy reasons as those Facebook users and their posts do not have anything to do with this articles research, testing, and confirmations.

1. U.S And United Kingdom To Cut Power In Preparation of Massive Solar Storm (Completely blocked according to Screenshot and Alexander Higgins [1] verifying this)

2. House Passes World War 3 Legislation With Senate To Vote On Bill Next (Completely blocked according to Screenshot and several Facebook friends verifying this)

3. Facebook Censoring Some Alternative News Sites While Allowing Hackers To Attack Others (Will post on Facebook Wall status but refuses to show a title and Description according or any thumbnails of any of the images on the post or website, so here’s a screenshot and my Facebook friend testing this as well, screenshot from his wall included as evidence for this article)

So Facebook or some group of people is monitoring for certain posts then flags them for abuse and spam to get them barred from Facebook entirely. In fact Chris R. Hughes, the Co-founder of Facebook, has attended the Bilderberg meeting according to the leaked 2011 Bilderberg Attendee List [1] thanks to Jim Tucker and moles inside the Bilderberg Group. In fact the Bilderberg Group had planned for internet censorship for a long time but was likely to discuss how to further tighten Internet controls to further censor the truth from the four corners of the Internet world.

All Hope is Not Lost

In fact USWGO was able to easily circumvent the blocks by Facebook by syndicating the article titled “House Passes World War 3 Legislation With Senate To Vote On Bill Next” then posting the USWGO Syndicated link on Facebook instead of the original one from TheIntelHub and success, no block was engaged against the truth article.

So people syndicating other peoples articles might still be a way of working around Facebooks relentless censorship link blocks.

Another method to circumvent Facebooks blocks would be to use a proxy-style free URL redirection service which provides a good redirect link that at least has a title and description for the redirect page that way Facebook assumes the link is not coming from TheIntelHub or any blocked sites and allows the blocked link.

By Brian D. Hill

http://uswgo.com/facebook-bars-users-from-posting-theintelhub-articles.htm

SPECIAL REPORT. The USAID-CIA consortium in which Obama was raised

2011-06-10T00:53:00.002-04:00

The world of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and U.S. government-run foreign assistance priograms in which President Obama was raised has long been dominated by the CIA. It is against this backdrop that Obama's continuation of Bush-era covert and overt intelligence operations abroad must be seen. Obama's mother, father, and step-father directly benefited from U.S. government assistance programs in countries where the CIA backed despotic regimes, lavishing them with hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance.

USAID and the Soetoros' years of living dangerously in Indonesia

Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, worked on micro-financing projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Ford Foundation, both linked to the CIA, that helped prop up dictatorships in Indonesia and Pakistan. After Suharto seized power in 1965, USAID returned to Indonesia, with Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro as one of its chief employees, to help Suharto create the New Order (Orde Baru) that would usher in decades of fascist and kleptocratic rule. Suharto established the Bureau of Logistics (BULOG) that steered USAID-provided rice and other food staples to Suharto's business cronies. Suharto also relied on a group of U.S. economists, including Obama's mother, to re-engineer Indonesia's socialist economy. The group was called the "Berkeley mafia" and it ensured that Indonesia was compliant with dictates of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and large Western commercial banks. It is a family history that Obama refuses to comment on and one that is certainly nothing to be proud of.

While USAID was moving into Indonesia in 1965, USAID contractors flying for the CIA airline, Air America, were dropping off weapons and picking up drugs in Laos and dropping off the contraband in Thailand and South Vietnam.

One of the covert CIA operations that Obama continues is the use of USAID as a front for destabilizing foreign governments.

Obama continues USAID operations with the CIA

One USAID contractor, Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI) of Bethesda, Maryland, has been caught red-handed providing assistance to opposition forces in Cuba and Venezuela. DAI contractor Alan Gross was arrested in Cuba last December. Gross claimed to be installing Internet and other communications networks for the Jewish community in Cuba, however, leading members of that community reported they had never heard of Gross. The Cuban leadership has kept Gross in prison, believing him to be a spy. Recently, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson went to Cuba seeking Gross's release.

USAID has long been involved in trying to oust the Castro government in Cuba, funneling money through the Cuban-American National Foundation, the Center for a Free Cuba, and even a German foundation, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, an adjunct of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Party.

DAI is heavily involved with USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives, which transfers U.S. funds to opposition parties, labor and student movements, and other groups that are pro-American. DAI, under USAID contract, was caught providing U.S. funds to Venezuelan labor unions and media outlets that supported the CIA-led coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002.

In Haiti, USAID, acting at the behest of the CIA, funded political opposition to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, ousted in CIA-backed coups in 1991 and 2004. After Aristide's return to power in 1994, USAID money used to oppose Aristide was funneled through a "Project Democracy." Today, USAID is providing dubious small and micro-financing loans to small businesses in Haiti. The legacy of the micro-loan scheme created, in part, by Obama's mother continues in the earthquake-ravaged nation.

Bolivian President Evo Morales tossed USAID out of his country, charging it with acting with the CIA to destabilize Bolivia and bring about a coup. To this day, USAID is providing hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid to groups trying to undermine Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

During his ten-year rule, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori and his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, thought to be a CIA asset, reportedly received USAID funds to put down the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru guerrilla movements.

Continuing USAID and CIA covert ops in Pakistan and Indonesia

Currently, private military contractors working for the ex-Blackwater, now Xe Services, have been reported to be posing as USAID employees in Pakistan. Last year, the Pakistani press reported that USAID was bypassing the Pakistan ministries of Education and Information and providing direct educational assistance to Pakistani students. One USAID program in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan resulted in some $45 million disappearing down a virtual black hole.

In the 1980s, when Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Jr. spent time in Pakistan, USAID opened up a major office in Islamabad that distributed "non-lethal aid" to Afghan mujaheddin refugees in Pakistan, particularly in Peshawar. Some of the USAID assistance was also reportedly used to buy weapons for the Afghan mujaheddin but some of the weapons ended up in the hands of Pakistani Muslim radicals intent on ousting Pakistani dictator Muhammad Zia-ul Haq. Other USAID money ended up paying for expensive automobiles for leading Afghan mujaheddin commanders in Pakistan. Zia-uk Haq, his top generals, U.S. ambassador Arnold Raphel, and the head of the U.S. military aid mission in Islamabad General Herbert Wassom were killed in the suspicious crash of their C-130 aircraft in August 1988. A board of inquiry concluded that poisonous gas was released inside the aircraft causing it to crash after take-off in Bahawalpur.

The June 18, 1998, Jakarta Postreported that USAID programs in Indonesia continued to be fronts for CIA activity. Specifically, the paper said two Indonesian NGOs, the Indonesian Environmental Forum and the Indonesian Biodiversity Foundation, were charged with accepting money from USAID but should have known that the aid did not come "free of charge" and was linked to the CIA.

USAID: no aid is free of charge

In 2002, USAID in Palestine, where DAI is also active, demanded detailed personal information on all the members of NGOs that received American funding. The Palestinian press reported that the information, including personal political opinions of NGO members, was to be turned over to the CIA and eventually, Mossad, to apply pressure on the NGOs to comply with U.S. and Israeli policies.

For years, USAID operated in Manila from the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency building at the Ramon Magsaysay Center on Roxas Boulevard in the Malate district of the city. In 2000, the offices moved to the Makati district of the city but the building that hosued USAID was always known to locals as the "CIA building." The building, owned by the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation, in honor of the Philippines President who died in a 1955 plane crash, was built in 1959 with a loan from the Rockefeller family. The Rockefellers also provided grants to the Magsaysay Foundation.

In 2004, USAID was charged by Philippines opposition parties of using CIA agents to "monitor" elections in the country. The deal to permit USAID observers was signed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The head of the Anakpawis Party, Crispin Beltran, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer, "So much for independence when foreign intelligence agents can broker an official agreement with the Comelec (election commission) allowing them to interfere in the polls."

The CIA-linked Asia Foundation, which worked closely with the CIA-funded East-West Center at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, where Obama's mother met her second husband, General Suharto's colonel, Lolo Soetoro, was linked closely to USAID covert programs in Laos, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Vietnam, Thailand, Palau, Malaysia, and other Asian-Pacific nations. In Laos and Thailand, USAID officials provided counter-insurgency military training to Laotian and Thai special forces. In 1970, Dan Mitrione, a USAID official who was working for the CIA training Uruguyan special police on torture tactics, was kidnapped and killed by Tupamaro guerrillas.

In 1988, USAID opened a huge compound in a suburb of San Jose, Costa Rica that many Costa Ricans charged was the CIA headquarters for the "parallel state" established by the CIA in Costa Rica to support the contra-led civil war in neighboring Nicaragua. USAID also pumped millions of dollars in loans, some at zero percent, to private banks in Costa Rica to undermine the state banking system.

In 1995, Representative Mel Reynolds (D-IL), who was convicted of having sex with an underage female campaign worker, was also revealed as working for U.S. intelligence in the 1980s, via employment with the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and USAID in Africa, particularly in Sudan. Reynolds, an African-American, also spent time in Israel under USIA cover.

Obama has continued USAID's involvement in CIA-directed programs in former Soviet states, including Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. In so doing, USAID complements the destabilization efforts of George Soros and his network of NGOs. Soros was a major financial backer of Obama's presidential campaign. In 1999, Croatian media reported that USAID was working through various NGOs, some connected to Soros, to oust the ailing Croatian President Franjo Tudjman. The paper Vjesnikcharged that USAID, as well as the U.S. Information Service (USIS), were used as ''tampons between the American non-governmental agencies and American state bodies." The paper said the USAID program to aid Tudjman's opposition was run by the CIA and coordinated by the U.S. ambassador in Zagreb, William Montgomery.

In a 2008 Russian documentary film, "Technology of Modern Coup," Bermet Akayeva, the daughter of ousted Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev, ousted in the 2005 Tulip Revolution, stated, "USAID is very actively financed by the Soros Foundation, by the National Democratic Institute and some kind of training is carried out constantly. However, it is difficult to describe USAID as an NGO given that it is under the U.S. Department of State. They work very actively." Akayeva said there were rumors in Kyrgyzstan that the U.S.-backed coup plotters distributed narcotics to rioters who participated in the coup.

In the north Caucasus, NGOs supported by USAID, have been accused by Russian authorities of having links to Chechen terrorists.

In 2002, Eritrea expelled USAID from the country, accusing it of working with the CIA to overthrow the government and assisting Ethiopia, which had engaged in a border war with Eritrea.

USAID in Africa: involvement in political assassinations and corruption

In 2009, Susan Tsvangirai, the wife of Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, was killed in an automobile accident in which the Prime Minister was injured. The truck that struck their automobile was bought with USAID funds and bore a U.S. embassy license plate. USAID denied it had anything to do with the truck. Public Works Minister Theresa Mokone, a friend of Mrs. Tsvangirai, likened the crash to the mysterious auto accident that killed popular and incorruptible Tanzanian Prime Minister Edward Sokoine in 1984. Sokoine was the designated successor to President Julius Nyerere, who antagonized the CIA by his close ties with the Soviet Union and China. Sokoine created a number of enemies among the elite class when he ordered the assets of embezzlers and smugglers seized. USAID, at the time of Sokoine's possible assassination, was heavily-involved in Tanzania.

In Zaire, millions of dollars in USAID money was diverted by CIA-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko to amass his personal fortune making him one of the world's wealthiest leaders. Other USAID funds for Zaire were diverted to help the Angolan rebel forces of UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi, in violation of U.S. law prohibiting aid to Angolan rebel groups. The covert aid program to UNITA was started in 1976 by Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Similarly, during the Reagan administration, USAID money was funneled through the National Endowment for Democracy to the Nicaraguan contras, again in violation of a specific law prohibiting such assistance.

During the late 1970s and 80s, USAID-funded "researchers" established links with African liberation movements, particularly the African National Congress of South Africa and the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) of Zimbabwe. Actually, these programs were CIA activities using "leftist" academics to spy on the nationalist movements. The operations were concentrated in Harare, Zimbabwe and Cape Town, South Africa, and cities that had a large expatriate African student community, including London and Melbourne and Perth, Australia.

USAID and the oil industry

In 1998, USAID participated in a closed-door meeting between major oil companies and the CIA, National Security Council, and three State Department officials, Stuart Eisenstat, Thomas Pickering, and Susan Rice (now Obama's ambassador to the UN) . The topic was exploitation of Africa's oil resources and the senior executives of Exxon, Mobil, Chevron (where Condoleezza Rice was a board member), and Texaco were present along with Department of Energy and Petroleum Finance Corporation officials.

In 2000, the CIA and USAID worked jointly through a private military company, Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI) to train the Nigerian army in tactics to combat secessionists in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta region. The CIA also commissioned the services of a private business intelligence and risk firm, Evidence-Based Research (EBR) of Vienna, Virginia, which appears to be a very similar operation to the CIA front, Business International Corporation, for which Obama worked in 1984, to conduct an assessment of the tribal revolt in the Niger Delta region, referred to by the CIA as a "semi-riot zone." EBR was formed in 1987, a year after Business International was sold to the Economist Intelligence Unit in London.

A formerly Secret CIA Intelligence Assessment, dated June 1983, and titled "Indonesia: Deteriorating Prospects for Energy Diversification," warns of a drop in Indonesia's oil export capacity. The CIA, along with USAID and the World Bank/IMF, had invested heavily in Indonesia, most importantly, to secure the nation's oil supply for the United States and its allies.

After helping Suharto seize power, Soetoro became an official of the Indonesian state-owned oil company, Pertamina, and Mobil Oil. The CIA assessment states: "Huffco and Mobil, two U.S. firms, rapidly developed natural gas exports for the Japanese market in the past decade in partnership with Pertamina." The memo states that this development, as well as coal, hydro, and geothermal, was carried out with strong financial and technical assistance from the World Bank and foreign aid donors like USAID. Huffco is Huffington Oil, founded in 1956 by Texas oil man Roy M. Huffington, the father of former Representative Michael Huffington (R-CA), a former vice chairman of Huffco and the ex-husband of Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post. The Huffingtons divorced in 1997 and a year later Michael Huffington announced that he was gay. More noteworthy is the fact that Roy Huffington, who died in 2008, was a seven-year chairman of the Asia Society, linked to the East-West Center in Hawaii, where Obama's father and step-father resided and the CIA.

Case Study on how USAID was used by the CIA for political purposes

A case of how the CIA used USAID to prevent a left-wing political party to winning at the polls is Mauritius. In a formerly Secret CIA Intelligence Memorandum, dated June 1982, and titled "Mauritius: Moderate Government Threatened at Polls," the CIA discusses the use of USAID money to prop up the pro-Western Labor government Prime Minister Seewoosagur Ramgoolam at the expense of the leftist Militant Mauritian Movement (MMM) of Paul Berenger.

Ramgoolam was forced to adopt economically destructive austerity measures dictated by the IMF that resulted in high unemployment, wage reductions, and currency devaluation. The beneficiary of the economic downturn would have been Berenger and his socialist MMM. But the CIA and USAID intervened to send aid money to Ramgoolam. The CIA memo states: "Labor is attempting to limit the political fallout from the restrictive measures and regain the political initiative by the announcement in mid-May of . . . a large public works program that would employ 8,000 people. The funds for the program are derived from the USAID "Food for Work" agreement."

The importance of Ramgoolam to the CIA was his quiet support for the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia, a British island in the Indian Ocean over which Mauritius officially claimed sovereignty. The Pentagon also intervened in the Mauritian economic situation by agreeing to employ Mauritian workers on Diego Garcia. Ramgoolam also succeeded in getting an agreement for the United Kingdom to compensate 1200 Diego Garcians who were removed from the island to Mauritius in 1971 to make way for the military base.

USAID funds were used by the CIA to prevent the nightmare scenario for the agency. The memo states: "An MMM victory would be a political victory for the Soviets, shifting Mauritius from a pro-Western to an non-aligned or even pro-Soviet position. [sentence redacted]. Based on MMM rhetoric, however, Moscow has reason to believe that an MMM regime would deny the Western powers the limited, though useful, military access they now enjoy on Mauritius. An MMM regime would be a valuable ally in Moscow's campaign for an Indian Ocean zone of peace and against the US military presence on Diego Garcia."

The CIA also believed the MMM to be influenced by Libya, which it accused of stirring up Mauritian Muslim youth. However, MMM leader Berenger was, at the time, the prominent Christian political leader in Mauritius. The CIA memo states "The Libyans have been rumored to be storing weapons in the Seychelles for the MMM, according to the US Embassy in Seychelles."

The CIA memo states that an MMM victory would reduce the Hindu community's influence. Mauritian politics was dominated by Hindus of Indian origin. The CIA also believed that the MMM would invite Cuban medical doctors and teachers to the island nation.

The CIA memo also reveals that South Africa's apartheid regime was assisting Ramgoolam's re-election campaign costs to avert an MMM victory.

---

President Obama's entire career and family history strongly suggests that the person who now resides in the White House has a crass view of the world's downtrodden peoples. Years of exposure to CIA operatives operating under corporate, USAID, World Bank, micro-financing schemes, NGO, and diplomatic cover has extended the U.S. Intelligence Community's massive control over America's foreign and domestic policies. Frankly, it would be best for the United States if Obama does not run for another term as president. Let the secret control over the United States by groups answerable to no one finally end with the Obama administration.

By Macu

http://milfuegos.blogspot.com/2010/09/special-rpeort-usaid-cia-consortium-in.html

The Hunchback of Notre Dame 1939 PART 13

2011-05-28T10:04:00.000-04:00

"Why was I not made of stone like thee?"

Pavane

2011-05-28T09:54:00.000-04:00

Vladimir Kush

2011-05-28T09:43:00.000-04:00

Max Ernst

2011-05-28T02:56:00.000-04:00

Giorgio De Chirico

2011-05-28T02:33:00.000-04:00

Vàli - Lengsel

2011-05-28T02:24:00.000-04:00

Empyrium - Abendrot

2011-05-28T02:23:00.001-04:00

Kow Otani - Prayer

2011-05-28T02:20:00.000-04:00

Where Are the Christian Churches When We Need Them Most?

2011-05-21T18:15:00.001-04:00

One of the most important functions of religious faith, observed St. Thomas Aquinas, is to allow people of limited intelligence and people with limited time for study to know important truths about God without having to investigate them personally. After all, few ordinary people are in a position to spend years rationally investigating the tenets of their faith, so, if they are to have any chance at finding Truth during their lives, they need to have it prepackaged for them to swallow on faith alone with the assistance of the Church.

This infinitely wise observation is just as true today as it was in the thirteenth century, and the Christian churches would do well to remember it during these especially turbulent political and economic times. In fact, with the world’s masses aflame with revolutionary ideas at the very same time that governments are going bankrupt, the need has never been greater for the Christian churches to remind their unthinking, gullible, and emotional flocks of what is true and just and good. If they fail to do this, and right quick, there is a very real and dangerous possibility that the Christian masses will get swept away by exciting and profoundly immoral ideas that will doom Western civilization for the foreseeable future.

Specifically, the Christian masses desperately need to have the foundations of Christian ethics beaten into their dense skulls to keep them on the right path during these hours of intellectual temptation. Since many of the ideas floating around the world right now are both alluring and morally dangerous, the Christian masses need a simple set of criteria by which to judge what is right and what is wrong. Fortuitously, God was provident enough to provide Christians (and Jews and Muslims) with a list of ten moral criteria so undemanding that even the most intellectually challenged among them should be able to determine right from wrong.

The list contains two ethical commandments of especial importance today because of the extreme danger that the Christian masses will unthinkingly violate them. The first and most important is that it is wrong for Christians to kill people. One would think that the Christian masses would have been able to memorize and abide by this simple proscription in the two thousand years that Christians have been walking the Earth, but apparently the density of the mass man’s mind continues to defy penetration. Christians in recent years are definitely no less likely to kill than any other peoples, and the danger is that they will kill even more frequently in coming years as economic and political conditions deteriorate further.

Thus, the Christian churches must intervene right now to remind the Christian masses that it is wrong to kill human beings and it is wrong for other people to kill in one’s name. The Christian flocks are increasingly angry, frightened, and impoverished by the political classes’ extravagances, and the temptation will only grow to take out their frustrations on other groups of people, such as the wealthy, Muslims, immigrants, or even their own neighbors. This is all the more true today, when it is so easy to aid in killing other people simply by voting. The majority of Christians do not need to bloody their own hands by shooting unarmed women and old men, for example, but they do irreparably stain their consciences by supporting such killings and paying for them with their tax money. And let’s not forget about the hordes of professional "Christian" killers (i.e., "soldiers") that are presently plying their bloody trade in the three immoral wars that the supposedly "Christian" West is prosecuting in the Middle East.

The task of reigning in Christian killing before it gets even more out of hand will be impossible, however, unless the Christian churches simultaneously reign in their flocks’ nationalistic sentiments. Like most peoples today, Christians have come to worship their own governments with religious fervor, a serious Christian sin in its own right. They thus do not view killings by "their" government soldiers and police as morally analogous to killings by rapists and robbers. Unless this nationalistic moral blindness is corrected by the Christian churches, or by human reason, by emphasizing that the lines drawn on maps identifying different countries are completely morally irrelevant, Christians will never curtail their killing, because they will inevitably view government-sponsored killing of "other people" as somehow morally acceptable. Without help from the Christian churches, the unthinking Christian masses will continue to value, not human life as such, but their "own" people’s lives, and to hell with the rest of the people of the world.

The Christian churches must also urgently emphasize that Christians should not torture, imprison, beat, or otherwise physically abuse other human beings. Nor should they countenance such depraved activities done in their name by their governments. This proscription follows directly from the prohibition against killing, because to put a man in a cage deprives him of his life and dignity during that time just as surely as killing him would, and torturing him makes him envy the dead, which is worse than actually killing him. It should go without saying that Christians ought not to do these things or accept that they be done in their name with their tax monies, but the Christian masses keep approving of them nonetheless. This will only increase as political and economic turmoil increases, and the Christian churches will be morally responsible to a certain extent if they do not do all they can to head it off now.

The second important ethical precept that the unthinking Christian masses urgently need to be reminded of is God’s prohibition against stealing. It is unequivocally wrong for Christians to take property from other people without their consent, and it is equally wrong for them to encourage or to pay other people (e.g., tax collectors or mob strongmen) to do the same thing. Like the prohibition against killing, God’s prohibition against stealing is about as clear as man could possible desire: "Thou shalt not steal." One might be tempted to think that the Christian masses would be able to comprehend something as simple as that, but apparently God vastly overestimated the mental abilities of His progeny. The Christian masses accept stealing, by governments in particular, just as much as any other people, and they tend to particularly approve of stealing from (i.e., taxing) the rich. They apparently think that it is morally acceptable for their government to take money from rich people by force just because Jesus was poor and defended poor people. The fact that Jesus’ own Father explicitly forbade them to steal – even from rich people – does not seem to enter into their moral reasoning. The Christian churches desperately need to undermine this invidious tendency before the increasingly impoverished and desperate Christian masses fall on their rich prey with a vengeance. Failure to head this tendency off will doom Western civilization for the foreseeable future, as the rich take flight with their capital to places that actually care about God’s Commandments. The loss of this valuable economic capital at a time when it is most needed to rebuild after the government created recession will send the Christian West back to the stone age.

Along a similar vein, there is an urgent need for the Christian churches to remind their mindless flocks that it is immoral to counterfeit money. It is just as wrong for me to print fake money to buy your car, for example, as it would be for me to steal it from you outright. The need for the Christian churches to emphasize this ethical precept does not, however, stem from a danger that the Christian masses will resort to the printing press themselves. Instead, the danger lies in the likelihood that the Christian masses will have their entire life savings and livelihoods wiped out by profoundly immoral economic idiots working in collusion with government who believe that prosperity grows on trees. Again, one would think that the Christian masses would already be aware that counterfeiting money is sickeningly immoral and economically destructive, but Christians of all stripes have done virtually nothing to stand up to this form of robbery. This testifies, yet again, to the appalling stupidity of the Christian masses – even when they themselves are being victimized, and the desperate need for the Christian herd to be morally guided by the Christian churches.

One hopes that the Christian churches will begin to lay seeds in the minds of their followers that will counteract these deadly immoral trends. With economic conditions deteriorating and political "leaders" plumbing new moral depths, the need has never been greater for the Christian churches to lead their herds back to the ethical path laid by Jesus and His Father. And that means, first and foremost, that the Christian churches must do their best to stop Christians from killing and robbing other people. One shudders to think that the Christian Churches even need to be reminded of something as fundamental as this.

By Mark R. Crovelli

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28155.htm

The Establishment Eliminates A Threat

2011-05-21T03:56:00.001-04:00

The police and the prostitute media have made it impossible for Dominique Strauss-Kahn to get a fair trial. From the moment of the announcement that he had been arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a hotel maid, and before he was ever indicted, the accounts given by the police were designed to create the impression that the director of the International Monetary Fund was guilty. For example, the police told the media, which duly regurgitated to the public, that Strauss-Kahn was in such a hurry to flee the scene of the crime that he left behind his cell phone. The police also put out the story that by calling airlines and demanding passenger lists, they managed to catch the fleeing rapist just as his plane was departing for France.

A New York judge denied Strauss-Kahn bail on the basis of police misrepresentation that he was apprehended fleeing the country.

Once he was imprisoned, the police announced that Strauss-Kahn was on suicide watch, which is a way of suggesting to the public that the accused rapist might take his own life in order to avoid the public humiliation of a guilty verdict from a jury.

But what really happened, assuming one can learn anything from press reports, is that Strauss-Kahn, upon arriving at JFK airport for his scheduled flight, discovered that he did not have his cell phone and telephoned the hotel, the scene of the alleged crime. It boggles the mind that anyone could possibly think that a person fleeing from his crime would call the scene of the crime, ask about his left-behind cell phone, and tell them where he was.

Then in rapid succession, reeking of orchestration, a French woman steps forward and declares that a decade ago she was nearly raped by Strauss-Kahn. This was followed by Kristin Davis, the Manhattan Madam of the prostitute who did in Eliot Spitzer before he could get the banksters on Wall Street, stepping forward to announce that one of her call girls refused to service Strauss-Kahn a second time because he was too rough in the act.

With hunting season opened, any woman whose career would benefit from publicity, or whose bank account would bless a damage award, can now step forward and claim to have been a victim or near victim of Strauss-Kahn.

This is not to deny that Strauss-Kahn might have an inordinate appetite for sex that did him in. It is to say that long before a jury hears from the maid, or from a prosecutor speaking for the maid "who is too traumatized to appear in court," the jury has been programmed with the verdict that he is guilty.

Why would he run away if he didn't do it?

Look at all the women he has accosted!

You get the picture.

I have written about the anomalies of the case. One of the most striking is the confirmed reports in the French and British press that a political activist for French President Sarkozy, Jonathan Pinet, tweeted the news of Strauss-Kahn's arrest to Arnaud Dassier, a spin doctor for Sarkozy, before the news was announced by the New York police.

Pinet's explanation for how he was the first to know is that a "friend" in the Sofitel Hotel, where the alleged crime took place, told him. Is it merely a coincidence that the men assigned the task of removing the Strauss-Kahn threat to French President Sarkozy's re-election had a clued-in friend in the Sofitel Hotel? Did the police clue-in the "friend" before they made the public announcement? If so, why?

What bothers me about the Strauss-Kahn affair is that if the police have evidence that supports their insistence on his guilt, it is pointless for the police to set Strauss-Kahn up in the media. Generally, set-ups like this occur only when there is no evidence or when the evidence has to be fabricated and cannot withstand examination.

As a person who had a Washington career, I find other aspects of the case disturbing. Strauss-Kahn had emerged as a threat to the establishment. Polls showed that as the socialist candidate, he was the odds-on favorite to defeat the American candidate, Sarkozy, in the upcoming French presidential election. Perhaps it was only electoral posturing to help defeat Sarkozy, but Strauss-Kahn indicated that he intended to move the International Monetary Fund away from its past policy of making the poor pay for the mistakes of the rich. He spoke of strengthening collective bargaining, and of restructuring mortgages, tax and spending policies in order that the economy would serve ordinary people in addition to the banksters. Strauss-Kahn said that regulation needed to be restored to financial markets and implied that a more even distribution of income was required.

These remarks, together with a likely win over Sarkozy in the French election, made Strauss-Kahn a double-barreled challenge to the establishment. The third strike against him was the recent IMF report that said China would surpass the US as the world's first economy within five years.

People who haven't spent their professional lives in Washington may not understand the threat to Washington that is in the IMF report. Whether deserved or not, the IMF has a lot of credibility. By placing China as the number one economic power by the end of the next US presidential term, the IMF thrust a dagger through the heart of American hegemony. Washington's power is based on America's economic supremacy. The IMF report said that this supremacy was at its end.

This kind of announcement tells the political world that, as the headline read, "The age of America is over." For the first time in decades, other countries can see the prospect of escaping from US domination. They don't have to be puppet states; part of the hegemonic empire. They see the prospect of serving their own people and their own interests instead of those of Washington. European countries, for example, forced to fight for Washington in Afghanistan and Libya, see light at the end of the tunnel. They can now think about refusing.

Although rich and a member of the establishment, and independently of his behavior toward women, Strauss-Kahn made the mistake of revealing that he might have a social conscience. Either this social conscience or the hubris of power led him to challenge American supremacy. This is an unforgivable crime for which he is being punished.

My friend, Alexander Cockburn, an intelligent and civilized person who is derided by right-wingers as a communist, lacks my experience of Washington. Consequently, he thinks that the facts will come out, although he seems to prefer that they come out on the side of the maid and not Strauss-Kahn.

If Alex were the Bolshevik he is said to be, he would know that no high-ranking figure who was serving the establishment would be destroyed on the basis of the word of an immigrant maid living in a sub-let apartment in a building for Aids victims. The very notion that the US establishment craves justice to this extent is a total absurdity. Americans are so indifferent to injustice that the American public shrugs off the hundreds of thousands and millions of women, children, and village elders who are murdered, maimed, dispossessed, and displaced by the US military in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and wherever. Washington and the military/security complex, while feeding on power and profit, can claim to be protecting Americans from "terrorists" or bringing democracy to the heathen.

The American criminal justice system is riddled with wrongful convictions and stinks of injustice. The US has a much higher rate of incarceration than alleged authoritarian regimes, such as China, and routinely destroys the lives of young people, and even mothers of small children, for using drugs.

Strauss-Kahn's indictment serves emotional needs of conservatives, left-wingers, and feminists as well as establishment agendas. Conservatives don't like the French, because they did not support the US invasion of Iraq. The left-wing doesn't like rich white guys and IMF officials, and feminists don't like womanizers. But even if the government's case falls apart in the courtroom, Strauss-Kahn has been removed from the French presidential race and from the IMF. This, not justice for an immigrant, is what the case is about.

Many Americans are unable to comprehend that authorities would remove a threat with a frame-up. But far worst has occurred. Francesco Cossiga, a former President of Italy, revealed that many of the bombings in Europe during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, which were blamed on communists, were in fact "false flag" operations carried out by the CIA and Italian intelligence in order to scare voters away from the communist party. Cossiga's revelations resulted in a parliamentary investigation in which intelligence operative Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated: "You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security."

If democratic governments will murder innocents for political reasons, why wouldn't they frame someone? Whether innocent or guilty, Strauss-Kahn has been framed in advance of his trial.

By Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28153.htm

Escaping the Matrix

2011-05-19T20:36:00.002-04:00

Are you ready for the red pill?

The defining dramatic moment in the film The Matrix occurs just after Morpheus invites Neo to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill promises "the truth, nothing more." Neo takes the red pill and awakes to reality--something utterly different from anything Neo, or the audience, could have expected. What Neo had assumed to be reality turned out to be only a collective illusion, fabricated by the Matrix and fed to a population that is asleep, cocooned in grotesque embryonic pods. In Plato's famous parable about the shadows on the walls of the cave, true reality is at least reflected in perceived reality. In the Matrix world, true reality and perceived reality exist on entirely different planes.

The story is intended as metaphor, and the parallels that drew my attention had to do with political reality. This article offers a particular perspective on what's going on in the world--and how things got to be that way--in this era of globalization. From that red-pill perspective, everyday media-consensus reality--like the Matrix in the film--is seen to be a fabricated collective illusion. Like Neo, I didn't know what I was looking for when my investigation began, but I knew that what I was being told didn't make sense. I read scores of histories and biographies, observing connections between them, and began to develop my own theories about roots of various historical events. I found myself largely in agreement with writers like Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti, but I also perceived important patterns that others seem to have missed.

When I started tracing historical forces, and began to interpret present-day events from a historical perspective. I could see the same old dynamics at work and found a meaning in unfolding events far different from what official pronouncements proclaimed. Such pronouncements are, after all, public relations fare, given out by politicians who want to look good to the voters. Most of us expect rhetoric from politicians, and take what they say with a grain of salt. But as my own picture of present reality came into focus, "grain of salt" no longer worked as a metaphor. I began to see that consensus reality--as generated by official rhetoric and amplified by mass media--bears very little relationship to actual reality. "The matrix" was a metaphor I was ready for.

In consensus reality (the blue-pill perspective) "left" and "right" are the two ends of the political spectrum. Politics is a tug-of-war between competing factions, carried out by political parties and elected representatives. Society gets pulled this way and that within the political spectrum, reflecting the interests of whichever party won the last election. The left and right are therefore political enemies. Each side is convinced that it knows how to make society better; each believes the other enjoys undue influence; and each blames the other for the political stalemate that apparently prevents society from dealing effectively with its problems.

This perspective on the political process, and on the roles of left and right, is very far from reality. It is a fabricated collective illusion. Morpheus tells Neo that the Matrix is "the world that was pulled over your eyes to hide you from the truth....As long as the Matrix exists, humanity cannot be free." Consensus political reality is precisely such a matrix. Later we will take a fresh look at the role of left and right, and at national politics. But first we must develop our red-pill historical perspective. I've had to condense the arguments to bare essentials; please see the annotated sources at the end for more thorough treatments of particular topics.

Imperialism and the matrix
From the time of Columbus to 1945, world affairs were largely dominated by competition among Western nations ⁽¹⁾ seeking to stake out spheres of influence, control sea lanes, and exploit colonial empires. Each Western power became the core of an imperialist economy whose periphery was managed for the benefit of the core nation. Military might determined the scope of an empire; wars were initiated when a core nation felt it had sufficient power to expand its periphery at the expense of a competitor. Economies and societies in the periphery were kept backward--to keep their populations under control, to provide cheap labor, and to guarantee markets for goods manufactured in the core. Imperialism robbed the periphery not only of wealth but also of its ability to develop its own societies, cultures, and economies in a natural way for local benefit.

The driving force behind Western imperialism has always been the pursuit of economic gain, ever since Isabella commissioned Columbus on his first entrepreneurial voyage. The rhetoric of empire concerning wars, however, has typically been about other things--the White Man's Burden, bringing true religion to the heathens, Manifest Destiny, defeating the Yellow Peril or the Hun, seeking lebensraum, or making the world safe for democracy. Any fabricated motivation for war or empire would do, as long as it appealed to the collective consciousness of the population at the time. The propaganda lies of yesterday were recorded and became consensus history--the fabric of the matrix.

While the costs of territorial empire (fleets, colonial administrations, etc.) were borne by Western taxpayers generally, the profits of imperialism were enjoyed primarily by private corporations and investors. Government and corporate elites were partners in the business of imperialism: empires gave government leaders power and prestige, and gave corporate leaders power and wealth. Corporations ran the real business of empire while government leaders fabricated noble excuses for the wars that were required to keep that business going. Matrix reality was about patriotism, national honor, and heroic causes; true reality was on another plane altogether: that of economics.

Industrialization, beginning in the late 1700s, created a demand for new markets and increased raw materials; both demands spurred accelerated expansion of empire. Wealthy investors amassed fortunes by setting up large-scale industrial and trading operations, leading to the emergence of an influential capitalist elite. Like any other elite, capitalists used their wealth and influence to further their own interests however they could. And the interests of capitalism always come down to economic growth; investors must reap more than they sow or the whole system comes to a grinding halt.

Thus capitalism, industrialization, nationalism, warfare, imperialism--and the matrix--coevolved. Industrialized weapon production provided the muscle of modern warfare, and capitalism provided the appetite to use that muscle. Government leaders pursued the policies necessary to expand empire while creating a rhetorical matrix, around nationalism, to justify those policies. Capitalist growth depended on empire, which in turn depended on a strong and stable core nation to defend it. National interests and capitalist interests were inextricably linked--or so it seemed for more than two centuries.

World War II and Pax Americana
1945 will be remembered as the year World War II ended and the bond of the atomic nucleus was broken. But 1945 also marked another momentous fission--breaking of the bond between national and capitalist interests. After every previous war, and in many cases after severe devastation, European nations had always picked themselves back up and resumed their competition over empire. But after World War II, a Pax Americana was established. The US began to manage all the Western peripheries on behalf of capitalism generally, while preventing the communist powers from interfering in the game. Capitalist powers no longer needed to fight over investment realms, and competitive imperialism was replaced by collective imperialism (see sidebar). Opportunities for capital growth were no longer linked to the military power of nations, apart from the power of America. In his Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (see access), William Blum chronicles hundreds of significant covert and overt interventions, showing exactly how the US carried out its imperial management role.

Sidebar

Elite planning for postwar neo-imperialism...
Recommendation P-B23 (July, 1941) stated that worldwide financial institutions were necessary for the purpose of "stabilizing currencies and facilitating programs of capital investment for constructive undertakings in backward and underdeveloped regions." During the last half of 1941 and in the first months of 1942, the Council developed this idea for the integration of the world.... Isaiah Bowman first suggested a way to solve the problem of maintaining effective control over weaker territories while avoiding overt imperial conquest. At a Council meeting in May 1942, he stated that the United States had to exercise the strength needed to assure "security," and at the same time "avoid conventional forms of imperialism." The way to do this, he argued, was to make the exercise of that power international in character through a United Nations body.
- Laurence Shoup & William Minter, in Holly Sklar's Trilateralism (see access), writing about strategic recommendations developed during World War II by the Council on Foreign Relations.

In the postwar years matrix reality diverged ever further from actual reality. In the postwar matrix world, imperialism had been abandoned and the world was being "democratized"; in the real world, imperialism had become better organized and more efficient. In the matrix world the US "restored order," or "came to the assistance" of nations which were being "undermined by Soviet influence"; in the real world, the periphery was being systematically suppressed and exploited. In the matrix world, the benefit was going to the periphery in the form of countless aid programs; in the real world, immense wealth was being extracted from the periphery.

Growing glitches in the matrix weren't noticed by most people in the West, because the postwar years brought unprecedented levels of Western prosperity and social progress. The rhetoric claimed progress would come to all, and Westerners could see it being realized in their own towns and cities. The West became the collective core of a global empire, and exploitative development led to prosperity for Western populations, while generating immense riches for corporations, banks, and wealthy capital investors.

Glitches in the matrix, popular rebellion, and neoliberalism
The parallel agenda of Third-World exploitation and Western prosperity worked effectively for the first two postwar decades. But in the 1960s large numbers of Westerners, particularly the young and well educated, began to notice glitches in the matrix. In Vietnam imperialism was too naked to be successfully masked as something else. A major split in American public consciousness occurred, as millions of anti-war protestors and civil-rights activists punctured the fabricated consensus of the 1950s and declared the reality of exploitation and suppression both at home and abroad. The environmental movement arose, challenging even the exploitation of the natural world. In Europe, 1968 joined 1848 as a landmark year of popular protest.

These developments disturbed elite planners. The postwar regime's stability was being challenged from within the core--and the formula of Western prosperity no longer guaranteed public passivity. A report published in 1975, the Report of the Trilateral Task Force on Governability of Democracies, provides a glimpse into the thinking of elite circles. Alan Wolfe discusses this report in Holly Sklar's eye-opening Trilateralism (see access). Wolfe focuses especially on the analysis Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington presented in a section of the report entitled "The Crisis of Democracy." Huntington is an articulate promoter of elite policy shifts, and contributes pivotal articles to publications such as the Council on Foreign Relations's Foreign Affairs (access).

Huntington tells us that democratic societies "cannot work" unless the citizenry is "passive." The "democratic surge of the 1960s" represented an "excess of democracy," which must be reduced if governments are to carry out their traditional domestic and foreign policies. Huntington's notion of "traditional policies" is expressed in a passage from the report:

"To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's 'Establishment'."

In these few words Huntington spells out the reality that electoral democracy has little to do with how America is run, and summarizes the kind of people who are included within the elite planning community. Who needs conspiracy theories when elite machinations are clearly described in public documents like these?

Besides failing to deliver popular passivity, the policy of prosperity for Western populations had another downside, having to do with Japan's economic success. Under the Pax Americana umbrella, Japan had been able to industrialize and become an imperial player--the prohibition on Japanese rearmament had become irrelevant. With Japan's then-lower living standards, Japanese producers could undercut prevailing prices and steal market share from Western producers. Western capital needed to find a way to become more competitive on world markets, and Western prosperity was standing in the way. Elite strategists, as Huntington showed, were fully capable of understanding these considerations, and the requirements of corporate growth created a strong motivation to make the needed adjustments--in both reality and rhetoric.

If popular prosperity could be sacrificed, there were many obvious ways Western capital could be made more competitive. Production could be moved overseas to low-wage areas, allowing domestic unemployment to rise. Unions could be attacked and wages forced down, and people could be pushed into temporary and part-time jobs without benefits. Regulations governing corporate behavior could be removed, corporate and capital-gains taxes could be reduced, and the revenue losses could be taken out of public-service budgets. Public infrastructures could be privatized, the services reduced to cut costs, and then they could be milked for easy profits while they deteriorated from neglect.

These are the very policies and programs launched during the Reagan-Thatcher years in the US and Britain. They represent a systematic project of increasing corporate growth at the expense of popular prosperity and welfare. Such a real agenda would have been unpopular, and a corresponding matrix reality was fabricated for public consumption. The matrix reality used real terms like "deregulation," "reduced taxes," and "privatization," but around them was woven an economic mythology. The old, failed laissez-faire doctrine of the 1800s was reintroduced with the help of Milton Friedman's Chicago School of economics, and "less government" became the proud "modern" theme in America and Britain. Sensible regulations had restored financial stability after the Great Depression, and had broken up anti-competitive monopolies such as the Rockefeller trust and AT&T. But in the new matrix reality, all regulations were considered bureaucratic interference. Reagan and Thatcher preached the virtues of individualism, and promised to "get government off people's backs." The implication was that everyday individuals were to get more money and freedom, but in reality the primary benefits would go to corporations and wealthy investors.

The academic term for laissez-faire economics is "economic liberalism," and hence the Reagan-Thatcher revolution has come to be known as the "neoliberal revolution." It brought a radical change in actual reality by returning to the economic philosophy that led to sweatshops, corruption, and robber-baron monopolies in the nineteenth century. It brought an equally radical change in matrix reality--a complete reversal in the attitude that was projected regarding government. Government policies had always been criticized in the media, but the institution of government had always been respected--reflecting the traditional bond between capitalism and nationalism. With Reagan, we had a sitting president telling us that government itself was a bad thing. Many of us may have agreed with him, but such a sentiment had never before found official favor. Soon, British and American populations were beginning to applaud the destruction of the very democratic institutions that provided their only hope of participation in the political process.

Globalization and world government
The essential bond between capitalism and nationalism was broken in 1945, but it took some time for elite planners to recognize this new condition and to begin bringing the world system into alignment with it. The strong Western nation state had been the bulwark of capitalism for centuries, and initial postwar policies were based on the assumption that this would continue indefinitely. The Bretton Woods financial system (the IMF, World Bank, and a system of fixed exchange rates among major currencies) was set up to stabilize national economies, and popular prosperity was encouraged to provide political stability. Neoliberalism in the US and Britain represented the first serious break with this policy framework--and brought the first visible signs of the fission of the nation-capital bond.

The neoliberal project was economically profitable in the US and Britain, and the public accepted the matrix economic mythology. Meanwhile, the integrated global economy gave rise to a new generation of transnational corporations, and corporate leaders began to realize that corporate growth was not dependent on strong core nation-states. Indeed, Western nations--with their environmental laws, consumer-protection measures, and other forms of regulatory "interference"--were a burden on corporate growth. Having been successfully field tested in the two oldest "democracies," the neoliberal project moved onto the global stage. The Bretton Woods system of fixed rates of currency exchange was weakened, and the international financial system became destabilizing, instead of stabilizing, for national economies. The radical free-trade project was launched, leading eventually to the World Trade Organization. The fission that had begun in 1945 was finally manifesting as an explosive change in the world system.

The objective of neoliberal free-trade treaties is to remove all political controls over domestic and international trade and commerce. Corporations have free rein to maximize profits, heedless of environmental consequences and safety risks. Instead of governments regulating corporations, the WTO now sets rules for governments, telling them what kind of beef they must import, whether or not they can ban asbestos, and what additives they must permit in petroleum products. So far, in every case where the WTO has been asked to review a health, safety, or environmental regulation, the regulation has been overturned.

Most of the world has been turned into a periphery; the imperial core has been boiled down to the capitalist elite themselves, represented by their bureaucratic, unrepresentative, WTO world government. The burden of accelerated imperialism falls hardest outside the West, where loans are used as a lever by the IMF to compel debtor nations such as Rwanda and South Korea to accept suicidal "reform" packages. In the 1800s, genocide was employed to clear North America and Australia of their native populations, creating room for growth. Today, a similar program of genocide has apparently been unleashed against sub-Saharan Africa. The IMF destroys the economies, the CIA trains militias and stirs up tribal conflicts, and the West sells weapons to all sides. Famine and genocidal civil wars are the predictable and inevitable result. Meanwhile, AIDS runs rampant while the WTO and the US government use trade laws to prevent medicines from reaching the victims.

As in the past, Western military force will be required to control the non-Western periphery and make adjustments to local political arrangements when considered necessary by elite planners. The Pentagon continues to provide the primary policing power, with NATO playing an ever-increasing role. Resentment against the West and against neoliberalism is growing in the Third World, and the frequency of military interventions is bound to increase. All of this needs to be made acceptable to Western minds, adding a new dimension to the matrix.

In the latest matrix reality, the West is called the "international community," whose goal is to serve "humanitarian" causes. Bill Clinton made it explicit with his "Clinton Doctrine," in which (as quoted in the Washington Post) he solemnly promised, "If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our power stop it, we will stop it." This matrix fabrication is very effective indeed; who opposes prevention of genocide? Only outside the matrix does one see that genocide is caused by the West in the first place, that the worst cases of genocide are continuing, that "assistance" usually makes things worse (as in the Balkans), and that Clinton's handy doctrine enables him to intervene when and where he chooses. Since dictators and the stirring of ethnic rivalries are standard tools used in managing the periphery, a US president can always find "innocent civilians" wherever elite plans call for an intervention.

In matrix reality, globalization is not a project but rather the inevitable result of beneficial market forces. Genocide in Africa is no fault of the West, but is due to ancient tribal rivalries. Every measure demanded by globalization is referred to as "reform," (the word is never used with irony). "Democracy" and "reform" are frequently used together, always leaving the subtle impression that one has something to do with the other. The illusion is presented that all economic boats are rising, and if yours isn't, it must be your own fault: you aren't "competitive" enough. Economic failures are explained away as "temporary adjustments," or else the victim (as in South Korea or Russia) is blamed for not being sufficiently neoliberal. "Investor confidence" is referred to with the same awe and reverence that earlier societies might have expressed toward the "will of the gods."

Western quality of life continues to decline, while the WTO establishes legal precedents ensuring that its authority will not be challenged when its decisions become more draconian. Things will get much worse in the West; this was anticipated in elite circles when the neoliberal project was still on the drawing board, as is illustrated in Samuel Huntington's "The Crisis of Democracy" report discussed earlier.

The management of discontented societies
The postwar years, especially in the United States, were characterized by consensus politics. Most people shared a common understanding of how society worked, and generally approved of how things were going. Prosperity was real and the matrix version of reality was reassuring. Most people believed in it. Those beliefs became a shared consensus, and the government could then carry out its plans as it intended, "responding" to the programmed public will.

The "excess democracy" of the 1960s and 1970s attacked this shared consensus from below, and neoliberal planners decided from above that ongoing consensus wasn't worth paying for. They accepted that segments of society would persist in disbelieving various parts of the matrix. Activism and protest were to be expected. New means of social control would be needed to deal with activist movements and with growing discontent, as neoliberalism gradually tightened the economic screws. Such means of control were identified and have since been largely implemented, particularly in the United States. In many ways America sets the pace of globalization; innovations can often be observed there before they occur elsewhere. This is particularly true in the case of social-control techniques.

The most obvious means of social control, in a discontented society, is a strong, semi-militarized police force. Most of the periphery has been managed by such means for centuries. This was obvious to elite planners in the West, was adopted as policy, and has now been largely implemented. Urban and suburban ghettos--where the adverse consequences of neoliberalism are currently most concentrated--have literally become occupied territories, where police beatings and unjustified shootings are commonplace.

So that the beefed-up police force could maintain control in conditions of mass unrest, elite planners also realized that much of the Bill of Rights would need to be neutralized. (This is not surprising, given that the Bill's authors had just lived through a revolution and were seeking to ensure that future generations would have the means to organize and overthrow any oppressive future government.) The rights-neutralization project has been largely implemented, as exemplified by armed midnight raids, outrageous search-and-seizure practices, overly broad conspiracy laws, wholesale invasion of privacy, massive incarceration, and the rise of prison slave labor ⁽²⁾ . The Rubicon has been crossed--the techniques of oppression long common in the empire's periphery are being imported to the core.

In the matrix, the genre of the TV or movie police drama has served to create a reality in which "rights" are a joke, the accused are despicable sociopaths, and no criminal is ever brought to justice until some noble cop or prosecutor bends the rules a bit. Government officials bolster the construct by declaring "wars" on crime and drugs; the noble cops are fighting a war out there in the streets--and you can't win a war without using your enemy's dirty tricks. The CIA plays its role by managing the international drug trade and making sure that ghetto drug dealers are well supplied. In this way, the American public has been led to accept the means of its own suppression.

The mechanisms of the police state are in place. They will be used when necessary--as we see in ghettos and skyrocketing prison populations, as we saw on the streets of Seattle and Washington D.C. during recent anti-WTO demonstrations, and as is suggested by executive orders that enable the president to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law whenever he deems it necessary. But raw force is only the last line of defense for the elite regime. Neoliberal planners introduced more subtle defenses into the matrix; looking at these will bring us back to our discussion of the left and right.

Divide and rule is one of the oldest means of mass control--standard practice since at least the Roman Empire. This is applied at the level of modern imperialism, where each small nation competes with others for capital investments. Within societies it works this way: If each social group can be convinced that some other group is the source of its discontent, then the population's energy will be spent in inter-group struggles. The regime can sit on the sidelines, intervening covertly to stir things up or to guide them in desired directions. In this way most discontent can be neutralized, and force can be reserved for exceptional cases. In the prosperous postwar years, consensus politics served to manage the population. Under neoliberalism, programmed factionalism has become the front-line defense--the matrix version of divide and rule.

The covert guiding of various social movements has proven to be one of the most effective means of programming factions and stirring them against one another. Fundamentalist religious movements have been particularly useful. They have been used not only within the US, but also to maximize divisiveness in the Middle East and for other purposes throughout the empire. The collective energy and dedication of "true believers" makes them a potent political weapon that movement leaders can readily aim where needed. In the US that weapon has been used to promote censorship on the Internet, to attack the women's movement, to support repressive legislation, and generally to bolster the ranks of what is called in the matrix the "right wing."

In the matrix, the various factions believe that their competition with each other is the process that determines society's political agenda. Politicians want votes, and hence the biggest and best-organized factions should have the most influence, and their agendas should get the most political attention. In reality there is only one significant political agenda these days: the maximization of capital growth through the dismantling of society, the continuing implementation of neoliberalism, and the management of empire. Clinton's liberal rhetoric and his playing around with health care and gay rights are not the result of liberal pressure. They are rather the means by which Clinton is sold to liberal voters, so that he can proceed with real business: getting NAFTA through Congress, promoting the WTO, giving away the public airwaves, justifying military interventions, and so forth. Issues of genuine importance are never raised in campaign politics--this is a major glitch in the matrix for those who have eyes to see it.

Escaping the matrix
The matrix cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Under the onslaught of globalization, the glitches are becoming ever more difficult to conceal--as earlier, with the Vietnam War. November's anti-establishment demonstrations in Seattle, the largest in decades, were aimed directly at globalization and the WTO. Even more important, Seattle saw the coming together of factions that the matrix had programmed to fight one another, such as left-leaning environmentalists and socially conservative union members.

Seattle represented the tip of an iceberg. A mass movement against globalization and elite rule is ready to ignite, like a brush fire on a dry, scorching day. The establishment has been expecting such a movement and has a variety of defenses at its command, including those used effectively against the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In order to prevail against what seem like overwhelming odds, the movement must escape entirely from the matrix, and it must bring the rest of society with it. As long as the matrix exists, humanity cannot be free. The whole truth must be faced: Globalization is centralized tyranny; capitalism has outlasted its sell-by date; matrix "democracy" is elite rule; and "market forces" are imperialism. Left and right are enemies only in the matrix. In reality we are all in this together, and each of us has a contribution to make toward a better world.

Marx may have failed as a social visionary, but he had capitalism figured out. It is based not on productivity or social benefit, but on the pursuit of capital growth through exploiting everything in its path. The job of elite planners is to create new spaces for capital to grow in. Competitive imperialism provided growth for centuries; collective imperialism was invented when still more growth was needed; and then neoliberalism took over. Like a cancer, capitalism consumes its host and is never satisfied. The capital pool must always grow, more and more, forever--until the host dies or capitalism is replaced.

The matrix equates capitalism with free enterprise, and defines centralized-state-planning socialism as the only alternative to capitalism. In reality, capitalism didn't amount to much of a force until the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s-- and we certainly cannot characterize all prior societies as socialist. Free enterprise, private property, commerce, banking, international trade, economic specialization--all of these had existed for millennia before capitalism. Capitalism claims credit for modern prosperity, but credit would be better given to developments in science and technology.

Before capitalism, Western nations were generally run by aristocratic classes. The aristocratic attitude toward wealth focused on management and maintenance. With capitalism, the focus is always on growth and development; whatever one has is but the seeds to build a still greater fortune. In fact, there are infinite alternatives to capitalism, and different societies can choose different systems, once they are free to do so. As Morpheus put it: "Outside the matrix everything is possible, and there are no limits."

The matrix defines "democracy" as competitive party politics, because that is a game wealthy elites have long since learned to corrupt and manipulate. Even in the days of the Roman Republic the techniques were well understood. Real-world democracy is possible only if the people themselves participate in setting society's direction. An elected official can only truly represent a constituency after that constituency has worked out its positions--from the local to the global--on the issues of the day. For that to happen, the interests of different societal factions must be harmonized through interaction and discussion. Collaboration, not competition, is what leads to effective harmonization.

In order for the movement to end elite rule and establish livable societies to succeed, it will need to evolve a democratic process, and to use that process to develop a program of consensus reform that harmonizes the interests of its constituencies. In order to be politically victorious, it will need to reach out to all segments of society and become a majority movement. By such means, the democratic process of the movement can become the democratic process of a newly empowered civil society. There is no adequate theory of democracy at present, although there is much to be learned from history and from theory. The movement will need to develop a democratic process as it goes along, and that objective must be pursued as diligently as victory itself. Otherwise some new tyranny will eventually replace the old.

It ain't left or right. It's up and down.
Here we all are down here struggling while
the Corporate Elite are all up there having a nice day!..
--Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt Maine and anti-corporate activist

By Richard K. Moore

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28139.htm

Dies Irae (Day of Wrath)

2011-05-18T15:40:00.000-04:00

水墨动画 Chinese Painting Animation

2011-05-18T01:18:00.000-04:00

Beautiful Chinese Song 【Ancient Chinese Clothing "Hanfu"】

2011-05-18T01:15:00.000-04:00

Rostropovich plays the Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 5

2011-05-18T00:51:00.000-04:00

Can Americans Be Unplugged?

2011-05-17T23:53:00.002-04:00

The ongoing bin Laden saga

"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it." - The Matrix (1999)

The ever-changing, ever-growing bin Laden story becomes ever more preposterous. The cowardly bin Laden is now the vain bin Laden, the terror mastermind who has nothing to do but to sit and watch videos of himself.

Washington released a video of an alleged bin Laden indulging in self-admiration, but there is no sound. Why? Was the video made without sound? Did Washington delete the audio? The video seems to show the alleged bin Laden speaking to someone in the room. Is the voice not bin Laden’s? Is the alleged bin Laden referring to the image on the screen in the third person, as not himself? Why would bin Laden have a video made of himself watching videos of himself? Why is a video of bin Laden watching bin Laden a headline story? Is it meant to substitute for the absence of a corpse?

As one reader put it, “The government is playing with us, experimenting to see if there is any tall tale we won’t believe.”

The story keeps changing as to whether “bin Laden’s compound,” no longer a million dollar luxury mansion, had Internet and communications or relied on couriers. The latest installment is that bin Laden was online. Washington says that the raid delivered into its hands bin Laden’s emails and diary, which, Washington claims, show an active bin Laden directing his terror network to carry out more plots. If bin Laden was online, why did Obama have to find him by trailing a courier?

Somehow the SEALs grabbed bin Laden’s diary and emails, but left all sorts of other documents that allegedly have fallen into Pakistani hands. These left-behind documents now serve as a pretext for more disputes with Pakistan and another excuse for ignoring Pakistan’s protests about the military operations the US carries out in Pakistan, violating the sovereignty of the country.

Why would the SEALs leave behind so many precious documents? First they kill for no reason the mastermind who could have revealed the world of terror; then they depart, leaving terror records behind. Some will say that this is typical US government incompetence. So how did such an incompetent government find bin Laden?

Any documents left behind were most likely carried in by the SEALs as plants.
Has anyone independent of Washington examined the alleged bin Laden diary and confirmed that it was in bin Laden’s handwriting? These kind of questions are the kind the media, back when we had one, used to ask.

The bin Laden story is now such a fable with so many contradictory bits that people can pick and choose to suit the telling. Time magazine likes it all, except the part about an all-powerful bin Laden, still in control, rejecting an underling’s proposal “to fit a tractor with rotating blades to use to ‘mow down the enemies of Allah.’” Time prefers a bin Laden who was unsettled by his realization that he had lost his “historic significance” prior to losing his life to the US Navy SEALs.

If bin Laden had lost his significance, why did Obama get such a boost in the polls from his claim that he found bin Laden and had him killed?

The American Empire cannot do without bin Laden. The next installment of the fable will be that bin Laden escaped, leaving behind a double, and is abroad carrying out more terror plots.

As the fable continues, try to rescue from the Memory Hole the fact that we were presented with a death without a corpse and that Washington has no explanation for why an unarmed, undefended, frail man, who was a font of terrorist information, was murdered and not captured.

By Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28109.htm

No Expectation of Justice

2011-05-17T23:17:00.001-04:00

Does Sarkozy Like Seeing France Get Dragged Through the Mud?

"American justice" is an oxymoron like "military intelligence" or "jumbo shrimp". The two words just don't fit together, in fact, they're polar opposites. The truth is, there is no expectation of justice in the United States today. Even the thought of it is laughable. Just look at the way the Dominique Strauss-Kahn matter has been handled. The former IMF chief "allegedly" tried to rape or force a maid at his fancy hotel to perform oral sex. As a result, he was arrested and thrown in jail.

Fine. But in America "what a man is accused of" is not supposed to matter. He's still entitled to a fair trial.

So, what are the chances that Strauss-Kahn will get a fair trial now that he's been blasted as a serial sex offender in about 3,000 articles and in all the televised news reports?

Not very good, I'd say.

Let me ask you: Why was DSK stripped of his suit and tie and paraded in handcuffs in front of the media after a sleepless night in the hoosegow? Were New York's finest trying to demonstrate their deep appreciation for the rule of law or did they think the overweight 62 year old was going to make a run-for-it?

And why is the media so quick to judge the man? Do they know something we don't know? Is there some reason why they trust the claims of an unidentified maid who no one has even talked to over Strauss-Kahn, or are they just following orders from on-high?

We all know that the media is an old hand at destroying people's lives and reputations. That's what they do and they're damn good at it. Have you talked to Bill Clinton recently? How about Scott Ritter, Michael Schiavo or Martha Stewart? The joke about the Bush administration was that, even though they were never tough on crime, at least they got Martha Stewart "off the streets".

Pretty funny, eh?

So, here's something to chew on: Anyone who thinks that the media is anything more than a stick that's used to beat political enemies is a fool. This whole incident has been set up to make Strauss-Kahn look like a perv before he even gets a chance to open his mouth. Which is why there's really is no expectation of justice. The whole thing is a farce. His goose is already cooked.

But doesn't the hypocrisy bother you a bit? I mean, do you remember any Wall Street bankers being dragged off in handcuffs when they blew up the financial system and bilked people out of trillions of dollars? Do you remember Tony Hayward being thrown in jail when BP dumped millions of gallons of untreated crude into the Gulf of Mexico? Do you remember anyone in the Bush administration doing time for leading the country into a war that killed over 1 million Iraqi civilians and displaced 4 million more?

The people who make the rules aren't bothered by fraud, rape, murder or any other crime. Hell no. It just doesn't matter to them because there are no consequences. They do what they want and let someone else worry about it. But that rule doesn't apply to Strauss-Kahn, which makes me think that he must have pissed off some very important people who decided he needed to be taught a lesson.

That's it, isn't it? He stepped on the wrong people's toes. Now he's a dead duck.

Here's a thought experiment: Let's say the shoe was on the other foot. Let's say that the head of the World Bank Robert Zoellick (who is an American citizen) was arrested in France on similar charges. Let's say he was kept up all night, plopped in a raincoat, then frog-marched in front of the media flanked by a small army of cops.

What do you think Obama's reaction would be? Do you think he'd let anyone drag the US through the mud like that or do you think he'd grab the nearest phone and read Sarkozy the riot act? And how long do you think it would be before every newspaper and every pundit and every politician in America was demanding Zoellick's immediate release?

I'll bet it would it take no more 24 hours before the F-16's were screeching over Paris pounding the Louvre and Notre Dame with laser-guided missiles and bunker busters sending terrified civilians scampering for cover.

No one fu**s with the Godfather. No one. Not unless they want a whole lotta trouble.

So, why hasn't Sarkozy called Obama? Does he like seeing France get kicked around in public? Is that it? Or was Sarkozy in on this little scam from the get-go, and now he's just thrilled-to-death that his biggest rival in the upcoming presidential race has been knocked out of the running?

Funny how that works, isn't it? It almost seems like it was planned.

In any event, Strauss-Kahn's career is over. My guess is that the reforms he planned to announce at the upcoming Bretton Woods conference would have cost some very wealthy people alot of money, and they didn't like that. So they had him removed.

By Mike Whitney

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28116.htm

CLASSIFIED: Why we’ll never see dead Osama bin Laden

2011-05-14T21:23:00.001-04:00

What really happened?

We need to look at the facts, use common sense and everything becomes crystal clear. For example, to prove that Osama bin Laden was killed at the compound in Abbottabad,the easiest way is to take the DNA test of the blood on the floor of the compound. What we all know:

August 2010: Pakistan shares with US some details about the compound in Abbottabad.US gathers intelligence that the compound is occupied by Osama’s children.
Jan 27: Raymond Davis, the CIA Station Chief in Pakistan gets an audio file and some pictures of Pak military installations at Tarbela from an informer in Lahore. On the wayback he is pursued by two ISI contractors. He realizes that he is being followed and shotsboth followers in the back. He is arrested by Pakistani police.
March 16: Raymond Davis is released and he shares the information he had gathered with the CIA.
March 17: General Kayani starts criticizing drone attacks in public statements
First Week of April: News started circling that General Petraeus is being transferred toCIA.
April 5: Obama Administration submits a report to the Congress that Pakistan government has no clear strategy to triumph over militants. This is followed by a concerted international media campaign which puts enormous pressure on Pakistani Military and ISI.
April 7: Bruce Riedel, former CIA officer and White House advisor writes a report arguing that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are not only a deterrent to India but also to USA.
April 8: General Kayani meets with Centcom Chief Gen James Mattis.
April 18: On Pakistan’s Geo TV, Adm. Michael Mullen said Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence “has a longstanding relationship with the Haqqani Network. That doesn’t mean everybody in the ISI, but it’s there.”
April 20: Adm. Mike Mullen meets with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee General Khalid Shameem Wynne and General Kayani.
April 22: News appears that Pakistan has taken back Shamsi Airbase back from CIA, US forces.
April 26: Washington critically attacks Pakistan Army’s counter-terrorism efforts.April 26: General Petraeus met with General Kayani.
April 26: Meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (JCSC) is held at Rawalpindi,one week ahead of schedule at the Joint Staff Headquarters
April 27: Wall Street Journal reports that Pakistan is trying to wean Afghanistan away from the United States and draw it into China’s orbit.
April 28: Obama signs General Petraeus’ transfer to CIA.
April 29: Obama signs the orders to attack the Abbottabad compounds.
April 30: General Kayani gave a veiled threat in his Youm-e-Shuhada address:“Pakistan is a peace-loving country and wants friendly relations with other countries and our every step should move towards prosperity of the people. But we will notcompromise our dignity and honour for it”.
May 1: Four US choppers flew from Afghanistan. Reaching Abbottabad they attacked a secure compound which housed some important Al Qaeda members. A gun battle soon ensued. Within minutes a Pakistani military helicopters flew from Tarbela, reaching the compound in Abbottabad few minutes later. In the meanwhile US forces had torched one of their own choppers. The four choppers (three US and one Pak) took off from the compound and flew to Afghanistan. Incidentally, this time none of them followed a low altitude flight. They were quite visible on Pakistani radars.

What we all should know

In August 2010 after Pakistani authorities shared intelligence with US about the compound in Abbottabad. US after its own intelligence gathering ascertains that the compound is occupied by Osama’s children. Compound surveillance continues through the next year in anticipation of capturing Osama bin Laden. In January 2011 the young CIA contractor who is give the charge of Pakistan Station Chief works “extra hard” to gather clandestine information related to ISI and Al Qaeda relationship.

The contractor,now infamous as Raymond Davis the “American Rambo” receives a call from one of his assets, early morning on January 27 about a high value target. But the asset refuses to lay out details on phone or to leave the Lahore city, where he had gone underground.Raymond Davis hires a rent a car and drives to Lahore, while his security detail followshim in a bullet proof Land Cruiser.

Raymond Davis is able to loose his Islamabad’s ISI“detail” by leaving in unmarked rent a car. The ISI agents falling for his trap follow the embassy’s Land Cruiser. Raymond Davis arrives at Lahore one hour earlier than his detail and meets with the asset. The asset gives him some pictures of an intelligence building at Tarbela and recording of a phone call. Listening the phone call Raymond Davis realizes the gold mine he had struck and immediately calls his security detail which had also reached Lahore, knowing if ISI reaches him first, he would not leave Lahore alive.

Next hour when the security car catches up with Raymond Davis, the ISI bosses realizes that Raymond Davis had give them a slip earlier in the morning and in the couple of hours he had in Lahore, he might have got some important information. Resultantly,they put two contractors on his tail. Raymond Davis seeing a tail fears the worse and shoots them both in the back, at a traffic stop, without logically realizing that there was no way ISI could have know what he was holding.

His security detail which was close behind rushed to his “rescue” however, by the police had chased and arrested him, while the security Land Cruiser running over pedestrians escapes towards US embassy compound in Islamabad. ISI officers quickly reach the scene and confiscating the memory sticks realize Raymond Davis has unearthed a deep secret which even their immediate bosses didn’t know about.

The sensitivity of information rattles the entire echelons of the ISI and even its own officers are sent under house arrest while the relevant cell steps forward. At that time even some of the top intelligence officers of the secretive ISI outside the relevant cell did not know that Osama bin Laden had died and his body was kept frozen at Tarbela. Young Raymond Davis had unearthed the biggest secret of the century, somehow. But now the Pandora’s Box had been opened. Pak top brass knew it had only a few days or weeks at best to capitalize Raymond Davis’ arrest before US get the intel.

In the next six weeks Pakistan plugs all leaks related to Osama’s death and makes sure that maximum gains are made for Raymond’s release. However,when Raymond Davis is released on March 16, his debriefing results in a tsunami of US policy, personal agendas and fueling of political rivalries. Everyone in the US chain of command now wanted to use the information to further personal goals from General

Petreaus to President Obama. On March 17, knowing that Pakistan had lost its trump card General Pervaiz Kayani releases a press statement in which he critically criticize drone attacks, first from him. From then on Pak Military raised its stance against drone attacks, fearing that US now might target its nuclear assets. While in USA politics was at its full swing. General Petreaus wanted to get the buckle for Osama bin Laden’s death on his belt for his future political ambitions, while President Obama wanted the credit to help is sliding popularity. While the tussle continued, the other issue still pending was how to confirm Osama’s death.

In the next one month, nearly every week a top US official visited Pakistan, everyone meeting with General Kayani trying to convince him to hand over Osama’s body. While the stance from Pakistan remained, “Osama, Who?” It was a first in the history that so many US top officials had visited and met with a military chief of a foreign country in such a short time. Seeing nothing getting through the top military brass of Pakistan, US started a political and media campaign on the sides to put extra pressure on Pak Military.

Politics within Obama Administration was also at its full swing. Petraeus was pulling all the strings to take the credit, while trying to lay out a plan to get Osama bin Laden’s body out of Pakistan. President Obama on the other hand in one smooth move decided to “promote” Petraeus to the head of the CIA. The news got out in the first week of April that Petraeus was being transferred to the CIA. While at the main front, Obama continued to pressurize General Kayani and General Pasha and one April 5, Obama Administration submitted a report to the Congress that Pakistan government had no clear strategy to triumph over militants. Alongside the report the media campaign against Pak Military and the ISI continued.

The second week of April began with a bang for top Pak Military brass. On April 7, Bruce Riedel, former CIA officer and White House advisor wrote a report arguing that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are not only a deterrent to India but also to USA. The obvious had now become clear that Obama Administration has indirectly sent a clear threat to Pakistan’s nuclear assets. The timing of the report was perfect with Centcom Chief Gen James Mattis meeting with General Kayani next day. In the meeting General Mattis asked about Pakistan’s cooperation in capturing Osama bin Laden.

This was ironically one of typical Hollywood thriller scene. Pakistan knew that US knew that Pakistan knows that US knows that Osama is dead. But Pakistan continued the naive game of “Osama Who?” while US continued to play the game that “Osama must be captured”. General Mattis leaves with veiled threats and stresses that Pakistan must do more to against the Al Qaeda and Taliban, or indirectly saying that Osama bin Laden must be handed over.

For the ten days US waits and sees how Pakistan responds to the threats, but Pakistan acts by burying its head in the sand – see no evil, hear no evil. Obama Administration ups the ante and on April 18 on Pakistan’s Geo TV, Adm. Michael Mullen said Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence “has a longstanding relationship with the Haqqani Network.That doesn’t mean everybody in the ISI, but it’s there.” Again, international media had its field day against Pakistan’s ISI and its links with Taliban and the ISI.

After putting pressure on General Kayani, Adm. Mike Mullen meets with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee General Khalid Shameem Wynne and General Kayani on April 20.Admiral Mullen again demands indirectly that Pakistan needs to help USA in locating Osama bin Laden. Pakistan’s response was again, “Osama, Who?” Admiral Mullen however, left with another threat that if they came to know about Osama bin Laden’s location they would go ahead and take unilateral action. This is the same message which President Obama repeated in his announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death, when he said, “We will take actions in Pakistan, if we knew where he was.”

In response to continued threats from USA Pakistan starts taking back its air bases from US in an attempt to avoid launching of any operation from its own soil. As a result on April 22 the news appears that Pakistan had taken back Shamsi Airbase back from CIA,US forces. While Obama Administration was piling pressure on Pakistan, General Petraeus visited Pakistan on April 26 and met with General Kayani openly asking him to hand over Osama bin Laden, otherwise get ready to face the consequences. Same day Washington also critically attacked Pakistan Army’s counter-terrorism efforts. General Petraeus left with a clear message that unless Pakistan hands over Osama, US forces would be forces to take action over Pakistani soil. Pakistani Military knowing that US knew that Osama bin Laden was dead couldn’t understand Obama Administration’s continued stance on capturing Osama bin Laden. General Petraeus left with the ultimatum that either Pakistan handed over Osama or US would get him.

Same day meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (JCSC) is held at Rawalpindi,one week ahead of schedule at the Joint Staff Headquarters. The top brass discusses the Osama issue and decision is reached to work out the Obama’s strategy leading to continuous threats for capturing Osama bin Laden alive, even after knowing that he was dead. While in Pakistan intelligence community starts using all of its sources to reach to the bottom of US’ demand of capturing Osama bin Laden. On April 28 President Obama signs General Petraeus’ transfer to CIA and next day signs the orders to attack the Abbottabad compounds. Thus Osama bin Laden’s credit is assured to President Obama.

On 29 April after President Obama signed the orders to “bring back” Osama bin Laden,Pakistani security agencies get a report that another order had been signed which had authorized US forces to neutralize Pakistan’s nuclear assets, if needed. The report was nothing short of seeing a death angel for the top Pak Military brass.

Seeing the imminent threat, General Kayani tried his last shot when on 30 April 2011 he clearly stated in his Youm-e-Shuhada address: “Pakistan is a peace-loving country and wants friendly relations with other countries and our every step should move towards prosperity of the people. But we will not compromise our dignity and honour for it”.However, it didn’t stop what was about to come 24 hours later.

As night fell on Sunday, 1 May four choppers from a US Afghan base at a low altitude towards its destination in Abbottabad, to the same compound where Osama’s children were in the hiding. Without any detection courtesy of their latest stealth technology and Pakistan’s outdated technology the choppers continued over the Pakistani territory.Ironically, ten years ago a Pak Air force air commodore had raised concern about the outdated radar technology citing that US or worse India could fly helicopters into the country and take out nuclear installations and in reply he was shown the boot while no upgrades to the systems were made.

Anyway, the four choppers made it to the compound in Abbottabad. It is then that PakArmy was notified that they have a choice. Either face an entire barrage of US choppers attacking Pak nuclear assets or hand over Osama’s body. In the meanwhile the small

gun battle at the Abbottabad compound continued and to give the drama some authenticity the US forces torched one of their own choppers. Pressed for time a Pakistani helicopter flew from Tarbela carrying dead body of Osama bin Laden which was stored in a cold storage there. While at Abbottabad Pak Army soldiers encircle the entire area around the compound within five minutes of the start of fire fight. The firefight continued for 35 more minutes, waiting for the Pakistani helicopter. Once the Pakistani helicopter reached the compound the three US choppers and the Pakistani helicopter flew towards the Afghan border, this time without the need to fly below the radar detection altitude.

Next day, the world woke up to the news that Osama bin Laden was dead and President Obama had delivered wheat President Bush and Dick Cheney couldn’t. But the Pak Military brass did not wake up, because they never slept the night before. Last night they had woken to the realization that US could fly under the radar and take out Pakistan’s nuclear assets. The problem here is that US has the complete inventory of Pakistan’s nuclear assets along with exact locations. It would be a matter of minutes in a country wide operation to dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear assets.

By Raqib Shah

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/05/12/classified-why-we-will-never-see-dead-osama-bin-laden/

Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Be

2011-05-07T04:28:00.000-04:00

10 curses of the analytical thinker

2011-05-07T03:52:00.002-04:00

Each curse can be viewed as a blessing.

The average person may envision IT as the home of the geek. I prefer to think of IT as the kingdom of the analytical thinker. Analytical thinkers, or left-brain thinkers, are straight-line thinkers. Logic, not emotion, rules in the land of the analytical. The very traits that make an analytical person poor with people make them good with computers. And that is perhaps why IT is loaded with socially inept information junkies who would prefer to hang out by themselves instead of attending a party.

I am a highly analytical person myself. This has served me well in my analyst/programmer jobs over the years. But I have also experienced the many downsides of being analytical. Perhaps you have experienced one or more of these curses of the analytical thinker yourself.

Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1: Information addict

Analytical thinkers just can’t get enough information. They devour Web pages about everything from the weather to the latest high tech gadget. They are gluttons for online discussions, but they’re more often lurkers than participants. They have voracious appetites for facts and figures of any kind. They head straight for the specs page when shopping for anything more technologically sophisticated than an alarm clock. The siren call of the Internet cries out, “Step right up to the buffet — all the information you can eat for one low price”.

I can understand how this behavior might be really annoying to a family member. Please understand it is natural for humans to seek after information — just not as compulsively as the analytical thinker seeks it. Come to think of it, this propensity for information binging might explain the swelled heads of a few IT personnel I have encountered over the years.

2: Vacillatory

Most people see only one side of a controversial issue. Not the analytical thinker. To him, every issue has pros and cons. To him, the glass can be both half full and half empty at the same time. The analytical will inevitably be known as Dr. Doom to some and the eternal optimist to others. Being both a pessimist and an optimist gives the impression to friends that the analytical is wishy-washy, assuming he has any friends.

3: Indecisive

Because the analytical likes to gather as many facts as possible before making an informed decision, he may be perceived by others as being indecisive. The phrase “lead or get off the pot” could apply to the analytical manager who is so busy gathering information that he often overlooks the value of a quick, definitive decision.

4: Insensitive

I was once explaining parts of a client/server system to Mark, one of our mainframe guys. I pointed to the screen and said something like, “As you can see right here…” There was only one problem with that gesture and statement: Mark was totally blind. I was so embarrassed that I froze and said nothing. Had Mark been able to see he would have seen a flushed face with perspiration beginning to form at the hairline. This kind of “foot in mouth” behavior isn’t that unusual for an analytical. I now realize that I should have had the courtesy to acknowledge my gaffe and apologize, but words failed me at the time. It may be more than 15 years late, but Mark please accept this apology for my insensitivity.

5: Habitual

“You want me to do what– skip lunch? Are you kidding?” Missing lunch to complete some inane pet project for my manager was physically upsetting. My blood pressure rose. My stress hormones rose. Yes, I was angry. Stand well clear of a hypoglycemic logician when sustenance has been withheld!

It can be hard to for analyticals to break their habits. They prefer the predictable, daily routine and are resistant to change. A left-brain thinker may lack motivation when starting a new project, but once started, they are like a persistent bulldog working to complete the project. It’s not that they can’t accept change; analyticals would just prefer it not intrude upon their comfort zone

6: Socially inept

I once told a young lady who I was friends with that she was overweight. Well, she did ask. I never got a chance to tell her that it, the weight, was in all the right places. Analyticals take matters literally — too literally. It is not the intention of the analytical to be critical but rather to provide an honest assessment, although it is almost always perceived as criticism. Unfortunately for the well-intentioned analytical, people don’t like an “honest assessment” of their looks, behavior, general hygiene, or body fat index. The irony is that these socially oblivious, albeit honest assessors usually don’t take criticism well themselves.

7: Skeptical

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said this. Politicians, of all people, know that it’s hard to fool a logical thinker. If you want to sell anything to left-brain thinkers, you’d better explain why they need it. An analytical needs facts, not feelings or persuasive platitudes.

If you are a manager trying to convince a team of programmers that a project can be completed two months ahead of schedule, you’d better come armed with facts to support how such a miracle can be achieved. The pushback you are almost certain to receive is a predictable response from the cynical analytical.

8: Poor marketers

The very thing that makes analyticals good product reviewers is what makes them poor at the sales pitch. They thoroughly and accurately note both the positive and negative attributes of the product they are reviewing. One of the important skills needed to land a job is self promotion. While others may exaggerate their positive traits, the analytical person does not. Stating that you prefer working with computers rather than people may be an honest and unbiased analysis but is perceived as a black mark by the interviewer. I know I am weak at promoting myself. I have worked at improving my marketing skills. But if I could get away with it, I would hire a marketing specialist for my next job interview!

9: Politically incorrect

When I write I try to address the very real possibility that there might actually be personages of the female persuasion reading my musings. I try to throw in at least one” he or she” in recognition of this. The truth is that I put readability ahead of political correctness. Right or wrong, I believe that including references to both genders is tedious for the patient reader. So ladies, please forgive my political incorrectness. I am indeed honored to have you as a guest.

10: Loners

We analyticals would rather spend time alone with a good book or movie than with people. It’s not that we dislike people, per se. We just find them boring, uninspiring, and mundane. To the all seeing and all knowing analytical, the average person is like the emperor in the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes“– there’s nothing there. I mean, really, when was the last time you found someone who wanted to discuss the theory of relativity or the law of diminishing marginal returns?

The bottom line

Sure, the analytical thinker can appear to be cold, insensitive, and logical, somewhat akin to the personality of Mr. Spock, but the world needs these attributes. After all, it would take only one analytical lemming to save the others from mythological disaster by telling his friends, “Hey guys, I don’t think this cliff diving idea is so good after all.”

Every curse is a blessing in disguise. Because analytical thinkers like information in tabular format, I give you the 10 blessings for the aforementioned curses:

Each curse can be viewed as a blessing.

Give your favorite analytical person a break the next time you want to scream at him. The characteristics you find so annoying do have positive benefits to society.

Author’s Note: While these traits may apply in part or in whole to me and other analytical people, we are all complex creatures. It is not my intention to imply that such a simplistic view applies to all analytical thinkers.

By Alan Norton

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-curses-of-the-analytical-thinker/2466?tag=nl.e019

Correlation & Covariance

2011-05-04T19:29:00.000-04:00

OBAMA IS A FRAUD AS IS HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE AND BIN LADEN’S RECENT DEATH

2011-05-04T06:28:00.001-04:00

Beneath the Obama birth certificate hoopla lies a far deeper issue that the majority of Americans feel Obama is a fraud and a shill for Wall Street and the financial elite. Little has been done by Obama to dispel that mistrust and now even his recently disclosed birth certificate appears to be a fraud along with Bin Laden’s recent death.

President Obama can now finally claim he delivered on a promise with his public announcement four years ago that “We will kill Bin Laden” but it is common knowledge in intelligence circles that Bin Laden died in December, 2001 due to an untreated lung complication, the Pakistan Observer reported, citing a Taliban leader who allegedly attended the funeral of the Al Qaeda leader. Bin Laden, according to the source, was suffering from a serious lung complication and succumbed to the disease in mid-December, in the vicinity of the Tora Bora mountains. foxnews.com

Obviously, Obama is still fraudulently shilling for the so called War On ( Of ) Terror in a blatant attempt to cover up his many false promises of 2007. It’s also obvious that Bush, Cheney and eventually Obama all knew of Bin Laden’s death but used him as an excuse for their illegal military excursions and empire building. The bottom line is ~ if it was Osama bin Laden who was killed, then the body would have been put on public Display, and since that wasn’t done, then the body wasn’t his. Not that it will matter in the U.S. where the sheeple are waving flags and celebrating their latest bamboozle by the Obama administration.

The reason for the burial at sea is to hide the fact that Osama Bin Laden actually died in late 2001 and they were keeping his legend alive for propaganda purposes. The scam is so obvious that it’s ridiculous ~ but as Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, once said ~ “ You keep up your lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous” because the people are afraid of the truth and its implications. Obama is desperate for a victory of any sort but this one will be short lived because of its political timing and obvious questionable authenticity.

Bin Laden’s assassination, quite simply, is a hoax and Al Qaeda is a CIA inspired myth; never in living history has a man died so many times. I assume this is the last time but the germ of this on going hoax is the 9/11 cover up which continues to this day. Pandora’s Box is finally opening ~ Must see Nine minute Video:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/1092.html

The current hard truth is that President Obama’s broken campaign promises have not only eroded his progressive and Independent base but have dropped his approval ratings to new lows. 71% of Likely U.S. Voters say the country is heading in the wrong direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey taken the week ending Sunday, April 24 ( Pre Bin Laden Hoax ) Voter confidence that the nation’s best days are still to come has also fallen to its lowest level ever and a plurality of voters believes that most members of Congress are corrupt.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Thursday shows that 22% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Thirty-eight percent (38%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -16 and that figure has been continually sliding.

And another problem is that 52% of Americans want a new leader and deeply mistrust the President who promised change and did not deliver but instead hitched his wagon to Wall Street and the financial elite and left Main Street to pay the price for the administration’s excessive and unpopular bailouts. Trillions of American taxpayer dollars were given, in secrecy, to the banks/people who were most responsible for causing the financial crisis in the first place ~ and all in great secrecy.

There is real anger in the streets toward Obama and it’s not just the Tea Party ( the new name for the hard Christian right ) but also extends through all genders and age groups who generally feel both abandoned and betrayed by Obama’s broken promises.

Obama’s billion dollar re-election campaign is meant to scare off a solid progressive candidate or Independent in the primaries. Obama can be beat within his own party with the right candidate ~ he’s that vulnerable. With the price of gas heading towards an eventual $5 a gallon, many voters are beginning to finally realize that President Obama is running on empty promises.

So the birth certificate issue is the tip of the iceberg regarding Obama’s problems with the electorate and now it appears that the before mentioned birth certificate may well be a fraud.

Where Obama was actually born is the least of our problems.

That being said, the document on the White House web site is NOT a scan of a print document as the White House claims it is.

It's a digital creation!

Which means ~ it's a fraud.

Here's the detailed analysis from BrasscheckTV

10 minute Video: http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/1089.html

And why am I not surprised?

It appears that in attempting to close the door on this birth certificate issue, Obama has opened the door on a far greater issue ~ which is the significant loss of trust Americans have with his presidency. The Bin Laden death fraud reinforces this issue and opens other doors which will eventually lead to the 9/11 cover up.

As Mike Whitney explains ~ “The fact is, Bin Laden is just an inconsequential cog in the mighty machinery of state propaganda. This has more to do with "perception management" than terrorism. Bin Laden just provides a credible rationale for pursuing policies that are contrary to the public's interest. Any Hollywood-type villain would have done just as well. (Although it does help that he's a Muslim and 75% of the world's remaining oil reserves are located in countries that are predominantly Islamic)” See full story ~

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28008.htm

Unfortunately, it is apparent that our real government consists of unelected bankers and corporate special interests. The argument regarding Obama’s birth certificate legitimacy pales in comparison to the growing realization that the entire office of the president has been usurped for at least 2 decades by Wall Street and the corporate elite~ and Obama takes his orders from them and most certainly not from the American people. As such, do not believe anything Obama says as he tries to justify his re-election as President. These are words I once said about George W Bush and they were proven correct.

By Allen L Roland

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2011/05/04/obama-is-a-fraud-as-is-his-birth-certifi#more17562

Advocates: Consumers 'betrayed' by high court ruling on class-action suits

2011-04-28T05:11:00.001-04:00

Fine print in everyday consumer contracts can include provisions that require Americans to surrender their rights to file class-action lawsuits, the U.S Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, overturning a lower court ruling.

The ruling could have immediate impact on consumers' ability to fight against companies when they feel their rights have been violated. It also raises questions about the future of class-action cases.

Consumer advocates roundly criticized the decision.

"(The ruling) is a devastating and far-reaching betrayal of the most fundamental principles of American justice," said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, a civil rights advocacy organization. "(The court) has effectively removed any incentive for corporations to behave within the law."

When consumers sign up for everything from cell phone service to rental cars, terms of the contracts signed often compel them to forgo traditional legal mechanisms when a dispute arises, forcing them to mandatory binding arbitration instead. Such provisions have been struck down in many state cases as "unconscionable," with various courts deciding consumers could not be compelled to surrender basic legal rights granted by the state. That is especially true in what are known as "contracts of adhesion" -- standard form contracts offered on a "take it or leave it" basis, where consumers have little bargaining power, the courts have said.

Last year the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review a case filed in a California federal court in which AT&T's arbitration clause had been voided, a decision that was later upheld by a federal appeals court.

By a 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court overturned the appeals court ruling on Wednesday, with the majority essentially saying that federal law encouraging use of arbitration trumps state laws aimed at preserving consumer rights.

“Because it stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress ... the judgment of the Ninth Circuit is reversed," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in his opinion.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the dissent for the divided court.

"California courts believe that the terms of consumer contracts can be manipulated to insulate an agreement’s author from liability for its own frauds by ‘deliberately cheat(ing) large numbers of consumers out of individually small sums of money,’ " he wrote. "Why is this kind of decision — weighing the pros and cons of all class proceedings alike — not California’s to make?"

Class-action lawsuit advocates say that grouping consumers together is often the only way to force a misbehaving company to clean up its act. Most consumers can't or won't complain about small transgressions, such as erroneous $30 fees -- and many companies ignore such complaints. But pooled together, the voices of a million complaining consumers have much more power, and the ability to attract professional legal help.

Detractors say that victims in class-action cases often receive minimal compensation – sometimes, only a coupon -- while lawyers earn millions in legal fees. Binding arbitration, they say, can result in larger awards for consumers and dramatically reduce their legal fees.

Tort reform advocate Ted Frank, writing before the Supreme Court decision was issued, argued that class-action lawyers would benefit most from a decision against AT&T.

“In every single one of my cases, my clients would have been better off … with the AT&T Mobility arbitration provision than with what class-action attorneys negotiated for them,” he wrote. “The media is uniformly describing this case as one of consumers vs. businesses, when it's really one of consumers vs. lawyers trying to protect their monopoly on dispute resolution procedures.”

But some studies have called into question the fairness of arbitration boards, and their composition. In 34,000 California arbitration cases filed with the National Arbitration Forum between 2003 and 2007 and studied by Public Citizen, consumers prevailed only 4 percent of the time.

Harvey Rosenfield, founder of California-based organization Consumer Watchdog, said the Supreme Court ruling "effectively eliminates" protections against unfair small print.

"This decision means it will be open season on consumers,” Rosenfield said. “It slams the courtroom doors shut on Americans who are nickeled and dimed by big corporations. Knowing they can never be held accountable, American corporations will be emboldened to fleece their customers."

Now, consumer advocates are worried that Americans will have a hard time standing up to large companies when small-dollar issues are involved.

"Through this ruling, the court’s ultra-conservative majority continues its relentless effort to shift power to corporate interests while hobbling the ability of everyday Americans to band together within the legal system to fight back against corporate misbehavior," said Aron, the Alliance for Justice president. "After today’s ruling, corporations will now be able to decide on their own which civil rights and consumer protections they want to obey, knowing that there will be no effective means available to their victims to find redress."

The issue of binding arbitration isn't settled, however. The financial reform law passed by Congress last year that created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau mandated that the agency study the arbitration issue and ban techniques that are deemed "anti-consumer." The law creating the agency gives it the task of conducting a six-month study of arbitration agreements, then grants it the ability to void such agreements in contracts involving consumer financial issues.

Legislation banning binding mandatory arbitration clauses in consumer contracts also has been introduced in Congress, most recently by former Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Rep. Ed Markey, D.-Mass., but has stalled several times.

By Bob Sullivan

http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/04/27/6544896-advocates-consumers-betrayed-by-high-court-ruling-on-class-action-suits

Exporting Tyranny through Foreign Aid

2011-04-20T23:27:00.001-04:00

Will upheaval in the Middle East force the U.S. to rethink its practice of subsidizing repressive regimes?

Before the successful ouster of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, Tahrir Square was filled with chants and handcrafted picket signs pleading with the U.S. to stop funding Mubarak’s repressive government. Rubber bullets, shotgun shells, and teargas canisters were collected by the largely peaceful protestors – and given to news agencies to show to the world – with the names of American military contractors branded on them. The Mubarak regime received approximately $60 billion in U.S. aid throughout his tenure.

Uprisings in Yemen and calls for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down have been intensifying. Reports in late March of non-violent protestors being shot with live rounds, killing and wounding hundreds, put in question the Obama administration’s escalation of support to Yemen. A June 2010 Amnesty International report published “images of a US-manufactured cruise missile that carried cluster munitions” aimed at “an alleged al-Qaida training camp in Yemen that killed 41 local residents, including 14 women and 21 children.” The bombings were later corroborated to have been launched on presidential orders and in conjunction with the Yemeni government, which has received over $300 million from the U.S. in the past five years.

In Bahrain in late February, when security forces opened fire on peaceful demonstrators and began to enforce martial law, similar revelations of U.S. backing came to the fore. The tens of millions of dollars sent to the Bahraini government each year in part help King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa maintain domestic stability – as well as compensate for his country hosting the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, one of the largest military forces in the region.

The recent onset of anti-government demonstrations across the Middle East has placed an integral pillar of U.S. foreign policy into flux. America’s consistent, decades-long policy of lavish support for Middle Eastern autocrats is becoming prominent enough in the national debate to shake it from its seemingly unshakable roots.

The maverick Tea Party Senator Rand Paul grabbed headlines in late January when he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer he would end all aid to foreign governments, including Israel. Other congressional leaders, like Senator Patrick Leahy, exhibited similar scrutiny for foreign aid when he stated during Egyptian protests that “if [Mubarak] doesn’t leave, there will not be foreign aid; I mean, it’s as simple as that.”

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert complained on the House floor that foreign aid is inconsistent with American values. America “was all about human rights, human dignity, and human freedom,” he said. “And we see that slipping away every time we prop up some brutal dictator.”

Leahy and others have been citing what is called the Leahy Law, enacted in 1997, which prohibits U.S. assistance to foreign military or security forces credibly accused of human rights violations. However, this legislation applies only to programs funded under the Foreign Operations Act and the Defense Department Appropriations Act; it does not apply to drug enforcement and non-Defense Department counterterrorism assistance. These technicalities and the overriding justification of vital national security interests have allowed the government to consistently circumvent the law’s injunctions.

Justin Logan, Associate Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, told TAC in an interview that “U.S. policy in the Middle East is caught up in a contradiction.” Some elements of U.S. influence have been “trying to promote a wave of democratic revolutions in the region” while others have been trying to keep “the balance of power by giving support to various players.”

In mid-April, The New York Times reported that “even as the United States poured billions of dollars into foreign military programs and anti-terrorism campaigns, a small core of government-financed organizations” channeled money to democratic movements within these countries. The Times quotes Stephen McInerney of the Project on Middle East Democracy explaining that “We didn’t fund them to start protests, but we did help support their development of skills and networking.”

“The money spent on these programs was minute compared with efforts led by the Pentagon,” the report said. And the people in the region “are also aware that the same government also trained the state security investigative service, which was responsible for the harassment and jailing of many of us,” an Egyptian activist told the Times.

But other signs of a break with this Washington consensus came after the wave of protests broke out. After the shootings in Bahrain, political pressure and an unusual amount of media coverage on the issue prompted the Obama administration to review its policy. The State Department, in a letter to Senator Leahy, said, “the administration is reevaluating its procedures for reviewing U.S. security assistance and defense sales during periods of domestic unrest and violence and has specifically included Bahrain in this reassessment.” This investigation, reported the Wall Street Journal, “could force the U.S. to cut off aid to specific military units found to be involved in crackdowns on civilian protestors.”

In April, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama administration quietly suspended portions of an aid package set for Yemen “worth a potential $1 billion or more over several years,” news that came almost a month after Human Rights Watch publicly urged that “The United States should immediately suspend military assistance to Yemen.”

Brian Katulis, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, predicts that U.S. assistance to “the security sector will be unsustainable in an Egypt that is even marginally more responsive to popular moods.” This reflects an understanding in Washington that with more democratic control and autonomy in the region, maintaining support for dictators will not be tolerated by the populations.

These are noteworthy developments given how steadfast American support for Arab tyrannies has been over the years. Immediately after World War II, “the Defense Department, the CIA, the State Department, and USAID provided assistance to police and internal security forces in key strategic regions,” said a 2006 RAND Corporation report. The flow of aid to successive regimes in the Middle East has been consistent ever since.

In a June 2010 report for the Congressional Research Service, Jeremy Sharp writes that, in addition counterterrorism, aid to Middle East regimes is an attempt to “encourage peace between Israel and her Arab neighbors,” and serves for “the protection of vital petroleum supplies.” This latter justification was, of course, understood by early post-war national security planners. As a Top Secret National Security Council briefing put it in 1954, “the Near East is of great strategic, political, and economic importance,” as it “contains the greatest petroleum resources in the world” as well as “essential locations for strategic military bases in any world conflict.”

Continued and in some cases increased foreign assistance after the September 11^th attacks had the benefit of giving “the United States leverage on key foreign policy issues, since it can make assistance contingent on cooperation,” says the RAND report. But these assistance programs “can have a negative effect on democratic development by strengthening a state’s capacity for repression” and, as one study concluded “the more foreign police aid given [to repressive states], the more brutal and less democratic the police institutions and their governments become.”

This underbelly of foreign policy has typically resided in the shadows when it comes to the national debate. But the democratic fervor and uprisings against U.S.-backed dictatorships in recent months makes this mainstay of American foreign policy difficult for Washington to hide. The crackdowns many of these regimes have engaged in to suppress the popular revolts exposes the U.S. as knowingly behind that suppression, and Muslims in the Arab world have been crying hypocrite. “No system of government,” Obama said in his speech in Cairo in June 2009, “can or should be imposed upon one nation by another.”

Support for repressive Middle Eastern regimes has to some extent been exposed to the limelight since September 11^th. In 2004, early on in the Bush administration’s war on terror, the Department of Defense sent an unclassified report to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld saying, “If it is one overarching goal they [Islamists] share, it is the overthrow of what Islamists call ‘apostate’ regimes: the tyrannies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan and the Gulf States” and that “The United States finds itself in the strategically awkward – and potentially dangerous – situation of being the longstanding prop and alliance partner of these authoritarian regimes. Without the US these regimes could not survive.”

In this context, the wave of protests sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa, putting many U.S. clients in danger of being deposed, has led the media and the public to challenge such support for dictatorship. In a February poll, Rasmussen reported that 58 percent of American adults and 76 percent of Republicans “believe America should end all foreign aid to Arab countries in the Middle East.”

But cemented policies of the federal government going back a half-century don’t get eliminated that easily. “I suspect that public opinion with regard to the aid to various countries will not cause or prevent change,” Justin Logan told TAC. “Aid to Middle Eastern autocracies just isn’t a salient issue in American politics, so it is entirely possible for Beltway elites to defy public opinion on the issue, because no one votes or gives money based on it.”

And Logan’s suspicions have been playing out. In the immediate aftermath of Mubarak’s departure, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced $150 million of aid in his wake, saying “the U.S. is ready to provide assistance to Egypt to advance its efforts.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates, on a recent visit to Egypt, met with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who heads the ruling military council. Speaking for Gates, Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said he “thought there was support for sustaining military support to Egypt as well as other forms of aid.”

Some of the most influential leaders in Congress – Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry, Homeland Security Committee chairman Joe Lieberman, and ranking member on the Armed Services Committee John McCain — have been pushing for similar aid packages to places like Egypt and Tunisia.

While the regular $1.5 billion in aid to Egypt has been officially requested for next year, Obama has additionally requested another $120 million for the Yemeni government in FY 2012. Oman is set for $12.6 million, Jordan has $675 million, Tunisia another $6.5 million, and almost $3 billion for Pakistan – to say nothing of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel.

In a hearing in front of the House Armed Services Committee, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen responded to pressure from representatives taking aim at foreign aid and itching to cut the federal budget. “Foolhardy it would be,” he said, “for us to make hasty judgments about the benefits – tangible and intangible – that are about to be derived from forging strong military relationships overseas.” Mullen urged caution when considering “changes to those relationships – in either aid or assistance.”

In mid-March Texas Congressman Ted Poe introduced the Foreign Aid Accountability Act, which would make aid to each individual country contingent on a congressional vote, instead of the omnibus-style, packaged bill for all foreign aid. “It is time to re-evaluate foreign aid,” Poe says. “The United States sends taxpayer money to 150 of 192 countries in the world. The American people would be shocked to know some of the places where we send their money. Our country simply cannot afford to be shelling out taxpayer money to nations when it is not in the best interest of the United States.”

The customarily sub rosa policy of actively supporting repressive dictatorships by itself produces enough oppression and perverse consequences to justify rescinding it. But considering America’s precarious debt situation and the eruption of the Middle East in revolutionary fervor, our most time-honored tradition of support for Middle East tyrannies may soon have to be modified. The current uprisings are in part a response to U.S. meddling and the end result of the transitions taking place is yet unclear. But the prospect of a Middle East functioning by the consent of the governed may lead to drastic changes for Washington’s modus operandi.

John Glaser is an editorial assistant at The American Conservative.

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/exporting-tyranny-through-foreign-aid/

Janus Metz: Armadillo, Kill Teams, and the Savagery of War

2011-04-19T00:10:00.000-04:00

More GRITtv

Jussi Bjöerling - " Leise flehen meine Lieder " Schubert ( Serenade)

2011-04-16T22:39:00.000-04:00

Atomic Deserts

2011-04-16T22:11:00.001-04:00

A Survey of the World's Radioactive No-Go Zones

By Michail Hengstenberg, Gesche Sager and Philine Gebhardt

The Soviet nuclear testing site in present-day Kazakhstan is just one of many places in the world that remain dangerously radioactive to this day.

Part 14: The Desert Rats

AFP

France was also determined not to get left behind in the nuclear arms race. The first French atomic bomb was called "Gerboise Bleue," named after a desert rodent, and was detonated on the morning of Feb. 13, 1960 in the Reggane district of Algeria, then a French colony. At 70 kilotons, it was bigger than the first nuclear tests of the UK, USSR and USA combined. Three more bombs were exploded soon thereafter. France moved its testing grounds to remote areas of the South Pacific after Algeria gained its independence in 1962.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,756369-14,00.html

Don't Cut Entitlements-Cut the Military

2011-04-16T22:07:00.000-04:00

It seems that this President has turned his back on everything he touted during his campaign. Yet, as mature individuals we should have expected it…after all he’s a politician and most politicians lie through their teeth, right? You must remember, closing Guantanamo, having a more “transparent” government, working for peace in the Mid-East, talking to Iran, etc., etc., etc.

I hate to shatter anyone’s bubble, but he hasn’t done anything except reward the perpetrators of the Wall Street crash, expand the War in Afghanistan and move it over to Pakistan to boot. We still have troops in Iraq and we are considering putting troops in Libya where we have no national interests at all. Funny what that “Commander-in-Chief” title can lead you to do.

Yes, since the Congress declared “The Global War on Terror”, the executive branch has almost unlimited resources and power. “Hail Caesar!” I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little bit tired of him moving our military around the World like he’s playing some kind of chess game. You can bet that the military personnel are getting a little sick of it too.

I found out that the reason we are so down on Iran is because they are the sworn enemy of Saudi Arabia. Gee, I didn’t know that. I should have figured it out. When the Saudi’s sent troops into Bahrain to put down a popular movement against the princes of the oilfields, it became quite clear that America is certainly for freedom in the Mid-East, but only in certain parts. We supply Saudi Arabia with 3.5 Billion dollars of military equipment every year. Do they pay for it? Let me guess…no. Between Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia we give them more that 10.5 Billions of dollars in military hardware.

We have a situation where we spend more on our military than all the other nations on Earth combined. We are doing it today, and what are our fearless leaders talking about in Congress? How to reduce the average Americans entitlements! They have absolutely no qualms about spending more than half the tax dollars they get, but want to cut programs that American taxpayers put money into! If what I heard tonight is true, 40 cents of every tax dollar received goes to finance the debt. If that’s true, between financing the debt and paying for our military, that only leaves 10 cents of every dollar to actually spend. Is it any wonder why we are going bankrupt?

How about Libya? Who the F**K authorized us into that war? Just what are the people of the U.S. going to gain from it? The U.S. has a new toy called AFRICOM and they want to use it. Some say that Somalia, Yemen and Sudan will be next. Just what is going on and why aren’t Americans screaming their fool heads off?

Look, I didn’t use any big words and everything I’ve said here can be easily verified. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this nation is in a fatal spiral of debt that will eventually have us go the way of the Soviet Union. Where are all the lefties? Where are the people that don’t want Medicare and Social Security cut? Why isn’t there uproar over our out of control military spending? Do you realize the two largest air forces are the U.S.Airforce and secondly the U.S. Navy? Did you know that it takes approximately 50 Billion dollars to operate one nuclear powered aircraft carrier and we have eleven of them? There are two nations; Italy and Spain the closest to us in numbers have 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_by_country

So why do we have so many carriers? Just what real good are they doing? Off the coast of Somalia American and other nations ships are routinely captured by pirates in fast boats. How do you hide a two football field long tanker from an aircraft carrier? Doesn’t this make you sit up and say WTF?

We’re fighting a war in Afghanistan to root out what the U.S. admits are only 50-100 al Qaida. The average cost of having one set of boots on the ground there for a year is One Million Dollars http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114294746, just what are we doing? Opium production there has risen 400% since the U.S. landed troops there. Some sources say it is now over 6000 metric tons yearly. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6239734.stm There are entire families addicted to the stuff. War is hell and opium makes it less so. If we gave them a democracy (which isn’t the real mission there) they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Between depleted uranium and opium, the Afghani’s will never forget us.

Forget about the class war here in America where the top 1% of the population owns almost 40% of the wealth and the other 19% together with the1% hold 83% of the nation’s wealth, leaving the bottom 80% of us with a whopping 7% of the total wealth. Never mind that the middle class has seen wages fall steadily over the last two decades while the upper 10% have had a 13% increase. Don’t tax the rich! According to the GOP that will mean that they can’t hire anyone. (What …like an extra maid or butler?)

So when are we going to do something about it? Obama, with his minions from Goldman Sacks aren’t going to break the status quo. Anyway, he’s Commander-in-Chief! I say do something. If things progress the way they are, we will have the largest armed forces in the world, but they will all be mothballed. (And maybe that’s a good thing). The government wants to cut everything under the sun, but the military is sacrosanct. It’s about time we brought the subject up loud enough for these cowards in Washington to hear us. Don’t you think?

-###-

By Timothy V. Gatto

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2011/04/16/don-t-cut-entitlements-cut-the-military#more17343

DEADLINE LIVE EXCLUSIVE: Sinaloa Drug Cartel Controlled and Protected by Both Mexican and U.S. Governments

2011-04-16T21:57:00.001-04:00

Recent testimony by captured drug cartel leader Vicente Zambada in Federal Court points to DEA and FBI protection and collaboration with one of the most dangerous and powerful criminal organizations in the world: the Sinaloa Drug Cartel. South of the border, a brave Mexican journalist exposes how the Mexican government not only protects the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, but also works as an ally to eliminate their rivals and competitors.

Almost four years ago, on September of 2007, the Mexican military caught and confiscated an airplane with almost 4 tons of cocaine in the state of Yucatan. A month later, there was a plane crash in the same region, involving a similar aircraft –a Gulfstream II with registration N987SA, belonging to a U.S. company known as Donna Blue Aircraft Inc. When authorities arrived at the crash site, they discovered around 4 tons of cocaine onboard the aircraft. The narcotics reportedly belonged to the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, under the command of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, whom according to Forbes Magazine, is among one of the wealthiest men in the world. However, the airplane did not belong to Guzman; it was later discovered by both Mexican authorities and independent news sources that the aircraft was used for CIA rendition flights. Mexico’s leading newspaper, El Universal, obtained the flight records and other documents related to the ownership and recent flight information and confirmed that it was a CIA aircraft.

Captured drug lord Vicente Zambada said in court that he worked with the DEA and FBI.

A year later, one of the members of Guzman’s inner circle, Vicente Zambada, was captured and later extradited to the United States. Last week, at a federal court in Chicago, Zambada presented evidence stating that U.S. Government agencies, such as the D.E.A. and the F.B.I. protected him and worked with him. Furthermore, he’s not just making baseless accusations; Zambada is actually naming names, such as “the DEA Regional Assistant for South America, the Director General of the Office of the DEA in Mexico, the DEA agents commissioned in Monterrey, Hermosillo and Mexico City , including but not limited to those who are named Eduardo Martinez “Manny” LNU, “David” LNU, and Stephen Monk, as well as other people, including FBI agents whose names are unknown but the defendant agencies are known for, ” according to court documents. In the document, Zambada states that the U.S. Government agencies were in contact with him and were fully aware of his operations between January of 2004 and March of 2008, just months before his arrest.

Who are the real drug lords?

In a recent interview with the newspaper Diario de Juarez, Mexican journalist Anabel Hernandez, who’s living in exile in Italy, stated that in the Mexican Drug War, the federal government and the United States D.E.A. only go after the Sinaloa Drug Cartel’s competitors. She indicated that the protection that Sinaloa receives from the government is ‘systematic’ and embedded in the drug war policy. She also accused Felipe Calderon of protecting the Federal Public Safety Director, Genaro Garcia Luna, who many accuse of having ties to the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, and plays the most significant role as the government liaison with organized crime.

Anabel Hernandez, author of the book "Los Señores del Narco"

In her new book “Los Señores del Narco” (or the Narco-Lords), she provides detailed information about how Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the alleged leader of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel is an Orwellian creation of the Mexican government, almost a mythical and elusive character, who’s story about how he broke out of prison in 2001 using a laundry truck is completely bogus. She finds it hard to believe that Forbes Magazine listed Guzman among the richest people in the world, given the fact that he’s illiterate and cannot do basic math. “When he was captured, his testimony made absolutely no sense; he couldn’t come up with the exact figures he was supposedly paying his people; he could not do basic additions or multiplications,” she said.

Further in the interview, Hernandez said that the real drug trafficking is done by people other than the typical drug dealers, who are only figure heads in this so-called “drug war.” The real drug lords are not wanted by police or federal authorities; they are people well established in the political and economic systems, as well as many other areas of government, from where they have established a wide network of complicity to money laundering and protection of the drug cartels. “These are people in positions of power, who use their power for trafficking, or who at one point of another it has been proven conclusively that their careers -whether they are businessmen, politicians, governors, presidents, secretaries of state or police chiefs- have been financed by drug money or are deeply linked with drug trafficking,” she said.

By Mario Andrade
DeadlineLive.info
April 15, 2011

http://deadlinelive.info/2011/04/15/deadline-live-exclusive-sinaloa-drug-cartel-controlled-and-protected-by-both-mexican-and-u-s-governments/

The Day My God Died

2011-04-15T01:19:00.000-04:00

CIA SUED FOR 'HOLDING HISTORY HOSTAGE' ON BAY OF PIGS INVASION

2011-04-14T23:08:00.000-04:00

The Houston, a supply ship for the CIA's invasion force, was sunk by Cuban T-33s on the morning of April 17, 1961 (CIA photo)

National Security Archive files FOIA lawsuit to Force Release of
"Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation" on 50th Anniversary

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 341

Posted - April 14, 2011

By Peter Kornbluh

For more information contact:
Peter Kornbluh - 202/374-7281 or by email

Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba
Edited by Peter Kornbluh

Washington, D.C., April 14, 2011 - Fifty years after the failed CIA-led assault on Cuba, the National Security Archive today filed a FOIA lawsuit to compel the Agency to release its “Official History of the Bay of Pigs Invasion.” The suit charges that the CIA has “wrongfully withheld” the multi-volume study, which the Archive requested under the FOIA in 2005. As the “official history,” the court filing noted, the document “is, by definition, the most important and substantive CIA-produced study of this episode.”

The Top Secret report, researched and written by CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer, is based on dozens of interviews with key operatives and officials and a review of hundreds of CIA documents and was compiled over the course of nine years that Pfeiffer served as the CIA’s in-house historian. Pfeiffer’s internal study is divided into five volumes: I, Air Operations; II, Participation in the Conduct of Foreign Policy; III, Evolution of CIA’s Anti-Castro Policies, 1951-January 1961; IV, The Taylor Committee Report; and V, Internal Investigation Report. (In 1998 the CIA released Vol. III under the Kennedy Assassination Records Act.)

In 1987, Pfeiffer himself filed a FOIA lawsuit seeking the release of Vol 5; the CIA successfully convinced the court that it could not be declassified.

“The CIA is holding history hostage,” according to Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive’s Cuba Documentation Project. Kornbluh called on the CIA to release the report under President Obama’s Executive Order 13526 on Classified National Security Information which states that “no information may remain classified indefinitely.” He noted that “fifty years after the invasion, it is well past time for the official history to be declassified and studied for the lessons it contains for the future of U.S.-Cuban relations.”

In 1998, the Archive's Cuba project successfully obtained the declassification of the CIA’s internal investigation into the failure of the invasion, the “Inspector General’s Survey of the Cuban Operation,” written in 1961 by the Agency’s Inspector General, Lyman Kirkpatrick. The report provided a scathing critique of the CIA misconduct and ineptitude in conducting a massive paramilitary operation that went “beyond the area of Agency responsibility as well as Agency capability.”

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the invasion, which began with a preliminary airstrike on April 15, 1961, the Archive re-posted a collection of the major reports and documents that address the Bay of Pigs, among them the Inspector General’s report, and Vol. III of the Pfeiffer report which was originally discovered and posted by Villanova professor David Barrett in 2005.

The Archive also posted the only existing interview with the two managers of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Jacob Esterline and Col. Jack Hawkins, that Peter Kornbluh conducted in 1996. The interview was published in Kornbluh’s book, Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba.
In March of 2001, the National Security Archive organized a 40th anniversary conference in Havana, Cuba on the Bahia de Cochinos. The conference brought together retired CIA officers, Kennedy White House officials, and members of the exile brigade with Fidel Castro and his military commanders to discuss this history. Other documents and revelations generated by the conference can be accessed here.

Read the Documents

Lawsuit - On April 14, 2011, the National Security Archive filed a lawsuit against the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to secure the declassification of several volumes of an Official history of the Bay of Pigs Operation compiled between 1974 and 1983. Nearly a decade after the failed invasion, on August 8, 1973, CIA Director William Colby tasked the Agency's History Staff to "develop accurate accounts of certain of CIA's past activities in terms suitable for inclusion in Government-wide historical and declassification programs, while protecting intelligence sources and methods." Historian Jack Pfeiffer assumed responsibility for this history, which was written over the course of 9 years and is divided into 5 volumes; it is based on dozens of interviews with key operatives and officials and hundreds of CIA documents. Volume III of the Pfeiffer report was declassified by the CIA in 1998, and the rest of the report is now the last major internal study that remains secret, fifty years after the Bay of Pigs.

Document 1 - CIA, “Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, Volume III: Evolution of CIA’s Anti-Castro Policies, 1951- January 1961”

Jack Pfeiffer, the chief historian at the CIA, researched and wrote a comprehensive history of the Bay of Pigs operation between 1974 and 1983. The CIA declassified only Volume III of the five-volume history in 1998, under the Kennedy Assassination Records Act. This three-hundred page report was discovered in the National Archives by Villanova professor of political science David Barrett in 2005, and first posted on his university’s website. Volume III focuses on the last two years of the Eisenhower administration and the transition to the Kennedy presidency. It is newsworthy for clarifying the role of Vice-President Richard Nixon, who, the report reveals, intervened in the planning of the invasion on behalf of a wealthy donor.

This volume also contains the extraordinary revelation that CIA task force in charge of the invasion did not believe it could succeed. On page 149, Pfeiffer quotes minutes of the Task Force meeting held on November 15, 1960, to prepare a briefing for the new President-elect, John F. Kennedy: “Our original concept is now seen to be unachievable in the face of the controls Castro has instituted,” the document states. “Our second concept (1,500-3000 man force to secure a beach with airstrip) is also now seen to be unachievable, except as a joint Agency/DOD action.”

This candid assessment was not shared with the President-elect then, nor later after the inauguration. As Pfeiffer points out, “what was being denied in confidence in mid-November 1960 became the fact of the Zapata Plan and the Bay of Pigs Operation in March 1961”—run only by the CIA, and with a force of 1,200 men.

Document 2 - CIA, October 1961, “Inspector General’s Survey of the Cuban Operation and Associated Documents”

This internal analysis of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs operation, written by CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick after a six month investigation, is highly critical of the top CIA officials who conceived and ran the operation, and places blame for the embarrassing failure squarely on the CIA itself. The report cites bad planning, inadequate intelligence, poor staffing, and misleading of White House officials including the President, as key reasons for the failure of the operation. “Plausible denial was a pathetic illusion,” the report concluded. “The Agency failed to recognize that when the project advanced beyond the stage of plausible denial it was going beyond the area of Agency responsibility as well as Agency capability.” The declassified report also contains a rebuttal to Kirkpatrick from the office of deputy director Richard Bissell, challenging those conclusions. Volume V of the Pfeiffer report, titled “Internal Investigation Report,” which remains classified, also critiques Kirkpatrick’s conclusions.

Document 3 - DOD, 5/5/1961, “Record of Paramilitary Action Against the Castro Government of Cuba, 17 March 1960- May 1961”

This May 5, 1961 report was written by Colonel Jack Hawkins, the paramilitary chief of the Bay of Pigs operation. His 48-page report cites poor CIA organization, and "political considerations" imposed by the Kennedy administration, such as the decision to cancel D-day airstrikes which "doomed the operation," as key elements of its failure. "Paramilitary operations cannot be effectively conducted on a ration-card basis," the report concludes. "The Government and the people of the United States are not yet psychologically conditioned to participate in the cold war with resort to the harsh, rigorous, and often dangerous and painful measures which must be taken in order to win." Hawkins also recommended that further covert operations to depose Castro, unless accompanied by a military invasion, "should not be made." Castro, according to the report, could "not be overthrown by means short of overt application" of U.S. force.

Document 4 - CIA, 3/9/1960, “First Meeting of Branch 4 Task Force, 9 March 1960”

This is a memorandum of conversation of the first CIA Task Force meeting to plan what became the Bay of Pigs, a covert operation to recruit, train, and infiltrate paramilitary units into Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro. The meeting is noteworthy because the chief of the Western Hemisphere division, J.C. King states that “unless Fidel and Raul Castro and Che Guevara could be eliminated in one package—which is highly unlikely—this operation can be a long, drawn out affair and the present government will only be overthrown by the use of force.”

Document 5 - CIA, 3/16/1960, “A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime”

This memorandum outlines the original plans for what became the Bay of Pigs. It was presented to and authorized by President Eisenhower on March 17, 1960. Components of the plan include the creation of a unified Cuban opposition, development of broadcasting facilities, and the training of paramilitary forces. The purpose of the operations, according to the proposal, is to “bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S. in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention.” The original proposed budget is $4.4 million; by the time of the invasion the budget has risen to $45 million.

Document 6 - NSC, 3/11/1961, “Memorandum of Discussion on Cuba, March 11, 1961”

This top secret memorandum of conversation from a meeting of the National Security Council describes continued planning of paramilitary operations in Cuba. President Kennedy says he plans to authorize an operation in which “patriotic Cubans return to their homeland.”

Document 7 - White House, 3/2/1963, [Audio conversation between President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy]

[Part 1 - mp3] [Part 2 - mp3]

In this telephone conversation between President Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, they discuss concerns that a Senate investigating committee might reveal that the President had authorized jets from the US aircraft carrier Essex to provide one hour of air coverage, to create a no-fly zone for Bay of Pigs B-26 bombers the morning of April 19. Due to a timing mistake, the jets never met up with the bombers; 2 bombers were shot down, leading to the deaths of 4 Americans.

Document 8 - White House, "Memorandum for the President: Conversation with Commandante Ernesto Guevara of Cuba," August 22, 1961.

In this memorandum of conversation, aide Richard Goodwin recounts for President Kennedy his conversation with Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who seeks to establish a "modus vivendi" with the U.S. government. This document is noteworth for the Bay of Pigs because Guevara "wanted to thank us very much for the invasion- that it had been a great political victory for them- enabled them to consolidate- and transformed them from an aggrieved little country to an equal."

Interview - In October 1996, the National Security Archive's Cuba Documentation project arranged for the two chief managers of the Bay of Pigs operation, Jacob Esterline and Colonel Jack Hawkins, to meet in a Washington DC hotel for a lengthy filmed interview on the invasion. The meeting marked the first time they had seen each other since the weekend of April 17-19, 1961, and the first time they had together recalled the events surrounding the failed invasion. This interview was conducted by the Archive's Peter Kornbluh and is excerpted in his book, Bay of Pigs Declassified (New York: The New Press, 1998).

LPACTV: The True Story of The Bretton Woods

2011-04-14T01:34:00.000-04:00

Joseph Stiglitz slams US dollar

2011-04-14T01:24:00.000-04:00

American-British war crimes: Is torture a good idea? spsyed review

2011-04-13T00:38:00.000-04:00

Above the Law

2011-04-13T00:15:00.000-04:00

In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court last month sided against John Thompson, a former Louisiana prison inmate who sat on death row for 14 years until proof surfaced that prosecutors had withheld evidence of his innocence. The Court reversed a lower court's ruling that New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. (the father of the famous pop singer) could be held liable for poorly training Thompson's prosecutors with respect to their obligations to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence.

The Court's decision is another black mark against the U.S. legal system, according to Independent Institute Research Editor Anthony Gregory. The Court "essentially immunized the entire municipality" against lawsuits for misconduct and represents "the newest peak into the gross corruption of American criminal justice, and a reminder of what government power means," he writes in an op-ed published in the Birmingham News.

More concretely, not only must Thompson forgo the $14 million in damages awarded by the lower court, but he must also cope with the knowledge that a couple of his prosecutors still practice law. These injustices should anger all Americans, Gregory argues. "State criminality is above the legal standards that apply to the rest of us," he laments. "This is the real nature of government--the right of state agents to do what would be criminal if done by common people."

"Putting Prosecutors above the Law," by Anthony Gregory (Birmingham News, 4/5/11)

The Pursuit of Justice: Law and Economics of Legal Institutions, edited by Edward J. López

Sexual Deviants Being Held Up As Models Of Virtue?

2011-04-12T23:56:00.001-04:00

Dear Rocco :

                            
                            The Radical Homosexuals infiltrating the United States Congress have a plan:
                            
                            Indoctrinate an entire generation of American children with pro-homosexual propaganda and eliminate traditional values from American society.
                           
                            Their ultimate dream is to create a new  America based on sexual promiscuity in which the values you and I  cherish are long forgotten.
                           
                            I hate to admit it, but if they pass the  deceptively named “Student Non-Discrimination Act,” that’s exactly what  they’ll do.
                           
                             Better named the “Homosexual Classrooms Act,” its chief advocate in Congress is Rep. Jared Polis, himself an open homosexual and radical activist.
                           
                            That’s why I need you to act quickly -- right away -- to protect our nation’s youth.
                           
                            I have prepared the official “Protect Our Children’s Innocence” Petition to Congress for you to sign.
                           
                             You and I must defeat this disastrous legislation.
                           
                            You see, the Homosexual Classrooms Act contains a laundry list of anti-family provisions that will:
                             *** Require schools to teach appalling homosexual acts so “homosexual students” don’t feel “singled out” during already explicit sex-ed classes;
                             *** Spin impressionable students in a whirlwind of sexual confusion and misinformation, even peer pressure to “experiment” with the homosexual “lifestyle;”
                             *** Exempt homosexual students from punishment for propositioning, harassing, or even sexually assaulting their classmates, as part of their specially-protected right to “freedom of self-expression;”
                             *** Force private and even religious schools to teach a pro-homosexual curriculum and purge any reference to religion if a student claims it creates a “hostile learning environment” for homosexual students.
                             And that’s just the beginning of the Homosexual Lobby’s radical agenda.
                           
                             In fact, it will set them up to ram through their entire perverted vision for a homosexual America.
                           
                            My friend, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this is not a fight we can afford to lose.
                           
                            That’s why Public Advocate is leading the fight against this immoral legislation.
                                                                                        This is a battle for the survival of American values and the fact is, there’s no time to waste.
                           
                            The Homosexual Classrooms Act will turn  America’s schools into indoctrination centers and its classrooms into  social laboratories -- and they’re pulling out all the stops to pass it.
                           
                                                            You see,  they’ve disguised the bill’s wicked purpose behind an innocent name:                                  “The Student Non-Discrimination Act.”
                           
                            The Homosexual Lobby knows that if  pro-family Americans like you and me have time to alert the public of  their radical agenda, they’ll have no hope of success.
                            
                            They made that mistake last year and you and I had enough time to kill this bill.
                           
                            This year they won’t make the same mistake and have successfully kept everything under wraps -- for now.
                           
                             Unfortunately, this agenda is nothing new.
                           
                            In fact, other countries like Britain  are already experimenting with this kind of legislation, such as  mandating public schools inject pro-homosexual content into every aspect  of education.
                            
                            Word problems in math classes are now to  include homosexual characters.  History classes will document the “civil rights” struggle against the “oppressive” pro-family establishment.
                           
                            And it’s even started to infiltrate our state governments.
                           
                            In California, lawmakers want to “require  schools to portray lesbians, homosexuals, transsexuals ... as positive  role models to children in all public schools.”
                            
                            Sexual deviants being held up as models of virtue?
                           
                            If that makes you as sick as it makes me,  you simply must join me in this battle for America’s children.
                           
                            Please sign the “Protect Our Children’s Innocence” Petition to Congress 
                                                                                        And if all that wasn’t enough to convince you that action must be taken immediately, there’s more.
                           
                            Many say that there will always be private  schools and traditional homeschool families to teach traditional values  to the next generation.
                           
                            But the truth is,  this radical agenda is NOT restricted to public schools.
                            
                            Kevin Jennings,  Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar,” has clearly stated that “every school,  public, private or parochial has an obligation” to teach a  pro-homosexual curriculum.
                           
                            In fact, Jennings denounced school choice programs as “very dangerous” because they make it much harder to impose the Homosexual Agenda on our kids.
                           
                            “Lord forbid a Baptist or Mormon school,” he added.
                           
                             Jennings' ultimate goal is for all  curriculum in “kindergarten, and first grade, and second grade – every  grade” be infused with a pro-homosexual slant.
                           
                            Traditional values will be squashed and  demonized as old fashioned or out of date, or even as bigotry.
                           
                            You and I cannot let them succeed.
                           
                            Please sign the “Protect Our Children’s Innocence” Petition to Congress I’ve prepared for you right away.
                            
                            Thank you so much for all you have done.
                           
                             Sincerely,
                           
                            Eugene Delgaudio
                            President,
Public Advocate of the U.S.
                             P.S. Radical Homosexuals in Congress have a  plan to indoctrinate our children in schools -- both public and private.
                            
                            But Public Advocate is taking a stand.  Will you join me?
                           
                            Please sign the “Protect Our Children’s Innocence” Petition to Congress I’ve enclosed.

Now that Obamacare comes to light

2011-04-12T22:26:00.000-04:00

Remember when Sen. Nancy Pelosi said they had to sign the healthcare bill to know what was in it? Well it has come to light, and some people are troubled by what it reveals.

Dr. Donalid Condit says it’s a big document loaded with sugar-coated rhetoric covering a bitter pill to swallow.

This ObamaCare prescription threatens patients, the physicians who care for them, and the common good. The only clear winners are the consultants and lawyers busy trying to decipher this 429-page tome of acronyms and encrypted methodology that will compromise the doctor-patient relationship and is contrary to the principle of subsidiarity.

Very good point.

Medicare beneficiaries will be “assigned” to 5,000 patient-minimum organizations to coordinate their care. While HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius talks about improvement in care, the politically poisonous truth is that Medicare is going broke and ACOs are designed to save money. The words “rationing” or “treatment denial” or “withholding care” are not part of her press release, but reading the regulations reveals intentions to “share savings” with those who fulfill, or “penalize” others who fall short of, the administration’s objectives. The administration’s talking points include politically palatable words which emphasize quality improvement and care enhancement when the real objective is cost control by a utilitarian calculus.

Physicians and other health care providers will find themselves in conflict with the traditional ethos of duty to patient within ACOs.

Somebody has to point this out. The moral medicine we have taken for granted, that’s now under new threat.

Ever increasing numbers of doctors are leaving private practice and becoming employed by hospitals, due to a variety of challenges inherent in these uncertain times . The hospitals are the most likely recipient of bundled payments for caring for Medicare patients. Doctors will face agency conflicts between the time honored primary duty to patient, which may conflict with hospital administration, and ACO goals of fiscal savings. Medical care providers will receive incentives for controlling spending, and penalties if they do not. “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). Not even physicians.

The physician’s ACO conundrum is illustrated in the language where these regulations proclaim that, “Providers should be accountable for the cost of care, and be rewarded for reducing unnecessary expenditures and be responsible for excess expenditures.”

This is chilling.

Yet the very next sentence stipulates that, “In reducing excess expenditures, providers should continually improve the quality of care they deliver and must honor their commitment to do no harm to beneficiaries.” (page 14)

Doublespeak? Where is this leading?

The principle of subsidiarity guides policy makers to empower decision making and scarce health care resource allocation at the doctor-patient level. However, the Affordable Care Act moves in the opposite direction.

There is no question that significant – and scarce — health care resources are consumed in the Medicare population toward the end of life. ACOs intend to limit this spending — the government way. The Ethical and Religious Directives by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops suggest a better path forward…
http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/8977/

The Miracle Of Human Creation part(1) must see

2011-04-10T00:22:00.000-04:00

"Life Begins at Conception"

2011-04-10T00:19:00.000-04:00

Pro-Life Song & Video (Anti-Abortion)

2011-04-10T00:17:00.000-04:00

E-Mail: Susan B. Anthony List

2011-04-10T00:15:00.000-04:00

Dear Rocco,

1,000 innocent, unborn children.

That’s the number of lives that are saved each year thanks to the Dornan Amendment, which prevents federal funding of abortion in the District of Columbia.
...
And in last night’s eleventh hour negotiations on the federal budget, our pro-life House leadership forced the radically pro-abortion Senate and the most pro-abortion president ever to concede on the Dornan amendment, which will save one thousand lives in the shadow of the Capitol building.

Rocco, I know you know the value of one life saved, and will join with me in celebrating all those children in Washington, D.C. that will be born as we all are: with a purpose.

And while we did not win everything, we cannot loose sight of this partial victory.

Like you, I am extremely disappointed that Planned Parenthood will continue to receive federal funding. But the debate these past few months since Lila Rose released undercover footage from an abortuary in Perth Amboy, NJ has dealt them a significant blow.

Planned Parenthood has been exposed. Their friendly “pro-woman” image has been shattered. Instead, they’re now seen for what they are: a billion-dollar business centered around abortion, a habitual and unapologetic ally of those who wish to exploit young girls.

It was thanks to your emails, phone calls, participation in pro-life vigils, and your conversations with family and friends that we came further than ever before in the fight to defund Planned Parenthood. And as this battle continues, we have a huge leg up thanks to you.

Our work, your work, the work of pro-life America isn’t done yet, Rocco.

Your SBA List will not rest until Planned Parenthood is defunded and we will continue working with our pro-life leaders in the House to get the job done. We already have work ahead, including Congressional hearings on Planned Parenthood that will further expose them.

A debate and vote on defunding Planned Parenthood will come up very soon in the Senate. While we do not have enough votes for passage, this will allow us to put each and every Senator on record, especially those up for re-election in 2012. We’ll certainly need your help in this fight.

I sincerely thank you for your partnership, Rocco. The SBA List team and I remain committed to you, and to those precious unborn children and their mothers and families whose lives are destroyed and hurt each and every day by the evil of abortion.

With you in this fight for Life,

Marjorie Dannenfelser
President, Susan B. Anthony List

Latin America Shakes Off the US Yoke

2011-04-09T23:49:00.001-04:00

The current spat with Ecuador is symptomatic of Washington's failure to grasp that it no longer exercises regional hegemony

On Thursday, the United States expelled the ambassador from Ecuador, in retaliation for Wednesday's expulsion of the US ambassador from Ecuador. This now leaves the United States without ambassadorial relations in three South American countries – Bolivia and Venezuela being the other two – thus surpassing the Bush administration in its diplomatic problems in the region.

US Ambassador Heather Hodges was declared "persona non grata" and asked to leave Ecuador "as soon as possible", after a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks showed her saying some disparaging things about Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa. In the cable, she alleges that President Correa had knowledge of corruption by a former head of the national police.

Although the Bush administration intervened in the internal affairs of countries such as Bolivia and even Brazil, it was somewhat better at keeping its "eyes on the prize" and avoiding fights that would distract from its main goal. The prize, of course, is Venezuela – home to the largest oil reserves in the world, estimated by the US Geological Survey at 500bn barrels. Washington's goal there for the last decade has been regime change. The Bush team understood that the more they fought with other countries in the region, the less credible would be their public relations story that Venezuela was the problem.

It's nothing personal, really – Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez could have chosen to be the perfect diplomat and he would still be treated in much the same manner by the US government. And it's not the oil itself, since Venezuela still sells the US more than 1m barrels a day and there is a world market for oil, in any case. It's just that any country with that much oil is going to have regional influence; and Washington just doesn't want to deal with someone who has regional influence and doesn't line up with its own goals for the region – not if it can get rid of them. And they have come close to getting rid of Chávez, in the 2002 coup – so they are not giving up.

But Washington is losing ground there, too. A big blow was the change in Colombia's foreign policy last summer, when President Juan Manuel Santos took office. An important part of Washington's strategy in Venezuela is to maintain tension between Colombia and Venezuela. They have a head start on this project since the 2,000km border between the two countries has been plagued by paramilitary and guerrilla violence for decades. Conflict between Venezuela and Colombia is also important to Washington's electoral strategy in Venezuela. When there is trouble between the two countries, as in 2009, when Venezuela cut off bilateral trade in response to the US effort to expand its military presence in Colombia, it has a negative impact on a lot of Venezuelans in border states. This helps garner some anti-Chávez votes in border states, as in last year's congressional election in Venezuela. And accusations of Venezuelan support for the Farc guerrillas in Colombia – despite Washington's failure to offer any evidence – are a key element of bringing its anti-Venezuela efforts under the "war on terror" umbrella.

Although Colombia's previous president, Álvaro Uribe, was – in recent years – very much allied with the United States' strategy toward Venezuela, Santos immediately rejected it and decided to make peace with Chávez. This turned out to be quite easy to do, despite their past fights when Santos was Uribe's defence minister. As anyone who follows Venezuela knows, Chávez is friendly to any head of state or government that is friendly to Venezuela.

Santos's U-turn towards Venezuela is very interesting for several reasons. First, it shows how important regional economic integration is as a force for peace and stability in the area. The attempt by Washington and Santos's predecessor to expand the US military presence in Colombia led to a cutoff of $2.3bn of Colombia's exports to what had recently become their second most important trading partner, Venezuela. This was more than 11% of Colombia's exports, and the bulk of it was in livestock and textile products for which replacement markets were not so readily available. Venezuela also has very close relations with Brazil and most of the rest of South America, and they all felt the same way about Colombia's foreign policy. They were especially concerned about the US military expansion in Colombia – and even more opposed after US Air Force documents made it clear that this expansion was for "mobility operations … on the South American continent" and against the "constant threat" from "anti-US governments".

Santos was basically faced with a choice of continuing to do Washington's bidding or being part of South America. He chose South America. The key role of commerce here, as South America continues to integrate economically, illustrates some of the most important "gains from trade". These are far greater than the neoclassical "efficiency gains", often exaggerated by advocates of "free trade" agreements.

Also, Santos's choice to rejoin South America shows how geopolitical changes led by the left governments of the region have now encompassed even rightwing governments. This is a result of changes in institutions (foreign ministries, multilateral organisations such as Unasur, the Rio Group), ideas, and norms that have taken place over the last decade.

Now comes Washington, demanding that Colombia extradite one Walid Makled, an accused Venezuelan narco-trafficker arrested in Colombia, to the United States. No, thank you, says President Santos – this guy goes to Venezuela. Santos cites Colombian law, stating that, first, Colombia has an extradition treaty with Venezuela, not with the United States; second, Venezuela got their extradition request in first; and third, Makled is wanted for more serious crimes (including murder) in Venezuela than in the US (drug-trafficking). All of these are facts that legally require extradition of Makled to Venezuela.

This is most infuriating to Washington. To understand why this is so important to the state department, one has to look behind official pronouncements about Makled getting "a fair trial" in Venezuela and other nonsense repeated with charming innocence by the major media. Venezuela has a presidential election next year. For every important election or referendum in Venezuela – and there are many, but none more important to Washington than this one – there is an international media campaign, with the participation of the US government. (A recent WikiLeaks cable shows the Colombian government sharing with US officials its coordinated media campaign to link both Chávez and Correa to the Colombian Farc guerrillas.) Makled has already offered to sing about alleged corruption of Venezuelan officials, but only if he is extradited to the US. So, if they could only get him to Miami, they could have a splendid show trial that would be better than any international media campaign that the state department could organise.

If all that seems like it's not worth the trouble, it's exactly what happened in 2008. US authorities used a sketchy show trial of a Venezuelan slapped with dubious "failing to register as a foreign agent" charges – but not with actual espionage – in order to broadcast allegations of corruption at the "highest levels" of the Venezuelan government. The allegations made headlines throughout the hemisphere and, of course, were a mainstay of the Venezuelan opposition-dominated media. Just think what the Makled trial could do: no one would ask what the witnesses were offered for their testimony, or whether there was any corroborating evidence for their allegations. It would be one big free-for-all smear-fest, with reporters gobbling it all up.

But Santos is not co-operating, despite enormous pressure and, of course, the currently pending "free trade" agreement between the US and Colombia. Perhaps Washington wants this agreement more than he does.

In any case, the Obama administration – like its predecessor – is fighting a losing battle. President Obama's recent trip to Latin America was hardly more successful than those of Bush. He gets better press – no riots in the streets or Mayan leaders cleansing the site after his visit. But every president and foreign minister there can see that US policies haven't changed one bit.

By Mark Weisbrot

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/08/venezuela-ecuador

Requiem For A Dream

2011-04-08T08:27:00.001-04:00

Mozart - Lacrimosa

2011-04-08T08:19:00.000-04:00

Le preghiere della nostra fede: PADRE NOSTRO

2011-04-08T08:13:00.000-04:00

Verdi: Requiem

2011-04-08T07:59:00.000-04:00

America's War On Democracy

2011-04-08T07:52:00.000-04:00