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Media Scoundrels Promote War on Syria by Stephen Lendman 23 April 2012

Syria's a battle zone. Western generated violence is to blame, not Assad. America's media scoundrels claim otherwise. They want him ousted by any means, including war.

An April 9 Wall Street Journal commentary said "Syrian government forces (keep) bombing and killing...." Assad "reneged on (his) promises to end the bloodshed."

Washington "and its allies (are) doing little or nothing to depose (his) regime. (The) illusion of diplomatic progress serves as cover for the Assads of the world to do more killing. Your move, President Obama."

Like all scoundrel media commentators, Journal contributors blame victims, not villains. Their readers are betrayed, not informed.

Wall Street Journal contributor Fouad Ajami long ago sold out to imperial interests for whatever he gets in return. He showed it in an op-ed headlined, "A Kosovo Model for Syria," saying:

"In the Obama world, the tendency to wait has become official policy: It is either boots on the ground or head in the sand."

He'd "be wise to consider the way Bill Clinton dealt with the crisis of Kosovo in 1999. He authorised a NATO air campaign against Serbia that began on March 23, 1999, the very same day a bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress voted to support it."

Fact check

Bombing Yugoslavia for 78 days violated international law, as well as US constitutional and statute laws. It was also humanitarian hypocrisy.

Congress didn't declare war. The Security Council didn't authorise it. Yugoslavia didn't threaten America, other NATO members or neighbouring states. Nonetheless, Clinton got the war he wanted. 

It was lawless, premeditated aggression. Ajami thinks it's a good thing. So do other scoundrel media contributors like him. Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman said America "suffered one casualty in the (Serbia/Kosovo) war. (The) rule of law (was) blown to pieces."

While Congress appropriated funds for the war, it never authorised it. Presidents can't do it on their own. It hasn't stopped them since WW II. Roosevelt's war was the last one Congress declared. Failure to do so made others following it illegal, Obama's wars included.

Ajami claimed Clinton acted responsibly. Obama "has a similar opportunity" to oust Assad "without a massive American commitment." Failure leaves "only the shame of averting our eyes from Syrian massacres."

Shamefully, many others agree with him.

On April 21, a Washington Post editorial said it's time for "Plan B."

"THE ONLY good news about Syria since the Obama administration’s embrace of an unworkable United Nations peace plan is the hints that it is beginning to consider alternatives."

Assad "will never be induced by diplomacy to end his assaults on Syrian cities, allow peaceful demonstrations or release political prisoners...."

Obama has "to recognise these realities and embrace options that actually can advance its stated goal of ending Mr. Assad’s rule."

"Mr. Assad will fall only when his attacks are blocked and countered; it follows that U.S. policy should aim at that."

The Post urges "feckless diplomacy" ended in favour of immediate military action. Hawkish throughout the conflict, its position heads toward boiling over. Can war be far behind? Read more...

Defra Lies Exposed by Alison Banville 24 April 2012

BBC London News tonight reported that two slaughterhouse workers filmed committing sickening acts of cruelty have been jailed. What's very interesting is the role of Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) which refused to prosecute any of the employees at the 8 abattoirs out of 9 filmed by Animal Aid in which the already inadequate laws were broken. Defra had falsely claimed that the footage would be inadmissible in court - a blatant lie!! It's only when responsibility was taken from them and given to the CPS that a case was brought, and then only against one company. Animal Aid are pushing for more prosecutions using their evidence. Filming was also done in slaughterhouses certified organic to explode the myth of humane meat.

Why, may one ask, is Defra so reluctant to do the right thing? Their stance is grindingly familiar to me after following undercover farming stories over the last two decades. It's simple, they protect the industry at all costs, even at the cost of incredible suffering about which they care absolutely nothing. Humanity and compassion are rare enough when it comes to human need V corporate interests, but where animals are concerned - the ultimate innocents - it is non-existent. However, Defra can rely on a public that really would rather not know what goes in these hell-holes.

Let's not forget, too, that the everyday and legal treatment of animals in these places would see the owner of a dog or cat treated that way up in court for cruelty - terrified animals dragged and pushed to their deaths is necessarily cruel, and as the father of one of the convicted men revealingly said: 'they issued my boy with that baton to keep 'em moving', and a parade of ex-slaughterhouse workers confirm that the kind of abuse caught by this undercover operation is routine. Of course it is, only a fool thinks otherwise. As Gary Yourofsky says: 'how do you think slaves are treated?”

Collateral Insanity in Afghanistan by Terry J. Allen 17 April 2012

After decades of military devastation, Afghans are traumatised.

War makes people crazy.

The war in Afghanistan has taken a devastating toll on mental health–from depression to suicide, domestic violence to murderous rampages. And financial and family strains, as well as attempts at self-medication, have exacerbated the casualty count.

I am talking about the war’s effect on Afghans. But after U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly massacred at least 17 civilians, including nine children, on March 11, media and experts quickly rallied to lament how the mental stress of Bales’ multiple combat deployments provided sympathetic context to the Panjwai butchery. The ignored context is an Afghan population traumatised by more than four decades of cultural and military devastation wrought by invading armies, mercenaries, women-hating Taliban and warlords – on top of a life expectancy in the low 60s.

Many Afghans–blameless in ways that volunteer soldiers never can be–have been pushed past sanity by violence; by becoming refugees or internally displaced; and by losing family, culture, educational opportunities, professions, houses, rights and hope.

“[V]iolence is now embedded in daily routine,” concluded the Dutch nongovernmental organisation (NGO) Healthnet. The World Health Organisation (WHO) found that 60 percent of Afghans have mental illnesses including anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Women and children bear the brunt: More than half of all women are depressed, with 78 percent suffering anxiety disorders, according to Healthnet researchers. And 80 percent of children surveyed in Kabul “felt frightened, sad and unable to cope,” with 90 percent believing they will die in war, according to a 2011 report by the U.K.-based NGO Tearfund.

While 227 health professionals serve the 40,000 troops at Bales’ military base – Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash. – Afghanistan's 26 million inhabitants have a few dozen trained providers, and they lack medications and adequate facilities. Services in rural areas, where 75 percent of the population lives, “are nonexistent,” WHO reports.

Not surprisingly, many of the country’s mentally ill turn to self-medication, either with over-the-counter balms such as benzodiazepines (e.g. Valium) or with illegal opium and heroin. A 2009 U.N. study found that war trauma is a key factor for the almost 1 million Afghans with drug problems.

Some Afghans pay $100 or more a month to have loved ones treated at religious shrines where they are chained and fed only bread and water. One shackled patient scratched a drawing of a plane on his wall “so he can fly out of here,” his uncle told the Chicago Tribune.

Victims are plentiful in this ill-conceived war, in which America invaded a hostile and already brutalised nation instead of targeting a group of terrorists. The media have dissected Bales’ psyche, exploring reasons why he may have “snapped”; describing him as a family man, a good soldier, disgruntled, disappointed, disillusioned; and suggesting a host of mitigating factors: repeated tours, a house with an underwater mortgage, watching his comrade’s leg get blown off, and suffering a concussion, possibly not the first brain injury for the former high-school football star.

Bales is not undeserving of compassion. With the collaboration of a military that failed to monitor his mental health, his government sent him again and again into combat that was beyond his ability to endure. Yet the most tragic victims are the dead and their families, along with the millions of Afghans for whom the traumatic wartime conditions Bales faced for several years have been the norm for generations. Read more...

'Strings attached': Moscow extends helping hand to NATO by Russia Today 21 April 2012

NATO is to get more help from Russia in the Afghan war. At a ministerial meeting in Brussels, the sides discussed expanding the vital transit of military cargo to Afghanistan through Russian territory. But on what terms?

­Moscow has provided the alliance with air corridors and railway routes. The link is vital as Pakistan blocked NATO supplies from crossing its territory after an airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers six months ago.

At the same time, Moscow is clearly worried that the drugs and terrorism situation will deteriorate in Afghanistan after the pull-out of the international contingent.

“As long as the Afghan side is unable to provide security in the country, any artificial deadlines for troops’ withdrawal do not seem quite correct,” Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said on Thursday, emerging from the Russia-NATO Council meeting.

“But when the UN Security Council mandate expires, there will be no reason for a foreign presence in Afghanistan and the region,” Lavrov added.

Lavrov also questioned Washington’s plans to keep its military contingent in Afghanistan after the pull-out of international troops in 2014. According to these plans, 20-30,000 US troops may remain in Afghanistan after 2014 in a backup role, in case it is decided to retain a few military bases in this country.

Bsnews.info co-founder Mike Raddie says those troops would be “conveniently located” along a proposed oil pipeline Russia and China might want to use in their interests.

“The Russians will obviously benefit from that oil pipeline in their own exports," he noted. "But it’s likely that the strings that are attached to the aid that’s forthcoming will ensure that the majority of the US troops, the combat troops, will be out by 2014.”

“I suspect some of these strings will be that the US and Western military will withdraw in 2014,” Raddie told RT. “The US, actually, what they are planning, is to have a substantial military presence until 2024, and I think that the Russians and the Chinese don’t favour that at all.”

­As NATO prepares to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, it finds itself in the midst of a series of scandals involving extreme breaches of discipline by US troops.

“That is definitely not isolated incidents,” argues Mike Raddie. “The fact that we don’t hear about them in the West doesn’t mean they don’t happen almost on a daily basis… It seems that the US soldiers are fully aware that there are very few consequences to their actions when it comes to killing civilians.”

Among the recent scandals is another series of photographs showing US soldiers posing with the gory remains of several Afghan suicide bombers. Washington insists that they show an isolated incident of young people caught up in the moment. Read more...

Bradley Manning: A Show Trial of State Secrecy by Michael Ratner 24 April 2012

The US government's suppression of all accountability and transparency in prosecuting the WikiLeaks suspect is totalitarian

On 24 April, a hearing in one of the most important court martial cases in decades will take place in Fort Meade, Maryland. The accused faces life in prison for the 22 charges against him, which include "aiding the enemy" and "transmitting defence information". His status as an alleged high-profile whistleblower and the importance of the issues his case raises should all but guarantee the proceedings a prominent spot in major media, as well as in public debate.

Yet, in spite of the grave implications, not to mention the press and public's first amendment right of full and open access to criminal trials, no outside parties will have access to the evidence, the court documents, court orders or off-the-record arguments that will ultimately decide his fate. Under these circumstances, whatever the outcome of the case, the loser will be the transparency necessary for democratic government, accountable courts and faith in our justice system.

In the two years since his arrest for allegedly leaking the confidential files that exposed grand-scale military misconduct, potential war crimes and questionable diplomatic tactics, army private Bradley Manning has been subjected to an extremely secretive criminal procedure. It is a sad irony that the government's heavy-handed approach to this case only serves to underscore the motivations – some would say, the necessity – for whistle-blowing like Manning's in the first place.

The most well-known of the leaked files, a 39-minute video entitled "Collateral Murder", depicts three brutal attacks on civilians by US soldiers during the course of just one day of the Iraq war. The footage, recorded from the cockpit of a US Apache helicopter involved in the attacks, shows the killing of several individuals, including two Reuters journalists, as well as the serious injury of two children. Beyond the chilling images of US soldiers eagerly pleading for chances to shoot, the release of this footage placed a spotlight on the military's blatant mischaracterisation of the events, in which a spokesman claimed that there was "no question" that the incident involved engagement with "a hostile force", and underscores the vital role that public scrutiny plays in government accountability. Read more...

97% Owned - New Documentary Released Today by Queuepolitely 1 May 2012

When money drives almost all activity on the planet, it's essential that we understand it. Yet simple questions often get overlooked - questions like:

1. •Where does money come from?
   

2. •Who creates it?
   

3. •Who decides how it gets used?
   

4. •And what does that mean for the millions of ordinary people who suffer when money and finance breaks down?
   

97% Owned is a new documentary that reveals how money is at the root of our current social and economic crisis. Featuring frank interviews and commentary from economists, campaigners and former bankers, it exposes the privatised, debt-based monetary system that gives banks the power to create money, shape the economy, cause crises and push house prices out of reach.

Fact-based and clearly explained, in just 60 minutes it shows how the power to create money is the piece of the puzzle that economists were missing when they failed to predict the crisis.

Produced by Queuepolitely and featuring Ben Dyson of Positive Money, Josh Ryan-Collins of The New Economics Foundation, Ann Pettifor, the "HBOS Whistleblower" Paul Moore, Simon Dixon of Bank to the Future and Sargon Nissan and Nick Dearden from the Jubliee Debt Campaign, this is the first documentary to tackle this issue from a UK-perspective, and can be watched online now. The full two hour version can be see here.

97% Owned is a new documentary that reveals how money is at the root of our current social and economic crisis. Featuring frank interviews and commentary from economists, campaigners and former bankers, it exposes the privatised, debt-based monetary system that gives banks the power to create money, shape the economy, cause crises and push house prices out of reach.

Tax Me, for Fuck’s Sake! by Stephen King 1 May 2012

Chris Christie may be fat, but he ain’t Santa Claus. In fact, he seems unable to decide if he is New Jersey’s governor or its caporegime, and it may be a comment on the coarsening of American discourse that his brash rudeness is often taken for charm. In February, while discussing New Jersey’s newly amended income-tax law, which allows the rich to pay less (proportionally) than the middle class, Christie was asked about Warren Buffett’s observation that he paid less federal income taxes than his personal secretary, and that wasn’t fair. “He should just write a check and shut up,” Christie responded, with his typical verve. “I’m tired of hearing about it. If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check—go ahead and write it.”

Heard it all before. At a rally in Florida (to support collective bargaining and to express the socialist view that firing teachers with experience was sort of a bad idea), I pointed out that I was paying taxes of roughly 28 percent on my income. My question was, “How come I’m not paying 50?” The governor of New Jersey did not respond to this radical idea, possibly being too busy at the all-you-can-eat cheese buffet at Applebee’s in Jersey City, but plenty of other people of the Christie persuasion did.

Cut a check and shut up, they said.

If you want to pay more, pay more, they said.

Tired of hearing about it, they said.

Tough shit for you guys, because I’m not tired of talking about it. I’ve known rich people, and why not, since I’m one of them? The majority would rather douse their dicks with lighter fluid, strike a match, and dance around singing “Disco Inferno” than pay one more cent in taxes to Uncle Sugar. It’s true that some rich folks put at least some of their tax savings into charitable contributions. My wife and I give away roughly $4 million a year to libraries, local fire departments that need updated lifesaving equipment (Jaws of Life tools are always a popular request), schools, and a scattering of organisations that underwrite the arts. Warren Buffett does the same; so does Bill Gates; so does Steven Spielberg; so do the Koch brothers; so did the late Steve Jobs. All fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.

What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility—America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. Charity from the rich can’t fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny. That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, “OK, I’ll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS.” That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry.

And hey, why don’t we get real about this? Most rich folks paying 28 percent taxes do not give out another 28 percent of their income to charity. Most rich folks like to keep their dough. They don’t strip their bank accounts and investment portfolios. They keep them and then pass them on to their children, their children’s children. And what they do give away is—like the monies my wife and I donate—totally at their own discretion. That’s the rich-guy philosophy in a nutshell: don’t tell us how to use our money; we’ll tell you.

The Koch brothers are right-wing creepazoids, but they’re giving right-wing creepazoids. Here’s an example: 68 million fine American dollars to Deerfield Academy. Which is great for Deerfield Academy. But it won’t do squat for cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, where food fish are now showing up with black lesions. It won’t pay for stronger regulations to keep BP (or some other bunch of dipshit oil drillers) from doing it again. It won’t repair the levees surrounding New Orleans. It won’t improve education in Mississippi or Alabama. But what the hell—them li’l crackers ain’t never going to go to Deerfield Academy anyway. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.

Here’s another crock of fresh bullshit delivered by the right wing of the Republican Party (which has become, so far as I can see, the only wing of the Republican Party): the richer rich people get, the more jobs they create. Really? Read more...

Why Are We Striking? Or to Put it Another Way – What’s Wrong with the World? by Mike David 1 May 2012

Of course, most of us know what’s wrong with the world. We know about the poverty, war, violence and disease. We’re conscious of the injustice, but not fully conscious of it, because frankly, we have enough to worry about in our own lives. As such, we’ve come to accept these injustices as simple facts of life – prepackaged side effects of the human condition, as natural and intertwined with our existence as water to a stream, beyond our capacity to effect in any significant way. This collective sense of powerlessness and default apathy is why we’re striking.

Our growing sense of isolation and disconnection, whether from ourselves, from those next door to us, or from those producing our food and products halfway across the globe, is why we’re striking. Our forced support of perpetual war waged for and by the 1% - whether explicitly with speech, or implicitly with inaction and tax dollars - without ever paying mind to the true causes and motives behind it, is why we’re striking. Our failure uptil now to connect the dots and realise that the benefits of a cheap iPod, lovely as it may be, would be far outweighed by the benefits of a truly just world free of exploitation, is why we’re striking.

The fact that most of us are too busy being exploited to realise we’re being exploited – too busy greasing the cogs of our economic system to notice how the fruits of our labor never fail to float up and out of our reach - is why we’re striking, as is the fact that most aren’t able to do anything about this exploitation even when we do notice it. While some of us are lucky enough to have jobs and careers that give real meaning to our lives, allowing us to take full advantage of our talents and fulfil our destiny, most of us have jobs devoid of meaning and dignity, yet full of the feeling that we are fulfilling someone else’s destiny. Our recognition that the ruling class’s seat at the top of the pyramid is prepared and propped up by the working class is why we’re striking. Our knowledge that it’s actually the CEO who is the most dependent among us, and that the ones truly indispensable to our society are not bankers, lobbyists and politicians, but workers, teachers and engineers, is why we’re striking.

Indeed, the fact that we have an economic system which functions in the same manner as a virus is why we’re striking. Just as a virus’s only reason for existence is to expand, without regard or awareness of the effect of its expansion on its host body, our economic system pursues its infinite expansion without regard or awareness of its effect on human welfare or the environment. Though the earth is finite, it is sustainable, so we reject, in the words of Michael Nagler, “the inherent contradiction of an economy based on indefinitely increasing wants – instead of on human needs that the planet has ample resources to fulfil.”

We’re striking because we also reject the notion that selfishness must be the driving force in our world. We believe, contrary to propaganda, that most people in our world are not selfish, and would rather work together than constantly compete against each other. We believe that the only people who really care about things like power, corporate monopolies and global dominance only make up, say, 1% of the population, making it seem only logical that we should have an economic system which reflects the values of the 99% of us who don’t care about such things. Read more...

Iraq’s “Grim Reaper” Madeleine Albright Gets Humanitarian Award by Felicity Arbuthnot 1 May 2012

'There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women.' Madeleine Albright

As the anniversary of probably one of the most infamous responses in broadcasting history approaches, the woman who uttered it is shortly to be awarded “the highest honour” that America bestows upon civilians: the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Madeleine Albright, Iraq’s “Grim Reaper”, of course confirmed on “Sixty Minutes” (12th May 1996) that the deaths of half a million children as a result of the absolute, all-embracing deprivations of the UN embargo were: “A hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.”

So Long, US Dollar by Marin Katusa 1 May 2012

The Media Won't Touch This Story About The End Of The US Dollar

There's a major shift under way, one the US mainstream media has left largely untouched even though it will send the United States into an economic maelstrom and dramatically reduce the country's importance in the world: the demise of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency.

For decades the US dollar has been absolutely dominant in international trade, especially in the oil markets. This role has created immense demand for US dollars, and that international demand constitutes a huge part of the dollar's valuation. Not only did the global-currency role add massive value to the dollar, it also created an almost endless pool of demand for US Treasuries as countries around the world sought to maintain stores of petrodollars. The availability of all this credit, denominated in a dollar supported by nothing less than the entirety of global trade, enabled the American federal government to borrow without limit and spend with abandon.

The dominance of the dollar gave the United States incredible power and influence around the world… but the times they are a-changing. As the world's emerging economies gain ever more prominence, the US is losing hold of its position as the world's superpower. Many on the long list of nations that dislike America are pondering ways to reduce American influence in their affairs. Ditching the dollar is a very good start.

In fact, they are doing more than pondering. Over the past few years China and other emerging powers such as Russia have been quietly making agreements to move away from the US dollar in international trade. Several major oil-producing nations have begun selling oil in currencies other than the dollar, and both the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have issued reports arguing for the need to create a new global reserve currency independent of the dollar.

The supremacy of the dollar is not nearly as solid as most Americans believe it to be. More generally, the United States is not the global superpower it once was. These trends are very much connected, as demonstrated by the world's response to US sanctions against Iran.

US allies, including much of Europe and parts of Asia, fell into line quickly, reducing imports of Iranian oil. But a good number of Iran's clients do not feel the need to toe America's party line, and Iran certainly doesn't feel any need to take orders from the US. Some countries have objected to America's sanctions on Iran vocally, adamantly refusing to be ordered around. Others are being more discreet, choosing instead to simply trade with Iran through avenues that get around the sanctions.

It's ironic. The United States fashioned its Iranian sanctions assuming that oil trades occur in US dollars. That assumption – an echo of the more general assumption that the US dollar will continue to dominate international trade – has given countries unfriendly to the US a great reason to continue their moves away from the dollar: if they don't trade in dollars, America's dollar-centric policies carry no weight! It's a classic backfire: sanctions intended in part to illustrate the US's continued world supremacy are in fact encouraging countries disillusioned with that very notion to continue their moves away from the US currency, a slow but steady trend that will eat away at its economic power until there is little left. Read more...

Bolivia Seizes Spanish Power Generator Assets by Veronica Navarro Espinosa 1 May 2012

Bolivia is nationalising the local assets of Spain’s Red Electrica Corp. (REE), giving the government control of the Andean nation’s power grid two weeks after neighbouring Argentina seized its biggest oil company.

President Evo Morales signed the decree today, saying the Alcobendas, Spain-based company’s local investment was inadequate and energy should be controlled by the government, according to a statement on the presidential website. Bolivia generated 45.7 million euros ($60.4 million) in revenue for Red Electrica in 2011, less than 3 percent of total company sales.

Morales, a 52-year-old ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, is echoing Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in citing underinvestment and strategic reasons for nationalising the company. Fernandez seized oil producer YPF SA on April 16 from Madrid-based Repsol YPF SA. (YPFD). Read more...

NO Free Speech Zone Secretly Signed into Law by Obama 1 May 2012

Empire of Capital by George Monbiot 1 May 2012

Colonialism never ended, it continues by different means.

The conviction of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, is said to have sent an unequivocal message to current leaders: that great office confers no immunity. In fact it sent two messages: if you run a small, weak nation, you may be subject to the full force of international law; if you run a powerful nation, you have nothing to fear.

While anyone with an interest in human rights should welcome the verdict, it reminds us that no one has faced legal consequences for launching the illegal war against Iraq. This fits the Nuremberg tribunal's definition of a "crime of aggression", which it called "the supreme international crime". The charges on which, in an impartial system, George Bush, Tony Blair and their associates should have been investigated are far graver than those for which Taylor was found guilty.

The foreign secretary, William Hague, claims that Taylor's conviction "demonstrates that those who have committed the most serious of crimes can and will be held to account for their actions". But the international criminal court, though it was established 10 years ago, and though the crime of aggression has been recognised in international law since 1945, still has no jurisdiction over "the most serious of crimes". This is because the powerful nations, for obvious reasons, are procrastinating. Nor have the United Kingdom, the United States and other western nations incorporated the crime of aggression into their own legislation. International law remains an imperial project, in which only the crimes committed by vassal states are punished. Read more...

We Are Not Powerless: Resisting Financial Feudalism by Charles Hugh Smith 2 May 2012

It's comforting to think "I can't do anything to resist the Central State and its financial Plutocracy," but it's not true. There are many of acts of resistance you can pursue in your daily life; here are 12 perfectly legal ones.

That we are powerless is one of the key social control myths constantly promoted by the Status Quo. What better way to keep the serfs passive than to reinforce a belief in their powerlessness against the expansive Central State and its financial feudalism?

But we are not powerless. Our complicity gives the aristocracy its power. Remove our complicity and the aristocracy falls.

The pathway of dissent is to resist financial feudalism and its enforcer, the expansive Central State. Here are twelve paths of resistance any adult can legally pursue in the course of their daily lives:

1. Support the decentralised, non-market economy. The core ideology of consumerism and financialization is that non-market assets and experiences have no status or financial value. This includes social capital, meals with friends, projects done cooperatively with friends, home gardens and thousands of other decentralised activities that cannot be financialized into centralised market transactions. Identity and social status are established in the non-market economy by collaboration, sharing, conviviality and generosity. Decentralised generally means localised; farmers markets are examples of local market economies where the transactions are in cash (so banks can’t skim transactions fees) and the money stays in the local economy rather than flowing to some distant concentration of capital.

If you start valuing non-market assets and experiences as the most important markers of high status, you are resisting both financialization and consumerism.

Top-down centralised “solutions” imposed by the Central State are the problem, not the solution, as they further the concentration of wealth and power into unstable monocultures. Stop looking to overly complex “reforms” and centralised solutions to unsustainable systems and start exploring decentralised, localised solutions that bypass both the Central State and its financial aristocracy.

2. Stop participating in financialization. Financialization is the insidious imperative of the financial aristocracy that seeks to turn every interaction into a financial transaction that can be charged a fee and all assets into financialized instruments that can be sold for immensely profitable transaction fees. Read more...

In-debt to a destructive economy by Mira Tekelova Dec 2011

Mira Tekelova explains how our debt-driven monetary system prevents us from achieving a green and resilient economy

Those involved in the debates around Green Economy are probably familiar with the topic of decoupling economic growth and environmental problems. A lot has been written about slowing down growth, steady state economics, and even degrowth. There are different views on the transition path but the issue is that there can’t be infinite growth in a finite world. What is not usually in focus, however, is the underlying reason which makes growth inevitable and necessary. Might it be that this underlying cause is the money and banking system? What this article tries to argue is that if we want to address ecological problems then we have to start by looking at money. Economics and finance have been obscured in complexity for so long that many people have given up trying to understand it. In reality, the essence of finance is not complicated at all. But to understand it we have to know what money actually is and how it comes into existence.

Perhaps the best explanation of the monetary system comes from Martin Wolf, the chief economics editor at the Financial Times. He says "the essence of the contemporary monetary system is the creation of money, out of nothing, by private banks' often foolish lending." Read more...

The Empire vs. Iran (and Syria): A New World War for a New World Order? by Jooneed Khan 2 May 2012

Confronted with a declining World Order it can no longer control, does the West want to re-assert its will through a new world war, which this time would be really global?

A terrifying scenario emerges from the ceaseless escalation of pressures and threats against Syria and Iran, pitting, for the first time since the NATO-OECD Empire won the Cold War two decades ago, the Western trio of the UN veto club (U.S., U.K., France) against its non-Western duo (Russia and China).

These two latter superpowers, key players of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) spanning the Eurasian mega continent, have blocked the trio's plans to carry out a Libya-II in Syria, and to choke Iran with an array of sanctions that include cutting off its oil exports -- while keeping the military strike option "on the table."

This is the first time the Russians and Chinese have, together, raised obstacles in the way of the apparently unstoppable march of the victors of the Cold War -- and the destroyers of the former Soviet Empire.

But the march of the NATO-OECD Empire is becoming less and less triumphal. With support from most of the non-Western countries of the Non Aligned Movement and the G77, Russia and China are reasserting the primacy of international law and UN diplomacy in tackling the Syria and Iran issues, hobbling further the Western propensity to drown every "crisis," real or fabricated, under a carpet of bombs, missiles and boots on the ground -- with dire unintended consequences for all!

From euphoria to quagmire, and decline

Still basking in its victory over the ex-Soviet Empire, the NATO-OECD Empire dismembered the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and extended NATO to the European limits of Russia -- which did not react militarily. Moscow reacted only when NATO tried to take hold in the Caucasus, through Georgia and Azerbaijan.

Despite the French "lone wolf" episode in Rwanda, the Empire also reinforced its hegemony over the Great Lakes region of Africa -- as compensation for the fall of Apartheid in the South of the continent. Neither Russia nor China budged. And China coolly swallowed the repeated provocations of the Empire along its borders -- through Tibet, Xinjiang, Burma, Taiwan, North Korea.

But as the 21st century set in, the Empire began to falter. The attacks of September 11, 2001 precipitated implementation of a New World Order according to George W. Bush's PNAC (Project for a New American Century): "You are either with us or against us."

For the first time in its history, NATO invoked Article 5 of its Charter to attack and occupy Afghanistan -- bypassing the UN. Two years later, again without UN approval, the Empire attacked and occupied Iraq.

But very soon it hit a quagmire. By 2012, these wars will have cost $4 trillion, according to the Oakland Institute -- while OECD economies stagnate or decline. Read more...

US military-industrial giant KBR in bidding to privatise British police forces by NewsCore 3 May 2012

LONDON -- Giant US military-industrial company Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) is in the running to win a slice of a controversial £1.5 billion (US$2.43 billion) contract to transform the West Midlands and Surrey police forces in Britain, The (London) Times reported.

Hailed as the largest police privatisation scheme in the UK, it has been suggested the private companies who win the contract will be tasked to perform several police functions -- including patrols, detention and criminal investigation.

KBR, a former subsidiary of the Halliburton group, has attracted its share of criticism over the large contracts it won with the US government during the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The corporation also helped to build the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

The Times reported that it was among four groups shortlisted to win the British police contract, a number whittled down from more than 200.

A KBR spokesman said its bid was the first time the corporation had attempted to get involved in regular policing.

"KBR is not involved in policing; instead, our objective in the privatisation of the police force is to get more police doing actual police work while KBR brings operational efficiencies to the back office with the objective of achieving an overall lower cost of service while improving service levels," the spokesman said.

With police planning to hold a protest march next week against the push to privative the force, KBR's involvement in the bidding process will possibly add fuel to the fire.

"This is the latest move that seems to be designed to make the police more and more remote from the public we serve," said Julie Nesbit, of the Police Federation.

"We believe simply that if you call a cop, you should get a cop, not a security guard, not a uniformed civilian nor an employee of a major international conglomerate. We believe it's what the public expect and believe that there should be a public debate before parts of the police service are sold off to the highest bidder."

Police Superintendents' Association President Derek Barnett said the public should be more involved in the push towards privatisation.

"The legitimacy of policing stems from the fact that it takes place with the consent of the public; it is only right, therefore, that the public should have a say in who they want to deliver operational policing services," he said. Read more...

UK military prepare for ‘9/11-type  attack' by AFP 3 May 2012

BRITISH military commanders said they are training to deal with a "9/11-type attack" as they launched a major exercise to test their readiness for the 2012 London Olympics.

As jet fighters took to the sky with nine weeks to go to the opening ceremony, the Olympic Park was getting its biggest try-out as the final wave of sporting test events got under way.

Four Royal Air Force (RAF) Typhoon fighter jets flew into the British capital to herald the start of Exercise Olympic Guardian, a nine-day training operation to test the response to a possible air attack during the Games.

Military helicopters were stationed around the capital, including on the amphibious assault ship HMS Ocean in the River Thames, with some carrying sniper teams.

AWACS surveillance planes and air-to-air refuelling aircraft will also be airborne during the exercise.
Airspace restrictions will be in place throughout the July 27-August 12 Games.

Air Vice-Marshal Stuart Atha, air component commander for Olympics air security, said their plan had several levels and "will allow us to deal at one end - which is that 9/11-type attack - perhaps down to the lower and the slower type of threat that we may face.

"All we are doing is having in place what we would describe as prudent and appropriate measures, in order that we could react if required in a timely and appropriate fashion."

Speaking of any potential attackers, he said: "I would hope when they see how we are preparing they might be deterred from making any threats to the Games."

Typhoons are stationed on high alert as part of Britain's regular air defence.

"Whilst there is no specific threat to the Games, we have to be ready to assist in delivering a safe and secure Olympics for all to enjoy," said defence secretary Philip Hammond.

The exercise underlines the commitment "to keeping the public safe at a time when the world will be watching us".

At the Olympic Park in Stratford, east London, five venues were to stage events in three Olympic and three Paralympic sports between today and next Monday.

Assisted by 11,000 staff, more than 140,000 spectators were to watch 3000 athletes take part in hockey, wheelchair tennis, water polo, athletics, boccia and Paralympic athletics. Read more...

Secret Hidden In US-Afghan Deal Pact Won't End War – Or SOF Night Raids by Gareth Porter 3 May 2012

The optics surrounding the Barack Obama administration's "Enduring Strategic Partnership" agreement with Afghanistan and the Memorandums of Understanding accompanying it emphasise transition to Afghan responsibility and an end to U.S. war.

But the only substantive agreement reached between the U.S. and Afghanistan - well hidden in the agreements - has been to allow powerful U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to continue to carry out the unilateral night raids on private homes that are universally hated in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan.

The presentation of the new agreement on a surprise trip by President Obama to Afghanistan, with a prime time presidential address and repeated briefings for the press, allows Obama to go into a tight presidential election campaign on a platform of ending an unpopular U.S. war in Afghanistan.

It also allows President Hamid Karzai to claim he has gotten control over the SOF night raids while getting a 10-year commitment of U.S. economic support.

But the actual text of the agreement and of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids included in it by reference will not end the U.S. war in Afghanistan, nor will they give Karzai control over night raids.

The Obama administration's success in obscuring those facts is the real story behind the ostensible story of the agreement.

Obama's decisions on how many U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan in 2014 and beyond and what their mission will be will only be made in a "Bilateral Security Agreement" still to be negotiated. Although the senior officials did not provide any specific information about those negotiations in their briefings for news media, the Strategic Partnership text specifies that they are to begin the signing of the present agreement "with the goal of concluding within one year".

That means Obama does not have to announce any decisions about stationing of U.S. forces in Afghanistan before the 2012 presidential election, allowing him to emphasise that he is getting out of Afghanistan and sidestep the question of a long-term commitment of troops in Afghanistan.

The Bilateral Security Agreement will supersede the 2003 "Status of Forces" agreement with Afghanistan, according to the text. That agreement gives U.S. troops in Afghanistan immunity from prosecution and imposes no limitations on U.S. forces in regard to military bases or operations.

Last month's Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids was forced on the United States by Karzai's repeated threat to refuse to sign a partnership agreement unless the United States gave his government control over any raids on people's homes. Karzai's insistence on ending U.S. unilateral night raids and detention of Afghans had held up the agreement on Strategic Partnership for months.

But Karzai's demand put him in direct conflict with the interests of one of the most influential elements of the U.S. military: the SOF. Under Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. war strategy in Afghanistan came to depend heavily on the purported effectiveness of night raids carried out by SOF units in weakening the Taliban insurgency. Read more...

Finding Bin Laden: The Truth Behind the Official Story by Gareth Porter 3 May 2012

A few days after US Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a "senior intelligence official" briefing reporters on the materials seized from bin Laden's compound said the materials revealed that bin Laden had, "continued to direct even tactical details of the group's management." Bin Laden was, "not just a strategic thinker for the group," said the official. "He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions." The official called the bin Laden compound, "an active command and control center."

The senior intelligence official triumphantly called the discovery of bin Laden's hideout, "the greatest intelligence success perhaps of a generation," and administration officials could not resist leaking to reporters that a key element in that success was that the CIA interrogators had gotten the name of bin Laden's trusted courier from al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo. CIA Director Leon Panetta was quite willing to leave the implication that some of the information had been obtained from detainees by "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Such was the official line at the time. But none of it was true. It is now clear that CIA officials were blatantly misrepresenting both bin Laden's role in al-Qaeda when he was killed and how the agency came to focus on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

In fact, during his six years in Abbottabad, bin Laden was not the functioning head of al-Qaeda at all, but an isolated figurehead who had become irrelevant to the actual operations of the organization. The real story, told here for the first time, is that bin Laden was in the compound in Abbottabad because he had been forced into exile by the al-Qaeda leadership. Read more...

Related:

Benazir Bhutto named Osama bin Laden’s killer before her death 15 Jan 2008

Benazir Bhutto, who was killed in a suicide attack at the end of 2007 stated in November that the Osama bin Laden, the head of the international terrorist network al-Qaida, had been killed. Bhutto claimed that she even knew the man who had killed the prime suspect of 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA. According to Bhutto’s words, Bin Laden was killed by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh – one of those convicted of kidnapping and killing U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl.

Bhutto released that statement on November 2, 2007 in an interview with Al-Jazeera TV channel. Bhutto spoke in English in the program titled Frost Over the World. However, no one paid any attention to her words. Speaking about the enemies, who did not wish to see her back in Pakistan, she said: “Omar Sheikh is the man who murdered Osama bin Laden.”

The video of Bhutto’s interview to Al-Jazeera can be found on YouTube (click to watch the video). The assassinated Pakistani prime minister says the words about Bin Laden’s killer during the second minute of the interview. She stays absolutely calm when she pronounces the names. More than 600,000 people have already viewed the video.

Correspondent David Frost, who interviewed Bhutto, did not even care to ask more questions about the sensational statement. Frost, who is believed to be an experienced journalist, did not even ask Bhutto when Bin Laden was killed.

Benazir Bhutto’s interview to Al-Jazeera received very little attention from the media. There was practically no newspaper in the world who published the news on its front page, although tens of thousands of people discussed the news for two months. It just so happens that even Al-Jazeera messed it up.

There was no official who commented on the information. Not a word was said from the CIA and the FBI. They did not even lift a finger to reject it. Absolute silence. But the U.S. administration promised a reward of 25 million dollars for Bin Laden’s body, dead or alive.

Benazir Bhutto is now dead. She cannot say anything about her sources of information.

Washington acknowledges Al Qaeda attempts to undermine Syria by Voice of Russia 3 May 2012

A U.S. State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, has acknowledged that Al Qaeda is seeking to destabilize Syria. After the April 27 deadly explosions in Damascus, two car bombs targeting administrative buildings and police offices rocked the northern Syrian city of Idlib.

At least 40 people have been killed and dozens of others were wounded in those latest attacks. Earlier, the U.S. administration claimed that President Bashar Assad was the only one responsible for instability and violence in Syria. Read more...

Parliament Square being cleared for state opening by Rikki 3 May 2012

This morning, the high court lifted the injunction against westminster council preventing them from removing the last tent and the large 'peace strike' box from parliament square. Police are now in Parliament Square to enforce the controversial new PASRA law and clear the square before the state opening of parliament next week.

For years, parliament square has been the site of continuous protests against the government's unlawful waging of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and linked issues such as the illegal occupation of Palestine.

Brian Haw lived in the square for a decade, repeatedly seeing off legal attempts to have him removed. He became an icon for peaceful protest throughout the world, although he was often maligned by the right-wing press here.

The new con-dem regime has gone further than any previous government, producing the 'police reform and social responsibility act' (PRASRA), which for anyone with knowledge of the previous legal history of the square, might as well have had a section called the 'Brian Haw legislation', as it is so specifically framed to address the earlier failed attempts to prevent 24-hour protest outside parliament.

Replacing the previous SOCPA legislation, covered on indymedia in much detail, the new legislation focusses on the two issues that politicians found most galling outside their place of "work". First, it bans any sound-amplification equipment, (so badly drafted that it may include hearing aids!), and second it bans tents, or any structure or any sleeping equipment designed or adapted to facilitate a stay overnight or for any length of time.

One of the protestors, Maria Gallestegui, worked with and supported Brian Haw for many years, before setting up her own campaign alongside (the 'peace strike'). when the new law came into force, she asked for an injunction against westminster council, pending legal arguments over the lawfulness of the new rules and their compatibility with the human rights act.

For a while, that temporary injunction stood, while high court judges tried to work out whether they could challenge primary legislation before it was even used.

After several weeks, they decided they could not, but the injunction still stood for one more week pending a hearing into whether an appeal would be granted. That final hearing was this morning, and the court has decided that the law must stand, on the basis that, in drafting the law, a declaration of human rights compatibility was signed, and so any further challenges should now occur after the law is enforced, rather than before.

Within hours of the hearing, police have just arrived at parliament square, and accompanied by officials from westminster council, they are dismantling and seizing Maria's tent and the remaining box (she had two until recently sending one to america with a view to raising money for children in iraq by selling it).

The boxes have stood on parliament square for several years, after Maria had the idea of playing with the SOCPA conditions imposed on her. Those conditions were that her protest should take up no more space than 3m x 3m x 1m, and so she decided to build a huge edifice with exactly those dimensions. Using them for banner storage and security, the two boxes (under two separate SOCPA authorisations), attracted decoration and donated art from several underground artists, and one has recently sported a mock door to number ten, while the other is painted like a 'Dr Who' style police box (subverted to a 'peace' box).

Maria has already donated one of the boxes to an american art exhibition, with a view to auctioning it and raising money for a children's hospice in Iraq. She had been attempting to negotiate a similar auction for the remaining box should she lose the legal case, but westminster have, under intense pressure from members of parliament, now moved unilaterally to seize the box the moment the injunction was lifted.

The PASRA rules have already been enforced on the brian haw peace campaign, and they have continued their protest with immense determination remaining overnight under umbrellas and wrapped up in layers, denied the comfort of shelter or a tent.

The new law means that a continuous 24-hour protest outside parliament will be the preserve of only the most incredibly determined (facing sleep deprivation, hypothermia, and trench foot!), or the independently wealthy.

The arrogance and petty selfishness of this unelected minority government appears to know no bounds. the PASRA clauses governing protest appear to have no other function than to protect the corrupt and genocidal ruling classes from embarrassment. Their hypocrisy is breath-taking. Read more...

Extractive Capitalism and the Divisions in the Latin American Progressive Camp by James Petras 3 May 2012

The leading agro-mineral exporting countries, including those engaged with the world’s leading mining and energy multi-national corporations(MNC) are also those characterised as having the most independent and progressive foreign policies. Apparently the primacy of “extractive capitalism” and commodity-export based economies are no longer correlated with ‘neo-colonial’ regimes.

It can be argued that the concessions to the extractive MNC and local ‘leading’ classes assures stability, steady revenues and finances the incremental social expenditures which permit the re-election of the center-left regimes. In other words a de facto alliance between the “top” and “bottom” of the class structure is the unstated bases for center-left electoral successes despite the growing political divergence between the regimes and sections of the social movements.

The Progressive Camp

There is a general consensus that regimes in seven countries in Latin America form what can be called the “progressive camp”: Bolivia , Ecuador , Argentina , Brazil , Uruguay , Peru and Venezuela .

The identifying features usually attributable to regimes in these countries include

(1) their past political trajectory: most are led by former leaders and activists from social movements, trade unions or guerrilla formations. Read more...

Not Explaining the Why of Terrorism by Ray McGovern 3 May 2012

John Brennan, President Obama’s chief adviser on counterterrorism, has again put on public display two unfortunate facts: (1) that the White House has no clue as to how to counter terrorism; and (2) (in Brennan’s words) “the unfortunate fact that to save many innocent lives we are sometimes obliged to take lives.”

In a speech on April 30, Brennan did share one profound insight: “Countries typically don’t want foreign soldiers in their cities and towns.” His answer to that? “The precision of targeted [drone] strikes.” Does he really mean to suggest that local populations are more accepting of unmanned drones buzzing overhead and firing missiles on the push of a button by a “pilot” halfway around the world?

Beneath Brennan’s Orwellian rhetoric lies the reality that he remains unable (or unwilling) to deal with, the $64 question former White House correspondent Helen Thomas asked him repeatedly on Jan. 7, 2010, about why terrorists do the things they do.

Brennan: “Al-Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.”

Thomas: “But you haven’t explained why.”

Is it possible he still has no clue? To demonstrate how little progress Brennan has made in the way of understanding the challenge of “terrorism,” let’s look back at my commentary in early 2010 about Brennan’s vacuous non-answers to Helen Thomas. At the time, I wrote:

Thank God for Helen Thomas, the only person to show any courage at the White House press briefing after President Barack Obama gave a flaccid account of the intelligence screw-up that almost downed an airliner on Christmas Day 2009.

After Obama briefly addressed L’Affaire Abdulmutallab and wrote “must do better” on the report cards of the national security schoolboys responsible for the near catastrophe, the President turned the stage over to counter-terrorism guru John Brennan and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

It took 89-year old veteran correspondent Helen Thomas (now 91) to break through the vapid remarks about rechanneling “intelligence streams,” fixing “no-fly” lists, deploying “behaviour detection officers,” and buying more body-imaging scanners.

Thomas recognised the John & Janet filibuster for what it was, as her catatonic press colleagues took their customary dictation and asked their predictable questions. Instead, Thomas posed an adult query that spotlighted the futility of government plans to counter terrorism with more high-tech gizmos and more intrusions on the liberties and privacy of the traveling public.

She asked why Abdulmutallab did what he did. Thomas: “And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.”

Brennan: “Al-Qaeda is an organisation that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents. … They attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that he’s (sic) able to attract these individuals. But al-Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.”

Thomas: “And you’re saying it’s because of religion?”

Brennan: “I’m saying it’s because of an al-Qaeda organisation that used the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.”

Thomas: “Why?”

Brennan: “I think this is a — long issue, but al-Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.”

Thomas: “But you haven’t explained why.”

Neither did President Obama, nor anyone else in the U.S. political/media hierarchy. All the American public gets is the boilerplate about how al-Qaeda evildoers are perverting a religion and exploiting impressionable young men.
 

There is almost no discussion about why so many people in the Muslim world object to U.S. policies so strongly that they are inclined to resist violently and even resort to suicide attacks.

Obama’s Non-Answer

I had been hoping Obama would say something intelligent about what drove Abdulmutallab to do what he did, but the president uttered a few vacuous comments before sending in the clowns. This is what he said before he walked away from the podium:

It is clear that al-Qaeda increasingly seeks to recruit individuals without known terrorist affiliations … to do their bidding. … And that’s why we must communicate clearly to Muslims around the world that al-Qaeda offers nothing except a bankrupt vision of misery and death … while the United States stands with those who seek justice and progress. … That’s the vision that is far more powerful than the hatred of these violent extremists.

But why it is so hard for Muslims to “get” that message? Why can’t they end their preoccupation with dodging U.S. missiles in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Gaza long enough to reflect on how we are only trying to save them from terrorists while simultaneously demonstrating our commitment to “justice and progress”?

Does a smart fellow like Obama expect us to believe that all we need to do is “communicate clearly to Muslims” that it is al-Qaeda, not the U.S. and its allies, that brings “misery and death”? Does any informed person not know that the unprovoked U.S.-led invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and displaced 4.5 million from their homes? How is that for “misery and death”? Read more...

Spanish homeowners rally together to fight evictions by banks by Fiona Govan 2 May 2012

Residents in a quiet suburb of Barcelona are taking the fight against the financial sector to the judiciary as they attempt to save a family from being evicted from their home, in a case that has become a powerful symbol of Spain's five-year economic crisis.

At 9.30am in the district of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, just as the governing council of the European Central Bank meets in Barcelona to debate the future of the eurozone, a group of protesters will make a stand outside number 2, Pasaje Tarragona to try to prevent the eviction.

A protest called by the local branch of Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) – a support group formed to prevent property repossessions – hopes to shame the mortgage lenders into backing off.

"It's a family who have no income, both adults are on the dole and they just can't afford to pay back their loan," explained a representative from the Barcelona branch of PAH.

"Enshrined in the Spanish constitution is the human right to enjoy decent and adequate housing and yet the banks can just turf them out on the street."

Between 2007, when the housing boom burst, and the end of last year some 500,000 families have lost their homes through repossession.

PAH estimates that around 200 families each day are thrown out of their homes.

"It's a travesty. These are people who have lost their jobs, and now they lose their homes. There are millions of unsold properties across Spain and yet nowhere for them to go," complained Javier Mendez, marching under a PAH banner during a May Day demonstration in the Catalan capital.

Last month the government put forward proposals aimed at preventing the forced evictions of homeowners who can no longer pay their mortgages. The "good practice guidelines" ask banks to forgive mortgage debt worth less than €200,000 (£162,000) when all members of the family are unemployed.

But in the absence of legal measures to enforce the ethical code, the banks are under no obligation to allow struggling families to stay in their homes when they fail to meet mortgage repayments.

For many, the loss of their home is not the end of the nightmare.

"We bought the flat for €220,000 in 2006 with a 110pc mortgage," explained Maria del Mar, a woman living under the threat of eviction. "Now they are selling similar flats in the same block for €110,000. But if the bank takes our home, the debt won't be wiped. We will owe the bank the remainder for the rest of our lives. It's desperate." Read more...

Next Page...

A Rebellious World or a New Dark Age? On the History of the US Economy in Decline by Noam Chomsky 8 May 2012

The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead -- because victory won’t come quickly -- it could prove a significant moment in American history.

 The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialisation, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s -- although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today -- nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

There was militant labor union organising going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organisations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world -- you could see it in the business press at the time -- because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, “we’re gonna get out of it.”

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. Read more...

Torture: The Bush Administration on Trial by Andy Worthington 8 May 2012

Law-abiding US citizens have been appalled that Jose Rodriguez, the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service until his retirement in 2007, was invited onto CBS’s “60 Minutes” program last weekend to promote his book Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, in which he defends the use of torture on “high-value detainees” captured in the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” even though that was — and is — illegal under US and international law.

Rodriguez joins an elite club of war criminals — including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — who, instead of being prosecuted for using torture, or authorising its use, have, instead, been allowed to write books, go on book tours and appear on mainstream TV to attempt to justify their unjustifiable actions.

All claim to be protected by the “golden shield” offered by their inside man, John Yoo, part of a group of lawyers who aggressively pushed the lawlessness of the “war on terror.” Abusing his position as a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose mandate is to provide impartial legal advice to the executive branch, Yoo instead attempted to redefine torture and approved its use — including the use of water-boarding, an ancient torture technique and a form of controlled drowning — on an alleged “high-value detainee,” Abu Zubaydah, in two memos, dated August 1, 2002, that will forever be known as the “torture memos.”

Unfortunately, for those who abhor the use of torture and respect the rule of law, President Obama refused to allow Yoo — and his boss, Jay S. Bybee — to be punished. A four-year internal ethics investigation concluded in January 2010 that Yoo and Bybee had been guilty of “professional misconduct,” which would have led to professional sanctions, but a senior DoJ fixer, David Margolis, was allowed — or encouraged — to override those conclusions, stating instead that both men had, understandably, been under great pressure following the 9/11 attacks, and had only exercised “poor judgment,” which was the equivalent of nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

No one bothered mentioning that Article 2.2 of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which the US became a signatory under Ronald Reagan, declares: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” Read more...

US Kills 5 Afghan Kids by Glenn Greenwald 8 May 2012

The way in which the U.S. media ignores such events speaks volumes about how we perceive them

Yesterday, I noted several reports from Afghanistan that as many as 20 civilians were killed by two NATO airstrikes, including a mother and her five children. Today, the U.S. confirmed at least some of those claims, acknowledging and apologizing for its responsibility for the death of that family:

The American military claimed responsibility and expressed regret for an airstrike that mistakenly killed six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan, Afghan and American military officials confirmed Monday.

The attack, which took place Friday night, was first revealed by the governor of Helmand Province, Muhammad Gulab Mangal, on Monday. His spokesman, Dawoud Ahmadi, said that after an investigation they had determined that a family home in the Sangin district had been attacked by mistake in the American airstrike, which was called in to respond to a Taliban attack. . . . The victims were the family’s mother and five of her children, three girls and two boys, according to Afghan officials.

This happens over and over and over again, and there are several points worth making here beyond the obvious horror:

(1) To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYT article on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that “in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding” — as though that’s comparable to the U.S.’s dropping bombs on innocent people). We’ve all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase “collateral damage” cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it’s quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that’s just how it is. It’s all grounded in America’s central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.

At some point — and more than a decade would certainly qualify — the act of continuously killing innocent people, countless children, in the Muslim world most certainly does reflect upon, and even alters, the moral character of a country, especially its leaders. You can’t just spend year after year piling up the corpses of children and credibly insist that it has no bearing on who you are. Read more...

Mankind’s Most Desperate Hour by Mark Sircus 3 May 2012

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998. This is a close-up look into the insanity of the main governments of the world over the last 67 years.

It’s totally amazing what we have had to live with and get used to in the modern age. Increasing radiation is just one of the menaces building up in the background as we badly pollute our world with heavy metals like mercury and with a host of other chemicals and plastic. It looks increasingly like we are drawing the curtains over the future of all our children and that is profoundly sad.

We are being blindsided from multiple sources, kicked and buffeted around on the parts per million, billion and even trillion levels and this is polluting our bodies and gumming up the works. What I call the Hun Hordes of mercury is now being joined with the Hun Hordes of uranium, Hun Hordes of a host of other radioactive particles, and even Hun Hordes of plutonium because just a little bit of that will subdue the human race, putting many into their graves. Read more...

Another Watergate unfolding: The Lutfallah II Arms-Smuggling to Syria Scandal by Franklin Lamb 7 May 2012

It would be an incautious stretch to suggest any sort of parity between Watergate and the unfolding Lutfallah II arms shipment-to-Syria drama, that each day brings more revelations. But some of what we are daily learning about the who, what and why of Lutfallah II reminds some of us of a Watergate, type atmosphere including  “bit by bit, drip by drip” revelations,  denials, setting up fall guys and remarkable examples of incompetence.

The still unfolding Lutfallah II weapons running misadventure, in which a claimed Syrian-owned vessel registered in Sierra Leone but apparently flying the Egyptian flag, was detained off the Lebanese port of Batoun, by the Lebanese Army Marines because it was sailing too high in the water, and appeared “suspicious,” and was then found to contain 300,000 pounds of weapons may erupt unpredictably with serious political consequences for the region.

“Deepthroat”, the FBI mole who met secretly with Woodward & Bernstein and leaked confidential US government information to the duo, as revenge against President Nixon for rejecting him as successor to the deceased FBI Director, J.Edgar Hoover, outed himself in 2005.  “Deepthroat”, after a quarter century of hundreds of sleuths trying to divine, if he/she even existed, turned out to be none other than Deputy Director of the FBI, William Mark Felt, Sr. “Deepthroat” repeated advice to the Washington Post reporters was to “Follow the Money!”

They did. The rest is history.

If a ‘deep throat’ appears in Libya, Qatar of elsewhere, and offering advice to reporters who appear in Benghazi and Misrata in order to dig into what really happened, it might be that he will counsel:  “Follow the weapons”.

Eyewitness Hassan Diab is a Libyan researcher who has been working with a group of American and International lawyers preparing a case against NATO to be filed with the International Criminal Court. Hassan and three of his friends actually saw the ship Lutfallah II being loaded in Benghazi, Libya. Read more...

Meet the New Boss: French President is Another Bilderberg Stooge by Paul Joseph Watson 7 May 2012

The mass media is promulgating the notion that the election of Socialist French President Francois Hollande represents some kind of massive sea change and is a direct challenge to the European Union, and yet Hollande’s past and the people he surrounds himself with confirms the fact that he is merely another committed globalist and an enthusiastic supporter of the dictatorial EU’s sovereignty-stripping ethos.

“In the whole of Europe it’s time for change,” Hollande told cheering crowds who gathered to hear his victory speech in Paris early Monday,” reports the L.A. Times.

“Observers agree that Mr Hollande’s election represents a sea-change in the governance of the eurozone and the management of the single currency crisis,” reports Sky News.

However, any suggestion that Hollande’s defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy represents some kind of major challenge to the European Union and its efforts, in close coordination with the IMF and Goldman Sachs, to exploit the debt crisis for its own political ends, is clearly wide of the mark.

Hollande is merely another creature of the establishment and an enthusiastic pro-European superstate globalist. He supported the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the document which outlined the introduction of the euro single currency and was itself based on a 1955 Bilderberg blueprint.

Hollande also supported the European Constitution in a 2005 referendum despite most of his socialist allies voting against it.

Hollande is the former spokesman for ex-French President Lionel Jospin, another committed globalist who attended the Bilderberg Group meeting in 1996.

He is also a former aide to the last Socialist President in France, Francois Mitterand, a 33rd degree Freemason who commissioned the pyramid at the Louvre to be made out of 666 glass panels – another down to earth “man of the people”. Alongside German Chancellor and Bohemian Grove attendee Helmut Kohl, Mitterand fathered the Maastricht Treaty. According to Bilderberg sleuth Daniel Estulin, Bilderberg were largely responsible for Mitterand’s presidential victory in in 1981.

Hollande’s “special adviser” is none other than Manuel Valls, a former Freemason and 2008 Bilderberg attendee who openly supports the establishment of a European federal superstate at the expense of national sovereignty. Valls has publicly called for the European Commission to control national budgets of EU member nations. Read more...

US Jobless Toll—a Failure of Capitalism by Patrick Martin 8 May 2012

Friday’s US jobless report, the most dismal so far this year, demonstrates the complete failure of the capitalist system to provide jobs for the unemployed. Nearly five years after the official beginning of the recession, and nearly four years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered a worldwide financial panic, there has been no significant recovery for working people.

Corporate profits are at pre-slump highs, CEO pay is soaring, the wealth of the multimillionaires has reached new levels of obscenity. But working-class living standards continue to fall, not only in the United States, but in Europe, Asia and throughout the world. In every country the watchword is the same: austerity for the masses, while the ruling elites have never had it so good.

More detailed analysis of the statistics provided by the US Department of Labor confirms the historic character of the stagnation in jobs and income for working people. One key metric is the labor-force participation rate, the proportion of the adult population that is engaged in paid labor. This fell to 63.6 percent in April, the lowest figure since 1981, when millions of women still worked only in the home and so were not counted.

The labor force participation rate has declined steadily throughout the slump that began in 2007. This fall accelerated in the course of the past 12 months, when nearly 2.7 million people dropped out of the labor force. The majority of these are workers older than 55, who face widespread age discrimination and little prospect of new employment.

The pace of job creation over the past three years is far below the level required to restore employment to pre-slump levels. Based on the 200,000 jobs per month average added during December through February, it would take until 2020 for the US to return to the employment levels of 2006. Based on the 130,000 jobs per month average of March and April, it would take even longer.

Nearly 23 million American workers are either unemployed or working only part-time when they want full-time jobs. Of these, some 2.4 million have stopped looking for work altogether, while 5.3 million have been jobless for at least six months. The average duration of unemployment is 39 weeks—nine months.

According the Department of Labor, so-called “discouraged” workers have good reason to feel that way. Workers unemployed for fewer than five weeks have a re-employment rate of 31 percent. Workers unemployed for more than a year have just a 9 percent chance of finding a new job.

On top of joblessness is the stagnation in earnings. During the month of April, average hourly pre-tax wages for non-supervisory workers rose by only a penny, to $23.38. Average weekly wages have risen by 2.1 percent over the past year, while prices have risen more than 3 percent: in effect, the entire working class is taking a pay cut, while corporate profits reach new records. Read more...

Media silent when administration targets sources by Edward Wasserman 7 May 2012

When President Obama addressed the American Society of News Editors convention last month, the real news was what didn’t happen. The watchdogs didn’t bark. No discouraging word from the gathering of 1,000 of the country’s top news people, facing a president whose administration has led a vigorous attack on journalism’s most indispensable asset — its sources.

Obama took office pledging tolerance and even support for whistleblowers, but instead is prosecuting them with a zeal that’s historically unprecedented. His Justice Department has conducted six prosecutions over leaks of classified information to reporters. Five involve the Espionage Act, a powerful law that had previously been used only four times since it was enacted in 1917 to prosecute spies.

Some spies. We’re no longer in the era of Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen or Kim Philby, infamous Cold War turncoats.

Instead, there’s Thomas Drake, a career official of the National Security Agency, who faced 35 years in prison for telling a Baltimore Sun reporter about what The New York Times called “a potential billion-dollar computer boondoggle.” At stake was bureaucratic embarrassment, not national security. (The case against Drake collapsed last summer.)

Then there’s Shamai Leibowitz, a translator for the FBI, who believed he had intercepted evidence of illegal influence-peddling by the Israeli embassy. When his boss wouldn’t act, he leaked transcripts to a blogger. He got 20 months.

Ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou was indicted in January for allegedly identifying a Guantánamo interrogator (who was not working undercover;) Stephen Kim, a State Department analyst, allegedly told a reporter for Fox News — wait for it — that the U.S. was worried North Korea might respond to new U.N. sanctions by testing another A-bomb; and Jeffrey Sterling, who allegedly disclosed a botched CIA operation in Iran that was described in a 2006 book by a Times reporter.

And there’s the biggest case, the court martial of Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of engineering the mammoth dumps of U.S. military and diplomatic data that Wikileaks, the online whistleblower network, turned over to leading newspapers in 2010 and 2011. Read more...

Another Foiled False Flag by Stephen Lendman 9 May 2012

Wikipedia defines false or black flags as "covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities." 

"The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is: flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations and can be used during peace-time."

Big lies substitute for truth. Stories are fabricated. Media scoundrels promote them. At issue is heightening fear for planned policies. Pretexts are needed for militarism, imperial wars, and homeland repression. If and when people learn they were duped, it's too late to matter.

It's an American tradition. Incidents are strategically timed. Innocent victims suffer. So does everyone living under heightened national security state conditions.

Threats are manufactured. States of emergency are declared. Rule of law principles are discarded. Unchallenged dominance alone matters. Wars on humanity follow. Big lies facilitate them. False flags play their part. Read more...

The Countdown To The Break Up Of The Euro Has Officially Begun by Michael Snyder 9 May 2012

The results of the elections in France and Greece have made it abundantly clear that there is a tremendous backlash against the austerity approach that Germany has been pushing.  All over Europe, prominent politicians and incumbent political parties are being voted out.  In fact, Nicolas Sarkozy has become the 11th leader of a European nation to be defeated in an election since 2008.  We have seen governments fall in the Netherlands, the UK, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Greece.  Whenever they get a chance, the citizens of Europe are using the ballot box to send a message that they do not like what is going on.  It turns out that austerity is extremely unpopular.  But if newly elected politicians all over Europe begin rejecting austerity, this puts Germany in a very difficult position.  Should Germany be expected to indefinitely bail out all of the members of the eurozone that choose to live way beyond their means?  If Germany pulled out of the euro tomorrow, the euro would absolutely collapse, bond yields for the rest of the eurozone would skyrocket to unprecedented heights, and without German bailout money troubled nations such as Greece would be headed directly for default.  The rest of the eurozone is absolutely and completely dependent on Germany at this point.  But as we have seen, much of the rest of the eurozone is sick and tired of taking orders from Germany and is rejecting austerity.  A lot of politicians in Europe apparently believe that they should be able to run up gigantic amounts of debt indefinitely and that the Germans should be expected to always be there to bail them out whenever they need it.  Will the Germans be willing to tolerate such a situation, or will they simply pick up their ball and go home at some point?

Over the past several years, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have made a formidable team.  They worked together to push the eurozone on to the path of austerity, but now Sarkozy is out.

Francois Hollande, the new French president, has declared that the financial world is his "greatest enemy".

He may regret making that statement.

One of the primary reasons why Hollande was elected was because he clearly rejected the austerity approach favored by the Germans.  Shortly after winning the election in France, he made the following statement....

"Europe is watching us, austerity can no longer be the only option"

Hollande says that he wants to "renegotiate" the fiscal pact that European leaders agreed to under the leadership of Merkel and Sarkozy.

But Merkel says that is not going to happen.  The following Merkel quotes are from a recent CNBC article....

"We in Germany are of the opinion, and so am I personally, that the fiscal pact is not negotiable. It has been negotiated and has been signed by 25 countries," Merkel told a news conference. Read more...

Shocking Animal Cruelty at Tyson Foods Supplier 9 May 2012

The Humane Society of the United States released undercover video footage revealing cruel treatment of animals and inhumane conditions at a Wyoming pig breeding facility owned by a supplier to Tyson Foods. Tyson now admits that it purchases pigs from the facility HSUS investigated and that Tyson will at least temporarily suspend purchases from them. However, Tyson needs to do more: It must stop allowing its suppliers to confine pigs in tiny metal “gestation crates” where they cannot even turn around for nearly their whole lives -- a standard pork industry practice.

The investigation revealed workers kicking piglets like soccer balls, swinging sick piglets in circles, and ruthlessly beating mother pigs. Along with individual acts of animal abuse, this investigation also highlights the suffering pigs endure when locked in gestation crates. Read more...

Remember, in many western countries, this sort of thing will be illegal very soon . . . oh no, not the abuse of the animals, but the filming of this abuse and enlightening the factory farmed citizen about what they are eating.

Warning: Contains Graphic Footage. Undercover video footage at "Wyoming Premium Farms" revealing egregious cruelty and filthy conditions at a Wyoming pig breeding facility owned by a supplier for Tyson Foods.

European elections: if the left doesn't lead revolt against austerity, others will by Seumas Milne 8 May 2012

The French and Greek elections have already shifted Europe's politics. But it needs real change to hold the right at bay

Revolt against austerity is sweeping Europe. The election of François Hollande has not only opened up the chance of a change of direction in France, but even in the citadels of fiscal orthodoxy in Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin. In Greece, Sunday's electoral earthquake has all but destroyed the political establishment that dominated the country for 40 years.

From the Netherlands to Romania, governments are falling under the weight of cuts and tax rises required by the eurozone's new permanent deflation treaty. In Ireland, the anti-austerity tide is swelling support for a no vote in this month's treaty referendum.

By rejecting renegotiation of either the treaty or the impossible terms of Greece's bailout, Angela Merkel has meanwhile turned the struggle over Europe's economy into a battle for democracy. The Greeks and French have now unequivocally voted to reject a programme the German chancellor insists they will have to swallow regardless.

And it's not difficult to see why they're rejecting it. Austerity isn't working, even in its own terms. Cutting jobs and pay while increasing taxes isn't reducing borrowing and debt, let alone leading to economic recovery. It's deepening recession, increasing debt and destroying jobs and squeezing living standards across the eurozone – in countries such as Spain and Greece, catastrophically – as well as in Britain. Read more...

Austerity Can’t Be Just for Regular People by Matt Taibbi 9 May 2012

It didn’t take long to crank up the backlash against European voters. This is inevitable whenever a socialist wins a major election, but particularly now, when new French president François Hollande rode to victory shouting, “Austerity can no longer be inevitable!”

This sounds like the beginning of what will be a very heated debate over who has to pay for the excesses of the financial crisis. It was previously assumed that everybody but the actual financial services sector would have to pay, but voters in Europe now are refusing to go along, sparking a wave of eye-rolling editorials in the financial press. Even David Brooks got into the act [yesterday], penning a lugubrious editorial about the errant political instincts of the populist masses here and abroad.

Markets all over the world freaked out over the prospect of having ignorant European voters meddling in the recovery process the geniuses of the high finance world had already painstakingly laid out for them. The model for economic progress in the financial bubble era, after all, is supposed to go something like this:

1. Let banks inflate massive asset bubbles with the aid of cheap or even free government cash, and tons of leverage;
2. Before it all explodes, carve out gigantic sums for bonuses and compensation for the companies that inflated those bubbles;
3. After it explodes, get the various governments to bail those companies out;
4. Pay for it all by slashing services to what’s left of the middle class.

This is the model we used in America. We had a monster asset bubble based on phoney mortgages, which Wall Street was allowed to inflate to spectacular dimensions with minimal reserve capital, huge amounts of leverage, and tons of fraud for good measure. When that bubble exploded, we first rescued the banks who inflated the thing in the first place, and then our plan for paying for it mostly revolved around folks like Paul Ryan and Chris Christie, who made great political hay by trying to take an ax to “entitlements” like health care and retirement benefits.

They’re replaying the same script in Europe, sort of. The causes of crises in places like Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy vary somewhat and are less simple to define, but a common denominator in all of them is weak growth mixed with giant budget deficits.

In most all of these cases, you had enormous sums of money entering these countries in the middle and late 2000s as global financiers in the midst of the bubble boom looked for higher-yield investments around the world – Spanish real estate, Greek debt, etc.

The local economies sucked up the bubble money, and in Greece’s case they used it to ramp up state benefits, which they could no longer afford once the bubble burst. A lot of these countries turned to Wall Street to finance their way out of budgetary messes using swap deals and other hocus-pocus moves, kicking the can down the road as it were, and those decisions are now blowing up in their faces. Read more...

MAY 12TH GlobalMay Statement by the global movement for  Justice, Democracy and Dignity May 2012

We are living in a world controlled by forces incapable of giving freedom and dignity to the world´s population (if, indeed, they ever were). A world where we are told ‘there is no alternative’ to the loss of rights achieved through the long, hard struggles of our ancestors.

We find ourselves in a world where success is defined in seeming opposition to the most fundamental values of humanity, such as solidarity and mutual support. Moreover, anything that does not promote competitiveness, selfishness and greed is seen as dysfunctional. This immoral ideology is reinforced by the monopoly of the mainstream media, the instrument that manufactures false consensus around this unfair and unsustainable system.

But we have not remained silent! Our consciousness has awakened, and we have joined the wave of collective consciousness now spreading light and hope to every corner of the world. From Tunisia to Tahrir Square, Madrid to Rejkavik, New York to Brussels, people are rising up. In the Arab Spring, in the dignity of Iceland, in the dignified rage of 15M and Occupy Wall Street. Together we have denounced the status quo. Our effort states clearly ‘enough!’, and has even begun to push changes forward, worldwide.

This is why we, women and men, inhabitants of this planet, are uniting once again to make our voices heard this May 12th. All over the world. We denounce the current condition of our planet, and urge the application of different policies, designed to encourage and promote the common good. Read more...

Media Spins Wild Conspiracy Theories To Sell NATO Attack on Syria by Paul Joseph Watson 10 May 2012

The establishment media has once again turned over its entire news coverage of today’s bombing in Damascus to dubious Twitter users in order to spin wild conspiracy theories as a cover for the fact that NATO-backed terrorists are behind the attacks.

Death Toll of Thursday Damascus Twin Explosions Rises to 55 Martyrs, 372 Injured by SANA 10 May 2012

The Interior Ministry said the death toll of Damascus twin terrorist blasts has risen to 55 martyrs, while 372 people were injured including civilians and army members.

"At 7.56 AM on Thursday of May 10th, 2012, in a time when the Syrian people head to work and children go to schools, in al-Qazaz crowded intersection at the southern ring-road in Damascus and near to a law enforcement center, the foreign-backed terrorist groups carried out two coinciding terrorist explosions with a less than moment time-lag," the statement issued by the Ministry on Thursday said.

"Two booby-trapped cars loaded with more than 1000 kg of explosives and driven by suicide bombers carried out the terrorist blasts," the statement said.

"The explosions caused two holes, one is 5.5 meters long, 3.30 meters wide and 1 meter deep and the other is 8.5 meters wide and 2.5 meters deep," the statement added.

The statement pointed out that fifteen bags of limbs and turn-off bodies for unidentified people were collected, pointing out that 105 cars crashed completely, in addition to 78 damaged automobiles in the blasts .

"The explosions caused huge material damage to public and private properties, in addition to inflicting damage to around 400 houses" the statement added.

The statement underlined that the Ministry will chase the terrorist criminals and those who aid and lodge them, as it will not be tolerant in tracking terrorism or uprooting those who destabilise the security of the Syrian community.

The Ministry called upon the citizens to practice their role and cooperate with the competent authorities through informing about any suspicious cases and reporting about the activities of the terrorists.

Earlier, twin terrorist explosions hit Damascus on Thursday morning near al-Qazaz crowded intersection at the southern ring-road .

The explosions took place at a densely populated area as they coincided with the employees and students going to their jobs and schools.

The UN observers team inspected the site of the two terrorist attacks. Read more...

‘Politics darkens the 2012 London Olympics’ by Adrian Salbuchi 10 May 2012

Politics has crawled into the London Olympic Games. Some countries are taking the occasion to question British foreign policy; others reject possible hidden agendas. The result: the Olympic Spirit may not shine so bright this summer in London.

Last week, for instance, yet another diplomatic row broke out between Argentina and the United Kingdom over a TV advertisement commissioned by Argentina’s Government, showing Argentine Olympic Hockey Team captain Fernando Zylberberg working-out and running through the streets and fields of Port Stanley/Puerto Argentino in the Falkland/Malvinas Islands.

The ad’s slogan is strong: “To compete on English soil; we are first training on Argentine soil,” the insinuation being that the Malvinas Islands are Argentinean territory.

The ad ends with a message from the Argentine President’s Office paying tribute to “our heroic dead and veterans of the Malvinas War” between Argentina and the UK.

Immediately, the advertising agency which prepared the spot – New York-based Young & Rubicam – issued a statement saying, “It has come to our attention that our agency in Argentina created an ad for the Argentine government that has deeply offended many people in the UK and around the world. We strongly condemn this work and have asked the Argentine government to pull the spot.”

Hopefully, Argentina’s government will not pull the spot, particularly after recent heated diplomatic exchanges over the Falkland/Malvinas which pitted both countries in a brief 74-day war in 1982.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague accused Argentina of using the upcoming Olympic Games for political aim, pointing to President Cristina Kirchner’s diplomatic failure in claiming sovereignty over the islands. In turn, Sebastian Coe, president of the 2012 Olympic Games Committee, criticised the ad saying the Games “are not a political affair” but rather a gathering “to celebrate sports.”

They’re probably both right: the Argentine government’s unrealistic and lukewarm strategies over the Falklands are poor at best.

As the undersigned wrote to the London Telegraph on May, to balance things out maybe Young & Rubicam should issue a further statement saying something like, “It has come to our attention that the UK continues to illegally occupy the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, something that has deeply offended many people in Argentina and around the world. We strongly condemn this occupation which should cease, and will ask the British government to pull out of the Falklands/Malvinas.” Read more...

The Twitter – Wikileaks Cases and the Battle for the Network Free Press, Now its Personal: an Afternoon with Birgitta Jónsdóttir by Dwayne Winseck 10 May 2012

A week-and-a-half ago I met up with Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an activist Icelandic MP and central figure in the Twitter-Wikileaks cases (see earlier posts on the topic here, here, here and here). Passing time on Twitter, I saw she was in Ottawa, sent her a tweet, quickly received a reply and presto, we met on a Sunday afternoon with a fellow professor from Ottawa University, Patrick McCurdy.

Jónsdóttir came to my attention after becoming a target of the U.S. Justice Department’s ongoing investigation of Wikileaks because of her role as co-producer of the video Collateral Murder, which documents a U.S. Apache helicopter gunning down two Reuters journalists and several others in Baghdad. The video was released by Wikileaks in April 2010.

Over the rest of the year, Wikileaks teamed up with five of the world’s most respected news outlets — New York Times, The Guardian, Der Speigel, Le Monde and El Pais – to release material that wreaked havoc with the routine conventions of journalism to set the global news agenda not once, but three more times: (2) the release of the Afghan and (3) Iraq war logs in July and October, respectively, and (4) a cache of diplomatic cables starting in late November.

The response from the U.S. Government was ferocious. The search to find the source of the leaks quickly led to the arrest of U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, in May 2010, and his detention in solitary confinement ever since. Simultaneously, it began shaking down popular U.S. search and social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Skype and Google in a bid to gain access to information about people of interest in the Wikileaks investigation.

Birgitta is one of those people, along with Wikileaks front man Julian Assange, Tor developer, activist and Wikileaks volunteer, Jacob Applebaum, as well as Dutch hactivist Ron Gongrijp. Let’s call them the “Twitter –Wikileaks Four”.

Entering this murky world of state secrets, blacked out documents and unnamed internet companies cooperating with electronic surveillance efforts by the state offers a rude slap to anyone who sees the U.S. as a beacon of democracy, human rights and the free press. In fact, such values seem to have wilted with alarming ease in the face of the national security claims surrounding Wikileaks, and Birgitta Jónsdóttir specifically.

Talking to Jónsdóttir gave us a personal look behind the cool, technical view found in legal briefs and court rulings. And one of the first things she told us is that she no longer sets foot on U.S. soil on the advice of her lawyers and Iceland’s State Department, despite having diplomatic immunity on account of being a Member of Parliament in Iceland. Still embroiled in the Wikileaks cases, she has recently joined a lawsuit launched by Noam Chomsky, Noami Wolfe, Christopher Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, and others to overturn the National Defense Authorization Act on the basis that its vague definition of terrorists threatens to sweep up dissidents into its maw, thereby threatening their ability to travel freely in the US and worldwide without fear of being arrested.

That we know much at all about how internet companies have been dragooned into the crackdown on Wikileaks is due to the fact that Birgitta, Applebaum and Gongrijp have led the fight with legal support from the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation against such activities in the courts of law and public opinion (Assange has kept his focus elsewhere). And it is for this reason that The Guardian newspaper last month put Birgitta, Applebaum, Twitter’s chief lawyer, Alex MacGillivray, and Assange on its list of twenty “champions of the open internet”.

MacGillivray made the list primarily because only Twitter had the spine to challenge the Justice Department’s “secret orders” (not “court authorized warrants”), whereas all of the other search and social media companies rolled-over and shut-up. This was not just a one-time stance, either. This week Twitter was at it again, pushing to have a court order forcing it to hand-over information about an Occupy Wall Street activist to New York Police over-turned.

Twitter won a modest victory in January 2011 in the first Twitter – Wikileak case when it obtained a court order allowing it to tell Jónsdóttir and the others that the Justice Department was demanding information about their accounts as part of its Wikileaks investigation. The victory also opened a bigger opportunity to discover what other internet companies may have received the Justice Department’s secret orders.

Whatever hope was raised by the first Twitter – Wikileaks ruling was dashed by a District Court ruling in the second case last November, however. The ruling was blunt: users of corporate-owned, social media platforms have no privacy rights. Read more...

A Star is Born! Victoria Grant 27 April 2012

12-year old Victoria Grant explains why her homeland, Canada, and most of the world, is in debt. April 27, 2012 at the Public Banking in America Conference, Philadelphia, PA. For more information see http://www.publicbankinginstitute.org

Honouring a ‘Terror War’ Architect by Ray McGovern 13 May 2012

Since even readers of the New York Times are aware of deputy national security adviser John Brennan’s open identification with torture, secret prisons and other abuses of national and international law, Fordham University’s invitation to him to give the commencement address on May 19 brought, well, shock and awe to many Fordham students, faculty and alumni.

It now turns out we didn’t know the half of it. Piling outrage upon indignity, Fordham announced this week that Brennan will enjoy pride of place among the “eight notables” on whom it will confer honorary degrees at commencement. The others receiving a Doctorate in Humane Letters, honoris causa, include Timothy Cardinal Dolan (Archbishop of New York), and Brooklyn congressman Edolphus Towns.

Unlike his co-recipients, Brennan is widely known for his advocacy of kidnapping-for-torture (aka “extraordinary rendition”) and killing “militants” (including U.S. citizens) with “Hellfire” missiles fired by “Predator” and “Reaper” drone aircraft.

These practices and “Special Forces” operations guarantee an indefinite supply of anti-U.S. militants for what is now known as the “new normal” in the kind of wars that former Gen. and now CIA Director David Petraeus has said our grandchildren will still be fighting.

The endless supply of “insurgents” engendered by the violent tactics so beloved of Brennan makes Americans less secure. But there is no sign that Brennan recognises that — or cares. Not that some of Brennan’s co-honourees are all that great, either.

Cardinal Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is best known for his outspokenness on pelvic issues, his stalwart defence of the first nine months of life, and his deafening silence on the taking of life in war. Since by all evidence he is far more interested in birth control than death control, it is impossible to know where Dolan or his fellow bishops stand on the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. He abjures any attempt to offer moral guidance on issues like war, preferring to defer — as the Fordham Jesuits do — to a good Jesuit-trained Catholic like Brennan to make decisions on such issues.

Edolphus Towns’s claim to distinction, in Fordham’s pre-commencement publicity, relates to his bringing “millions of dollars” to his district. Unmentioned is Towns’s membership in the Congressional Unmanned Systems (Drone) Caucus, which serves as a lobbying arm for drones — a new cash cow for the defence-industrial-congressional complex.

O Tempora, O Mores!

Since John Brennan has been accorded the dual honour of commencement speaker cum Doctorate of Humane Letters honoris causa, let’s try to piece together why Fordham’s Trustees decided to single him out for such glory. What, in other words, is the causa behind the honores? Why does George Orwell have a smirk on his face; and why are many past and present Jesuits holding their noses — Justice Jesuits like Rupert Mayer, Pedro Arupe, Dean Brackley and Dan Berrigan?

Could it be that Brennan is being honoured for his role in serving up fraudulent intelligence to “justify” attacking Iraq in 2003? Or is it perhaps his open advocacy of kidnapping Muslim clerics off the streets of Milan (he calls it “extraordinary rendition”) and rendering them to “friendly” intelligence services more practiced at torture techniques than the CIA?

Is it the secret prisons he favoured for “enhanced” interrogation techniques; or maybe his role in promoting illegal eavesdropping on Americans? Or could it be his stalwart defence of the intentional drone killing of American citizens without charge or judicial process? Or is it the aggregate set of abuses. And could intelligent Jesuits actually believe these approaches are okay because they are “keeping us safe?”

This would mean the teaching of moral theology at Fordham has changed markedly. Five decades ago, torture was very clearly put in the same category as slavery and rape — always “intrinsically evil” — no gray areas. I wonder where Fordham’s moral theologians now put remote-control drone killings of people on the hunch they are “militants.”

The causa of the honores could have a simpler explanation, one that risks damage to the mystique of Jesuit sophistication — no, not sophistry. Maybe the Fordham Jesuits and Trustees get their news from Fox. Perhaps their thought process was simply this: Brennan is a Fordham alumnus; he works in the White House; isn’t that enough?

Earlier Indignities

This is hardly the first time a Jesuit university has succumbed to the “prestige virus” and given a proven scoundrel high honors at a commencement. There are, sad to say, numerous examples, but one comes immediately to mind.

It is George W. Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who, according to ABC News, chaired White House deliberations in 2002 and 2003 at which CIA torture techniques were “almost choreographed” by the most senior national security officials. The objective was to determine which particular technique, or combination, might be most effectively applied to which “high-value detainee.”

Rice gave the commencement address at Boston College on May 22, 2006, and was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws (yes, George Orwell, that is ironic.).

An onlooker would be permitted the reasonable inference that one causa of the honores must be the promoting of torture that Rice and Brennan held in common. Maybe an objective history of the Inquisition, and the Jesuit role in it, was not included in the books available at Jesuit seminaries.

Or, worse still, maybe it is the case that ingrained habits — like jesuitically justifying torture — can apply for renewal after several centuries. Habits die slowly. Has torture and killing of innocents now entered some sort of grey area in moral theology because a Jesuit-trained, White House functionary now says these things are necessary to “keep us safe?”

O Tempora, O Morons!

It remains to be seen whether what happened when the hapless Jesuits of Boston College invited Rice turns out to be a harbinger of what is in store at Fordham next Saturday. Ten days before the commencement at BC, Steve Almond, adjunct professor of English, resigned in protest. Here are excerpts from his letter to BC’s president, Rev. William P. Leahy, S.J.:

“I am writing to resign … as a direct result of your decision to invite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be the commencement speaker at this year’s graduation.

“Many members of the faculty and student body already have voiced their objection to the invitation, arguing that Rice’s actions as secretary of state are inconsistent with the broader humanistic values of the university and the Catholic and Jesuit traditions from which those values derive.

“But I am not writing this letter simply because of an objection to the war against Iraq. My concern is more fundamental. Simply put, Rice is a liar. She has lied to the American people knowingly, repeatedly, often extravagantly over the past five years, in an effort to justify a pathologically misguided foreign policy.” Read more...

‘Indignants’ hold fresh rally in Spanish capital by PressTV 14 May 2012

Spaniards have once again staged a rally at the capital’s Puerta del Sol square to protest against the government’s harsh austerity measures.

The so-called Spanish "Indignados (Indignants)" held the demonstration in Madrid on Sunday after 18 people were arrested in the same area earlier in the morning.

The protesters, chanting, "We're not all here," are planning to stay at the square until May 15.

The development came a few hours after tens of thousands of protesters marked the first anniversary of the anti-austerity “Indignados” movement with mass protests throughout the country.

Spain has entered a deep recession for the second time since the global economic downturn in 2008, with unemployment now standing at almost 25 percent, which is the highest in the eurozone.

The Spanish government has planned to reduce its public deficit to 5.3 percent of gross domestic product in 2012 from 8.5 percent in 2011.

Madrid is adopting a fresh round of austerity measures, while experts fear that the country may soon require a Greece-style bailout. Read more...

Eurodämmerung
End of the Euro by Paul Krugman 13 May 2012

Some of us have been talking it over, and here’s what we think the end game looks like:

1. Greek euro exit, very possibly next month.

2. Huge withdrawals from Spanish and Italian banks, as depositors try to move their money to Germany.

3a. Maybe, just possibly, de facto controls, with banks forbidden to transfer deposits out of country and limits on cash withdrawals.

3b. Alternatively, or maybe in tandem, huge draws on ECB credit to keep the banks from collapsing.

4a. Germany has a choice. Accept huge indirect public claims on Italy and Spain, plus a drastic revision of strategy — basically, to give Spain in particular any hope you need both guarantees on its debt to hold borrowing costs down and a higher eurozone inflation target to make relative price adjustment possible; or:

4b. End of the euro.

And we’re talking about months, not years, for this to play out. Read more...

Indentured Servitude for Seniors: Social Security Garnished for Student Debts by Ellen Brown 13 May 2012

"Security program…represents our commitment as a society to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute."

-- President Jimmy Carter, December 20, 1977.

 [This law] assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made in troubled times a half century ago…[The Social Security Amendments of 1983 are] a monument to the spirit of compassion and commitment that unites us as a people.
-- President Ronald Reagan, April 20, 1983.

So said Presidents Carter and Regan, but that was before 1996, when Congress voted to allow federal agencies to offset portions of Social Security payments to collect debts owed to those agencies. (31 U.S.C. §3716). Now we read of horror stories like this:

I’m a 68 year old grandma of 2 young grandchildren. I went to college to upgrade my employment status in 1998 or 1999. I finished in 2000 and at that time had a student loan balance of about 3500.00.

Could not find a job and had to request forbearance to carry me. Over the years I forgot about the loan, dealt with poor health, had brain surgery in 2006 and the collection agents decided to collect for the loan in 2008.

At no time during the 6-7 year gap did anyone remind me or let me know that I could make a minimum payment on the loan. Now that I am on Social Security (have been since I was 62), they have decided to garnishee my SS check to the tune of 15%.

I have not been employed since 2004 and have the two dependents . . . . I don’t dispute that I owed them the $3500.00 but am wondering why they let it build up to somewhere around $17,000/20,000 before they attempted to collect.

Her debt went from $3500 to over $17,000 in 10 years?! How could that be? Read more...

Long Live 'Our' Gulf Bastards by Pepe Escobar 14 May 2012

Life is a golden gift from Allah if you're a certified member of the Gulf Counter-Revolution Club (GCC), also known as the Gulf Cooperation Council; Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates can torture, kill, repress and demonise their own subjects - in full confidence the "master" will let you get away with it.

Just as the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in power in Bahrain is vowing, publicly, to keep arresting, tear-gassing, raiding their homes, confiscating their jobs and forcing pro-democracy protesters to live in non-stop fear, Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa is being hosted in Washington by the Barack Obama administration.

Prince Salman - who Bahraini propaganda sells as a "moderate" - showed up at the US State Department side-by-side with Secretary of State Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton. Those who "die" are evil dictators of the Muammar Gaddafi variety; "our" bastards get to party in DC after being extended a red carpet welcome.

Is there any Arab Spring-related repression and killing going in Bahrain? According to Clinton, of course not; these are only "internal issues" - in her own words.

What this means in practice is that Clinton subscribes to the official narrative that the sectarianization of everything happening in Bahrain is to be blamed on the protesters - and not the al-Khalifas, who for a year now have been destroying Shi'ite mosques and investing on all-out demonisation of all things Shi'ite (blame it on "evil" Iran).

The al-Khalifas have been way wilier than President Bashar al-Assad in Syria; they have killed only an acceptable number of people. But why is Bahrain substantially "different" from Syria? Because "it hosts the US Navy's 5th Fleet, helping the US military project its might in the Gulf and contain Iran"; and that's not a neo-conservative talking, but Washington director of Human Rights Watch, Tom Malinowski.

A bunch of cowards
Here is Libya conqueror Clinton:

Bahrain is a valued ally of the United States. We partner on many important issues of mutual concern to each of our nations and to the regional and global concerns as well. I'm looking forward to a chance to talk over with His Royal Highness a number of the issues both internally and externally that Bahrain is dealing with and have some better understanding of the ongoing efforts that the government of Bahrain is undertaking. So again, His Royal Highness, welcome to the United States.

Here's a Bahraini government spokesman telling it like it is to Reuters only one day before the Clinton-Crown Prince schmooze:

We are looking into the perpetrators and people who use print, broadcast and social media to encourage illegal protest and violence around the country. If applying the law means tougher action, then so be it.

Translation: we will keep going on a rampage because the masters in Washington have our backs covered.

Not a word from the Obama administration on the arrest of top Bahraini human-rights activist Nabeel Rajab, who Amnesty International declared a "prisoner of conscience", as well as calling for his immediate release. Activist Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, for his part, has been on a hunger strike for three months, protesting his life imprisonment by the al-Khalifa regime.

R2P, "responsibility to protect", that oh so lovely doctrine espoused by the Three Graces - Clinton, US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and Special Assistant to Obama Samantha Power - does not apply to civilian protesters, the majority of them Shi'ites, in Bahrain. They have been yelling for their basic human rights - of which they don't have much - to be protected for over a year now. Read more...

The Palestinian Hunger Strike & Occupy Wall Street by Noam Chomsky

Occupy Wall Street "Has Created Something That Didn’t Really Exist" in U.S. — Solidarity

Colonised by Corporations by Chris Hedges 14 May 2012

In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centres of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed. “The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organising into politically effective groups,” he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonised. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans. The colonised are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalise corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalise dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.

A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process—Gamer’s “patron-client” networks. It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance to distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate power, to cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we must first recognise ourselves as colonial subjects. We must accept that we have no effective voice in the way we are governed. We must accept the hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of our political theatre, and we must destroy the corporate structure itself.

The danger the corporate state faces does not come from the poor. The poor, those Karl Marx dismissed as the Lumpenproletariat, do not mount revolutions, although they join them and often become cannon fodder. The real danger to the elite comes from déclassé intellectuals, those educated middle-class men and women who are barred by a calcified system from advancement. Artists without studios or theatres, teachers without classrooms, lawyers without clients, doctors without patients and journalists without newspapers descend economically. They become, as they mingle with the underclass, a bridge between the worlds of the elite and the oppressed. And they are the dynamite that triggers revolt.

This is why the Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite. What fosters revolution is not misery, but the gap between what people expect from their lives and what is offered. This is especially acute among the educated and the talented. They feel, with much justification, that they have been denied what they deserve. They set out to rectify this injustice. And the longer the injustice festers, the more radical they become. Read more...

Loving our servitude

Man's Almost Infinite Appetite For Distractions by Aldous Huxley

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

In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighbourhood movie theatre was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humour by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema.

In "Brave New World" non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. Read more...

Idiocy as WMD by Linh Dinh 14 May 2012

Borges writes, “dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.” As a preeminent mind, Borges rightly considers the mind to be a man’s greatest asset, for without mind, a man is nothing. The more oppressive a political system, then, the greater its assault on its subjects’ minds, for it’s not enough for any dictator, king or totalitarian system to oppress and exploit, but it must, and I mean must, make its people idiotic as well. Every wrongful bullet is preceded and accompanied, then followed up by a series of idiotic lies, but we’re so used to such a moronic diet by now, our trepanned intelligentsia don’t even squirm in their tenured chairs.

Sane men and women don’t consent to kill, rob and rape, much less be killed, robbed and raped, least of all to enrich their masters, and that’s why their minds must be molested as early and as much as possible. Hence our nonstop media brainwashing us from the cradle, literally, to the grave. Fixated by flickering boxes, even infants are now mind-conditioned to become scatterbrained idiots before they stagger into kindergarten, to begin a lifelong process of becoming docile and slogan-shouting Democrats and Republicans.

Yes, savages killed, but, like apes and monkeys, our ancestors, they mostly tried to intimidate and trash talk their way out of conflicts. There wasn’t a lot of murdering after the haka, frankly. They didn’t wipe out entire cities by defecating exploding metal from the sky, nor sit in a brightly lit and spic-and-span office stroking a joy stick to ejaculate missiles half a planet away. Drone hell fire for y’all, with sides of bank-sponsored debt slavery and austerity, plus an unlimited refill of American pop bullshit. Would you like a public suicide with that? No, sir, these savages need to take webcast courses from us sophisticates when it comes to genocide, or ecocide, or any other kind of cides you can think of. When it comes to pure, unadulterated savagery, these quaint brutes ain’t got shit on us plugged-in netizens chillaxin’ in that shiny upside down condo on da capital-punishment-for the-entire-world, y’all, hill.

You’d think that a government with absolute power would not bother with expensive parades and elaborately-staged rallies in stadia, as are routine in North Korea, but such is the importance of propaganda and mind-control. America has gone way beyond Kim Jong-Un and his Nuremberg-styled pageantry, however, because the Yankee Magical Show is relentlessly pumped into our minds via television and the internet, at home, in office or even as we’re walking down the street, so that we’re always swarmed by sexy sale pitches, soft and hard porn, asinine righteousness and imbecilic trivia. All day long, we can stuff ourselves with unlimited kitsch. Today’s urgent topic, “Sylvester Stalone Spotted in 16th Century Painting.” Yesterday’s, “Tom Cruise’s Daughter Gets Inked.” Imagine a triple-amputee Iraq vet or an unemployed mother, sitting in an about to be foreclosed home with unpaid bills scattered across her kitchen table, staring at such headlines. At 48, I’m old enough to remember when it wasn’t this overwhelmingly stupid, though the dumbing down of America will only accelerate as this cornered and bankrupt country becomes ever more vicious to its citizens and foreigners alike. Read more...