La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser Des Briques?, in English, “Can Dialectics Break Bricks?”, is a 1973 Situationist film produced by the French director René Viénet which explores the development of class conflict through revolutionary agitation against a backdrop of graphic kung-fu fighting.
The film uses 1972 martial arts film Crush by Tu Guangqi, which tells the story of anti-colonialist revolt in Korea during the period of Japanese occupation, for its visuals which has been dubbed over by the filmmakers in an attempt at détournement. The concept and motivation of this film was to adapt a “spectacular” film into a radical critique of cultural hegemony and thus into tools of subversive revolutionary ideals.
The Narrative is based upon a conflict between the proletarian and bureaucrats within state capitalism. The proletarians enlist their dialectics and radical subjectivity to fight their oppressors whilst the bureaucrats defend themselves using a combination of co-optation and violence. The film is noted for its humorous approach to this serious subject matter.
The film also contains many praising references to revolutionaries who thought and fought for the realisation of a post-capitalist world, including Marx, Bakunin, and Wilhelm Reich, as well as scathing criticism towards the French Communist Party, trade unionism and Maoism. Also Subplots dealing with issues of gender equality, alienation, Paris Commune, May 1968, and the Situationist themselves are riddled throughout the film.
There are many signs pointing to a false flag attack in Brussels on 3-22-16. Independent and alternative media, as usual, has been right on top of the story catching many of the usual oddities, lies and coincidences which are characteristic of false flags and are now piling on top of each other as they always do. And here’s another thing everyone should take note of; something we also observed during the Paris attacks on 11-13-15. As we saw in the Paris attacks, once again we’re seeing a “global” component to the “reaction” phase of the usual problem-reaction-solution dialectic employed by the controllers. Look for it. Problem at point A, subsequent “reaction” to the problem at point B, all the way on the other side of the world. This then leads to a “solution” that applies to both point A and B. This also serves to endorse the illusion that the bogeymen, in this case ISIS of course, involved in the Brussels attack are somehow everywhere at once.
One of the key purposes of this event, among other purposes like maintaining an excuse for U.S. military intervention in Syria, is to reinforce the need for a global police which is being sold as a “global solution” to a “global problem.” This global police state is a very clear agenda of the U.S., NATO and the U.N. This entire event is also designed to push the Authorization for Unlimited Military Force (AUMF) the Pentagon wants so badly and it’s a perfect quick and easy event in NATO’s and the European Union’s home turf to push for all of these goals at once. What am I talking about?
Following the Brussels “attacks,” which were immediately and deliberately linked to “ISIS,” we saw how in the city of Atlanta, Georgia halfway across the world, police were “on edge” and completely evacuated the Atlanta airport because of an unattended “package” they thought could be related or connected to the “ISIS” Brussels attacks. Though the whole thing turned out to be nothing at all, make no mistake this is part of the mass conditioning that comes with the entire quest for global police and perpetuation of the ISIS psyop. Even the officers involved in the airport evacuations I’m sure got caught up in the hysteria simply following protocol. Can you imagine how easy it would be for someone to purposely leave an unattended package just to extract the reaction, fear and hysteria from the masses while at the same time endorsing the idea of “global terrorism” and conditioning the masses to accept the idea of a need for a “global police.” One tiny fake package in Atlanta accomplishes all of this and more. And it wasn’t just Atlanta caught in the psyop, in Denver we saw “evacuations” as well:
Atlanta’s airport was briefly evacuated on Wednesday over a suspicious package while U.S. law enforcement agencies and travelers were on edge a day after deadly suicide bombings by Islamist militants rocked Brussels.
Passengers were ordered out of public areas of the domestic terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the United States’ busiest by passenger volume, but the site was quickly cleared and operations resumed, airport officials said.
Parts of Denver airport were also evacuated on Tuesday, hours after at least 31 people were killed and 271 wounded in attacks on Brussels airport and a rush-hour metro train, as airports across the United States tightened security.
As you can see, the hysteria wasn’t just in Atlanta. Notice the article doesn’t even bother to discuss what exactly happened in Denver. Was it also a “suspicious package” there? Was it a phone call from ISIS? Who cares, right? Because apparently the only thing that matters is that it’s part of the “reaction” phase; and the true answer is, this is part of the mass conditioning for the new world order’s global police state which is now being born with every ISIS “attack.”
Historic Mass Conditioning
So for the first time in human history an event at point A in one side of the world forces a Pavlov-style reaction at point B, on the opposite side of the world; even though the 2 events (in the organic reality) have no association with each other other than the conditioned response. The conditioning of the masses can be compared to Pavlov’s dog experiment. In the Pavlov dog salivation experiment, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was able to demonstrate that dogs can be conditioned to organically react a certain way by simply associating one artificial stimulus enough times with a natural stimulus. Eventually Pavlov demonstrated that you wouldn’t need the natural stimulus (food) to elicit the conditioned response (salivation) if you provide the artificial stimulus (a bell).
If you understand Pavlov’s classical conditioning then you should understand the mass conditioning of the masses going on right now via the mainstream media and politicians. The Brussels attacks is no different from the Paris “attacks” of November of 2015. Isn’t it a coincidence that less than a week ago the mainstream media brought back the Paris attack “story” as if to prepare the masses subconsciously for the upcoming Brussels attacks in Belgium? How about the fact the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan basically subliminally announced the upcoming attacks 4 days prior? Are we surprised given that Erdogan’s Turkey is right now the primary lifeline for ISIS purchasing their oil and supporting fighters with resources in the Turkey-Syrian border while blowing up Russian planes that interfere with that mission? This has all the markings of a mass psychological operation.
First of all, we don’t know who planted those explosives in the Brussels airport or subway system and we don’t know why or who told them to do it. With ISIS being credited, that alone is proof as far as I’m concerned that this is a state crime funded by NATO countries. We must all shed the myth that ISIS fighters are freely doing what they want, independent of the will of the states that created, funded, trained and armed them. Think about this. No one trains fighters only to let them go away and fight for someone else. Whoever trained these guys is still giving the orders or they wouldn’t have wasted their resources training these guys. Just like in the U.S. military, you wouldn’t train a Marine in boot camp, show them how to survive and offer weapons training only to watch them leave the Marines after boot camp and fight elsewhere. Yet this is precisely what Americans are asked to believe every day by the mainstream media. We’re told to believe these fighters just so happened to switch sides AFTER being trained to fight for the “Free Syrian Army.”
If it wasn’t that ISIS is a mercenary group employed by NATO countries, they’d be long gone by now. The only reason ISIS is still “alive” in our consciousness is because nations like Turkey, US, Israel and Saudi Arabia are keeping them alive both literally and figurative using their controlled media. ISIS is therefore alive because they (U.S., NATO and company) want and need them to be alive for political reasons. No ISIS means no Syria, no PNAC Middle East plan completion, no fear, no war on terror, no global police and no stripping away of individual rights, it’s that simple.
Incidentally the location of the explosions in Brussels Belgium is immensely convenient. There’s no question that the headquarters of NATO and the European Union would be a perfect place to execute and control a false flag like this. This is also the perfect false flag to quickly put together during this election year campaign hysteria pause. It likely took very little coordination and effort requiring a couple of explosives and a patsy or 2. Here’s the sequence as I see it: Boom! ISIS did it, lockdown airports in the U.S. due to an unattended package, goals and conditioning reinforced by media, back to election campaign with the candidates calling for “solution” to ISIS.
This is the part where ALL politicians running for president get to offer their “solution” to the same artificially created “problem.” In other words, this is a win-win for the ruling elite. And in this sense the Brussels attack is already part of the election campaign itself. Be on the look out for candidates endorsing ideas “global solutions” to ISIS.
Finally, I call on readers to observe how these false flags are getting easier and easier for them to do. I’m sure there was a time when a false flag attack like this took years to prepare (think 9/11). Now we are seeing quick attacks being strung together with minimal preparation, attacks which nonetheless have long-lasting implications for freedom, the rise of the global police, obtaining their AUMF license to kill, and obtaining all the excuses they need to justify U.S. aggression in Syria in hopes of forcibly removing their democratically elected president.
Remember practice makes perfect. So as they get better and more efficient at pulling these false flag attacks, let us get better and more efficient at diagnosing them and spreading the word. I believe both phenomenons are happening simultaneously. Hopefully, the ability of alternative and independent media to quickly diagnose these attacks by simply observing the process of problem-reaction-solution will help us turn a corner in changing minds at the highest level and thus effect much needed change sooner rather than later.
In a new article at Harper’s (“Legalize It All,” April 2016), Dan Baum recalls a 1994 confession by former Nixon domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichmann, about Nixon’s motives in first launching the War on Drugs. Baum, interviewing Ehrlichman for a book on drug prohibition, asked a “series of earnest, wonky questions, that he impatiently waved away”:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people…. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Judged by those objectives, Nixon’s War on Drugs and its subsequent dramatic escalation under Reagan have been resounding successes.
Many liberals, unfortunately, are prone to describing the War on Drugs as a “failure” — much as the Vietnam or Iraq War was “a mistake” — implicitly accepting the general goals of the American state as good and well-meaning, and merely unfortunate in their execution. The liberals who frame the wars in this way, as Noam Chomsky has argued, share the hawks’ view that “America owns the world” and has the right to define as a “threat” any country that defies its authority or attempts to undermine the global corporate order. And liberals and progressives are nauseatingly prone to referring to criminal foreign wars of aggression and domestic police wars on civil society as something “we” did.
But if you genuinely think the actions of the American state have anything to do with “we” or “us,” either you belong to the economic classes served by the state, or you probably still ask the dentist to save your extracted molars to put under your pillow.
Long before I saw Ehrlichman’s admission, I noted that the expanded War on Drugs against crack and meth under Reagan and Clinton had had a disruptive effect on two of the demographic groups (inner city black people and rural poor whites) that, as it happens, are least socialized to cheerfully accept direction from authority figures behind desks.
Going back to the passage of the Virginia Slave Code after the defeat of Bacon’s Rebellion, running through the use of racial divisions to split and defeat the southern tenant farmers’ unions, and right up to the present, the possibility of a strategic political alliance between poor black and white people has been one of the major fears of the propertied classes who control the American state.
So whether it be Nixon’s or Reagan’s War on Drugs, or the Clintons’ support for a Crime Bill (to “bring to heel” so-called black “super-predators”) that completed America’s growth into the largest carceral state in the world, the fact that a third of the urban black male population is in some phase of the “criminal justice” system and deprived of the franchise has had an enormous effect on radical political possibilities in this country. It has gone a long way towards nullifying the effects of the Voting Rights Act, in much the same way that Black Codes nullified the effects of Emancipation. Jeb Bush’s purge of 70,000 alleged “felons” — mostly not felons, but mostly black — from the Florida voting rolls was the main factor in handing the presidency to his brother.
I’m not, by the way, the kind of conspiracist who thinks every government policy fits into some larger, malign strategy that serves as the “real” motivation for all officials. I don’t doubt a great deal of legislation and executive action is intended as a good faith response to the stated concerns of policy-makers. Of course even such “well-meaning” policies are subject to the law of unintended consequences, mission creep, refusal to reassess in response to feedback on their effectiveness, and abusive or self-dealing execution by the bureaucracies tasked with enforcement.
But even when policies are sincerely “well-meaning,” they still tend to serve vested interests through a sort of structural “invisible hand” effect. The “well-meaning” policies that get passed are those that structurally benefit the economic ruling class, and those that get repealed are those that no longer do so.
The state does not represent “us,” and the destructive and genocidal effects of its policies are not “mistakes.”
Editor’s note: Today marks the birthday of artist Mark Lombardi (born in 1951) and is also the day after the 16th anniversary of his suicide or murder. To learn more about Lombardi’s life, art and the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death, please take a moment to listen to the Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast and/or read the transcript.
A story of banking, organized crime, intelligence, petrodollars and politics…all seen through the lens of innovative Art.
Patricia Goldstone’s INTERLOCKis the first biography to explore the life and suspicious death of Mark Lombardi, a controversial artist whose drawings walked the line between art and information — and revealed the incestous connections between banking, organized crime, politicians, the FBI and the CIA.
His work highlighted such subjects as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the Iran-Contra affair, the World Finance Corporation, and the relationship between George W. Bush and Harken Energy Corporation. The mystery of Lombardi’s alleged suicide has yet to be resolved. On March 22, 2000, he was found hanged. Friends find it suspicious because Lombardi was on the the cusp of achieving the recognition that would crown his career.
Goldstone talks to WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about the full scope of Lombardi’s life and work.
For a look at some of Lombardi’s dangerously revealing and possibly fatal work, go here, and here.
JEFF SCHECHTMAN: Welcome back to radio who-what-why. I’m Jeff Schechtman. In March of 2000 the acclaimed conceptual artist, Mark Lombardi, was found hanged in his New York apartment. It was ruled a suicide but Mark Lombardi was no ordinary artist. His work, ‘Interlocks’ as they were called, art was also information shining light on the Vatican, the Mafia, the Bushes, international financiers, and the CIA. In the words of his biographer Patricia Goldstone, his death transformed itself into the ultimate piece of conceptual art. In fact, after his death, Lombardi’s work drew the attention of the most influential art museums in the world as well as the FBI and the CIA. Patricia Goldstone has been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a bureau chief for Cablevision. She has written for the Washington Post, Maclean’s and The Economist Intelligence Unit. She’s an award-winning playwright and she’s just completed Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi. It is my pleasure to welcome Patricia Goldstone here to radio who-what-why.
PATRICIA GOLDSTONE: Thank you for having me on the show.
JEFF S.: Great to have you here. First of all, who was Mark Lombardi? It’s not a name that a lot of people instantly recognize.
PATRICIA G.: That’s quite true. Mark was a conceptual artist, as you said, which means he essentially drew ideas and not water lilies. Some people considered him to be the first great artist of the 21st century. He is unique in the art world because he used interlocks to create his art. Now interlocks are basically a form of flowchart tracing overly cozy relationships between boards of directors. And they’re common in accounting and in some forms of litigation, but they’re very, very unusual in the art world. Mark used interlocks to draw what amounts to a continual visual history of the interconnections between intelligence and organized crime and corporations and governments in the shadow banking industry that we’ve heard so much about since 2007. He was particularly fascinated in tracing things like money laundering and tax evasion. He was actually way ahead of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in releasing a very wide swath of extremely uncomfortable information to the public. What he created was a form of visual wiki-leaks. His own life is actually the missing strand and several of the shadowy visual narratives that make up his work. He died, as you said, a very mysterious death.
JEFF S.: Talk little bit about how Mark first got interested in the shadowy world that he would come to depict in all of these interlocks.
PATRICIA G.: Well, Mark’s research skills were well known in the Houston art world which was very progressive in its politics, at least at that time, through major patrons like the de Menils, who were the heirs to the Schlumberger fortune and the owners of the world-famous de Menil collection and the Rothko Chapel where Mark was married. Sissy Farenthold, a very prominent Texas politician who once ran for president of the United States, was on the board of the Rothko Chapel and she met Mark at a gathering around 1986. Farenthold introduced Mark to an informal investigative salon of young people, in her words, who included a number of lawyers and investigative journalists and prosecutors etc. She also introduced him to Bill White who was changing our Bath former business partner. White was engaged in a long-running series of lawsuits at the time so that the group was digging into interconnections of the Texas Savings and Loan scandals and the Iran Contra funding network. So Mark was tasked to draw out these interconnections in a readable way.
JEFF S.: To what extent was Lombardi simply creating this conceptual art, creating these interlocks from what was the assumed knowledge of the time, as opposed to doing additional work, additional research, to try and find connections that didn’t exist out there, in the popular press for example?
PATRICIA G.: That’s a very good question. Mark was actually very methodical and systematic. He worked very much like the way a historian works. He learned about the flow of hot money largely through published material by well-respected academics and journals. His library, which I ran through in the course of researching the book, consisted of hundreds of books on the financial debacle he drew, which he rigorously boiled down to bullet points of essentially academically and dictated information which he compiled in thousands of 3 x 5 index cards. He would arrange these in a narrative design on the floor next to the drawing he was composing, much like a film director uses a storyboard. But as I explained in the book, at that time he was given a very large stash of internal memos and other primary documents by one of the participants in the scandals. These are documents that were never previously published and would be a prize of any serious historian. At the time I discovered that he was taught how to do interlocks by the lawyer who deposed Richard Shelby who was one of the major middlemen in the Iran Contra scandal and in DCI. So his research was quite professionally grounded,
JEFF S.: Who was it that originally recruited Mark to really start doing this political work in Houston?
PATRICIA G.: Well, I would say it was Farenthold. And you know, he was already rather motivated personally to do it according to a note I found in his files which was apparently written by him. He had a personal run in with the Bushes and it was hard to put this story together because nobody really wanted to talk about it, not even Mark. But according to what I pieced together, Mark moved down to Houston straight out of Syracuse University to work as a curator at the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, which was a very important job for such a young man. He was hired to do that by Jim Harithas who was the director of the museum and Mark’s college teacher and mentor. And from what I understood from a number of sources under pressure from the board, Harithas terminated him after a famous impromtu bread fight at a major art opening which turned into a major brawl when certain of the eminent guests, who were perhaps inflamed by alcohol, the naughty nature of the proceedings started ripping apart the installation and throwing it around. And a couple of unidentified artists sailed into the melee and started punching up the guests. Now Mark never spoke about this incident again and in fact his ex-wife told me that as the reason for his firing was introduced into a conversation he would actually get up and leave the room. But in his personal files I found this note which looks like it was written by him and it reads “In the late 1970s,” – which is when this incident occurred – “I was working as an organizer of art exhibitions in the Houston area. First International Bank, which was George HW Bush’s bank, barged into the scene at about this time effectively vetoing my participation in a large number of projects.” And Mark said in this note, which is an addendum to the journalism that he was attempting, that he embarked on his research as a form of revenge.
JEFF S.: Was there anybody specifically, a specific individual that he had had a run-in with from the Bush family that really precipitated this?
PATRICIA G.: No, again, this is shared conjecture on my part. From the way the note is put together, from the sounds of this, the Bushes might’ve been present at this gathering.
JEFF S.: What happened to all of Mark’s file cards after his death?
PATRICIA G.: Well, all of them is kind of a subjective number. Because I was told by one major collector of his work that there were as many as 40,000 file cards. And this collector had access to his studio. But what is archived at the Museum of Modern Art in Long Island, the number is about 14,000 cards, a considerably smaller number and when I went to use the cards, all but four on the financial activities of the Bushes, on whom he focused much of his attention, were missing. That really did strike me as extremely odd. I asked the chief archivist if they had archived the Bush material elsewhere, if I had missed it, and she couldn’t answer the question. She referred me to the security department instead.
JEFF S.: To what extent was his interest in these things driven by a desire to continue to uncover new stuff or really to continue to uncover new areas to expand his art and create more interesting interlocks essentially?
PATRICIA G.: I think that Mark was primarily an artist. I think in many ways he can be considered the heir to Marcel Duchamp who was the founder of Dada, one of the most important of the early 20th century art movements. Now Duchamp created his revolutionary art out of ordinary objects like the famous Urinal. Mark took another kind of ordinary object, the interlock, and he used it to pursue that to produce his main track of thought: how the political influence that he was essentially tracing took shape in flows of hot money. And those flows continually expanded and pooled together over the period of years that he was tracing them. So yes, he was constantly expanding his artwork. In fact, he linked all of his drawings together to form one continual drawing he called ‘the one continual drawing in my head’.
JEFF S.: To what degree did accuracy matter to Mark?
PATRICIA G.: A great deal. A great deal, as I said. He worked like a historian and the file cards are amazing because they are very much like what an academic would use in compiling the bibliography and index of a 600- page work. So I think he was very, very scrupulous in his research and he relied on primarily unpublished material but by academics and journalists.
JEFF S.: How was he seen in the art world, his early work, and as his work progressed?
PATRICIA G: He was a late bloomer. He turned out his initial body of work at white-hot speed in the mid 1990s when he was already in his 40s. And he garnered quite a bit of attention with this one body of drawings. He had a solo exhibit in Houston. And the amazing thing about these drawings was that they answered a lot of the questions that John Kerry’s Senate Investigating Committee on BCCI which was winding down at about the same time that Mark was turning out his work, he answered questions that if you read the Kerry committee report they said they didn’t have the time or the resources to pursue. And he was this artist sitting on the floor of a tiny studio in Houston pursuing them.
JEFF S.: How did the subjects of these pieces of art, those that he really reflected in this interlocking aspect of crime and as you say, ‘hot money’, how did they react to what he was doing?
PATRICIA G.: Well, with some discomfort, as you might expect. I was told a story by one of my interviews that one of Neil Bush’s friends came to Mark’s first solo show in Houston and he was looking at a painting on the wall. It was the Silverado painting in which Neil figures and he remarked to someone “Well, I’m going to have to tell Neil that he is represented here.”
JEFF S.: Talk a little bit about the evolution of his work. How did it progress? How were some his later works and later interlocks different from the early ones?
PATRICIA G.: Well, the work became much more complex as he progressed because it all interconnected. So the genesis of his work really was a huge bank called BCCI that some people may not remember. It was a bank that billed itself as Bank of America for the Third World but in fact it was the CIA’s first global money laundry and BCCI was very connected to the subprime crises of the 1970s and 1980s and it was officially closed down in the 1990s. But Mark really developed all of his drawings from his initial two boxes of research into BCCI and ended up in this immense continuum of drawings that makes up his work tracing the genesis of BCCI all the way back to a trove of stolen World War II plunder.
JEFF S.: Talk about the FBI and the CIA and their interest in Mark’s work.
PATRICIA G.: Well, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Defense and the Office of Naval Research actually all had to study Mark’s work in the wake of 9/11 which wasn’t really made public until my book came out. They were looking for clues for two terrorist social networks. That’s a subject Mark covered in some of his drawings and also for traffic analysis tools which is kind of a funny story because although the NSA, which also studied Mark’s work, may be very good at collecting data on all of us but are not terrific in analyzing it. And when they feed it into a main computer, the visualization tends to come out looking like what they call ‘house of spagetti’. But Mark’s work is actually used in the computer science world to study traffic analysis because he spaced his players in a particular way that makes them very easy to read and sort of aesthetically pleasing and directs the eye in certain ways.
JEFF S.: Tell us a little bit about Mark’s personality . What was he like?
PATRICIA G.: He was a fascinating person. He was a workingclass guy from Syracuse, New York, who had nothing more than a bachelors in fine arts. And he was intensely ambitious, untrained in finance or anything like that but very, very quick intuitively. And his talent as an artist was to be able to apprehend a lot of visual information all at once and to get at the big picture that lies below the surface of things. I suppose many people would call him obsessive. People have tended to use Aspergers as an explanation for his ability to focus very intensely for a very long period of time. I don’t think that that is quite fair or true. Mark was very charming, very funny, exuberant, impish, intensely attractive to women, and very good socially when he wanted to be. And very good verbally. He was a shrewd communicator and a cunning player of the art game who never quite revealed what he was really up to. I mean nobody in the art world, for example, had a clue that he had actually created his work out of interlocks.
JEFF S.: Talk about what happened in March of 2000.
PATRICIA G.: Mark was in the process of opening a very important show at one of the iconic exhibition spaces in New York and everything seemed to be going beautifully for him. He was getting attention, he was getting a great deal of critical acclaim that people were lining up to buy his work, he was making money which had always been an issue for him. His personal life was a bit rocky but that was not unusual. He had recently broken up with a girlfriend depending on whom you talk to and I heard many, many different renditions of this story and in the course of interviewing over 80 people who knew him for over a 50 year period. Depending on whom you talk to he was either happy about that or unhappy about that but he was certainly seeing other women at the time. So he had had a suspicious flood in his studio about three weeks before the show opened. His masterwork, which was the third version of his BCCI series, was very badly water damaged, and this drawing is remarkable because he actually strung all of his previous drawings together on a series of timelines so that you can see exactly how all the scandals from the 1970s onwards sort of add up to this one huge scandal which is BCCI. That painting was almost, almost destroyed but it does remain readable today. So Mark re-created it in a mad workspace. He reconstructed the whole drawing in the space of about four days and some people say that the strain of doing that drove him into a suicidal depression. I don’t quite buy that because he did open the show very successfully with the drawing that he had re-created and people told me that he was quite happy with that drawing. Regardless, about three weeks later he was found hanged in his studio. And the police reports which I got hold of in the beginning of my research, were rather sketchy. A lot of things didn’t ring true. The time of death was never established, for one. Establishing death by hanging is a controversial area of forensic pathology, and the police based their very hasty verdict of death by suicide on the testimony of one witness who appeared increasingly unreliable during the interview process. I actually did track down the two cops who found him , one of whom was a rookie at the time, still very disturbed by the experience. He was a policeman who actually pushed open the transom which is how they got into Mark’s studio and there was Mark staring him straight in the face because he didn’t hang from a sprinkler pipe and he had an open bottle of champagne suspended beside him. Till today I have never really seen anyone take a drink on the way out.
JEFF S.: Talk about the flood. What is it that made it suspicious? What do we know about that?
PATRICIA G.: Well, it was a sprinkler flood. And a lot of rumor and conjecture exist in the art world about Mark’s suicide/death/murder. But one artist told me what sounded like a rather implausible story that he had tried to hang himself earlier, at the time of this flood from one of the sprinkler pipes, and that his weight is what broke the pipe and that’s what caused the flood. That’s actually very difficult for that kind of a factor to trigger a flood. I mean sprinkler pipes go off because of fire or they can go off because of a sharp blow applied to a pipe from an upstairs apartment to the gage, to the gage on the pipe line or to apply heat to that gage, that can trigger a flood in the downstairs apartment but someone hanging himself, no, not very likely.
JEFF S.: Talk a little bit about whether or not there was any history of depression or mental illness or anything else with respect to him.
PATRICIA G.: No, there was no critical history of depression. In retrospect certain members of Mark’s family told me that they felt he was depressed. However, his mother, who was really the closest person to call me before she died – she died in 2012 – she told me that she had talked to him a couple of days before he was found and he said he was absolutely jubilant at the success his work had brought him and at the prospect of moving in with his girlfriend. So, you know, a lot of this doesn’t compute.
JEFF S.: The police report after his death, and all the investigation was, as you talk about it, a bit sketchy. Talk about that and was that normal at the time in terms of police procedure or was that unusual?
PATRICIA G.: Well, the circumstances surrounding his death were really quite strange. He had no clinical history of depression and his mother to whom he was closest and to whom he spoke almost daily, told me that he had told her that he was actually very happy a couple of weeks, a couple of days rather, before he died. And I believe that because Mark was quite single-mindedly ambitious and he was getting the success that he had worked for, for decades by this time, to achieve. He may have been unhappy at the breakup of a relationship but he was extremely attractive to women and extremely attracted to women, and in fact he was seeing somebody else at the time. So I actually began my research by getting hold of the police report through a friend of mine in the homicide division in New York, and there were a lot of things that didn’t ring quite true. A time of death was never established for one thing and that’s very important in this kind of investigation and standard procedure and establishing death by hanging is a controversial area in forensic pathology. That and the fact that the police based their very hasty verdict of death by suicide to close the case today on the testimony of one witness who appeared increasingly unreliable during the interview process. I actually ended up tracking down the two cops who found him. One of them who was a rooky at the time and showed signs of doubt; that and the other pillar, that there are other pillars of evidence which was the absence of signs of struggle and the fact that the door was securely locked from the inside are also questionable as I explained in my book. But the exact nature of what’s in the drawing which can cause any number of people to want him dead.
JEFF S.: Is there anything in the drawings, all of them, that was what we would classify, I suppose, is original material? One of the things you’ve talked about is that in many ways he worked based upon academic reports, in journalism, and in all the material that he could get his hands on, and he was graded at bringing all of this together in these interlocks. But was there anything in this material that was revealing of anything that hadn’t been revealed anywhere else?
PATRICIA G.: Well, I did find in his files a large cache of internal memos and other primary documents from James R Bath Company Highway and some of these connections come up in in the George W. Bush Harken Energy Jackson Stevens drawing which was of interest to the FBI after Mark’s death.
JEFF S.: Did the FBI ever do anything with any of that to your knowledge?
PATRICIA G.: Well, it might be known that the FBI went to the Whitney after Mark died to look at one of his big BCCI drawings but the FBI was really interested in the relationship between how bin Mahfouz was anchored to the Saudi Royals and certain Islamic charities in Virginia that were allegedly funding Al Qaeda and that the FBI ended up raiding in 2002. And there are some clues to those interconnections in the Lombardi and the George W. Bush Harken Energy Jackson Stephens drawing which focuses on Bush’s oil companies. Now bin Mahfouz allegedly bankrolled Arbusto which was one of George W. Bush’s companies through James Bath who represented Saudi business interests in America; and one of the documents I did find in Mark’s files was a copy of the 1976 trust agreement between James Bath and Salem bin Laden who was Osama’s older brother and died in a crash a few years later. bin Mahfouz was also allegedly the real owner of that aircraft leasing company Skyways. Now interestingly, bin Mahfouz himself doesn’t actually appear in this drawing. However, Salem bin Laden and also Abdullah Taka Bakhsh who was a major Harken shareholder and CEO of a Halliburton subsidiary who had close ties to bin Mahfouz does appear as a central hub or connection along with James Bath and so does Fox’s representative on the Harken board, an influential business name, who opened the 2000 Republican national convention with the Muslim benediction on Bush’s behalf and later successfully protested the FBI raid on the Virginia charities in a private meeting with Bush’s treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill.
JEFF S.: If not suicide, where does your speculation, or where can speculation lead in terms of the cause of Mark’s death?
PATRICIA G.: Well, I have to point out that Mark was actually pretty equal opportunity in his finger-pointing. He did focus a lot of attention on the Bushes for the reasons I go into in the book and he did die during the presidential election in which at least one of his drawings might have had an impact. That he did a number of important drawings that focused attention on the Clintons and knowing a little group of Indonesians and the Riady family who were the sources of Chinese influence peddling during the Clinton administration. Also Mark Rich who is famously connected to the Clintons was one of the key middlemen that hooked Mark’s drawings together as is Jackson Stephens who funded both the Bush and the Clinton campaign, so you know overall Mark was really more like a social scientist and political partisan and that I believed his overwhelming interest was in getting this whole financial system done on paper for everyone to see. And in fact, he had reportedly been threatened in the late 1990s. He got a call from someone telling him to back off investigating the five major New York Times families who were the subject of a preparatory sketch he had been working on. He mentioned it to a Williamsburg publication and it was repeated after his death by a German freelance journalist. So there are a lot of names in these drawings. One of them told me that he wouldn’t know a Lombardi drawing from a Mona Lisa.
JEFF S.: In the material that you’ve uncovered since in your investigation and your work on this, does it lead anyplace in particular?
PATRICIA G.: Well, you know I have to be careful to point out that I don’t have anything like the smoking gun, that I don’t have the power to pin people and I have many, many different stories from almost everyone I talked to on this subject. But the heft of circumstantial evidence makes me feel that at the minimum a lot more questions should have been asked at the time of his death.
JEFF S.: And is your conclusion that didn’t really suicide just seem the most unlikely scenario?
PATRICIA G.: Well, it’s not my impression of Mark as a human being. He was tremendously vital and totally committed to his work. They said he was getting where he wanted to go and he was quite ebullient really, as a person, very high energy. Now of course, you know, I didn’t know the man and it’s always possible for certain personality types to be very volatile and from what people told me he was particularly, when he had been drinking, but no, it doesn’t stack up with where he was going in his life at the time. Because he was really on the verge of very major success.
JEFF S.: Is there any evidence that he was on to something or that he had made a connection, or that his research had taken him somewhere that was new and heretofore undiscovered?
PATRICIA G.: Well, that’s an interesting question. One of his drawings, one of his late drawings is called George
Bush Harken Energy Jackson Stephens and the drawing focuses on relationships that apparently – my source for this was a rather particular intelligence newsletter that came out in March of 2000 - said that the Bush campaign might run into trouble over the Bush relationship with Khaled bin Mahfouz who was anchored to the Saudi royals and very much a presence in Houston. This drawing that Mark had done focused on that relationship.
JEFF S.: What was the interest like in his work after his death?
PATRICIA G.: Well, his prices took off, certainly. One of his larger drawings recently went up for sale at one of the most prominent art galleries in the country priced at $450,000. He’s been quite avidly collected. The Whitney has a major holding of his works, the Museum of Modern Art has a major holding of his work. A number of eminent computer scientists collect his works. There’s Robert in Germany who I think owns four of the drawings. Robert, whom I interviewed, is engaged in trying to convert Mark’s drawings into hypertext, stringtext, which means you click on the name and it pulls up the whole history. Through the drawings of the problems he told me he had had in completing this, was that some of the drawings are not available to view because they are in private collections.
JEFF S.: is there any work that disappeared after his death that anybody is aware of?
PATRICIA G.: The George Bush Harken Energy drawing did migrate to Germany for quite a number of years but it’s back in the United States now. Some people that I interviewed said they felt that drawings had disappeared from his studio but his studio was not actually very well secured. But it’s after his death and impossible to substantiate that.
JEFF S.: Patricia Goldstone: the book is Interlock: Art,Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi. Patricia, thanks so much for spending time with us here on radio who-what-why.
PATRICIA: Oh, thank you for having me on the show.
JEFF S.: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on radio who-what-why. I hope you’ll join us next week for another radio who-what-why podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share it and help other people find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to who-what-why.org/donate
The more we challenge the status quo, the more those with power attack us. Fortunately, social change is not a popularity contest.
Activism is a path to healing from trauma. It’s taking back our power to protect ourselves and our future.
From a spoken-word presentation in Victoria BC, 2009
Thank you for the opportunity to launch my speaking career. Some of you may know me as a writer and an advocate for social and environmental justice. Others may know me as a cat-sitter, odd-jobber, and temp slave. (Laughter)
I knew when I started out as an activist that I would never be a millionaire and I was right. But I have a certain freedom and flexibility that your average millionaire might envy.
The market demand for social justice advocates is huge right now. It’s a growth industry. And the job security is fantastic – there is no shortage of urgent issues demanding our attention. Experience is not necessary, people come to activism at every age and stage in their lives. It’s that easy!
OK, it’s not actually that easy. (Laughter) But it is a fascinating time to be a “radical.”
There is a great tradition of courage and action here on Vancouver Island. There is potential for even greater future action, so we are doing everything we can to nurture that potential. Building community, linking up networks, teaching, learning, coming together, healing – this is all part of the movement.
For most of my adult life, I suffered from social phobia. I was afraid of authority, filled with self-doubt, paralyzed by anxiety. Getting interviewed live on national TV doesn’t make that go away. But hiding under the covers doesn’t cure it either. So my insecurities and I just have to get out there and do our best.
What compels me is the knowledge that we’re rewriting the script – the one that says, “You don’t make a difference. It is what it is, you can’t fight city hall, the big guys always win.” We can remember that we are not powerless. And when we choose to stand up, it is a huge adrenaline rush – bigger than national TV or swinging from a tree top. That’s the reward – that flood of excitement that comes from taking back our power and using it effectively, for the collective good.
It helps to get love letters from friends and strangers who want to thank me for standing up for what’s important, and who get inspired to take action themselves.
But it’s not all warm fuzzies and celebratory toasts. We face backlash and punishment and threats to our lives and safety.
I led a workshop for new activists this year, and I asked them, “Who are your heroes?”
They named a dozen. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Tommy Douglas. Rosa Parks. These folks led amazing, heroic movements, but our discussion focused on the ferocious backlash they faced. British media reports on Gandhi when he was challenging the monarchy had the same tone as white Southerners responding to Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus. It was vicious. “Uppity and no-good” were some of the polite terms. They were targeted with hate speech and death threats. We hear the same now about whistleblowers. And feminists and environmentalists. It can be terrifying.
The more we challenge the status quo, the more the entrenched powers attack us. The more effective we are, the more they attack us. As Gandhi said: “First the ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”
The fight for justice and liberation won’t be won by popularity contests.
Every campaigner finds their own way of dealing with the counter-attacks. Some laugh it off. Some pray, some cry on their friends’ shoulders. Some go on the counter-offensive, some compose songs, some write long academic papers deconstructing their opponents’ logic. The important thing is, they deal with it, and they don’t give up.
We take care of each other as a community. Because we are all so fragile. Because there is so much trauma and despair everywhere and it affects everyone. But inside that despair, in all of us, there is a solid core of love for the earth and the knowledge that we can act in self-defense. That’s where we find strength.
It’s humbling to note that the economic downturn has done more to preserve habitat and stop climate change than all of our conservation efforts of the past years combined. We take responsibility for recycling and turning down the thermostat, but who is responsible for the scale of destruction from the Tar Sands? That project is the equivalent of burning all of Vancouver Island to the ground. It negates everything we could hope to do as individuals to fight climate change.
How do we deal with that horrible reality? I couldn’t, for the first year of the campaign. I didn’t want to look at the pictures and hear the news stories about the water and air pollution and the rates of illness among the Lubicon Cree people. The scale and the horror of it were too great.
I’ve worked on toxics campaigns and I dread them. Old-growth campaigns are inspiring, because where the action is, the forest is still standing – it’s beautiful and magical and we’re defending nature’s cathedral from the bulldozers and chainsaws. The good earth is here, and the evil destructive forces are over there. It’s clearcut, so to speak. But when a toxics campaign is underway, the damage has been done. The landscape is poisoned and people have cancer and spontaneous abortions, and the birds, the fish, the animals, are dead and dying. It is a scene of despair.
If it sounds traumatizing, it is. And we are all traumatized.
Look at this landscape – concrete, pavement, bricks and mortar, toxic chemicals, but underneath, the earth is still there. We have whole ecosystems slashed and burned without so much as a by-your-leave. We’ve lost whole communities of spruce, marmots, murrelets, arbutus, sea otters, and geoducks. These are terrible losses.
And we humans suffer on every level. Is there anyone here who doesn’t know someone who’s had cancer? Who hasn’t seen the damage caused by diseases of civilization? Who here hasn’t been forced to do without for lack of money? Are there any women here who have never been sexually harassed or raped or assaulted?
(Silence)
Something fundamental has been taken from us here. How do we deal with these losses?
I consider myself fortunate because after a lifetime of abuse from my family and male partners, I participated in six months of Trauma Recovery and Empowerment at the Battered Women’s Support Centre in Vancouver.
And I got to know the stages of trauma recovery:
Acknowledge the loss, understand the loss, grieve the loss.
And the stages of grief:
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
These steps are a natural and necessary response to the loss of a loved one, and also to the loss of our humanity and the places we love.
There are people living in national sacrifice zones, people who burn with determination to make change. They are angry, and they have a right to be. I am angry because I’m not dead inside, in spite of all they’ve done to me. Anger is part of the process of grief, and it’s useful. It grabs us by the heart when people are hurting the ones we love.
For me, part of the process is taking action – rejecting helplessness and taking back power. Stopping the bleeding and comforting the wounded.
I fall in love with places and I want to protect them. I fell in love with the Elaho Valley and some of the world’s biggest Douglas Firs in 1997. That forest campaign was a pitched battle, far from the urban centers, against one of the biggest logging companies on the coast at that time.
In the third year of the campaign, I walked into my favourite campsite shaded by majestic cedars. I saw the flagging tape and the clearcut boundaries laid out, and I realized it was all doomed. I could see the end result in my mind’s eye: stumps and slash piles as far as the eye could see, muddy wrecked creeks, a smoldering ruin.
I realized no one was going to come and save this place – not Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, no MP’s private member’s bill, or whatever petition or rally was being planned back in the city. It was as good as gone. All we had to do was stand aside and do nothing, and this incredible, irreplaceable forest would be just a sad memory.
But after that realization, and after the despair that followed, I had a profound sense of liberation. If it is all doomed, then anything we do to resist is positive, right? Anything that stops the logging, even for a minute, or slows it down, or costs the company money, or exposes it to public embarrassment and hurts its market share, is positive – it keeps the future alive for that one more minute, one more hour, one more day. It was a revelation.
Acceptance, for me, meant being able to act to defend the place I loved. It meant standing up to the bullies and refusing to let them take anything more from me.
In the third year of the Elaho campaign, it was just a handful of people rebuilding the blockades, defying the court orders and continuing the resistance. We didn’t quit when the police came, or when we were called “terrorists” and “enemies of BC.” We didn’t quit even after 100 loggers came and burned our camp to the ground and put three people in the hospital.
The attack was a horror show. People were in shock. But a crew was back with a new camp five days later. By then, the raid was national news. And our enemies had nothing left to throw at us. The loggers didn’t know what to do next. Short of killing us, what more could they do?
We had called their bluff.
We didn’t know about the negotiations going on behind the scenes. We didn’t realize that we had already cost the loggers more than they could hope to recoup by logging the entire rest of the valley. (They were operating on very slim profit margins.) We found out when the announcement came that the logging would stop. And it never started again. We won. Now the Elaho Valley is protected by the Squamish Nation — and by provincial legislation — as a Wild Spirit Place.
The violence of the mob showed the level of fear and desperation of the losing side. It was their weapon of last resort and it didn’t work. And they lost.
In the fourth year of the stand for SPAET – the campaign to stop the development and protect the caves, the garry oaks, and the wetlands on Skirt Mountain – we faced the same tactics. We were called “terrorists,” and in 2007, the developers sent 100 goons to rough up people at a small rally. And again, most of our comrades are still in shock. There’s only a handful of us still bashing away at the next phase of development.
We are winning. The other side has thrown everything they have at us and they have nothing left.
There are still sacred sites on SPAET. The cave is still there, buried under concrete.
Meanwhile, the developer’s little empire fell apart, either because of our boycott campaign, bad karma, or because it was operating on the slimmest of shady margins. We took the next phase of development to court. Our campaign, and the economic downturn, turned out to be enough to scare off investors and cancel the project, at least for now.
This work is difficult, painful, and traumatic. So the first step to courage is to acknowledge that pain and loss. We need to name what has been taken from us. Then we can cry, and rage, and grieve. We can name the ones who are doing the damage. We can reach down inside and find our core strength and our truth, and use it. That’s where courage comes from.
Martin Luther King said, “Justice shall roll down like waters, righteousness like a mighty stream.” But I’m impatient. I want to see that mighty stream now – what’s the hold-up? What’s holding us back, when there’s so much to do?
We’re not heroes, actually – none of us is smart enough, or tough enough, or connected enough, to take this on alone. We don’t have superpowers. We are only human, we struggle and suffer and sometimes, we win.
Some folks assume I have some vision, some over-arching game plan, some magic power that gives me an edge. Nope. Most of the time I am just flailing around on the political landscape, taking potshots when I see an opening. Sometimes it’s intuition, and it pays off. When we are right, it is amazing. When we win, it sets a precedent for the future.
In order for evil to prevail, all that’s required is for good people to do nothing. Don’t be one of those good people.
Activism is part of the healing. It’s taking action to protect ourselves and our future.
Thank you for the opportunity to tell these stories today.
Critics have long questioned why violent intervention was necessary in Libya. Hillary Clinton’s recently published emails confirm that it was less about protecting the people from a dictator than about money, banking, and preventing African economic sovereignty.
The brief visit of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya in October 2011 was referred to by the media as a “victory lap.” “We came, we saw, he died!” she crowed in a CBS video interview on hearing of the capture and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi.
But the victory lap, write Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the New York Times, was premature. Libya was relegated to the back burner by the State Department, “as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.”
US-NATO intervention was allegedly undertaken on humanitarian grounds, after reports of mass atrocities; but human rights organizations questioned the claims after finding a lack of evidence. Today, however, verifiable atrocities are occurring. As Dan Kovalik wrote in the Huffington Post, “the human rights situation in Libya is a disaster, as ‘thousands of detainees [including children] languish in prisons without proper judicial review,’ and ‘kidnappings and targeted killings are rampant’.”
Before 2011, Libya had achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had arisen under Qaddafi from one of the poorest of countries to the richest in Africa. Education and medical treatment were free; having a home was considered a human right; and Libyans participated in an original system of local democracy. The country boasted the world’s largest irrigation system, the Great Man-made River project, which brought water from the desert to the cities and coastal areas; and Qaddafi was embarking on a program to spread this model throughout Africa.
But that was before US-NATO forces bombed the irrigation system and wreaked havoc on the country. Today the situation is so dire that President Obama has asked his advisors to draw up options including a new military front in Libya, and the Defense Department is reportedly standing ready with “the full spectrum of military operations required.”
The Secretary of State’s victory lap was indeed premature, if what we’re talking about is the officially stated goal of humanitarian intervention. But her newly-released emails reveal another agenda behind the Libyan war; and this one, it seems, was achieved.
Mission Accomplished?
Of the 3,000 emails released from Hillary Clinton’s private email server in late December 2015, nearly a third were from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal, the Clinton aide who gained notoriety when he testified against Monica Lewinsky. One of these emails, dated April 2, 2011, reads in part:
Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver . . . . This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and wasintended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).
In a “source comment,” the original declassified email adds:
According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:
A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,
Increase French influence in North Africa,
Improve his internal political situation in France,
Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,
Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa
Conspicuously absent is any mention of humanitarian concerns. The objectives are money, power and oil.
Other explosive confirmations in the newly-published emails are detailed by investigative journalist Robert Parry. They include admissions of rebel war crimes, of special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the start of protests, and of Al Qaeda embedded in the US-backed opposition. Key propaganda themes for violent intervention are acknowledged to be mere rumors. Parry suggests they may have originated with Blumenthal himself. They include the bizarre claim that Qaddafi had a “rape policy” involving passing Viagra out to his troops, a charge later raised by UN Ambassador Susan Rice in a UN presentation. Parry asks rhetorically:
So do you think it would it be easier for the Obama administration to rally American support behind this “regime change” by explaining how the French wanted to steal Libya’s wealth and maintain French neocolonial influence over Africa – or would Americans respond better to propaganda themes about Gaddafi passing out Viagra to his troops so they could rape more women while his snipers targeted innocent children? Bingo!
Toppling the Global Financial Scheme
Qaddafi’s threatened attempt to establish an independent African currency was not taken lightly by Western interests. In 2011, Sarkozy reportedly called the Libyan leader a threat to the financial security of the world. How could this tiny country of six million people pose such a threat? First some background.
It is banks, not governments, that create most of the money in Western economies, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged. This has been going on for centuries, through the process called “fractional reserve” lending. Originally, the reserves were in gold. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt replaced gold domestically with central bank-created reserves, but gold remained the reserve currency internationally.
In 1944, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to unify this bank-created money system globally. An IMF ruling said that no paper money could have gold backing. A money supply created privately as debt at interest requires a continual supply of debtors; and over the next half century, most developing countries wound up in debt to the IMF. The loans came with strings attached, including “structural adjustment” policies involving austerity measures and privatization of public assets.
After 1944, the US dollar traded interchangeably with gold as global reserve currency. When the US was no longer able to maintain the dollar’s gold backing, in the 1970s it made a deal with OPEC to “back” the dollar with oil, creating the “petro-dollar.” Oil would be sold only in US dollars, which would be deposited in Wall Street and other international banks.
In 2001, dissatisfied with the shrinking value of the dollars that OPEC was getting for its oil, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein broke the pact and sold oil in euros. Regime change swiftly followed, accompanied by widespread destruction of the country.
In Libya, Qaddafi also broke the pact; but he did more than just sell his oil in another currency.
For decades, Libya and other African countries had been attempting to create a pan-African gold standard. Libya’s al-Qadhafi and other heads of African States had wanted an independent, pan-African, “hard currency.”
Under al-Qadhafi’s leadership, African nations had convened at least twice for monetary unification. The countries discussed the possibility of using the Libyan dinar and the silver dirham as the only possible money to buy African oil.
Until the recent US/NATO invasion, the gold dinar was issued by the Central Bank of Libya (CBL). The Libyan bank was 100% state owned and independent. Foreigners had to go through the CBL to do business with Libya. The Central Bank of Libya issued the dinar, using the country’s 143.8 tons of gold.
Libya’s Qadhafi (African Union 2009 Chair) conceived and financed a plan to unify the sovereign States of Africa with one gold currency (United States of Africa). In 2004, a pan-African Parliament (53 nations) laid plans for the African Economic Community – with a single gold currency by 2023.
African oil-producing nations were planning to abandon the petro-dollar, and demand gold payment for oil/gas.
Showing What Is Possible
Qaddafi had done more than organize an African monetary coup. He had demonstrated that financial independence could be achieved. His greatest infrastructure project, the Great Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya; and the $33 billion project was being funded interest-free without foreign debt, through Libya’s own state-owned bank.
That could explain why this critical piece of infrastructure was destroyed in 2011. NATO not only bombed the pipeline but finished off the project by bombing the factory producing the pipes necessary to repair it. Crippling a civilian irrigation system serving up to 70% of the population hardly looks like humanitarian intervention. Rather, as Canadian Professor Maximilian Forte put it in his heavily researched book Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa:
[T]he goal of US military intervention was to disrupt an emerging pattern of independence and a network of collaboration within Africa that would facilitate increased African self-reliance. This is at odds with the geostrategic and political economic ambitions of extra-continental European powers, namely the US.
Mystery Solved
Hillary Clinton’s emails shed light on another enigma remarked on by early commentators. Why, within weeks of initiating fighting, did the rebels set up their own central bank? Robert Wenzel wrote in The Economic Policy Journal in 2011:
This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences. I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising.
It was all highly suspicious, but as Alex Newman concluded in a November 2011 article:
Whether salvaging central banking and the corrupt global monetary system were truly among the reasons for Gadhafi’s overthrow . . . may never be known for certain – at least not publicly.
There the matter would have remained – suspicious but unverified like so many stories of fraud and corruption – but for the publication of Hillary Clinton’s emails after an FBI probe. They add substantial weight to Newman’s suspicions: violent intervention was not chiefly about the security of the people. It was about the security of global banking, money and oil.
Errata: Sidney Blumenthal is not an attorney, as originally stated in this article. When he earned notoriety as Bill Clinton’s defender against Monica Lewinsky, it was as special adviser for the Clintons.
Once a weapon to combat idleness, the clock has become a prosthesis, augmenting the human body to override its need for rest IF time is money, then sleep is theft. Today’s cult of busyness regards sleep as a defect that threatens to render people competitively unfit. In a recent article for the Guardian, Lucy Rock wrote about CEOs’ “competitive sleep deprivation,” with top executives sleeping for a mere three to four hours, mimicking Margaret Thatcher’s four-hour sleep cycle when she was in office. Similarly, Angela Ahrendts, head of retail at Apple and former CEO of Burberry, has claimed she “gets a headache when she sleeps for more than six hours.”
Such enthusiasm for sleeplessness seems to make an executive virtue out of a capitalistic necessity. But it has deep epistemological roots. In the wake of Enlightenment and in tandem with the emergence of capitalism, humans began to view nature as a pool of resources to be tamed, mastered, owned, and directed toward fulfilling human desires. It wasn’t long before this conquest of nature was redirected toward the intransigencies of human nature. Despite all the technological advances that positivistic science yielded, humans were still faced with their own physical limitations. They could build skyscrapers of glass and steel that defied gravity in the name of human reason, yet they could not tame the unreasonable demands of their own body for rest.
The attempt to tame the body of its unprofitable tendency to tire began as an effort to make “saving time” a moral issue. Sixteenth-century moralist and mercantilist discourses already regarded punctuality as a prerequisite for the conception of a modern man, the pinnacle of social development in an imagined context of linear progress. British historian E.P. Thompson points out in “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” that toward the end of the 17th century, as wage labor relations began to become more prevalent, time began to be conceived as a precious commodity to be spent rather than merely passed. “Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time,” Thompson notes. “And the employer must use the time of his labor, and see that it is not wasted.” Tolling bells and fines levied by employers taught students and workers that their time was being counted, that it was a regulated and regimented currency.
Moralists urged “time thrift,” and framed the waste of time as summoning divine punishment. As British nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood put it in the 17th century tract Meetness for Heaven, “This is our working day, our market time … O Sirs, sleep now, and awake in hell, whence there is no redemption.” Paternalist and colonialist discourses, whether in addressing the English poor or indigenous people from developing countries, represented idleness as a trait of those who are “naturally inferior.” For instance, as Thompson notes, clergyman John Clayton’s pamphlet “Friendly Advice to the Poor” urges the factory worker, whom he refers to as a “sluggard,” to use his time efficiently and refrain from “dulling his spirit by Indolence.” Similarly, where theories of social evolutionism gained prominence, time discipline was seen as essential for the transition to “mature societies.” Thompson notes how economic-growth theorists viewed Mexican mineworkers as “indolent and childlike people” because of their deficient time discipline.
Parallel to the rise of “time thrift” comes the monumental role of the clock. In 17th century Britain, clocks restructured work habits by materializing the ethic of time thrift, setting a clear demarcation between “work” and “life” and reminding workers of their tasks. The omnipresence of clocks was a guarantor of regulation, it ensured the institution of order in the workspace. The clock’s ubiquity legitimized time discipline and naturalized it, making it banal and commonsensical. It made sure that no one escaped the tempo.
One might say that the clock becomes a subject, with agency in its own right, shaping social customs and subjecting people to its rhythms. As anthropologist Bruno Latour has argued, technology and things are not simply animated by humans but also mediate human action. And as anthropologist Benjamin Snyder argues, clocks served the purpose of training and manipulating the body to accomplish set tasks, thereby “turning it into an inexhaustible source of energy.” The incessant sound of the ticking clock, the mounting anxiety it almost automatically evokes, has come to regulate the body and embed it within the culture of busyness.
If clocks are agents that shape human actions, is it valid to assume that clocks are an “other”? By making sure everyone maximizes their efficiency, clocks address the physical limitations of the human body, becoming a kind of prosthesis that pushes humans closer to reaching an “optimal” state of activity.
This is reflected in the late 19th century emergence of the idea of an “internal clock,” which exemplifies how biological processes can be redefined in terms of prominent material objects. By this means, the ideology of time discipline— inseparable from the clock—becomes seen as a natural imperative. In the wake of the clock’s ubiquity, positivist and scientific rhetoric began to depict the biological clock as an “endogenous” factor that operates according to “innate” biological rhythms, leading to medical advice shaped by the metaphors it employs: “how to reset your internal clock” and so on. Such advice points to the mechanization of the body, which now requires “daily maintenance.”
It may seem as if the presence of a master clock in our brains, which synchronizes and sets sleeping patterns on its own, means we no longer need an outside force to tame our bodies. Our bodies have internalized this systemic regulation, becoming in this sense, machinic. However, what implications arise from this? This mechanization of the body—a precursor and template for the ongoing reconceptualization of the self in terms of quantities alone—reflects how our bodies have become products, rather than agents, of a culture of busyness and rationality that glorifies productivity. Scientific discourses have succeeded in masking the way we’ve been clocked in and can no longer clock out.
After the Crash 