Author Archives: Reid Mukai

Bank Crimes Pay: Under the Thumb of the Global Financial Mafiocracy

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By Andrew Gavin Marshall

Source: Occupy.com

On Nov. 13, the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced it was charging 10 individual bankers, working for two separate banks, Deutsche Bank and Barclays, with fraud over their rigging of the Euribor rates. The latest announcement shines the spotlight once again on the scandals and criminal behavior that have come to define the world of global banking.

To date, only a handful of the world’s largest banks have been repeatedly investigated, charged, fined or settled in relation to a succession of large financial scams, starting with mortgage fraud and the Libor scandal in 2012, the Euribor scandal and the Forex (foreign exchange) rate rigging. At the heart of these scandals, which involve the manipulation of interest rates on trillions of dollars in transactions, lie a handful of banks that collectively form a cartel in control of global financial markets – and the source of worldwide economic and financial crises.

Banks such as HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS anchor the global financial power we have come to recognize as fraud. The two, after all, are not mutually exclusive. In more explicit terms, this cartel of banks functions as a type of global financial Mafia, manipulating markets and defrauding investors, consumers and countries while demanding their pound of flesh in the form of interest payments. The banks force nations to impose austerity measures and structural reforms under the threat of cutting off funding; meanwhile they launder drug money for other cartels and organized crime syndicates.

Call them the global Mafiocracy.

In May, six major global banks were fined nearly $6 billion for manipulation of the foreign exchange market, which handles over $5 trillion in daily transactions. Four of the six banks pleaded guilty to charges of “conspiring to manipulate the price of U.S. dollars and euros exchanged.” Those banks were Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland, while two additional banks, UBS and Bank of America, were fined but did not plead guilty to the specific charges. Forex traders at Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and other banks conspired to manipulate currency prices through chat room groups they established, where they arrogantly used names like “The Mafia” and “The Cartel.”

The FBI said the investigations and charges against the big banks revealed criminal behavior “on a massive scale.” The British bank Barclays paid the largest individual fine at around $2.3 billion. But as one trader at the bank wrote in a chat room conversation back in 2010, “If you aint cheating, you aint trying.” The total fines, while numerically large, were but a small fraction of the overall market capitalization of each bank – though the fine on Barclays amounted to some 3.4% of the bank’s market capitalization, the highest percentage by far among the group.

Despite the criminal conspiracy charges covering the years 2007 through 2013, the banks and their top officials continue to lay the blame squarely at the feet of individual traders. Axel Weber, the former president of the German Bundesbank (the central bank of Germany), who is now chairman of Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS, commented that “the conduct of a small number of employees was unacceptable and we have taken appropriate disciplinary actions.”

Looking at the larger scale of bank fines and fraud in the roughly eight years since the global financial crisis, the numbers increase substantially. In addition to a 2012 settlement for mortgage-related fraud in the U.S. housing market, which amounted to some $25 billion, several large banks paid individual fines related to mortgage and foreclosure fraud – including a $16 billion fine for Bank of America, and $13 billion for JPMorgan Chase. Added to these are fines related to the rigging of the Libor rate (the interest rate at which banks lend to each other) and the Forex rigging, as well as money laundering, violating sanctions, manipulating the price of gold, manipulating the U.S. electricity market and assisting tax evasion, among other crimes.

According to a research paper published in June, the total cost of litigation (fines, penalties, settlements, etc.) paid by 16 major global banks since 2010 has reached more than $300 billion. Bank of America paid the most, amounting to more than $66 billion, followed by JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds, Citigroup, Barclays, RBS, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, BNP Paribas, Santander, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, UBS, National Australia Bank, Standard Chartered and Société Générale.

Virtually all of these banks also appear on a list of data, compiled through 2007, revealing them to be among the most interconnected and powerful financial institutions in the world. This core group of corporations forms part of a network of 147 financial institutions that Swiss scientists refer to as the “super-entity,” which, through their various shareholdings, collectively controland own each other and roughly 40% of the world’s 43,000 largest transnational corporations.

In other words, the big banks – along with large insurance companies and asset management firms – do not simply act as a cartel in terms of engaging in criminal activities, but they form a functionally interdependent network of global financial and corporate control. Further, the banks work together in various industry associations and lobbying groups where they officially represent their collective interests.

The largest European banks and financial institutions are represented by the European Financial Services Round Table (EFR), whose membership consists of the CEOs or Chairmen of roughly 25 of the top financial institutions on the continent, including Deutsche Bank, AXA, HSBC, Allianz, RBS, ING, Barclays, BNP Paribas, UBS, and Credit Suisse, among others.

In the United States, the Financial Services Forum (FSF) represents the largest American along with some European banks and financial institutions. The Forum’s membership consists of less than 20 executives, including the CEOs or Chairmen of such firms as Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, UBS, HSBC, AIG, Bank of New York Mellon, State Street Corporation, Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo, among others.

And on a truly global scale, there is the Institute of International Finance (IIF), the premier global association representing the financial industry, with a membership of nearly 500 different institutions from more than 70 countries around the world, including banks, insurance companies, asset management firms, sovereign wealth funds, central banks, credit ratings agencies, hedge funds and development banks.

In addition to these various groups and associations, many of the same large banks and their top executives also serve as members, leaders or participants in much more secretive groups and forums – for example, the International Monetary Conference (IMC), a yearly meeting of hundreds of the world’s top bankers hosted by the American Bankers Association, which invites selected politicians, central bankers and finance ministers to attend their off-the-record discussions. In addition, there is the Institut International d’Etudes Bancaires (International Institute of Banking Studies), or IIEB, which brings together the top officials from dozens of Europe’s major financial institutions for discussions with central bankers, presidents and prime ministers in “closed sessions” with virtually no coverage in the media.

These financial institutions are major owners of government debt, which gives them even greater leverage over the policies and priorities of governments. Exercising this power, they typically demand the same thing: austerity measures and “structural reforms” designed to advance a neoliberal market economy that ultimately benefits those same banks and corporations. The banks in turn create the very crises that require governments to bail them out, racking up large debts that banks turn into further crises, pressuring economic reforms in return for further loans. The cycle of crisis and control continues, and all the while, the big banks and financial institutions engage in criminal conspiracies, fraud, manipulation and money-laundering on a massive scale, including acting as the financial services arm of the world’s largest drug cartels and terrorists organizations.

Welcome to the world governed by the global financial Mafiocracy – because if you’re not concerned, you’re not paying attention.

There is something extraordinary happening in the world

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By Gustavo Tanaka

Source: Medium

A few months ago, I freed myself from society, I’ve released myself from attachments I had and fear that locked me to the system. And since then, I started seeing the world from a different perspective. The perspective that everything is changing and most of us have not even realized that.

Why is the world changing? In this post I’ll list the reasons that take me to believe this.

1 — No one can stand the employment model anymore.

Each one is reaching its own limit. People that work in big corporations can’t handle their jobs. The lack of purpose starts to knock the door of each one as a desperate scream coming from the heart.

People want to escape. They want to leave everything behind. Look how many people trying to become entrepreneurs, how many people going on sabbaticals, how many people depressed in their jobs, how many people in burnout.

2- The entrepreneurship model is also changing

A few years ago, with the explosion of the startups, thousands of entrepreneurs, ran to their garages to create their billion dollar ideas. The glory was to get funded by an investor. Investor’s money in hand was just like winning the World Cup.

But what happens after you get funded?

You become an employee again. You have people that are not aligned with your dream, that don’t give a damn to the purpose and everything turns into money. The financial return starts to be the main driver.

Many people are suffering with this. Brilliant startups start to fall because the model of chasing money never ends.

We need a new model of entrepreneurship.

And there is already many good people doing this.

3- The rise of collaboration

Many people have already realized that makes no sense to go alone. Many people awake to this crazy mentality of “going on your own”.

Stop, take a step back and think. Isn’t it an absurd, we, 7 billion people living in the same planet get so separated from each other? What sense does it make, you and the thousands (or millions) of people living in the same city turn your back to each other? Every time I think of that I get kind of depressed.

But fortunately, things are changing. All the movements of sharing and collaborative economy are pointing towards this direction. The rise of collaboration, sharing, helping, giving a hand, getting united.

It is beautiful. It brings tears to my eyes.

4- We are finally starting to understand what the internet is

Internet is an incredibly spectacular thing and only now, after so many years we are understanding it’s power. With internet, the world opens, the barriers fall, separation ends, union starts, collaboration explodes, help emerges.

Some nations made revolution with the internet, such as the Arab Spring. In Brazil we are just starting to use better this magnificent tool.

Internet is taking down mass control. There is no more television, no more few newspapers showing the news they want us to read. You can go after whatever you want, you relate to whoever you want. You can explore whatever you want, whenever you want.

With internet, the small starts to get a voice. The anonymous become known. The world gets united. And the system may fall.

5- The fall of exaggerated consumption

For many years, we have been manipulated, stimulated to consume as maniacs. To buy everything that was launched in the market. To have the newest car, the latest iphone, the best brands, lots of clothes, lots of shoes, lots of lots, lots of everything.

But many people have already understood that it makes no sense at all. Movements such as the lowsumerism, slow life, slow food, start to show us that we have organized ourselves in the most absurd possible way.

Each time less people using cars, less people buying a lot, each time more people trading clothes, donating, buying old things, sharing goods, sharing cars, apartments, offices.

We need nothing of what they told us we needed.

And this consciousness can break any corporation that depends on exaggerated consumption.

6- Healthy and organic eating

We were so crazy that we accepted eating any kind of garbage. It only needed to taste good, that was ok.

We were so disconnected, that the guys started to add poison in our food and we didn’t say anything.

But then some guys started to wake up and give strength to movements of healthy eating and organic consumption.

And this is going to be huge.

But what does it have to do with economy and work? Everything!

The production of food is the basis of our society. Food industry is one of the most important in the world. If consciousness changes, our eating habits also change, and consumption changes, and then the big corporations must follow these changes.

The small farmer is starting to have strength again. Also people who are planting their own food.

And that changes the whole economy.

7 — The awakening of spirituality

How many friends do you have that practice yoga? What about meditation?

How many used to do it 10 years ago?

Spirituality for many years was a thing of the esoteric people. Of those weird people from mysticism.

But fortunately, this is also changing. We got to the limit of our rationality. We could see that only with the rational mind we cannot understand everything that happens here. There is something more happening and I know you want to understand.

You want to understand how things work in here. How life operates, what happens after death, what is this energy thing that people talk so much, what is quantum physics, how can thoughts become things and create our reality, what are coincidences and synchronicities, why meditation works, how is it possible to cure with the hands and what about these alternative therapies that medicine does not approve, but work?

Companies are promoting meditation to their employees. Schools teaching meditation to kids.

8 — Unschooling movements

Who created this teaching model? Who chose the classes you have to take? Who chose the lessons we learn in history classes? Why didn’t they teach us the truth about other ancient civilizations?

Why should the kids obey rules? Why should they watch everything in silence? Why should they wear uniform?

Take a test to prove that you learned?

We created a model that forms followers of the system. That prepare people to be ordinary human beings.

But fortunately there are many people working to change that. Movements like unschooling, hackschooling, homeschooling.

Maybe you have never thought of this and you are chocked with the points I’m listing here.

But all these things are happening.

Silently, people are awakening and realizing how crazy it is to live in this society.

Look at all these movements and try to think everything is normal.

I don’t think it is.

There is something extraordinary happening.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Gustavo Tanaka — Brazilian author and entrepreneur, trying to create with my friends a new model, a new system and maybe helping to create a new economy.

Saturday Matinee: Wave Twisters

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“Wave Twisters” (2001) is a mindbending homage to hip-hop culture set to the music of DJ Q-Bert. Using a mix of live-action, CG and cel animation, it tells the story of a heroic team who confronts an army of anti-hip-hop oppressors with the help of a powerful weapon known at the Wave Twister. Buckethead, D-Styles and Flare also contribute to the excellent soundtrack.

Why the Drug War Has Been a Forty-Year Lynching

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By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

Source: FreePress.org

The Drug War has been a forty-year lynching….
…the corporate/GOP response to the peace and civil rights movements.

It’s used the Drug Enforcement Administration and other policing operations as a high-tech Ku Klux Klan, meant to gut America’s communities of youth and color.

It has never been about suppressing drugs. Quite the opposite.

And now that it may be winding down, the focus on suppressing minority votes will shift even stronger to electronic election theft.

The Drug War was officially born June 17, 1971, (http://www.drugpolicy.org/new-solutions-drug-policy/brief-history-drug-war) when Richard Nixon pronounced drugs to be “Public Enemy Number One.” In a nation wracked by poverty, racial tension, injustice, civil strife, ecological disaster, corporate domination, a hated Vietnam War and much more, drugs seemed an odd choice.
In fact, the Drug War’s primary target was black and young voters.

It was the second, secret leg of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” meant to bring the former Confederacy into the Republican Party.

Part One was about the white vote.

America’s original party of race and slavery (https://zinnedproject.org/materials/a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states-updated-and-expanded-edition/)was Andrew Jackson’s Democrats (born 1828).

After the Civil War the Party’s terror wing, the KKK, made sure former slaves and their descendants “stayed in their place.”

A century of lynchings (at least 3200 of them) (http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1979/2/79.02.04.x.html)efficiently suppressed the southern black community.

In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal social programs began to attract black voters to the Democratic Party. John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil and voting rights legislation, plus the 24th Amendment ending the poll tax, sealed the deal. Today blacks, who once largely supported the Party of Lincoln,  vote 90% or more Democrat (http://blackdemographics.com/culture/black-politics/).

But the Democrats’ lean to civil rights angered southern whites. Though overt racist language was no longer acceptable in the 1970s, Nixon’s Republicans clearly signaled an open door to the former Confederacy (https://www.thenation.com/article/why-todays-gop-crackup-is-the-final-unraveling-of-nixons-southern-strategy/).

But recruiting angry southern whites would not be enough for the Republicans to take the south. In many southern states more than 40% of potential voters were black. If they were allowed to vote, and if their votes were actually counted, all the reconstructed Democrat Party would need to hold the south would be a sliver of moderate white support.

That’s where the Drug War came in.

Reliable exact national arrest numbers from 1970 through 1979 are hard to come by.

But according to Michelle Alexander’s superb, transformative The New Jim Crow, and according to research by Marc Mauer and Ryan King of the Sentencing Project, more than 31,000,000 Americans were arrested for drugs between 1980 and 2007 (http://newjimcrow.com).

Further federal uniform crime report statistics compiled by www.freepress.org indicate that, between 2008 and 2014, another 9,166,000 were arrested for drug possession.
Taken together, than means well over 40,000,000 American citizens have been arrested for drugs in the four decades since Nixon’s announcement.
It is a staggering number: more than 10% of the entire United States, nearly four times the current population of Ohio, far in excess of more than 100 countries worldwide.
A number that has gutted the African-American community.  A national terror campaign far beyond the reach of even the old KKK.
Justice Department statistics indicate than half of those arrests have been for simple possession of marijuana.
According to US Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1980 and 2013, while blacks were 12% of the population, blacks constituted 30% of those arrested for drug law violations and nearly 40% of those incarcerated in all U.S. prisons.  Thus some 20,000,000 African-American men have been sent to prison for non-violent “crimes” in the past forty years.
If the Hispanic population is added in, as much as 60% of drug arrests are of racial or ethnic minorities.
On the 40th anniversary of the Drug War in 2010, the Associated Press used public records to calculate that the taxpayer cost of arresting and imprisoning all these human beings has been in excess of $1,000,000,000.
Sending them all to college would have been far cheaper.  It also would have allowed them to enhance and transform their communities.
Instead, they were taken from their families.  Their children were robbed of their parents.  They were assaulted by the prison culture, stripped of their right to vote and stopped from leading the kind of lives that might have moved the nation in a very different direction.
Nixon also hated hippies and the peace movement. So in addition to disenfranchising 20,000,000 African-Americans, the Drug War has imprisoned additional millions of young white and Hispanic pot smokers.
Thus the DEA has been the ultra-violent vanguard of the corporate culture war.
In 1983 Ronald Reagan took the Drug War to a new level.  Using profits from his illegal arms sales to Iran, he illegally funded the Contra thugs who were fighting Nicaragua’s duly elected Sandinista government.
The Contras were drug dealers who shipped large quantities of cocaine into the US—-primarily in the Los Angeles area—-where it was mostly converted to crack.
That served a double function for the GOP.
First, it decimated the inner city.
Then Reagan’s “Just Say No” assault—-based on the drugs his Contra allies were injecting into our body politic—-imposed penalties on crack far more severe than those aimed at the powdered cocaine used in the white community.
In 1970 the US prison population was roughly 300,000 people.  Today it’s more than 2.2 million, the largest in world history by both absolute number and percentage of the general population.  There are more people in prison in the US than in China, which has five times the population (http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=11).

According to the Sentencing Project, one in seventeen white males has been incarcerated, one in six Latinos, and one in three blacks.
By all accounts the Drug War has had little impact on drug consumption in the US, except to make it more profitable for drug dealers (http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=11).  It’s spawned a multi-billion-dollar industry in prison construction, policing, prison guards, lawyers, judges and more, all of them invested in prolonging the drug war despite its negative impacts on public health.

For them, the stream of ruined lives of non-violent offenders is just another form of cash flow.
Like the Klan since the Civil War, the Drug War has accomplished its primary political goal of suppressing the black vote and assaulting the African-American community.
It’s shifted control of the South from the Democrats back to the Republican Party. By slashing voter eligibility and suppressing black turnout, the Drug War crusade has helped the GOP take full control of both houses of the US Congress and a majority of state governments across the US.
But the repressive impacts hit everyone, and ultimately enhance the power of the corporate state.
Toward that end, the southern corporate Democrat Bill Clinton’s two terms as a Drug Warrior further broadened the official attack on grassroots America. Clinton was determined to make sure nobody appeared tougher on “crime.”  He escalated the decimation of our democracy far beyond mere party politics, deepening the assault on the black community, and the basic rights of all Americans for the benefit of his Wall Street funders.  Obama has been barely marginally better.
In political terms, the Nixon-Reagan GOP remains the Drug War’s prime beneficiary. Today’s Republicans are poised to continue dominating our electoral process through the use of rigged electronic registration rolls and voting machines. That’s a core reality we all must face.
But no matter which party controls the White House or Congress, by prosecuting a behavior engaged in by tens of millions of Americans, the Drug War lets the corporate state arrest (and seize assets from) virtually anyone it wants at any time. It has empowered a de facto corporate police state beyond public control.

Regardless of race, we all suffer from the fear, repression and random assaults of a drug-fueled repressive police force with no real accountability.
In the interim, the Drug War is not now and never has been about drugs.
Legalizing pot is just the beginning of our recovery process.
Until we end the Drug War as a whole, America will never know democracy, peace or justice.
____________________
THE SIXTH JIM CROW: ELECTRONIC ELECTION THEFT & THE 2016 SELECTION will be released by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman by January, 2016. Their CITIZEN KASICH will follow soon thereafter. Bob’s FITRAKIS FILES are at www.freepress.org; Harvey’s ORGANIC SPIRAL OF US HISTORY will appear in 2016.

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Glenn Greenwald Stands by the Official Narrative

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By William A. Blunden

Source: Dissident Voice

Glenn Greenwald has written an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times. In this editorial he asserts that American spies are motivated primarily by the desire to thwart terrorist plots. Such that their inability to do so (i.e., the attacks in Paris) coupled with the associated embarrassment motivates a public relations campaign against Ed Snowden. Greenwald further concludes that recent events are being opportunistically leveraged by spy masters to pressure tech companies into installing back doors in their products. Over the course of this article what emerges is a worldview which demonstrates a remarkable tendency to accept events at face value, a stance that’s largely at odds with Snowden’s own documents and statements.

For example, Greenwald states that American spies have a single overriding goal, to “find and stop people who are plotting terrorist attacks.” To a degree this concurs with the official posture of the intelligence community. Specifically, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence specifies four topical missions in its National Intelligence Strategy: Cyber Intelligence, Counterterrorism, Counterproliferation, and Counterintelligence.

Yet Snowden himself dispels this notion. In an open letter to Brazil he explained that “these [mass surveillance] programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.”

And the public record tends to support Snowden’s observation. If the NSA is truly focused on combatting terrorism it has an odd habit of spying on oil companies in Brazil and Venezuela. In addition anyone who does their homework understands that the CIA has a long history of overthrowing governments. This has absolutely nothing to do with stopping terrorism and much more to do with catering to powerful business interests in places like Iran (British Petroleum), Guatemala (United Fruit), and Chile (ITT Corporation). The late Michael Ruppert characterized the historical links between spies and the moneyed elite as follows: “The CIA is Wall Street, and Wall Street is the CIA.”1

The fact that Greenwald appears to accept the whole “stopping terrorism” rationale is extraordinary all by itself. But things get even more interesting…

Near the end of his article Greenwald notes that the underlying motivation behind the recent uproar of spy masters “is to depict Silicon Valley as terrorist-helpers for the crime of offering privacy protections to Internet users, in order to force those companies to give the U.S. government ‘backdoor’ access into everyone’s communications.”

But if history shows anything, it’s that the perception of an adversarial relationship between government spies and corporate executives has often concealed secret cooperation. Has Greenwald never heard of Crypto AG, or RSA, or even Google? These are companies who at the time of their complicity marketed themselves as protecting user privacy. In light of these clandestine arrangements Cryptome’s John Young comments that it’s “hard to believe anything crypto advocates have to say due to the far greater number of crypto sleazeball hominids reaping rewards of aiding governments than crypto hominid honorables aiding one another.”

It’s as if Greenwald presumes that the denizens of Silicon Valley, many of whose origins are deeply entrenched in government programs, have magically turned over a new leaf. As though the litany of past betrayals can conveniently be overlooked because things are different. Now tech vendors are here to defend our privacy. Or at least that’s what they’d like us to believe. In the aftermath of the PRISM scandal, which was disclosed by none other than Greenwald and Snowden, the big tech of Silicon Valley is desperate to portray itself as a victim of big government.

You see, the envoys of the Bay Area’s new economy have formulated a convincing argument. That’s what they get paid to do. The representatives of Silicon Valley explain in measured tones that tech companies have stopped working with spies because it’s bad for their bottom line. Thus aligning the interests of private capital with user privacy. But the record shows that spies often serve private capital. To help open up markets and provide access to resources in foreign countries. And make no mistake there’s big money to be made helping spies. Both groups do each other a lot of favors.

And so a question for Glenn Greenwald: what pray tell is there to prevent certain CEOs in Silicon Valley from betraying us yet again, secretly via covert backdoors, while engaged in a reassuring Kabuki Theater with government officials about overt backdoors? Giving voice to public outrage while making deals behind closed doors. It’s not like that hasn’t happened before during an earlier debate about allegedly strong cryptography. Subtle zero-day flaws are, after all, plausibly deniable.

How can the self-professed advocate of adversarial journalism be so credulous? How could a company like Apple, despite its bold public rhetoric, resist overtures from spy masters any more than Mohammad Mosaddegh, Jacobo Árbenz, or Salvador Allende? Doesn’t adversarial journalism mean scrutinizing corporate power as well as government power?

Glenn? Hello?

Methinks Mr. Greenwald has some explaining to do. Whether he actually responds with anything other than casual dismissal has yet to be seen.

  1. Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, New Society Publishers, 2004, Chapter 3, page 53.

Bill Blunden is an independent investigator whose current areas of inquiry include information security, anti-forensics, and institutional analysis. He is the author of several books, including The Rootkit Arsenal and Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, and the Malware-Industrial Complex. He is the lead investigator at Below Gotham Labs. 

Israelis – Not Muslims – Cheered in Jersey City on 9/11

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In debunking Donald Trump’s big lie about Jersey City Muslims celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center, the corporate media have told an even bigger lie of omission. There was, indeed, shameless cheering on the banks of the Hudson River on 9/11. But it was by young Israelis, as was widely reported at the time. Fourteen years later, corporate media are covering up for Israel – which makes them even bigger liars than Trump.

By Glen Ford

Source: Black Agenda Report

“By making only a partial correction of Donald Trump’s prevarication, the corporate media were telling their own lie about what happened on 9/11.”

The corporate media don’t like Donald Trump. They used to like him a lot; in fact, Big Business Media are responsible for making this minor multi-millionaire into a household name. But Trump is on their hit list, nowadays, because the Republican presidential candidate insists on telling his own lies, rather than sticking to the list of official lies parroted by corporate media every minute of every day.

Donald Trump told a really “HUGE” – as he would put it – lie when he claimed to have watched thousands of Muslims cheering in Jersey City, New Jersey, as the World Trade Center came down on 9/11. Every corporate news outlet in the country rushed to debunk Trump’s fictitious account. The Washington Post offered psychological theories for why Trump gets away with telling fantastic lies. The New York Times said there was no evidence that Jersey City Muslims cheered the destruction on 9/11. CNN said it never happened. And, they were right.

However, by making only a partial correction of Donald Trump’s prevarication, the corporate media were telling their own lie about what happened on 9/11. There was, in fact, celebration in Jersey City on that fateful morning, and the incident did, briefly, make a major news splash. But the people doing the cheering weren’t Muslims: they were five young Israelis in a white moving van, who were observed in Liberty Park ecstatically taking pictures of themselves framed against the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers. As ABC News reported, the five were later arrested at gunpoint near the New Jersey Giants football stadium. Most U.S. intelligence sources believed the men were Israeli spies, and that their “moving company” was an Israeli intelligence cover. They were detained for a while, and then deported.

“Who is the biggest liar?”

In the year before 9/11 scores of young Israelis posing as “art students” were arrested after penetrating U.S. Defense Department and other classified sites. Both stories made national news. The corporate media could not have avoided running across articles on the “cheering Israelis” when they set about debunking Donald Trump’s “cheering Muslims” account. But, not one of them dare to mention that, yes, some people were seen celebrating 9/11 at Liberty State Park in Jersey City.

I was in a different part of the park on 9/11 morning, alone except for two young Israelis with very expensive cameras, carrying phony New Jersey press credentials, who claimed to be Polish but spoke Hebrew to each other. The two young men were giddy with joy at the destruction that the three of us were observing across the Hudson River.

Later that day, I learned from local and national news outlets about the five Israelis who were dancing with delight about a mile upriver from me and the two other Israelis. Articles about Israelis celebrating 9/11 would have come up in any search to correct Donald Trump’s tall tale – but the corporate media kept that part of the story from the public. They censored their own correction of Donald Trump. So, who is the biggest liar? Trump, who lies to advance his own personal interests, or the U.S. corporate media, who lie to the people on behalf of the State of Israel, and Zionism.

 

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Related Article: The Five Dancing IsraelisArrested On 9-11

Little Murders in Retrospect

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By John R. Hall

Source: Dissident Voice

After their wildly successful anti-war classic Mash, actors Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland ventured out on a very weak limb and made a film version of a hit and miss Broadway production.  Alan Arkin directed the film and played the part of mentally disturbed Lieutenant Practice of the NYPD.  The year was 1971.  My beautiful baby daughter had just entered the world.  I’d recently been convicted of twice refusing induction into the U.S. Army, and was awaiting my court date for sentencing.  Somehow, amid the mix of joy, sadness, and confusion, my wife and I managed to slip out and take in a movie.  Little Murders would haunt me for the rest of my life.

If you’re like virtually everyone I’ve ever quizzed about Little Murders, you not only missed seeing it, you’ve never even heard of it.  It is also likely that, if you happen to be among the few who actually saw it, you’d really like to forget it.  But, of course, you can’t.  44 years later I don’t remember all the gory details of the flick, but I do remember apathetic Alfred Chamberlain (Elliott Gould), focusing his camera on a newly deposited bowel movement in a toilet, and on a steaming pile of dog crap in a park.  He was a photographer and poop was his forte.  His subject matter of choice also reflected his world view.  If Alfred could have possibly cared less about anything, he would have.  Alfred’s world was shit.

Then one day while he was being beaten to a bloody pulp by street thugs, and not even bothering to defend himself, Alfred was saved by feisty, optimistic Patsy Newquist (Marcia Rodd).  Apathist that he was, Alfred tried to walk away without even thanking his heroine.  But Patsy fell for him, and decided to show him that the world wasn’t such a bad place after all.  It was no easy task, but she eventually married Alfred, put a hesitant smile on his glum face, taught him to fight for himself,  and convinced him that life was worth living.  Then she took a random bullet, splattering her husband with blood, and dying.

Little Murders took place in a somewhat exaggerated version of New York City, or Anytown, U.S.A.  Civil society had spiraled out of control and degenerated into a cesspool of fear, loathing, and random violence.  In spite of the raging nightmare of The Vietnam War, few Americans in 1971 would have believed that their country 44 years later would become such an accurate replica of the social wasteland of “Little Murders”.  But that is exactly where we are today, and then some; living in a world so violent and cold that there is nothing left which can shock us.  Mass murders, school shootings, infanticide, beheadings, immolation, cops run amok, manufactured terrorism, the Airport Gestapo, black sites and torture, endless wars for corporate profit, daily specter of nuclear annihilation.

But here in the U.S.A. we like to look on the bright side.  No sense in focusing on the negative when there’s so much positive energy in the world.  We’ve got Kim Kardashian’s ass to obsess about.  A spectacular spectators’ array of gladiator sports:  NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NCAA FB, Cage Fighting, NASCAR, Pro golf & tennis.  Black Friday deals on electronics, reality television, celebrity weddings, divorces, and sex changes, Dancing with the Stars, The Voice.  The upcoming Presidential Coronation Circus and Candy Crush.  Did I mention Kim Kardashian’s ass?  Thank God for Pollyanna’s Glad Game.  If not for such an array of inane, petty distractions, Americans would all end up like apathetic Alfred Chamberlain, or worse yet like angry, infuriated me.

Any American with his head screwed on straight should have suffered an extended and incurable case of righteous indignation by now.  While the National Rifle Association has succeeded in enshrining The Second Amendment alongside mom, home, and apple pie, little murders on the domestic front have been on the rise to the point that they’re as common as bedbugs in cheap motels.  But my countrymen do love their portable WMDs, apparently more than life itself.  It’s not just gun violence defining the nightmare which is America.  What has finally emerged is a complete lack of respect.  Respect for self and others, for all life forms, for Mother Earth itself.  Anyone paying attention can see it in their actions.  They litter the streets with their garbage, litter their skin with ill-conceived epidermal etchings, litter their bodies with poisonous food-like substances and soul-killing drugs, litter maternity wards with litters of unwanted children.  Alfred Chamberlain’s world has grown to fruition.

Of course, Americans have had plenty of inspiration as they’ve sacrificed their souls upon the alter of American Exceptionalism.  Their government has waged a nearly non-stop series of wars for corporate profit since Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.  Anyone paying a lick of attention knows that every one of these wars were waged for the benefit of Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse, and that official government explanations are only believed by fools.  At least our heroes in the White House, the Halls of Congress, and the Pentagon learned something during the Vietnam fiasco:  The new definition of winning a war is that you slaughter as many civilians as possible, bomb cities, destroy infrastructure, burn crops, and create enough chaos that the U.S. Military is forced to open permanent bases and swing wide the doors for corporate plunder.  Conveniently under armed protection.

This is exactly what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, what went on in Libya recently, and what is now happening in Syria and elsewhere.  The American agenda is being rammed down the throats of unwilling participants wherever there are valuable resources to be plundered by Wall Street pirates.  Migrations of refugees from U.S. bombings seek asylum elsewhere, while foolish, careless Americans pay little heed.  A few hoorays for the red, white, and blue, thanks to our brave fighting men for slaughtering innocent foreigners, and back to watching Kim Kardashian’s ass over a can of Coca-Cola.  Things go better with Coke.

In 1971, I was shocked by the last scene of Little Murders, in which Alfred (still wearing his shirt splattered with his wife’s blood), and the father and brother of his recently deceased bride finally have a few moments of sheer joy.  Taking turns with a loaded rifle, they join in with their fellow New York citizens, becoming snipers from their apartment window,  Finding fun and laughter with each kill.  I’d no longer be shocked by the scene.  Now I get it.  It’s what species do in the final death throes of extinction.

 

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