In the wake of recent revelations of documents confirming Bank of America’s use of social media trolling teams to spy on activist groups, Anonymous Olympia has released an open letter (reposted below) stating that they will hold them accountable. Whether or not they follow through on their promise, they make good arguments for why we should not be giving our money to such banks. There’s plenty of alternatives more deserving of our trust and which make better investments, such as public banks, community banks, credit unions, community currencies, digital currencies (do careful research first) and safe deposit boxes for physical precious metals. Currently, only North Dakota has a state-owned bank, but it’s been such a success, at least 20 other states are considering proposals to create their own.
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Dear Bank of America,
Thank you for your interest in Anonymous Olympia. After careful review
of your actions, we have prepared the following open letter:
Your institution is like a large, festering carcass that smothers all
of the life beneath it as it wallows, decaying in its own gluttonous
vastness. Nobody pretends that you’re a decent banking institution
these days except you, and we all know you’re not. You’re swollen,
sallow with your own misdeeds.
It blows our minds how anyone could still bank with you, or why they
would want to. Your commercials smile and lie, but everyone can smell
the bullshit wafting from behind those carefully constructed scenes of
gentle middle-class life that you promote on television and in the
lobbies of your bank branches.
The way you nickel and dime your customers to financial death is
disgusting, and you should be ashamed. A fee to close an account, a
monthly fee to have an account, a thirty five dollar over-draft fee
for as little as a $0.01 over-draft, a fee for bill-pay, the five
dollar debit-usage fee.
You’re a vampire, Bank of America. You’re a parasite, bloated with the
blood that you suck from the financial life of your customers.
Shall we mention your colluding with Visa and MasterCard to keep ATM
fees outrageously high? Or all the times that you illegally and
wrongfully foreclosed on the homes of families that banked with you,
leaving those families homeless, their lives ruined? Or the miniscule
amount of taxes that you’re supposed to pay, but don’t?
What about the six former Bank of America employees who came forward
and revealed your despicable practices, including rewarding employees
who managed to place ten or more mortgage accounts into foreclosure in
one month with a $500.00 bonus?
We suppose a financial institution with your track record of being
evil could justify spying on a group of average citizens who were
attempting to exercise their right to air grievances through public
assembly, but that doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t make what we
do any of your business, either.
In fact, your actions directly violate our constitutional right to
privacy. The fact that you worked with Washington State Patrol to
share information represents a terrifying fusion of financial and
state interest, one that I hope keeps your employees up at night.
Fascism is defined as a merging of state and corporate interest, so
make of that what you will, Bank of America.
We know that you were asked to comment on your spying, but declined to
do so- this leaves us with little hope that you will hold yourself
accountable for this and other actions, so we’re going to start
holding you accountable, instead, and we’re going to ask all of our
brothers and sisters to join us.
You may have been watching us, Bank of America, but we’ve been
1/11 Guillermo Jimenez and writer/activist Larry Pinkney discuss the recent release of Lynne Stewart in the context of past and present COINTELPRO actions against activists at Traces of Reality:
1/13 On the Black Agenda Report they commemorate the life of Amiri Baraka, discuss the war on poverty, important people-powered movements for 2014, failures of the moderate democrats and the International Criminal Court, the Washington Post as CIA asset, and an update on the Dallas 5:
1/13 Guy Evans and independent journalist Rania Khalek discuss positive aspects and limitations of independent media, the school-to-prison pipeline, Nelson Mandela, the NSA and other topics on Smells Like Human Spirit:
1/15 On the C-Realm Podcast, KMO and David J. Blacker explore the themes of David’s new book, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame. They cover big questions related to technology and economics such as “If public education in the 20th Century was shaped by the needs of capitalist production, what form does education take when what Capitalists really need a growing segment of the population to do is go away?”:
1/16 Another great Smells Like Human Spirit interview featuring former LAPD police officer and whistleblower Michael Ruppert. They discuss JFK, the rise of corporate power, and the future of the surveillance state among other topics:
With the impending demise of World Wide Web “net neutrality,” which has afforded equal access for website operators to the Internet, the one percent of billionaire investors are busy positioning themselves to take over total control of news reporting on the Internet.
In the latest move by billionaires to monopolize the Internet, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and billionaire Nick Berggruen announced the creation of World Post, a news and views website that will be officially launched at the World Economic Forum conclave of one percenters in Davos, Switzerland.
Among the announced contributors to World Post are Microsoft owner Bill Gates, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The move by Huffington and Berggruen follows the creation of the “investigative” news website First Look, Inc. by PayPal’s billionaire founder Pierre Omidyar. First Look plans to distribute the remaining cache of National Security Agency (NSA) documents originally leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald.
Another billionaire who has joined the rush to seize part of the Internet is hedge fund tycoon George Soros. Soros has backed two media operations, Pro Publica, which promised to disclose many Snowden documents but has not followed through, and Project Syndicate, which paves the Internet with editorials backing all of Soros’s global initiatives.
Greenwald and his associates have published only one percent of the estimated 50,000 documents downloaded by Snowden from classified NSA databases. In a recent interview by Israel’s Channel Ten, Greenwald made it very clear that he would release more documents concerning NSA surveillance of Israeli leaders based on what the Obama administration does with regard to convicted and jailed Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. There are increasing calls for Pollard’s release from prison and permission for him to move to Israel.
Greenwald stated to Israeli television that the slow pace of document release would continue and that he agreed with Israel on the issue of Pollard: “I think you are absolutely right to contrast the Jonathan Pollard case with revelations of American spying on their closest allies within the Israeli government, because it does underlie, underscore exactly the hypocrisy that lies at the center of so much of what the U.S. government does.”
Pollard is serving a life sentence in the Butner, North Carolina, federal penitentiary for disclosing a cache of documents that resulted in a number of U.S. intelligence assets in the Middle East being compromised to Mossad. The Mossad approached the U.S. assets and offered them a deal: cooperate with Mossad or risk being outed to their governments as CIA assets. In either case, the assets faced a certain death sentence: disclosure of work for Israel or the United States would have been met with the same fate of execution as spies.
A number of American journalists are now coming out in support of clemency for Pollard to placate Israel over the NSA spying reports leaked by Greenwald. First Look’s initial operating budget is $250 million. Along with Greenwald, journalists such as The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill; Dan Froomkin, formerly with The Washington Post; and Entertainment Weekly.com’s Bill Gannon jumped ship to sign on to First Look. The hiring of an entertainment editor who once worked for Lucas Films, the producer of Star Wars movies, raised eyebrows among those who believed Greenwald and Omidyar intended First Look to be a no-nonsense news operation. It now seems certain that First Look will be no different than Disney Corporation’s running of ABC News.
There have been some outrageous examples of corporate parents spiking stories by their news divisions in order to avoid bad publicity. In 2006, ABC News was pressured by Disney and its then-CEO Michael Eisner to kill an investigation of pedophiles being employed by Disney World in Orlando. The end of net neutrality will stymie and possibly eliminate investigative reporting on the Internet as we now know it.
The formation of the two newest media companies follows Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of The Washington Post. It is believed that Bezos will begin to streamline the newspaper with more focus on Internet distribution than the print run.
Under President Obama, the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission have done little to advance the cause of net neutrality. In fact, the regulatory agencies have gone the other way in order to facilitate the creation of a multi-tiered Internet that will permit high bandwidth access in a “pay to play” scheme. In other words, only billionaires like Omidyar, Berggruen, Bezos, and others will have access to the top tier of the Internet to distribute varnished “news” reports.
Those media organizations without deep pockets will be relegated to the slower tiers of the Internet, sharing limited bandwidth with pornography, quack medicine, and get-rich-quick scam operators.
Rupert Murdoch’s British Sky Broadcasting and Virgin Media, formerly owned by Sir Richard Branson, have been at the forefront of establishing a “two-speed Internet.”
It is painfully clear that the top one percent are feverishly engaged in an orgy of carving up the Internet after the collapse of net neutrality for the benefit of corporatism and oligarchic control over news dissemination.
It is noteworthy that Obama’ old friend from Columbia and Harvard and his first FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, has just joined a new firm after offering only lukewarm support for net neutrality. Genachowski now works for the eternally dubious Carlyle Group.
There is little wonder why one of World Post’s first contributors will be Google’s Schmidt, the frequent habitué of the Davos and Bilderberg secret conclaves of financial and political vipers who run the world. The journalists who have joined the frenzy to climb into the one percenters’ Internet top tier deserve nothing but condemnation from their peers.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report.
Last week, French comedian, actor and activist Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala gained international attention when, in a move backed by French President Francois Hollande and the country’s highest court, his comedy tour was banned in several French cities. The bannings followed a January 6 announcement from France’s interior minister Manuel Valls that he considered Dieudonné’s performances anti-semitic and a “a grave disturbance of public order”.
To be honest, I can’t say I’m familiar enough with Dieudonné to know whether he is anti-semitic or, as has happened to many others, he was given that label because he’s anti-Zionist or just critical of certain policies of the Israeli government. However, given his background it’s highly unlikely that he’s racist. He himself is of mixed race, his father being a white artist and his mother a black accountant originally from Cameroon. He was raised mostly by his mother since they divorced when he was one. His first comedy partner and childhood friend was Jewish, and in the 1997 and 2001 legislative elections in Dreux, he campaigned against racism and ran against the National Front.
Even if Dieudonné was a racist and anti-semite he should not have been censored (though it’s true if his performances weren’t banned I may not have heard of him). No matter how offensive one might find someone’s words and ideas, the best policy is open discussion and debate so people can decide for themselves what to believe and what to reject.
Yesterday Amiri Baraka, a longtime activist and one of the great American poets, passed away at age 79. The cause of his death, at Beth Israel Medical Center in Newark, New Jersey, was not immediately released, but he was hospitalized in the facility’s intensive care unit since Dec. 21 and had a long struggle with diabetes.
Reflecting the exploratory and always-evolving nature of his mind, Amiri’s career path connected him to the Greenwich Village Beat community, the Black Nationalists, the Black Arts Movement (which he founded in 1964), and Marxist-Leninists. Though his beliefs during different stages of life may have different labels, he was consistently committed to justice, unity, social change and the struggle against oppression. As a revolutionary organizer, cultural critic, poet, novelist, essayist, historian, playwright, publisher and orator, Amiri Baraka’s words and ideas have influenced and inspired untold numbers of people around the world. His works have also been the source of much controversy, outrage and condemnation, at least during the initial time of their release.
One of Baraka’s last great acts as a rabble-rouser was his recitation of his poem “Somebody Blew Up America” before 2,000 people at the September 2002 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival held in Stanhope, New Jersey. This was incredibly courageous because throughout the country (especially on the East Coast) just one year after the attacks, questioning the official 9/11 story was enough to make one viewed as a conspiracy theorist, an apologist for terrorists, possibly traitorous, and/or insensitive to victims and their families. To do so and implicate the Israeli government, as Amiri Baraka did in his poem, led to accusations of antisemitism from the Anti-Defamation League. Many at the time believed the accusations even though under closer scrutiny it was obviously untrue because in the poem he clearly condemns the murder of Jews in the Holocaust and the lines in question could more accurately be described as anti-Zionist.
Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion And cracking they sides at the notion?
Amiri Baraka was appointed Poet Laureate of New Jersey just one month before delivering “Somebody Blew Up America” to the public. Despite pressure from the powers that be to resign immediately, he steadfastly refused. In his own words, from an October 2, 2002 post on his website: “I WILL NOT ‘APOLOGIZE’, I WILL NOT ‘RESIGN!'” Governor Jim McGreevey and state legislators discovered there was no legal way to remove Poet Laureate appointees so in an act revealing their fear, hatred and desperation, they abolished the post in July 2003. This is just one chapter of many from Baraka’s often history-making career, but it’s emblematic of his courage, integrity, dedication to truth, and stubborn stance against injustice. This isn’t to say he was a saint or superhero. None of us are without fault, but what we can learn from Amiri is that development of political thought and civic engagement can and should be lifelong processes, and one can remain true to oneself yet open to new ideas and experiences. Above all, his life is a reminder that simple words (especially when composed and unleashed with skill at the right place and time) contain immense power; sometimes enough to change the world.
Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Somebody Blew Up America
They say its some terrorist, some barbaric A Rab, in Afghanistan It wasn’t our American terrorists It wasn’t the Klan or the Skin heads Or the them that blows up nigger Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row It wasn’t Trent Lott Or David Duke or Giuliani Or Schundler, Helms retiring
It wasn’t The gonorrhea in costume The white sheet diseases That have murdered black people Terrorized reason and sanity Most of humanity, as they pleases
They say (who say?) Who do the saying Who is them paying Who tell the lies Who in disguise Who had the slaves Who got the bux out the Bucks
Who got fat from plantations Who genocided Indians Tried to waste the Black nation
Who live on Wall Street The first plantation Who cut your nuts off Who rape your ma Who lynched your pa
Who got the tar, who got the feathers Who had the match, who set the fires Who killed and hired Who say they God & still be the Devil
Who the biggest only Who the most goodest Who do Jesus resemble
Who created everything Who the smartest Who the greatest Who the richest Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest
Who define art Who define science
Who made the bombs Who made the guns
Who bought the slaves, who sold them
Who called you them names Who say Dahmer wasn’t insane
Who? Who? Who?
Who stole Puerto Rico Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan Australia & The Hebrides Who forced opium on the Chinese
Who own them buildings Who got the money Who think you funny Who locked you up Who own the papers
Who owned the slave ship Who run the army
Who the fake president Who the ruler Who the banker
Who? Who? Who?
Who own the mine Who twist your mind Who got bread Who need peace Who you think need war
Who own the oil Who do no toil Who own the soil Who is not a nigger Who is so great ain’t nobody bigger
Who own this city
Who own the air Who own the water
Who own your crib Who rob and steal and cheat and murder and make lies the truth Who call you uncouth
Who live in the biggest house Who do the biggest crime Who go on vacation anytime
Who killed the most niggers Who killed the most Jews Who killed the most Italians Who killed the most Irish Who killed the most Africans Who killed the most Japanese Who killed the most Latinos
Who? Who? Who?
Who own the ocean
Who own the airplanes Who own the malls Who own television Who own radio
Who own what ain’t even known to be owned Who own the owners that ain’t the real owners
Who own the suburbs Who suck the cities Who make the laws
Who made Bush president Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying Who talk about democracy and be lying
Who the Beast in Revelations Who 666 Who know who decide Jesus get crucified
Who the Devil on the real side Who got rich from Armenian genocide
Who the biggest terrorist Who change the bible Who killed the most people Who do the most evil Who don’t worry about survival
Who have the colonies Who stole the most land Who rule the world Who say they good but only do evil Who the biggest executioner
Who? Who? Who?
Who own the oil Who want more oil Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie
Who? Who? Who?
Who found Bin Laden, maybe they Satan Who pay the CIA, Who knew the bomb was gonna blow Who know why the terrorists Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego
Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion And cracking they sides at the notion
Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain’t goin’ nowhere
Who make the credit cards Who get the biggest tax cut Who walked out of the Conference Against Racism Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing? Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?
Who invaded Grenada Who made money from apartheid Who keep the Irish a colony Who overthrow Chile and Nicaragua later
Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani, the same ones who killed Biko, Cabral, Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino,
Who killed Kabila, the ones who wasted Lumumba, Mondlane, Betty Shabazz, Die, Princess Di, Ralph Featherstone, Little Bobby
Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba, Geronimo, Assata, Mumia, Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton
Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, Medgar Evers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney, Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed
Who put a price on Lenin’s head
Who put the Jews in ovens, and who helped them do it Who said “America First” and ok’d the yellow stars
Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt Who murdered the Rosenbergs And all the good people iced, tortured, assassinated, vanished
Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine,
Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo Who invented Aids Who put the germs In the Indians’ blankets Who thought up “The Trail of Tears”
Who blew up the Maine & started the Spanish American War Who got Sharon back in Power Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo, Chiang kai Chek
Who decided Affirmative Action had to go Reconstruction, The New Deal, The New Frontier, The Great Society,
Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for Who doo doo come out the Colon’s mouth Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus Subsidere
Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop, Who poison Robeson, who try to put DuBois in Jail Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs, Garvey, The Scottsboro Boys, The Hollywood Ten
Who set the Reichstag Fire
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away?
Who? Who? Who?
Explosion of Owl the newspaper say The devil face cd be seen
Who make money from war Who make dough from fear and lies Who want the world like it is Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty.
Who is the ruler of Hell? Who is the most powerful
Who you know ever Seen God?
But everybody seen The Devil
Like an Owl exploding In your life in your brain in your self Like an Owl who know the devil All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog
Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell Who and Who and WHO who who Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo!
David Sirota reports on the successful political strategy used by activist Mason Tvert to help decriminalize recreational marijuana use in Colorado. It demonstrates how a slight shift in the public discourse can lead to large and rapid changes in attitudes towards an issue, and hopefully this strategy will be used in other states and countries currently prohibiting recreational cannabis use. Excerpts from Pando Daily:
“Marijuana has been illegal because of the perception of harm surrounding it — that’s how they made it illegal, that’s how it is illegal currently,” Tvert tells me in the shop’s bustling lobby. “Our opponents’ goal has been to maintain a perception of harm. So our idea has been to get people to understand that marijuana is not as harmful as they’ve been led to believe, and not as harmful as a product like alcohol that is already legal.”
Despite increasingly absurd attempts by the government’s drug-war apparatus to obscure the obvious truth, decades of medical and social science research on everything from physiologicaltoxicity, to domestic violence to addiction has proven Tvert’s point that cannabis is less harmful than alcohol. But it was only a few years ago that Tvert’s colleague and future mentor at MPP, Steve Fox, happened upon a key political revelation in the reams of survey data about drug policy.
“He was looking at the polling and discovered that of those who think marijuana is safer than alcohol, 75 percent think it should be legal,” Tvert recounts as we wait behind a customer who is interrogating one of the shop’s staff members about THC and CBD content. “In other words, the number one indicator of whether or not you support marijuana being legal is whether you recognize it is safer than alcohol.”
From that revelation came the creation of the group headed by Tvert that was entirely focused on drawing the alcohol-marijuana comparison. Aptly named Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation (aka SAFER), it was predicated on a two-step strategy.
“Rather than trying to increase the percentage of people who think marijuana should be legal, we simply tried to increase the percentage of people who understand marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, which would naturally produce an increase in the percentage of people who support legalization,” he says.
…In their view, this script-flipping tactic has worked better than any other strategy before it. Not only has it resulted in Colorado legalized weed, but national polls seem to support the larger theory. Indeed, as surveys show more Americans are now viewing marijuana as less harmful than alcohol, they are simultaneously showing a majority now support legalization across the country.
…But even beyond lessons about cannabis is an even larger lesson about how assumptions and frames of reference so often determine the difference between status quo and disruption.
In drug policy, the assumption had long been that prohibition is pro-safety and that legalization is a dangerous experiment. So instead of only amplifying old messages about legalization (it will raise tax revenue, it will end criminal justice iniquities, etc.) Tvert, SAFER and MPP creatively changed the fulcrum of the entire conversation. Rather than portray their fight as one for a brand new, wholly unknown and therefore frightening reality, they used alcohol – a product that most are already comfortable with – to recast their push as one designed to create a new version of current reality. And not just a new version, but a safer reality that doesn’t statutorily encourage people who want to use a mind-altering substance to only use one that is more harmful than cannabis.
…With the rise of social media and the slow-motion fall of a monopoly media that once had complete control over the public policy conversation, there is clearly more opportunity than ever to change the terms of the debate, even on issues that seem utterly intractable.
Chris Hedges’ regular columns for Truthdig.com are consistently informative and provocative, but his latest piece offers a particularly critical analysis of the current political moment in the United States. In the following excerpt he ruminates on a number of recent actions of our modern corporate totalitarian state:
Via Truthdig:
The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state.
The corporate state, in our case, has used the law to quietly abolish the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution, which were established to protect us from unwarranted intrusion by the government into our private lives. The loss of judicial and political representation and protection, part of the corporate coup d’état, means that we have no voice and no legal protection from the abuses of power. The recent ruling supporting the National Security Agency’s spying, handed down by U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III, is part of a very long and shameful list of judicial decisions that have repeatedly sacrificed our most cherished constitutional rights on the altar of national security since the attacks of 9/11. The courts and legislative bodies of the corporate state now routinely invert our most basic rights to justify corporate pillage and repression. They declare that massive and secret campaign donations—a form of legalized bribery—are protected speech under the First Amendment. They define corporate lobbying—under which corporations lavish funds on elected officials and write our legislation—as the people’s right to petition the government. And we can, according to new laws and legislation, be tortured or assassinated or locked up indefinitely by the military, be denied due process and be spied upon without warrants. Obsequious courtiers posing as journalists dutifully sanctify state power and amplify its falsehoods—MSNBC does this as slavishly as Fox News—while also filling our heads with the inanity of celebrity gossip and trivia. Our culture wars, which allow politicians and pundits to hyperventilate over nonsubstantive issues, mask a political system that has ceased to function. History, art, philosophy, intellectual inquiry, our past social and individual struggles for justice, the very world of ideas and culture, along with an understanding of what it means to live and participate in a functioning democracy, are thrust into black holes of forgetfulness.
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, in his essential book “Democracy Incorporated,” calls our system of corporate governance “inverted totalitarianism,” which represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.” It differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader; it finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, replace decaying structures with new structures. They instead purport to honor electoral politics, freedom of expression and the press, the right to privacy and the guarantees of law. But they so corrupt and manipulate electoral politics, the courts, the press and the essential levers of power as to make genuine democratic participation by the masses impossible. The U.S. Constitution has not been rewritten, but steadily emasculated through radical judicial and legislative interpretation. We have been left with a fictitious shell of democracy and a totalitarian core. And the anchor of this corporate totalitarianism is the unchecked power of our systems of internal security.
Our corporate totalitarian rulers deceive themselves as often as they deceive the public. Politics, for them, is little more than public relations. Lies are told not to achieve any discernable goal of public policy, but to protect the image of the state and its rulers. These lies have become a grotesque form of patriotism. The state’s ability through comprehensive surveillance to prevent outside inquiry into the exercise of power engenders a terrifying intellectual and moral sclerosis within the ruling elite. Absurd notions such as implanting “democracy” in Baghdad by force in order to spread it across the region or the idea that we can terrorize radical Islam across the Middle East into submission are no longer checked by reality, experience or factually based debate. Data and facts that do not fit into the whimsical theories of our political elites, generals and intelligence chiefs are ignored and hidden from public view. The ability of the citizenry to take self-corrective measures is effectively stymied. And in the end, as in all totalitarian systems, the citizens become the victims of government folly, monstrous lies, rampant corruption and state terror.
After the Crash 