The enduring reality of government by wealth and some of its consequences

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By John Chuckman

If you really want to understand the world in which we live—its endless wars, coups, interventions, and brutality towards great masses of people—you need to start with a correct understanding of the political machinery at work.

Talk of liberal interventions or fighting for rights, Western values, and democracy are hopelessly naïve and mostly deliberately deceptive. America’s record in such matters is one of securing everything from bananas, copper, and crude oil concessions to, at the very least, foreign governments obedient to its mandates after removing a disliked leader, whether elected or not. There is no concern for principles outside of their being featured in blowhard, insincere political speeches. The interests of America’s government do not match the interests of ordinary people, those in America or anywhere else, and, were the informed consent of the governed genuinely involved in launching bloody adventures, they likely never would happen.

The underlying reality of how people in the West are governed now compared to hundreds of years ago is surprisingly unchanged, much the way the rules governing how chemical bonds form have not changed despite a long and great parade of events and discoveries in the visible world. Despite all the revolts, revolutions, congresses, constitutions, and great movements over the centuries, we are in fact governed in the same essential way, people.

Of course to see this, you have to strip away the forms and rituals we have constructed over the centuries, forms and rituals which create impressive effects much like the green smoke and thunderous voice of the Wizard of Oz, a wizened old man who worked from his curtained control room, pulling levers and hitting buttons to create intimidating effects. Most Americans remain impressed with the smoke and thunder and cheap magic tricks, it requiring some dedicated effort to shake off well-done illusions, and, as I’ve written before, Americans work extremely hard in their jobs or live a kind of marginal life trying to scrape by on low wages or part-time work, either of which situations leaves little time or inclination to question what government is really doing and for whose benefit.

And so long as America remains under the rule of wealth, it is unlikely other states, as in Western Europe, will emerge from it because America’s establishment has such decisive influence—economic, financial, military, and political—over many of them.

What is considered as wealth changes over time and with economic development, and with those changes so do its interests as well as the practices of its power. Great deposits of copper ore or crude oil In the Middle Ages were virtually worthless. Wealth then was land for agriculture, forestry, and hunting, with the family names of owners determined by their estates. The revenue from that natural wealth was converted to great houses and jewels and the implements of war. War, too, was a source of wealth with most wars being little more than adventures for dominance and looting on a grand scale. Again, as in our own day, they were dressed up with slogans about principles or causes which had almost no meaning. The case of the “Christian” Crusades, which continued their pillaging and orgy of killing, on and off, for centuries, springs to mind. Soldiers and sailors, up until modern times, were not motivated by their paltry pay and poor supplies, it being understood as a condition of employment that they would enjoy a share of the bounty looted in any campaign.

Today, the forms wealth are as diverse and complex as is our society, and many of them are not apparent to ordinary people in the way great estates and hunting rights and obligations in war and peace to great lords were apparent in 800. Even as late as, say, 1850, wealth in the form of belching factories employing armies of people was often still quite apparent, but today’s complex banking and securities and financial institutions are not well understood by most people, although they represent immense wealth just as real in its demands and power as estates and obligations of the 9^th century. Wealth today also comes from huge global manufacturing concerns of every description often with operations scattered out of sight, great shipping and transportation fleets, or electronic and communications empires. Land itself remains an important form of wealth where it can produce industrial-scale crops or contains deposits of valuable minerals or can generate flows of electricity or has been developed into great cities or resorts. War remains a source of wealth, only on a scale which could not have been imagined a few hundred years ago, but the spoils no longer go to soldiers in professional armies, they go to those responsible for the war, often in forms not easily recognized, as with special rights and concessions and secret arrangements.

As the nature of wealth evolved from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era, outward forms and rituals of government also changed. We have moved from the near-absolute power of kings and autocrats through aristocracies and republics with senates to a great variety of forms, parliaments and congresses, which appear designed to yield, to one degree or another, to the consent of the governed.

But appearances, as in the case of the Wizard of Oz, can be deceiving.

Today, a single wealthy individual cannot make the kind of demands upon ordinary people that marked arrangements in the Middle Ages—although that must be qualified as I’m sure anyone who has become involved in a dispute with a wealthy neighbor or a great corporation will be happy to explain—but the class of wealthy people can indeed make just such demands, and they do so all the time. You will be taxed to pay for the schemes that their lobbying establishes, your water and air will contain the pollution of their manufacturing and mining, your children will be sent to kill and die in their wars, the ethics or morals you were taught as a child will be trampled upon, and virtually all important legislation will deal with the rights and interests of wealth, and not those of the broad mass of people.

In America, once in four years you will be asked to choose between two names, both of which have been closely vetted by the powers that be, to elect as head of government. Not only have they been vetted, but the immense costs of their campaigns in reaching you on television, at rallies, and with opinion polls to regularly fine tune their words will be paid almost exclusively by those whose real interests are at stake in every major election, the wealthy and their important serving institutions of government. The end effect is not really all that different than the old single-candidate Soviet elections at which the press trained Americans to sneer.

Many of America’s founding fathers had dark suspicions about the existence of wealth being secure in the presence of democratic government, and that is why they created forms—mostly adapted from Britain, a place no one regarded as a democracy then—to keep wealth safe. Over a couple of centuries, the original arrangements were modified, the country moving from a tiny one percent or so privileged voters—for perspective, that’s roughly the same as the percent of voters in China’s Communist Party deciding who rules the country—to something approaching universal suffrage, but always arrangements were made to safeguard wealth against the assumed predations of democracy.

In elections for the American Senate, the legislative body with real power, authority, and privilege, you again will be asked to choose between two well-vetted and well-connected candidates. Others may run, but they will be rendered helpless by the vetted candidates’ flood of money and resources, you will never hear their voices, and America’s press—itself an empire of wealth serving wealth—will waste no time on their views. In the case of the Senate, you will be asked once in six years to vote, with the elections staggered so that only one-third of that body faces election at any time—a perfectly-conceived formula for keeping the old bunch in charge despite issues which might have generated election discontent. In fact, you can never “throw the bums out” in America. Anyway, there really isn’t much risk for senators running for re-election, with incumbents winning about 95% of the time. Senate seats are so secure they sometimes become family sinecures, handed down from father to son. After the election, unless you live in a small-population, insignificant state, you will never see or meet your senator, and you will certainly have no opportunity to lobby. Virtually all seeing, meeting, and lobbying will be done by the wealthy sponsors of the successful candidates or by their hired help.

The average American senator is said to spend two-thirds of his or her time securing funds for the next election, and such elections have now been bid-up to unbelievable amounts of money. The huge costs serve as what economists call “a barrier to entry,” a kind of high financial wall which keeps others from entering the political market, or, if somehow they do manage to enter, keeps them from effectively competing. Only the other wealth-vetted and connected candidate will have any hope of collecting a big enough pot of money to threaten an incumbent. The belief that people giving millions of dollars to candidates expect nothing in return is not even worth discussing. What they get—apart from goodies like important and prestigious appointments or valuable government contracts—is access, and access is exactly what most people never enjoy. Intimate access to politicians in high office, people always mindful of the necessity for another overflowing campaign war chest, is genuine power.

It is not impossible to have compatibility between democracy and wealth, but it requires a set of laws and regulations concerned with campaign financing, lobbying, and disestablishing a political duopoly of two privileged parties, laws which simply cannot happen in America over our lifetimes. In America, law makes corporations persons, and the highest court, packed by judges appointed to serve wealth’s interests, has ruled that campaign money is free speech. These are not things easily turned around.

The American system of campaign financing not only assures the secure power of domestic wealth, it assures also the influence of wealthy lobbies serving the interests of foreign states, Israel being the most outstanding example. Other foreign states also exploit this system to varying degrees, but no other state has more than five million American citizens in great part keen to serve its interests. And many of them are successful, affluent, and well-placed people enjoying a connected set of organizations and well-funded lobbies. Other foreign states also do not enjoy having many of their lobbyists in America being dual-citizens, free to move back and forth between the country being lobbied and the country being lobbied for, surely an ethical issue for politics and foreign affairs of the first magnitude. It is a unique situation in many respects, and it has helped create a unique set of problems in the world.

The wealthy interests of America happen to share some important interests with lobbyists for Israel, including securing the Western world’s supply of energy and not permitting the rise of states of any power in the Middle East who disagree with America’s essential views. It is important to keep in mind that “America’s essential views” are not necessarily the views of most of the American people and that many of those “essential views” have never received genuine informed consent. Elections conducted the way America’s high-level elections are conducted are incapable of bestowing meaningful consent, especially in vitally important matters.

The Israeli-American alliance is something of an unholy one because in binding America so closely to Israel, some huge and unresolvable conflicts have been created. Israel is associated with a long series of wars and abuses in the region, and, ipso facto, so is America. Israel, given the nature of its founding, expansion, and practices, is not liked by any neighboring states, although many now cooperate secretly, and sometimes even openly, in areas of mutual interest and have learned to tolerate its existence, the way generally eased by large American bribes or equally large American threats.

Traditionally, states in the Middle East are not democracies. Their often short histories have given limited opportunity for wide-spread development and prosperity creating a strong middle-class, the sine qua non for democracy. With the United States always (insincerely) praising democracy—including Israel’s grotesque contradiction of “democracy for some but not others”—it has been caught in a bind between supporting what it says it opposes and opposing what it says it supports.

Its proposed solution was a huge CIA project, nicknamed “the Arab Spring” by America’s wealth-serving and often dishonest press, a set of manufactured uprisings intended to bring a semblance of democracy to the region. It has been largely a failure, ending with some countries trapped in chaos or civil war and others, notably Egypt, briefly gaining a government Israel hated intensely, the truth being that genuine democracy in virtually any of these countries will not be friendly to Israel’s geopolitical ambitions in the region nor to those of its American promoter and protector. While the “Arab Spring” was allowed to proceed in some states, in others, where it was neither intended nor desired, such as Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, spill-over effects were deliberately and violently suppressed with American assistance. So the American-Israeli relationship now still locks the United States effectively in fighting against democracy in some countries and in supporting absolute monarchs and oligarchs in others, while in still others, such as Syria and Iraq, it is involved literally in smashing them as states, in violation of all international law and long-term good sense.

The entire situation is an ongoing disaster and is almost certainly not sustainable over the long term. How do you insist a huge country like Egypt remain a backwater without democratic rights indefinitely? How can you justify the destruction of an ancient and beautiful country like Syria? How can you justify supporting absolute monarchs and keeping their people in total political darkness? How do you continue supporting Israel in its abuse of millions, depriving them of every human right, or in its constant aggression to secure its hegemony? The drive for regional hegemony is all that is behind Israel’s constant hectoring of Iran, and how is that behavior different to the aggressive wars condemned by the Nuremburg Tribunal? It’s not, of course. Further, destructive, deliberately-induced conflicts like that in Syria, by degrading its economic advance, only slow the day for democracy’s having a real chance to emerge.

So here is America, self-proclaimed land of the free, mired in a vast situation where it works to suppress democracy, supports tyrants, and supports aggressive war because its leaders, with no genuine consent of the governed, have put it there, and this is just one of many unhealthy and destructive consequences of wealth’s rule in the United States. Wealth has no inherent interest in democracy, and it is entirely up to a people anywhere to demand respect for democracy through laws.

John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. He has many interests and is a lifelong student of history. He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and concern for human decency. John regards it as a badge of honor to have left the United States as a poor young man from the South Side of Chicago when the country embarked on the pointless murder of something like 3 million Vietnamese in their own land because they happened to embrace the wrong economic loyalties. He lives in Canada, which he is fond of calling “the peaceable kingdom.” John’s columns appear regularly on Counterpunch, Media Monitors, Politics Canada, Baltimore Chronicle, Intrepid Report, Scoop (New Zealand), Asian Tribune, Aljazeerah.info, Smirking Chimp, Dissident Voice, and many other Internet sites. He has been translated into at least ten languages and is regularly translated into Italian and Spanish. Several of his essays have been published in book collections, including two college texts. His first book has just been published, “The Decline of the American Empire and the Rise of China as a Global Power,” published by Constable and Robinson, London. Contact him at jc60649@yahoo.com.

Jade Helm, Terrorist Attacks, Surveillance and Other Fairy Tales for a Gullible Nation

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.” ― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

Once upon a time, there was a nation of people who believed everything they were told by their government.

When terrorists attacked the country, and government officials claimed to have been caught by surprise, the people believed them. And when the government passed massive laws aimed at locking down the nation and opening the door to total government surveillance, the people believed it was done merely to keep them safe. The few who disagreed were labeled traitors.

When the government waged costly preemptive wars on foreign countries, insisting it was necessary to protect the nation, the citizens believed it. And when the government brought the weapons and tactics of war home to use against the populace, claiming it was just a way to recycle old equipment, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were labeled unpatriotic.

When the government spied on its own citizens, claiming they were looking for terrorists hiding among them, the people believed it. And when the government began tracking the citizenry’s movements, monitoring their spending, snooping on their social media, and surveying their habits—supposedly in an effort to make their lives more efficient—the people believed that, too. The few who disagreed were labeled paranoid.

When the government let private companies take over the prison industry and agreed to keep the jails full, justifying it as a cost-saving measure, the people believed them. And when the government started arresting and jailing people for minor infractions, claiming the only way to keep communities safe was to be tough on crime, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were labeled soft on crime.

When the government hired crisis actors to take part in disaster drills, never alerting the public to which “disasters” were staged, the people genuinely believed they were under attack. And when the government insisted it needed greater powers to prevent such attacks from happening again, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were told to shut up or leave the country.

Finally, the government started carrying out covert military drills around the country, insisting they were necessary to train the troops for foreign combat, and most of the people believed them. The few who disagreed, warning that perhaps all was not what it seemed, were dismissed as conspiracy theorists and quacks.

By the time the government locked down the nation, using local police and the military to impose martial law, there was no one left in doubt of the government’s true motives—total control and domination—but there was also no one left to fight back.

Now every fable has a moral, and the moral of this story is to beware of anyone who urges you to ignore your better instincts and trust the government.

In other words, if it looks like trouble and it smells like trouble, you can bet there’s trouble afoot.

For instance, while there is certainly no shortage of foul-smelling government activities taking place right now, the one giving off the greatest stench is Jade Helm 15. This covert, multi-agency, multi-state, eight-week military training exercise is set to take place from July 15 through Sept. 15 in states across the American Southwest.

According to official government sources, “Jade Helm: Mastering the Human Domain” is a planned military exercise that will test and practice unconventional warfare including, but not limited to, guerrilla warfare, subversion, sabotage, intelligence activities, and unconventional assisted recovery. The training exercise will take place in seven different southwestern states: California, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Utah and Nevada.

U.S. Army Special Operations Command will primarily lead this interagency training program but the Navy Seals, Air Force Special Operations, Marine Special Operations Command, Marine Expeditionary Units, 82nd Airborne Division, and other interagency partners will also be involved. Approximately 1,200 troops are expected to participate in these exercises.

The training is known as Realistic Military Training because it will be conducted outside of federal property. The exercises are going to be carried out on both public and private land, with the military reportedly asking permission of local authorities and landowners prior to land usage. The military map listing the locations that will host the exercise shows Texas, Utah, and the southern part of California as “hostile territory.” According to U.S. officials, these three areas are marked as hostile to simulate environments where American troops are viewed as the enemy. The other areas on the map are marked as permissive, uncertain (leaning friendly), or uncertain (leaning hostile).

Military officials claim that the southwestern states were chosen because this exercise requires large areas of undeveloped land as well as access to towns and population hubs. These states purportedly also provide a climate and terrain that is similar to that of potential areas of combat for the United States, particularly Iraq, Iran and Syria.

Now the mainstream media has happily regurgitated the government’s official explanation about Jade Helm. However, there is a growing concern among those who are not overly worried about being labeled conspiratorialists or paranoid that the government is using Jade Helm as a cover to institute martial law, bring about total population control, or carry out greater surveillance on the citizenry.

In the first camp are those who fear that Jade Helm will usher in martial law. These individuals believe that by designating the two traditionally conservative and Republican-dominated states, Utah and Texas, as hostile territory, while more Democratic states like Colorado and California are marked as friendly, the military plans to infiltrate the states with large numbers of gun owners and attempt to disarm them.

Adding fuel to the fire is the mysterious and sudden temporary closures of five Walmart stores in Texas, California, Oklahoma and Florida, two of which are located near Jade Helm training sites. Those in this camp contend that the military is planning to use the Walmart stores as processing facilities for Americans once martial law is enacted.

Pointing to the mission’s official title, “Jade Helm: Mastering the Human Domain,” there is a second camp that fears that the military exercises are merely a means to an end—namely total population control—by allowing the military to discern between friendly civilians and hostiles. This concern is reinforced by military documents stating that a major portion of Jade Helm training will be about blending in with civilians, understanding how to work with civilians, using these civilians to find enemy combatants, and then neutralizing the target.

In this way, the United States military is effectively using psychological warfare to learn how people function and how to control them.

As a study written by military personnel states, mastering the human domain, also known as identity processes, means “use of enhanced capabilities to identify and classify the human domain; to determine whether they are adversarial, friendly, neutral, or unknown.” The study later states that identity processes can be used to “manage local populations during major combat, stability, and humanitarian assistance and/or disaster relief operations.”

While the military has promised that the work they are doing is aimed for use overseas, we have seen first-hand how quickly the military’s weapons and tactics used overseas are brought home to be used against the populace. In fact, some of the nation’s evolutionary psychologists, demographers, sociologists, historians and anthropologists have been working with the Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative to master the human domain. This security research includes “Understanding the Origin, Characteristics, and Implications of Mass Political Movements” at the University of Washington and “Who Does Not Become a Terrorist and Why?” at the Naval Academy Post Graduate School. Both studies focus on Americans and the different movements and patterns that the government can track to ensure “safety and security.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is also working to infiltrate churches across the country to establish a Christian Emergency Network, carry out emergency training exercises to prevent and prepare for disasters (active shooter drills and natural disaster preparedness), and foster two-way information sharing, while at the same time instituting a media blackout of their activities. As the DHS continues to establish itself within churches, a growing number of churches are adopting facial recognition systems to survey their congregations, identify and track who attends their events, and target individuals for financial contributions or further monitoring. As the partnership between churches and the DHS grows, their facial recognition databases may be shared with the federal government, if that is not already happening.

Finally, there is the third camp which fears that Jade Helm is merely the first of many exercises to be incorporated into regular American life so that the government can watch, study, and better understand how to control the masses. Certainly, psychological control techniques could be used in the future to halt protests and ensure that the nation runs “smoothly.”

It remains to be seen whether Jade Helm 15 proves to be a thinly veiled military plot to take over the country (one lifted straight out of director John Frankenheimer’s 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May), turn the population into automatons and psychological experiments, or is merely a “routine” exercise for troops, albeit a blatantly intimidating flexing of the military’s muscles.

However, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the problem arises when you add Jade Helm to the list of other troubling developments that have taken place over the past 30 years or more: the expansion of the military industrial complex and its influence in Washington DC, the rampant surveillance, the corporate-funded elections and revolving door between lobbyists and elected officials, the militarized police, the loss of our freedoms, the injustice of the courts, the privatized prisons, the school lockdowns, the roadside strip searches, the military drills on domestic soil, the fusion centers and the simultaneous fusing of every branch of law enforcement (federal, state and local), the stockpiling of ammunition by various government agencies, the active shooter drills that are indistinguishable from actual crises, the economy flirting with near collapse, the growing social unrest, the socio-psychological experiments being carried out by government agencies, etc.

Suddenly, the overall picture seems that much more sinister. Clearly, there’s a larger agenda at work here, and it’s one the American people had better clue into before it’s too late to do anything about it.

Call me paranoid, but I think we’d better take James Madison’s advice and “take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.”

US Military and NATO: Praetorian Guard of the Orwellian Empire

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

The new world order is chaos

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has positioned itself, one administration after another, as a global supercop guarantor of world peace. Indeed, since the end of World War II, even as the US has projected its power worldwide through military might, its clever ideologues have managed to convince a large portion of their public opinion that their ambitions for global hegemony are altruistic and benevolent. This dichotomy between the fictional discourse and the brutal reality of US imperialism, applied globally since 1945, is more blatant than George Orwell’s worse fears expressed in “1984“. In this war-is-peace construct, nothing is what it appears to be, and imperialist wars are sold to a gullible citizenry as being humanitarian. Despite the disinformation propagated by the think tanks and Western mainstream media outlets, factual evidence shows that currently, the clear-and-present dangers to world peace are not ISIS, “Russia‘s aggressive acts” or Ebola but, rather, the US military and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq given by the spin masters of Orwellian imperialism was to “spread freedom and democracy to the Middle East”. Twelve years later, what has spread in Iraq, Libya and Syria is not freedom and democracy, but ashes, ruins, blood baths and despair. The new world order that the ideologues of Orwellian imperialism are striving to impose globally under the cover of fake revolutions, at least until everyone is beaten into submission, is actually controlled chaos. The destructive empire has several wrecking balls at its disposal, but its tools of choice are, in addition to the US military and the troops of its dependable and mostly occupied vassals in NATO, the Israel “Defense” Forces. The creation of controlled chaos works as a tactic to mold the collective psyche of the citizenry, because people usually strive for stability, security and order, even at the expense of their own personal liberty. The collective state of fear that chaos generates makes most people welcome the worst kinds of repression from the most oppressive forms of governments. Fear and paranoia are the essential ingredients of police states.

Global hegemony plan from a warmongering Nobel peace prize laureate Nothing could be more appropriate for the warmongering Orwellian empire than to have as its current public-relations person a Nobel peace prize laureate. The irony and absurdity of it all is tragic. On February 11, 2015, president Obama sent an official request to the US Congress to pass an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against America’s latest elusive enemy: ISIS or ISIL. In the request to Congress, which is a gem in Orwellian rhetoric and legalese, it is mentioned that Obama “has directed a comprehensive and sustained strategy to degrade and defeat ISIL”, further the letter explains the plan to use convenient regional surrogates on the front line of the empire’s new war: “Local forces, rather than the US military should be deployed to conduct such operations. The authorization I propose would provide the flexibility (for the US military) to conduct ground combat operations…..”

Needless to say, the new AUMF will pass unquestioned, with flying colors and wide bipartisan support. After all, could the US Congress say no to a perfect new war that promises very few US casualties, for its patrons of the military-industrial complex? War is the US’ leading export and an extremely lucrative business for everyone associated with the merchants of death. The timing of the AUMF, a few months after the full-scale operation against ISIS started without it, has to do with the budget of the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2016. Added to a “base” defense budget of $534 billion, the Pentagon is asking for $51 billion to pay for “the war on ISIL in Iraq and Syria”. The 2016 budget proposal asks for $168 million of additional funding to “counter Russian aggressive acts”, with $117 million for Ukraine and $51 million for Moldova and Georgia, plus $789 million to bolster NATO in the European Union. The direct and indirect beneficiaries, namely Wall Street and the political class, of the colossal war machine are thrilled with the prospect of more profit from permanent war.

Despite the fact that ISIS was originally the foster child of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with Uncle Sam for its godfather, it has just been labeled enemy number one and is a dream come true to make the “War on Terror” global, permanent and perhaps even more destructive. The Islamic State foreign legion is indeed the perfect enemy: one that can justify a permanent war-without-borders; help finish the job of wrecking the Middle East in preparation for the greater Israel project; and finally, create a clash-of-civilizations fear and discourse in Europe to make people accept a full-blown police state.

In the time of the Orwellian empire, most people not only accept the notion that they must be protected against themselves, but are also conditioned to embrace it happily, as if they are singing cheerfully to the slaughterhouse. Furthermore, the war on ISIS will allow the US military and its NATO surrogate to invade and occupy more countries.

US military: occupier of allies

Facts are still awfully stubborn even in this era. Seventy years after the end of World War II, the US military still occupies the main losers of the conflict and current “allies”. About 40,000 US troops occupy Germany, while 60,000 occupy Japan. Fifty-four years since the end of the Korean war, almost 30,000 troops occupy South Korea. Fourteen years after the invasion of Afghanistan, a Praetorian guard of 11,000 is still in that country, and 12 years after the invasion of Iraq a force of about 5,000 troops, quickly growing, remains there. Some other significant footprints of the US military on so-called sovereign countries are as follows: about 12,000 in Kuwait; 3,500 in Bahrain; 1,500 in Turkey; 11,000 in Italy; 10,000 in the United Kingdom; and 2,000 in Spain.

The overall US military force overseas occupies more than 150 countries and amounts to the staggering number of 160,000 troops, with an additional 70,000 deployed in “contingency” operations with either the Navy, Air Force, or Special Forces. A priority of further military expansion, in this case through NATO, is Eastern Europe using the pretext of necessary defense against “Russia’s aggressions”. In Spring 2015, NATO will establish command centers in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to oversee 5,000 troops.

From time to time, despite the thick fog of disinformation and propaganda where basic truth become meaningless, the empire’s ideologues slip up and become candid. Such a chilling moment of semi-truth happened in the White House National Security Strategy report/statement of February 6, 2015. Vague literary flourishes do not hide the fact that the leadership of Orwellian Empire Inc. does not intend to respect national sovereignty and pull out its Praetorian guards.

“Now, at this pivotal moment, we continue to face serious challenges to our national security, even as we are working to shape the opportunities of tomorrow. Violent extremism and an evolving terrorist threat raise a persistent risk of attacks on America and our allies. Escalating challenges to cybersecurity, aggression by Russia, the accelerating impact of climate change, and the outbreak of infectious diseases all give rise to anxieties about global security. We must be clear-eyed about these and other challenges and recognize the United States has a unique capability to mobilize and lead the international community to meet them. Any successful strategy to ensure the safety of the American people and advance our national security interests must begin with an undeniable truth- America must lead. Strong and sustained is essential to a rules-based international order that promotes global security and prosperity as well as the dignity and human rights of all peoples. The question is never whether America should lead, but how we lead.”

So we have it. The global citizenry must challenge the US’ Orwellian leadership that has driven the world from one war to another for the past seven decades. This is a clear-and-present danger to all of us. Nations, worldwide, must reclaim their sovereignty by firstly recognizing that the Praetorian guard of the Orwellian empire are not allies but occupiers. Contesting the “leadership” of the US is the only way out of a perverse global construct where war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and reality is fiction.

The Never-Ending ISIS Fraud

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Daniel Spaulding

Source: The Soul of the East

In the midst of Saudi Arabia’s merciless, unprovoked bombing campaign against the people of Yemen comes news that a faction of ISIS-aligned militants has established a beachhead in the south of the Arabian Peninsula for their proclaimed Caliphate. Already media reports have been circulating that the local al-Qaeda affiliate has taken advantage of Riyadh’s bombing campaign to seize control of territory in the southeast of Yemen, with no noticeable Saudi opposition to these acts. The Saudis have not made quelling groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS any sort of priority in their assault; rather it is exclusively the Houthi militias that are in the sights of the Wahhabist kingdom.

This state of affairs apparently suits jihadist factions just fine. They have expressed no noticeable opposition to the Saudi bombing campaign and the mass killing of Yemeni civilians. Rather, ISIS has issued a declaration of war against the Houthis, threatening the mass slaughter of Yemen’s Shiite sect. The aims of Saudi Arabia, and its main backer, the United States, and jihadist factions like ISIS and al-Qaeda converge when it comes to fighting and suppressing the Houthis (cynically presented as Iranian proxies). Or rather, once again, jihadists are deliberately unleashed and encouraged to wage war against the enemies and rivals of Washington and Riyadh, just as they have been previously employed in Libya and Syria.

Despite all the fearmongering rhetoric and disinformation trumpeted by elements of the American media about secret ISIS training camps in Mexico, there have been precisely zero ISIS cells uncovered in the United States. More specifically, no cells not manufactured and managed by America’s own domestic intelligence agencies have been found. On the other hand, ISIS is very active in savagely attacking states, like that of Bashar Assad’s Syria, and other groups, like the Houthis in Yemen, that are in the target sights of Washington and Riyadh. To put it bluntly, ISIS and al-Qaeda are the shock troops of America’s Brave New War.

It is a common and entirely cynical meme among certain factions of the alternative media to place all the blame on Barack Obama for US support of the jihad international, insinuating that he’s a secret Islamist sympathizer and fellow traveler. On the contrary, the joint American-Saudi sponsorship of mujahedin brigades is hardly anything new or unique to the Obama administration. It reaches back to Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who armed the mujahedin in Afghanistan against the Russians. Indeed, the entire sordid love affair goes back even earlier to British imperial policy to divide and rule the Middle East, as enacted by Lawrence of Arabia. Oddly enough, the Iranian government, now opposed by America and Israel, was built up by both countries throughout the 1980’s.

More recently, during the presidency of George W. Bush, the Washington-Riyadh axis funded and facilitated jihadist militants in Iran and Lebanon in a concerted effort to destabilize those countries. The specific aim of this endeavor, according the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story, was to use the Sunni jihadists to undermine and degrade the influence of Shiite powers in the region, especially Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.[1]

Thus the current positions and activities employed by the Obama administration toward this end are merely a continuation of previous Bush-era policies. Collaborating with the Saudis to unleash radical Sunni jihadists in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen against the Shiites of those nations is an attempt to break Iran’s perceived hegemony in the Middle East.

Israel’s role in this criminal enterprise, meanwhile, should not be passed over in silence. Israel has repeatedly bombed the Syrian military, while allowing Syrian jihadists to remain unmolested in the Golan, and even providing various forms of aid to the Syrian jihadists. Tel Aviv officials are quite open about the fact that they are far more comfortable with murderous ISIS and other Sunni radicals in power next door than with Iran and the Shiites.

Between the globalists based in Washington and the Saudi Wahhabists, one hand washes the other. (Lest we dare to mention the cover up of Saudi Arabia’s involvement with 9-11 terror attacks by Washington.)

We would never have any understanding of the monstrous fraud perpetrated against the peoples of the Middle East, as well as ordinary Americans, from ingesting the poison-pill weaponized memes of the mass media. When not chasing their tails with ridiculous celebrity gossip, phony social outrage, or even more trivial and banal items, the press in the Western world, especially the United States, are a non-stop source of disinformation, fake news sets, State Department talking points, and general mind-blowing stupidity.

“We live in a world where there is more and more information,” observed the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, “and less and less meaning.”

The average cable news viewer or social media consumer is saturated with all sorts of images, narratives, and factoids, but they are deprived of any coherent meaning to the items they absorb. Many assume, Baudrillard observed, that “information produces meaning,” but they are wrong, and in fact, “the opposite occurs.”

Instead of finding meaning or even connecting the dots in the ISIS scam, and unaware of elite dialectical manipulations, the average American is left to wallow in his ignorance, blind to what his rulers do in his name. He is easily cowed into fear and terror of the very same jihadist groups that his government has sponsored and promoted for decades, surrendering his freedom and identity while cheering on his own dehumanization in the Brave New War. Murder, mayhem, and a kaleidoscopic spectacle of lies: such are the fruits of the fraud we celebrate.

[1] Russia is the other perpetual target of the American-Saudi sponsored jihadist networks. Russian president Vladimir Putin recently revealed in an interview that he confronted former president Bush about the CIA’s backing of Muslim radicals in the North Caucasus. And in 2013 then head of Saudi intelligence Prince Bandar in a meeting with Putin offered to reign in Chechen militant groups, which he acknowledged where directed by Saudi intelligence, if Russia agreed to end its support for the Assad government in Syria.

Washington Protects Its Lies With More Lies

Posted on June 4, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

My distrust has deepened of Seymour Hersh’s retelling of the Obama regime’s extra-judicial murder of Osama bin Laden by operating illegally inside a sovereign country. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/05/11/seymour-hersh-succumbs-disinformation-paul-craig-roberts/ That Hersh’s story, which is of very little inherent interest, received such a large amount of attention, is almost proof of orchestration in order to substantiate the Obama regime’s claim to have killed a person who had been dead for a decade.

Americans are gullible, and thought does not come easily to them, but if they try hard enough they must wonder why it would be necessary for the government to concoct a totally false account of the deed if Washington kills an alleged terrorist. Why not just give the true story? Why does the true story have to come out years later from anonymous sources leaked to Hersh?

I can tell you for a fact that if SEALs had encountered bin Laden in Abbottabad, they would have used stun grenades and tear gas to take him alive. Bin Laden would have been paraded before the media, and a jubilant White House would have had a much photographed celebration pinning medals on the SEALs who captured him.

Instead, we have a murder without a body, which under law classifies as no murder, and a story that was changed several times by the White House itself within 48 hours of the alleged raid and has now been rewritten again by disinformation planted on Hersh.

Perhaps the release of book titles allegedly found in bin Laden’s alleged residence in Abbottabad is part of the explanation. Who can imagine the “terror mastermind” sitting around reading what the presstitute London Telegraph calls bin Laden’s library of conspiracy theories about 9/11 and Washington’s foreign and economic policies? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/11619270/Osama-bin-Ladens-bookshelf-featured-conspiracy-theories-about-his-terror-plots.html

Keep in mind that the government’s claim that these books were in bin Laden’s Abbottabad library comes from the same government that told you Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that Assad used chemical weapons, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and that Russia invaded Ukraine. There is no evidence whatsoever that bin Laden had these books, just as there is no evidence for any claim made by Washington. In the absence of evidence, Washington’s position amounts to this: “It is true if we say so.”

I would wager that the Hersh story was planted in order to gin up renewed interest in the bin Laden saga, which could then be used to discredit Washington’s critics. Notice that the authors in bin Laden’s alleged library are those careful and knowledgeable people who have severely whipped Washington with the truth. The whip wielders are Noam Chomsky, David Ray Griffin, Michel Chossudovsky, Greg Palast, Michael Scheuer, William Blum. You get the picture. You mustn’t believe these truth-tellers, because bin Laden approved of them and had their books in his library. By extension, will these truth-tellers be accused of aiding and abetting terrorism?

Obama claims to have settled the score in mafia godfather fashion with bin Laden for 9/11. But there is no body and not even a consistent story about what happened to the body. The sailors aboard the ship from which the White House reported bin Laden was given a burial at sea report no such burial took place. The SEAL unit that allegedly supplied the team that killed an unarmed and undefended bin Laden was mysteriously wiped out in a helicopter crash. It turns out that the SEALs were flown into combat against the Taliban in an antique, half-century-old 1960s vintage helicopter. Parents of the dead SEALs are demanding to have unanswered questions answered, a story that the presstitute media has conveniently dropped for Washington’s convenience.

Other than 9/11 itself, never has such a major event as bin Laden’s killing had such an enormous number of contradictory official and quasi-official explanations, unanswered questions and evasions. And the vast number of evasions and contradictions arouse no interest from the Western media or from the somnolent and insouciant American public.

Now it turns out that Washington has “lost” the bin Laden “death files,” thus protecting in perpetuity the fabricated story of bin Laden’s killing. http://www.globalresearch.ca/pentagon-orders-purge-of-osama-bin-ladens-death-files-from-data-bank/5342055

Here is Tom Hartman’s interview with David Ray Griffin: Is bin Laden dead or alive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI5b3Ir012k

Here is Philip Kraske’s OpEdNews article on Steve Kroft’s orchestrated “60 Minutes” interview with Obama on the killing of Osama bin Laden: http://www.opednews.com/populum/printer_friendly.php?content=a&id=143300

ISIS Psyop Continues With “Counter Terror” Blackwater Commander

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Bernie Suarez

Source: Activist Post

In the latest installment of the ISIS show the newest CNN report is pulling out a new storyline. The latest script now admits that a major Blackwater operative is an ISIS “counter-terror commander” leader training ISIS and sharing his combat secrets with them. Yes, the new ISIS psyop script is actually being spun in a way that the script writers are now admitting (one story at a time) that ISIS fighters are part of U.S.’s Blackwater. This is a way to admit that the U.S. continues to train ISIS, while at the same time maintaining the psyop. As usual, they are pretending this happened out of sheer coincidence and bad luck.

Why the change of script? Because it is now common knowledge amongst anyone not plugged into the CIA’s mainstream media that the West and its allies created ISIS; and in order to buffer and dodge future stories showing the connections, they are feeding the “crossover” and “defecting” narratives. Thus, anyone caught fighting for ISIS in the future who has clear ties to Israel or the U.S. can be disavowed as “defectors” (think plausible deniability!)

When the ISIS show began in the summer of 2014, many of us including yours truly were suspecting that at least some of the ISIS members are probably Blackwater (aka Academy, XE) continuing their terrorism of the Middle East under the control of course of U.S./Israeli Intelligence. Blackwater terrorists after all were the perfect foot soldiers in the U.S. occupation in Iraq; Iraq is essentially the birthplace of the Islamic State, Blackwater terrorist mercenaries are criminals that operate outside the law. Everything seemed to fit, the marriage seemed to be made in heaven. Well now we know for sure thanks to the latest CNN report which essentially admits that this is the case.

The new ISIS show script says that Gulmurod Khalimov, a special forces commander from Tajikistan, “disappeared” since April of 2014 and of course now has resurfaced with brand new pledged allegiance to the Islamic State! Coincidence? It gets better. The report claims that-

Gulmurod Khalimov is perhaps the highest-profile defector from the majority-Muslim ex-Soviet republic in central Asia.

The convenience of this supposed Blackwater Russian-speaking defector with super James Bond skills cannot be overstated. With this latest ISIS psyop CNN report we are asked by U.S./Israel Intelligence to believe that this super skilled killing machine operative is not only siding with ISIS, but for good measure he’s planning and training for ways to attack America and (the report implies) he and his trained ISIS fighter friends will come and get you in your city dwelling place wherever you live!

Above and beyond all of this, the report is careful to insert anti-Russian propaganda directly into the script. The suggestion in this latest episode is that there is a growing allegiance somehow building between Russia and ISIS! CNN is careful to show you the usual HD super high quality ISIS marketing-style videos, showing you ISIS fighters training, winning and being great. Even the background music is proper Middle Eastern style, perfect background that makes ISIS seem even greater and more intimidating.

As I’ve indicated in the past, no entity on the planet has received more promotion and marketing than ISIS at the hands of the Western CIA-controlled mainstream media. This promotional and marketing campaign has been very aggressive and has spanned the globe. If we consider the cost of advertising today with any media platform it would be fair to say that the ISIS show is a multi-billion dollar marketing campaign that the U.S. created terror group is getting for free. That alone should wake readers up to the magnitude of this ISIS story being told predominantly since the summer of 2014. This should also help others realize how important the new world order is to the globalists who are using ISIS as a tool to advance their plans for world domination.

Since ISIS now represents one of the greatest hopes for the new world order, no one should be surprised that they are getting such incredible multi-billion dollar promotion and marketing effort. And no one should be surprised by the continued super marketing campaign the terror group will continue to get from CNN and the other CIA front media organizations. The reality of the matter is now becoming crystal clear to many – and is quite clear to those who had been paying attention all along – that without CNN’s and the rest of the mainstream media’s careful HD high quality coverage and glorification of the organization there will be no new world order.

So for now, arm yourself with knowledge, study the origins of ISIS, and see the truth about this fake terror group whose only purpose is to serve as a tool to advance the PNAC new world order plans. Once you see their role in the bigger picture you will probably never not see it again. Then as you do your part to expose this reality show, sit back and take note of this real-time reality show – It has a lot of money behind it, it has a sense of adventure, shock, irony, and it knows no boundaries in terms of believability.

Clearly the ISIS show has emerged as one of the central surreal psyop events of the century, and that alone makes it deserving of our individual attention. Let’s pay attention and consider some solutions.

Solutions

We must think in multiple dimensions when dealing with government psychological operations. Realize that as human beings we have to maintain simultaneous awareness of the greater (conspiratorial) picture, while at the same time maintaining an effective awareness of the real-time (matrix) deception that many people are still under. This will give us an operating dual consciousness – one mentally placing one foot in each side of the matrix. That allows us to tactfully, patiently and carefully wake others up from the ISIS show (in this case) and into the simple truth of the emerging, determined super fast moving globalist new world order plans.

For those who are wide awakened let’s realize that it is up to us to continue exposing the ISIS show at any cost. Let us prepare for the soon to be repeating future. Remember that the globalists like to repeat their tactics. Just look at the similarities between JFK and 9/11. Keep in mind the two events were about 40 years apart, yet the mindset, the script, and the propaganda logic behind the two events were the same, coming from the same primitive predictable minds.

I believe it is more important to focus on putting out solutions and ideas that appeal and resonate with those who get it not those who don’t get it. Worrying about those who still don’t get it could be a trap and energy/time waster because truth is realized.

Those who are still asleep will either realize the ISIS show or they will seek out the ending to the show and logically continue to try to rationalize it into their reality.

The RESTORED version of humanity, which is what many of us are, should pursue perfection, improvement and should strive to thrive. That’s right. The “restored” version of humanity means that you have been mentally rescued from the great human self-experiment propagated by the controllers. The species has been mentally enslaved for very long and you are awakened from that enslavement. As with any disease, those that are disease-free only look to care for those still diseased, not take on their disease. If the disease is mental, where the subject could represent a threat to you, (just as in medicine/psychiatry) the best thing to do is to isolate the subject. Similarly, in this case it is up to those who are awakened to intellectually isolate those who are still diseased by the deception and mental enslavement. Nurture them when possible with care (timely information) but don’t burden yourself with their disease (of not understanding or not accepting the truth outside their personal paradigm and illusions).

Part of practicing solutions is knowing how to deal with disinformation agents and those who are part of the system and thus part of the problem. Both those who are fooled and those who spread deliberate lies and disinformation on behalf of the control system suffer from a disease of mental enslavement. They are infected by their circumstances which may include the pressure to go along with the government paradigm for fear of losing their job, the offer of money and riches, government and CIA’s mainstream media mind control, etc.

So, in the end, it all comes down to mental enslavement versus mental freedom. Mental enslavement is the key to going along with the stories we’re told by CIA’s mainstream media and is the key to leading us to their new world order. Mental freedom, on the other hand, is the state humanity is in when it realizes, just like all the creatures on the planet, that it is free to express whatever it wants and be whatever nature leads it into being. This “freedom” and the quest to express this simple freedom is truly the story of humanity. The perception of being free can thus become the obstacle to actually being free as George Orwell outlines in his novel Animal Farm. This false perception of freedom in combination with learned helplessness thus accounts for the perpetual struggle to be free. True freedom therefore consists of the combination of perceiving that one is free plus ACTUALLY being free from the control system. This final stage of true freedom cannot be reached without the understanding of what it is to be truly (mentally) free. The ISIS show is nothing more than an obstacle to that understanding, an obstacle which utilizes the fear factor, one of the greatest historic tools for keeping humanity mentally enslaved and disconnected from the concept of freedom.

Bernie is a revolutionary writer with a background in medicine, psychology, and information technology. He has written numerous articles over the years about freedom, government corruption and conspiracies, and solutions. A former host of the 9/11 Freefall radio show, Bernie is also the creator of the Truth and Art TV project where he shares articles and videos about issues that raise our consciousness and offer solutions to our current problems. His efforts are designed to encourage others to joyfully stand for truth, to expose government tactics of propaganda, fear and deception, and to address the psychology of dealing with the rising new world order. He is also a former U.S. Marine who believes it is our duty to stand for and defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. A peace activist, he believes information and awareness is the first step toward being free from enslavement from the globalist control system which now threatens humanity. He believes love conquers all fear and it is up to each and every one of us to manifest the solutions and the change that you want to see in this world, because doing this is the very thing that will ensure victory and restoration of the human race from the rising global enslavement system, and will offer hope to future generations.

Who is Afraid of Conspiracy Theories?

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Lance deHaven-Smith

Source: Waking Times

In his book Philosophical Investigations, philosopher of science Ludwig Wittgenstein demonstrated that words are more than designations or labels. They are signals in a context of activity, and are invested with many assumptions about the roles and social status of speakers and listeners.

In the 20th century, men often called women “girls.” This term, while indeed referring to something real – to women – was more than merely a label; it was demeaning and implicitly conveyed a subservient status. Wittgenstein called the common sense view of words standing for things, the “naming theory of language.” However, he pointed out, if words were merely labels, you could not teach language to children. If you pointed at a table and said “table,” how would a child know you are referring to the piece of furniture and not to the rectangular shape of its top, or the table’s colour, or its hardness, or any number of other attributes? Language is taught in the context of activity. You say to the child, “the cup is on the table,” “slide the cup across the table top,” “I am setting the table for dinner,” and slowly the child learns what a table is and how the word table is used.

Wittgenstein’s observation may seem simple, but it posed a profound challenge to all of Western philosophy since Plato, who had asked: What is beauty? What is truth? What is justice? Wittgenstein’s critique of the naming theory of language suggested these were the wrong questions. What needs philosophical investigation is who uses such words in what circumstances and with what implications.

The term conspiracy theory did not exist as a phrase in everyday conversation before 1964. The conspiracy theory label entered the lexicon of political speech as a catchall for criticisms of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that US President Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman with no assistance from, or foreknowledge by any element of the United States government. Since then, the term’s prevalence and range of application have exploded. In 1964, the year the Warren Commission issued its report, the New York Times published five stories in which conspiracy theory appeared. In recent years, the phrase has occurred in over 140 New York Times stories annually. On Amazon.com, the term is a book category that includes in excess of 1,300 titles. In addition to books on conspiracy theories of particular events, there are conspiracy theory encyclopedias, photographic compendiums, website directories, and guides for researchers, sceptics and debunkers.

Initially, conspiracy theories were not an object of ridicule and hostility. Today, however, the conspiracy theory label is employed routinely to dismiss a wide range of anti-government suspicions as symptoms of impaired thinking akin to superstition or mental illness. For example, in his 2007 book on the assassination of President Kennedy, former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi says people who believe JFK conspiracy theories are “as kooky as a three dollar bill in their beliefs and paranoia.” Similarly, in Among the Truthers, Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay refers to 9/11 conspiracy theorists as “political paranoiacs” who have “lost their grip on the real world.” Making a similar point, if more colourfully, in his popular book Wingnuts journalist John Avlon refers to conspiracy believers as “moonbats,” “Hatriots,” “wingnuts,” and the “Fright Wing.”

As these examples illustrate, conspiracy deniers adhere unwittingly to the naming theory of language. They assume that what qualifies as a conspiracy theory is self-evident. In their view, the phrase conspiracy theory as it is conventionally understood, simply names this objectively identifiable phenomenon. Conspiracy theories are supposedly easy to spot because they posit secret plots that are too wacky to be taken seriously. Indeed, the theories are deemed so far-fetched they require no reply or rejoinder; they are objects of derision, not ideas for discussion. In short, while ridiculing conspiracy beliefs, conspiracy deniers take the conspiracy theory concept itself for granted.

This is remarkable, not to say shocking, because the concept is both fundamentally flawed and in direct conflict with English legal and political traditions. As a label for irrational political suspicions about secret plots by powerful people, the concept is obviously defective because political conspiracies in high office do, in fact, happen. Officials in the Nixon administration did conspire to steal the 1972 presidential election. Officials in the Reagan administration did participate in a criminal scheme to sell arms to Iran and channel profits to the Contras, a rebel army in Nicaragua. The Bush-Cheney administration did collude to mislead Congress and the public about the strength of its evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. If some conspiracy theories are true, then it is nonsensical to dismiss all unsubstantiated suspicions of elite intrigue as false by definition.

This fatal defect in the conspiracy theory concept makes it all the more surprising that most scholars and journalists have failed to notice that their use of the term to ridicule suspicions of elite political criminality betrays the civic ethos inherited from British legal and political traditions. The Magna Carta placed limitations on the King, guaranteed trial by one’s peers, assigned historic revenue sources to London, and in other ways recognised the dangers of unrestrained political authority. More generally, the political institutions of the English speaking peoples presuppose political power is a corrupting influence which makes political conspiracies against the people’s interests and liberties almost inevitable. One of the most important questions in Western political thought is how to prevent top leaders from abusing their powers to impose arbitrary rule or tyranny. The men and women who fought for citizens’ rights, the rule of law, and constitutional systems of checks and balances would view today’s norms against conspiratorial suspicion as not only arrogant, but also dangerous and historically illiterate.

The founders of English legal and political traditions would also be shocked that conspiracy deniers attack and ridicule individuals who voice conspiracy beliefs, and yet ignore institutional purveyors of conspiratorial ideas, even though the latter are the ideas that have proven truly dangerous in modern history. Since at least the end of World War II, the citadel of theories alleging nefarious political conspiracies has been, not amateur investigators of the Kennedy assassination and other political crimes and tragedies, but political elites and governments. In the first three decades of the post-World War II era, officials asserted that communists were conspiring to take over the world, Western governments were riddled with Soviet spies, and various social movements of the 1960s were creatures of Soviet influence. More recently, Western governments have accepted US claims that Iraq was complicit in 9/11, failed to dispose of its biological weapons, and attempted to purchase uranium in Niger so it could construct nuclear bombs. Although these ideas were untrue, they influenced millions of people, fomented social panic, fuelled wars, and resulted in massive loss of life and destruction of property. If conspiracy deniers are so concerned about the dangers of conspiratorial suspicions in politics and civic culture, why have they ignored the conspiracism of top politicians and administrators?

In my book Conspiracy Theory in America, I reorient analysis of the phenomenon that has been assigned the derisive label of conspiracy theory. In a 2006 peer-reviewed journal article, I introduced the concept of State Crimes Against Democracy (SCAD) to displace the term conspiracy theory. I say displace rather than replace because SCAD is not another name for conspiracy theory; it is a name for the type of wrongdoing which the conspiracy theory label discourages us from speaking. Basically, the term conspiracy theory is applied pejoratively to allegations of official wrongdoing that have not been substantiated by public officials themselves.

Deployed as a derogatory putdown, the label is a verbal defence mechanism used by political elites to suppress mass suspicions that inevitably arise when shocking political crimes benefit top leaders or play into their agendas, especially when those same officials are in control of agencies responsible for preventing the events in question, or for investigating them after they have occurred. It is only natural to wonder about possible deception when a US president and vice president bent on war in the Middle East are warned of impending terrorist attacks, and yet fail to alert the public or increase the readiness of their own and allies’ armed forces. Why would people not expect answers when Arabs with poor piloting skills manage to hijack four planes, fly them across the eastern United States, somehow evade America’s multilayered system of air defence, and then crash two of the planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, DC? By the same token, it is only natural to question the motives of President Bush and Vice President Cheney when they dragged their feet investigating this seemingly inexplicable defence failure and then, when the investigation was finally conducted, they insisted on testifying together, in secret, and not under oath. Certainly, citizen distrust can be unwarranted and overwrought, but often citizen doubts make sense. People around the world are not crazy to want answers when a US president is assassinated by a lone gunman with mediocre shooting skills who manages to get off several lucky shots with an old bolt-action carbine that had a misaligned scope. Why would there not be doubts when an alleged assassin is apprehended, publicly claims he is just a patsy, interrogated for two days but no one makes a recording or even takes notes, and then shot to death at point-blank range while in police custody at police headquarters?

In contrast, the SCAD construct does not refer to a type of allegation or suspicion; it refers to a special type of transgression: an attack from within on the political system’s organising principles. For these extremely grave crimes, English legal and political traditions use the term high crime and included in this category istreason and conspiracies against the people’s liberties. SCADs, high crimes, and antidemocratic conspiracies can also be called elite political crimes and elite political criminality. The SCAD construct is intended not to supersede traditional terminology or monopolise conceptualisation of this phenomenon, but rather to add a descriptive term that captures, with some specificity, the long-recognised potential for representative democracy to be subverted by people on the inside – the very people who have been entrusted to uphold the constitutional order.

If political conspiracies in high office do, in fact, happen; if it is therefore unreasonable to assume conspiracy theories are, by definition, harebrained and paranoia; if constitutional systems of checks and balances are based on the idea that power corrupts and elite political conspiracies are likely; if, because it ridicules suspicion, the conspiracy theory label is inconsistent with the traditional Western ethos of vigilance against conspiracies in high office; if, in summary, the conspiracy theory label is unreasonable and dangerous, how did the label come to be used so widely to begin with?

Most people will be shocked to learn the conspiracy theory label was popularised as a pejorative term by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a global propaganda program initiated in 1967. This program was directed at criticisms of the Warren Commission Report. The propaganda campaign called on media corporations and journalists around the world to criticise conspiracy theorists and raise questions about their motives and judgments. The CIA informed its contacts that “parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by communist propagandists.” In the shadows of McCarthyism and the Cold War, this warning about communist influence was delivered simultaneously to hundreds of well-positioned members of the press in a global CIA propaganda network, infusing the conspiracy theory label with powerfully negative associations. In my book, I refer to this as the “conspiracy theory conspiracy.”

About the Author

LANCE DEHAVEN-SMITH is Professor in the Reubin O’D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University. A former President of the Florida Political Science Association, deHaven-Smith is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Battle for Florida, which analyses the disputed 2000 US presidential election, as well as The Hidden Teachings of Jesus: The Political Meaning of the Kingdom of God (Phanes Press, 2001). His latest book is Conspiracy Theory in America (University of Texas Press, 2013). DeHaven-Smith has appeared on Good Morning America, the Today Show, NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, CBS Nightly News with Dan Rather, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and other US TV and radio shows. His website is www.dehaven-smith.com.

Ukraine a Vector for GMO Poison’s Spread Through EU

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Ulson Gunnar

Source: Land Destroyer Report

When the Washington Post chooses to pen an insulting, condescending editorial targeting entire nations speaking up against Western impropriety, one can just as well assume the precise opposite of whatever narrative the Post is trying to push forward is true.

Regarding American biotech companies and their attempts to infest the planet with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and in particular their attempts to corrupt the whole of Europe with their unwanted poison through a backdoor (Ukraine), has prompted Russia to speak up for their Eastern European neighbor. Up until the armed coup in 2013-2014, also known as the “Euromaidan,” Ukraine had adamantly rejected GMOs.

With an obedient client regime now installed in Kiev, a series of political, economic and military decisions have been made that have more or less extinguished Ukraine as a sovereign nation state. Along with its extinguished sovereignty comes a complete lack of desire for self-preservation, and so, sowing one’s fields with genetically tainted, unsafe, literal poison goes from being adamantly avoided, to being openly embraced.

This brings us back to the Washington Post and a recent editorial it has published. Titled, “Russia says Western investment in Ukraine’s farms is a plot to take over the world,” it first attempts to make Russia’s accusations that Monsanto is now moving in on Ukraine with plans to institute GMOs nationwide sound unfounded. That is until the Post itself admits that is precisely what Monsanto is doing. The pieces claims:

Ukraine has long tried to sell itself to Europe as the once-and-future breadbasket of the continent, promising that Western investment is the key to making its under-exploited black earth bloom.

But official Russia would like you to know that all this agricultural development talk is really just a secret plot to help companies like Monsanto take over the world.

Then the Post openly admits:

Genetically-modified cultivation was long banned in Ukraine – as was the sale of farmland.

Then admits:

But the association agreement signed between the European Union and Ukraine last year may have created new space for the potential introduction of genetically-modified crops in Ukraine.

Finally, the Post mentions Monsanto:

Monsanto – perhaps the most recognizable corporate name in genetically modified products – did express interest in investing in Ukraine last year. (It’s worth noting that the company operates in Russia as well, though not with GMOs, just as it has operated in Ukraine.)

Since Monsanto already operates in Ukraine, what else would it be investing in additionally that it hasn’t had the opportunity to before besides GMOs? Ukraine would serve as the perfect victim to host Monsanto and other biotech corporations’ GMO-infected products in the heart of Europe.

With the EU itself relaxing some of its regulations regarding GMOs, likely without the consent of a population increasingly conscious of the risks and actively seeking organic alternatives, biotech conglomerates hope to make GMO products spread from what will be the completely unregulated fields of Ukraine, into Europe and to become as ubiquitous and unavoidable as they are in America.

Elsewhere around the world, big-agriculture has attempted to use other backdoors to bring their products into regions they are wholly rejected, including Asia where “Golden Rice” has been proposed as the answer to fighting “vitamin A deficiency,” even when simply planting some carrots would accomplish this goal more easily, cheaper and without the threat of tainting Asia’s rice crops with a strain consumers would reject out of hand.

In other instances, conquering Western interests, like in Afghanistan, have used “aid” as a backdoor to bring big-agriculture and GMOs into the region.

So by the Post’s own admission and by simply looking at what Monsanto and its counterparts have done all over the world already, they themselves couldn’t agree more with the Russian Federation regarding Monsanto’s obvious intentions in Ukraine and for the rest of Europe.

The Post, like many papers across America and Europe, has long-served the interests of the monied elite, with biotech and big-agriculture counted prominently among them. The Post and others will spin and obfuscate Monsanto’s intentions until it is too late to overturn the genetic corruption their crops will inflict on the once well-protected, sovereign fields of Ukraine.

Like many other things in Ukraine, the so-called “Euromaiden” that was allegedly spurred for freedom and self-determination has clearly stripped Ukraine of both its freedom and its ability to determine what is best for itself. From a military set upon its own people, to an economy looted by foreign interests, to a government directed literally by foreigners who chair it, to now fields to be sown with genetically altered poison, the ruination of Ukraine is nearly complete and a lasting testament to what the West truly means when it says “democratization.”

No One Will Buy GMO-Tainted Crops

Included in Russia’s comments regarding the impending despoilment of Ukraine’s agricultural industry by Monsanto and others, the Post would report:

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev told a meeting of his counterparts in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on Tuesday that the West plans to grown “genetically modified crops” in Ukraine. And it’s a fool’s errand too, he suggested, because, “to put it mildly, Europe will not approve of such products.”

The Post, in its role as associate lobbyist for big-agriculture, attempts to downplay this fact. However, reported elsewhere, even within the Western media itself, are reports that the agricultural powerhouse that is the United States is now importing organic corn because consumers refuse to eat tainted GMO products grown within the States.

Bloomberg in its report “U.S. Forced to Import Corn as Shoppers Demand Organic Food” would claim:

A growing demand for organics, and the near-total reliance by U.S. farmers on genetically modified corn and soybeans, is driving a surge in imports from other nations where crops largely are free of bioengineering.

Imports such as corn from Romania and soybeans from India are booming, according to an analysis of U.S. trade data released Wednesday by the Organic Trade Association and Pennsylvania State University.

The humiliation of a nation historically self-reliant agriculturally having to import something as basic as corn because everything grown domestically is poisoned is a lesson any Ukrainian seeking to preserve what is left of not only their dignity, but their sense of self-preservation should take note of. Even as the “miracle” of GMO evaporates amid an increasingly astute market in the United States, US corporations are buying off Ukraine’s infinitely servile regime to place Ukraine’s neck into the same noose.

However, in a way the Post is right. Russia is crazy to think Monsanto is taking over the world. The corporation, despite untold of billions pumped into lobbying, propaganda, bribes and other forms of mass persuasion, is failing miserably to convince people to ingest their poison, even in the nation their headquarters is located in. However, Russia shedding light on what Monsanto is trying to do in Ukraine, against the obvious best interests of Ukraine itself, is yet another illustration of how the “Euromaiden” putsch had nothing to do with freedom, and everything to do with Washington and Wall Street hijacking yet another nation and its resources out from under its own people under the guise of “democracy.”

	You Don’t Have To Wa… on You Don’t Have To Wait For Hal…
	ALL OUT WAR ON THE L… on ALL OUT WAR ON THE LIFE F…
	Pacific.scoop.co.nz… on Killing the Biosphere to Fast-…
	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: black ops