Category Archives: conditioning

Was Afghanistan’s Invasion Also Based on Lies?

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It’s Time for a Real Investigation

By Jack Balkwill

Source: Dissident Voice

There appears to be a bigger lie than “weapons of mass destruction.”  It’s not simply that the illegal invasion of Iraq was based on lies, but that the entire “war on terrorism” is likely based on lies.

We were told by our government that Afghanistan was invaded for giving shelter to Osama bin Laden, who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.  Mainstream press have pushed this so repeatedly that “9/11″ and “Osama bin Laden” have become interchangeable.

While working on this piece I asked the first three people I ran into at my local grocery store “Who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks?,”  three times getting “Osama bin Laden” for replies.  This is not scientific, yet it makes one wonder how this would work out in national polling.

But what if bin Laden was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks despite the drumbeat of government officials and the corporate press?  What if there has been a rush to judgment to make it appear the Bush regime was taking definitive action?

The invasion of Afghanistan certainly wasn’t about the Taliban – the Bush regime gave the Taliban $43 million in “aid” only four months before the 9/11 attacks, so were on friendly terms.

Following are three reasons to question official sources on their casus belli for invading Afghanistan.

Attempts to Peacefully Resolve the Issue

First, before the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban offered to try bin Laden in exchange for evidence that he was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

President Bush provided no evidence, and invaded Afghanistan instead.

After the start of the U.S. air campaign, the Taliban offered to send bin Laden to a third country for trial if evidence could be provided that he had been involved in the 9/11 attacks – a proposal the United States also promptly rejected.

Why not provide evidence, if it were available, to prevent a war?  It was obvious that the people of Afghanistan would defend their country from a foreign invasion, as they had since Alexander the Great invaded, and there would be a great loss of life (see Roman Empire, British Empire, USSR, etc.).

There can only be two answers– that there was no evidence supporting the cause for invasion, or that former President Bush is a psychopath who doesn’t care about human life, so contemptuously ignored the request for evidence.

Bin Laden’s Denials

Second, bin Laden denied, more than once, in the months following 9/11, that he was involved in the dirty deed.  Less than a week after the 9/11 attacks, al Jazeera quoted bin Laden:  “The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it.  I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seem to have been planned by people for personal reasons.”

In an interview with Pakistan’s Karachi Ummat on 28 September 2001, bin Laden was quoted,

Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people. Such a practice is forbidden ever in the course of a battle. … I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed.

This is a translation from Arabic to Urdu to English, and may not be entirely clear.  But for those who believe bin Laden was lying, I would suggest they come up with a motive for such a lie.  The USA had offered a $25 million reward for information leading to his capture, and President Bush had threatened “I want justice, and there’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted Dead or Alive,’” so bin Laden had nothing to gain from such a lie – he was condemned either way.  Bin Laden’s followers would have admired him as a great hero for having taken on the USA, so he had much to gain by accepting responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, were it a fact.

Demonization

Third, there was an extensive effort to demonize bin Laden, at times with apparently false charges.  Why would this be necessary for one who was guilty?

Our government and corporate media, as one on National Security State issues, made him out to be abominable, and without providing evidence, unceasingly assumed his guilt.  Recordings were blasted and headlined in Western corporate print and electronic media of bin Laden accepting responsibility for 9/11.  The public were not given the same eyeball-grabbing headlines when the recordings were proven to be likely bogus.

Here is a Guardian report showing that Swiss Scientists suggested that an audio tape of bin Laden taking responsibility was likely faked, although widely broadcast in the corporate press as evidence of his involvement in 9/11 attacks.

Here’s a BBC report showing how the “smoking gun” video may have been faked, again, after the corporate press hyped the video as incontrovertible evidence.

Conclusion

The official version, that 19 Arab hijackers were responsible, has flaws.  One flaw was that many of the alleged hijackers have been found alive and well since 9/11.  Of course, it may be that the hijackers used pseudonyms to conceal their identities.

But getting beyond these 19 Arabs is difficult because they are all dead and cannot be interviewed.  Official government investigations into 9/11, much of which are classified, look like reflexive actions to neatly tie up loose ends rather than serious inquiries.

Certainly, as Ward Churchill pointed out (and lost his job for raising the issue), Arabs had a clear motive for the 9/11 attacks, with the UN revealing, only two years earlier, that the sanctions pushed mainly by the USA on the people of Iraq resulted in over 500,000 deaths of children under age five, mostly Arab, and most Arabs were aware of this and seething with anger.

To jump to the conclusion that bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks causes one to wonder, “Why then did the FBI never bring charges against bin Laden for the hijackings and murders?  Why did the wanted posters (up to his death he was on the FBI ten most wanted list) not mention the biggest crime, though they mentioned smaller terrorist incidents as reasons for his being on the list?

We may never know if bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, but his involvement was used as the excuse for invading Afghanistan and slaughtering a massive number of people, based on the assumption that they gave bin Laden refuge.

Just as nobody has been charged with a crime for the illegal invasion of Iraq based on lies, it would appear that an investigation is in order involving the justification behind invading Afghanistan, starting with the matter of proof that bin Laden was directly involved.  The American people and the people of Afghanistan have every right to be presented with the evidence.

Jack Balkwill is an activist in Virginia. He can be reached at libertyuv@hotmail.com Read other articles by Jack.

Related article: Who Was Really Behind the 9/11 Attacks?

Indulge . . . & Undermine

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Source: CrimethInc.

Have you noticed—exhortations to indulge yourself are always followed by suggestions? Adherents of doctrines seek footholds to claim territory within you, salesmen grasp for handles to jerk you around . . . from new-age prophets to advertisers, from pornographers to radicals, everyone exhorts you to “pursue your desires,” but the question remains: which ones? The “real” ones? Who decides which those are?

This just makes it clear what’s going on: a war for your soul on every front. And those much talked-about desires are all constructed, anyway—they change, they’re dependent on external factors, culture, the whole context and history of our society. We “like” fast food because we have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn’t taste much better, because the nuclear family—for those who still have even that—is too small and stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating. We “have to” check our email because the dissolution of community has taken our friends and kindred far away, because our bosses would rather not have to talk to us, because “time-saving” technology has claimed the hours once used to write letters—and killed all the passenger pigeons, besides. We “want” to go to work because in this society no one looks out for those who don’t, because it’s hard to imagine more pleasurable ways to spend our time when everything around us is designed for commerce and consumption. Every craving we feel, every conception we form, is framed in the language of the civilization that creates us.

Does this mean we would want differently in a different world? Yes, but not because we would be free to feel our “natural” desires—no such things exist. Beyond the life you live, you have no “true” self—you are precisely what you do and think and feel. That’s the real tragedy about the life of the man who spends it talking on his cell phone and attending business seminars and fidgeting with the remote control: it’s not that he denies himself his dreams, necessarily, but that he makes them answer to reality rather than attempting the opposite. The accountant regarded with such pity by runaway teenage lovers may in fact be “happy”—but it is a different happiness than the one they experience on the lam.

If our desires are constructs, if we are indeed the products of our environment, then our freedom is measured by how much control of these environments we have. It’s nonsense to say a woman is free to feel however she wants about her body when she grows up surrounded by diet advertisements and posters of anorexic models. It’s nonsense to say a man is free when everything he needs to do to get food, shelter, success, and companionship is already established by his society, and all that remains is for him to choose between established options (bureaucrat or technician? bourgeois or bohemian? Democrat or Republican?). We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this reality, by forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us. Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of habit, custom, law, or prejudice—and it is up to you to create these situations. Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution.

And those moments are not as rare as you think. Change, revolutionary change, is going on constantly and everywhere—and everyone plays a part in it, consciously or not. “To be radical is simply to keep abreast of reality,” in the words of the old expatriate. The question is simply whether you take responsibility for your part in the ongoing transformation of the cosmos, acting deliberately and with a sense of your own power—or frame your actions as reactions, participating in unfolding events accidentally, randomly, involuntarily, as if you were purely a victim of circumstance.

If, as idealists like us insist, we can indeed create whatever world we want, then perhaps it’s true that we can adapt to any world, too. But the former is infinitely preferable. Choosing to spend your life in reaction and adaptation, hurrying to catch up to whatever is already happening, means being perpetually at the mercy of everything. That’s no way to go about pursuing your desires, whichever ones you choose.

So forget about whether “the” revolution will ever happen—the best reason to be a revolutionary is simply that it is a better way to live. It offers you a chance to lead a life that matters, gives you a relationship to injustice so you don’t have to deny your own grief and outrage, keeps you conscious of the give and take always going on between individual and institution, self and community, one and all. No institution can offer you freedom—but you can experience it in challenging and reinventing institutions. When school children make up their own words to the songs they are taught, when people show up by the tens of thousands to interfere with a closed-door meeting of expert economists discussing their lives, that’s what they’re up to: rediscovering that self-determination, like power, belongs only to the ones who exercise it.

Shout it over the rooftops: Culture can belong to us. We can make our own music, mythology, science, technology, tradition, psychology, literature, history, ethics, political power. Until we do, we’re stuck buying mass-produced movies and compact discs made by corporate mercenaries, sitting faceless and immobilized at arena rock performances and sports events, struggling with other people’s inventions and programs and theories that make less sense to us than sorcery did to our ancestors, shamefacedly accepting the judgments of priests and agony columnists and radio talk show hosts, berating ourselves for not living up to the standards set by college entrance exams and glamour magazines, listening to parents and counselors and psychiatrists and managers tell us we are the ones with the problems, buying our whole lives from the same specialists and entrepreneurs we sell them to—and gnashing our teeth in secret fury as they cut down the last trees and heroes with the cash and authority we give them. These things aren’t inevitable, inescapable tragedies—they’re consequences of the passivity to which we have relegated ourselves. In the checkout lines of supermarkets, on the dialing and receiving ends of 900 numbers, in the locker rooms before gym classes and cafeteria shifts, we long to be protagonists in our own epics, masters of our own fate.

If we are to transform ourselves, we must transform the world—but to begin reconstructing the world, we must reconstruct ourselves. Today all of us are occupied territory. Our appetites and attitudes and roles have all been molded by this world that turns us against ourselves and each other. How can we take and share control of our lives, and neither fear nor falter, when we’ve spent those lives being conditioned to do the opposite?

Whatever you do, don’t blame yourself for the fragments of the old order that remain within you. You can’t sever yourself from the chain of cause and effect that produced you—not with any amount of willpower. The trick is to find ways to indulge your programming that simultaneously subvert it—that create, in the process of satisfying those desires, conditions which foster new ones. If you need to follow leaders, find leaders who will depose themselves from the thrones in your head; if you need to “lead” others, find equals who will help you dethrone yourself; if you have to fight against others, find wars you can wage for everyone’s benefit. When it comes to dodging the imperatives of your conditioning, you’ll find that indulge and undermine is a far more effective program than the old heritage of “renounce and struggle” passed down from a humorless Christianity.

To return, finally, to the original question—yes, we too are making suggestions about which desires you pursue. We would be scoundrels to deny that! But we would be scoundrels not to make these suggestions, not to extol freedom and self-determination in a world that discourages them. Exhorting others to “think for themselves” is ironic—but today, refusing to oppose the propaganda of the missionaries and entrepreneurs and politicians simply means abandoning our society and species to their control. There’s no purity in silence. And liberty does not simply exist in the absence of control—it is something we have to make together. Taking responsibility for our part in the ongoing metamorphoses of the world means not being afraid to take part in the making of our society, influencing and being influenced as we do.

We make suggestions, we spread this propaganda of desire, because we hope by doing so to indulge our own programmed passion for propaganda in a way that undermines an order that discourages all of us from playing with our passions—and so to enter a world of total liberty and diversity, where propaganda and power struggles alike are obsolete. See you on the other side.

Related Video:

“Breaking the Fear Factor”: Opposing War, Financial Fraud and State Terrorism, Dismantling Propaganda

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By Peter Koenig

Source: Global Research

We are living in a (western) world dominated by neoliberal dictators, criminals and crooks. And many of us, impregnated with the human idiocy, as so well described by  Andre Vltcheck (The West Spreads Intellectual Idiocy) are every day deeper and deeper immersed into fear – fear of action, fear of what’s next – fear of losing our comfort zone. The western propaganda machine paid for by the corporate and financial oligarchy through the presstitute media is constantly indoctrinating the little we have left of our free-thinking brains.

Fear is everywhere. People who are afraid can easily be manipulated. People who are afraid obey. The system needs people who don’t resist. Renegades are potential drone targets. The Big Constant that pervades our western world with ambitions to also infiltrate Asia – is terrorism. Man-made terrorism – or better – elite-made terrorism; George Orwell would have called it Big Brother-made terrorism; terrorism with a particular purpose: spreading fear and submission.

On Friday, 21 August 2015, on a train from Amsterdam to Paris, according to the New York Times, “a heavily armed gunman opened fire aboard a packed high-speed train, traveling from Amsterdam to Paris [….] wounding several passengers before he was tackled and subdued” by two American military servicemen (on leave), who were helped by a third American. According to French officials, they “averted a mass killing.”- The gunman was armed with an automatic pistol, an AK47 and a knife (NYT annotation: AK47 is Al Qaeda’s preferred weapon). The Americans were coincidentally and suitably near to subdue the shooting 26 year-old Moroccan, a convenient Arab, who was taken into custody when the train stopped in Arras, France, just beyond the French-Belgian border. No doubt, he will be squeezed for confession. He may try to escape – and then may be shot death. Amen.

The French anti-terrorist unit took immediately charge of the investigation. The unit is known to work in utmost secrecy. Whatever news comes out of it is most likely ‘cooked’ to suit the system.

The NYT proclaims that the three Americans saved the train from a massacre. Nobody was killed. Just one of the American heroes was injured. Hollande thanked Obama for the brave Americans’ exemplary behavior and for preventing a train carnage. Propaganda all over. In America we trust – is dogma number one; dogma number two is – there is no save place on earth.

Fear everywhere, but America is there to help. Danger lingers at every corner. A terrorist may be just next door. Just give yourself up to Big Brother and he won’t let you down.

The first step towards sub-doing fear is asking yourself: Who invented and fabricated terrorism in the first place? In countries and entire regions ravaged by Washington incited wars and conflicts, terrorism is the expression of hopelessness, of wrath – of fighting back, when there is nothing left to lose. Look at the Middle East. A battlefield of nations destroyed by years of war – people living in ruins, in miserable squalor; some escape – and become the endless and EU loathed stream of refugees. According to the UN High Commissioner, there are more than 50 million refugees worldwide.

People take-up arms in self-defense. The west calls them terrorists. A term popularized by the media. A term that instills fear. – Imagine a world where the Judeo-Christian aggressors would suddenly see the light and stop spreading wars and conflicts and subjugating the world – peace would break out and settle in – terrorism, one of the key reasons for fear, would have no purpose to persist – fear would die, trust and solidarity would grow. The empires worst enemy: solidarity, friendship, and trust among people.

All wars and conflicts are multi-purpose. They boost the elite-dominated war industry; in the US more than 50% of GDP; they help dominate and subjugate people, exploit their resources, and are trailblazing a path towards Full Spectrum Dominance – world hegemony. They also help one of the ‘elite’s’ key objective – depopulating the world, so the elite may live longer with the ever scarcer resources of our gradually depleted planet. Reducing world population is a key objective of the Bilderberg Society – voiced by Henry Kissinger already in the 1960s. Recently I overheard one buddy telling another: I hate wars; but the only good thing about wars is – they reduce world population.

That is the horrendous level of immorality and greed to which humanity has sunk. – We the over-fed west may not get enough in an ‘overpopulated world’ (sic), therefore let’s reduce the human stock by killing off the under-people.

According to FAO – the UN Food and Agriculture Organization – with the current available agricultural technology Mother Earth could aliment at least 12 billion people, almost double of today’s world population. Fear and greed decimate our rational thinking. The me-me-me of abject western consumerism – and the fear of losing it – overwhelms our innate sense of human solidarity.

Remember the infamous Christmas Day 2009 ‘underwear bomber’ on a Northwest Airliner approaching Detroit wanting to detonate a plastic bomb sewed into his undies? He was suitably identified as a Nigerian Al Qaeda fighter and also conveniently and par hazard filmed by a passenger in the back row — This was such an amateurish attempt to spread fear, that after a short while even the media didn’t want to lose their ‘credibility’ (sic) and shut up.

Is there ever a thought among the fearful that such terrorists might be ‘planted’ by those who are served by the fear they cause?

A former CIA official recently admitted that virtually all so-called terror acts in the US and most of those in other parts of the world since (and including – added by me) 9/11 are false flags. With every false flag, the system can tighten its grip on the population under the pretext of ‘protection and security’. The populace literally asks for it – please protect us, please come to our houses, put them upside down and see whether there are terrorists hiding in our closets… that’s how the Boston people reacted after the April 2013 false-flag Marathon bombing.

Since 9/11 US citizens have lost more than 90% of their civil rights; first through the Patriot Act, then by subsequent extensions of police ‘protective measures’. Most US citizens are not even aware of the power they gave up to the police which has now the authority to invade people’s homes at will, without search warrant or explanation and then find anything justifying the arrest and indefinite confinement without trial of an inconvenient person. The ‘suspects’ are mostly Muslims. These days it’s easy selling to the brainwashed western world a Muslim as a criminal or terrorist.

Yet, the Boston Marathon false flag was of such low grade that anybody with a little bit of reason left, could recognize that the bombs were detonated by special forces with the mere purpose of implanting the notion that even a relatively progressive thinking university town like Boston is in danger of terrorism. Therefore let’s control the people, let’s not this ‘intellectual Boston crowd’ choose its own ways, abandoning the sinking ship. All sheep must be kept together in false solidarity, of course.

The two Chechnyan brothers were pre-identified, they had no clue what may eventually happen to them. They conveniently had a police record, maybe fabricated, to also hurt Russia, hitting two flies with the same stone. The Chechnyan ‘malfeasance’ could easily be sold to the public. One of the two alleged suspects was killed – and silenced – in an artificially created ‘shootout’. The other one is in solidarity confinement and is not allowed to talk, not even in court – condemned to die – soon to be silenced too.

Public events henceforth project fear. – People, please stand up against police and state-sponsored violence and terrorism! – Analyze for yourselves! Don’t believe the lies spread by the mainstream media. Yes, it takes a little effort, seeking out the truth and reading the news on internet – Global Research, Information Clearing House, Sputnik News, VNN, RT, TeleSUR, PressTV, CounterPunch, New Easter Outlook, The Saker – and many more – but it is one of the few chances you have to see the light and stand up for your rights – and get rid of fear.

The Boston false flag bombing, was followed by a similar horror event in Paris, in January this year. The Hebdo Charlie and related supermarket assault killed 17 people. It was opportunely planned at a notoriously anti-Muslim cartoon magazine, executed by CIA-Mossad forces in full connivance with the French secret service

(see http://www.globalresearch.ca/paris-charlie-the-shock-doctrine-par-excellence/5424960).

Two plus one ‘suspects’ with previous police records, were pre-identified. One of them ‘forgets or loses’ casually his ID in the get-away car – the only link the police has to the ‘terrorists’ – they find two, kill them at sight – so they won’t talk anymore. – The third related alleged assassin of a Jewish supermarket at the outskirts of Paris awaited the same fate: death by a police barrage of bullets. A blurred amateur video (maybe by now taken off internet) shows how a hand-cuffed individual is thrown before the wolves outside of the supermarket, to be riddled mercilessly with bullets. Nobody to talk. The truth remains ugly propaganda – propaganda for the system – a system that prevails over and feeds on terrorism. Millions of people, dulled by the event, walked the streets of European cities, solemnly parading placards lettered with “I am Charlie” — millions of people submitted – and still do – to a miserable lie – spreading and perpetuating fear.

Hollande had a justification to tighten the grip around France and within Paris – police everywhere, reducing civil liberties just a tad more – orders from the Washington masters. Being a nominal ‘socialist’ (sic), the emperor doesn’t quite trust him – as he may resent having been forced by the White House to abrogate his country’s lucrative sale of two Mistral type amphibious assault ships to Russia. To dampen any lingering sympathy for Russian President Putin, Hollande had to be reined in; and the spineless French leader (sic) did indeed cave in.

Fear is everywhere. European politicians are all afraid they may be in the crosshairs of the CIA or Pentagon or other US mercenary hit men if they don’t behave. A couple of days ago it was reported that Hollande is now also planning preventive drone assassinations, mimicking his brother-in-crime, Peace Nobel Laureate, Barack Obama. Imagine! – How far can you sink to lick – ehhh – the naked toes of the naked emperor. How far has our western civilization sunk in only the last 30 years – the onset of neoliberalism!

Fear commands everyone – almost. Fear is the public enemy number One – but it can be overcome – with courage, an open mind and foremost an awakened consciousness.

People feel reasonably happy. They feel protected. They gladly trade their civil rights for police and military protection. Terrorism is horrible and it is so unpredictable. It lurks everywhere. And nobody dares to question these bloody fabricated horror events. Nobody dares ask: what motivates the terrorists? How come their number has increased exponentially in the last 15 years? Terror sows more terror. Fear disseminates more fear. More fear facilitates more oppression and manipulation of people – and eventually more terrorism.

Take the massive flood of refugees engulfing Europe. The EU laments the ‘refugee crisis; seemingly not realizing that they helped making it. The Eurocrats cannot deal with the overwhelming influx of refugees. They use the bought media to make people afraid of them. The refugees come from these Arab countries the west is fighting for ‘freedom and democracy’. They are dark-skinned, poor and no-good. They steal our jobs, food and women. The human touch and solidarity of westerners has been annihilated long ago – by the neoliberal doctrine – that knows no mercy, only profit and power. Western powers don’t want these poor homeless beggars within their frontiers. What to do with them? They are a costly nuisance. Most of them are Muslims anyway. There is no space for them.

Would it ever occur to one of those high-flying, arrogant never elected Maastricht politicians to ask ‘why is this onslaught of refugees increasing by the day?’ – They may find the answer in front of their nose, in case they still have some left-over ticking brains. We, Europeans, in full complicity with war-mongering hegemonic Washington have helped destroy their countries, their economies, their jobs, torn apart their families, killed their children, have bombed their very homes to ashes – now they come to seek help from us. These poor people have no choice but asking their hangmen for a bit of mercy, for some crumbs of bread, for some rudimentary shelter. The raped seeks alms from the rapist. It’s the Stockholm syndrome. – Its fear from dying. Maybe the criminals who almost killed them have some humanity left, a bit of mercy – please.

What makes them tick – these criminal hegemonic politicians? Why are they so inhumanly selfish, greedy and violent? The public at large is afraid to even ask. Asking could produce answers that may derange one’s comfort zone. Better don’t ask and follow the rules. Let fear continue to rule.

The NYT also reports, “Stock prices around the world continued to plunge on Friday, threatening to end one of the longest bull runs in the history of the United States stock market.” Fear of losing money is spread. Such ‘market’ fluctuations, as most of us know, have little to do with ‘markets’, be it share or money markets. Money is fabricated by a mouse-click of a bank dishing out debt. Markets are manipulated by banks and political powers for monetary profit and political gains – and to sow fear – fear that something horrendously drastic may happen, may affect our fragile economy – and may foremost affect our stolen well-being. Yes, stolen. Our western riches have been stolen during hundreds of years of abject, murderous colonization of the southern hemisphere. And we continue colonizing them with our modern weapon – MONEY. When banks spread fear, it is to steal the money, pension funds, social systems from us, their faithful clients. Stealing from abroad is not enough.

Rather than fearfully shutting up – wake up! Dare stand up fellow citizen – against the white collar onslaught of fraud and exploitation, against corruption of our elitist neoliberal system! Get rid of those deceiving politicians – the scum of greed and power. Expose them. Neutralize them.

The US as well as the European Commission just enacted laws, allowing banks, effective immediately – to ‘rescue’ themselves by so-called ‘bail-ins’ – meaning, a bank that has overstretched and over-speculated itself into bankruptcy may literally save itself by stealing the money from its depositors and shareholders. – Why does such an edict – not really a law because those who designed the rule are unelected Eurocrats – not prompt an immediate run on the banks? – Why does nobody even protest? – Because people don’t know? Maybe. But Fear – sheer fear from being punished for ‘disobedience’ – is a better explanation.

Instead, our fear makes us trust that such ‘bail-ins’ will always happen to others. We so easily forget what happened only two years ago, in March 2013 to the people of Cyprus, when their deposits were decimated by the infamous ‘haircut’, administered by the highly indebted Cypriot banks, by order of the BCE, with full complicity of the Cypriot elites, who first transferred their fortunes abroad. It was like a trial run. How much would the populace swallow without (too much) protesting? – It worked. The rule is now institutionalized – and nobody says beep. – For fear that worse may follow? – Or for sheer comfort of not moving our butts.

The famous late Howard Zinn said civil disobedience is our – as in ‘we the people’ – strongest weapon against corporate and state injustice and abuse. Today’s version of this wisdom might be for the 99.99% of us, the people, to organize and infiltrate the reigning criminal system and breaking it down from within. Much like did and do the State Department funded Washington-based thinktanks (sic) – initiating the deadly and destructive ‘Arab Spring’, intruding and subverting the European Parliament with bought proxies and fake NGOs – and what they attempt to do in Russia and China, albeit unsuccessfully.

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Back to the NYT article on the plunge of the US stock exchange. Finger-pointing of the guilty is of the order. The fear factor has to be substantiated and enhanced by fault of an ‘outsider’ – in this case China – which according to the NYT has ‘unexpectedly’ devalued its currency, a sign of a troubled economy and a bleak outlook for the economy of other large ‘developing countries’.

Let’s fear the Evil East. – No good may come from the east. The NYT has of course no explanation of truth. Namely that the Chinese Yuan had been artificially over-valued under pressure of the US, and kept within a 2% band of fluctuation by the Chinese authorities. This was also in line with China’s huge dollar reserves, some 1.6 trillion dollars. Relaxation of the fluctuation – letting the rate slide naturally to an expected 3% margin, would not only make China more competitive, but might enhance the currency’s international standing to eventually becoming a new currency in the IMF’s basket constituting the SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights. The SDR is an international virtual money that may be lent to countries which so desire, hence, better balancing the currency exchange risk of the loan. The current SDR basket is composed of only four ‘world’ currencies; the US dollar, the British Pound, the Euro and the Japanese Yen.

If the Yuan can keep its own by floating against other major currencies, chances are it may be admitted by the west-dominated IMF as the fifth currency to the SDR basket, thereby opening the door for the Chinese Yuan to become a major official world reserve currency. Washington may not like it, but may have little choice preventing the currency of the world’s strongest economy to become an officially admitted reserve currency.

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Fear may also be the main reason for the Greek Tsipras Government 180 degree U-turn after the 62% NO vote on July 5 – No to austerity, No to more strangulation by the infamous troika – European Central Bank (ECB), European Commission (EC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Not Germany, not the troika, are Greece’s strongest enemies; fear is. The Syriza government was pressured, blackmailed, coerced – and possibly even corrupted – into accepting an even more nefarious austerity package than the one against which Greeks voted with an overwhelming NO. If indeed enacted, the new debt commitment of € 86 billion will drive Greece’s debt to GDP ratio way above 200 % – and not one euro will flow into Greece’s economy, her social system, fighting unemployment, bringing back public hospitals, schools, water and electricity.

The Syriza Tsipras Government has committed an illegal act against Greece’s own Constitution which puts the people above parliament and above the executive – as a true democracy should. Tsipras’ anti-democratic act could be undone any time by a simple decision of the Supreme Court. According to international standards, Greece’s accumulated debt is fully illegal and could be erased by a mouse click, the same way it was created. Any contract – in this case debt – concluded under duress, coercion, corruption and / or blackmail does not stand up before an international court of law. This must have been known to the Tsipras government. Yet, Tsipras and his inner circle went to Brussels to ‘negotiate’ ignoring this chance. Instead they sold out their country to the banksters, let themselves be humiliated, ridiculed in the face of their own people, let alone the rest of the world.

Fear was most likely the engine for Tsipras’ behavior. Many of his Syriza colleagues left the government coalition. Ministers who didn’t agree with his politics were fired. He preferred succumbing to fear – fear of the potential wrath that might emanate from the corrupt and criminal EU; from greedy Germany whose neoliberalism is rapidly taking on the colors of Nazism. – German supremacy over Europe – again? – Maybe there were death-threats involved, who knows. It is common practice when power and resources are at stake.

However, a true leader has no fear. He or she stands tall with the moral and ethical obligation to defend the interests of the people who elected him or her. As did Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, Cristina Kirchner, Lula, Dilma Rousseff and many more.

Traveling recently all over Greece fear was visible everywhere. When asked, why their inaction in the face of this shameful treason of their PM – no protests, the streets remained calm – the answer was almost uniformly – we are afraid. Afraid of what? Of the police; they shoot at us with rubber bullets, with water cannons – and we don’t know when the military will intervene.

In Delphi, the very town where democracy was born some 2,500 years ago, a shop owner confessed, democracy is dead, not only in Greece – but in Europe, in the world. With this backdrop, a new military takeover was according to him not far-fetched. The Tsipras betrayal was a boon for the rightwing, the Nazi-like ‘Golden Dawn’ – a perfect backing for a new military regime.

After the 1967 US-supported so-called Coup of the Colonels, Greece suffered seven years of a most repressive right wing military dictatorship, where full obedience was of the order, where people disappeared, where the communist party was forbidden and communists were prosecuted and killed, where anything resembling left-wing literature was censured, during which miniskirts, pop-music, long hair, the peace sign and the like were prohibited. This repressive regime has deeply marked the Greek population. They are afraid it may return. They are aware of their country’s vulnerability due to its importance for Washington, hosting the southern-most strategic NATO base. Any deviation of the Washington made and EC imposed rule may bring back the military horror – reminiscent of Costa Cavras’ 1969 extraordinary docudrama “Z”.

Now, the Tsipras Government has resigned – for fear of the domestic consequences of its actions? – A new interim government is to be prepared before the announced 20 September election. Will the radical break-away Syriza faction, the new Unity Party, be able to form a viable coalition and gather the necessary trust to win the coming September elections?

Will Greece after all be able to break the paralyzing streak of fear?

Will Greece set the new standard of fearlessness for the rest of Europe to follow? – Will Greece dare to go the only practical way – exit the unviable euro – go back to her drachma and revamp their economy with public banking for the benefit of the Greek people? – I trust Greece will dare take back her sovereignty, breaking the all-permeating Fear Factor and become a flagship of courage for Europe and for the world.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik News, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance . 

Upside down economics of debt, poverty, unemployment: Ready to seize solutions now, or do you require more pain?

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By Carl Herman

Source: The Daily Censored

“If people were really self-interested, they would stop trying to be individualistic.” – John B. Cobb, founder of Seizing an Alternative conference (and here, videos here)

Economic Hitman John Perkins’ 2-minutes on today’s neo-colonialism capitalism:

Demonocracy’s 2-minutes on what the US national debt looks like if shown in actual amounts of $100 bills:

Earth economics is upside down.

Accelerating technology can and should provide:

  • more personal freedom from labor,
  • more beauty in infrastructure and nature,
  • greater joy in our freedom to create and explore our beautiful, powerful, and diverse virtues (something like “resource-based economics” as researched by The Venus Project).

We know what we have is in contrived Orwellian opposition of what leadership should create. We know that what we receive is literal criminal fraud:

I could go on to literally ~100 areas of crucial concern.

The first challenge for the 99.99% is to trust their own Emperor’s New Clothes observations that Earth is truly in this tragic-comedy rather than listen to the .01%’s lies attempting to cover naked facts anyone can see.

Please understand that I represent likely hundreds of thousands of professionals making factual claims with objective evidence anyone with a high school-level of education can verify. For example, the June 2015 Seizing an Alternative conference (and here, videos here) at the Claremont Colleges had hundreds of professionals presenting data and solutions in over 80 areas of speciality. My paper and videos for this conference is here.

The purpose of education since the “Age of Enlightenment” is to present facts for public verification, and to seize the victory of refuting lies by would-be dictators, especially when such lies are obvious and of crucial public importance.

The path forward as we build a critical mass of humans recognizing the Emperor’s New Clothes truth is to demand arrests and solutions, obviously:

  1. ARRESTS: the first responsible action upon recognizing massive crimes that annually kill millions, harm billions, and loot trillions is to demand that law enforcement and military enact arrests of criminal leaders to stop the crimes and begin unwinding the truth of what happened in Earth’s tragic-comedy (four-part article series with videos on arrests as the obvious citizen response).
  2. SOLUTIONS: the .01% with corporate media have suppressed solutions documented beginning with Benjamin Franklin how government can abundantly operate without taxes: monetary and credit reform allow the public to have near-instant prosperity: full-employment, zero public deficits and debt, the best infrastructure we can imagine, falling prices, and release of public TRILLIONS held in “rainy day” accounts. Full documentation here.

Humanity’s choices:

  1. Ongoing .01% Orwellian, upside-down, tragic-comic, Emperor’s New Clothes crimes with all the pain, fear, harm, death, debt, poverty, enslavement, crime, destruction, and despair.
  2. Arrests to stop the crimes of the present, and ready-to-start solutions to build a brighter future.

Be your brightest light as the person you’ve always wanted to be.

Former World Bank economist Herman Daly and co-author John B. Cobb of For the Common Good discuss our condition and pathways forward in this 40-minute interview:

Carl Herman is a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History; also credentialed in Mathematics. He worked with both US political parties over 18 years and two UN Summits with the citizen’s lobby, RESULTS, for US domestic and foreign policy to end poverty. He can be reached at Carl_Herman@post.harvard.edu

Where is Neo When We Need Him — Paul Craig Roberts

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

In The Matrix in which Americans live, nothing is ever their fault. For example, the current decline in the US stock market is not because years of excessive liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve have created a bubble so overblown that a mere six stocks, some of which have no earnings commiserate with their price, accounted for more than all of the gain in market capitalization in the S&P 500 prior to the current disruption.

In our Matrix existence, the stock market decline is not due to corporations using their profits, and even taking out loans, to repurchase their shares, thus creating an artificial demand for their equity shares.

The decline is not due to the latest monthly reporting of durable goods orders falling on a year-to-year basis for the sixth consecutive month.

The stock market decline is not due to a week economy in which after a decade of alleged economy recovery, new and existing home sales are still down by 63% and 23% from the peak in July 2005.

The stock market decline is not due to the collapse in real median family income and, thereby, consumer demand, resulting from two decades of offshoring middle class jobs and partially replacing them with minimum wage part-time Walmart jobs without benefits that do not provide sufficient income to form a household.

No, none of these facts can be blamed. The decline in the US stock market is the fault of China.

What did China do? China is accused of devaluing by a small amount its currency.

Why would a slight adjustment in the yuan’s exchange value to the dollar cause the US and European stock markets to decline?

It wouldn’t. But facts don’t matter to the presstitute media. They lie for a living.

Moreover, it was not a devaluation.

When China began the transition from communism to capitalism, China pegged its currency to the US dollar in order to demonstrate that its currency was as good as the world’s reserve currency. Over time China has allowed its currency to appreciate relative to the dollar. For example, in 2006 one US dollar was worth 8.1 Chinese yuan. Recently, prior to the alleged “devaluation” one US dollar was worth 6.1 or 6.2 yuan. After China’s adjustment to its floating peg, one US dollar is worth 6.4 yuan. Clearly, a change in the value of the yuan from 6.1 or 6.2 to the dollar to 6.4 to the dollar did not collapse the US and European stock markets.

Furthermore, the change in the range of the floating peg to the US dollar did not devalue China’s currency with regard to its non-US trading partners. What had happened, and what China corrected, is that as a result of the QE money printing policies currently underway by the Japanese and European central banks, the dollar appreciated against other currencies. As China’s yuan is pegged to the dollar, China’s currency appreciated with regard to its Asian and European trading partners. The appreciation of China’s currency (due to its peg to the US dollar) is not a good thing for Chinese exports during a time of struggling economies. China merely altered its peg to the dollar in order to eliminate the appreciation of its currency against its other trading partners.

Why did not the financial press tell us this? Is the Western financial press so incompetent that they do not know this? Yes.

Or is it simply that America itself cannot possibly be responsible for anything that goes wrong. That’s it. Who, us?! We are innocent! It was those damn Chinese!

Look, for example, at the hordes of refugees from America’s invasions and bombings of seven countries who are currently overrunning Europe. The huge inflows of peoples from America’s massive slaughter of populations in seven countries, enabled by the Europeans themselves, is causing political consternation in Europe and the revival of far-right political parties. Today, for example, neo-nazis shouted down German Chancellor Merkel, who tried to make a speech asking for compassion for refugees.

But, of course, Merkel herself is responsible for the refugee problem that is destabilizing Europe. Without Germany as Washington’s two-bit punk puppet state, a non-entity devoid of sovereignty, a non-country, a mere vassal, an outpost of the Empire, ruled from Washington, America could not be conducting the illegal wars that are producing the hordes of refugees that are over-taxing Europe’s ability to accept refugees and encouraging neo-nazi parties.

The corrupt European and American press present the refugee problem as if it has nothing whatsoever to do with America’s war crimes against seven countries. I mean, really, why should peoples flee countries when America is bringing them “freedom and democracy?”

Nowhere in the Western media other than a few alternative media websites is there an ounce of integrity. The Western media is a Ministry of Truth that operates full-time in support of the artificial existence that Westerners live inside The Matrix where Westerners exist without thought. Considering their inaptitude and inaction, Western peoples might as well not exist.

More is going to collapse on the brainwashed Western fools than mere stock values.

Don’t Worry – Everything is Not Under Control

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By Zen Gardner

Source: ZenGardner.com

What a farce. Telling everyone “everything is under control” is perhaps the most dulling and disempowering phrase ever uttered.

My fascination with language just keeps expanding. I love looking at expressions, words, colloquialisms, so-called “sayings” and the like with fresh awakened eyes. I can’t help it. The supposed, accepted and unconscious meanings of these imposed “expressions” are what direct our minds and turn our attention.

So much of what we’ve been handed down is contorted, manipulated and eventually nestled in the collective mindset to twist our hearts away from simple truth.

How many times has this expression been used to bring seeming comfort to someone; “Don’t worry, everything’s under control.” Really? What control? Who’s controlling what? And why?

So often this is used to imply some powerful force is behind everything directing what’s going on. Remind you of anything? Yes – religion, hierarchy, and social, political and economic so-called “controllers”. How debilitating can you get when it comes right down to it, playing on people’s insecurity and lack of conscious awareness?

“It’s under control” is comforting to people? It’s the picture of personal disempowerment!

External Control? Or Creative Freedom!

Sure, there is a wonderful creative Source we are all intrinsically part of, but it’s not “controlling” anything in a living, expanding Universe with beings of all sorts with free will and self determination in an alive multidimensional environment. If anything, this Creative impetus is tearing down control systems that attempt to foist themselves on its process, put there either by conscious intent or the manifestation of hardening mindsets in the social fabric.

Earth processes attest to this, as well as our spectacular expanding and ever changing Universe. Nature itself is alive with new sprouts of life in the animal, plant and mineral worlds, never mind other realms of existence.

Look at earthquakes and volcanoes, or the sun and astral influences. As much as some try to analyze or predict major events that affect earth that still brings no control, only a measure of preparedness on rare occasion. And that type of insecurity is good for us. It’s humbling and keeps us in check.

This process is what the awakening is all about!

While some earth changes may be exacerbated by human activity, the big stuff is way out of our control. Thankfully. That’s what makes life life, and also why the insane would-be captivators of humanity and its planet work so feverishly in their mad pursuits to try to control natural processes. Control is their yardstick and without it they have no temporal security or power, which to them equates some weird form of normalcy or equilibrium.

How upside down can you get.

Be it geoengineering our climate, genetically modifying the natural progression of life forms, or attempting to install artificial intelligence to run their soulless programs, these maniacs are desperate for control in every shape and form. Why? They cannot meld or harmonize with what’s natural since their psychopathic, demonic intentions have nothing to gain, all while the rest of us thrive on being part of the fantastic empowering natural processes of Creation Itself.

Therein lies the rub. Quite apparently we’re in a world of conflicts of interest. That’s our current playing field, if you will. Or won’t. It’s just the way it is.

Let Go Into Conscious Anarchy

I like the anarchy approach. Anarchy is an example of another twisted word. It’s doesn’t mean putting a society into deliberate chaotic destruction, it means living without hierarchical control mechanisms. Something most groomed humans are scared spitless of thanks to generations of social programming.

You mean to tell me if we didn’t have so-called “government” that everything would fall apart? Baloney. People are resourceful and essentially responsible, at least their inner nature is, that hasn’t been perverted by all of this programming to the contrary. That very dependence on external control systems is what the hierarchy is literally banking on which is why the repeated memes of fear of scarcity or personal security.

There’s plenty for everybody. All we need to do is work together locally and share with other communities in a range of sizes and distances. Real commerce in loving cooperation, not the regulated systems that have been foisted upon us. We’ve been weaned from personal responsibility into a system of statist dependence, like someone who’s stopped using their muscles and is dependent on some mass produced contraption for their mobility when there’s nothing wrong with them at all.

They just need to exercise their innate capabilities.

Just because people have become spiritually atrophied in large numbers doesn’t mean that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Exactly like waking up, it’s time to arise and use the magnificent body of capabilities we’ve all been given, and let go of these false crutches and systems of hierarchy and walk into life and live!

Epilogue

That false assurance that everything’s under control by external forces as if we individually have virtually none has got to go. Being comforting in times of stress and turmoil is one thing, but propping people up with some external dependence reinforcement is fundamentally wrong.

It’s time to be conscious – in our words, our thoughts and our actions.

It’s really not that difficult. The main thing you’ll confront is ignorant, unenlightened opposition from those who’ve grown deeply accustomed to this dependency programming, as if it’s some form of respect for the “great ones” who rule them.

It’s very deep and will take time to overcome for most. But remaining in that conscious space, no matter what ridicule or obstacles assail you, is the very solution we each are longing for.

It begins with each of us. Standing our ground and then moving forward in conscious, loving action.

Do it. Bravely. The time for humanity to arise is now.

Much love, be well, and fully empowered,

Zen

ZenGardner.com

The Nature of American Denial

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By SARTRE

Source: Waking Times

At the core of self delusion is the inability and/or the unwillingness of facing reality. While psychological disorders can often explain abnormal behavior in individuals, the exegesis for deviant social attitudes and accompanying conduct is reserved for society. Or so we are told! But does this make sense to you? As long as you accept that reality does exist and that it can be understood, it follows that we have the right, the ability and the obligation to comprehend it and adjust our actions accordingly.

Most Americans view, of their own personal identity, is inculcated by the political culture. Delmar England, in his provocative work – Mind and Matters, The World in a Mirror – offers this valuable insights into our mutual and shared condition: “In human affairs, as surely as effect is preceded by action, action is preceded by belief, and belief is preceded by thought and conclusions.”

Applying this standard to politics Mr England depicts government is this fashion:

“For all the sidestepping, dance arounds, word games, and confused rhetoric, the term government is easily defined; not by subjective agreement, but by reference to objective reality and the actual entities involved. First, we know that there is no such thing as an infinite entity and that the term, government, necessarily denotes a relationship. The actual entities involved are human individuals. The base options of relationships between individuals are non-initiation of force and non-coercion, or initiation of force and coercion. It makes no difference how many different subjective labels are put upon the situation, the objective fact remains that at the root of it all, these are the only two options. The former is in recognition of the individual as a self-owned entity. The latter is based on the idea of an individual being the property of an “infinite entity”; which is the “justification” for rule by the individuals who hide behind the abstracts and exercise their will to dominate and control all others.”

“The subjective and arbitrary labels arbitrarily associated with government such as democracy, socialism, communism, etc. are purely for the purpose of self-delusion. Although form of implementation may vary and some versions start closer to ultimate self-destruction than other versions, the common and identifying objective content of each and every one is initiation of force and coercion. Millions may volunteer for such an anti-social system and play self-deluding word games for the sake of preferred self-image, but all the pretense in the world and “definitions by agreement” will not erase the truth about government, nor prevent the certain violent consequences of initiation of force and coercion.”

No doubt, this is a correct assessment. Virtually every society and country operates with the implied and universal acceptance that government is natural and ordained. The individual accepts force and coercion as a substitute for avoiding the risk and responsibility of personal Freedom. MindMatters concludes with this point:

“Rather than freedom being the highest value sought by most, it is their deepest and most abiding fear. So much so that they can’t even envision it.”

American denial has caused an epidemic dysfunctional confusion. The delusion that our own self identify is equivalent with the “collective will” of society; which, in turn is synonymous with the government and its policies, is a sociopathic sickness. The antisocial behavior of the STATE demonstrates all the characteristics of a profile of a sociopath. Apply the top five to the demeanor of government: Glibness/Superficial Charm – Manipulative and Conning – Grandiose Sense of Self – Pathological Lying – Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt. We are all taught what we should believe about government; but only the fool, the liar or the delusional accepts that our – self-owned entity – benefits from the force and coercion that the State demands upon us.

Robert L. Kocher has compiled a body of works far too numerous, on this topic to cite sufficiently. We urge you to review and absorb the wisdom in his insights. Most of the lessons detail the last administration, but are completely relevant to the current regime. One essay, especially compliments the Delmar England conclusion. Mr Kocher writes in American Mental Health and Politics:

“If some of us are appalled, frightened, and even driven half crazy by the maddeningly and complacently silly or psychotic levels of denial, by the superficiality, by the abysmal immaturity, by the primitive level of personality structure, by the too-easily employed distorted rationalizations, by the lack of contact with basic reality that we deal with in our daily lives, hear in our college faculties, and see on TV and in high political office, we can nevertheless know that the reality of our perceptions is validated by mental health figures as well as those patients being seen in therapist’s offices.”

Currently, the national mood is absorbed in the illusion that Americans are at risk and that they are in danger from terrorists abroad. While reality demonstrates that enemies of America are plentiful, the disconnect that their veridical hatred is focused upon the U.S. Government and its policies, is concealed. Vast numbers of Americans feed their denial that they are the target of madmen; while they seek comfort in the fallacy that support for the WAR Party will make them safe. The force and coercion that the government imposes upon you, under the pretext that it is necessary and protective, diminishes your safety as it destroys your Liberty. The utter fraud of national security policy, seeks only to preserve the government, no matter how much harm it inflicts upon citizens.

So why do so many misguided flag-waving zealots rally to a jingoistic cause? Kocher provides the answer: “We now live in a society where many people no longer want or value freedom. Personal freedom and the responsibility that goes with it are abrasive intrusions or demands upon a crippled self-absorbed internal state.”

“American Denial” prevents the admission that U.S. policies only benefit the government. Their own personal delusional perceptions are interchangeable with a phony litmus test, judged by their support for State illusions. The thought of exercising the Freedom to think, criticize, condemn and resist is far too disconcerting to the sheeple. They view their own self worth as an adjunct of an abstract deception; while, the true motives of the government are to control society and all individuals, using force and coercion. Both England and Kocher have it right. The association between an individual and an infinite entity denotes a relationship; and the reluctance or unwillingness to exercise freedom and responsibility, allows the government to implement force and coercion.

“Eternal Vigilance” is no longer enough to preserve Liberty. Sound mental health, appreciation for your own self worth, trust in the integrity of reality and the courage to do battle with the forces that seek to delude your own dignity are all necessary to win this struggle. America is NOT the Government. When policies are dishonest they must be opposed. When officials are depraved they need to be removed. And when your neighbor demands your allegiance to a corrupt government, it is your duty to confront his delusion.

We can no longer afford to be silent in the face of “American Denial”.

 

About the Author

SARTRE is the mind behind BATR. org (Breaking All The Rules), which documents the steady decline of American exceptionalism.

The Asshole Factory

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Our economy doesn’t make stuff anymore. So what does it make?

By Umair Haque

Source: Medium

My good friend Mara has not one but two graduate degrees. From fine, storied universities. Surprise, surprise: the only “job” she was able to find was at a retail store.

Hey—it’s only minimum wage, but at least she’s working, right? And at a major-league, blue-chip company, An American icon; an institution; a name every man, woman, and child in this country knows; an historic company that rings of the American Dream the world over, besides. Surely, if nothing else, it’s a start.

Perhaps you’re right. Maybe it isn’t the start she always dreamed of…but at least it is one. If so…then awaits her at the finish?

What is Mara’s job like? Her sales figures are monitored…by the microsecond. By hidden cameras and mics. They listen to her every word; they capture her every movement; that track and stalk her as if she were an animal; or a prisoner; or both. She’s jacked into a headset that literally barks algorithmic, programmed “orders” at her, parroting her own “performance” back to her, telling her how she compares with quotas calculated…down to the second…for all the hundreds of items in the store…which recites “influence and manipulation techniques” to her…to use on unsuspecting customers…that sound suspiciously like psychological warfare. It’s as if the NSA was following you around……and it was stuck in your head…telling you what an inadequate failure you were…psychologically waterboarding you…all day long…every day for the rest of your life.

Mara’s boss sits in the back. Monitoring all twelve, or fifteen, or twenty people that work in the store. On a set of screens. Half camera displays, half spreadsheets; numbers blinking in real-time. Glued to it like a zombie. Chewing slowly with her mouth open. Jacked into a headset. A drone-pilot… piloting a fleet of human drones…pressure-selling disposable mass-made shit…as if it were luxury yachts…through robo-programmed info-warfare…like zombies…to other zombies…who look stunned…like they just got laser blasted, cluster-bombed, shock-and-awed…

WTF?

It’s bananas. The whole scene is like a maximum-security mental asylum designed by sadomasochists in a sci-fi movie. If Jeffrey Dahmer, Rasputin, and Michael Bay designed a “store” together, they couldn’t do any better. Her “job” will begin to drive her crazy—paranoid, depressed, deluded—in a matter of years if she continues doing it. No human psyche can bear that kind of relentless, systematic abuse.

Now. Note what all the technology and bureaucracy that wonderful, noble company has invested hundreds of millions in doesn’t ask her to do. Learn. Think. Reflect. Teach. Inspire. Lead. Connect. Imagine. Create. Grow. Dream. Actually…serve customers. Heaven forbid. It just beats her over the head, over and over again, three times a minute, every twenty seconds, with how much she hasn’t sold; hasn’t made; hasn’t produced. For her shitty .0003% commission. According to the quota that’s been set for her. By her boss. For his boss. For their boss. And so on all the way up the food chain.

See my point? Mara’s job isn’t to benefit customers. It isn’t to educate, understand, listen to, or even to chat with them. It isn’t to stop them from buying what they don’t want; to help them find what they might need; to match them with the right stuff. Nope. It’s merely to push more and more and more and more shit at them…faster, meaner, and dumber than any sane person would think is humanly possible…using advanced military technology and techniques… programmed to abuse her…so she can wage advanced psychological warfare…on her customers. And they were just suckers, gaping maws, fools, marks. And be yelled at…by a robot…if she doesn’t.

Really? This is the best our economy can do? To take the stuff of 21st century warfare and use them them to…rack up the profit? To turn a bright young woman with two grad degrees…into a Superprofitable Human Weapon of Mass Consumption…a half-crazed algorithmically-programmed asshole…a human drone…so even bigger, actually crazy assholes…can get super-rich…by slinging entire supertankers full of junk…at people getting poorer at four thousand percent interest a year…by using drones and bots to wage psy-warfare against them…so they’re conned into buying too much?

The economy doesn’t make stuff anymore. That much you know. So what does it make?

It makes assholes.

The Great Enterprise of this age is the Asshole Industry.

And that’s not just a tragedy. It is something approaching the moral equivalent of a crime. For it demolishes human potential in precisely the same way as locking someone innocent up, and throwing away the key.

Consider Mara again. Who in Christ’s name would design such an inhuman system? Whose sick joke of an idea is a “store” like that? What do you even call it? Because it’s surely not a “store”.

Only a monstrous asshole of the highest order could assemble such a demonically vampiric bullshit machine to prey on…everyone. Customers, managers, workers alike. Such a carefully sophisticated engine of human misery; of finessed cruelty; all to rake in a few extra pennies an hour, at the expense of dignity, intelligence, creativity, commitment, fairness, craft, service, sovereignty…sanity.

The store is an Asshole Factory.

Allow me to explain.

What happens to Mara when she’s “doing her job”? Think about it for a second. She turns into precisely the kind of asshole that the heartless dweebs who thought up this infernal torture-machine no doubt already are. Not because she wants to. But because she has to.

That’s exactly what the store was designed to do. Turn everyone into the same kind of asshole as the assholes that made it, run it, and benefit from it…want everyone to be.

The store is an Asshole Factory.

Our world is now full of Asshole Factories. That’s what the stores, offices, industrial parks, skyscrapers, malls, low-rise blocks, gleaming headquarters, whimsically designed corporate campuses, really are.

It’s the grand endeavor of today. We don’t make stuff anymore. We make assholes. The Great Enterprise of this age is the Asshole Industry.

Consider, for a moment, my tiny hypothesis.

Have you noticed, lately, that people seem to be more, well, assholish…than before? That everywhere you go, people seem to be meaner, nastier, dumber, angrier, more brutish?

Why?

It is the last and greatest industry left in an economy that has been impoverished, emptied, hollowed out, drained.

The Great Enterprise of the Age of Stagnation is the wholesale manufacture not of great, world-shaking, ground-breaking ideas, inventions, concerns…but of bigger and bigger assholes.

The chain-store; the mall; the hypermarket. The corporation; the firm; the partnership. B-school; law school; med school. The boardroom; the backroom; the trading floor.

These are, by and large, Asshole Factories. They don’t make people. Capable of great things. Who create and build and touch and soar. They make assholes.

They are designed to disinfect us of our fragility. To cleanse us of our flaws. To disinfect us of weakness. Love, grace, mercy, longing, forgiveness, passion, truth, nobility, dreams. Their objective is to stamp all that out; to eradicate it; to erase it. To replace it with calculation, ruthlessness, self-concern; gluttony; cruelty; anxiety, despair. By using the most sophisticated technology ever made to subjugate, oppress, and goad us into being little torturers ourselves.

And in so doing, they emotionally sterilize us. They psychically traumatize us. They intellectually castrate us. They socially neuter us. They cheat us of greatness. That is how they turn us into assholes.

They are designed to deprive us into depriving everyone else of the lives we could and have, at our highest and truest and noblest.

The assholes haven’t just taken our incomes, our savings, our careers, our educations. They’ve taken something far more precious; something priceless. It is our lives—the full, true lives we should be living—that have been taken from us. And in the gaping void where the lives we should be living are, the assholes have deftly inserted carbon copies of…themselves.

When you think about it that way…is it any wonder that society seems to be stuck? That the economy seems headed into oblivion? That life for so pretty much anyone under the age of 35 and/or worth less than $20 million or so appears to be going…nowhere?

Remember my friend Mara? She’s probably being piloted like a drone…yelled at by a bot…three times a minute…into waging advanced techniques of psycho-war…designed to traumatize prisoners…over and over and over again…right this very second…

Until she’s cleansed. Perfect. Flawless. Pure. Another gleaming, brand-new asshole, rolling proudly off the assembly line of the Asshole Factory.

We’re obedient constructivists. Pragmatists. Rationalists. So you probably want to know: what can we do about it?

It’s pretty simple.

Don’t be an asshole. Remember the Asshole Factories? Here’s a secret: they’re churning out assholes by the millions. And so should you bravely decide to be an asshole, what you’ll really be is just another interchangeable, forgettable, rapidly depreciating commodity.

So who should you be?

Be yourself. The person you were meant to be. Whether you believe in heaven or the inferno, freedom or fate, the simple fact is: each and every one of us was put here to be something greater than Just Another Asshole stealing pennies from his neighbors to pay off Even Bigger Assholes.

So let me say it again. Don’t be an asshole. Be yourself. The miracle of being that you were meant to be. A person that, consumed with passion, seared with happiness, aglow with meaning, brings forth all that is great, noble, and true in the world, and so, with love, mercy, and wisdom, lifts every life that you meet into the light.

Thank you and goodbye.