About Those Dancing Israelis

Posted on May 28, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Kurt Nimmo

On Friday Whitney Webb of Mint Press News wrote about new information on the 9/11 “Dancing Israelis” and their connection to Israeli intelligence.

You may not remember the Dancing Israelis incident. It didn’t fit the larger narrative concocted in the days, months, and years that followed that tragic event.

That narrative dwelt exclusively on Osama bin Laden and Islamic evil-doers in Afghan caves plotting a major terror attack because “they hate our (sic) freedoms,” while ignoring or omitting information that contradicted that narrow and obviously absurd conclusion. There is a wealth of information demonstrating how the attacks could not have occurred as the government and its corporate media insist.

Webb’s post adds damning new information to the now largely forgotten Dancing Israelis incident. Documents released through a Freedom of Information request reveals at least two members of the group were Mossad agents, others members of the IDF; the moving company they supposedly worked for was an intelligence front; the moving company van the Israelis used tested positive for explosives. Other suspicious items were found in this cut-out business van, including boxcutters and cash-stuffed socks.

For more damning evidence in direct conflict with the official narrative and its conclusions, read Webb’s article. It’s an eye-opener.

For the last decade and a half, I have argued that the official narrative is a rather clumsy cover-up designed to protect the real perpetrators of 9/11—the triumvirate of terror: the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

As we know, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were planned before September 11, 2001 (seeNew Documents Show Bush Administration Planned War In Iraq Well Before 9/11/2001 and Bush team ‘agreed plan to attack the Taliban the day before September 11’).

These invasions required a “new Pearl Harbor,” as pointed out by the neocons in a paper titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses.

In 2002, months before the illegal invasion of Iraq, investigative journalist and filmmaker John Pilger wrote:

The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the “new Pearl Harbor”, described as “the opportunity of ages”. The extremists who have since exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups and “think-tanks” were established to avenge the American “defeat” in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a “peace dividend” following the cold war. The Project for the New American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime.

I don’t believe this “opportunity” simply fell in the lap of the neocons by happenstance. It was manufactured and has multiple goals—a hegemonic drive in the Middle East (in the name of neoliberalism masquerading as democracy), bolstering the racist Zionists with weapons and stolen taxpayer money, and protecting the vile and psychopathic Wahhabi regime in Saudi Arabia and selling them weapons to kill Yemeni civilians.

It is also a tool to create a massive surveillance apparatus, feed more obscene billions into the “defense” (war) budget, and basically harden the edges of a soft “public-private” fascism (corporatism, as Mussolini knew) that has ruled since the establishment of the national security state directly following the Second World War.

As Webb points out, Zionist Israelis are the ones who “hate us for our freedoms,” and they consider the American people a passel of naive chumps easily tricked into sacrificing their lives and treasure in wars that benefit Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“Indeed, it goes without saying that the aftermath of 9/11—which involved the U.S. leading a destructive effort throughout the Middle East—has indeed benefited Israel. Many of the U.S.’ post-9/11 ‘nation-building’ efforts have notably mirrored the policy paper ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,’ which was authored by American neoconservatives—PNAC members among them—for Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister,” writes Webb.

Webb’s incisive report on these recently released FBI documents should be read by all Americans.

If you decide to read it, however, be forewarned: you will be denounced as a crazy American-hating conspiracy theorist—thus calling into question anything you say thereafter. In the months ahead, it is possible you will be tarred and feathered as an antisemite, an extremist, a terrorist.

The US will eventually adopt harsh measures like France and Germany to deal with critics of Israel and its apartheid system and slow-motion ethnic cleansing. US states are passing laws making it a crime to boycott Israel.

This is the emergent “New Antisemitism” criminalizing all who dare criticize the Zionist state. This includes not only Holocaust denial, but also “ideological antisemitism,” that is arguing Israel’s race laws and its treatment of the Palestinians amounts to apartheid.

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it,” said George Orwell.

As for an easily blindsided and brainwashed public, Orwell wrote: “A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves, and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.”

Are “Conspiracy Theories” Tearing Society Apart Or Saving Us From Destruction?

Posted on May 24, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

Source: Activist Post

The phrase “conspiracy theory” is often used by establishment agencies, the mainstream media and useful idiots as a tool to dismiss legitimate evidence or viewpoints that disagree with their predetermined version of events. This method of propaganda was not always as widespread as it is today. The phrase was not “created” by the CIA, but it was in fact weaponized by them in the 1960s after the assassination of John F. Kennedy with the express purpose of shutting down rational debate.

CIA memo 1035-960, circulated within the CIA in 1967 and exposed through a freedom of information act request by The New York Times in 1976, outlines strategies the agency would use to shut down critics of the Warren Commission Report. Specifically, they suggested the accusation of “conspiracy” with negative connotations attached, predominantly in mainstream books and articles. This was indeed done through the CIA’s many puppets in the media, and the concept of “conspiracy theory” as a pejorative was born.

Through the use of straw man arguments, red herring fallacies and sophistry, the incredible scale of evidence (exposed by investigators like New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison) suggesting the Warren Commission was either corrupt or ignorant in its findings was buried in a flurry of hatchet jobs and hit pieces. And this was the goal, of course; to attack the messenger and silence the truth without having to go through the ugly process of directly confronting the truth.

Until recently, this strategy was highly effective. Attacking a person as a “conspiracy theorist” was the only tool critics really needed to keep a piece of evidence or a concrete viewpoint from going viral. Conspiracy theory is equated to insanity, or stupidity, or buffoonery. Everyone knows a conspiracy theorist is not to be taken seriously, so why waste time listening to what they have to say in the first place?

It should come as no surprise that conspiracy REALITY is not something these people want entertained by the public. Conspiracies are a fact of history. Governments lie, all the time, and they have been caught doing it. The media lies, constantly, and has been caught doing it. Yet, we are supposed to ignore this and assume that anyone daring to stand contrary to government and media claims is some kind of lunatic?

In the past 5-10 years, however, things have been changing. Suddenly, anti-establishment views and investigations of corruption are bulldozing the mainstream scripted narrative, and the elites and the media are bewildered. They can see they are losing control of popular thought and they are disturbed, to say the least. A steady stream of articles and essays have been flooding the MSM recently lamenting the rise of “conspiracy culture” and warning of the “death of democracy” if this is allowed to continue.

They seem specifically angered by the idea that their “journalistic” and “professional” status no longer matters to most people. Not long ago, anyone wearing a suit, a uniform, a lab coat, a journalist’s badge or collecting a government paycheck was supposed to be immediately taken seriously as a designated “expert”. As Noam Chomsky describes them in his book Manufacturing Consent, they were the professional class, the top 10% or less of individuals with “all the answers”. These were the people the establishment sought to indoctrinate most of all, because these were the community leaders that many in the public listened to without question.

Now there is a growing movement of people who could not care less about what kind of degree someone’s parents purchased for them from an Ivy League university. They don’t care about establishment designations and fake accolades and titles and credentials. What they care about are facts and evidence. What they care about are the arguments a person puts forth, rather than how important they purport to be. This is causing some consternation among the elites.

A key figure and gatekeeper in the propaganda war against the alternative media and conspiracy reality is Cass Sunstein, former “Information Czar” in the Obama Administration. Sunstein has written numerous books and articles lamenting the growing influence of the alternative media, including his book Conspiracy Theories And Dangerous Ideas.

The main thrust of Sunstein’s position is that conspiracy theories isolate the populace into small groups of like-minded people perpetuating each other’s “misguided” views. He also suggests that these groups represent a concrete threat to the stability of government and of society by spreading wrong (or perhaps inconvenient) information and civil unrest. In other words, a few decades ago all information was centralized and filtered by the corporate media and government, and now the Internet is decentralizing information flow thereby allowing people to think differently and break from the majority narrative, which is unacceptable by Sunstein’s standards.

Sunstein sees the creation of a public hive mind as the best outcome for social order. He suggests in his book Nudge the concept of “Libertarian Paternalism” (which is neither libertarian nor paternal). He advocates for the control of society through subversive means of influence (nudging) while allowing people to continue believing that their choices are actually their own.

But how would Sunstein go about executing this influence? His solution to the threat of the alternative media was first made clear in his paper titled “Conspiracy Theories”, published in 2008. In it, he argues in favor of government interference or control of alternative media or “conspiracy theory” sources. His primary tactic was the infiltration of alternative media forums and sites by government agents or private actors paid by the government to disrupt discussion, derail activism and sow seeds of doubt or chaos. Effectively, Sunstein wanted the covert destruction of the liberty media by paid agitators.

So, the same man who accuses the alternative media of conspiracy mongering and the destruction of the Western world is actively seeking to foment a conspiracy to undermine that movement. Is this irony, or hypocrisy or both? Doesn’t this mean that Sunstein is a part of one of the very conspiracies he criticizes people like me for being concerned about?

Sunstein and his elitist ilk want the power to erase or sabotage the alternative media. In fact, there are probably a few of their agents provocateurs attacking this article in the comments below right now. They would prefer that the government eventually take full control of the Internet and dictate the terms of media participation directly. This gives rise to one of the most important questions that the establishment does not want to answer – Who gets to decide what is and what is not “dangerous conspiracy theory”?

If pressed, the elites will ultimately suggest that they are the best qualified. Sunstein describes the general public in his books as essentially lazy, unintelligent, impulsive and not to be trusted to make good decisions. He does not seem to include himself and his globalist comrades as being prone to the same weaknesses. They are apparently wise and benevolent enough to make the best decisions for all of us. Imagine that…

This elitism bias and Sunstein’s overall methodology for biting at the ankles of the liberty media is being carried over into a new wave of propaganda in the past couple of years, primarily coming from (though not limited to) the political left.

Sunstein’s gatekeeping has spawned a cancerous growth of copycats in progressive academics. This is going on everywhere, but one particular example I found recently was on Vox, a leftist rag which shamelessly flaunts its political bias and actively slanders conservatives. Vox‘s article “Conspiracy Theories Are Getting More Absurd And Harder To Refute” promotes a new book which regurgitates Sunstein’s propaganda model. The article takes special time to reassert the old disinformation narrative by stating that:

Democracy requires a minimum amount of mutual trust among citizens, and conspiracism destroys it.

Are you getting the sense yet that there is a repetitive message coming from these people that they want you to embrace? Is there ANYTHING true about the statement above? The fundamental root of their argument is that conspiracy theories (viewpoints outside the mainstream) must be treated as existential threats to society. In other words, some ideas are so dangerous that they must be controlled or outlawed. The basis of this argument, though, is entirely fraudulent.

First, leftists incessantly refer to our society as a “democracy”, I think because they believe if they tell the lie enough it will become reality by default. The US was never intended to be a “democracy”, but a Republic, and with good reason. Democracy requires blind and often misplaced faith in the system. A Republic requires constant vigilance and healthy skepticism. In a Republic, we are not supposed to simply “trust” that our leaders are going to do the right thing. We are supposed to put them under a microscope, uncover criminality and corruption, and generally make them uncomfortable at all times. It is our civic duty to become “conspiracy theorists”.

The establishment prefers a democracy because in a democracy 51% of the population can dictate the individual liberties of the other 49%, and they are rightly convinced that they can influence the thinking and decisions of the larger half. Also, in a democracy, society revolves around moral relativism and the ever arbitrary “greater good for the greater number”, instead of governing according to individual liberty, inherent moral compass and human conscience.

The Vox article goes on to make the claim that while there are some correct conspiracy theories, they have all come from the left side of the political spectrum (which they call “progressive conspiracy theories”). They then assert that there are no verifiable conspiracy theories coming from the political right. This is madness.

When Cass Sunstein describes the tribalist isolation and conspiracy delusions of certain groups, he was clearly trying to mislabel conservative activists and the alternative media, but the REAL conspiracy nutbags have actually been on the left this whole time.

A lot of young leftist millennials, professional (I say this with the utmost sarcasm) mainstream media personalities and celebrities foolishly bought into the Russiagate conspiracy theory; a theory based on ZERO concrete evidence and a garbage heap of empty conjecture. For example, how many sessions of Real Time With Bill Maher or Late Night With Stephen Colbert was the Russiagate fantasy propped up as verified fact by a screeching flock of leftist parrots, blanketed in the protective peanut-brained imbecility of the audiences in their Los Angeles and New York echo chambers?

Even today, after the long-anticipated Mueller Report led to no indictments, leftists continue to cling desperately like hemorrhoids to the anus that is Russiagate.

Leftists have to this point justified much of their schizophrenic and sometimes violent and criminal behavior on the lie that Donald Trump is a usurper put into office by Russian manipulation of US elections. Now isn’t this the epitome of a conspiracy theory that is destructive to society?

Not all conspiracy theories are started by the alternative media. Many are started by the establishment itself, and these are indeed designed to cause the destabilization of the nation.

At the same time, the fabricated Russiagate conspiracy has been very effective at leading the left away from the very real conspiracy of Trump’s saturation of his cabinet with banking elites and globalist think tank ghouls like John Bolton, Steven Mnuchin or Wilber Ross. Weren’t these the same elites that Trump was going to “drain from the swamp”? Why hasn’t the left talking about that for the past two years?

The article also makes no mention of the DNC rigging of the Democratic primaries in favor of Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders. This was a conspiracy conservatives had to help expose, while the left sat idle and ignored it, hyperfocusing on their hatred of Trump while propping up Hillary Clinton, a repeat criminal offender. But, hey, conservative conspiracies are always wrong and leftist conspiracies are often correct according to Vox and friends…

And what about the verified fact of mass digital surveillance by government on the public? This was a conspiracy that conservative groups had been warning about for years. We were called kooks, because why would the government care about what the average person did in their day-to-day life? Our fears were verified by the exposure of classified data by people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange (who is now facing extradition and prosecution for nothing more than publishing truths on the Internet). Both the political left and political right are aggressively hostile to both these men, and are seeking to bury them.

My question is, what is really more dangerous? Conspiracy theories, or the actual conspiracies governments and elitists execute against the people?

The message here is not ambiguous at all. To summarize, the establishment wants control of Internet media, by hook or by crook, in the name of protecting people from themselves and from ideas they consider unsettling to the world order. The political left is all on board with this as long as their conspiracy theories are treated with legitimacy; and they will be, because their conspiracy theories are the establishment’s conspiracy theories.

The only theories that are being threatened with subjugation are those of conservatives and the alternative media that are contrary to centralization and government power. Not because our theories are dangerous to the fabric of society, but because our theories are dangerous to the people who want to dictate the fabric of society. Our activism and journalism represents decentralized thought which could choke the engine of the globalist agenda. We aren’t tearing down the Western world, we’re the only thing keeping it alive.

You can read more from Brandon Smith at his site Alt-Market. If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch. Learn more about it HERE.

Understanding the American Dictatorship

Posted on May 7, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

Source: Washington’s Blog

The American dictatorship is by the aristocracy of the country’s 585 billionaires, and has been scientifically proven beyond any doubt, now, not only in the classic Gilens and Page study, which examined thousands of bills in Congress and their money-backers and their ultimate outcomes (passage or failure to pass), during the studied period, 1981-2002. But also another (though less rigorous) study suggests that this control of the U.S. Government by America’s billionaires is getting even worse. So, America is clearly a dictatorship, by America’s aristocracy.

This is not just one or the other of America’s two Parties — Democrats versus Republicans — representing only the super-rich. Both of the Parties do, but the Democratic Party represents liberal billionaires, while the Republican Party represents conservative billionaires. Each Party represents a different faction of the billionaires.

The conservative faction is well represented by Donald Trump, whose swash-buckling rhetoric — “I’d take the oil!” in Iraq, and in Syria, and in Venezuela, etc. — is more blatantly uncouth than Barack Obama’s more gentlemanly rhetoric, but not basically different than Obama’s even bloodier grabbing of Honduras, Ukraine, Libya, and Syria were. The prominent Obama-backer George Soros, however, was demanding that banks, backed up by taxpayers, should kick in an extra $50 billion to enable him and other billionaires to exploit that country successfully. (He said this while Ukraine was spending most of the money that it did have trying to conquer the people in the far-eastern part of the country who refused to accept Obama’s imposed ruler who replaced the democratically elected President for whom they had voted over 90%.) So, ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are both neoconservative, or the old term for that was “imperialistic.” In such matters (international matters), the billionaires very much are unified, and their news-media also are. And they all do represent the billionaires — never the public.

One billionaire, the owner of the fake-progressive “The Intercept” news-site, was exposed recently for his grabbingness. The excellent and honest journalists Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal headlined at one of the few honest news-media, Mint Press, “Pierre Omidyar’s Funding of Pro-Regime-Change Networks and Partnerships with CIA Cutouts”, and reported:

A select group of national news ‘stakeholders’ gathered at an undisclosed location for what was described as a “semi-secret” workshop somewhere in Canada on January 26. The meeting had been convened to determine how and to whom a ‘news industry bailout’ of $645 million in Canadian government subsidies to private and supposedly independent media outlets would be disbursed. …

Jesse Brown, a Canadian journalist who participated in the meeting, complained that the first thing he noticed about it “was that one major public ‘stakeholder’ wasn’t represented: the public.” Inside what amounted to a smoke filled room that was off limits to most Canadian citizens, Ben Scott — a former Obama administration official who also served in Hillary Clinton’s State Department — presided over the discussions. Today, as the director of policy and advocacy for the Omidyar Network, Scott works for one of the most quietly influential billionaires. …

Pierre Omidyar, the ebay founder [is] best known for his sponsorship of The Intercept, a flashy progressive publication that possesses the classified documents exfiltrated by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Unlike rival Silicon Valley billionaires Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Eric Schmidt, Omidyar has mostly managed to keep his influential role in media below the radar. … Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the UN and liberal interventionist guru, has explicitly praised Omidyar as someone who is following in the footsteps of Soros.

While Samantha Power was Obama’s U.N. Representative, she joined with two other countries, Ukraine and Canada, to oppose a U.N. resolution condemning nazism and all forms of racism. (Only three nations opposed it at the U.N., and these were the three.) When Donald Trump became America’s President, his U.N. Representative, Nikki Haley, likewise was one of only three nations at the U.N. who opposed a similar resolution.

So, perhaps the only people in U.S. and Canada who don’t know that their Governments are among only three that march ideologically in today’s lockstep with the Axis powers that lost World War II, are those three nazi-supporting countries’ own citizens. What media will tell their citizens the truth about this? Who owns the major media, and who finances politicians’ careers there, in the three-or-so brazenly fascist and even pro-nazi countries — the three that vote shamelessly for it?

The extraordinarily fine Rubenstein-Blumenthal article continued:

While backing media outlets around the world that produce news and commentary, Omidyar supports a global cartel of self-styled fact-checking groups that determine which outlets are legitimate and which are “fake.” He has also thrown his money behind murky initiatives like the non-profit backing New Knowledge, the data firm that waged one of the most devious disinformation campaigns in any recent American election campaign; and he is a key backer of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), the outfit that holds the Panama Papers and oversees the strategic dissemination of that leaked trove of financial files to hand-picked journalists.

And this is only on the liberal side of the U.S. regime.

The present article is being submitted to all major and most of the smaller national news media throughout the U.S. and its allied countries. The sites that publish it will be the only national and international news-media worth subscribing to, because all the rest are simply censoring-out these basic truths — and are labeling as ‘fake news’ the few honest sites, such as the one you are reading now, the ones that publish such news.

The American dictatorship can’t be accurately understood by relying mainly upon the ‘news’ that the billionaires’ sites publish. That’s very sad, but it’s true. It’s bad news, but it is real news, and not (like the billionaires’ sites call it but actually they themselves are) “fake news” sites. Maybe they publish non-controversial news honestly, but that’s about all of the truth that their owners will allow.

The American dictatorship is increasingly becoming a lock-down against truth. No matter how ugly one might imagine it to be, it’s worse. No solution to this vast problem is being presented here, but the first step toward solving any problem is to understand accurately what that problem actually is, and how it actually functions. In the present case, it’s no malfunction. It’s not a mistake. It’s instead a plan. And it is very competently being imposed — by the billionaires’ agents, against the public. That’s how dictatorships normally are imposed, and that’s how they’re imposed here. Mussolini called it “corporationism.” The U.S. has become its center.

The Making of a Monster: We’re All Lab Rats in the Government’s Secret Experiments

Posted on April 8, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.” — Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The U.S. government, in its pursuit of so-called monsters, has itself become a monster.

This is not a new development, nor is it a revelation.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

Mind you, there is no greater good when the government is involved. There is only greater greed for money and power.

Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle coming out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government.

These horrors are being meted out against humans and animals alike.

It’s heartbreaking enough when you hear about police shooting family dogs that pose no threat—beloved pets that are “guilty” of little more than barking, or wagging a tag, or racing towards them in greeting—at an alarming rate somewhere in the vicinity of 500 dogs a day.

What I’m about to share goes beyond heartbreaking to horrifying.

For instance, did you know that the U.S. government has been buying hundreds of dogs and cats from “Asian meat markets” as part of a gruesome experiment into food-borne illnesses? The cannibalistic experiments involve killing cats and dogs purchased from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, China and Ethiopia, and then feeding the dead remains to laboratory kittens, bred in government laboratories for the express purpose of being infected with a disease and then killed.

It gets more gruesome.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been removing parts of dogs’ brains to see how it affects their breathing; applying electrodes to dogs’ spinal cords (before and after severing them) to see how it impacts their cough reflexes; and implanting pacemakers in dogs’ hearts and then inducing them to have heart attacks (before draining their blood). All of the laboratory dogs are killed during the course of these experiments.

It’s not just animals that are being treated like lab rats by government agencies.

“We the people” have also become the police state’s guinea pigs: to be caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.

Back in 2017, FEMA “inadvertently” exposed nearly 10,000 firefighters, paramedics and other responders to a deadly form of ricin during simulated bioterrorism response sessions. In 2015, it was discovered that an Army lab had been “mistakenly” shipping deadly anthrax to labs and defense contractors for a decade.

While these particular incidents have been dismissed as “accidents,” you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.

At the time, the government reasoned that it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks.

In Alabama, for example, 600 black men with syphilis were allowed to suffer without proper medical treatment in order to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis. In California, older prisoners had testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts implanted in them to test their virility. In Connecticut, mental patients were injected with hepatitis.

In Maryland, sleeping prisoners had a pandemic flu virus sprayed up their noses. In Georgia, two dozen “volunteering” prison inmates had gonorrhea bacteria pumped directly into their urinary tracts through the penis. In Michigan, male patients at an insane asylum were exposed to the flu after first being injected with an experimental flu vaccine. In Minnesota, 11 public service employee “volunteers” were injected with malaria, then starved for five days.

In New York, dying patients had cancer cells introduced into their systems. In Ohio, over 100 inmates were injected with live cancer cells. Also in New York, prisoners at a reformatory prison were also split into two groups to determine how a deadly stomach virus was spread: the first group was made to swallow an unfiltered stool suspension, while the second group merely breathed in germs sprayed into the air. And in Staten Island, children with mental retardation were given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured.

As the Associated Press reports, “The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs … because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.”

Moreover, “Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the ’60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.”

Media blackouts, propaganda, spin. Sound familiar?

How many government incursions into our freedoms have been blacked out, buried under “entertainment” news headlines, or spun in such a way as to suggest that anyone voicing a word of caution is paranoid or conspiratorial?

Unfortunately, these incidents are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities the government has inflicted on an unsuspecting populace in the name of secret experimentation.

For instance, there was the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. As NPR reports, “All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren’t recorded on the subjects’ official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn’t tell doctors what happened to them.”

And then there was the CIA’s MKULTRA program in which hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel were dosed with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. As Time reports, “before the documentation and other facts of the program were made public, those who talked of it were frequently dismissed as being psychotic.”

Now one might argue that this is all ancient history and that the government today is different from the government of yesteryear, but has the U.S. government really changed?

Has the government become any more humane, any more respectful of the rights of the citizenry?

Has it become any more transparent or willing to abide by the rule of law? Has it become any more truthful about its activities? Has it become any more cognizant of its appointed role as a guardian of our rights?

Or has the government simply hunkered down and hidden its nefarious acts and dastardly experiments under layers of secrecy, legalism and obfuscations? Has it not become wilier, more slippery, more difficult to pin down?

Having mastered the Orwellian art of Doublespeak and followed the Huxleyan blueprint for distraction and diversion, are we not dealing with a government that is simply craftier and more conniving that it used to be?

Consider this: after revelations about the government’s experiments spanning the 20^th century spawned outrage, the government began looking for human guinea pigs in other countries, where “clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules.”

In Guatemala, prisoners and patients at a mental hospital were infected with syphilis, “apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease.” In Uganda, U.S.-funded doctors “failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study… even though it would have protected their newborns.” Meanwhile, in Nigeria, children with meningitis were used to test an antibiotic named Trovan. Eleven children died and many others were left disabled.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Case in point: back in 2016, it was announced that scientists working for the Department of Homeland Security would begin releasing various gasses and particles on crowded subway platforms as part of an experiment aimed at testing bioterror airflow in New York subways.

The government insisted that the gases released into the subways by the DHS were nontoxic and did not pose a health risk. It’s in our best interests, they said, to understand how quickly a chemical or biological terrorist attack might spread. And look how cool the technology is—said the government cheerleaders—that scientists can use something called DNATrax to track the movement of microscopic substances in air and food. (Imagine the kinds of surveillance that could be carried out by the government using trackable airborne microscopic substances you breathe in or ingest.)

Mind you, this is the same government that in 1949 sprayed bacteria into the Pentagon’s air handling system, then the world’s largest office building. In 1950, special ops forces sprayed bacteria from Navy ships off the coast of Norfolk and San Francisco, in the latter case exposing all of the city’s 800,000 residents.

In 1953, government operatives staged “mock” anthrax attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg using generators placed on top of cars. Local governments were reportedly told that “‘invisible smokescreen[s]’ were being deployed to mask the city on enemy radar.” Later experiments covered territory as wide-ranging as Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas.

In 1965, the government’s experiments in bioterror took aim at Washington’s National Airport, followed by a 1966 experiment in which army scientists exposed a million subway NYC passengers to airborne bacteria that causes food poisoning.

And this is the same government that has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

So, no, I don’t think the government’s ethics have changed much over the years. It’s just taken its nefarious programs undercover.

The question remains: why is the government doing this? The answer is always the same: money, power and total domination.

It’s the same answer no matter which totalitarian regime is in power.

The mindset driving these programs has, appropriately, been likened to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews. As the Holocaust Museum recounts, Nazi physicians “conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent.”

The Nazi’s unethical experiments ran the gamut from freezing experiments using prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia, tests to determine the maximum altitude for parachuting out of a plane, injecting prisoners with malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis, exposing prisoners to phosgene and mustard gas, and mass sterilization experiments.

The horrors being meted out against the American people can be traced back, in a direct line, to the horrors meted out in Nazi laboratories. In fact, following the second World War, the U.S. government recruited many of Hitler’s employees, adopted his protocols, embraced his mindset about law and order and experimentation, and implemented his tactics in incremental steps.

Sounds far-fetched, you say? Read on. It’s all documented.

As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was initially so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that Herbert Hoover, then-head of the FBI, actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret police, the Gestapo.

The FBI was so impressed with the Nazi regime that, according to the New York Times, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.

All told, thousands of Nazi collaborators—including the head of a Nazi concentration camp, among others—were given secret visas and brought to America by way of Project Paperclip. Subsequently, they were hired on as spies, informants and scientific advisers, and then camouflaged to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. All the while, thousands of Jewish refugees were refused entry visas to the U.S. on the grounds that it could threaten national security.

Adding further insult to injury, American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever since. And in true Gestapo fashion, anyone who has dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties has found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.

As if the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II wasn’t bad enough, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have since fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them repeatedly against American citizens.

It’s certainly easy to denounce the full-frontal horrors carried out by the scientific and medical community within a despotic regime such as Nazi Germany, but what do you do when it’s your own government that claims to be a champion of human rights all the while allowing its agents to engage in the foulest, bases and most despicable acts of torture, abuse and experimentation?

When all is said and done, this is not a government that has our best interests at heart.

This is not a government that values us.

Perhaps the answer lies in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s influential 1949 film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. In the film, set in a post-WW II Vienna, rogue war profiteer Harry Lime has come to view human carnage with a callous indifference, unconcerned that the diluted penicillin he’s been trafficking underground has resulted in the tortured deaths of young children.

Challenged by his old friend Holly Martins to consider the consequences of his actions, Lime responds, “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we?”

“Have you ever seen any of your victims?” asks Martins.

“Victims?” responds Limes, as he looks down from the top of a Ferris wheel onto a populace reduced to mere dots on the ground. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax — the only way you can save money nowadays.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is how the U.S. government sees us, too, when it looks down upon us from its lofty perch.

To the powers-that-be, the rest of us are insignificant specks, faceless dots on the ground.

To the architects of the American police state, we are not worthy or vested with inherent rights. This is how the government can justify treating us like economic units to be bought and sold and traded, or caged rats to be experimented upon and discarded when we’ve outgrown our usefulness.

To those who call the shots in the halls of government, “we the people” are merely the means to an end.

“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become obsolete, undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that, in the words of Rod Serling, “has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.”

In this sense, we are all Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”

“The Obsolete Man” speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet—and here’s the kicker—this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete. As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.”

How do you defeat a monster? You start by recognizing the monster for what it is.

Mueller Report Ends a Shameful Period for the Press

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Hedges

Source: Truthdig

The Mueller report’s categorical statement that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia ends one of the most shameful periods in modern American journalism, one that rivals the mindless cheerleading for the Iraq War by most of the press. It further erodes and may prove fatal to the credibility of a press that has steadfastly rendered most of the country invisible and functions as little more than an array of gossiping courtiers to the elites.

“ ‘[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,’ ” the report by special counsel Robert Mueller says, according to a direct quotation given in an official letter by U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

The charge that Russia stole the 2016 presidential election, that Vladimir Putin has secret “pee tapes” of Trump cavorting in a Moscow hotel with prostitutes or that Trump has been a longtime “Kremlin agent,” repeated by reporters whose work I admired in the past, is demagoguery as pernicious as the vile taunts and racist tropes that come out of the White House. The press endlessly repeated such allegations while ignoring the expanding social inequality and suffering of a country where half the population lives in poverty, as well as the collapse of our democratic institutions. These facts, not Russian manipulation, saw enraged American voters elect a demagogue who at least belittles the elites, including those in the press, who sold them out. The charge that Trump was a tool of Russia is entertaining. It attracts billions in advertising dollars. It allows the press to posture as a moral crusader. But over the past three years this obsession blotted out most of the real crimes committed by this administration and the reality most Americans endure.

The mainstream press, owned by the corporations that have extinguished the democratic state and are fleecing the public, as well as destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life, does not hold its employers to account. The empty chatter about Russia, including in The New York Times, exposes the bankruptcy of the U.S. media. MSNBC and CNN, which long ago abandoned journalism for entertainment, have breathlessly clogged the airwaves with ridiculous conspiracy theories and fantasies and used them to justify a faux crusade.

Don’t expect any of this to change. Rachael Maddow, like Jack Tapper or any other fatuous news celebrity, will not be held to account for slogging through this fiction night after night. Maddow will still collect her $10-million-a-year salary. And the handful of reporters who exhibited journalistic integrity—Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Maté, Robert Scheer, Max Blumenthal and Katrina vanden Heuvel—will continue to remain on the margins of the media landscape. The press is an arm of the corporate-funded burlesque that has replaced the country’s political life and turned civic debate into a vast reality show.

The more the big news outlets try to spin this report, arguing that they need to see the full report rather than the attorney general’s summary, or that Jared Kushner sought to use the communications systems of Russian diplomats, the more credibility they will lose. And they do not have much credibility left. The lurid details of the president’s alleged sexual relations with a porn star and a Playboy bunny, and of “Russiagate,” have replaced journalism. These stories have nothing to do with the lives of most Americans. This descent into the inane and the tawdry gives immunity to Trump. In attacking the press he attacks an institution most Americans loath. And with good reason. The press, unwittingly, enhances a president it seeks to destroy. And its decline, accelerated by its collaboration with liberal Democratic elites who scapegoat Russia to avoid confronting their responsibility for trashing the country in the service of corporate oligarchs, will get worse. Little the press says about Trump will now be believed.

There was, of course, massive interference in our election by a foreign power—Israel. But try saying this naked truth out loud and you will suffer the character assassination, chanted by the unified chorus in the press and the political hierarchy of both parties, that was unleashed on Rep. Ilhan Omar. The engine driving our animosity toward Russia comes from the arms industry, which with the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s border—despite assurances given upon the unification of Germany that this would not happen—is making billions of dollars selling weapons to countries in Eastern Europe. The situation is also exacerbating tensions between two of the world’s biggest nuclear powers. But this is just one more suppressed truth.

The Trump administration has carried out policies that, rather than serve Russian interests, have further antagonized our relationship with Moscow. It has imposed sanctions. It is openly attempting to overthrow the government of a country that Russia supports, Venezuela. It is attempting to block the sale of Russian natural gas to Europe. It has sold weapons to Ukraine, a foe of the Kremlin. It has armed insurgents in Syria and carried out airstrikes, even as Russian troops seek to prop up the Syrian regime. It has withdrawn from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. But facts matter little to Russian-conspiracy theorists.

It is not only Trump who has obliterated the line between fact and fiction. It is the press. It hyped and reported allegations it never investigated or confirmed. And by doing this, repeating failures of the kind that appeared in its coverage of the invasion of Iraq, it has committed suicide. A nation that lacks a functioning press becomes a tyranny. This is not Trump’s fault, but our own.

Evidence Indicates Link Between North Korean Embassy Break-In And Christchurch Attacks

Posted on March 25, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Screenshot from video showing two men with baseball caps and assault rifles in Christchurch.

By William Craddick

Source: Disobedient Media

As the world reels from the tragic terrorist attack against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, much attention has been given to sensational information about the single named suspect, Brenton Tarrant. However, the hyperfocus on Tarrant distracts from the fact that the Australian national was arrested along with other suspects.

An investigation and analysis by Disobedient Media indicates that Tarrant and the group he worked with likely have professional military connections, are part of the same cell that perpetrated a February 22nd break-in of the North Korean embassy in Spain and potentially have intelligence ties to various agencies that cooperate under the UKUSA Agreement popularly known as Five Eyes (FVEY).

I. Signs Of Professional Military Connections

Despite the characterization of Tarrant in the media, he was no run-of-the-mill white supremacist. Images posted by Tarrant online just before the attack to a Twitter account which had been dormant until March 12 showed that he was in possession of high-capacity magazines and a semi-automatic assault rifle. The weapon and magazines would have been classified as either a “restricted weapon” or a “military-style-semi-automatic” (MSSA) under New Zealand law. A person who possesses or uses a firearm in New Zealand needs to hold a firearms license issued by police. Licenses normally last for ten years unless revoked. Foreign nationals may apply from overseas for a one year license based on their possession of an existing license in their home country.

Suspicions are inevitably raised over how exactly Tarrant and his alleged co-conspirators managed to stockpile the military-grade weapons and ammunition used in the attack in a country with comparatively strict gun laws. Tarrant, who supposedly began to radicalize starting in 2016 and was allegedly unemployed would have had his radical tendencies discovered with a proper background investigation. Police say that another suspect in the shooting was an individual who acquired the necessary Category A license and began to legally stockpile weapons used in the attack.

Additional reports have also established that Tarrant trained at the Bruce Rifle Club in Dunedin. Although the club’s website and YouTube channel have been scrubbed from the internet, an archive shows that it explicitly catered to users and collectors of military rifles.

The Australian also engaged in extensive travel abroad to a number of areas that should have raised red flags with intelligence services. Countries visited by Tarrant included Pakistan, North Korea, Turkey, parts of Africa, Portugal, Spain, France, Afghanistan and Xinjiang, China. The extensive travel and access to military grade firearms should have made detection by law enforcement and intelligence services nearly impossible to avoid.

II. Similarities Between Spain And New Zealand Operations

There are a number of analogous facts shared by the attack on the North Korean embassy in Spain and the terror event in Christchurch which suggest that the same team was involved in both incidents. In both cases the perpetrators showed that they were well versed in “breach and clear” tactics against buildings filled with people. In both cases the buildings were cleared efficiently and quickly even though the goal of the North Korean incident was focused on intelligence gathering as opposed to mass murder. Aerial analysis of the North Korean embassy in Spain, the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre show that all buildings are of similar size and each would have required the same know-how and training to breach.

In securing a getaway from the North Korean embassy, the attacking team of approximately ten individuals utilized two luxury vehicles. In the Christchurch attack, the suspects used two vehicles for transport in which live explosive devices were found. The similar number of vehicles used in both incidents points to a common number of participants.

III. In Both Attacks, Perpetuators Are Likely Military Cells

The groups involved in both the Spain embassy break-in and the Christchurch terror attacks appear to be military or paramilitary in nature. The March 13, 2019 exposé of the embassy break-in by El País directly cited sources involved with the investigation who stated that the attackers were likely a “military cell” with at least two members who were tied to the CIA. Sources such as the New York Post and Washington Post have both run stories attempting to attribute the break-in to a shadowy group of North Korean dissidents. But this explanation is unconvincing since this group would not not have the practical military know-how or muscle required to breach and clear the embassy in such an efficient manner.

Analysis of documentation of the Christchurch terror attack also indicates that the perpetrators were part of a military style cell. Although much has been made of Brenton Tarrant’s live-streamed attack, no other individuals were featured in the film. Video footage being distributed online shows two individuals carrying firearms during the attacks. Both are wearing baseball caps. This means that neither can be Tarrant, who was filming himself during the attack and wore a helmet with a mounted camera, not a hat.

Police speculated during the attacks that there were up to three suspects. But footage and photos that have emerged along with early reports of other suspected locations where incidents occurred indicates that the number of attackers was likely larger. One image shows a man with shaven head in military-style camouflage fatigues being detained by New Zealand police as the attack was contained and halted. Another video shows police standing around a suspect lying on the pavement. As the individual videoing the scene passes, officers roll the apparently lifeless man over onto his back, showing his arm flop as he moved. If the suspect had been alive then police would have restrained him with handcuffs before moving him. Authorities have made no announcement about casualties among the attackers.

There were also rumors of other incidents which suggest that the attack might have been larger than is being disclosed. Maori News noted reports that an additional shooting was ongoing at Christchurch Hospital. This went largely unacknowledged by the international media. In the aftermath of the attacks, police in Auckland, New Zealand also responded to a bomb scare at Auckland train station.

These facts all indicate that the Christchurch terror attacks were perpetrated by a larger group that would be similar in size to the one involved with the break-in at the North Korean embassy. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has expressed similar opinions, stating on March 15 that the attack was “no individual act” and that he was sending an official delegation to New Zealand to gather further information about the groups behind the attack. Turkish state-owned media source TRT World has cited anonymous officials who claimed that Tarrant entered the country “to carry out a terror attack and/ or an assassination.” Tarrant’s visits to Turkey occurred on March 17-20, and September 13, 2016. Erdoğan survived a coup attempt that began July 15, 2016.

It is also worth noting that the location of police stations in and around Christchurch shows that there were several just a few blocks away from the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre. This is about a seven to eight minute drive with normal traffic. But witness statements say that police took over 20 minutes to arrive at the scene (the police response time was actually an even longer 36 minutes). Ambulance services took over half an hour to arrive at the scene despite the fact that hospitals were in even closer proximity to the attack locations than police stations.

The failure of police to deploy with greater haste or intercept the attackers while they moved from their first target to the second raises serious questions about the reasons for inadequate law enforcement reactions. Normally an incident on such a scale would trigger an immediate lockdown of the affected city and a total isolation of the affected area.

If any attackers were not filming themselves, resupplying from their vehicles or firing on innocent civilians while driving in transit as Tarrant did it is likely that they would have been able to effect an escape.

IV. Potential Connection To Organizations Affiliated With FVEY

Many of the countries visited by Tarrant play host to the operations of agencies with connections to FVEY. FVEY members include the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. FVEY also have a number of Tier B nations who participate in “focused cooperation” on computer network exploitation, including Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungry, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey.

Outside of the UKUSA Agreement, FVEY members are known to cooperate with Tier B nations on their own. Great Britain has had a deep relationship with Spain since World War II, when Britain bought off the Spanish to remain neutral and then used the country as an escape route for downed Allied airmen. British agency GCHQ also collaborates independently with counterparts in Germany, France, Spain and Sweden. British-Russian double agent Sergei Skripal was also revealed to have been collaborating with Spanish intelligence officers in the years leading up to his poisoning in 2018.

Brenton Tarrant’s travels to Turkey, France, Spain and Portugal raise questions about potential connections to intelligence services who collaborate loosely under the FVEY intelligence sharing agreement. Additionally, his time spent in Pakistan, a country with a long history of deep CIA involvement creates an even stronger possibility that Tarrant might have had ties to military or intelligence organizations.

Since Tarrant had at least one New Zealander acting as an accomplice, it is possible that there may have been other New Zealand nationals associated with his group. Outside of their collaboration through the FVEY framework, New Zealand’s Special Air Service has been deployed to Afghanistan where they worked directly under the CIA at a base in Bamiyan province according to claims published in 2011.

If individuals who had a past or present affiliation with New Zealand’s intelligence or military services were involved with a military cell that participated in the embassy and Christchurch attacks, it would provide a potential explanation for the extraordinarily slow police response time which caused an increased number of casualties. It would also give context to reports that New Zealand police are refusing to provide footage of Brenton Tarrant’s attack to US authorities who are seeking it for training purposes.

V. Conclusion: Tragedy Exploited By Special Interests

Whether or not one believes that the Christchurch terror attacks have more to them than meets the eye, it is undeniable that the tragedy is now being exploited by various parties for personal gain. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has taken the opportunity to promote increased gun control with a total ban on semi-automatic weapons. Ardern formerly worked as a policy advisor to Tony Blair, who has himself been a willing collaborator with British intelligence services. Ardern has not yet commented on the fact that New Zealand security and emergency services caused the death toll to rise substantially higher than needed due to an incredibly slow response time.

In addition to the debate about gun control, pundits have begun to harass President Donald Trump, accusing him of having some kind of ideological connection to Brenton Tarrant due to the suspect’s fascist loyalties. These efforts only serve to intensify efforts to derail the ongoing crisis involving the Korean peace process.

With the operational similarities between the the Spanish embassy and Christchurch attacks in mind one cannot help but observe that global attention has been ripped away from potential peace talks between the US and North Korea. The gross showmanship of the Tarrant in broadcasting murders for the world to see was an intentional attempt to capture attention and shift global discussion by committing a heinous act of terror. As the Christchurch attacks unfolded, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui made an announcement blaming US administration officials for a breakdown in denuclearization talks and threatened to break off negotiations to resume testing. These comments were immediately highlighted by Russian news agency TASS and the international press. Other comments clarifying that personal relations between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump were still good and their chemistry “mysteriously wonderful” were almost totally ignored in coverage of the press conference.

The official facts of the Christchurch terror attacks will likely shift over time in the same way that official narratives fed to the public by federal investigators changed constantly in the aftermath of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. But the apparent military and intelligence connections of perpetrators in the attack, the discrepancies between the official reports about the size of the group of suspects and footage of the event as it unfolded and the operational similarities to the North Korean embassy incident will continue to erode confidence that the public is being given all the facts.

3/17/2019: This article was updated with new details regarding emerging facts and clarification about police response times. Unfortunately, the New Zealand government has engaged in unprecedented censorship of the event and videos of the incident have all been taken offline.

US Regime Change Blueprint Proposed Venezuelan Electricity Blackouts as ‘Watershed Event’ for ‘Galvanizing Public Unrest’

Posted on March 14, 2019 by Reid Mukai

The US-funded CANVAS organization that trained Juan Guaido and his allies produced a 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages and urged the opposition “to take advantage of the situation…towards their needs”

By Max Blumenthal

Source: Grayzone

A September 2010 memo by a US-funded soft power organization that helped train Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaido and his allies identifies the potential collapse of the country’s electrical sector as “a watershed event” that “would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.”

The memo has special relevance today as Guaido moves to exploit nationwide blackouts caused by a major failure at the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant at Guri dam – a crisis that Venezuela’s government blames on US sabotage.

It was authored by Srdja Popovic of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), a Belgrade-based “democracy promotion” organization funded by the US government that has trained thousands of US-aligned youth activists in countries where the West seeks regime change.

This group reportedly hosted Guaido and the key leaders of his Popular Will party for a series of training sessions, fashioning them into a “Generation 2007” determined to foment resistance to then-President Hugo Chavez and sabotage his plans to implement “21st century socialism” in Venezuela.

In the 2010 memo, CANVAS’s Popovic declared, “A key to Chavez’s current weakness is the decline in the electricity sector.” Popovic explicitly identified the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant as a friction point, emphasizing that “water levels at the Guri dam are dropping, and Chavez has been unable to reduce consumption sufficiently to compensate for the deteriorating industry.”

Speculating on a “grave possibility that some 70 percent of the country’s electricity grid could go dark as soon as April 2010,” the CANVAS leader stated that “an opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.”

Flash forward to March 2019, and the scenario outlined by Popovic is playing out almost exactly as he had imagined.

On March 7, just days after Guaido’s return from Colombia, where he participated in the failed and demonstrably violent February 23 attempt to ram a shipment of US aid across the Venezuelan border, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a major and still unexplained collapse.

Days later, electricity remains sporadic across the country. Meanwhile, Guaido has done everything he can “to take advantage of the situation and spin it” against President Nicolas Maduro – just as his allies were urged to do over eight years before by CANVAS.

Rubio vows “a period of suffering” for Venezuela hours before the blackout

The Venezuelan government has placed the blame squarely on Washington, accusing it of sabotage through a cyber-attack on its electrical infrastructure. Key players in the US-directed coup attempt have done little to dispel the accusation.

In a tweet on March 8, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo framed the electricity outage as a pivotal stage in US plans for regime change:

No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro.

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) March 8, 2019

At noon on March 7, during a hearing on Venezuela at the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, Sen. Marco Rubio explicitly called for the US to stir “widespread unrest,” declaring that it “needs to happen” in order to achieve regime change.

“Venezuela is going to enter a period of suffering no nation in our hemisphere has confronted in modern history,” Rubio proclaimed.

Around 5 PM, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a total and still unexplained collapse. Residents of Caracas and throughout Venezuela were immediately plunged into darkness.

At 5:18 PM, a clearly excited Rubio took to Twitter to announce the blackout and claim that “backup generators have failed.” It was unclear how Rubio had obtained such specific information so soon after the outage occurred. According to Jorge Rodriguez, the communications minister of Venezuela, local authorities did not know if backup generators had failed at the time of Rubio’s tweet.

Back in Caracas, Guaido immediately set out to exploit the situation, just as his CANVAS trainers had advised over eight years before. Taking to Twitter just over an hour after Rubio, Guaido declared, “the light will return when the usurpation [of Maduro] ends.” Like Pompeo, the self-declared president framed the blackouts as part of a regime change strategy, not an accident or error.

Two days later, Guaido was at the center of opposition rally he convened in affluent eastern Caracas, bellowing into a megaphone: “Article 187 when the time comes. We need to be in the streets, mobilized. It depends on us, not on anybody else.”

Article 187 establishes the right of the National Assembly “to authorize the use of Venezuelan military missions abroad or foreign in the country.”

Upon his mention of the constitutional article, Guaido’s supporters responded, “Intervention! Intervention!”

Exploiting crisis to “get back into a position of power”

As Dan Cohen and I reported here at the Grayzone, Guaido’s rise to prominence – and the coup plot that he has been appointed to oversee – is the product of a decade-long project overseen by the Belgrade-based CANVAS outfit.

CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja Popovic in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor, which means “resistance” in Serbian, was the student group that worked alongside US soft power organizations to mobilize the protests that eventually toppled the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

CANVAS has been funded largely through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cut-out that functions as the US government’s main arm of promoting regime change. According to leaked internal emails from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the “shadow CIA,” CANVAS “may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.”

A leaked email from a Stratfor staffer noted that after they ousted Milosevic, “the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in other words a ‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”

Stratfor subsequently revealed that CANVAS “turned its attention to Venezuela” in 2005, after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime change operations across Eastern Europe.

In September 2010, as Venezuela headed for a parliamentary election, CANVAS produced a series of memos outlining the plans they had hatched with “non-formal actors” like Guaido and his cadre of student activists to bring down Chavez. “This is the first opportunity for the opposition to get back into a position of power,” Popovic wrote at the time.

In his memo on electricity outages, Popovic highlighted the importance of the Venezuelan military in achieving regime change. “Alliances with the military could be critical because in such a situation of massive public unrest and rejection of the presidency,” the CANVAS founder wrote, “malcontent sectors of the military will likely decide to intervene, but only if they believe they have sufficient support.”

While the scenario Popovic envisioned failed to materialize in 2010, it perfectly describes the situation gripping Venezuela today as an opposition leader cultivated by CANVAS seeks to spin the crisis against Maduro while calling on the military to break ranks.

Since the Grayzone exposed the deep ties between CANVAS and Guaido’s Popular Will party, Popovic has attempted to publicly distance himself from his record of training Venezuela’s opposition.

Today, however, Popovic’s 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages reads like a blueprint for the strategy that Guaido and his patrons in Washington have actively implemented. Whether or not the blackout is the result of external sabotage, it represents the “watershed event” that CANVAS has prepared its Venezuelan cadres for.

Elite Banking at Your Expense: How Secretive Tax Havens are Used to Steal Your Money

Posted on March 13, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

Tax havens are locations around the world where wealthy individuals, criminals and terrorists, as well as governments and government agencies (such as the CIA), banks, corporations, hedge funds, international organizations (such as the Vatican) and crime syndicates (such as the Mafia), can stash their money so that they can avoid regulation and oversight and, very often, evade tax. According to Nicholas Shaxson: ‘Tax havens are now at the heart of the global economy.’

Which is why, as he explains it: ‘The term “tax haven” is a bit of a misnomer, because such places aren’t just about tax. What they sell is escape: from the laws, rules and taxes of jurisdictions elsewhere, usually with secrecy as their prime offering.’ See ‘The tax haven in the heart of Britain’. A tax haven (or ‘secrecy jurisdiction’) then is a ‘place that seeks to attract business by offering politically stable facilities to help people or entities get around the rules, laws and regulations of jurisdictions elsewhere’. See Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.

Tax havens are a vitally important part of the global infrastructure of corruption and criminality – see ‘Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and Corruption’ – that enables privileged individuals and their organizations to legally and illegally steal money from the rest of us, particularly those in developing countries, and to have the services of a vast network of accountants, bankers, lawyers and politicians (often from captured legislatures) to help them do it, and to ensure that they get away with it.

How many tax havens are there? Where are they? How much money do they have? Who uses them? Why? How do they work? Why does all this matter to us? And what can we do about them?

Tax Havens: how many and where are they?

In his book Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, author and financial journalist Nicholas Shaxson identified about sixty ‘secrecy jurisdictions’ or ‘offshore groups’ around the world which he divided into four categories, as follows.

The most important category, by far, is those tax havens that form the spider’s network of havens centred on the City of London. It has three main layers: there are two inner rings – Britain’s Crown Dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey (which includes the sub-havens of Sark, Alderney and Brecqhou) and the Isle of Man, and its overseas territories such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and Gibralter – which are substantially controlled by Britain. The third layer is an outer ring with a more diverse array of havens, like Hong Kong, Singapore, the Bahamas, Dubai and Ireland, which are outside Britain’s direct control but have strong historical and current links to that country and the City of London (which I will discuss below). This network controls almost one half of all international bank assets.

The second category of tax havens is those in Europe notably including Switzerland, Luxembourg – see ‘Explore the Documents: Luxembourg Leaks Database’ – the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria, as well as microstates such as Liechtenstein and Monaco. While ‘Geneva bankers had sheltered the secret money of European elites since at least the eighteenth century’, the European havens ‘got going’ during World War I as governments raised taxes sharply to pay for the war.

The third category of tax havens is that focused on the United States. It has three tiers as well. At the federal level, the US government offers a range of tax exemptions, secrecy provisions and laws designed to attract foreign money. This means, for example, that US banks can legally accept proceeds from a range of crimes as long as the crimes are committed overseas. The second tier involves individual US states such as Florida (where Central/South American elites do their banking and the countries adversely impacted are prevented by US secrecy provisions from accessing relevant data, and where much Mob and drugs money is hidden too), Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming, where even terrorist money is protected by secrecy provisions. The third tier of the US network is the overseas satellites such as the American Virgin Islands, the Marshall Islands, Liberia and Panama, with the latter, according to Jeffrey Robinson, being ‘one of the filthiest money laundering sinks in the world’. See The Sink: Terror, Crime and Dirty Money in the Offshore World.

As Shaxson notes: ‘offshore finance has quietly been at the heart of Neoconservative schemes to project US power around the globe for years. Few people have noticed.’

The fourth category of tax havens identified by Shaxson includes those that do not fit in the categories above, such as Somalia and Uganda.

The (incomplete) list of tax havens on the website ‘Tax Havens of the World’ will give you some idea of where these secrecy jurisdictions are located but there are important omissions in this list, notably including the City of London Corporation.

For a brief look at 15 tax havens (again, notably excluding some of the most important) and some of the corporations that use them, see ‘What Are the World’s Best Tax Havens?’

And for a highly instructive and utterly sobering video documentary on British Tax Havens, see ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’. This documentary will inform you, among many more important things, that the building housing Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the UK tax office, is owned by an offshore company in Bermuda!

To summarize the central aspect of the development of tax havens following World War II: ‘The British Establishment – an old boys network of privileged elites – had carved out a lucrative vehicle for themselves in the offshore world after the demise of Empire. They transformed themselves from administrators of Empire to financial handlers for the global elite and multinational corporations.’ See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

Before concluding this section, it is worth emphasizing that, as Shaxson explains it, ‘the offshore world is not a bunch of independent states exercising their sovereign rights to set their laws and tax systems as they see fit. It is a set of networks of influence controlled by the world’s major powers, notably Britain and the United States. Each network is deeply interconnected with the others.’ He goes on: ‘The world’s most important tax havens are not exotic palm-fringed islands, as many people suppose, but some of the world’s most powerful countries.’ Shaxson quotes Marshall Langer, a prominent supporter of secrecy jurisdictions: ‘It does not surprise anyone when I tell them that the most important tax haven in the world is an island. They are surprised, however, when I tell them that … the island is Manhattan. Moreover, the second most-important tax haven … is located on an island. It is called the City of London.’

The City of London Corporation

What is the City of London Corporation, also known as the ‘Square Mile’? It is ‘a 1.22-square-mile slab of prime central London real estate that stretches from the Thames at Victoria Embankment, clockwise up through Fleet Street, the Barbican Centre, then to Liverpool Street in the north-east, then back down to the Thames just west of the Tower of London.’ See Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.

According to Shaxson, the City of London Corporation, the ‘modern period’ of which dates from 1067 (yes, that is not a typing error), is ‘the local-government authority for the 1.2-square-mile slab of prime real estate in central London that is the City of London. The corporation is an ancient, semi-alien entity lodged inside the British nation state; a “prehistoric monster which had mysteriously survived into the modern world”, as a 19th-century would-be City reformer put it.’

Importantly, Shaxson explains, ‘the role of the City of London Corporation as a municipal authority is its least important attribute. This is a hugely resourced international offshore lobbying group pushing for international financial deregulation, tax-cutting and tax havenry around the world.’ Moreover, it is ‘the hub of a global network of tax havens sucking up offshore trillions from around the world and sending it, or the business of handling it, to London’. Notably, so powerful is the City of London that no sovereign or government of Britain in a thousand years has had the courage to seriously take it on and attempt to subject it to British government control. See ‘The tax haven in the heart of Britain’.

How much money is in Tax Havens?

So how much of the world’s wealth is stashed in tax havens around the globe? According to the Tax Justice Network in its 2012 report written by James S. Henry ‘The Price of Offshore Revisited: New Estimates for “Missing” Global Private Wealth, Income, Inequality, and Lost Taxes’: ‘A significant fraction of global private financial wealth – by our estimates, at least $21 to $32 trillion as of 2010 – has been invested virtually tax-free through the world’s still-expanding black hole of more than 80 “offshore” secrecy jurisdictions. We believe this range to be conservative…’ He goes on to emphasize that ‘this is just financial wealth. A big share of the real estate, yachts, racehorses, gold bricks – and many other things that count as non-financial wealth – are also owned via offshore structures where it is impossible to identify the owners’.

Henry also notes that given that Credit Suisse estimated global wealth in 2011 at $231 trillion, the amount of money in secrecy jurisdictions is conservatively estimated at 10% of global wealth.

But other figures do indeed suggest this estimate is low. Shaxson cites compelling evidence that ‘More than half of world trade passes, at least on paper, through tax havens. Over half of all banking assets and a third of foreign direct investment by multinational corporations, are routed offshore.’ Moreover, as long ago as 2008, the US Government Accountability Office reported that 83 of the 100 biggest corporations in the USA had subsidiaries in tax havens and the following year, using a broader definition, the Tax Justice Network discovered that ninety-nine of Europe’s hundred largest companies used offshore subsidiaries. And in each country, ‘the largest user by far was a bank’. See Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.

In any case, the most recent estimate by the Tax Justice Network indicates ‘tax losses to profit shifting by multinational companies (a)pplying a methodology developed by researchers at the International Monetary Fund to an improved dataset… of around $500 billion a year’. See ‘New estimates reveal the extent of tax avoidance by multinationals’.

To reiterate then, on the understanding that these estimates are probably quite low, by 2010, between $US21 and $US32 trillion had been taken out of circulation so that it was beyond the laws, financial regulations and taxes that the rest of us cannot escape. But that figure has been added to by half a trillion dollars each year since, by moving more money into tax havens. And don’t forget: this figure does not include non-financial wealth. How many gold bricks, yachts, artworks and racehorses do you own and have stashed away somewhere free of scrutiny?

Who uses Tax Havens? And why?

As I mentioned above, tax havens are used by wealthy individuals (including businesspeople, sports and pop stars), criminals and terrorists, as well as governments (and their agencies), banks, corporations (such as Amazon and Google), international organizations and crime syndicates (such as the Medellin Cartel). While motives vary, in essence the lack of regulation and oversight, as well as tax evasion, are the reasons that individuals and organizations use them.

An individual might want to hide stolen wealth, to evade tax or cheat a divorced spouse out of their share of the family fortune. A bank, corporation, crime syndicate, international or terrorist organization might want to evade scrutiny of the source of their money and/or evade tax on windfall or even ongoing profits (legal and/or otherwise). A government might want to hide the ‘dirty money’ it uses to finance ‘black ops’ (that is, illegal and secret military violence such as that carried out by the CIA). But there are myriad explanations.

In John Christensen’s analysis of over 100 offshore clients of accounting firm Deloitte Touche he studied in Jersey, he found that the clients were engaging in insider trading, market rigging, failure to disclose conflicts of interest, weapons trading, illicit political donations, contract kickbacks, bribery, fraudulent invoicing, trade mispricing and tax evasion. See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

Most people have heard of the money stashed away by corrupt dictators like Suharto in Indonesia, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) each of whom stole from the people of their country. However, they could only do this with the help of western enablers and ongoing elite resistance to developing country attempts to create a more transparent and fairer process for collecting tax on cross-border financial flows. As a result, Alex Cobham of the Tax Justice Network observes, worldwide, developing nations lose in excess of $1trillion per year in ‘capital flight’ and tax evasion to wealthy countries. See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

But these more public examples, while terrible, tend to obscure two important facts. The amount stolen from sub-Saharan Africans, for example, between 1970 and 2008 was at least five times the total amount of their foreign debt during that period – see ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’ – and, by highlighting these examples, attention is drawn away from even worse and ongoing examples of such criminality by those corrupt/criminal individuals and organizations (including banks, accountancy and legal firms, corporations, international organizations, crime syndicates and governments) committed to using outright theft, fraud, money laundering and other devices to steal wealth from ordinary people all over the world.

So, for example, if one follows the money trails of various lucrative financial operations, some technically legal but immoral and others simply illegal, apart from the world’s major corporations, one quickly comes across the names of the major (and well known) banks and financial institutions (such as the Bank of England, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase…), the ‘big four’ accountancy firms (Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY), KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers), and elite lawyers (such as those in London’s ‘Magic Circle’, like Clifford Chance, Mourant du Feu & Jeune, and Slaughter and May). See, for example, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, ‘New estimates reveal the extent of tax avoidance by multinationals’ and ‘Looting with Putin’.

Apparently, like major corporations and crime syndicates, few banks, accountancy firms and lawyers have ethics policies that require them to follow the law and to exercise ‘due diligence’ (check out a client before signing a contract) so that they can steer clear of handling illegal and immoral profits, especially if they are monstrous.

In fact, according to a US Senate report, ‘virtually every major bank in the world – especially the biggest in North America and Europe – holds accounts for offshore banks and/or banks in suspect jurisdictions’. See The Sink: Terror, Crime and Dirty Money in the Offshore World.

As Eva Joly MEP, vice-chair of the Panama Papers Committee of the European Parliament, succinctly puts it: ‘Ordinary people are paying taxes. Rich people are not.’ See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

The Vatican

But perhaps the example which best illustrates the moral depravity of those who use tax havens is the Vatican. In his carefully researched book Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia author Paul L. Williams recounts the efforts of the CIA, former Nazis, the Sicilian/American Mafia, the Vatican and even Freemasonry to resist an anticipated postwar invasion of western Europe by those ‘Godless communists’ in the Soviet Union by establishing ‘stay-behind units’ (clandestine military and paramilitary units) throughout the countries of Europe (Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal…) led by former Nazis and composed of ‘die-hard fascist fanatics’.

This alliance to fight the Cold War against the former Soviet Union and the rising tide of progressive governments in Europe and the rest of the world, particularly as the US war on Vietnam gathered pace, led, as Williams chillingly puts it, to ‘the toppling of governments, wholesale slaughter and financial devastation’ around the world. It was also, of course, the forerunner to its equivalent – Operation Condor – to resist, and destroy if possible, the spread of progressive movements, ranging from communism to liberation theology, throughout Central/South America.

While the Vatican played a number of unsavory roles in this alliance, including its facilitation of massive numbers of heroin addictions, its use of counterfeit securities, participation in false flag attacks that killed thousands and strings of gangland slayings, support of military juntas (that massacred tens of thousands) and the ‘purging’ of progressive priests (including Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador and two Jesuit priests denounced by Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, in Argentina: see ‘Who is Pope Francis? Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Argentina’s “Dirty War”’) while causing the financial destitution of thousands of families, one of its key ongoing functions, designed to maximize the Vatican’s power while highlighting its moral and spiritual bankruptcy, was to act as ‘God’s banker’ for many of these operations. See Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia.

It did this, for example, by accepting Mafia/Medellin Cartel-collected drugs money (for a 15-20% cut) into the Vatican Bank (technically: Istituto per le Opere di Religione or Institute for the Works of Religion) and then laundering it through its shell companies – such as Cisalpine Overseas Bank, Astolfine SA, United Trading Corporation, Erin SA, Bellatrix SA, Belrose SA, Starfield SA and Nordeurop Establishment – in tax havens in the Bahamas, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Panama and Switzerland.

With the CIA providing services, such as the transport of Mafia/Medellin cocaine to drug dealers in the US, its share of the drug profits (cycled through its own CIA-controlled banks including Continental Illinois, Castle Bank & Trust, and Bank of Credit and Commerce International but eventually involving many of the most prestigious banks in the US, as the money was passed to the Vatican Bank) were used to finance key aspects of Operations Gladio and Condor with weapons also supplied by the CIA from NATO arsenals. But there was plenty of Vatican money in these Operations too.

As an aside, so devastating was the fallout from the ongoing exposure of the many aspects of Vatican corruption that, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Roman Catholic membership was falling by 400,000 per year in the USA alone but the trend was even stronger in Europe with ‘magnificent churches and cathedrals’ becoming museums visited solely by tourists, parishes being boarded up, seminaries and convents closed, and parochial schools consolidated. And this was before the ‘plague of pedophilia’ had fully hit further decimating the Church’s tattered reputation. To this day, the Vatican Bank remains ‘one of the world’s leading laundries for dirty money’. See Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia.

How do Tax Havens work?

Each tax haven offers its own unique combination of services. After all, it is a tough market competing for the world’s wealth and so each jurisdiction has developed its own set of services designed to maximize its attractiveness to potential clients. In essence, this means that there is some ongoing ‘competition’ to reduce regulatory and oversight requirements so that each tax haven can attract clientele. This has become so extreme that basic requirements of banking for those who do it legally, such as proof of identity, are not required in the offshore world. In fact, even your true name can be withheld if you wish. It is easier to avoid any risk of embarrassment from exposure this way.

As a result, virtually any jurisdiction will open an account (or as many accounts as you want) in whatever names you specify. Then, usually employing a variety of devices, ranging from secret bank accounts, nominee directors (usually locals who play no part in the organization bar give it their name) and structures such as shell companies (that exist on paper and perhaps a wall plaque somewhere, but nothing else) and trusts (which, unlike the legitimate version, appear to separate responsibility and control from the benefits of ownership but actually do not), to processes such as transfer pricing (a technique by which companies ‘shift paper profits into low-tax countries and costs into high-tax countries’ to minimize – or eliminate – tax payments) and often employing a convoluted process that rapidly shifts monies through several jurisdictions so that it becomes ‘untraceable’ (because authorities must get permission to access each jurisdiction in turn in any effort to trace the money), profits are effectively hidden and any accountability to authorities of any kind utterly eliminated. See Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.

For one simple example of such a strategy, employing a technique known as the ‘double Irish, Dutch sandwich’ (which is legal), see ‘Google shifted $23bn to tax haven Bermuda in 2017, filing shows ’. But you can read other examples here: ‘The tech giants will never pay their fair share of taxes – unless we make them’ and ‘7 Corporate Giants Accused of Evading Billions in Taxes’.

Why does the existence of Tax Havens matter to us?

Well, the simple answer to this question is that just a fraction of the money hidden in tax havens would feed, clothe, house and provide clean water, medical care and educational opportunities to everyone on Earth. It would eliminate the 100,000 deaths by starvation-related diseases each day. It would eliminate poverty and homelessness. And, as one byproduct of having these material needs met, it would facilitate the emergence of an informed, engaged and empowered human population to tackle the vast range of environmental, climate and military threats that currently threaten biosphere collapse and imminent human extinction. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

As Professor Prem Sikka puts it more simply: Because of the penetration by financial services executives of the British state, including the Treasury ‘It deprives people of opportunities to have healthcare, education, security, justice and, ultimately, a fulfilling life.’ See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

Fundamentally, then, tax havens and their secrecy are at the heart of those elite institutions and processes that functionally undermine democracy and give extraordinary power to certain anonymous individuals and their entities without accountability. See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

Of course, the elites that control the tax haven networks are not about to let this change. Tax havens are simply too important as part of the global infrastructure for maintaining elite profit, power and privilege and for resisting grassroots efforts to bring peace, justice and ecological sanity to our world. And that is why they are protected by government legislation and legal systems, with an ‘army’ of accountants, auditors, bankers, businesspeople, lawyers and politicians ensuring that they remain protected.

So don’t forget: laws are designed to control and punish you, no matter how trivial your infringement: a parking fine, a littering offence, a petty theft. But if you have enough money, the law simply does not exist. And you can evade taxes legally and in the full knowledge that your vast profits (even from immorally-acquired wealth such as sex trafficking, gun-running, endangered species trafficking, conflict diamonds and drug trafficking) are ‘lawful’ and will escape regulation and oversight of any kind. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

Let me give a personal example. I have been a war tax resister since 1983: I have a conscientious objection to paying taxes to the Australian government to deploy military forces in other countries to kill people in my name. So, instead of paying taxes to kill, for many years I donated the equivalent amount to organizations engaged in peace, development, environment and human rights work, and to ‘pay the rent’ for my use of indigenous land. As some of many outcomes to this conscientious and highly public resistance (garnering national media attention at times), in 1991 I was bankrupted, in 1992 I was convicted of contempt of court (for my conscientious refusal to cooperate with the bankruptcy trustee) and in 1993 my passport was seized. In 1999, I was advised that I will be ‘bankrupt forever’ because of my ongoing conscientious refusal to finance the killing.

In the same period, since 1983, trillions and trillions of dollars of tax have been illegally and secretly evaded as wealthy individuals and corporations, criminals and crime syndicates, international organizations and governments channel their incomes and profits through tax havens. Laws and legal systems throughout the world make this possible and, provided it is done correctly, it is quite straightforward to avoid any penalties for secretly evading payment of taxes or hiding money acquired through criminal activity. But the point, as you can see, is that tax evasion by wealthy individuals and corporations meant that many of these individuals and corporations didn’t pay taxes to kill people either. They just didn’t pay taxes at all.

Of course, their motive was personal gain, their way was legal, they incurred no penalty and, of course, they didn’t pay an equivalent amount to support peace and justice causes. More fundamentally, however, the trillions of dollars they took from the global economy were made by killing and exploiting people and the planet in a significant variety of other ways, ranging from sex trafficking, gun-running, conflict diamonds and trafficking in drugs and endangered species, to simply starving people to death at the rate of 100,000 people each day by managing the global economy, using tax havens as a primary tool, to extract maximum profit.

Richard Brooks documents how this legal exploitation occurs in another way in his book The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business. The vast tax evasion by elites in Britain, including by diverting funds through tax havens, attracts just five prosecutions each year per £1 billion of evasion of direct taxes. In contrast, benefits fraud by those on unemployment and disability pensions attract 9,000 prosecutions each year per £1 billion of fraud. ‘So theft by the poor warrants the full force of the law’. But not theft by elites who write the law and largely control the political and legal processes in relation to it.

Hence, under the guise of ‘relationship taxing’ (that is, building a relationship between tax authorities and corporate executives and ‘tailoring’ tax payments to corporate wishes to the extent the law allows), corporations have long known that ‘If you don’t like the law… we’ll see what we can do’.

As is obvious from this example, attempts at government reform, including to defeat tax havens, in the direction of making elites financially and legally accountable, both nationally and internationally, for the responsibilities which the rest of us cannot escape, are invariably for show and, in any case, achieve zero of substance. For example, the attempt to ‘approve’ a blacklist of tax havens at the G20 gathering in 2009 was resisted by the Chinese premier on behalf of Chinese elites who, like other national elites keen to have political control but ‘judicial separation’ from their offshore centres, opposed the listing of notorious havens Hong Kong and Macau: see Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World. The global elite is clearly in control with national governments and international organizations powerlessly doing as instructed. So complete is this control, in fact, that Brooks notes that, in Britain, ‘Anti-tax avoidance laws had to be relaxed to accommodate companies’ tax avoidance schemes.’

Brooks concludes that ‘British taxation policy really had been so comprehensively captured by the world’s biggest corporations that screw-the-poor policies… could be written into the statute books at their whim, without a pang of conscience being felt anywhere in Whitehall.’ Clearly, however, his comment can be applied to virtually any government in the world.

So does it matter to you that these tax havens exist and do what they do?

What can be done about Tax Havens?

Authors such as Nicholas Shaxson and Richard Brooks suggest a raft of measures to correct the large number of ‘faults’ that facilitate the secrecy, protection from regulation and tax evasion that individuals, corporations, organizations, criminals and terrorists utilize in tax havens.

For Shaxson, these include financial reforms such as ‘blacklisting’ of tax havens so that their rogue state status is public knowledge; greater transparency, for example, through government sharing of information about the local income and assets of each other’s citizens and by requiring multinational corporate activities in each country to be made visible (rather than hidden behind ‘international’ figures); promoting the needs of developing countries which need their tax bases protected far more than they need aid or debt relief; confronting the British ‘spider’s web’ of tax havens by abolishing the City of London Corporation and submerging it into a unified and fully democratic London; taxing an entire multinational ‘group’ as a single unit and then allocating the appropriate amounts of its income out to the different jurisdictions in which it was earned and allow it to be taxed as each jurisdiction decides; onshore tax reform such as a land value tax (because land cannot be moved offshore and so tax on it must be paid locally), and by a direct distribution of mineral wealth in any country to each of its inhabitants (who can then be taxed); tackling the ‘enablers’ – the accountants, lawyers, individual bankers, businesspeople – and not just the clients, so that they go to jail; rethinking the meaning of ‘corporate responsibility’ (because corporations are given a wealth of capital in public infrastructure, an educated and healthy workforce… with which to work) so that corporations are transparent about their affairs and pay tax as part of their corporate responsibility; re-evaluating the meaning of corruption – insiders abusing the common good in secrecy and getting away with it and so worsening inequality and entrenching vested interests and unaccountable power – so that we see, more clearly, all of the actors and their activities; and changing the culture that fawns over people who abuse the system for personal gain. See Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World.

And some progress appears to be occurring along lines he suggests. For example, a version of automatic information exchange (AIE), by which governments make sure that essential information is made available to other jurisdictions as a matter of routine, has been discussed by the OECD and, while full of loopholes – see ‘Loophole USA: the vortex-shaped hole in global financial transparency’ – some commitments have been made. For the list of commitments as at November 2018, see ‘AEOI commitments’.

However, the USA has not made this commitment and while Switzerland, for example, finds this objectionable – see ‘The U.S. hasn’t signed the AEoI Agreement: Reciprocity demanded’ – the reality is that it makes little difference. For example, ICO Services, which specializes in the formation of offshore companies and offshore banking, will assist you to get around the AEoI requirement. Their website advertises that ‘asset holders need to start looking for alternative jurisdictions for protecting their assets. There are some reputable jurisdictions that are still outside the AEoI – e.g. Cyprus – but U.S. states of Delaware and some others shouldn’t be dismissed.’

But if you want a more established name to help you take advantage of a tax haven in the USA, you really can’t go past Rothschild & Co. So, to check out what they are offering: ‘Here Is Rothschild’s Primer How To Launder Money In U.S. Real Estate And Avoid “Blacklists”’.

Moreover, the AEoI agreement ‘outlaws’ bank secrecy but not trust secrecy (which dates from the Crusades) on which the British model is based – ‘The Trust lies at the core of the British secrecy model’ – so it does not address the cornerstone of British tax haven secrecy and explains why the British were happy to see the Cayman Islands commit to the AEoI. In short: the British government would be happy to kill off bank secrecy so that they can capture a larger market share (based on Trust secrecy). See ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.

Separately from this initiative, in 2018 the UK parliament enacted a new law requiring its overseas territories – including notorious tax havens like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands – to start disclosing the owners of corporations they register by 2020. In theory: ‘This could shut down a huge amount of offshore tax evasion and other financial crimes because individuals from anywhere in the world, including the United States, have long been able to set up secret corporations in these tax havens to stash their money.’ See ‘New UK Law May Shut Down the Biggest Tax Havens – Aside from the U.S.’

However, while the report pointed out that the new law obviously does not impact the USA (or, of course, Switzerland or …) and the easy rerouting options available if these havens are effectively (or even actually) shut down, it failed to mention that this initiative does not in any way address the City of London Corporation so the impact of this initiative must be very limited unless it is followed by some pretty drastic initiatives in Westminster, Washington, Bern and elsewhere.

In summary, while one cannot disagree with any of Shaxson’s fine suggestions or be displeased that public pressure has led to some effort being made by the OECD and the UK parliament to address elements of the tax haven scourge, the reality is that the extent of the changes necessary are not going to happen without enormous grassroots pressure, strategically applied, and they are very unlikely to happen as reforms of the existing capitalist system. This is simply because the global elite is solidly in control of the institutions and processes of global capitalism, including its compliant governments and international organizations, and will readily stymie any attempt at serious reform of tax havenry particularly given the number of major reforms needed and the number of nations in which these reforms must be enacted. To state two obvious examples: The City of London Corporation has not existed for 1,000 years because it has no defense. And the changes noted above have only made the US more attractive as a secrecy jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, with the aim of promoting ‘financial innovation’, Switzerland has recently made things easier for smaller financial technology companies thus making tax havenry more attractive to those who might not have otherwise considered it. See ‘Swiss watchdog to propose looser anti-money laundering rules for fintechs’.

So, given that most tax havens are protected by host government legislation and there is no international mechanism to control them, the tax haven industry generally is not under threat of being held to account in any significant way.

And, despite the more elaborate explanation offered above, there is a simple reason for this. Unofficially, of course, illegal money, laundered through tax havens, has become an essential and sometimes stabilizing element of the global financial system. See ‘Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor’.

So what can we do that will make a difference?

Given the deeply entrenched and long-standing nature of this problem, clearly it needs to be addressed at various levels.

Fundamentally, we can nurture our children so that we do not destroy their conscience. See ‘My Promise to Children’. Remember all of those corrupt/criminal accountants, bankers, businesspeople, priests and popes, lawyers and politicians that kept creeping up in the discussion above? The people who maintain the entire infrastructure that allows tax havens to exist and those who manage and profit from it too?

Do they care about you? Do they care about the people in Africa, Asia and Central/South America who starve as a result of the types of policies that allow tax havens to exist and function? Do they care about those driven into poverty and homelessness in modern industrial economies because vast sums are drained out of them and hidden in secrecy jurisdictions? Do they care about the people killed by the military and other violence from which they profit and then hide the proceeds to evade tax? Do they care about the Earth? Fundamentally, do they care about themselves?

Of course not! But this is only because they are extraordinarily psychologically damaged individuals. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ with a more complete explanation in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

If we inflict enormous violence on a child throughout their childhood to compel their obedience, how can we expect them to grow up to lead a life of integrity based on their conscience, courage, compassion, empathy and love? Those who use tax havens are truly ‘poor little rich boys’ (and girls). See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ and ‘Why Set Up a Shell Company in Panama? The Psychology Driving Illicit Financial Flows’.

Beyond tackling the problem at its source however, we can also tackle manifestations of the problem but not by lobbying elites – and their political agents: there are no votes in it, in any case – to control this depravity for which they are well rewarded.

For a start we can boycott all of the major private banks in favor of those smaller or member-owned banks that have a serious commitment to peace, justice and ecological sustainability, or we can seek out equivalent institutions like credit unions. We can also create public banks based on ethical principles. See ‘What are Public Banks and How Do They Operate? An Introduction’.

We can boycott large corporations – like Amazon, Apple, Gap, Google, Ikea, Microsoft and Starbucks – that use tax havens. None of these corporations is a monopoly: there are alternatives which can be investigated and employed, assuming we can’t go without some version of the product or service they offer. Whenever you can, find a locally-owned outlet that offers a local product or service.

We can boycott the Catholic Church. God does not ask that you morally or financially support a corrupt organization that doesn’t understand or represent morality and spirituality. Remember, it was Jesus who threw the moneychangers out of the temple.

If our conscience speaks loudly enough, we can decline employment by any organization that is unethical, such as those that use tax havens.

We can refuse to gamble, refuse to buy the services of a sex worker (who might even be illegally trafficked into the work), refuse to buy the products of endangered species – see, for example, ‘Killing Elephants “for Pet Food” Condemned’ – and refuse to use illicit drugs. These products and services are virtually always offered by industries controlled by criminal organizations so by buying them you are only harming yourself and/or other people or species about whom you could choose to exercise a duty of care while also not contributing to the diversion of financial resources into tax havens.

We can encourage unions, with members who work for organizations using tax havens, to take a stand on the issue.

We can support existing organizations that work on the problem, preferably those that offer grassroots alternatives. The Tax Justice Network, an ‘activist think tank’, and its sister organization, the Global Alliance for Tax Justice, campaign for systemic change.

If we are genuinely ambitious, we can develop comprehensive nonviolent strategies to compel particular individuals and organizations to desist from using tax havens or even compel countries to close down tax havens. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy. This can easily be part of a larger strategy to transform the global economy into one that satisfies human and ecological needs, particularly given the imminence of biosphere collapse, as noted above. See ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’.

If violence and exploitation in all of their guises concern you, consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

So here is a final question for you to consider: What might the world look like if all those trillions of dollars were being shared and spent where they are most needed?

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

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