Even More Certain Now: Obama’s Ukrainian Stooges Did Intentionally Down that Malaysian Airliner

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: RINF

Information continues to pour in confirming the retired Lufthansa pilot Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of how that Malaysian airliner (MH-17) came to be downed over the war-zone in Ukraine, the place to which Obama’s Ukrainian stooges had guided it and then shot it down in order to blame Russia for the tragedy so that Obama’s international sanctions against Russia could be increased. The present article is an updated version of the prior ones I’ve done attempting to present this case as clearly and as fully and honestly as I can. The “PS: at the end here is the main addition to the version I posted yesterday.

We’ll go considerably farther than has yet been revealed by the professional intelligence community, to provide the actual evidence that conclusively shows that (and how) the Ukrainian Government shot down the Malaysian airliner, MH-17, on July 17th.

The latest report from the intelligence community was headlined on August 3rd by Robert Parry, “Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts,” and he revealed there that, “Contrary to the Obama administration’s public claims blaming eastern Ukrainian rebels and Russia for the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, some U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded that the rebels and Russia were likely not at fault and that it appears Ukrainian government forces were to blame, according to a source briefed on these findings. This judgment — at odds with what President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have expressed publicly — is based largely on the absence of U.S. government evidence that Russia supplied the rebels with a Buk anti-aircraft missile system that would be needed to hit a civilian jetliner flying at 33,000 feet, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.”

It’s actually based on lots more than that; it’s based not on an absence of evidence, but on positive proof that the Ukrainian Government shot the plane down, and even proving how it was done. You will see this proof, right here, laid out in detail, for the first time anywhere, as of the present date.

The reader-comments to my July 31st article, “First Examination of Malaysian MH-17 Cockpit Photo Shows Ukraine Government Shot that Plane Down,” provided links and leads to independent additional confirmatory evidence backing up that account, of retired Lufthansa pilot Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of this event, to such an extent that, after exploring the matter further, I now feel confident enough to say that the evidence on this matter is, indeed, “conclusive,” that Haisenko is right. Here is all of that evidence, which collectively convinces me that Haisenko’s conclusion there, is, indeed, the only one that can even possibly explain this wreckage:

“There have been two or three pieces of fuselage that have been really pockmarked with what almost looks like machine-gun fire, very very strong machine-gun fire.” This remarkable statement comes not from Haisenko, but from one of the first OSCE investigators who arrived at the scene of the disaster. Go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ze9BNGDyk4 and you will see it.

That youtube snippet in an interview with Michael Bociurkiw, comes from a man who is “a Ukrainian-Canadian monitor with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), [who] has seen up close … the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. Bociurkiw and one other colleague were the first international monitors to reach the wreckage after the jet was shot down over a rebel-held region of eastern Ukraine July 17.” That description of him is from the lead-in to the full interview with him, at the 29 July 2014 CBC news article, “Malaysia Airlines MH17: Michael Bociurkiw talks about being first at the crash site.” The far briefer youtube clip shows only what’s presented on 6:10-6:24 of this CBC interview with Bociurkiw. The CBC reporter in the video precedes the interview by announcing, “The wreckage was still smoldering when a small team from the OSCE got there.” So: he had to have been there really fast. “No other officials arrived for days,” she said.

So: one of the two first international monitors on-site saw conclusive evidence that the Malaysian plane had been hit by “very very strong machine-gun fire,” not by ground-based missile-fire. Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of the downing of that airliner, was here being essentially confirmed on-site by one of the two first OSCE international monitors to arrive on-site, while the wreckage was still smoldering. That’s as close to virgin, untouched evidence and testimony as we’ll ever get. Unlike a black-box interpretation-analysis long afterward by the Russian Government, or by the British Government, or by the Ukrainian Government, each of which governments has a horse in this race, this testimony from Bociurkiw is raw, independent, and comes from one of the two earliest witnesses to the physical evidence. That’s powerfully authoritative testimony, and it happens to confirm pilot Peter Haisenko’s theory of what happened. Bociurkiw arrived there fast because he negotiated with the locals for the rest of the OSCE team, who were organizing to come later: Bociurkiw speaks the local languages there — Ukrainian and Russian.

Furthermore, this is hardly testimony from someone who is supportive of the anti-Government rebels. Earlier, there had been this, http://pressimus.com/Interpreter_Mag/press/3492, which transcribes the BBC’s interview with Bociurkiw on July 22nd. He said then: “We’re observing that major pieces, and I’m looking at the tail fin as I said, and then there’s also the rear cone section of the aircraft, they do look different than when we first saw them, … two days ago.” So, he had arrived on-scene July 20th at the latest. (Neither the BBC nor the CBC, both of which interviewed him, were sufficiently professional to have reported the specific date at which Bociurkiw had actually arrived on-scene, but, from this, it couldn’t have been after July 20th. The downing had occurred July 17th. If some of the debris was still “smoldering” as the CBC journalist said, then maybe he had arrived there even earlier.)

The youtube snippet of Bociurkiw came to me via a reader-comment to my article, from Bill Johnson, after which I web-searched the youtube clip for its source and arrived then at the 29 July 2014 CBC news article and its accompanying video.

Further, there’s this crucial 21 July photo-reconstruction of that cockpit-fragment positioned into place on the aircraft as it had originally been in that intact-airliner:  https://twitter.com/EzraBraam. (Sometimes that doesn’t work, so here’s another screen of it from someone who copied it.) Looking at that photo-reconstruction, one can easily tell that the SU-25 or other fighter-jet that was firing into the cockpit from the pilot’s left side didn’t just riddle the area surrounding the pilot with bullets, but that it then targeted-in specifically onto the pilot himself, producing at his location a huge gaping hole in the side of the plane precisely at the place where the pilot was seated. Furthermore, this gaping hole was produced by shooting into the plane, precisely at the pilot, from below and to the pilot’s left, which is where that fighter-jet was located — not from above the airliner, and not from beside it, and also not from below it.

In other words: this was precise and closely-targeted firing against the pilot himself, not a blast directed broadly against, and aiming to hit, the plane anywhere, to bring it down.

Haisenko explained how this penetration of the plane, though it was targeted specifically at the pilot, caused immediately a breaking-apart of the entire aircraft.

Other readers have responded to my news-report about Haisenko’s article, by saying that shrapnel from a Buk missile could similarly have caused those holes into the side of the cockpit. However, that objection ignores another key feature of Haisenko’s analysis. Haisenko said there: “You can see the entry and exit holes. The edge of a portion of the holes is bent inwards. These are the smaller holes, round and clean, showing the entry points most likeley that of a 30 millimeter caliber projectile. The edge of the other, the larger and slightly frayed exit holes showing shreds of metal pointing produced by the same caliber projectiles. Moreover, it is evident that … these exit holes of the outer layer of the double aluminum reinforced structure are shredded or bent — outwardly!”

What this means is that in order to have some of those holes frayed inwardly and the other holes frayed outwardly, there had to have been a second fighter-jet firing into the cockpit from the airliner’s right-hand side. That’s critically important, because no ground-based missile (or shrapnel therefrom) hitting the airliner could possibly have produced firing into the cockpit from both  sides of the plane. It had to have been a hail of bullets from both sides, that brought the plane down, in that circumstance. This is Haisenko’s main discovery, by his pointing that out. You can’t have projectiles going in both directions — into the left-hand-side fuselage panel from both its left and right sides — unless they are coming at the panel from different directions. Nobody before Haisenko had noticed that the projectiles had ripped through that panel from both its left side and its right side. This is what rules out any  ground-fired missile.

Peter Haisenko posted an extremely high-resolution image from that photo which he used, and it shows unequivocally that some of the bullet-holes were inbound while others of them were outbound: Here it is, viewed very close-up.

Although the fighter jets that were said to have been escorting the Malaysian plane into the war-zone were alleged to be SU-25 planes, a different type might have been used. SU-25s are designed to be flown up to 23,000 feet without an oxygen-mask, but can go much higher if the pilot does wear that mask, which was probably the case here. Of course, an airliner itself is fully pressurized. That pressurization inside the airliner is, moreover, a key part of Haisenko’s reconstruction of this airliner’s downing. Basically, Haisenko reconstructs the airliner’s breaking apart as soon as that hail of bullets opened and released the plane’s pressurization.

The specific photo of that cockpit-fragment, which Haisenko had downloaded immediately after the disaster, was removed from the Internet, but other photos of this fragment were posted elsewhere, such as at the British publication (which, like the rest of the Western “news” media is slanted pro-Obama, anti-Putin), on July 21st, headlining their anti-Putin missile-theory bias, “MH17 crash: FT photo shows signs of damage from missile strike.” Their “reporters” opened with their blatant anti-Russian prejudice: “The first apparent hard evidence that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was brought down by a surface-to-air missile is emerging from the crash site in eastern Ukraine, after experts confirmed on Monday there were signs of shrapnel damage to the aircraft.” Although they didn’t say in their opener that the “surface-to-air missile” was from the rebels, they made clear their pro-Ukrainian-Government anti-Russian bias by saying, “Over the weekend, western intelligence agencies pointed to mounting evidence that backs Ukraine’s claim that the aircraft with 298 people on board was shot down by mistake by pro-Russian separatists and Russian military personnel with an SA-11 missile launched from a Buk-M1 SAM battery.” Their stenographers (or as they would say “reporters”) stenographed (“reported”) that, “Douglas Barrie of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the photographic evidence ‘was consistent with the kind of damage you would expect to see from the detonation of a high explosive fragmentation warhead of the type commonly used in a SAM system’.” No analyst from the pro-Putin camp  was interviewed by their “reporters.” For example, Russia’s Interfax News Service headlined on July 29th, the same day as the FT’s  article, “Boeing’s downing by Buk missile system unlikely — military expert,” and they stenographed their  “expert,” as follows:

Chief of the Russian Land Forces’ tactical air defense troops Maj. Gen. Mikhail Krush said he doubts that the Malaysian passenger liner was brought down by a Buk surface-to-air missile system. “No one observed a Buk engaging targets in that region on that day, which provides 95 percent proof that Buk systems were not used in this concrete case,” the general said in an interview with the Voyenno-Promyshlenny Kuryer military weekly to be published on Wednesday [July 30th]. “This is no more than a theory for now. However, a guided missile launched by a Buk missile system leaves behind a specific smoke trail as it flies, like a comet. In daylight this trail can be clearly seen within a radius of 20-25 kilometers from the missile system. It cannot remain unnoticed. There are no eyewitnesses to confirm there was any. No one reported a launch. This is one thing,” he said. “Second. The holes left by the strike elements on the Boeing’s outer skin indicate that the warhead blew up from below and sideways. A Buk missile strikes the target from above,” he said. “The damage done to the plane suggests that a different missile was used. Our guidance method is a zoom, when the missile strikes the target from above covering it with a thick cloud of fragments” the general said. “I cannot state categorically, guided by this data, but I can suggest, using my experience, that it was not a Buk missile that hit the Boeing,” the expert said.

General Krush’s statement can fit with Haisenko’s and with Bociurkiw’s, but not with FT’s  or the rest of the “reporters” (just consider them as rank propagandists) in the West.

U.S. President Barack Obama has been saying all along that Russia – against which he is actually systematically building toward war – and not Ukraine (which he’s using as his chief vehicle to do that), is to blame for this airliner-downing. Previously, he had said that the snipers who in February had killed many people at the Maidan demonstrations against the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych came from Yanukovych’s State Security Service and not from the far-right political parties that were trying to bring Yanukovych down and that Obama’s agent Victoria Nuland selected to run the new Ukrainian government. But that too was an Obama lie. He lies a lot, and it’s just about the only type of statement he ever makes about Russia, and about Ukraine: lies.

If someone wants to verify how rabidly the U.S. Government lies, and has lied since at least the time of George W. Bush’s Presidency, just look at this video, by starting at 16:00 on it and going to 42:00 on it, and you will be shocked. (It pertains to lies by Bush that are still being covered up by Obama.) And when you further consider the many obvious questions it points out, which U.S. “news” media refused to ask and still refuse to ask about the matter, you’ll recognize that we are being lied to systematically and with utter contempt of the public, and with no respect for the public’s right to know the truth, even regarding massive history like that. It’s really brutal.

Ignorant “reporters” sometimes slip-up and include, in their stenography, facts that actually support the opposite side’s narrative of events and that discredit their own story-line. Such has been the case, for example, in the Financial Times  piece, which included the statement that, “Anti-aircraft missiles are not designed to score a direct hit as they are targeted to destroy fast, agile fighter jets. Instead, they are designed to explode within about 20m of their target, sending out a cloud of red hot metal to increase the chances of inflicting as much damage as possible.”

But rather than merely “a cloud of red hot metal,” what actually brought down this plane was what Haisenko has said brought it down: magazines-full of carefully targeted rapid-fire machine-gun bullets pouring forth from below the plane, at both its left and right.

This was a Ukrainian Government job. It was close-in. (No missile fired from the distance more than 30,000 feet down to the ground could have been that precise to target the pilot rather than the far larger target of the plane’s entire body.) It came from the Government that Obama installed there in February and that’s now carrying out an ethnic-cleansing campaign against the residents in Ukraine’s southeast, the places where Yanukovych’s voters live (to the extent that they still can and do live).

Compare that picture with the following one, which I take from a propaganda-site for the U.S. regime, and so which is intended instead to support the Administration’s line on this, certainly not Haisenko’s explanation of how the airliner was downed, though it actually supports Haisenko’s case:

3.August.2014.Screen shot 2014-08-03 at 3.25.30 PM

As you can see there, a plane that’s hit by a ground-fired missile, instead of by bullets fired from an attack-plane only a few yards away, has the damage spread rather widely over its body, not concentrated into a tiny area, such as to where the plane’s pilot is seated. Certainly, the contrast between that photo and this one is enormous.

Furthermore, note also that the shrapnel damage to that plane comes from above it, which is where missiles usually hit a plane from, releasing their shrapnel from above, down onto the plane. By contrast, the hail of bullets to the Malaysian plane’s pilot came from below the plane, aiming upward at the cockpit, from both sides of the cockpit.

Furthermore, note also that all of the holes appear to be inbound into the plane, none outbound.

As regards whether there were actually two fighter jets firing into the Malaysian airliner or only one, a proponent of the single-jet hypothesis, Bill Johnson, posted as a reader-comment to my article on August 4th, a series of extreme close-ups of the side-panel, in which he inferred that the explanation of the apparent left-side (pilot-side) bullets was probably the shape of the bullets. I then asked him why he declined to accept the possible existence of two jets. He said, “from what I could find Russian military radar detected only one Ukrainian fighter jet, not two. I have looked and looked for any type of radar confirmation of a second fighter jet and can not find it.” However, the most virginal, very earliest, online evidence concerning the matter was on July 17th, within moments of the downing, headlining in the subsequent English translation, “Spanish Air Controller @ Kiev Borispol Airport: Ukraine Military Shot Down Boeing #MH17,” and it included, “@spainbuca’s TWITTER FEED,” which included his observation, only minutes after the downing, “2 jet fighters flew very close” to the plane. Furthermore, immediately before that, he had tweeted, “The B777 plane flew escorted by Ukraine jet fighter until 2 minutes before disappearing from the radar.” So, perhaps the second jet appeared distinct to him only immediately prior to the downing. An extensive file of tweets from @spainbuca was posted below the headline story and it included also the note: “LAST MINUTE Air Traffic Controller: The Boeing 777 ‘flew fighters escorted by two Ukrainians’ before disappearing.” (The original Spanish there was: “‘voló escoltado por 2 cazas ucranianos’ antes de desaparecer.”)

Additionally, a news story from the Spanish language edition of Russian Television on 8 May 2014, soon after the Odessa massacre, had been headlined in google trans English as “Death threats to a Spanish review in Ukraine crisis” and it said: “Spanish air traffic controller who was threatened by supporters of the Maidan, Carlos, who spoke with RT on the condition of anonymity, has received threats despite not defending any interest. ‘I have my opinion and my view of a normal person, with a separate work [unrelated] or media, or any political party, nor to any association.’” These “supporters of Maidan … threatened to kill him, to send him to ‘do not know what battalion’ and out of the country.” Then on July 17th there was, yet again in google trans from Spanish, “Block a Twitter account accusing Kiev of the demolition of the MH17,” which reported that a controller at “Ukraine’s largest airport said the plane from Malaysia, which crashed in the east with 298 people on board, was escorted by two Ukrainian fighters until minutes before disappearing from radar.”

Another news-report, also on July 17th, came from Global Travel Industry News datelined 17 July and it headlined “Ukraine air traffic controller suggests Kiev military shot down passenger plane.” It said: “This Kiev air traffic controller is a citizen of Spain and was working in the Ukraine. He was taken off duty as a civil air-traffic controller along with other foreigners immediately after a Malaysia Airlines passenger aircraft was shot down over the Eastern Ukraine killing 295 passengers and crew on board. The air traffic controller suggested in a private evaluation and basing it on military sources in Kiev, that the Ukrainian military was behind this shoot down. Radar records were immediately confiscated after it became clear a passenger jet was shot down.” If this is true, then the radar-records upon the basis of which those tweets had been sent out were “confiscated.” That news-story from Global Travel Industry News closed by saying that the report was “based on” “tweets received” and “the statements of one airline controller.”

That person, who called himself anonymously by the name “Carlos,” had produced a file characteristic of someone hostile toward, and personally afraid of, the new Kiev government, and nothing further was heard from him, if he even survived. The Ukrainian Government said that he never existed, though the 8 May 2014 news report of his frictions with the Kiev authorities could hardly have been concocted after July 17th simply out of nowhere; it had pre-existed the airliner-downing, and it fit with his tweets on July 17th.

The best evidence is consistent with the view that those bullet-holes came from two directions not from one. What is virtually certain, however, is that at least one jet fighter was close up and shot down the Malaysian plane targeting the pilot at close range. There is no way that a 33,000-foot-away ground-fired missile could have produced that cockpit side-panel.

And the European Union has been playing along with this hoax. (If you still have any further doubts that it’s a hoax, just click onto that link and look.) And the mass of suckers in the West believe that hoax: it’s succeeding to stir a fever for war, instead of a fever to get rid of our own leaders who are lying us into a war that will benefit only the West’s aristocrats, while it inflicts massive physical and economic harms against everyone else – as if it were the invasion of Iraq except multiplied in this case a thousand-fold, especially with nuclear weapons possibly at the end of it.

If we had a free press, the news media would be ceaselessly asking President Obama why he doesn’t demand accountability against the Ukrainian Government for their massacre perpetrated on May 2nd inside the Trade Unions Building in Odessa, where that newly Obama-installed regime’s peaceful opponents were systematically trapped and then burned alive, which the Obama-installed Ukrainian Government has refused to investigate (much less to prosecute). Basically: Obama had sponsored the massacre. So, our “news” media ignore it, even though it started this civil war on Russia’s doorstep, and thereby re-started the Cold War, as Obama had intended that massacre (his  massacre, and his  subsequent ethnic cleansing) to do. (Similarly, the “news” media, though all of them receive my articles by email, virtually all refuse to publish them, because I won’t let them control what I find and report.)

And while Obama leads this Republican policy, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s top foreign-policy advisor Victoria Nuland actually runs it for Obama, congressional Democrats are just silent about it, and do not introduce impeachment of this fake “Democratic” hyper-George W. Bush neo-conservative President, who’s a “Democrat” in rhetoric only – and though Obama’s policy in this key matter threatens the entire world.

A reader-comment to an earlier version of this news report and analysis objected to my identifying Obama as a Republican-in-”Democratic”-sheep’s clothing, and said: “They may be rethug policies in origin but they are decidedly BI-PARTISAN to anyone who wants to admit FACTS. The democratic party you all think still exists is DEAD and only exists in your brain (the part that doesn’t accept reality).” However, U.S. Senate bill 2277, which invites Obama to provide direct U.S. military support to the Obama-installed Ukrainian regime, has 26 sponsors, and all of them are Republican U.S. Senators. Democratic Senators, by contrast, are just silent on Obama’s turn toward nazism (or racist — in this case anti-ethnic-Russian racist — fascism); the Senate’s Democrats aren’t seeking for it to be stepped up. This is a Republican policy, which congressional Democrats are simply afraid to oppose. Any realistic person knows that however far right Obama turns, the overt  Republican Party will turn even farther to the right, because they have to be to his right in order for them to be able to win Republican primaries and retain their own  Party’s nomination. Just because Obama’s game of moving the American political center as far to the right as he can move it is succeeding, doesn’t mean that the Democratic Party itself should end. It instead means that progressives need to take the Democratic Party over, just like conservatives took the Republican Party over with Reagan. There is no other hope. If a Democrat in the U.S. House will simply introduce an impeachment resolution against Barack Obama, then the right-wing takeover of the Democratic Party might finally end, and the world might yet be saved, because the Democratic Party itself could then reject Obama as being a fake “Democrat,” a Democrat-in-rhetoric-only. It could transform American politics — and American politics needs such a transformation, which would move the Democratic Party back to progressivism, more like the FDR Democratic Party was, so that Republican politicians would no longer need to be so fascist as they now have become (and as they now need to be  in order to be able to win their own  Party’s nomination). If Democrats fail to renounce the conservatism of Obama and of the Clintons, then the Party will end, and needs to be replaced, just like the Republican Party replaced the Whig Party immediately before the Civil War. Nazism has become today’s slavery-type issue – it’s beyond the pale, and Obama’s installation and endorsement of it in Ukraine is like James Buchanan’s endorsement of slavery was during the 1850s: either the Democratic Party will become the progressive party, or else the Democratic Party is over.

But that’s just my own theory of how Obama’s frauds might yet be able to be overcome and defeated, if they still can be; it’s not part of my presentation of the explanation of what brought down the Malaysian airliner, which has been an open case since July 17th, and which is now a closed case. This is past history, not future.

The present news story is being circulated free of charge or copyright to all “news” media in the English-speaking world, in the perhaps vain hope that the cover-ups of our leaders’ constant lies will cease soon enough to avoid a World War III, even though communism is long since gone from Russia and so the ideological excuse wouldn’t make any sense here. This insanity is actually all about aristocratic conquest, like World War I was. It’s not for the benefit of the public anywhere. Silence about it (by “Democrats,” and the “news” media) is a scandal, which needs to stop. The real Democratic Party (the Party of FDR, who loathed and despised nazis — and even mere fascists — yet today Obama installs nazis into power in Ukraine) must be restored, and a real news media needs to become established in America. Even Republicans need it, because the very idea of “victory” in a nuclear war is a vicious fantasy. It is a dangerous lie, though there are some people who find it a very profitable one. And time might be short — let’s hope not already too  short.

After all, Obama’s hoax of having won from Europe the stepped-up economic sanctions against Russia after the government that Obama had installed in Ukraine downed the Malaysian plane and successfully blamed it on “Russian aggression,” is very encouraging to him. And European leaders know that Obama’s entire operation is a very bloody fraud (read the phone-transcript there — it’s a stunner). So, they certainly won’t save the world from it. It’s up to us.

PS (dated August 5th):

Some readers disagree with Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of the event on account of their not understanding his reconstruction of it (not understanding what I have been trying here to state as clearly as I can, bringing in other evidence). For example, see:

http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/evidence-now-conclusive-2-ukrainian-government-su-25-fighter-jets-shoot-malaysian-airliner-buk-missile-ground-shot-involved/

reader-comment:

“Benoit • [c. 8AM on 5 August 2014]

“I do not agree with Peter Haisenko’s conclusions : if external hull of the cockpit is bent outwards, it is not necessarily because some of the bullets came outwards. It may also be because it’s a double hull, and explosive bullet coming inwards may, when exploding, have torn outer aluminium hull outwards. A very careful analysis shows tha the inner hull (the green one) is bent inwards, and that may well in fact confirm the present analysis. Here’s this careful analysis (in french, use Goolgle translate):

“Benoit” links there to:

http://www.agoravox.fr/actualites/international/article/mh17-preuve-de-canonnage-et-155019

“MH17: evidence gunnery and Western Bankruptcy”

by joelim , Wednesday, July 30, 2014, in which is buried its conclusion:

“Anyway, these five aligned and clearly visible impacts directly lead to the conclusion that fire gunnery (not gun, which stops 20 mm) was made precisely to where stood the driver (see here  and here ). The damage (physical, human, decompression) left them no chance. This is the cause of the crash. The plane did not explode which also explains the appearance of debris found.”

Here is the French original on that:

“MH17 : preuve de canonnage et faillite occidentale”

“Quoiqu’il en soit, ces 5 impacts alignés et parfaitement visibles mènent directement à la conclusion qu’un tir de canonnage (et non de mitrailleuse, qui s’arrête à 20 mm) a été effectué précisément à l’endroit où se tenait le pilote (voir ici et ici). Les dégâts occasionnés (matériel, humain, décompression) ne leur laissaient aucune chance. C’est donc la cause du crash. L’avion n’a pas explosé ce qui explique aussi l’aspect des débris retrouvés.”

In other words: “Benoit” couldn’t understand what he was reading, and so he said “I do not agree with Peter Haisenko’s conclusions.” He cited against Haisenko’s theory of the case, an analysis that was published a day after Haisenko’s, which concluded the same as Haisenko did.

The author of that French article refused to even use the word “Haisenko” in his article, much less to credit Haisenko’s article in any way, but the source-photo that he linked to came from Haisenko’s high-definition pdf of the photo that Haisenko was using. He was trying to get credit for Haisenko’s theory of the case.

There is a lot of lying going on, a lot of misrepresentation. The only way to get to the truth is to base it on the best available evidence, which is what Haisenko did. He found it; he analyzed it; he solved the mystery (though he could have explained it better). To the extent that other “evidence” is reliable, it fits his explanation — an explanation that I shall keep expanding on to the extent that new relevant evidence comes forth, pro and/or con, on it. The important thing to keep in mind, however, is this. It’s even more important than how that plane was brought down.

Barack Obama lies to us. All Republican (or conservative) politicians do. The Democratic Party will die if it fails to state that this is so and to make the case for the charge so that they separate themselves from the Republican Party and be clearly the progressive alternative to conservatism in America. A Democratic impeachment against this Republican President is essential in order to salvage the Democratic Party, and even in order to salvage democracy in America, because no country can be an authentic democracy if the country’s main political parties are all conservative, if none of the main parties is progressive. That’s not a democracy: it is a dictatorship. That’s what we’ve got.

WikiLeaks Cables Reveal U.S. Gov’t Planned To “Retaliate and Cause Pain” On Countries Refusing GMOs

monsanto

By Arjun Walia

Source: Collective Evolution

Studies that link Genetically Modified (GM) food to multiple human health ailments are not the only thing that has millions of people questioning the production of GM food. The fact that previously classified secret government documents show how the Bush administration developed ways to retaliate against countries that were refusing to use GM seeds is another. If documents regarding our food are required to be concealed from the public domain, something is not right, and it’s great to have an organization like WikiLeaks shed some light into the world that’s been hidden from us for so many years.

Targeting Certain Countries

The cables reveal that the State Department was lobbying all over the world for Monsanto, and other major biotech corporations. They reveal that American diplomats requested funding to send lobbyists for the biotech industry to meet with politicians and agricultural officials in “target countries.” These included countries in Africa, Latin America and some European countries.

A non-profit consumer protection group called Food & Water Watch published a report showing the details of the partnership between the federal government and a number of biotech companies who have pushed their GMO products on multiple countries for a number of years.

“The United States has aggressively pursued foreign policies in food and agriculture that benefit the largest seed companies. The U.S. State department has launched a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology, often over the opposition of the public and government, to the near exclusion of other more sustainable, more appropriate agricultural policy alternatives. The U.S. State department has also lobbied foreign governments to adopt pro-agricultural biotechnology politics and laws, operated a rigorous public relations campaign to improve the image of biotechnology and challenged common sense biotechnology safeguards and rules – even including opposing laws requiring the labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods.” (source) 

HERE is one cable (out of many) from Morocco.

HERE Is a 2008 cable that summarizes a French documentary called “The World According to Monsanto which attacks the U.S. biotech industry and the fact that Monsanto and the U.S. Government constantly swap employees and positions, below is a excerpt from the cable:

Corporations Dictate Government Policy

“The film argues that Monsanto exerted undue influence on the USG. Former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman is interviewed saying he had felt that he was under pressure and that more tests should have been conducted on biotech products before they were approved. Jeffrey Smith, Director, Institute for Responsible Technology, who is interviewed says that a number of Bush Administration officers were close to Monsanto, either having obtained campaign contributions from the company or having worked directly for it: John Ashcroft, Secretary of Justice, received contributions from Monsanto when he was re-elected, as did Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health; Ann Veneman, Secretary of Agriculture, was director of Calgene which belonged to Monsanto; and Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, was CEO of Searle, a Monsanto subsidiary; and Justice Clarence Thomas was a former lawyer for Monsanto.”

This is one example (out of many) that clearly show how giant corporations pretty much dictate government policy. When it comes to these food corporations, they are responsible for forcing independent agriculturists to go out of business, controlling the world’s seed supply and forcing farmers to become dependent on their seed. Monsanto and corporations like them have created this seed, and have prevented farmers from seed saving and sharing, which results in a dependence on Monsanto’s patented GMO seeds.

“The state department sent annual cables to ‘encourage the use of agricultural biotechnology,’ encouraging every diplomatic post worldwide to ‘pursue an active biotech agenda’ that promotes agricultural biotechnology, encourages the export of biotech crops and foods and advocated for pro-biotech policies and laws.” (source)

“The US Department of State is selling seeds instead of democracy. This report provides a chilling snapshot of how a handful of giant biotechnology companies are unduly influencing US foreign policy and undermining our diplomatic efforts to promote security, international development and transparency worldwide. This report is a call to action for Americans because public policy should not be for sale to the highest bidder.” – Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch Executive (source)

One of the most revealing cables is from 2007, with regards to French efforts to ban a Monsanto GM corn variety. HERE is a cable that shows Craig Stapleton, former ambassador to France under the Bush administration, asking Washington to punish the EU countries that did not support the use of GM crops:

“Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices.” (see source in above paragraph)

The U.S. government was not only working for the biotech industry, they were also threatening other governments who did not comply. Think about that for a moment. Over the years the United States government and Monsanto have collectively pushed their GMO agenda upon the rest of the world. Why? Do you really think it is to help feed the world? This could easily be done if we came together and pooled our resources. The entire planet could easily be fed organic food, and it could be done for free.

The World’s Resistance To GMOs

The past two years alone has seen millions of people from across the globe gather to show their opposition towards Monsanto and similar corporations. The “March Against Monsanto” is clear evidence of this. The people of the world are starting to see through the veil that’s been blinding the masses for years, and our food industry is one small, but large and important area where the veil is being lifted.

Activism and awareness has contributed to the banning of GMO products and the pesticides that go with them in multiple countries across the planet, it’s time for North America to follow suit.

Related CE articles:

New Study Links GMOs To Cancer, Liver/Kidney Damage & Severe Hormonal Disruption.

10 Scientific Studies Proving That GMOs Can Be Harmful To Human Health

For more CE articles on this subject please click HERE

 

Sources:

http://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/01/10RABAT14.html

http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=08PARIS614&q=monsanto

http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=07PARIS4723&q=france%20gm

http://rt.com/usa/wikileaks-monsanto-cables-report-273/

http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/reports/biotech-ambassadors/

 

James Tracy Answers Questions About Conspiracy Theories

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By Jaime Ortega

Source: The Daily Journalist

James Tracy teaches courses at Florida Atlantic University examining the relationship between commercial and alternative news media and socio-political issues and events.

1. There is a certain danger in the way conspiracy theories have eroded social media, especially on such platforms as YouTube.  Do people distrust mainstream television, radio, and print media?

First of all, we have to seriously think about what we mean by “conspiracy theories” before delving into such a discussion. What are the term’s origins?  How and why is it used?  Without nailing these things down at the outset any discussion of such communicative and sociopolitical dynamics tends toward the nonsensical and comes to eventually become absorbed in the discourse it is seeking the examine or critique.

A cursory look at reportage and commentary in major US news media from the late 1800s through the 1950s indicates that the term “conspiracy theory” is used sporadically in stories on criminal and court proceedings.  In the late 1960s, however, there is a major spike in usage of the term, specifically in items discussing criticism of the Warren Commission Report—President Lyndon Johnson’s commission mandated to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  On January 4, 1967 the Central Intelligence Agency issued a memorandum that became known as Document 1035-960.  The communique was directed at the Agency’s foreign bureaus recommending the deployment of the term by “media assets” to counter critics of the Warren Commission.  The main strategy involved suggestion that such individuals and their inquiries were flawed by slipshod methods and ulterior motives.  The then-foremost Warren Commission critic and JFK assassination researcher Mark Lane was even referenced in the document.

This document was indicative of an apparent strategy via press and public relations maneuvers to undermine New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s then-fledgling investigation of the assassination.  1035-960 explained quite rightly that the CIA had a substantial investment in the credibility of the Warren Report.  Press reportage of Garrison’s ongoing probe revealed a heavy bias from the very outlets that had been long-compromised by Agency-friendly owners, editors, and reporters.  These included NBC and CBS networks, in addition to Time and Newsweek magazines, where the disparaging coverage of Garrison and his inquiry reached truly farcical proportions.

Though he was repeatedly and vociferously decried as a “conspiracy theorist,” a corrupt and opportunistic politician, and even mentally deranged by such outlets, Garrison has been vindicated by the historical record.  For example, we now know, through copious records released as a result of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board, that the CIA was intimately involved in the assassination and cover-up, as were other US government agencies.  Yet the same news media that denounced Garrison almost fifty years ago still tout the legitimacy of the Warren Commission Report.

Since the Garrison episode, but in an especially pronounced fashion over the past twenty years, the conspiracy theory label is routinely mobilized by major corporate media to denigrate honest and intelligent individuals who bring forth important questions on vital events and issues.  Keep in mind that most major media still have often strong ties to the US intelligence and military communities.  With this in mind, a rational citizenry has an obligation to scrutinize what is reported and analyzed in corporate media, and balance their observations and conclusions by considering reportage of foreign and independent alternative media. In this regard the Internet provides a wealth of opportunity.  One needs only exercise the fundamental principles of logic to locate and assess quality information and research.

At the end of the day what we have in the “Conspiracy theory/ist” label is a psychological warfare weapon that has from the perspective of its creators been overwhelmingly effective.  Here is a set of words that is used to threaten, discipline and punish the intellectual class—mainly journalists and academics—who might question or otherwise refuse to tow the party line.  Using the term to designate pedestrian skeptics and researchers is redundant.  After all, as Orwell said, “The proles don’t count.”

Thus, unless we forthrightly interrogate the phrase and its unfortunate history we will be prone to the same confusion and misdirection that its originators
intended.

2. We did a poll here at The Daily Journalist a few weeks back, and the results indicated that 60% of people believed there was US government involvement in the Boston Marathon bombings, in addition to the events of September 11.  When people suspect their own government is involved on these attacks in US soil, what comes to mind?

It is cause for optimism because the US government was almost without question involved in the Boston Marathon bombing and the events of September 11, 2001.  Major media were also complicit in wide-scale public acceptance of the official narrative put forth concerning each incident.

For example, with the Boston bombing the New York Times played a key role in persuading the nation’s professional class and intelligentsia that a terror drill using actors, complete with a multitude of gaffes and outright blunders, was genuine.  In reality there were no severed limbs, no deaths, no injuries from shrapnel—only pyrotechnics and actors responding on cue. This is not only my view, but also that of multiple independent researchers and even former CIA officer Robert David Steele.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is well-known for entrapping and otherwise orchestrating such events to justify its own existence.  With the Boston bombing there were numerous federal, state and local agencies involved in an exercise that had been taking place in the city annually over the past few years with a similar scenario.  A plan for what would become the Boston Marathon bombing was authored by Director of Boston’s Emergency Medical Services Richard Serino in 2008.  Serino was tapped by President Obama in 2009 to become Deputy Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and there are photos of him directing the aftermath of the April 15, 2013 “bombing.”

The public is being asked to believe that two Chechen immigrants expertly devised extremely sophisticated and deadly explosives with consumer fireworks, scrap metal and pressure cookers.  No such refractory ordnance was found at the scene because no thorough forensic investigation ever took place.  The entire affair was a photo shoot and an opportunity for federal authorities to gauge public response to a military-style lockdown in a major metropolitan region.

With such a transparently phony event being proffered as “real” one needs to ask what the other 40% in your poll are actually thinking.  One can fool some of the people some of the time, and there’s still a significant portion of the population—including those who are highly educated, who can’t imagine it’s own government could be so corrupt.   This is a testament to the continued effectiveness of our educational and media apparatuses, each of which emphasize an unhistorical worldview and unquestioning deference to authority figures.

3. Modern media seems to have commercialized and sold its soul to sponsors, and media giants that profit from investments.  Is modern day news a fictional representation of reality?  Are journalists allowed to do their job of investigating serious cases?  Is there an agenda to not report on stories with higher impact?

If a news media outlet gets most of its revenue from advertising it is to a significant degree compromised.  If its main revenue source is advertising and its owned by a transnational corporate conglomerate, “compromised” is not sufficiently powerful enough of a term to describe the given outlet’s probable journalistic vulnerabilities.  It should be barred from tying the term “journalism” to any of its information-related activities.

When we use the term, “transnational corporate conglomerate,” which is often used to denote companies like News Corp and Viacom, we should include the US and British governments, each of which are in the practice of imperial expansion while either subsidizing or forthrightly funding news media.  All such powerful entities understand the importance of concealing, disseminating, and using information to shape public opinion in ways that will be favorable to its corporate and policy interests.  Walter Lippmann describes how this dynamic played out in World War One.  Such powerful corporations and governments shouldn’t even be involved in journalism, unless of course they describe what they are doing in honest and appropriate terms, which is often, as your question suggests, entertainment and public relations masquerading as journalism.

The best journalism today is being produced by independent writers and news media.  At present there is a renaissance taking place in this regard because of the internet.  Corporate news media don’t want to invest the money in true journalism because for them it’s a net loss anyway they figure.  If major outlets fund investigative journalistic ventures and there’s little impact on readership (and thus advertising/revenue) then there’s no return on investment.  On the other hand, if such investigative work is genuine and worthwhile, it’s often delving into areas that reveal how political or economic power operate, which can bring complaints or retaliation from influential entities.  Real investigative journalism from mainstream outlets has been subdued for decades because of this very dynamic.

4. It’s hard not to distrust the government in some cases.  Take for example, the assassination of John F. Kennedy or CIA involvement in the Watergate scandal, to name a few.  Has the government have to change its ways for people not to believe in conspiracies?

The US government doesn’t have to care a great deal about what the public thinks so long as it has major news media that’s committed to producing a steady stream of non-journalism and infotainment to distract the people from considering the things that really impact on their lives.  Events such as 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing aren’t questioned by such media because those media are more or less part of the operations.  As was the case almost 50 years ago with figures such as Mark Lane and Jim Garrison, those asking serious questions and conducting potentially meaningful research are dismissed within the parameters of permissible dissent as “conspiracy theorists,” at least long enough for a majority of the public to stop caring and forget.

What is somewhat new is how the government and psychiatry are now involved in psychologizing the practice or tendency of asking questions about or interrogating disputed events.  In other words, certain interests want to deem “conspiracy theorizing” as mental illness, or otherwise associate it with aberrant and perhaps violent behavior.  In other words, ponder ideas that certain forces deem beyond question and one runs the risk of being institutionalized, losing their job, and so on.

We saw this take place in the case of upstate New York school teacher Adam Heller, who, under the direction of the FBI, was involuntarily institutionalized and later fired from his tenured teaching position simply because of private exchanges where he discussed his views on the Sandy Hook massacre and probable government involvement in weather modification.  We have to keep in mind that the punitive use of psychiatry to punish thought crimes was common practice in the darkest days of the Soviet Union.  Now it’s emerging here.  In this way, government is changing its ways in order to force its own versions of reality on the public.

5. Looking at this from a logical perspective, overall, is it harder to trust the government over the conspiracy theorist?

The US government is responsible for devising and publicizing some of the most outrageous conspiracy theories in modern history while it accuses independent journalists and authors of being conspiracy theorists.  The major political assassinations of the 1960s (JFK, RFK, MLK) were all government operations, and “patsies” were produced with untenable scenarios accompanying the overall events.  The Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, and the Boston Marathon bombing were all “false flag” terror events that were intentionally misrepresented to the American public.  One need look no further than the plans for Operation Northwoods, or the attack on the USS Liberty, to develop a distinct understanding of how certain forces within government regard the public and those who fight their wars.

6. Conspiracy theories through the use of social media could cause irreparable effects on the future of mainstream news media because they report on stories, where journalists might not have done a good job or gone deep enough reporting.  When there is distrust, what follows next for the future and credibility of most media outlets, particularly if people believe media such as YouTube?

Again, we need to be precise.  YouTube is a medium with a multitude of “channels,” information, interpretations, and perspectives.  Some are potentially reliable and others may be dubious. This is, again, where education and, more specifically, the ability to employ logic and reasoning come to the fore.  How can we distinguish between good information and analysis versus that which is unhelpful or even purposefully misleading.

Many researchers who use YouTube or blogs are sincere in what they are seeking to do, which is relate ideas and information to broader public.

They may not be professionally-trained journalists, yet they are also subject to often profuse commentary and criticism from peers in a given research community examining a particular issue or event.  This process of scrutiny frequently yields fruitful exchanges where new information and insights are collectively revealed.  The participants may not have gone to graduate school to study politics or the media, and yet many of these exchanges are much more intense than that which takes place between a journalist and her editor as they vet a potential story.  There’s something going on there.  Of course, this assumes that those involved are serious in their participation, which is usually the case.  This depends on the quality and sincerity of participants.  The comments sections of many mainstream online news outlets can be bereft of serious exchanges.

In my view, certain YouTube channels or blogs are successful and worth checking out as forms of citizen journalism because they have something of substance along the lines described above to offer.

Mainstream commercial journalism has been challenged by counter forces since at least the early 1990s.  An initial challenge came from Hollywood in Oliver Stone’s JFK film.  That project incensed many establishment journalists and their institutions because it contested their fundamental investment and propagation of the flawed “lone gunman/magic bullet” explanation of the event ensconced in the Warren Report.

If truth be told, Stone’s screenplay is among the most accurate renderings of the Garrison investigation and the events surrounding the murder itself.  This is because it was based on key works by Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, journalist Jim Marrs, and Garrison himself.  JFK was in retrospect the initial last rights of mainstream journalism proper, which sold its soul to protect John Kennedy’s executioners.  The advent of the internet and Gary Webb’s brilliant exposé of the role played by the CIA in the crack cocaine epidemic vis-à-vis Webb’s excoriation by his own journalistic peers confirmed corporate journalism’s absolute demise.

7. Do conspiracy theorists have a solid opinion of the problems they observe when interpreting raw data, or is such data made to create propaganda to feed their belief systems?

There is sometimes an undue amount of paranoia among some conspiracy researchers that can contribute to flawed observations and analysis.  Again, this is where one must use careful discretion to interpret between worthwhile information and evaluation versus misguided and poorly-conceived study.

Because conspiracy research communities have no institutional bearings or specific research theories and traditions, as do academic schools of thought that take the shape of “disciplines” or “fields” with often considerable organizational and financial resources, there is a tendency toward infighting and fractiousness.  This is much more so the case than in academe where such disagreements, in the rare event they are exhibited, are often subsumed in other actions that enforce ideological conformity.  These include the refusal by scholarly organizations and their publications to entertain countervailing analyses and, ultimately, the denial of employment, promotion, tenure, and meaningful professional relationships.  Compulsory toleration of peers is entirely absent given the voluntary nature of conspiracy research collectives.  At the same time, a critical sense that comes with researching government conspiracies, combined with known attempts by government to “cognitively infiltrate” such research communities, can sometimes lead to unwarranted suspicion of colleagues or public figures and their motives.

8. Since the rise of conspiracies is higher than ever before, and un-education accompanies this, how do you think it will affect the government’s relationship with its citizens, particularly if government credibility vanished?  Could there be a future uprising of people who will oppose the government?

As my above responses suggest, I am unconvinced that interest or acceptance of “conspiracy theories” has any correlation with a lack of intelligence or education.  In fact, some recent research suggests that entertaining conspiratorial explanations of reality—meaning that one does not take what their political leaders offer as explanations of policies or events—is likely indicative of a higher intelligence and simply good citizenship.

I’m not sure if there is any more credibility left for the government to lose, at least among those inclined to rebel in the first place.  I think it’s important for us to keep in mind that the government is regarded by some as paternal or maternal protectors.  President Franklin Roosevelt was emblematic of the welfare state—a savior of the common man—even though he further established the banking sector’s control over the country and laid the groundwork for the present technocracy.  Since the Roosevelt administration and the aggressive expansion of the government in the post-World War Two era we have largely had a government by cult of personality.  For example, Barack Obama is the equivalent of a rock star, nevermind his family’s ties to the intelligence community and otherwise opaque background.  Like other recent presidents, his personality and charisma supersede public realization of the actual policies and trade deals he is enacting on the behalf of his sponsors—mostly powerful, anti-democratic interests.

As this response is written, the United States is arguably being undermined by the Obama administration’s politicization and exploitation of the nation’s immigration policies.  The notion that such maneuvers will ultimately change the overall constitution of the American polity is subsumed by Obama’s simple rejoinder, “Let’s give these people a break.”  Enough of the population is trusting enough of Obama to dismiss his critics.  Many of those who know better are too afraid of either being called “racists” or “conspiracy theorists.”  And so it goes.

The Stealing of America by the Cops, the Courts, the Corporations and Congress

edward_r_murrow_a_nation_of_sheep_will_soon_have_a_government_of_wolves__2013-06-24

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.” —Author Tom Clancy

Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures, foreclosures, etc.—but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is theft.

We’re operating in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where instead of Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves stealing from the rich to feed the poor, you’ve got the government and its merry band of corporate thieves stealing from the poor to fatten the wallets of the rich. In this way, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. All the while, the American Dream of peace, prosperity, and liberty has turned into a nightmare of endless wars, debilitating debt, and outright tyranny.

What Americans don’t seem to comprehend is that if the government can arbitrarily take away your property, without your having much say about it, you have no true rights. You’re nothing more than a serf or a slave.

In this way, the police state with all of its trappings—from surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT team raids, truancy and zero tolerance policies, asset forfeiture laws, privatized prisons and red light cameras to Sting Ray guns, fusion centers, drones, black boxes, hollow-point bullets, detention centers, speed traps and abundance of laws criminalizing otherwise legitimate conduct—is little more than a front for a high-dollar covert operation aimed at laundering as much money as possible through government agencies and into the bank accounts of corporations.

The rationalizations for the American police state are many. There’s the so-called threat of terrorism, the ongoing Drug War, the influx of illegal immigrants, the threat of civil unrest in the face of economic collapse, etc. However, these rationalizations are merely excuses for the growth of a government behemoth, one which works hand in hand with corporations to profit from a society kept under lockdown and in fear at all times.

Indeed, as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the real motivating factor behind erecting a police state is not to protect the people, but to further enrich the powerful. Consider the following costly line items, all part of the government’s so-called quest to keep us safe and fight terrorism while entrenching the police state, enriching the elite, and further shredding our constitutional rights:

$4.2 billion for militarized police. Almost 13,000 agencies in all 50 states and four U.S. territories participate in a military “recycling” program which allows the Defense Department to transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police. In 2012 alone, $546 million worth of military equipment was distributed to law enforcement agencies throughout the country.

$34 billion for police departments to add to their arsenals of weapons and equipment. Since President Obama took office, police departments across the country “have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.” While police departments like to frame the acquisition of military surplus as a money-saving method, in a twisted sort of double jeopardy, the taxpayer ends up footing a bigger bill. First, taxpayers are forced to pay millions of dollars for equipment which the Defense Department purchases from megacorporations only to abandon after a few years. Then taxpayers find themselves footing the bill to maintain the costly equipment once it has been acquired by the local police.

$6 billion in assets seized by the federal government in one year alone. Relying on the topsy-turvy legal theory that one’s property can not only be guilty of a crime but is also guilty until proven innocent, government agencies have eagerly cashed in on the civil asset forfeiture revenue scheme, which allows police to seize private property they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the cops keeps the citizen’s property. Eighty percent of these asset forfeiture cases result in no charge against the property owner. Some states are actually considering expanding the use of asset forfeiture laws to include petty misdemeanors. This would mean that property could be seized in cases of minor crimes such as harassment, possession of small amounts of marijuana, and trespassing in a public park after dark.

$11,000 per hour for a SWAT team raid on a government dissident. The raid was carried out against Terry Porter, a Maryland resident who runs a welding business, is married with three kids, is outspoken about his views of the government, and has been labeled a prepper because he has an underground bunker and food supplies in case things turn apocalyptic. The raiding team included “150 Maryland State Police, FBI, State Fire Marshal’s bomb squad and County SWAT teams, complete with two police helicopters, two Bearcat ‘special response’ vehicles, mobile command posts, snipers, police dogs, bomb disposal truck, bomb sniffing robots and a huge excavator. They even brought in food trucks.”

$3.8 billion requested by the Obama administration to send more immigration judges to the southern border, build additional detention camps and add border patrol agents. Border Patrol agents are already allowed to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. As one journalist put it, “The surveillance apparatus is in your face. The high-powered cameras are pointed at you; the drones are above you; you’re stopped regularly at checkpoints and interrogated.” For example, an American citizen entering the U.S. from Mexico was subjected to a full-body cavity search in which she was subjected to a variety of invasive procedures, including an observed bowel movement and a CT scan, all because a drug dog jumped on her when she was going through border security. Physicians found no drugs hidden in her body.

$61 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, one of the most notoriously bloated government agencies ever created. The third largest federal agency behind the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, the DHS—with its 240,000 full-time workers and sub-agencies—has been aptly dubbed a “runaway train.”

$80 billion spent on incarceration by the states and the federal government in 2010. While providing security, housing, food, medical care, etc., for six million Americans is a hardship for cash-strapped states, it’s a gold mine to profit-hungry corporations such as Corrections Corp of America and GEO Group, the leaders in the partnership corrections industry. Thus, with an eye toward increasing its bottom line, CCA has floated a proposal to prison officials in 48 states offering to buy and manage public prisons at a substantial cost savings to the states. In exchange, the prisons would have to contain at least 1,000 beds and states would have to maintain a 90% occupancy rate for at least 20 years. This has led to the phenomenon of overcriminalization of everyday activities, in which mundane activities such as growing vegetables in your yard or collecting rainwater on your property are criminalized, resulting in jail sentences for individuals who might otherwise have never seen the inside of a jail cell.

$6.4 billion a year for the Bureau of Prisons and $30,000 a year to house an inmate. There are over 3,000 people in America serving life sentences for non-violent crimes. These include theft of a jacket, siphoning gasoline from a truck, stealing tools, and attempting to cash a stolen check. Most of the non-violent offenses which triggered life sentences were drug crimes involving trace amounts of heroin and cocaine. One person imprisoned for life was merely a go-between for an undercover officer buying ten dollars’ worth of marijuana. California has more money devoted to its prison system than its system of education. State spending on incarceration is the fastest growing budget item besides Medicaid.

93 cents an hour for forced, prison labor in service to for-profit corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. What this forced labor scheme has created, indirectly or not, is a financial incentive for both the corporations and government agencies to keep the prisons full to capacity. A good portion of the 2 million prisoners in public facilities are forced to work for corporations, making products on the cheap, undermining free laborers, and increasing the bottom line for many of America’s most popular brands. “Prison labor reportedly produces 100 percent of military helmets, shirts, pants, tents, bags, canteens, and a variety of other equipment. Prison labor makes circuit boards for IBM, Texas Instruments, and Dell. Many McDonald’s uniforms are sewn by inmates. Other corporations—Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret, Boeing, Motorola, Compaq, Revlon, and Kmart—also benefit from prison labor.”

$2.6 million pocketed by Pennsylvania judges who were paid to jail youths and send them to private prison facilities. The judges, paid off by the Mid Atlantic Youth Service Corporation, which specializes in private prisons for juvenile offenders, had more than 5,000 kids come through their courtrooms and sent many of them to prison for petty crimes such as stealing DVDs from Wal-Mart and trespassing in vacant buildings.

$1.4 billion per year reportedly lost to truancy by California school districts, which receive government funding based on student attendance. The so-called “solution” to student absences from school has proven to be a financial windfall for cash-strapped schools, enabling them to rake in millions, fine parents up to $500 for each unexcused absence, with the potential for jail time, and has given rise to a whole new track in the criminal justice system devoted to creating new revenue streams for communities. For example, Eileen DiNino, a woman serving a two-day jail sentence for her children’s truancy violations, died while in custody. She is one of hundreds of people jailed in Pennsylvania over their inability to pay fines related to truancy, which include a variety of arbitrary fees meant to rack up money for the courts. For example, “[DiNino’s] bill included a laundry list of routine fees: $8 for a “judicial computer project”; $60 for Berks constables; $40 for “summary costs” for several court offices; and $10 for postage.” So even if one is charged with a $20 fine, they may end up finding themselves on the hook for $150 in court fees.

$84.9 million collected in one year by the District of Columbia as a result of tickets issued by speeding and traffic light cameras stationed around the city. Multiply that income hundreds of times over to account for the growing number of localities latching onto these revenue-generating, photo-enforced camera schemes, and you’ll understand why community governments and police agencies are lining up in droves to install them, despite reports of wide scale corruption by the companies operating the cameras. Although nine states have banned the cameras, they’re in 24 states already and rising.

$1.4 billion for fusion centers. These fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance and intelligence efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, have proven to be exercises in incompetence, often producing irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence, while spending millions of dollars on “flat-screen televisions, sport utility vehicles, hidden cameras and other gadgets.”

In sum, the American police state is a multi-billion dollar boondoggle, meant to keep the property and the resources of the American people flowing into corrupt government agencies and their corporate partners. For those with any accounting ability, it’s clear that the total sum of the expenses being charged to the American taxpayer’s account by the government add up to only one thing: the loss of our freedoms. It’s time to seriously consider a plan to begin de-funding this beast and keeping our resources where they belong: in our communities, working for us.

The Awakening – Clash of Civilizations

By Zen Gardner

Source: ZenGardner.com

Despite the furious efforts of the world’s Machiavellian destroyers, humanity is waking up. We’re seeing significant progress in exposing the ongoing brutal Gaza extermination, the mass revelation of chemtrails and other neo-scientific incursions, the disastrous effects of EMFs of every source, GMO food manipulation, tectronic surveillance and monitoring, and the front and center clearly induced global war and the militarization of society.

We’re in the thick of it now.

Don’t let these events and seeming contests of ideology throw you. There’s nothing level about this playing field, and the mass narrative is strong propaganda. Don’t even listen to it. Rely on your heart and alternative sources. Their only weapon is our consent by yielding to their lies. Disinformation serves several purposes, the most insidious of which is to introduce doubt to your heartfelt conviction regarding the reality of what is obviously before you. Keeping the mass mind at bay is imperative to their program.

Why? If we woke up to the truth we’d stop our participation and/or rise up and overthrow them. And they know that.

Major Signs of Awakening

As mentioned above, there are many manifestations that the Truth is flooding in to human consciousness. What we collectively do with this information is one thing; what we individually do with it is the key. We either activate, or we don’t. The more who do, the greater the mass awakening. With or without the masses, the awakening is coming to pass anyway, come what may. That’s the wonderfully exciting reality. What the naysayers and foot draggers do with it is their business, and their demise if they choose wrongly to ignore what is more obvious by the minute.

That Israelis are sitting on a hill sipping drinks in their beach chairs cheering the slaughter of civilian Palestinians should send shivers up anyone’s spine. That a captive population is being mercilessly annihilated on any pretext should shock even the most hard of hearing soul. Yet the mainstream media pounds its narrative of who the poor defenseless “good guys” are versus the obvious genocide and territory grab by an invading army.

Why not? The US has been doing this for decades, as have the Israelis. The conditioning runs deep. Literally mindfucked Amerikans are cheering just as avidly as is a swath of other similarly infected Canadians and Europeans and other mentally and spiritually disturbed Zionists around the world. The rest of the world sees it for what it is. A targeted slaughter and annihilation of something that’s in the way of another globalist maneuver for psychopaths to get what they want. And when it comes to the rabid Zionists everyone stands back.  The puppet powers and similarly cowed populace don’t dare touch them. Zionist fingers are in every facet of today’s societal and governmental fabric. The world is afraid to confront them.

Yet the truth of this masqueraded massacre is for all to see. The onus is on humanity. And the alternative is becoming crystal clear.

Financial, Governmental and Mad Scientific Schemes are Increasingly Obvious

Besides the obviously engineered take down of the Middle East and now Ukraine, there are many other fronts this hurricane of Truth is eroding in the human psyche. The geoengineering of our climate, oceans and soil are also becoming painfully, for them, clear. As long as real information is available hungry souls will find it and be forced to process it.

We also clearly see the central banking system, the FED, and our manipulated financial structure being exposed. Sitting helplessly watching no longer becomes an option. Pulling out of their system is a given eventuality, and it’s happening, as it becomes more evident by the day that major governmental powers are run by bought-off crooks and stooges.

The geoengineering chemtrail scam, poisoning humanity from it’s skies for whatever pretense, is taking a serious beating as communication and committed activism exposing this global affront wears away the veneer of outright lies and denial of such an obvious phenomenon. Take a look at the recent results of  sincere, concerned determination to bring this issue to the forefront of public awareness:

Our EMF Bombardment

Another insidious attack on our health and freedom is the electromagnetic assault on humanity, all in the guise of convenience, “conservation” and safety of course. Never mind the horrific surveillance invasion of our planet, the very presence of so many electromagnetic rays from so many man-made sources permeating our existence is one of the greatest threats to us, altering our genetic and physical make up and even influencing our thoughts and inherent impulses.

Besides France banning wi-fi in schools and Russia’s cellphone for youngsters prohibition, here’s just one example of the growing backlash under way:

Brazilian Courts order lower electromagnetic pollution

The Brazilian Judiciary determined to reduce the level of electromagnetic pollution generated by power lines to standard adopted by Swiss law (1.0 microtesla).

Two associations of residents in São Paulo — the largest city of Brazil — proposed the action. The plaintiff has pleaded to not be exposed to electromagnetic fields incompatible with the human health.

The electromagnetic fields generated by power lines that cross these areas is 10 times greater than the level determined by the court. The judgment of the Court of State of São Paulo (Tribunal de Justiça de São Paulo) has determined that the concessionaire of electric power reduces the electromagnetic field generated by power lines that pass through these neighborhoods. (Source)

GMO Rejection

The public outcry against genetically modified foods and the resultant use of the killer chemical glysophate has been front and center for quite a while. While the Monsanto dynasty and its network of affiliate chemical and distribution companies and ongoing governmental bribes and planted personnel continues its campaign, the rise against such infected food tyranny has been proportionally greater.

You just don’t mess with conscious people’s health. Period. And there are more of us by the minute.

Russia, China and a host of other nations are refusing to import GMO products. That this is so front and center in the public mind, whatever their entrained reflexive minds tell them, highlights this issue. Even more so in Amerika, whether to have these tampered with foods even labelled is appearing at their ballot boxes is keeping this subject front and center.

That’s pretty tough to ignore, even for the most brain dead, Brave New World “Epsilon” cretin out there.

The awakened civilization rolls on.

The List Continues

If you need further encouragement, get involved. You’ll see signs of it everywhere. Major inroads of Truth are being made by the minute as these disgusting forces continue to attempt to forge their desired goal of a subservient, complacent and even happily servile work force. Damn them, and do it with gusto.

Don’t be deceived, it’s all a wicked charade. A ploy, a scam: a counterfeit civilization they’re trying to construct that true conscious humanity is dissolving by the hour.

Disconnect – disobey – and de-enlist. Break your unconscious and conscious agreements. The parasites will shrivel up and disappear.

The time is now. It’s ours for the taking. And receiving.

Much love always, keep on, Zen

The Political Dimension of Breakdown

detroit_07101

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

This article claims that scientists have discovered an energy-efficient way to make biofuels. This brings up an often-overlooked point that there is nothing we can do under our current techno-industrial regime that requires fossil fuels. Anything we can do currently with fossil fuels we can theoretically do without them – power cars, generate electricity, make plastics, and so forth. There are substitutes – for example, ethanol and biodiesel in place of gas, corn for plastics, solar panels for electricity, and the like. We simply cannot do them on the scale we do now, because we would be limited by the earth’s solar budget. Fossil fuels were essentially “free” energy in so far as the EROI was so high because the sunlight that had created them occurred over the course of millions of years a long time ago. But to say that the techno-industrial system will cease to function with decreasing quality fossil fuels or net energy is simply not correct. It will simply decrease in scale. But that’s a different problem.

That’s also why the price issue never made sense to me. The argument is that the lower EROI of unconventional oil will cause the price of fuel to rise and the industrial economy to crash. So oil gets more expensive. So? Lots of things get more expensive, and the economy adapts. Oil was probably a lot cheaper fifty years ago than today. Well, we had an exploitative capitalist economy then, and we have one now. Nothing’s really changed. When something gets more expensive, it simply means that less people have access to it. Yes, the economy contracts, but so what? If it contracts slowly enough, no one will notice thanks to creeping normalcy.

Two recent stories about Detroit should illustrate this point. One is that thousands of people have been cut off from running water for delinquent bills. What has not been shut off, however, is water to the golf courses, businesses and sports fields, even though their bills are also delinquent:

Welcome to Detroit’s water war – in which upward of 150,000 customers, late on bills that have increased 119 percent in the last decade, are now threatened with shut-offs. Local activists estimate this could impact nearly half of Detroit’s mostly poor and black population – between 200,000 and 300,000 people.

“There are people who can’t cook, can’t clean, people coming off surgery who can’t wash. This is an affront to human dignity,” Charity said in an interview with Kate Levy. To make matters worse, children risk being taken by welfare authorities from any home without running water.

Denying water to thousands, as a sweltering summer approaches, might be bad enough in itself. But these shut-offs are no mere exercise in cost-recovery.

The official rationale for the water shut-downs – the Detroit Water Department’s need to recoup millions – collapses on inspection. Detroit’s high-end golf club, the Red Wing’s hockey arena, the Ford football stadium, and more than half of the city’s commercial and industrial users are also owing – a sum totalling $30 million. But no contractors have showed up on their doorstep.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2014/jun/25/detroits-water-war-a-tap-shut-off-that-could-impact-300000-people

Second, this story points out that while services and pensions are slashed for working people, billionaires are still enjoying taxpayer-funded subsidies:

As U.S. states and cities grapple with budget and pension shortfalls, many are betting big on an unproven formula: Slash public employee pension benefits and public services while diverting the savings into lucrative subsidies for professional sports teams.

Detroit on Monday made itself the most prominent example of this trend. Officials in the financially devastated city announced that current and future municipal retirees had blessed a plan that will slash their pension benefits. On the same day, the billionaire owners of the Detroit Red Wings, the Ilitch family, unveiled details of an already approved taxpayer-financed stadium for the professional hockey team.

http://www.ibtimes.com/detroit-other-cash-strapped-us-cities-states-slashing-pension-benefits-while-subsidizing-1635660

There’s some idea that things will fall apart for everyone. They won’t. Things will keep chugging along for the rich and powerful in their air-conditioned sports luxury boxes and their golf courses and their gated communities; it’s just the people on the outside who won’t have access to jobs, adequate shelter, health care, decent food, or running water. Industrial society, however, will keep chugging along, even with $200.00 a barrel oil, because the pain and suffering can just be pushed down to those lower on the socioeconomic totem pole. We’ve already seen this with jobs – the workforce participation rate is down to what it was in the late 1970’s and this is rationalized as “the new normal.” No doubt not having access to healthcare and running water will be also rationalized as “the new normal” at some point in the not-to-distant future. There are still plentiful high-paying jobs for those with the “right” skills, and those skills mainly consist of having the right parents or knowing (or sucking up to) the right people. And if you’re not on the inside, it will be rationalized as “your own fault.”

People overlook the political dimension of collapse. Too often peak oil was used as an excuse for doing nothing. “What’s the use when it will all collapse anyway?” the argument went. “The economy will collapse and we’ll all be even anyway,” they thought. The slate will be wiped clean. The dollar will collapse and we’ll all be on an even footing once again trading with gold nuggets or something.

But the stories from Detroit show that even in a collapse situation, the elites will keep resources – water, oil, money, etc. – flowing to themselves even as they deprive them from the rest of us. Politics will appropriate the remaining resources, however scarce, and keep them flowing to the elites. Technology and industry may be deprived from us, but it will not be deprived from them, because there will always be some way to power industrial civilization within the earth’s solar budget for a certain ever-shrinking segment of the population. In that sense, collapse will never happen. For a certain segment of people, though, it has happened already. Just ask Detroit.

If we use collapse as some sort of excuse to not fight back politically, we will be left without, but rest assured, the elites will not. Not only will it not happen, but we will be as lambs to the slaughter.

BONUS: Who Bled Detroit Dry? (Vice):

The Water and Sewage Department has claimed some residents could pony up if they really wanted to but were simply mooching off the city.

This was a view shared by the surly cabdriver who gave me a lift into town from the airport. The city is “going to shit” he said before making the sinking sound of a bomb landing with his lips. The citizens of Detroit are, by and large, slovenly idiots—the kind of people who keep going back to the convenient store for cans of beer instead of buying the whole six-pack, he explained. The cabby had lived in the city for 35 years after immigrating from Iraq, but, he told me, these days “Detroit is worse than Baghdad.”

And certain statistics back him up. Baghdad actually has both a lower unemployment rate and a lower murder rate than Detroit.

The Conflation Trap

By Roderick Long

Source: Bleeding Heart Libertarians

Left-libertarians differ from the (current) libertarian mainstream both in terms of what outcomes they regard as desirable, and in terms of what outcomes they think a freed market is likely to produce.

With regard to the latter issue, left-libertarians regard the current domination of the economic landscape by large hierarchical firms as the product not of free competition but of government intervention – including not only direct subsidies, grants of monopoly privilege, and barriers to entry, but also a regulatory framework that enables firms to socialise the scale costs associated with growth and the informational costs associated with hierarchy, while pocketing the benefits – and leaving employees and consumers with a straitened range of options. In the absence of government intervention, we maintain, firms could be expected to be smaller, flatter, and more numerous, with greater worker empowerment.

Thus we tend to wince when libertarians (or many of them, to varying degrees) rush to the defense of elite corporations and prevailing business models and practices as though these were free-market phenomena. First, we think this is factually inaccurate; and second, we think it’s strategically suicidal. Ordinary people generally know firsthand the petty tyranny and bureaucratic incompetence that all too often characterise the world of business; libertarians who try to glamourise that world as an arena of economic rationality and managerial heroism risk coming across as clueless at best, and shills for the ruling class at worse.

This is also why we tend to be less than enthusiastic about the word “capitalism” as the term for free-market society; as Friedrich Hayek notes, the term is“misleading,” since it “suggests a system which mainly benefits the capitalists,” whereas a genuine free market is “a system which imposes upon enterprise a discipline under which the managers chafe and which each endeavours to escape.” (Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol.1, p. 62.)

But it is not only mainstream libertarians (and of course, to a far greater extent, conservatives) that tend to conflate the results of crony corporatism with those of free markets; such conflationism is all too common on the traditional left as well. The difference is that the evaluations are reversed; where the right-wing version of conflationism treats the virtues of free markets as reason to defend the fruits of corporatism , the left-wing version of conflationism treats the objectionable fruits of corporatism as reason to condemn free markets.

Central to both forms of conflationism is the myth that big business and big government are fundamentally at odds. As is often the case, the myth sustains itself by containing a kernel of truth; while big business and big government are partners, each serving to prop up the other, each side would like to be the dominant partner (as with church and state in the Middle Ages, or Dooku and Palpatine in the Star Wars prequels), so much – though not, I think, most – of the conflict between them is genuine. But we should not allow these squabbles between different wings of the ruling class, essentially over how to divide up the loot, to obscure the far greater extent to which the political elite and the corporate elite work together. Conservative politicians, largely agents of the corporate wing, wrap their policies in anti-big-government rhetoric, while liberal politicians, largely agents of the political wing, wrap their policies in anti-big-business rhetoric; the differences in policy often involve nudging the balance of power slightly in one direction or the other (will healthcare be mainly controlled by government directly, or instead by the private beneficiaries of government-granted privilege like insurance companies and the AMA?), but both wings systematically benefit from most of the policies propounded by each side. FDR’s presidency, for example, with its cartelising policies, gave a massive boost to corporate power, while the three chief indices of state power – taxes, spending, and debt – all skyrocketed under Reagan’s presidency.

But conflationism isn’t just a mistake about the prevailing system; it’s also a means by which that system perpetuates itself. People who are attracted to the idea of free markets are hoodwinked by conflationism into supporting big business, and thus becoming foot soldiers of the corporate wing of the ruling class; people who are repelled by the reality of corporatism on the ground are hoodwinked into supporting big government, and thus becoming foot soldiers of the political wing of the ruling class. Thus, thanks to the pincer-movement of right-conflationism and left-conflationism, those who seek to oppose the prevailing system end up in the ranks of its supporters – and the possibility of a radical challenge to the system as a whole is rendered effectively invisible. This is how conflationism functions.

My talk of “functioning” is not meant to imply that conflationism is deliberately propagated in order to divert potential enemies of the system into the ranks of its supporters (though of course it sometimes is).

In a broader sense, whenever some feature A of a system B tends reliably to produce a certain result C, and A’s being such as to produce C helps to explain the existence and/or persistence of B, and thereby of A, then we may say that the function of A is to produce C. Thus the fact that thorns tend to protect roses from being eaten explains why roses, with their thorns, exist and persist. It’s in that sense that I say that the function of conflationism within the prevailing state/corporate system is to bewilder its foes into becoming supporters, and to render alternatives invisible. Conflationism is an instance of malign spontaneous order.

Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn describes an intriguing experiment:

Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g., a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. … For the normal cards these identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal. The black four of hearts might, for example, be identified as the four of either spades or hearts. Without any awareness of trouble, it was immediately fitted to one of the conceptual categories prepared by prior experience. … With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. Exposed, for example to the red six of spades, some would say: That’s the six of spades, but there’s something wrong with it – the black has a red border. … A few subjects … were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories. (Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 62-63)

In short, people tend to have not only difficulty with, but even aversion to, recognising something that doesn’t fit their established categories. This creates a problem for libertarians generally; for many in the political mainstream, the first impulse is to assimilate libertarians to a more familiar “anti-government” category, namely conservatives. When, after longer exposure, mainstreamers realise that libertarians aren’t quite conservatives after all, then they begin to see libertarians as the equivalent of “black spades with red borders” – conventionally conservative on some issues, conventionally liberal on others, rather than representing a radical alternative to existing ideologies. (Libertarians’ use of the Nolan Chart as an outreach tool may contribute to this tendency.)

What holds true for libertarians generally, holds to a still greater extent in the case of left-libertarians. The prevalence of conflationism tends to reinforce the impression that anyone who attacks (what we consider) the fruits of corporatism must be anti-free-market, and that anyone who defends free markets must be undertaking a defense of (what we consider) the fruits of corporatism. Thus nonlibertarian leftists tend to see us as corporate apologists in leftist camouflage, while nonleftist libertarians tend to see us as commies in libertarian guise.

Even when mainstream libertarians acknowledge the existence (and badness) of corporatism, as most do, communication with left-libertarians still tends to come to grief. Left-libertarians are baffled when mainstream libertarians acknowledge cronyism in one breath, only to slide back in the next breath to into treating criticisms of big business as criticisms of free markets. More mainstream libertarians, for their part, are baffled as to why left-libertarians keep raising the issue of corporatism when the mainstream libertarians have already acknowledged its existence and badness.

Kuhn is helpful here too:

Since remote antiquity most people have seen one or another heavy body swinging back and forth on a string or chain until it finally comes to rest. To the Aristotelians, who believed that a heavy body is moved by its own nature from a higher position to a state of natural rest at a lower one, the swinging body was simply falling with difficulty. Constrained by the chain, it could achieve rest at its low point only after a tortuous motion and a considerable time. Galileo, on the other hand, looking at the swinging body, saw a pendulum, a body that almost succeeded in repeating the same motion over and over again ad infinitum. … [W]hen Aristotle and Galileo looked at swinging stones, the first saw constrained fall, the second a pendulum …. (Ibid., pp. 118-121)

Aristotle and Galileo were observing the same two facts: the stone keeps swinging back and forth for a while, and then it eventually hangs straight down. But for Galileo the swinging was essential and the eventual cessation accidental, a “friction” phenomenon; whereas for Aristotle, progress toward a state of rest was, and the sideways perturbations accidental.

Likewise, for those operating within a conceptual framework that sees conservative opposition to big government and liberal opposition to big business as essential and deviations from these norms as accidental, evidence that conservative policies promote big government or that liberal policies promote will be dismissed as inessential or anomalous or an excusable. (See, for example, this video in which Obama supporters condemn right-wing-sounding policies when they think they’re Romney’s, but either excuse them or go into denial when told that the policies are actually Obama’s.)

Similarly, for many mainstream libertarians, free exchange is what essentially characterises the existing economy, while the corporatist policies are so much friction; and just as there’s no need for constant references to friction when talking about how a mechanism works, such mainstream libertarians don’t constantly bring up corporatism when discussing the working of the existing economy. For left-libertarians, by contrast, corporatism is a far more central feature of the existing economy, and leaving it out radically distorts our understanding. In such cases left-libertarians and more conventional libertarians are arguing from opposite sides of a Gestalt shift, where what looks essential to one side looks accidental to the other.

I don’t mean to suggest that these disputes are rationally irresoluble, however. In the playing-card experiments, subjects did eventually come to see the suits correctly after sufficiently long exposure. And sufficient exposure to the evidence marshaled by left-libertarians can prompt the relevant Gestalt shift, as indeed it frequently does; most left-libertarians once started out either less leftist or less libertarian or both. But the prevailing conceptual framework, through which so many (both libertarian and not) look at the economy without seeing what we see, is, I think, no accident; it’s part of the means by which the big-government/big-business partnership maintains itself.

Israeli Crimes and World Hypocrisy

gazze

By Robert Fantina

Source: Counterpunch

With Israeli terror continuing to be unleashed on the Gaza Strip, it might be interesting to look at the world’s reaction, or lack thereof.

First, let’s establish context. Israel was formed by the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians, driven from their homes with no recompenses, to refugee camps. Israel took far more than 50% of their land at that time. Since then, through illegal settlement building, Palestinians are squeezed into less than 20% of their own land, and that amount is constantly shrinking.

The U.S., Israel’s favorite puppet in all the world, is always stepping forward to ‘nobly’ offer its services to resolve this issue. However, when the United Nations Security Council criticizes Israel for some aspect of its numerous violations of international law, the U.S. vetoes the resolution.

While the U.S. disingenuously offers to broker a deal between Israel and Palestine, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu states categorically that Israel will never give up the West Bank. This is an integral part of Palestine, and a future, free Palestinian state.

The U.S. wishes to broker negotiations between two entities for which there can be no negotiation. That can only occur when each party has something the other wants, which can only be obtained by surrendering something it has. Palestine has much that Israel wants, but Israel can simply take it, without giving anything in return. It has done so for generations, and the U.S. has always condoned it.

Israel claims, incredibly, that it is only doing what it needs to do to ensure its national security. This is the country that receives over $3 billion from the U.S. every year and, as a result, has the fourth most powerful military in the world. Palestine, with no military budget since it has no military, can hardly be seen as threatening Israel.

A look at some of the violations of international law that Israel is committing even as this is writing, is shocking.

In the Gaza Strip:

* Bombing schools, residences, mosques and hospitals.

* Targeting children, such as those playing on a Gaza beach, killing at least four of them.

* Bombing without regard to the safety of ‘non-combatants’.

* Blockading all Gaza’s borders: land, sea and air.

* Turning off the water supply to Gaza’s residents.

* Destroying reservoirs that Palestinians use for drinking water.

In the West Bank:

* Moving hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the occupied territory.

* Displacing hundreds of thousands of residents by destroying entire cities.

* Restricting certain roads to ‘Israeli only’.

* Establishing countless checkpoints within the West Bank, making movement from one area to another that should take a few minutes, last for hours.

* Depriving residents of needed medical assistance.

Both lists could go on.

Now let’s see what some of the world’s leaders have said about all this.

* Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper: “The indiscriminate rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel are terrorist acts, for which there is no justification.”

* U.S. President Barack Obama reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself from rocket attacks by Hamas militants.

* U.S. secretary of State John Kerry said no country can accept such rocket attacks, adding that de-escalating the crisis is ultimately in everyone’s interests.

* German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said, “The missile attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip has created a situation which threatens a spiraling process of violence and violent counter measures. Israel of course has the right to protect its citizens from rocket attacks.”

* Stephane Dujarric, a spokesman for United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said that Ban Ki-moon “condemns the recent multiple rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza” and that “these indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas must stop.”

* French Ambassador to Israel Patrick Maisonnave said on Tuesday, “When one is here [Ashdod, Israel], 30 kilometers [19 miles] from Gaza, you can feel up close the constant anxiety and fear which the families in the south live with, who find themselves yet again hostage to the violence. I would like to say to these families that we are not forgetting them and that France stands alongside them.”

* The UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon told an emergency meeting of the Security Council that Israel and Hamas “must exercise maximum restraint” to end the fighting.

 

It might be helpful to look at each of these statements in some detail, to understand how blatantly and unfairly each one favors Israel.

Mr. Harper says there is no justification for the attacks from Gaza. Perhaps he is not aware that Israel has for years blockaded the Gaza Strip, depriving its residents of any freedom of movement. He is unaware, perhaps, that Israel closely monitors what is imported and exported to and from Israel. The following lists some of the ‘dangerous’ items that Israel either has prevented, or currently prevents, being imported to the Gaza Strip: lentils, pasta, tomato paste and juice, soda, juice, jam, spices, shaving cream, potato chips, cookies and candy, dry food, ginger and chocolate, crayons, stationary, soccer balls, musical instruments, toilet paper, books, candles, crayons, clothing, cups, cutlery, crockery, electric appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines, glasses, light bulbs, matches, needles, sheets, blankets, shoes, mattresses, spare machine and car parts, and threads. In addition, Israel has prevented the importing of fishing ropes and rods, hatcheries and spare parts for hatcheries, batteries for hearing aids, wheelchairs. Construction materials such as glass, steel, bitumen, wood, paint, doors, plastic pipes, metal pipes, metal reinforcement rods, aggregate, generators, high voltage cables and wooden telegraph poles have no or highly limited entry into Gaza.

Much of the Gazan economy depends on fishing. Israelis shoot fishermen working within three miles of the shore, boundaries far within what international law allows.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry said that Israel has a right to defend itself from rockets. Neither of them mentions Palestinians’ rights to self-determination, or the numerous violations of international law of which Israel is guilty.

Mr. Steinmeier misses the mark completely by saying that the situation in the Middle East was created by missile attacks from Gaza. Israel created the ‘situation’ generations ago, and has fanned the flames of it by its continuing abominable suppression of the human rights of the Palestinians.

Mr. Dujarric, while condemning rocket attacks from Gaza, didn’t have anything to say about the numerous resolutions passed by the United Nations condemning Israel’s violations of Palestinians’ basic human rights. The U.N., he might consider, has passed more such resolutions condemning Israel than it has of all other countries combined.

Mr. Maisonnave, incredibly, talks about the anxiety and fear which families within range of Gazan bombs must live. He seems unaware that all Gazans live with that anxiety and fear on a daily basis.

Mr. Ki-moon does not seem to understand that ‘maximum restraint’ is very different when applied to a third world, oppressed and occupied peoples, than it is when applied to a major military power.

Not all world leaders are so short-sighted. Turkish President Abdullah Gül has warned Israel against a ground assault on the Gaza Strip, and demanded that it stop its air strikes on civilians. Said he: “Israel, as though exploiting, is bombing Palestine from sea and land, destroying houses and killing innocent people in front of the world’s eyes.”

A media report is also telling:  “Rockets from Gaza have struck parts of central and southern Israel, disrupting the lives of people there but so far causing no serious casualties.” While that may be a true statement, there is no mention of the rockets from Israel that have struck all over the Gaza Strip, causing over 400 deaths of men, women and children, and over 1,000 injuries.

The U.S., many other countries and much of the U.S. media are all blaming Palestine for the violence. And while some of the blame does rest with Palestine, it is not Hamas, but the weak, spineless, puppet of Israel, President Mahmoud Abbas. He has for years worked with the Israel government, allowing it to steal more and more land, and displace more and more Palestinians. Even as of today, following the murders of four Palestinian children playing on a beach, he has not petitioned the International Criminal Court for redress. Palestinians would fare no worse if Netanyahu himself were the titular head of the Palestinian Authority.

The right to self-determination is foundational for all people. Israel, with the complicity of Canada, the U.S., and several other countries, has for generations denied Palestinians this basic right. Resistance to such horrific oppression is always justified. Imperial nations such as the U.S., which has successfully destroyed revolutionary peoples’ movements around the world, are understandably concerned about Palestinian national aspirations. The powerful Israeli lobby will not allow any U.S. lawmakers to questions its genocidal practices. There is no such thing as statesmanship in U.S. governance; there is only the profit motive, and human rights take a distant second (or third, or fourth) place to that.

It took years for people around the world to finally bring an end to the apartheid practices of South Africa. The movement to end the apartheid practices of Israel is ever-growing. Its success cannot come too soon for the suffering Palestinians.

Robert Fantina’s latest book is Empire, Racism and Genocide: a History of US Foreign Policy (Red Pill Press).