Category Archives: culture

HOW THE AMERICAN CULTURE OF CONVENIENCE IS KILLING US

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TROY, OH – MAY 11: An employee restocks a shelf in the grocery section of a Wal-Mart Supercenter May 11, 2005 in Troy, Ohio. Wal-Mart, America’s largest retailer and the largest company in the world based on revenue, has evolved into a giant economic force for the U.S. economy. With growth, the company continues to weather criticism of low wages, anti-union policies as well as accusations that it has homogenized America’s retail economy and driven traditional stores and shops out of business. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

By Daisy Luther

Source: Waking Times

In the United States, we are lucky to have massive convenience at our fingertips. I was talking to one of the instructors for the urban survival course, who is from Sweden, on a car ride. He was blown away by some of the things I told him about the levels of convenience and comfort in the United States. Things I completely took for granted don’t even exist there. I thought some of you might be interested in hearing about some of the insights we discussed.

Before I left for the course, I was walking my dogs a mile or two every day with my dogs, but that was about it. I thought it was enough but I learned during the field exercises that it wasn’t even close to the physicality required during an SHTF situation. But I digress. Let’s get back to convenience.

A caveat before people respond indignantly and tell me about all the inconvenience with which they deal every day: this is an opinion piece. Obviously many people in America still work out hard and have manual jobs. But when two-thirds of American adults and 30% of American children are overweight or obese, you have to see that you are not in the majority.

And it’s the majority here that I’m discussing. Between a combination of low-quality food and extremely sedentary lifestyles, the majority are killing themselves with convenience.

The American Culture of Convenience

The first thing that struck me when I landed in the Balkans was how different their lifestyle is from ours in the United States. But the longer I’ve been here, the more obvious it has become.

In the United States, depending on where you live, everything is dropped in your lap.

Food can be quickly acquired by shouting your order into a microphone and driving around a building, all without you having to leave your car. And if you live in a larger town or city, with the advent of services like GrubHub and DoorDash, the food delivered to your home is no longer the domain of pizza chains. You can have your choice of practically any restaurant in town brought right to your door within 45 minutes.

But it isn’t just about food. Instacart offers pick-up services from a wide variety of stores, including places like chain grocers, Wal-Mart, and Target. All you have to do is drive up, let them know by phone that you’ve arrived, and pop your trunk. Poof. Your shopping is done. In some cities, you can even use services like Instacart to have these things brought to your door.

Amazon has brought us practically anything else we could want with two-day shipping, regardless of where you live in the country. Gone are the days of scouring half a dozen stores to locate the whatchamacallit you needed. A quick search on Amazon and One-Click ordering and it’s yours within 48 hours and you never moved off your comfy chair.

If you need to go somewhere you don’t even have to drive yourself or take public transit. Uber or Lyft will happily send somebody to pick you up and drive you anywhere you need to go for a reasonable price, and you can watch the approach of your driver from the convenience of your phone.

Entire billion dollar industries are evolving to make our lives more convenient and easy every single day. Imagine how stunned our hunter-gatherer ancestors would be to discover we don’t even have to leave the house to be clothed and fed in epic abundance.

We don’t walk much, either.

And speaking of drive-thrus and driving to the store to get your Instacart packages, we drive everywhere. Part of this is because of the way suburbia is developed. It’s rare to live in a neighborhood where you can walk to the market, the bakery, and the wine store. So instead of walking to get our goods, we drive there, dash in, and get back in our cars. Those in big cities probably walk far more than those in suburbia, and for those in the country, it depends if they actually have a place to walk and whether they’re taking care of a large property.

And if we’re not walking to run our errands, we’re not carrying stuff. We get as close as possible with our cars if heavy groceries need to be lugged in and we carry as little as we can if we’re heading somewhere. When you walk the dogs, you might take your phone and some poop bags but you’re generally not taking it as a training opportunity and strapping on a pack.

Then there are the stairs.

Even two-story buildings in the United States have elevators much of the time because everything, by law, has to be easily accessible to every person. (And no, I’m not saying that people in wheelchairs need to try to haul themselves up the stairs. I’m discussing a trend.) But it goes even further than that. Adding elevators to your home is a growing trend in both the United States and Canada. New home builders are including elevators in the original design of some homes.

On the other hand, in Europe, they don’t have elevators in many buildings with fewer than five floors. I walked up and down more stairs in the past month than I have in the past year at home combined, and I live in a three-story house.

And the list of conveniences that would blow the minds of people I met in the Balkans goes on.

It’s an agoraphobic’s paradise in the United States.

You can get all sorts of mobile services that come to your door – everything from hairstyling to dog grooming. Other people mow our lawns, clean our homes, service our vehicles, and take care of us in general. There are even people who hire others to walk their dogs. Some people definitely need help with physical tasks but able-bodied people should be able to do a little yard work, shouldn’t we? Especially if we’re preparing for some kind of apocalypse.

In many areas, things are perfectly level, the sidewalks are carefully maintained (because who wants to ask for trouble in our litigious society), and a slight incline is considered a “hill” that people avoid to make their dog walk a little easier.

You can get meal kits brought to your door with every single ingredient you need to make a gourmet meal, right down to the seasonings accurately doled out in little packages. You can have fresh fruits and vegetables dropped off at your door by your local CSA. You can get subscription services of all types with the delivery of things like cosmetics, fitness gear, food from exotic locales, wine, candy, home decor items, socks, and dog paraphernalia.

Looking at it from the perspective of the area where I’ve been spending time, it’s simply mind-boggling that all of these riches are brought to you at the click of a button.

And it’s killing us.

As I mentioned earlier in this article, the obesity rate in the United States is staggering. A lot of it is our food. Thanks to subsidization by the USDA, many of the foods that are cheap are highly processed with low-quality ingredients. The NY Times reports:

At a time when almost three-quarters of the country is overweight or obese, it comes as no surprise that junk foods are the largest source of calories in the American diet. Topping the list are grain-based desserts like cookies, doughnuts and granola bars. (Yes, granola bars are dessert.)

That’s according to data from the federal government, which says that breads, sugary drinks, pizza, pasta dishes and “dairy desserts” like ice cream are also among Americans’ top 10 sources of calories.

What do these foods have in common? They are largely the products of seven crops and farm foods — corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sorghum, milk and meat — that are heavily subsidized by the federal government, ensuring that junk foods are cheap and plentiful, experts say.

Between 1995 and 2010, the government doled out $170 billion in agricultural subsidies to finance the production of these foods, the latter two in part through subsidies on feed grains. While many of these foods are not inherently unhealthy, only a small percentage of them are eaten as is. Most are used as feed for livestock, turned into biofuels or converted to cheap products and additives like corn sweeteners, industrial oils, processed meats and refined carbohydrates. (source)

And even when we try to clean up our diets, foods are genetically modified, produce is doused in pesticides, and it’s packaged in all sorts of hormone-disrupting material that leaches in when you heat it up.

But it’s not just the crappy food. A lot of folks in the United States just do not get off their butts. And – I hate to say it – but I’m talking to a lot of people in the survival and preparedness world. Sitting at a keyboard or phone typing all day while Netflix plays in the background is sedentary to a deadly degree. On average Americans sit for 8.2 hours per day and this does not include the average 7-ish hours a day we’re sleeping.  And when we’re not sitting, it doesn’t mean we’re doing things that are good for us. We spend a great deal of time standing in line and driving in our cars. And the trend toward inactivity is only increasing.

Meanwhile, obesity contributes to many diseases such as:

  • High blood glucose (sugar) or diabetes.
  • High blood pressure (hypertension).
  • High blood cholesterol and triglycerides (dyslipidemia, or high blood fats).
  • Heart attacks due to coronary heart disease, heart failure, and stroke.
  • Bone and joint problems, more weight puts pressure on the bones and joints. This can lead to osteoarthritis, a disease that causes joint pain and stiffness.
  • Stopping breathing during sleep (sleep apnea). This can cause daytime fatigue or sleepiness, poor attention, and problems at work.
  • Gallstones and liver problems.
  • Some cancers.

The National Institute of Health is incredibly concerned about the future of overweight, sedentary Americans.

More recent evidence points to differential roles for body fat distribution patterns, in addition to excess overall adiposity, in elevating risk of many major chronic diseases. The large numbers of children entering adulthood overweight, together with increased weight gain in adulthood, portend an enormous burden in terms of human suffering, lost productivity, and health care expenditure in the coming decades. (source)

And – since it’s the purview of this website – imagine if the SHTF and you were too overweight and sedentary to go out and acquire the supplies you need to survive. Imagine what will happen when your medication runs out and you have a preventable disease brought on by your sedentary lifestyle. Imagine how your family will feel watching you suffer.

You need to add more movement to your life.

Unless you are among the 23% of Americans who meet the national exercise guidelines, you need to add more movement to your life. I suspect that there are a lot of people who believe they are disabled because getting started on a movement program is hard. It really does hurt, I know. But there’s a very good chance as you begin to move more it will become far easier. Don’t give in to it if your doctor says, “Oh, you’re disabled” and hands you a sticker for your car unless you really, truly are. If there’s even a glimmer of doubt in your mind, try to move just a few more steps each day. Instead of using the scooter to shop, push a cart to give yourself something to lean on. You aren’t training for a marathon – 10 extra steps a day will add up if you keep on pushing. But, MOVE.

The best way to increase movement is to decrease convenience. I don’t mean that you need to suddenly become a hunter-gatherer but you need to get off your duff. (To get started, check out this article or Bug Out Boot Camp and of course, always contact your doctor before beginning an exercise program. Blah, blah, blah.)

You need to carry heavy things instead of getting them delivered. You need to climb the stairs instead of taking the elevator or escalator. You need to actually go inside the store to do your shopping instead of sitting in your car, waiting for stuff to get loaded into your trunk. Park at the back of the parking lot, or better yet, at a store further away. Quit ordering from Amazon and buy things locally so you can walk around the store. Look for the hills and walk up and down them instead of avoiding them. If you want to eat restaurant food, go to the dad-gum restaurant. Find a place to walk to every day – maybe the post office, a coffee shop, or the dog park – and make it part of your routine.

It’s not unusual in other parts of the world to walk 8, 10, or even more miles, every single day. You don’t need to start there but maybe you should strive to get there. Once you’re in your groove, it should only take an hour or so to walk 4 miles. Using your feet as transportation is one of the healthiest things you can do.

 

Saturday Matinee: Koyaanisqatsi

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Young Life Out Of Balance: The Impact and Legacy of ‘Koyaanisqatsi’

By Michael Grasso

Source: We Are the Mutants

Throughout the latter half of the 1970s, ex-seminarian/political activist Godfrey Reggio and cinematographer Ron Fricke shot, assembled, and edited film footage from all over the United States—from the yawning chasms of southwestern American deserts to the teeming mechanized metropolises of New York and Los Angeles—creating a feature film that would speak to the overwhelming complexity of late 20th century life in the West. This film, Koyaanisqatsi, debuted at American film festivals in 1982 and quickly became an arthouse (and eventual home video) favorite. The frequently eerie score for the film, composed by Philip Glass, provides the only aural accompaniment for this 86-minute montage showing the collision of nature and technology, of mankind and the planet. The word koyaanisqatsi, Hopi for “corrupted life” or “life out of balance,” provided a mission statement for the film; while Reggio has been cagey about not wanting to either imply or explicitly provide any specific meaning for the film, both the title and the Hopi prophecies of doom sung over the film’s final act make Koyaanisqatsi‘s point of view more or less explicit: something is dreadfully and fundamentally wrong with the way the settler inhabitants of America and the industrialized world as a whole relate to both the planet and themselves.

Koyaanisqatsi arrived with much fanfare as part of the PBS “Great Performances” anthology series in March of 1985. Given my love of all things PBS, I was absolutely there to see it in one of its initial broadcasts or repeats in ’85 or ’86. I’d heard about it most likely due to the hype around the film’s arrival on broadcast television for the first time. I do remember watching it at night, alone, possibly while my parents were out or in bed. When I found Koyaanisqatsi on a streaming service this year, I realized that I hadn’t watched it in its entirety since I was 10 years old. As I watched, I found myself thinking about how 10-year-old Mike responded to these overwhelming images. The process of meaning-making for a 10-year-old kid watching a film containing a sophisticated symbolic critique of modern life fascinated me. I decided to watch Koyaanisqatsi in 2019 with a close eye towards the images and sounds that had stuck with me subconsciously in the intervening third of a century, the sequences that offered today’s me a direct connection to my younger self. In childhood I was surrounded by films, cartoons, and other educational programming that transmitted the profundity and complexity of human existence and the universe directly into my growing brain. What did Koyaanisqatsi‘s sensory bombardment, its sometimes overwhelming contrasting of nature and technology mean to me then? And how did that meaning change for me as an adult, now fully conscious of and conversant with the issues Reggio raises?

It’s absolutely the first 15 minutes of the film that I remember most vividly from childhood. It begins with the juxtaposition of ancient petroglyphs at Horseshoe Canyon in Utah against slow-motion, almost abstract closeups of the Apollo 11 launch in 1969. This kind of meaning-through-montage connected with me on an intimate level at the age of 10; this was precisely the kind of respect for the pageant of human “progress” that electronic media teachers such as Carl Sagan had inculcated in me in my early years. Sagan did not necessarily privilege the Western, “scientific” worldview in his works; understanding that the ancient astronomers of the American West were precisely as clever as their European and Asian counterparts was an important part of Sagan’s pedagogy. And in this sweeping montage of the natural environment of the American West, Reggio offers a simultaneously calming and stunning view of the untouched majesty of nature. This is the same “blank screen” of desert that would thrill Baudrillard during his sojourn in North America at about exactly the same time. Even on a relatively tiny 1980s television screen, these aerial shots were breathtaking; it wouldn’t be until I first saw an IMAX projection in 1987 when the Omni Theater opened at Boston’s Museum of Science that I felt something similarly awe-inspiring.

These images of nature and the elements—earth and clouds and crashing waves—soothe the viewer; Glass’s musical accompaniments for these sections are tellingly titled “Organic” and “Cloudscape.” But just as we are lulled into a sense of security and a naturally human sense of awe at the landscape, Reggio (and Glass) throw us violently out of our idyll, showing us what man has done to these landscapes. We see engineering on a massive scale: strip mining, power plants with huge cooling lakes, massive dam projects. Glass’s hectic, pulsing aria, titled “Resource,” says it all. Natural rhythms and flows are subsumed under black clouds of pollution from earth-moving equipment; natural landscapes carved by millions of years of river and wind are carved into regularly-repeating, Cartesian geometry. “Resource” is horrifying, punishing: every trumpet blast announces the coming of something horrible. Again I am reminded of Cosmos: Sagan opines in Episode 5, “Blues for a Red Planet,” where Sagan imagines how an alien species will be able to determine that an intelligent species inhabits Earth—by how we change and adjust our natural environment. To Sagan, this is a largely joyful sign of our ingenuity and a necessary contrast with the natural “canals” of Mars. To Reggio, these marks are a constant, painful scarring, and his depiction of them on-screen has an immediate and negative emotional impact on the viewer, even a young one. Pollution was, of course, something I’d been made aware of from an early age: not just from the constant bombardment of PSAs on television, but from the plumes rising from the smokestacks every time I’d cross the Tobin Bridge in the family station wagon to go into Boston.

For much of “Resource” we are denied the opportunity to see sky: despite the grandeur of the landscapes, the camera angles and editing completely remove the context of said landscape with its cycles with nature and climate. The only blue we are offered is the reflection of the sky in the slightly sinister pools of the power plants’ cooling waters. And it’s here that we start to see humans for the first time as well, first dwarfed by the enormity of the dams and power plants around them, then briefly a few individuals populating the background of a sequence in a metal foundry. These figures are the reason behind all the scarring and carving of industry. Here is mankind. The glowing metal of the foundry reminds us of the original technological myth: fire tamed by Promethean man.

And there Reggio brings forth the myth’s ultimate expression: nukes. Stock footage of nuclear explosions would not be a symbol that needed much in the way of interpreting for a 10-year-old still scared bone-deep of the prospect of nuclear war. In this section we begin to see how all of these technological “advances” impact humanity. We see beachgoers enjoying a hot sunny beach—but with a huge looming power plant behind them. We see the mighty Boeing 747 taxiing on a runway, another testament to human ingenuity—sheathed and shimmering in an uncanny petroleum haze. Highways and cloverleaf overpasses are shown, overflowing with traffic; new cars are lined up in a holding yard, soon juxtaposed with Soviet tanks, American fighter jets, ICBMs, and more Apollo footage. Production and consumption, the war machine, and the nuclear arms race: all part of the same insane global system. The film footage of cluster bomb blasts, de rigueur as a signifier of the American war machine since the days of Vietnam and thus intimately familiar to 1985 me from various expressions on television and in pop culture, have a new and shocking impact when shown as part of the unnatural system that digs resources from the ground and turns them into immediate, instant death.

For many, the segment near the center-point of the film where the viewer is treated to an aerial survey of the abandoned Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis is the film’s most brutal and emotional. Bookended in Koyaanisqatsi by other images of the failure of social housing in the South Bronx, and very much of a piece with the worldwide midcentury penchant for Brutalist “urban renewal”, the tale of Pruitt-Igoe would be resolutely familiar to an adult in the early 1980s. For me at 10, a sheltered white kid who’d grown up entirely in the suburbs, the sequence’s eerie ruined majesty held complete mystery. What were these huge repeating buildings shaped like boxes? Why were they in such disrepair? And why were they being totally and completely annihilated with explosives in such a dramatic fashion? I was insulated through much of my youth (by express design of the white power structure, as it turns out) from the living and educational conditions of Black Americans in both my own home city of Boston and around the country. The wages of centuries of American apartheid were nothing but a vague unease at the periphery of my consciousness. The power demonstrated in both choosing to build and choosing to destroy these buildings, over a period of a mere three decades—little more than one human generation—was accurately and shockingly conveyed by the film, but its ultimate meaning was lost to me. As an adult, with all the context and knowledge present upon my re-viewing of the film, “Pruitt-Igoe” stands as a testament to midcentury liberalism’s best intentions, naturally sabotaged by the white violence inherent in American capitalism. This is the one sequence of Koyaanisqatsi that I look back on today and wish I’d had an adult—a wise, sensitive adult—to guide me through.

At the film’s halfway point, we really begin to see mass man. At first in slow motion, urban crowd “B-roll” shots of a type I would have been intimately familiar with from television in 1985, shot in slow-motion, cut with close-ups of individual human beings in front of vivid backgrounds: the whooshing of an urban subway, a military officer in front of a jet engine, a group of casino workers with the lights of Las Vegas flashing behind them. In a concerted way, these “portraits” arrest us as viewers after the sensory assault of the first 40 minutes of the film, getting us to begin seeing the individuals behind the mass movements and incomprehensible destruction we’ve seen so far. As an adult I find them almost unbearably poignant; I found myself wondering what happened to all these folks after Reggio and Fricke finished filming them. As a kid, their slightly outdated fashions (from the mid-to-late-’70s, by the looks of it) consigned them to the more recent past of the only context I could understand: sitcom reruns in syndication, that forever-lagging-behind-the-present that ensured I was in some ineffable way a nostalgic even at the age of 10.

“The Grid” is the section of Koyaanisqatsi where Reggio and Fricke first use time-lapse photography for, I would argue, its greatest achievement in film history. As much as we’ve been given a key to understanding the impact of technology and so-called progress on the natural world, this section, full of glittering cityscapes and the pulsating grid of traffic in Los Angeles at night, are heartbreakingly beautiful. The flow of traffic through midtown Manhattan, so expertly regulated by traffic lights, is yet somehow unnatural; these highway and street scenes, sped up, remind us (and certainly would have reminded the young me who’d grown up with educational programming) of microphotography of blood cells in arteries and capillaries, but somehow off: constantly halting and resolutely inorganic. In contrast, one of the film’s trademark shots (featured on the home video box and posters) of the moon’s movement through the sky as it is eclipsed by an office block is so sure in the lens of Fricke’s innovative time-lapse cameras, so machine-precise, far outstripping in elegance and power the stuttering processes of automobile and pedestrian traffic regulated by human-created technology.

Possibly the most homely, familiar, and comforting section of the film involves the juxtaposition of manufacturing, industry, and food processing with the crazy-quilt of consumption that completes industrial capitalism’s cycle. Hot dogs and Twinkies, blue jeans and televisions and automobiles roll off of assembly lines; as an adult in 2019 all I could think was “look at all those human workers!” There were so few robots in sight in each of these sequences, and the factory workers themselves looked so humble yet so proud. I also thought back to me at age 10, and how Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood would have primed me to look at these time-lapse sequences of production as something wondrous, something to be proud of. The flip side of all this production is seen in Koyaanisqatsi‘s views of Americans enjoying their leisure time: playing video games (I spotted Ms. Pac-Man, Q*bert, and Defender among many other video cabinets in the arcade sequence), bowling, going to the movies, visiting the mall food court, and especially watching television. The time-lapse photography zips through banks of televisions airing the prime-time advertisements and network news breaks of the kind I’m obsessed with and hunt down on YouTube in 2019. As a kid, this would have been the segment of the film that would’ve been the most immediate and identifiable to me. The people in these sections looked like me: they were suburban, not urban, dressed in casual clothes, not hats and suits and trenchcoats. They were young! There were younger kids sipping on milkshakes and having burgers with their families at the mall. These people were me. Did I understand how my consumption made me an accomplice to the black billowing smoke and scarred landscapes seen earlier in the film? At that age, I’m sure not.

Reggio always returns to people, not only to give the viewer (whether 10 years old or 43 years old) that sense of identification, a sense of their stakes in the modern “life out of balance,” but to return to the dignity of the individual human being. Reggio’s intellectual origins both in post-Vatican II Catholic conceptions of social justice and human dignity as well as Christian eco-anarchism demands this kind of attention to the individual humans behind these teeming visual landscapes. The final sequence is titled “Prophecies.” Glass’s musical accompaniment for this final sequence features a chorus singing three Hopi prophecies, interpreted by academic consultants Michael Lowatewama and Ekkehart Malotki, and translated on-screen at the end of the film. These prophecies are ones that would be familiar to anyone raised in the Western Christian tradition: tales of the death of the world thanks to mysterious poisons falling from the sky. As the choir chants these predictions of chaos and confusion, we see people wandering the streets, crushed by their surroundings: a homeless man gazing down at the change in his hand, a sick man put onto a litter by EMTs, someone in a hospital with a bloody wound resulting from an intravenous injection of fluids. The combination of Hopi prophecy on the soundtrack with the kind of lost people that Christ tried to minister to is devastatingly effective; even as a child, this section evoked pity and empathy in me rather than the disgust from seeing out of control pollution or technology. Bookending this is a lengthy sequence in slow-motion of an Atlas-Centaur rocket disaster, one of its thrusters tumbling back to earth slowly. The name of the star might have been Wormwood, but a year after this PBS airing, both a Challenger disaster and a nuclear disaster at another Wormwood half a world away would offer yet another Promethean lesson to both the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

I can’t remember exactly what I felt like immediately after viewing Koyaanisqatsi all those years ago, but its indelible images and sounds remained firmly in my subconscious all through my adolescence and adulthood. Now I’m middle-aged, the same age as all those scurrying New York City businessmen who seemed so weirdly uniform and alien to me as a kid. As I watch now, I of course am able to see that we are all lost in the life out of balance now. I wouldn’t call Reggio prophetic because anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knew what was happening to us in the years since the end of the Second World War. And while art can absolutely point out injustice, fraud, exploitation, and abuse, it can very easily be used to recuperate these ideas into a more comfortable idea of the inevitability of “progress.” I don’t feel like any later misuse of Reggio’s praxis is his fault per se; whether or not he expressly provides meaning for us, his words and actions in the years following Koyaanisqatsi‘s release are clear and obvious.

I’ve never bothered to watch the two “Qatsi” sequels released in the years following the original. Their dual focuses were on life in the developing world and “life as war,” focusing on the modern world’s war with itself over technology. I’m not sure if they could achieve the mythic status and impact which Koyaanisqatsi had on my developing brain as a kid. Was 10 years old too young to consider these kinds of issues of modern life? I’m not sure. All I know is that I’m grateful I was given the opportunity to internalize these images and thoughts, to consider my place on a planet, both blessed and cursed by my surroundings, to ponder my role both as an individual and as part of a societal collective. While the televisual instruction of my childhood idols Sagan and Rogers may have in some small part normalized the mindset that brought us to this point (all while being steadfast advocates of social justice and peace, of course), Reggio’s camera, untouched by words, conveys the meaning of this life out of balance directly, resolutely, fearlesssly. A prophet Reggio himself may not be, but his filmic prophecy, and through it the prophecy of the Hopi, lives on.

 

Watch the full film on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/product/koyaanisqatsi

 

Freedom Rider: No Chemical Attacks in Syria

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By Margaret Kimberly

Source: Black Agenda Report

The corporate media is concealing a leaked UN agency report that shows Syrian government innocence in an alleged chemical attack.

“Americans have been fed a steady diet of ‘Assad the butcher’ and any counter narrative is disappeared.”

The corporate media march in lock step with the United States and its allies around the world. They have a tacit agreement to exclude any information which might inconvenience pro-war, pro-interventionist narratives.

Claims of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government are but one example of this tactic. These improbable stories have been repeated with regularity ever since the United States and its allies began using jihadist proxies to overthrow the Syrian government in 2011. In 2013 we were told that president Assad waged a chemical weapons attack on the same day that United Nations weapons inspectors arrived in the country. It is an understatement to say that this scenario is unlikely to be true.

In 2018 the U.S. and its European allies repeated that they would take military action against Syria if there were any reports of chemical weapons use. Like clockwork, such an event was reported and a bombing campaign took place in April of that year.

Anyone with common sense should doubt these reports. Assad had no reason to do anything which guaranteed military attacks on his country. Furthermore, persons with credibility and expertise had already provided evidence that these claims are nothing but false flags meant to get public buy-in for aggression.

“Assad had no reason to do anything which guaranteed military attacks on his country.”

The claims and counter claims always merited serious scrutiny. But a leaked document from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) makes the case that even supposedly disinterested parties take the side of the U.S. and its allies if enough pressure is applied.

The leaked report makes clear that there were serious questions about the 2018 reports, even among OPCW staff. The New York Times and the rest of their partners in propaganda wanted to make the case for the once and future war and accused the Syrian government of dropping chlorine gas devices onto an apartment building. But the leaked document  shows that there were serious doubts expressed by the some of the expert investigators. “…there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at both locations rather than being delivered by aircraft.”

There are many dots to connect here and they point away from the “Assad is gassing his own people” tale. The OPCW was pressured into taking on the role of judge and jury and assigning blame, rather than merely reporting on its technical findings. The politicization of its work dove tailed nicely with charges of Syrian gas and Russian poisonings against former KGB operatives. As the old saying goes, there is no such thing as coincidence.

“The politicization of the OPCW’s work dove tailed nicely with charges of Syrian gas and Russian poisonings against former KGB operatives.”

The recently leaked documents ought to make for headlines around the world. Instead the story has been ignored by corporate media. Only those who are already interested in the topic or who are familiar with organizations such as the Working Group  on Syria, Propaganda and Media know anything about this news. It has been deliberately kept hidden so that the next call for an armed response will receive little or no opposition.

The U.S. Congress came very close to calling for a Syrian war in a May 20, 2019 letter signed by 70% of its members . The AIPAC inspired massive calls for president Trump to “stabilize” Syria, protect Israel and stop Russian and Iranian influence. The call was bipartisan and bicameral with 79 senators and 303 members of the house signing on to the call for imperialism. Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Cory Booker are among those calling for the dangerous slippery slope. Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) chairwoman Karen Bass signed too as did Hakeem Jeffries, James Clyburn, and Elijah Cummings among others.

Americans have been fed a steady diet of “Assad the butcher” and any counter narrative is disappeared, just like the OPCW leak. It is a useful ploy to have around. Let us not forget that last year’s bombing resulted in praise from the so-called resistance crowd who think they are supporting a humanitarian action. When he next decides to protect the U.S. jihadist proxies the gas attack story will suddenly reappear. Revealing any doubts about its veracity will undermine the U.S. hegemonic project.

“Seventy-nine senators and 303 members of the house signing on to the call for imperialism.”

There is plenty of collusion in the United States and it isn’t between Trump and Russia. The love triangle involves the corporate media, both sides of the war party, and foreign ally puppet states. They all play nicely together in the sandbox when there is an evil deed to carry out. The public are mostly hapless dupes who give approval for destruction and carnage just like the state want them to.

We have been through this often enough to know when lies are being told. It wasn’t that long ago that Colin Powell went to the United Nations with a vial and a tall tale about WMD. The cast of characters changes but the story is the same. It is time to grow up and end useful idiocy.

 

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

1% Politics and the New Gilded Age

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By Rajan Menon

Source: Intrepid Report

Despair about the state of our politics pervades the political spectrum, from left to right. One source of it, the narrative of fairness offered in basic civics textbooks — we all have an equal opportunity to succeed if we work hard and play by the rules; citizens can truly shape our politics — no longer rings true to most Americans. Recent surveys indicate that substantial numbers of them believe that the economy and political system are both rigged. They also think that money has an outsized influence on politics. Ninety percent of Democrats hold this view, but so do 80 percent of Republicans. And careful studies confirm what the public believes.

None of this should be surprising given the stark economic inequality that now marks our society. The richest 1 percent of American households currently account for 40 percent of the country’s wealth, more than the bottom 90 percent of families possess. Worse yet, the top 0.1 percent has cornered about 20percent of it, up from 7 percent in the mid-1970s. By contrast, the share of the bottom 90 percent has since then fallen from 35 percent to 25 percent. To put such figures in a personal light, in 2017, three men — Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates — possessed more wealth ($248.5 billion) than the bottom 50 percent of Americans.

Over the last four decades, economic disparities in the U.S. increased substantially and are now greater than those in other wealthy democracies. The political consequence has been that a tiny minority of extremely wealthy Americans wields disproportionate influence, leaving so many others feeling disempowered.

What Money Sounds Like

Two recent headline-producing scandals highlight money’s power in society and politics.

The first involved super-affluent parents who used their wealth to get their manifestly unqualified children into highly selective colleges and universities that previously had reputations (whatever the reality) for weighing the merits of applicants above their parents’ wealth or influence.

The second concerned Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s reported failure to reveal, as election laws require, more than $1 million in low-interest loans that he received for his 2012 Senate campaign. (For that lapse, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) fined Senator Cruz a modest $35,000.) The funds came from Citibank and Goldman Sachs, the latter his wife’s longtime employer. News of those undisclosed loans, which also cast doubt on Cruz’s claim that he had funded his campaign in part by liquidating the couple’s assets, only added to the sense that favoritism now suffuses the politics of a country that once prided itself on being the world’s model democracy. (Journalists covering the story couldn’t resist pointing out that the senator had often lambasted Wall Street’s “crony capitalism” and excessive political influence.)

The Cruz controversy is just one reflection of the coming of 1 percent politics and 1 percent elections to America at a moment when the first billionaire has been ensconced in the Oval Office for more than two years, posing as a populist no less.

Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, money has poured into politics as never before. That’s because the Court ruled that no limits could be placed on corporate and union spending aimed at boosting or attacking candidates running for political office. Doing so, the justices determined in a 5-4 vote, would be tantamount to restricting individuals’ right to free speech, protected by the First Amendment. Then came the Court’s 2014 McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission decision (again 5-4), which only increased money’s influence in politics by removing the aggregate limit on an individual’s contribution to candidates and to national party committees.

In an age when money drives politics, even ex-presidents are cashing in. Fifteen years after Bill Clinton departed the White House, he and Hillary had amassed a net worth of $75 million — a 6,150percent increase in their wealth. Barack and Michelle Obama’s similarly soared from $1.3 million in 2000 to $40 million last year — and they’re just warming up. Key sources of these staggering increases include sky-high speaking fees (often paid by large corporations), including $153 million for the Clintons between February 2001 and May 2016. George W. Bush also made tens of millions of dollars in this fashion and, in 2017, Obama received $400,000 for a single speech to a Wall Street firm.

No wonder average Americans believe that the political class is disconnected from their day-to-day lives and that ours is, in practice, a democracy of the rich in which money counts (and counts and counts).

Cash for College

Now let’s turn to what those two recent scandals tell us about the nexus between wealth and power in America.

First, the school scam. Parents have long hired pricey tutors to coach their children for the college admissions tests, sometimes paying them hundreds of dollars an hour, even $1,500 for 90 minutes of high-class prep. They’ve also long tapped their exclusive social and political connections to gin up razzle-dazzle internships to embellish those college applications. Anyone who has spent as much time in academia as I have knows that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time. So has the practice of“legacy admissions” — access to elite schools especially for the kids of alumni of substantial means who are, or might prove to be, donors. The same is true of privileged access to elite schools for the kids of mega-donors. Consider, for instance, that $2.5 million donation Charles Kushner made to Harvard in 1998, not long before his son Jared applied. Some of the folks who ran Jared’s high school noted that he wasn’t exactly a whiz-bang student or someone with sky-high SAT scores, but — surprise! — he was accepted anyway.

What’s new about the recent revelations is that they show the extent to which today’s deep-pocketed helicopter parents have gone into overdrive, using brazen schemes to corrupt the college admissions process yet more. One unnamed parent spent a cool $6.5 million to ensure the right college admitted his or her child. Others paid hefty amounts to get their kids’ college admissions test scores falsified or even hired proxies to take the tests for them. Famous actors and financial titans made huge payments to university sports coaches, who then lied to admissions officers, claiming that the young applicants were champions they had recruited in sports like water polo, crew, or tennis. (The kids may have known how to swim, row, or play tennis, but star athletes they were not.)

Of course, as figures on the growing economic inequality in this country since the 1970s indicate, the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the connections or the cash to stack the deck in such ways, even assuming they would do so. Hence, the public outrage, even though parents generally understand that not every aspirant can get into a top school — there aren’t enough spots — just as many know that their children’s future happiness and sense of fulfillment won’t depend on whether they attend a prestigious college or university.

Still, the unfairness and chicanery highlighted by the admissions scandal proved galling, the more so as the growing crew of fat cats corrupting the admissions process doubtless also preach the gospel of American meritocracy. Worse, most of their kids will undoubtedly present their fancy degrees as proof that quality wins out in our society, never mind that their starting blocks were placed so far ahead of the competition.

To add insult to injury, the same parents and children may even portray admissions policies designed to help students who lack wealth or come from underrepresented communities as violations of the principles of equal opportunity and fairness, democracy’s bedrock. In reality, students from low-income families, or even those of modest means, are startlingly less likely to be admitted to top private universities than those from households in the top 10 percent. In fact, applicants from families in the top 1 percent are now 77 times more likely than in the bottom 20 percent to land in an elite college, and 38 of those schools admit more kids from families in that top percentage than from the bottom 60 percent.

Buying Politics (and Politicians), American-Style

Now, let’s return to the political version of the same — the world in which Ted Cruz swims so comfortably. There, too, money talks, which means that those wealthy enough to gain access to, and the attention of, lawmakers have huge advantages over others. If you want political influence, whether as a person or a corporation, having the wealth needed to make big campaign contributions — to individuals or groups — and to hire top-drawer lobbyists makes a world of difference.

Official data on the distribution of family income in the United States show that the overwhelming majority of Americans can’t play that game, which remains the preserve of a tiny super-rich minority. In 2015, even with taxes and government-provided benefits included, households in the lowest 20 percent accounted for only about 5 percent of total income. Their average income — not counting taxes and government-provided assistance — was only $20,000. The share of the bottom 50 percent — families making $61,372 or less — dropped from 20 percent to 12 percent between 1978 and 2015.  By contrast, families in the top 1 percent earned nearly 50 percent of total income, averaging $215,000 a year — and that’s only income, not wealth. The super-rich have plenty of the latter, those in the bottom 20 percent next to none.

Before we proceed, a couple of caveats about money and political clout. Money doesn’t always prevail. Candidates with more campaign funds aren’t guaranteed victory, though the time politicians spend raising cash leaves no doubt that they believe it makes a striking difference. In addition, money in politics doesn’t operate the way simple bribery does. The use of it in pursuit of political influence works more subtly, and often — in the new era opened by the Supreme Court — without the slightest need to violate the law.

Still, in Donald Trump’s America, who would claim that money doesn’t talk? If nothing else, from inaugural events — for Trump’s inaugural $107 million was raised from a host of wealthy donors with no limits on individual payments, 30 of which totaled $1 million or more — to gala fundraisers, big donors get numerous opportunities to schmooze with those whose campaigns they’ve helped bankroll. Yes, there’s a limit — currently $5,600 — on how much any individual can officially give to a single election campaign, but the ultra-wealthy can simply put their money into organizations formed solely to influence elections as well as into various party committees.

Individuals, companies, and organizations can, for instance, give money to political action committees (PACs) and Super PACs. Though bound by rules, both entities still have lots of leeway. PACs face no monetary limits on their independent efforts to shape elections, though they can’t accept corporate or union money or take more than $5,000 from individuals. They can provide up to $5,000 to individual election campaigns and $15,000 per party committee, but there’s no limit on what they can contribute in the aggregate. Super PACs have far more running room. They can rake in unlimited amounts from a variety of sources (as long as they’re not foreign) and, like PACs, can spend limitless sums to shape elections, providing they don’t give money directly to candidates’ campaigns.

Then there are the dark money groups, which can receive financial contributions from any source, American or foreign. Though their primary purpose is to push policies, not individual campaigns, they can engage in election-related work, provided that no more than half their funds are devoted to it. Though barred from donating to individual campaigns, they can pour unlimited money into Super PACs and, unlike PACs and Super PACs, don’t have to disclose who gave them the money or how much. Between 2008 and 2018, dark money groups spent $1 billion to influence elections.

In 2018, 2,395 Super PACs were working their magic in this country. They raised $1.6 billion and spent nearly $809 million. Nearly 78 percent of the money they received came from 100 donors. They, in turn, belonged to the wealthiest 1 percent, who provided 95 percent of what those Super PACs took in.

As the 2018 congressional elections kicked off, the four wealthiest Super PACs alone had $113.4 million on hand to support candidates they favored, thanks in substantial measure to business world donors. In that election cycle, 31 individuals ponied up more than $5 million apiece, while contributions from the top four among them ranged from almost $40 million to $123 million.

The upshot: if you’re running for office and advocate policies disliked by wealthy individuals or by companies and organizations with lots of cash to drop into politics, you know from the get-go that you now have a problem.

Wealth also influences political outcomes through the lobbying industry. Here again, there are rules, but even so, vast numbers of lobbyists and eye-popping amounts of lobbying money now are at the heart of the American political system. In 2018 alone, the 50 biggest lobbying outfits, largely representing big companies, business associations, and banks, spent $540 million, and the grand total for lobbying that year alone was $3.4 billion.

Nearly 350 of those lobbyists were former legislators from Congress. Officials departing from senior positions in the executive branch have also found artful ways to circumvent presidential directives that prohibit them from working as lobbyists for a certain number of years.

Do unions and public interest groups also lobby? Sure, but there’s no contest between them and corporations. Lee Drutman of the New America think tank notes that, for every dollar the former spent in 2015, corporate donors spent $34. Unsurprisingly, only one of the top 20 spenders on lobbying last year was a union or a public-interest organization.

The sums spent by individual companies to gain political influence can be breathtaking. Take now-embattled Boeing. It devoted $15 million to lobbying in 2018 — and that’s not counting its campaign contributions, using various channels. Those added another $8.4 million in the last two-and-a-half years. Yet Boeing only placed 11th among the top 20 corporate spenders on lobbying last year. Leading the pack: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at $94.8 million.

Defenders of the status quo will warn that substantially reducing money’s role in American politics is sure to threaten democracy and civil liberties by ceding undue power to the state and, horror of horrors, putting us on the road to “socialism,” the right wing’s bogeyman du jour. This is ludicrous. Other democracies have taken strong steps to prevent economic inequality from subverting their politics and haven’t become less free as a result. Even those democracies that don’t limit political contributions have adopted measures to curb the power of money, including bans on television ads (a huge expense for candidates in American elections: $3 billion in 2018 alone just for access to local stations), free airtime to allow competitors to disseminate their messages, and public funds to ease the financial burden of election campaigns. Compared to other democracies, the United States appears to be in a league of its own when it comes to money’s prominence in politics.

Those who favor continuing business as usual like to point out that federal “matching funds” exist to help presidential candidates not be steamrolled by competitors who’ve raised mounds of money. Those funds, however, do no such thing because they come with stringent limits on total spending. Candidates who accept matching funds for a general election cannot accept contributions from individuals. Moreover, matching funds are capped at $20 million, which is a joke considering that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent a combined $1.2 billion in individual contributions alone during the 2012 presidential election. (Super PACs spent another $350 million to help Romney and $100 million to back Obama.)

A New American Tradition?

Rising income inequality, wage stagnation, and slowing social mobility hurt ordinary Americans economically, even as they confer massive social and political advantages on the mega-rich — and not just when it comes to college admissions and politics either.

Even the Economist, a publication that can’t be charged with sympathy for left-wing ideas, warned recently of the threat economic inequality poses to the political agency of American citizens. The magazine cited studies showing that, despite everything you’ve heard about the power of small donations in recent political campaigns, 1 percent of the population actually provides a quarter of all the money spent on politics by individuals and 80 percent of what the two major political parties raise. Thanks to their wealth, a minuscule economic elite as well as big corporations now shape policies, notably on taxation and expenditure, to their advantage on an unprecedented scale. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans support stricter laws to prevent wealth from hijacking politics and want the Citizens United ruling overturned. But then just how much does the voice of the majority matter? Judging from the many failed efforts to pass such laws, not much.

Unrealistically Great Expectations

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Our expectations have continued ever higher even as the pie is shrinking..

Let’s see if we can tie together four social dynamics: the elite college admissions scandal, the decline in social mobility, the rising sense of entitlement and the unrealistically ‘great expectations’ of many Americans.

As many have noted, the nation’s financial and status rewards are increasingly flowing to the top 5%, what many call a winner-take-all or winner-take-most economy.

This is the primary source of widening wealth and income inequality: wealth and income are disproportionately accruing to the top slice of earners and owners of productive capital.

This concentration manifests in a broad-based decline in social mobility: it’s getting harder and harder to break into the narrow band (top 5%) who collects the lion’s share of the economy’s gains.

Historian Peter Turchin has identified the increasing burden of parasitic elites as one core cause of social and economic collapse. In Turchin’s reading, economies that can support a modest-sized class of parasitic elites buckle when the class of elites expecting a free pass to wealth and power expands faster than what the economy can support.

The same dynamic applies to productive elites: as I have often mentioned, graduating 1 millions STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) PhDs doesn’t magically guarantee 1 million jobs will be created for the graduates.

Such a costly and specialized education was once scarce, but now it’s relatively common, and this manifests in the tens of thousands of what I call academic ronin, i.e. PhDs without academic tenure or stable jobs in industry.

This glut is a global: I’ve known many people with PhDs from top universities in the developed world who have struggled to find a tenured professorship or a high-level research position anywhere in the world.

In other words, what was once a surefire ticket to status, security and superior pay is no longer surefire.

No wonder wealthy parents are so anxious to fast-track their non-superstar offspring by hook or by crook.

There is an even larger dynamic in play. As I explained here recently, the economic pie is shrinking, not just the pie of gains that can be distributed but the pie of opportunity.

Would parents and students be so anxious about their prospects if opportunities abounded for average students? The narrowing of opportunities to secure a stable career and livelihood is driving the frenzy to get into an elite university.

As everyone seeks an advantage, there’s a vast expansion of people with advanced diplomas: what was once relatively scarce (and thus valuable) is no longer scarce and therefore no longer very valuable.

The soaring cost of the middle-class membership basics–home ownership, healthcare and access to college–has drastically reduced the number of households who can afford these basics.

Two generations ago, just about any frugal working-class household with two wage-earners could save up a down payment for a modest home and later, save enough to put their children through the local state college.

Now, even two relatively well-paid wage earners in Left and Right Coast urban areas cannot afford to buy a house or put their kids through college. They are lucky to afford the rent, never mind buying a house.

As the number of upper-middle class slots declines, expectations have risen.This manifests in two ways: a rising sense of entitlement, which broadly speaking is the belief that the material security of middle class life should be available without great sacrifice.

The second manifestation is is higher expectations of material life in general: not only should we all have access to healthcare, college and home ownership, we also “deserve” to eat out every day, own luxury brand items, take resort vacations, and so on.

In a recent pre-recording conversation with a podcast host, we were talking about the number of average workers who think very little (apparently) of buying a $15 breakfast and/or a $20 lunch for themselves every day, plus an expensive coffee or beverage. This contrasts with the “old school” expectations which reserved lunches in restaurants for executives with expense accounts or The Boss. Everyone else filled a thermos with coffee at home and packed a brown bag lunch (or kau-kau tin in Hawaii).

From this perspective, $25 a day is $125 a week or $6,250 annually (a 50-week year). That’s $12,500 annually for a two wage-earner household. Five years of foregoing this luxury yields a nest egg of $62,500, a down payment for a $300,000 house, or the full cost of a four-year university education for two students who attend the local state university and who live at home.

(Sidebar note: a kind person gave us a $50 gift certificate to a popular casual-dining breakfast-lunch cafe. I reckoned we’d get a nice chunk of change after ordering two basic sandwiches and one beer. The $50 didn’t cover the three items, much less the tip. I nearly fell out of my chair. Over $50 for two sandwiches and a beer? And yet the place is jammed with people young and old, and I wondered: is everyone here earning $200,000+ annually, i.e. a top 5% income? If not, how can they afford such a costly luxury?)

As I noted earlier this month in the blog, the Federal Reserve’s obsession with generating a “wealth effect” by inflating bubbles in stocks and housing have enriched owners of capital at the expense of the young.

But even if we set aside the perverse and destructive impact of this disastrous policy, the economy is changing in structural ways. Scarcity value is becoming, well, scarcer. Global competition has reduced the scarcity value of education, ordinary labor and capital, and so the gains flowing to these has declined accordingly.

Yet our expectations have continued ever higher even as the pie is shrinking. Common sense suggests realigning expectations with a realistic appraisal of what’s possible and what sacrifices are necessary is a good first step.

About Those Dancing Israelis

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Truth ultimately is all we have:” Julian Assange appeals for public supporta

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By Oscar Grenfell

Source: WSWS.org

In his first publicly-released comments to supporters since his arrest, WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange has detailed the repressive conditions he faces in Britain’s Belmarsh prison and called for a campaign against his threatened extradition to the United States.

“I am defenceless and am counting on you and others of good character to save my life,” Assange wrote, adding, “Truth ultimately is all we have.”

Assange’s comments were made in a letter addressed to independent British journalist Gordon Dimmack, who decided to make it public following last Thursday’s announcement by the US Justice Department of additional charges against Assange under the Espionage Act. The WSWS is republishing the letter, with Dimmack’s permission, in full below.

Assange explained that since he was convicted on trumped-up bail charges shortly after his arrest on April 11, he has been “isolated from all ability to prepare to defend myself, no laptop, no internet, no computer, no library so far, but even if I do get access it will be just for half an hour with everyone else once a week.”

The WikiLeaks founder stated that he is allowed “Just two visits a month and it takes weeks to get someone on the call list.”

All of his calls, except those to his lawyers, are monitored and limited to a maximum of ten minutes. There is a window of just 30 minutes per day for phone calls to be made “in which all prisoners compete for the phone.” Assange receives only a few pounds of phone credit per week and is not allowed to receive inbound calls.

The WikiLeaks founder declared that, despite these onerous conditions, he is “unbroken albeit literally surrounded by murderers. But the days when I could read and speak and organise to defend myself, my ideals and my people are over until I am free. Everyone else must take my place.”

The WikiLeaks founder stated that he faced “A superpower” that has “been preparing for 9 years with hundreds of people and untold millions spent” on the case against him.

He warned that “The US government or rather those regrettable elements in it that hate truth liberty and justice want to cheat their way into my extradition and death rather than letting the public hear the truth for which I have won the highest awards in journalism and have been nominated seven times for the Nobel Peace Prize.”

The unveiling of the US charges is a vindication of Assange’s warnings, in the letter and over the past nine years, that he faces a politically-motivated US prosecution for his role in WikiLeaks’ exposures of war crimes, mass surveillance operations and global diplomatic conspiracies.

The 17 counts against Assange carry a combined maximum prison sentence of 175 years. They are an unprecedented attempt to criminalise investigative journalism, and abolish the free press protections of the US Constitution’s First Amendment.

The charges centre on WikiLeaks’ receipt and publication of classified US government documents. These core journalistic practices are presented as criminal activities which “risked serious harm to United States national security to the benefit of our adversaries.”

The documents covered include the Afghan war logs, which exposed the extrajudicial killing of civilians by US-led forces, and other violations of international law.

Assange’s letter further exposes the ongoing political conspiracy against him, which included his illegal expulsion from Ecuador’s London embassy and detention by the British authorities.

The WikiLeaks founder was convicted, within hours of his arrest, on the British charges. The judge dismissed the fact that the offenses were effectively resolved years ago as a result of Assange’s forfeiture of bail monies, his years of arbitrary detention in the small embassy building and his United Nations-upheld status as a political refugee.

Despite the minor character of the bail conviction, Assange has been held in virtual isolation in a maximum security prison. This is a clear attempt to hinder his defence against the Trump administration’s extradition request, and the revived Swedish investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, which is aimed at blackening his name and creating an alternate route for him to be dispatched to a US prison.

Assange’s call for a campaign in his defence coincides with growing opposition to his persecution and to the Espionage Act charges against him.

In a Tweet shared almost 5,000 times, investigative journalist John Pilger warned that “The war on Julian #Assange is now a war on all. Eighteen absurd charges including espionage send a burning message to every journalist, every publisher… Modern fascism is breaking cover.”

The American Civil Liberties Union branded the charges “an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on journalism, establishing a dangerous precedent that can be used to target all news organizations that hold the government accountable by publishing its secrets.”

The Freedom of the Press Foundation described them as “the most significant and terrifying threat to the First Amendment in the 21st century.”

In Australia, there are mounting calls for the government to fulfil its obligations to Assange as an Australian citizen and journalist. Former Labor politician Bob Carr yesterday cynically warned that Foreign Minister Marise Payne “needs to protect herself from the charge that she’s failed in her duty to protect the life of an Australian citizen”

Greg Barns, an Australian-based advisor to Assange, declared “Australia does have a role to play here and our view is that the Australian government needs to intervene.” He said the US prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder was aimed at applying US domestic law extraterritorially. This meant that “anyone who publishes information the US deems to be classified anywhere in the world” could be targeted by the US government.

Over the past 18 months, the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Parties (SEP) around the world have played a prominent role in the struggle against the stepped-up persecution of Assange.

The SEP (Australia) has held a series of rallies, demanding that the Australian government secure Assange’s release from Britain and return to Australia, with a guarantee against extradition to the US.

The events, addressed by SEP national secretary James Cogan, and well-known fighters for civil liberties, including Pilger, Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria and Professor Stuart Rees, have been attended by hundreds of workers, students and young people.

The SEP (Britain) held a powerful public meeting in London on May 12, which brought together 150 defenders of Assange, and featured speakers from around the world. It was streamed live on Dimmack’s YouTube page to an audience of thousands.

On May 18, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei held a rally in Berlin, attended by 300 people, under the banner “freedom for Julian Assange.”

Over the coming weeks, the WSWS and the SEP’s will intensify the struggle against Assange’s extradition to the US, and for his complete freedom. We appeal to all supporters of civil liberties to join us in this crucial fight, which is the spearhead of the defence of democratic rights and against imperialist war.

Assange’s next hearing is set for Thursday May 30 at Westminster Magistrates Court in London. We urge all readers of the WSWS in the UK to attend.

Below is the full text of Assange’s letter to Gordon Dimmack:

I have been isolated from all ability to prepare to defend myself, no laptop, no internet, no computer, no library so far, but even if I do get access it will be just for half an hour with everyone else once a week. Just two visits a month and it takes weeks to get someone on the call list and the Catch-22 in getting their details to be security screened. Then all calls except lawyer are recorded and are a maximum 10 minutes and in a limited 30 minutes each day in which all prisoners compete for the phone. And credit? Just a few pounds a week and no one can call in.

A superpower that has been preparing for 9 years with hundreds of people and untold millions spent on the case. I am defenceless and am counting on you and others of good character to save my life

I am unbroken albeit literally surrounded by murderers. But the days when I could read and speak and organise to defend myself, my ideals and my people are over until I am free. Everyone else must take my place.

The US government or rather those regrettable elements in it that hate truth liberty and justice want to cheat their way into my extradition and death rather than letting the public hear the truth for which I have won the highest awards in journalism and have been nominated seven times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Truth ultimately is all we have.

 

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