#ACAB: Why the Institution of Policing Makes All Cops Bastards

Posted on September 25, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By PM Beers

All cops are bastards because all cops, if ordered to, will enforce laws that oppress poor people.

Many people would like to believe that there are good cops and bad cops. I’m going to explain why this is simply not true. When we are children, we are ingrained with the belief that police officers are good people who want to help us. Children are taught that if they need help, they should ask a police officer. These early beliefs are so deeply ingrained that it is very hard to shake them off. For me, it took over two years to finally understand the concept of ACAB—all cops really ARE bastards, even if they believe themselves to be good people.

When you learn the history of policing, you will better understand the need to dismantle the inherently racist institution. When we were new to the anti-police brutality movement, we all thought there were good cops and bad cops. As with most binary thinking, this is incorrect. All cops are indeed bastards as they blindly enforce laws which were written to oppress poor people, such as laws against feeding the homeless. The primary role of the first police departments was to catch runaway slaves. Racism is ingrained in policing. Racism is the root cause of police brutality.

There are no good cops. Laws and ethics are not the same thing. Laws don’t prevent crime from happening—people having their needs met does. One cannot be a good person and enforce unjust laws.

Someone once asked me, “But how is the statement ‘ALL cops are bastards’ any different from ‘ALL priests are pedophiles,’ or ‘All women are lousy drivers?’“ Another friend replied, “Nobody is born a cop. Joining that institution is a choice. It’s more akin to saying ‘all KKK are bastards.” Priests are not required to molest children, but cops are required to follow orders which oppress poor people and target people of color.

Every cop must obey orders without question. They are required to enforce unethical laws or risk losing a job that provides them with a comfortable income if they refuse. In the rare occasion that a cop does blow the whistle on an injustice, the thin blue line is immediately invoked and the seemingly well-intentioned cops are ostracized by their peers, almost always neutralizing their intentions.

Some cops think they are actually good people. Of course, they have to think they are good to rationalize what they are doing since in our society, one’s occupation is one’s identity.

We all know that many cops have done horrible things. They have abused their power, murdered people, and attempted to cover up those murders with lies. I’m not going to talk about those obvious injustices that we are already so aware of. I’m going to talk about more subtle ways that cops do unethical things under the color of law. The job of the police is not to protect people but to protect corporate assets.

When a person becomes a police officer, their job is to enforce the laws. Not all laws are good. Police are unthinking, unquestioning robots protecting a corrupt, unjust state. They simply do as they are told without question. The institution of policing is inherently corrupt because they enforce laws which have nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with serving corporate interests.

If your job requires you to do unethical things and you continue to do that job for a paycheck, you have sold out and can no longer consider yourself an ethical person. Every cop has sold their soul for a middle class income. Their price is low.

But wait…what about that one cop who bought groceries for a mom who stole food for her kids?

Yes, that cop did a good thing. That doesn’t erase the unethical things the cop does or would do if given the order. I like to call these types of news stories #copaganda because they are often played by mainstream media to try to get us to think that cops are good people, when in reality, the news stations want to appease police departments so that they can keep access to information for their news stories. TV news folks do unethical things for money, as well, and that’s a whole other rant for another day. If cops did these kinds of things on a daily basis, they wouldn’t be newsworthy. Cops are not as lovely as the TV would have us think they are.

When protests are held, police say they are there to make sure no one gets hurt. Yet on most occasions, they are the ones hurting protesters with batons, “less lethal” bullets, and tear gas. Sometimes, undercover cops are placed into crowds and are sometimes suspected by protesters of being the ones agitating the police. They use actions, such as throwing bottles, in order to give the police an excuse to become violent with the protesters.

Police have to enforce other unjust laws, like the criminalization of the medical use a cannabis. Smoking cannabis harms no one and is a victimless crime. Is it even a crime at all? Filling up jails with pot smokers only has negative consequences on society, as taxpayers are burdened and people prosecuted for drug offenses often have a difficult time finding employment after being released from prison. Children also suffer under the burden of having one less parent to care for them. This lack of need fulfillment leads to more crime as children mature.

Further, according to the LAPD, all cars are now under investigation. License plate scanners mounted on police cars and on light poles track drivers all over Los Angeles. The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are currently suing the LAPD to find out how the technology is being used. There is no probable cause to collect such data, making this practice a violation of our civil rights.

Police enforce unjust laws that harass and criminalize people who have no home. Sleep is a primary human need like air, food, and water. Is it ethically permissible to wake someone up at six AM because the only place they can afford to sleep is the sidewalk? Would a good cop do that?

In the summer of 2012, I participated in a sleepful protest in downtown Los Angeles in support of rights for people who didn’t have homes. Every morning, Officer Massey would come honk his horn to wake us up at 6 AM. He was baffled at why I would scream at him every morning. He thought he was a good cop. He had no clue that waking up unhoused people at 6 AM is an unethical thing to do. In his mind, he was just doing his job—just following orders. Officer Massey tried his best to be polite, but what he was doing was still wrong. Is he going to quit his job? What other job is he even qualified to do that can still provide him such a comfortable middle-class income? He is not going to quit his job. Instead, he will rationalize in his mind that he is a good cop. He never once kicked an unhoused person, so isn’t he lovely?

The police are an inherently violent institution where force is used to extort money from poor people and property is stolen. The racism and bias against the oppressed and poor is pervasive. The entire institution is so corrupt and violent that participating in it makes one corrupt and violent by silent consent. It is impossible to be a good person and participate in violence and oppression.

For example, a person unable to pay $150 for a car registration will have that car stolen from them with the assistance of the police. The car will then be held for ransom. If the person who was too poor to pay the $150 can’t pay the ransom, then the car, which has a value of thousands of dollars, will be sold and the state will profit off of the backs of the poor. Anyone willingly accepting money from such an institution that extorts poor people is by default not a good person.

People want to believe they are good without challenging their false beliefs. There are no good cops. Ethical and legal are completely separate things—therefore, there are no good cops as they are required to enforce unethical laws.

Are there decent individuals that become cops? Of course. However, the institution of policing means police officers, by default, are oppressors by occupation—meaning there truly are no good active-duty cops.

What is the alternative to policing? Community policing by the people who live in the community is a viable solution. Further, the situation will be improved by legalizing victimless crimes, making sure everyone’s needs are met, and reducing income inequality.

A conscious cop would think about quitting, realize they are not qualified for any other job that pays anything even close to what they currently get, and would quickly adjust their thinking back into justifying what they are doing.

All cops oppress poor people and are therefore evil. All cops make threats of death and are therefore evil.

Dismantling the institution of policing does not mean anarchy in the context of chaos. The word “anarchy” is a beautiful thing when used in certain contexts where people understand what the word actually means. For me, anarchy means equality, horizontalism, and no false authority. Communities can and should police themselves.

This article (#ACAB: Why the Institution of Policing Makes All Cops Bastards) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and theAntiMedia.org. Tune in! Anti-Media Radio airs Monday through Friday @ 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Help us fix our typos:edits@theantimedia.org.

PM Beers joined Anti-Media as an independent journalist in April of 2014. Her topics of interest include mental illness, neurology, quantum physics, Tourette’s, Autism, compassionate parenting, horizontal democracy, activism, and art. Born in Long Beach, California, she currently resides in Los Angeles, California. Learn more about Beers here!

Public School Students Are the New Inmates in the American Police State

Posted on September 17, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

In the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

When you’re a child in the American police state, life is that much worse.

Microcosms of the police state, America’s public schools contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.”

From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment she graduates, she will be exposed to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them, and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.

If your child is fortunate enough to survive his encounter with the public schools, you should count yourself fortunate.

Most students are not so lucky.

By the time the average young person in America finishes their public school education, nearly one out of every three of them will have been arrested.

More than 3 million students are suspended or expelled from schools every year, often for minor misbehavior, such as “disruptive behavior” or “insubordination.”

For instance, a Virginia sixth grader, the son of two school teachers and a member of the school’s gifted program, was suspended for a year after school officials found a leaf (likely a maple leaf) in his backpack that they suspected was marijuana. Despite the fact that the leaf in question was not marijuana (a fact that officials knew almost immediately), the 11-year-old was still kicked out of school, charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court, enrolled in an alternative school away from his friends, subjected to twice-daily searches for drugs, and forced to be evaluated for substance abuse problems.

Under similarly misguided school zero tolerance policies, students have been suspended for bringing to school household spices such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar. Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, even fingers positioned like guns) can also get a student kicked out.

Acts of kindness, concern or basic manners can also result in suspensions. One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.

Unfortunately, these incidents are indicative of a nationwide phenomenon in which children are treated like suspects and criminals, especially within the public schools.

When you bring the police into the picture, after-school detention and visits to the principal’s office are transformed into punishments such as misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.

More and more, police are “stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking—sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”

Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting.

Funded by government grants, these school resource officers have become de facto wardens in the elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepperspray, batons and brute force.

Now advocates for such harsh police tactics and weaponry will tell you that school safety should be our first priority lest we find ourselves with another Sandy Hook. What they will not tell you is that such shootings are rare. As one congressional report found, the schools are, generally speaking, safe places for children.

In their zeal to crack down on guns and lock down the schools, these cheerleaders for police state tactics in the schools might also fail to mention the lucrative, multi-million dollar deals being cut with military contractors such as Taser International to equip these school cops with tasers, tanks, rifles and $100,000 shooting detection systems.

Indeed, the transformation of hometown police departments into extensions of the military has been mirrored in the public schools, where school police have been gifted with high-powered M16 rifles, MRAP armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and other military gear. One Texas school district even boasts its own 12-member SWAT team.

As if it weren’t bad enough that the nation’s schools have come to resemble prisons—complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, random locker searches and active shooter drills—the government is also contracting with private prisons to lock up young people for behavior that once would have merited a stern lecture. Nearly 40 percent of those young people who are arrested will serve time in a private prison, where the emphasis is on making profits for large megacorporations above all else.

Young people have become easy targets for the private prison industry. For instance, two Pennsylvania judges made headlines when it was revealed that they had been conspiring with two businessmen in a $2.6 million “kids for cash” scandal that resulted in more than 2500 children being found guilty and jailed in for-profit private prisons.

It has been said that America’s schools are the training ground for future generations. Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters, however, we seem to be busy churning out newly minted citizens of the American police state who are being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

The lesson is this: you not only get what you pay for, but you reap what you sow.

If you want a nation of criminals, treat the citizenry like criminals.

If you want young people who grow up seeing themselves as prisoners, run the schools like prisons.

But if you want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters, who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and their government, then run the schools like freedom forums. Remove the metal detectors and surveillance cameras, re-assign the cops elsewhere, and start treating our nation’s young people like citizens of a republic and not inmates in a police state.

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

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Peter Koenig

Source: Global Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Superpower Conundrum

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Reid Mukai

The Rise and Fall of Just About Everything

By Tom Engelhardt

Source: TomDispatch.com

The rise and fall of great powers and their imperial domains has been a central fact of history for centuries. It’s been a sensible, repeatedly validated framework for thinking about the fate of the planet. So it’s hardly surprising, when faced with a country once regularly labeled the “sole superpower,” “the last superpower,” or even the global “hyperpower” and now, curiously, called nothing whatsoever, that the “decline” question should come up. Is the U.S. or isn’t it? Might it or might it not now be on the downhill side of imperial greatness?

Take a slow train — that is, any train — anywhere in America, as I did recently in the northeast, and then take a high-speed train anywhere else on Earth, as I also did recently, and it’s not hard to imagine the U.S. in decline. The greatest power in history, the “unipolar power,” can’t build a single mile of high-speed rail? Really? And its Congress is now mired in an argument about whether funds can even be raised to keep America’s highways more or less pothole-free.

Sometimes, I imagine myself talking to my long-dead parents because I know how such things would have astonished two people who lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and a can-do post-war era in which the staggering wealth and power of this country were indisputable. What if I could tell them how the crucial infrastructure of such a still-wealthy nation — bridges, pipelines, roads, and the like — is now grossly underfunded, in an increasing state of disrepair, and beginning to crumble? That would definitely shock them.

And what would they think upon learning that, with the Soviet Union a quarter-century in the trash bin of history, the U.S., alone in triumph, has been incapable of applying its overwhelming military and economic power effectively? I’m sure they would be dumbstruck to discover that, since the moment the Soviet Union imploded, the U.S. has been at war continuously with another country (three conflicts and endless strife); that I was talking about, of all places, Iraq; and that the mission there was never faintly accomplished. How improbable is that? And what would they think if I mentioned that the other great conflicts of the post-Cold-War era were with Afghanistan (two wars with a decade off in-between) and the relatively small groups of non-state actors we now call terrorists? And how would they react on discovering that the results were: failure in Iraq, failure in Afghanistan, and the proliferation of terror groups across much of the Greater Middle East (including the establishment of an actual terror caliphate) and increasing parts of Africa?

They would, I think, conclude that the U.S. was over the hill and set on the sort of decline that, sooner or later, has been the fate of every great power. And what if I told them that, in this new century, not a single action of the military that U.S. presidents now call “the finest fighting force the world has ever known” has, in the end, been anything but a dismal failure? Or that presidents, presidential candidates, and politicians in Washington are required to insist on something no one would have had to say in their day: that the United States is both an “exceptional” and an “indispensible” nation? Or that they would also have to endlessly thank our troops (as would the citizenry) for… well… never success, but just being there and getting maimed, physically or mentally, or dying while we went about our lives? Or that those soldiers must always be referred to as “heroes.”

In their day, when the obligation to serve in a citizens’ army was a given, none of this would have made much sense, while the endless defensive insistence on American greatness would have stood out like a sore thumb. Today, its repetitive presence marks the moment of doubt. Are we really so “exceptional”? Is this country truly “indispensible” to the rest of the planet and if so, in what way exactly? Are those troops genuinely our heroes and if so, just what was it they did that we’re so darn proud of?

Return my amazed parents to their graves, put all of this together, and you have the beginnings of a description of a uniquely great power in decline. It’s a classic vision, but one with a problem.

A God-Like Power to Destroy

Who today recalls the ads from my 1950s childhood for, if I remember correctly, drawing lessons, which always had a tagline that went something like: What’s wrong with this picture? (You were supposed to notice the five-legged cows floating through the clouds.) So what’s wrong with this picture of the obvious signs of decline: the greatest power in history, with hundreds of garrisons scattered across the planet, can’t seem to apply its power effectively no matter where it sends its military or bring countries like Iran or a weakened post-Soviet Russia to heel by a full range of threats, sanctions, and the like, or suppress a modestly armed terror-movement-cum-state in the Middle East?

For one thing, look around and tell me that the United States doesn’t still seem like a unipolar power. I mean, where exactly are its rivals? Since the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, when the first wooden ships mounted with cannons broke out of their European backwater and began to gobble up the globe, there have always been rival great powers — three, four, five, or more. And what of today? The other three candidates of the moment would assumedly be the European Union (EU), Russia, and China.

Economically, the EU is indeed a powerhouse, but in any other way it’s a second-rate conglomeration of states that still slavishly follow the U.S. and an entity threatening to come apart at the seams. Russia looms ever larger in Washington these days, but remains a rickety power in search of greatness in its former imperial borderlands. It’s a country almost as dependent on its energy industry as Saudi Arabia and nothing like a potential future superpower. As for China, it’s obviously the rising power of the moment and now officially has the number one economy on Planet Earth. Still, it remains in many ways a poor country whose leaders fear any kind of future economic implosion (which could happen). Like the Russians, like any aspiring great power, it wants to make its weight felt in its neighborhood — at the moment the East and South China Seas. And like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the Chinese leadership is indeed upgrading its military. But the urge in both cases is to emerge as a regional power to contend with, not a superpower or a genuine rival of the U.S.

Whatever may be happening to American power, there really are no potential rivals to shoulder the blame. Yet, uniquely unrivaled, the U.S. has proven curiously incapable of translating its unipolar power and a military that, on paper, trumps every other one on the planet into its desires. This was not the normal experience of past reigning great powers. Or put another way, whether or not the U.S. is in decline, the rise-and-fall narrative seems, half-a-millennium later, to have reached some kind of largely uncommented upon and unexamined dead end.

In looking for an explanation, consider a related narrative involving military power. Why, in this new century, does the U.S. seem so incapable of achieving victory or transforming crucial regions into places that can at least be controlled? Military power is by definition destructive, but in the past such force often cleared the ground for the building of local, regional, or even global structures, however grim or oppressive they might have been. If force always was meant to break things, it sometimes achieved other ends as well. Now, it seems as if breaking is all it can do, or how to explain the fact that, in this century, the planet’s sole superpower has specialized — see Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — in fracturing, not building nations.

Empires may have risen and fallen in those 500 years, but weaponry only rose. Over those centuries in which so many rivals engaged each other, carved out their imperial domains, fought their wars, and sooner or later fell, the destructive power of the weaponry they were wielding only ratcheted up exponentially: from the crossbow to the musket, the cannon, the Colt revolver, the repeating rifle, the Gatling gun, the machine gun, the dreadnaught, modern artillery, the tank, poison gas, the zeppelin, the plane, the bomb, the aircraft carrier, the missile, and at the end of the line, the “victory weapon” of World War II, the nuclear bomb that would turn the rulers of the greatest powers, and later even lesser powers, into the equivalent of gods.

For the first time, representatives of humanity had in their hands the power to destroy anything on the planet in a fashion once imagined possible only by some deity or set of deities. It was now possible to create our own end times. And yet here was the odd thing: the weaponry that brought the power of the gods down to Earth somehow offered no practical power at all to national leaders. In the post-Hiroshima-Nagasaki world, those nuclear weapons would prove unusable. Once they were loosed on the planet, there would be no more rises, no more falls. (Today, we know that even a limited nuclear exchange among lesser powers could, thanks to the nuclear-winter effect, devastate the planet.)

Weapons Development in an Era of Limited War

In a sense, World War II could be considered the ultimate moment for both the narratives of empire and the weapon. It would be the last “great” war in which major powers could bring all the weaponry available to them to bear in search of ultimate victory and the ultimate shaping of the globe. It resulted in unprecedented destruction across vast swathes of the planet, the killing of tens of millions, the turning of great cities into rubble and of countless people into refugees, the creation of an industrial structure for genocide, and finally the building of those weapons of ultimate destruction and of the first missiles that would someday be their crucial delivery systems. And out of that war came the final rivals of the modern age — and then there were two — the “superpowers.”

That very word, superpower, had much of the end of the story embedded in it. Think of it as a marker for a new age, for the fact that the world of the “great powers” had been left for something almost inexpressible. Everyone sensed it. We were now in the realm of “great” squared or force raised in some exponential fashion, of “super” (as in, say, “superhuman”) power. What made those powers truly super was obvious enough: the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union — their potential ability, that is, to destroy in a fashion that had no precedent and from which there might be no coming back. It wasn’t a happenstance that the scientists creating the H-bomb sometimes referred to it in awestruck terms as a “super bomb,” or simply “the super.”

The unimaginable had happened. It turned out that there was such a thing as too much power. What in World War II came to be called “total war,” the full application of the power of a great state to the destruction of others, was no longer conceivable. The Cold War gained its name for a reason. A hot war between the U.S. and the USSR could not be fought, nor could another global war, a reality driven home by the Cuban missile crisis. Their power could only be expressed “in the shadows” or in localized conflicts on the “peripheries.” Power now found itself unexpectedly bound hand and foot.

This would soon be reflected in the terminology of American warfare. In the wake of the frustrating stalemate that was Korea (1950-1953), a war in which the U.S. found itself unable to use its greatest weapon, Washington took a new language into Vietnam. The conflict there was to be a “limited war.” And that meant one thing: nuclear power would be taken off the table.

For the first time, it seemed, the world was facing some kind of power glut. It’s at least reasonable to assume that, in the years after the Cold War standoff ended, that reality somehow seeped from the nuclear arena into the rest of warfare. In the process, great power war would be limited in new ways, while somehow being reduced only to its destructive aspect and nothing more. It suddenly seemed to hold no other possibilities within it — or so the evidence of the sole superpower in these years suggests.

War and conflict are hardly at an end in the twenty-first century, but something has removed war’s normal efficacy. Weapons development has hardly ceased either, but the newest highest-tech weapons of our age are proving strangely ineffective as well. In this context, the urge in our time to produce “precision weaponry” — no longer the carpet-bombing of the B-52, but the “surgical” strike capacity of a joint direct attack munition, or JDAM — should be thought of as the arrival of “limited war” in the world of weapons development.

The drone, one of those precision weapons, is a striking example. Despite its penchant for producing “collateral damage,” it is not a World War II-style weapon of indiscriminate slaughter. It has, in fact, been used relatively effectively to play whack-a-mole with the leadership of terrorist groups, killing off one leader or lieutenant after another. And yet all of the movements it has been directed against have only proliferated, gaining strength (and brutality) in these same years. It has, in other words, proven an effective weapon of bloodlust and revenge, but not of policy. If war is, in fact, politics by other means (as Carl von Clausewitz claimed), revenge is not. No one should then be surprised that the drone has produced not an effective war on terror, but a war that seems to promote terror.

One other factor should be added in here: that global power glut has grown exponentially in another fashion as well. In these years, the destructive power of the gods has descended on humanity a second time as well — via the seemingly most peaceable of activities, the burning of fossil fuels. Climate change now promises a slow-motion version of nuclear Armageddon, increasing both the pressure on and the fragmentation of societies, while introducing a new form of destruction to our lives.

Can I make sense of all this? Hardly. I’m just doing my best to report on the obvious: that military power no longer seems to act as it once did on Planet Earth. Under distinctly apocalyptic pressures, something seems to be breaking down, something seems to be fragmenting, and with that the familiar stories, familiar frameworks, for thinking about how our world works are losing their efficacy.

Decline may be in the American future, but on a planet pushed to extremes, don’t count on it taking place within the usual tale of the rise and fall of great powers or even superpowers. Something else is happening on Planet Earth. Be prepared.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

They Live, We Sleep: A Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.”—They Live

We’re living in two worlds, you and I.

There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.

Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.

All is not as it seems.

This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live (1988), in which two migrant workers discover that the world’s population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.

It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.

When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them. Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”

When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.

This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture. A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.

In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”

We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality. The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats. Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates.

Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: the moneyed elite who rule us view us as expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.

In fact, a 2014 study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.

In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

Consider this: it is estimated that the 2016 presidential election could cost as much as $5 billion, more than double what was spent getting Obama re-elected in 2012.

Not only do you have to be rich—or beholden to the rich—to get elected these days, but getting elected is also a surefire way to get rich. As CBS News reports, “Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector. And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further.”

In denouncing this blatant corruption of America’s political system, former president Jimmy Carter blasted the process of getting elected—to the White House, governor’s mansion, Congress or state legislatures—as “unlimited political bribery… a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over.”

Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain. As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.

By creating the illusion that it preserves democratic traditions, fascism creeps slowly until it consumes the political system. And in times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights, criminalize virtually every form of behavior, and build enough private prisons to house all of us nonviolent criminals.

Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests. We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.

Vast sectors of the economy, government and politics are managed by private business concerns, otherwise referred to as “privatization” by various government politicians. Just study modern government policies. “Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized,” writes economic analyst Jeffrey Tucker. “Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect.”

In other words, the government in America today does whatever it wants.

Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.

For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime? The answer is the same in every age: fear.

Fear makes people stupid.

Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.

The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.

Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist, we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.

We have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.

In this regard, we’re not so different from the oppressed citizens in They Live. Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.

Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screens—that is, television, lap tops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month.

The question, of course, is what effect does such screen consumption have on one’s mind?

Psychologically it is similar to drug addiction. Researchers found that “almost immediately after turning on the TV, subjects reported feeling more relaxed, and because this occurs so quickly and the tension returns so rapidly after the TV is turned off, people are conditioned to associate TV viewing with a lack of tension.” Research also shows that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state.

Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet,” according to Newsweek.

Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega corporations, what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.

If we’re watching, we’re not doing.

The powers-that-be understand this. As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.

When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”

We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Racial injustice is growing. Human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.

Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.

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

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are No Easy Solutions for White Terrorism

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Jason Lee Byas

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

On June 17th, a white man named Dylann Roof murdered nine black members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (EAME). I mention race because it was not a coincidence – this was an act of terrorism in the service of white supremacy.

Understandably, people are scrambling for an easy solution, and most proposals involve some show of state force. Unfortunately, the reality is that there are no easy solutions, and most suggestions would only make things worse.

For example, many have used the shooting to push for stronger gun control measures. This is a non-starter.

Roof’s bloodbath was less than ten miles away from where white police officer Michael Slager shot Walter Scott, a black man who was running away. Slager’s case is unique in that we actually know about it, and that he was actually charged. Police kill countless Americans every year, and blacks are most likely to be their victims.

Black people — not just in Charleston, but throughout the United States — experience the police as occupiers, not protectors. Centralizing firearm ownership in the hands of the police will not protect people of color, because the police are the exact group most likely to terrorize people of color.

Furthermore, the actual effect of gun control laws has been to incarcerate black Americansat a rate more disproportionate than any other federal statute, including drug-related offenses. It is not just that gun control leaves disadvantaged communities dependent upon those most likely to terrorize them. Gun control itself is often the pretext of that terrorism.

Many who resist calls for gun control instead point to “doing something” about mental illness. This convenient narrative forgets that people deemed mentally ill are far more likely to be victims of violence, not perpetrators.

It also forgets that Roof’s problems were ideological, not psychological. Instead of just shrugging and saying “you can’t fix crazy,” we should confront Roof’s actual motive, white supremacy.

Finally, there is one almost universally endorsed response to Roof’s crime: his punishment. Some have also urged South Carolina to enact hate crime legislation, so that future Dylann Roofs can be punished even more harshly.

This, too, will only make things worse. No one will be made better off by Roof’s punishment, and the punitive focus of our legal system will rob survivors and victims’ loved ones of what restitution and restoration could have been made instead.

In Roof’s case, survivors and victims’ loved ones have publicly forgiven him, pleading that he repent. That is their desire. Our legal system’s desire, by contrast, is the satisfaction of public bloodlust.

If we are truly interested in fighting racism and violence against marginalized populations, punishment — and its expansion through hate crime legislation — is extremely counterproductive. The same groups “protected” by these statutes are the ones most likely to be harmed.

This is why the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (which specializes in protecting transgender and gender non-conforming people) staunchly opposes hate crime laws. As their powerful statement explains:

[H]ate crime laws … expand and increase the power of the … criminal punishment system. Evidence demonstrates that hate crime legislation, like other criminal punishment legislation, is used unequally and improperly against communities that are already marginalized in our society. These laws increase the already staggering incarceration rates of people of color, poor people, queer people and transgender people based on a system that is inherently and deeply corrupt.

By saying that there are no easy solutions, I am not saying that there are no solutions. The point isn’t “do nothing,” and it isn’t “wait around until we have a justice system based on restitution and restoration.”

What we should do instead is develop solutions from below, and step out of the way so those solutions can take effect. EAME, and other black churches like it, have historically been one such solution. They facilitated black self-empowerment, and in 1822, EAME’s founder even plotted a slave revolt.

The response of the white community was to burn down EAME. EAME’s response was to rebuild.

Now, the black community must rebuild again. White Americans must now work to ensure they don’t burn down those rebuilding efforts.

Many black Americans, such as the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, have begun to arm themselves for protection. When our white-dominated government seeks to burn that down by disarming them, it must be stopped.

Beyond just getting out of the way, white Americans must also work to question their own racism and the racism of their white peers.

None of these solutions are quick, and none of them are easy. But they are also the ones that will actually work.

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