Growing Social Inequality in America. Wealth Concentration and Decline in Living Standards

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Reid Mukai

New Federal Reserve report US median income has plunged, inequality has grown in Obama “recovery”

By Andre Damon

The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documents a sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.

The report makes clear that the drop in a typical household’s income was not merely the result of what is referred to as the 2008 recession, which officially lasted only 18 months, through June 2009. Much of the decline in workers’ incomes occurred during the so-called “economic recovery” presided over by the Obama administration.

In the three years between 2010 and 2013, the annual income of a typical household actually fell by 5 percent.

Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances

The Fed report exposes as a fraud the efforts of the Obama administration to present itself as a defender of the “middle class”. It has systematically pursued policies to redistribute wealth from the bottom to the very top of the income ladder. These include the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the banks, near-zero interest rates to drive up the stock market, and austerity measures and wage cutting to lift corporate profits and CEO pay to record highs.

The Federal Reserve data, based on in-person interviews, show a far larger decline in the median income of American households than indicated by earlier figures from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.

In line with the figures on household income, the report shows an ever-growing concentration of wealth among the richest households. The Fed’s summary of its data notes that “the wealth share of the top 3 percent climbed from 44.8 percent in 1989 to 51.8 percent in 2007 and 54.4 percent in 2013,” while the wealth of the “next 7 highest percent of families changed very little.”

The report states that “the rising wealth share of the top 3 percent of families is mirrored by the declining share of wealth held by the bottom 90 percent,” which fell from 33.2 percent in 1989 to 24.7 percent in 2013.

Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances

The ongoing impoverishment of the population is an indictment of capitalism. There has been no genuine recovery from the Wall Street crash of 2008, only a further plundering of the economy by the financial aristocracy. The crisis precipitated by the rapacious, criminal practices of the bankers and hedge fund speculators has been used to restructure the economy to the benefit of the rich at the expense of everyone else.

Decent-paying jobs have been wiped out and replaced by low-wage, part-time and temporary jobs, with little or no benefits. Pensions and health benefits have come under savage attack, as seen in the bankruptcy of Detroit.

Not surprisingly, the Fed report has been buried by the American media, confined to the inside pages of the major newspapers.

Measured in 2013 dollars, a typical household received an income of $53,100 in 2007. By 2010, this had fallen to $49,000. It hit $46,700 by 2013. At the same time, the average income for the wealthiest tenth of families grew by ten percent.

While median income fell between 2010 and 2013, mean (average) income grew, from $84,100 to $87,200. The report noted that, “the decline in median income coupled with the rise in mean income is consistent with a widening income distribution during this period.”

For the poorest households, the drop in income has been even more dramatic. Among the bottom quarter of households, mean income fell a full 10 percent between 2010 and 2013.

The report reveals other aspects of the social crisis. The share of young families burdened by education debt nearly doubled, from 22.4 percent to 38.8 percent, between 2001 and 2013. The share of young families with more than $100,000 in debt has grown nearly tenfold, from 0.6 percent to 5.6 percent.

These statistics reflect both a historic and insoluble crisis of the profit system and the brutal policies of the American ruling class, which is carrying out a relentless assault on working people and preparing to go even further by dismantling bedrock social programs such as Medicare and Social Security. The data undercuts the endless talk of “partisan gridlock” in Washington and the media presentation of a political system paralyzed by irreconcilable differences between the Democratic and Republican parties.

There has, in fact, been a seamless continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations in the pursuit of reactionary policies of war abroad and class war at home. The two parties have worked hand in glove to make the working class pay for the crisis of the capitalist system.

The Federal Reserve has itself played a critical role in the growth of social inequality in the US. The bailout of the banks, estimated at $7 trillion, has been followed by six years of virtually free money for the banks.

Every facet of American life is dominated by the immense concentration of wealth at the very top of society. The grotesque levels of wealth amassed by the parasites and criminals who dominate American business, and the flaunting of their fortunes before tens of millions struggling to pay their bills and keep from falling into destitution, are fueling the growth of social anger. This anger will increasingly be directed against the entire economic and political system.

The figures released by the Fed reflect a society riven by class divisions that must inevitably trigger social upheavals. The explosive state of social relations is itself a major factor in the endless recourse by the Obama administration to military aggression and war, which serve to deflect internal tensions outward.

The growth of inequality likewise underlies the relentless attack on democratic rights in the US, including the massive domestic spying exposed by Edward Snowden and the use of militarized police to crack down on social opposition, as seen most recently in Ferguson, Missouri.

Why Independent 9/11 Research and Education Still Matters

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Reid Mukai

Editor’s note: This is a revised article from last year followed by recent podcasts and videos on the topic.

One of the ways corrupt people and institutions retain power is by discouraging criticism and discussions that could lead to organized opposition. A classic tactic is to vilify targets as unpatriotic, disloyal, traitorous, heretical, dangerous, crazy, etc. Think about what happened to critics of capitalism during the peak of the cold-war hysteria. George Orwell’s 1984 depicted how governments could also manipulate language, history, media and other information in order to diminish critical thought (which leads to critical speech and organizing) and to control thought. The creation of a Big Brother-style police/surveillance state is another way to create a climate of fear and foster a culture which discourages the sharing of knowledge about certain topics and prevents people from taking action.

This should be kept in mind when discussing 9/11, because those who still have complete faith in government and corporate media (an increasingly shrinking number), have been conditioned to ignore, deny or dismiss any information that would lead them to question the official story. The most common knee-jerk reaction is to defend the official story by labeling all alternative narratives “conspiracy theory”. Though this argument is not as convincing today, when political scandals and crimes are almost a daily occurrence, the association between “conspiracy theories” and negative terms such as “crazy” and “wacko” are deeply ingrained in the culture, and not by accident.

The term “conspiracy theory” was not used as an ad hominem attack until shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Documented evidence shows the CIA needed to develop new and more effective ways to attack and discredit those who dared to question the Warren Commission Report. So when one counters questions about the official narrative with “That’s just a crazy conspiracy theory” they’re actually using a psy-op attack developed by and for a conspiracy. Because of experience and greater proliferation of information through the internet, fewer people are naive enough to deny extremely wealthy and powerful people would conspire to protect their position and interests. History and hard evidence shows it would be crazier to suppose that they don’t.

Another common argument is “The government is too incompetent to pull off something of that scale and keep it a secret”. It’s true that aspects of the government are incompetent, but the incompetence is generally limited to things they care little about such as medical and educational systems, the food system, domestic infrastructure, safety, financial regulation, disaster relief, fair elections, etc. When it comes to things they prioritize such as wars, bailouts, black budgets, black ops, cronyism, crowd control, surveillance, propaganda, etc., the US government is extremely effective. And the higher up the hierarchy, the easier it is to keep secrets. All it takes is a relatively small number of people in key positions, and through division of labor, compartmentalization, formation of policies conducive to conspiring, and covert actions and communications protected under the cloak of “national security” (with help from a mass culture of conformity, credulity and fear). One should also keep in mind that governments are not monolithic and are comprised of factions with conflicting interests which can be used, manipulated and/or compromised by players involved in the conspiracy (not just within U.S. government but in foreign governments and the private sector as well).

Some simply can’t accept that individuals and factions within U.S. government could intentionally cause an attack such as 9/11 or let it happen. This speaks to the power of corporate media and establishment propaganda on different levels. It shows how a significant majority of Americans can be kept completely ignorant of decades of violent imperialist policy around the world and how false flags have been used to start wars through history. There’s also a long history of state violence against its own people and on American soil going back to the genocide of Native Americans, murders of countless slaves and people of color, multiple massacres of labor activists, assassination of leaders such as JFK, RFK, MLK, Black Panthers, and MOVE, the 93 WTC bombing, WACO, OK City bombing, etc. There’s also ample documentation proving the US government has at least considered actions not dissimilar to 9/11 such as Operation Northwoods and Project for a New American Century. What this argument presupposes is that powerful and wealthy (mostly) white men are inherently more trustworthy, empathetic, and righteous than “Muslim fanatics” or any other “enemy” most Americans have been conditioned to fear and hate.

Other attacks against independent 9/11 researchers include dismissals like “9/11 is no longer relevant” and/or “there’s more important problems to deal with so we need to move on”. I would argue that when such crimes occur that have harmed and killed vast numbers of people and is responsible for countless casualties and elimination of civil liberties more than a decade after due to policies supposedly justified by the event, we have a moral obligation to uncover who did it and why. There’s no peace without justice and no justice as long as the truth behind such nation-changing crimes remains suppressed. Of course there’s always plenty of immediate and equally important issues to address, but those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. More specifically, those who benefit most from historical events such as 9/11 are motivated to repeat it while those who only know a distorted version of history while remaining ignorant of the truth are more likely to let it happen again.

Because of the work of “conspiracy theorists” we are now more aware of the scope of government/corporate criminality and connections between government, wall street, war-profiteers, and the criminal underworld. For example, without the work of independent JFK researchers we wouldn’t be aware of Operation Northwoods which many now view as a false flag template used for 9/11. Gaining a better understanding of how and why 9/11 happened helps us put current geopolitical events in context while providing insight into how such operations work and how they can be counteracted.

There’s also the “straw man” argument which creates the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing an argument with a superficially similar yet non-equivalent proposition and refuting it without ever having refuted the original position. This is particularly easy to do with complex high profile incidents such as 9/11 and the JFK assassination, where there can be a wide array of theories and speculation due to the complexity of the narrative, widespread interest, deep secrecy and disinformation or misinformation from “useful idiots” and/or those who would benefit from keeping crucial information hidden.

Discussing controversial subjects is never easy but it’s always rewarding when people turn out to be more receptive and thoughtful than one might suspect. Though corporate media does its best to defend the official stories, more people than ever are waking up. On this 9/11 anniversary with the potential for another war on the horizon, it’s as good a day as any to talk about it, share this information and help others wake up.

9/11/14 Update:

On the 9/3/14 episode of “Guns and Butter” Tod Fletcher uses a contextual approach to analyzing events at the Pentagon, explores origins and elements of the hijacker story (ie. telephone calls from the planes, analysis of eyewitness reports, physical debris, photo/video evidence, black boxes and FBI involvement) and investigates means, motive and opportunity.

audio http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20140903-Wed1300.mp3

This episode was followed by the 9/10/14 Guns and Butter: “9/11 and the Politics of Deception” with Christopher Bollyn.

http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20140910-Wed1300.mp3

Project Censored 9/8/14: With the anniversary of the September 11 attacks at hand, Peter and Mickey speak with Ken Jenkins, organizers of the annual 911 Film Festival in Oakland, California, about questions that still linger 13 years after the attacks. Then Shahid Buttar of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee talks about the scope and implications of the ongoing federal surveillance activities against Americans, and how to resist them. The program concludes with Robbie Martin of Media Roots, speaking about his new documentary “American Anthrax.”

https://s3.amazonaws.com/Pcradiodos/Project+Censored+090514.mp3

9/11: The Mother of All Big Lies by Stephen Lendman

9/11 Truth, Inner Consciousness, and the Public Mind by James Tracy

Thirteen Years After the September 11 Attacks, Blindness Persists by Thierry Meyssan

Mind control: Orwell, Huxley, and today’s reality

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Reid Mukai

We are able to see the architecture – the structural patterns – of each kind of mind-control regime. This can help us recognize precursors – signs that such a future is coming our way.

by Richard K. Moore

Source: News Beacon Ireland

Dystopian predictions

In 1984, George Orwell paints a picture of a dark, gray world. People are afraid to say anything contrary to the official party line, and surveillance is universal. Even thinking contrary to the party is a crime, and thoughtcrimes may be treated by radical psychological intervention. Information is closely controlled by the party media, and the historical record is routinely edited, so as to conform to the latest party statements.

By contrast, in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley paints a colorful, superficially pleasant world. Personal freedom of all kinds is encouraged, even to the point of being a cultural imperative. In the book a young boy is referred to a therapist, because he doesn’t want to play sex games with a girl classmate. An adult character is considered aberrant, because he is drawn toward a monogamous relationship. Drugs and distractions are readily available for mood enhancement.

Central to Huxley’s world is the abolition of the family. Sex never results in pregnancy, and embryos are grown in a production process, based on selected seed material. As part of the production process, an embryo can be fed or starved, at various stages of its development, so as to create classes of people (alphas, betas, etc) with differing levels of intelligence and skills. Quotas are set, regarding how many people of each class are going to be needed, and should therefore be produced.

Various kinds of conditioning are then used on infants in order to get them to accept their class, along with its prerogatives and restrictions, as being best for them. Children are raised on a communal basis, with no concept of parents, siblings, or family. From embryo to adulthood, the state has fine-tuned control over the development of the person, and of their thinking. In the resulting society, people behave as they were programmed to behave, and can’t imagine things being any different.

In Orwell’s world, wrong-thought (thoughtcrime) is detected and suppressed. In Huxley’s world, wrong-thought is unlikely to arise. Orwell’s world suppresses the individual; Huxley’s world manufactures the individual. In both cases, mind control – control over what people are able to think – is the strategy of the regime, as its means of social control generally. Orwell explores a brute-force approach to mind control, while Huxley explores a scientific approach.

The novels are useful because they each take one of these basic approaches to mind control, and follow its consequences to the end. If you really want to suppress what people think, you’d need to do A, B, and C. If you really want to program people, you’ve got to start when they’re born and do X, Y, and Z. We are able to see the architecture – the structural patterns – of each kind of mind-control regime. This can help us recognize precursors – signs that such a future is coming our way.

Echoes of Orwell

Consider the world of mainstream journalists, in particular TV news anchors. There we have a world with echoes of 1984, where what is said must conform to the party line. Any thoughtcrime – such as an anchor commenting onscreen that he doesn’t buy the official story of 9/11, or he thinks Russia isn’t an aggressor – would be quickly punished by the equivalent of death – expulsion from the world of journalism.

Thus is maintained the Matrix, the story we are told about US benevolence, the existence of democracy, the sacredness of market forces, and all the rest. With control of major media in just a few hands, the party line can be always maintained, and current (or past) events can be interpreted within that framework. To do otherwise, for a news anchor, would be literally unthinkable. Huxley’s Ministry of Truth is at work in our world, but it is invisible, hiding away in the boardrooms of media conglomerates, and behind the doors of the White House press office.

The same kind thoughtcrime regime is operating in other arenas as well, where socially-sensitive topics are concerned. The peer-review process, and the editorial boards of the relevant journals, ensure that thoughtcrimes are suppressed, when it comes to concerns regarding genetic manipulation, pesticides, fracking, pharmaceuticals, radiation levels, etc. Again, the Ministry of Truth is invisible, residing high up in the chain of corporate boardrooms.

Even though our society doesn’t resemble Orwell’s dystopia, his mind control methods are operating in very critical places, where the population’s ‘information’ is generated. And of course we do have universal surveillance, courtesy of the NSA, omnipresent CATV cameras, and cell-phone tracking. Big Brother is with us, but he stays behind the scenes, he sees all, and he decides what stories we will be told about the world by the mainstream media.

Echoes of Huxley

Huxley wrote a review of 1984, where he talked about the two different future visions. He suggested that we might go through some kind of dark period, reminiscent of 1984, but he thinks such a regime would be unstable and transitional. He goes on to say that the scientific approach to mind control, based on programming people’s belief systems, would be the more sensible choice for a modern totalitarian society.

US Government research into scientific mind control began at least in the 1960’s, and has been ongoing. The first approach – the CIA’s Operation Mind Control – was heavy handed, reminiscent of 1984. This research involved giving people psychotropic drugs, along with post-hypnotic suggestions. Quite a bit could be (and has been) accomplished with these kinds of methods, along the lines of The Manchurian Candidate, but it didn’t provide a general solution: two much work was required to program people on an individual basis.

Research then shifted to cult creation. If people can be herded into cults of various kinds, cult dynamics themselves would serve the programming function. This provides a more wholesale approach to mind control, than the individual methods tried earlier. The CIA has never publicly claimed credit for this later research, but the experiments were very successful, including Reverend Jim Jones and the People’s Temple, and David Koresh and Waco.

In this kind of research, the first step is to identify a natural cult leader, who has already shown some success in gathering followers. Then the cult is given support of various kinds. Covert agents are sent in to join the cult, not only to observe and report, but also to provide organizational skills. Funds are channeled to the cult, and local police are warned off, so that the cult can grow unhampered.

In this way, researchers have been able to study how a skilled cult leader operates, how people are drawn into a cult, how loyalty is maintained, and how people can be pushed into extreme beliefs and actions. When everything had been learned that could be learned from a cult, the cult’s leader and members were then killed, so as to hide the evidence of what had really been going on in the experiment.

Cults and their uses

One of the first large-scale deployments of cult technology, informed by this research, was the creation of the Jihad movement by the CIA. The immediate purpose was to destabilize the Soviet regime, by tying it down in a quagmire in Afghanistan. This operation was quite successful. Since then, the Jihad cult movement – aka Taliban, Al Qaeda, Kosovo Liberation Army, ISIS, etc. – has proven to be an extremely useful tool for the purpose of destabilizing regimes, in pursuit of US geopolitical objectives. These destabilization operations in turn provide an excuse for direct US intervention, as we’ve seen recently in Libya and Iraq, and as we may soon see in Syria.

Cults generally have certain characteristics. There is usually a charismatic leader, who is able to inspire belief and loyalty in cult members. There is always a defining core belief system, that sets cult members off from outsiders, and which provides a strong sense of identity and purpose for members. There is typically an alleged ‘outside threat’ to the cult, which draws members together. There are actions and sacrifices required of members, which serve to bind them more tightly to the cult. There are packaged arguments, that cult members are taught to employ, to repel attempts undermine the core belief system. These programming methods are very powerful, and typically intense deprogramming is needed to ply members away from a cult, once they have been thoroughly indoctrinated.

The society described in Brave New World is in fact a cult-based society. Each of the classes (alpha, beta, etc.) is a cult, and the programming begins at birth. No charismatic leader is needed, when so much control over programming is available. Each cult has its own core belief system, along with packaged arguments to maintain those beliefs. The required actions and sacrifices are simply the lifestyle which has been designed for each class. Such a society would tend to be stable, particularly since deprogramming efforts would be absent from the scene.

It is notable that Huxley’s world is not about a single cult, a uniform society, but rather about multiple cults. This makes for greater stability. Cult members have not only a model of what-to-be, they also have models of what-not-to-be. Each cult is more clearly defined, and drawn more into itself, by the existence of other cults. Being glad you’re not a beta is one of the reasons to be glad you are an alpha.

We see this same multi-cult dynamic operating in the US, in the divisiveness between liberals and conservatives. Liberals are kept in the fold by stories of conservative folly, and conservatives are kept in the fold by stories of liberal folly. In a propaganda-only system of control, there would be one party line for everyone. In this multi-cult system, there are two party lines, which we might characterize as CNN vs. FOX.

While the two party lines have many differences, in order to keep the two cults separated, they in fact share basic essentials in common. They both sustain the myth that state policy is a response to public sentiment, and they blame the other cult for providing support for the ‘bad’ policies. In fact US policy is made outside of government, by financial elites, and the state aims to control public sentiment, not respond to it. In this way we can see CNN and FOX as collaborators, sharing the common goal of hiding this fundamental truth from the people. The Democratic and Republican parties collaborate toward this same goal, using Congress as a stage, where they carry on a theater of divisiveness, providing the appearance of a democratic decision-making process.

The Barack Obama phenomenon provides an excellent example of cult tactics in action. Obama himself is obviously a natural cult leader, articulate and charismatic. He came onto the scene offering an inspiring core belief in deep reform, “The ground of politics has changed; Yes we Can!”. The dramatic effect was intense, as if we were witnessing the Second Coming. Campaign volunteers became the core of the budding Obama cult, and they were given lots of work to do, binding their identity to Obama and his professed mission. The McCain campaign was orchestrated to look like a dangerous threat by a rival cult, binding Obama supporters even more tightly.

The success of this mind-control operation was truly amazing. Obama in fact proceeded to carry on and expand everything Bush had been doing; the ground of politics hadn’t changed at all. But the cult binding was so strong that his support continued, by the very people who had hated Bush because of the same policies. Packaged arguments were put forward, to keep people in the cult, blaming Obama’s performance on Republican opposition – the standard divisiveness tactic. Even today there remain legions of Obama loyalists. Once bound to a cult, leaving becomes psychologically difficult.

Another example of mind control by means of cults is provided by global-warming hysteria. Al Gore played the role, at least temporarily, of cult leader, when he presented the core belief in CO2-caused climate crisis in his scientifically fraudulent, but very popular film, An Inconvenient Truth. The growth of the cult was ensured by the fact that it then became a thoughtcrime in mainstream media and climate journals to question these core beliefs. Cult members are given things to do and sacrifices to make, like riding a bicycle and buying a Prius. They are given a packaged argument, that contrary views are nothing but the propaganda of an outside-threat: the evil petroleum industry.

This kind of mind control operation is much more effective than propaganda on its own. It’s not just that cult members believe in CO2-caused climate crisis, they believe they are fighting a battle against an enemy. They have been fully immunized against counter arguments to their core beliefs, and their only concern is to ‘save the planet’ by supporting anything that looks like it will reduce carbon emissions. Thus they are being led willingly down the garden path to a micro-managed society, as outlined in Agenda 21.

The ‘conspiracy theory’ meme

State control of public schools and mainstream media goes a long way towards programming people’s minds. But it is not enough, particularly in the era of the Internet. There are many sources available that thoroughly debunk mainstream propaganda, and by using those sources a large number of people have escaped, at least in part, from the mind-control regime. In Orwell’s world, the Internet would be banned. In our world, which is developing more along Huxley’s lines, other ways have been found to limit the ability of the Internet to undermine the mainstream narratives.

The ‘conspiracy theory’ meme was launched by the CIA in the wake of the JFK assassination. The official story was so full of holes that more and more people were beginning to doubt it. While the Warren Commission was busy writing its cover-up document, the public began to learn about the existence of ‘conspiracy theorists’. These are people, the story goes, who suffer from paranoid delusions, and sane people should pay no attention to anything they say. If someone even looks at any of those ideas, their own mental stability comes into question.

This mind-control tactic was very effective in marginalizing research into the truth behind the JFK assassination. Anyone who presented evidence contrary to the official story was automatically seen as ‘conspiracy theorist’. By scoffing at such evidence, without looking at it, you could demonstrate that you were mentally balanced. Thus logic and reasoning are banished from the scenario. Either you believe the official story, or your mental health is called into question.

Since then, the conspiracy-theory meme has been carefully nurtured and expanded by the mainstream party lines. This mind-control campaign has been very successful in immunizing the majority of the population against the revelations available on the Internet. Any story not appearing in the mainstream media must by definition be a conspiracy theory, and anything that sounds like a conspiracy theory should be scoffed at and ignored.

Thus for the majority of the population we have a tightly controlled, two-tier, mind-control regime. The thoughtcrime dynamic governs what the media says, and the conspiracy-theory dynamic immunizes people against other views. For the majority, the party line (either CNN or FOX) is ‘truth’, as in Orwell’s world, but without the need for Big Brother’s extreme methods.

By these mind-control methods, a bubble has been created, in which the majority does their thinking. Inside the bubble are the two party-line narratives, and outside the bubble the real world proceeds, invisible to those inside the bubble. It’s a very effective system. The more outrageous the real actions of the state, the more quickly the majority rejects revelations of those actions, as being outrageous conspiracy theories.

In some cases the FOX party line includes accurate revelations which would be thoughtcrimes in the CNN world. In such cases, the CNN world responds by classifying those revelations as ‘right wing’ conspiracy theories. Unlike a propaganda-only system, where state crimes are always hidden, this multi-cult system enables the state to document its own crimes on conservative media, and know that the information will be disbelieved by the liberal cult. This system allows the truth to be hidden from some, through the act of revealing it to others. Very clever.

Mind control outside the bubble

While the majority may be inside the bubble, there is a large and growing number of people who don’t have faith in any mainstream party line, and who are open to considering the various ideas they find from Internet sources. The phrase ‘waking up’ is frequently used to describe the process of escaping from the bubble. More and more people are ‘waking up’ to the reality of false-flag events, routine government lies, the deep corruption of politics and the media, and the sociopathic central bankers who exercise the reins of power from behind the scenes.

However, the Internet is not being ignored by the state, and mind-control operations are underway there as well – designed for those who have ‘woken up’. Such operations are not aimed at moving people back into the bubble, rather they embrace the ‘awake’ ideas, aikido style, and then seek to direct the energy of the ‘awoken’ in ways that serve the state and its objectives.

An example of one of these outside-the-bubble mind-control operations, of the cult variety, is provided by the Zeitgeist Movement – which claims to be the “largest grassroots movement in the world with chapters in over 60 countries”. Peter Joseph is the charismatic leader of this cult, and he offers his set of core beliefs, backed up by persuasive evidence and arguments, in Zeitgeist: The Movie.

For those who are ‘awake’, the film is very powerful. It presents the essential truths about the world, without pulling punches, in a dramatic and compelling way. The film has gone through several versions over time, and the very first version went viral on the Internet as soon as it was released. To the ‘awoken’, it was a film of liberation, with the potential to wake everyone up and transform the world.

After the film was released, and after it gained a massive and enthusiastic audience, the Zeitgeist Movement was launched. Fans of the film flocked to join the movement, eager to ‘spread the gospel of truth’, and help ‘wake up the world’. They were joining an urgently-needed messianic cause, and this bound them to the movement, in the way cults always bind members. Peter Joseph was seen as a prophet figure, the articulator of the gospel, and the one who could lead the way to liberation – and this is more or less the textbook definition of a cult leader.

What these eager cult members fail to realize is that the very thing that attracts them to the movement also guarantees that the movement could never succeed in ‘waking up the world’. The core beliefs that are so liberating to the members are all seen as outrageous conspiracy theories inside the mainstream bubble. While members think they are pursuing a messianic cause, they are in fact a choir singing to itself, with Peter Joseph setting the tune.

The real purpose behind the cult is revealed in a press release on the movement website, entitled, ‘The Zeitgeist Movement defined: realizing a new train of thought’. Here Joseph expands the gospel, going beyond ‘revealing the truth’, and venturing into envisioning the transformed world that the movement aims to help create. Here are three key points from Prophet Joseph’s vision, with emphasis added:

2): The Scientific Worldview: The essay explores how the development of the scientific method has altered human perception and the critical importance of its recognition and larger order application, specifically with respect to the social system.

(5): The Case for Human Unity: This essay explores the reasoning for a unified global society along with tracing the source of national divisions and propensities for conflict. A relevant point is made regarding the advancement of technological warfare and how the dangers of keeping biased economic boundaries as we have could lead to rapid destruction as time moves forward.

(9): Market Efficiency vs Technical Efficiency: This essay argues the difference between true scientific (or technical) efficiency and the business practice of “market efficiency,” showing how the latter actually works against true economic optimization.

This is a prescription for a micro-managed global technocracy, under the control of a one-world government. Both the social system and the economic system are to be ‘scientifically optimized’ – which in fact means a world organized along whatever lines are set down by some technocratic bureaucracy, under the control of an enthroned global elite. In other words, Prophet Joseph is creating an enthusiastic constituency in support of the central bankers’ long-desired New World Order.

The Zeitgeist cult is an aikido masterstroke. It begins with the revelation that ‘evil bankers’ run the world, blending with the energy of the ‘awoken’, and then shifts that energy in a direction that serves the interests of those same ‘evil bankers’. Again, I must say very clever, very clever indeed.

Zeitgeist is only one example of a mind-control operation aimed at those who have achieved one degree or another of ‘awakening’. Numerous movements have been created, characterized by well-designed websites that tell some version of the truth, drawing in audiences with some specific focus of concerns, and which lead those audiences into useless or counter-productive activities.

In Huxley’s world, we see a scientifically designed society, tightly controlled by a full-spectrum mind-control regime, based on conditioning and cult dynamics. In today’s world, we see cult dynamics being used in a variety of mind-control operations, with cults customized for various constituencies both inside and outside the mainstream bubble. Huxley’s world has achieved stabilization by such means; in our world those means are being used to facilitate a transition – to a brave new world order that is likely to resemble Huxley’s in many of its essential features.

The demise of the family?

If the state can achieve full control over the raising of children, without parental interference, then quite obviously that would give the state the power to achieve a full-spectrum mind-control regime. Not only could the state design the society’s culture, it could tune that culture over time, by updating the conditioning process. If full-spectrum mind-control is the goal, then eliminating the family becomes a primary intermediate objective.

If eliminating the family is indeed an objective of the New World Order project, then it is by no means an easy objective to achieve. One would be hard-pressed to imagine an institution that would be more fiercely defended than the family, or to imagine a more painful experience than being separated from ones children or parents. Any campaign to achieve that objective would need to fly under false colors, not advertised as a campaign to eliminate the family, but rather as a campaign aimed at protecting the rights and welfare of the child.

It is in this light, I suggest, that we consider the many revelations that have emerged in recent years regarding child sexual abuse, and the existence of pedophile rings. In many of these cases we learn that the abusive activity have been going on for many, many years, as we see in the case of pedophile priests. Why is it that these longstanding activities have only recently been ‘discovered’?

If there is to be a strong campaign for the ‘rights and welfare of children’, there needs to be first a strong impression that their rights and welfare need protecting. Exposés of child sexual abuse serve that purpose very well. When you see a police drama, where abused children are rescued by noble cops from drug-addicted parents, you are are getting images of a benevolent state, and a social milieu that requires intervention. It becomes a template that can be expanded on as time goes on. And of course there are the interminable ads, where a neglected child sits alone at home (black and white film for effect), fearful and hungry, and you can donate $3 to some child-protection agency.

I don’t recall the link, but I came across a webpage from a UN agency, promoting the virtues of children raised ‘alternatively’. These are children raised as a group, sans parents, reminiscent of Huxley’s scenario. Supposedly these children were ‘more creative’, and showed other positive signs. How very nice. Another good-intention-stone along the garden path to the demise of the family.

Last year, 2013, in both Ireland and New Zealand, constitutional amendments were adopted, declaring that the rights and welfare of the child are paramount, trumping any rights that might be claimed by a child’s parents. In Ireland, a court challenge was immediately launched, based on the fact that the government had illegally campaigned for the referendum that approved the amendment, when by law the government should have been neutral. The challenge was, not surprisingly, rejected by the courts. There is no specific formula in these amendments as to what defines the rights and welfare of children, leaving it up to the discretion of the state, as to when intervention in the family might be appropriate.

As economic conditions worsen, under the screws of austerity, privatization, and eliminated social services, it will become a struggle for an increasing number of parents to feed, clothe, and house their families. It would be all too easy for the state to mandate a ‘minimum level of acceptable conditions’, and take children wholesale into care, based on ‘economic profiling’. That’s just one possible scenario, but it’s the kind of scenario it seems we are being prepared for.

The Onion on the Racist Police State

Posted on August 29, 2014 by Reid Mukai

Inspired by the situation in Ferguson, satirists at The Onion have been on a roll with a series of posts which are simultaneously humorous, incisive and sadly true as commentary on the absurdity and psychopathy of what so many accept as normal and acceptable.

Source: The Onion

Report: 79% Of Minority Suspects Receive Miranda Rights While Unconscious

WASHINGTON—Shedding light on law enforcement practices across the country, a Department of Justice study released Friday revealed that more than three-fourths of minority suspects in police custody receive their Miranda rights while unconscious. “In 79 percent of arrests involving blacks or Latinos, suspects were administered their rights while prostrate on the concrete, collapsed against a police car, or blacking out in the midst of a chokehold,” stated the report, which examined 2,000 arrests made last year where minority suspects remained either conscious, unconscious, or slowly drifting in and out of consciousness. “The data also confirmed that among non-white arrests last year, most police officers made an effort to determine if the suspect had a pulse before reading from their warning card.” The report further concluded that 98 percent of African-American suspects had their Miranda rights administered in between blows of a police baton.

Unpopular Police Officer Thinking About Committing Racially Motivated Offense For A Little Support

INDIANAPOLIS—Tired of being overlooked by everyone in his precinct, unpopular Indianapolis Police Department officer Kyle Norris told reporters Wednesday he was considering committing a racially motivated offense to generate a little support. “To be honest, I’m not the most well-known or looked-up-to guy around here, but I’m thinking that if I get caught up in a controversy after shooting a minority resident under questionable circumstances, things would really change for me,” said Norris, who added that having his coworkers immediately rally around him after the incident, watching consecutive nights of public demonstrations defending his actions, and finally receiving praise directly from the chief of police would be a nice change of pace from his day-to-day life as an ignored and unappreciated member of the force. “Obviously, I’d take some heat from some citizens, but I think it would be worth it when just as many people respond by openly speaking about my exemplary record as an officer and calling me a pillar of the community. No one’s ever said that about me before. If this thing gets big enough, I might even see some people on Twitter and TV calling me a hero—that would feel good.” Norris added that it would probably also be a nice little boost when the 12 members of his jury take less than an hour to declare him not guilty.

The Pros And Cons Of Militarizing The Police

The ongoing clashes between residents of Ferguson, MO and heavily armed police forces—which are equipped with M16 rifles and armored vehicles—have drawn attention to the increasing militarization of police in the United States. Here are the cases for and against outfitting local law enforcement with military-grade weapons:

PROS

Same tactics used successfully in Afghanistan, Iraq
Modern law enforcement simply cannot do their job properly by relying on handguns, tasers, and tear gas alone
A real shot in arm for nation’s ailing weapons industry
Look on driver’s face when tank pulls up beside Mini Cooper always fun
Local photojournalists now able to capture fog of war at home
Nice surprise treat for veterans to see weapons they used in war pop up on their hometown streets
Never a bad idea to put a more powerful gun in someone’s hand
Actually going to seem pretty quaint when compared with police armaments 20 years from now

CONS

Most police officers have proven fully capable of violently subduing protesters without any military-grade weapons
It’s actually very hard to recite Miranda rights while holding 40-pound grenade launcher
There’s no longer any middle ground between community watch and military
Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles only get 5 miles per gallon
Jesus, just look at this shit
Military-style helmets limit peripheral vision while firing indiscriminately into crowd
Could potentially be abused if put in lesser hands than America’s historically honest and virtuous police departments
Takes away that personal touch of beating a suspect to death with bare hands

Tips For Being An Unarmed Black Teen

With riots raging in Ferguson, MO following the shooting death by police of an unarmed African-American youth, the nation has turned its eyes toward social injustice and the continuing crisis of race relations. Here are The Onion’s tips for being an unarmed black teen in America:

Shy away from dangerous, heavily policed areas.
Avoid swaggering or any other confident behavior that suggests you are not completely subjugated.
Be sure not to pick up any object that could be perceived by a police officer as a firearm, such as a cell phone, a food item, or nothing.
Explain in clear and logical terms that you do not enjoy being shot, and would prefer that it not happen.
Don’t let society stereotype you as a petty criminal. Remember that you can be seen as so much more, from an armed robbery suspect, to a rape suspect, to a murder suspect.
Try to see it from a police officer’s point of view: You may be unarmed, but you’re also black.
Avoid wearing clothing associated with the gang lifestyle, such as shirts and pants.
Revel in the fact that by simply existing, you exert a threatening presence over the nation’s police force.
Be as polite and straightforward as possible when police officers are kicking the shit out of you.

Ferguson: No Justice in the American Police State

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: Foreign Policy Journal

There are reports that American police kill 500 or more Americans every year. Few of these murdered Americans posed a threat to police. Police murder Americans for totally implausible reasons. For example, a few days before Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, John Crawford picked up a toy gun from a WalMart shelf in the toy department and was shot and killed on the spot by police goons.

Less than four miles from Ferguson, goon thugs murdered another black man on August 19. The police claims of “threat” are disproved by the video of the murder released by the police.

Five hundred is more than one killing by police per day. Yet the reports of the shootings seldom get beyond the local news. Why then has the Ferguson, Missouri, police killing of Michael Brown gone international?

Probably the answer is the large multi-day protests of the black community in Ferguson that led to the state police being sent to Ferguson and now the National Guard. Also, domestic police in full military combat gear with armored personnel carriers and tanks pointing numerous rifles in the faces of unarmed civilians and arresting and threatening journalists make good video copy. The “land of the free” looks like a Gestapo Nazi state. To much of the world, which has grown to hate American bullying, the bullying of Americans by their own police is poetic justice.

For those who have long protested racial profiling and police brutality toward racial minorities, the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson is just another in a history of racists murders. Rob Urie is correct that blacks receive disproportionate punishment from the white criminal justice (sic) system. See, for example here.

Myself, former US Representative Dennis Kucinich, and others see Michael Brown’s murder as reflective of the militarization of the police and police training that creates a hostile police attitude toward the public. The police are taught to view the public as threats against whom the use of violence is the safest course for the police officers.

This doesn’t mean that racism is not also involved. Polls show that a majority of white Americans are content with the police justification for the killing. Police apologists are flooding the Internet with arguments against those of the opposite persuasion. Only those who regard the police excuse as unconvincing are accused of jumping to conclusions before the jury’s verdict is in. Those who jump to conclusions favorable to the police are regarded as proper Americans.

What I address in this article is non-evidential considerations that determine a jury’s verdict and the incompetence of Ferguson’s government that caused the riots and looting.

Unless the US Department of Justice makes Michael Brown’s killing a federal case, the black community in Ferguson is powerless to prevent a cover-up.

What usually happens in these cases is that the police concoct a story protective of the police officer(s) and the prosecutor does not bring an indictment. As Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, are partially black (in skin color alone), the black majority community in Ferguson, Missouri, might have hopes from Holder’s visit. However, nothing could be more clear than the fact that Obama and Holder, along with the rest of “black leadership,” have been co-opted by the white power structure. How else would Obama and Holder be in office? Do you think that the white power structure puts in office people who want justice for minorities or for anyone other than the mega-rich?

The 1960s were a time of black leadership, but that leadership was assassinated (Martin Luther King) or co-opted. Black leaders sold out for prestige appointments and corporate board memberships. Today black leadership is marginalized and exists only at local levels if at all.

If the cop who killed Brown is indicted and he is tried in Ferguson, the jury will contain whites who live in Ferguson. Unless there is a huge change in white sentiment about the killing, no white juror can vote to convict the white cop and continue to live in Ferguson. The hostility of the white community toward white jurors who took the side of a “black hoodlum who stole cigars” against the white police officer would make life for the jurors impossible in Ferguson.

The trouble with purely racial explanations of police using excessive force is that cops don’t limit their excesses to racial minorities. White people suffer them also. Remember the recent case of Cecily McMillan, an Occupy protester who was brutalized by a white good thug with a record of using excessive force. McMillan is a young white woman.

Her breasts were seized from behind, and when she swung around her elbow reflexively and instinctively came up and hit the goon thug. She was arrested for assaulting a police officer and sentenced by a jury to a term in jail. The prosecutor and judge made certain that no evidence could be presented in her defense. Medical evidence of the bruises on her breast and the police officer’s record of police brutality were not allowed as evidence in her show trial, the purpose of which was to intimidate Occupy protesters.

In America white jurors are usually sheep who do whatever the prosecutor wants. As Cecily McMillan, a white woman, could not get justice, it is even less likely that the black family of Michael Brown will. Those who are awaiting a jury’s verdict to decide Michael Brown’s case are awaiting a cover-up and the complicity of the US criminal justice (sic) system in murder.

If there is a federal indictment of the police officer, and the trial is held in a distant jurisdiction, there is a better chance that a jury would consider the facts. But even these precautions would not eliminate the racist element in white jurors’ decisions.

The situation in Ferguson was so badly handled it almost seems like the police state, in responding to the shooting, intended to provoke violence so that the American public could become accustomed to military force being applied to unarmed civilian protests.

Ferguson brings to mind the Boston Marathon Bombing. Two brothers of foreign extraction allegedly set off a “pressure cooker bomb” left in a backpack that killed and injured race participants or observers. The two brothers were deemed, without any evidence, to be so dangerous that the entirety of Boston and its suburbs were “locked down” while 10,000 heavily armed police and military patrolled the streets in military vehicles conducting door-to-door searches forcing residents from their homes at gun point, while the police ransacked homes where it was totally obvious the brothers were not hiding. Not a single family evicted from their residences at gunpoint said: “Thank God you are here. The bombers are hiding in our home.”

The excessive display of force and warrantless police home intrusions is the reason that aware and thoughtful Americans do not believe one word of the official account of the Boston Marathon Bombing. Thoughtful people wonder why every American does not see the bombing as an orchestrated state act of terror in order to accustom Americans to the lock-down of a city and police intrusion into their homes. Logistically, it is impossible to assemble 10,000 armed troops so quickly. The obvious indication is that the readiness of the troops indicates pre-planning.

In Ferguson, all that was needed to prevent mass protests and looting was for the police chief, mayor or governor to immediately announce that there would be a full investigation by a civic committee independent of the police and that the black community should select the members it wished to serve on the investigative committee.

Instead, the name of the cop who killed Michael Brown was withheld for days, a video allegedly of Michael Brown taking cigars from a store was released as a justification for his murder by police. These responses and a variety of other stupid police and government responses convinced the black community, which already knew in its bones, that there would be a coverup.

It is entirely possible that the police chief, mayor, and governor lacked the intelligence and judgment to deal with the occasion. In other words, perhaps they are too stupid to be in public office. The incapacity of the American public to elect qualified representatives is world-renown. But it is also possible that Michael Brown’s killing provided another opportunity to accustom Americans to the need for military violence to be deployed against the civilian population in order to protect us from threats.

Occupy Wall Street was white, and these whites were overwhelmed by police violence.

This is why I conclude that more is involved in Ferguson than white racist attitudes toward blacks.

The founding fathers warned against allowing US military forces to be deployed against the American people, and the Posse Comitatus Act prevents the use of military forces against civilians. These restrictions designed to protect liberty have been subverted by the George W. Bush and Obama regimes.

Today Americans have no more protection against state violence than Germans had under National Socialism.

Far from being a “light unto the world,” America is descending into cold hard tyranny.

Who will liberate us?

“Shock and Awe” Comes to America

Posted on August 21, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The United States has employed «shock and awe» techniques – described by Pentagon policy documents as the use of «spectacular displays of force» to intimidate an opponent – against the civilian population of the St. Louis, Missouri suburb of Ferguson, just a stone’s throw from Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. The police use of shock and awe tactics followed street protests after the police shooting death of an 18-year old black teen, Michael Brown. According to a private autopsy, Brown, an African-American, was shot six times, including twice in the head, by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. The St. Louis County coroner concluded that the number of shots that hit Brown could have been as high as eight.

Ferguson and St. Louis County police immediately dispatched military vehicles and equipment to quell the initially non-violent protests in Ferguson that erupted after the shooting. Two reporters covering the protests, one from The Washington Post and the other from the Huffington Post, were arrested by the police. An Al Jazeera television crew was subjected to a tear gas attack by police who then proceeded to shut off the news crew’s lights and disable their cameras.

After the local Ferguson and St. Louis County police were criticized for their «shock and awe» tactics, which also saw innocent protesters and members of the clergy shot at point blank range with rubber bullets and tear gassed, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, who was slow to respond to the racially-inflamed incident, ordered Ferguson and St. Louis County police to stand down. Nixon replaced the local police with Missouri state police troopers who did not initially use military-clad law enforcement or vehicles.

However, after it was revealed that Brown was shot multiple times, rioters were reported to have looted local businesses. Nixon ordered the Missouri National Guard on to the streets and imposed a strict night time curfew. Police on the scene also issued a «keep moving» order to Ferguson citizens, an attempt to prevent any public protest organization efforts by pedestrians.

There were also numerous reports of neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan, and other far-right extremists arriving in Ferguson, with police «wink and a nod» foreknowledge in some cases, to stoke violence and engage in «false flag» attacks on people and property. In many respects, Ferguson discovered what occurs when government authorities, officially or unofficially, team up with right-wing racists and xenophobes to menace an entire civilian population. The authorities in Kiev have made similar deals with neo-Nazis, who have links to American white supremacist groups, to attack civilians in eastern and southern Ukraine.

Police allegedly reported that Molotov cocktails were thrown at police by unknown parties after violence increased. The violence was stirred after Ferguson police released a videotape from a convenience store that allegedly showed Brown in a physical altercation with the store’s clerk after Brown was said to have stolen a pack of miniature cigars. The store owner later said that the videotaped individual in what the police released to the media was not Brown and the Ferguson Police Chief later admitted that Officer Wilson did not stop Brown based on any suspicion that it was he who had stolen the cigars.

Eyewitnesses said that police reports that Molotov cocktails were thrown at police vehicles were false. And as further proof that police were permitting agitators to stir up violence, there were a number of social media reports that among those stoking violence in Ferguson was a white man sporting a swastika tattoo.

Governor Nixon later stated that the release of the store’s video by police needlessly incited an already tense situation in Ferguson.

American police using heavy-handed tactics against peaceful protesters is not limited to Ferguson and neither are police arrests of journalists covering protests. Neither was Ferguson the first time police arrested or threatened to arrest national television and radio reporters, as St. Louis area police threatened to do with a reporter for MS-NBC after another night of street violence in Ferguson.

In 2008, national reporters were arrested by police who used unjustified force at a protest at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. The scenes from Ferguson were also reminiscent of strong-armed police tactics sued against Occupy Wall Street protesters around the country, as well as anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle; Washington, DC; Pittsburgh, and other cities.

The presence of police-sanctioned provocateurs who engaged in violent acts in order to provoke a «shock and awe» response from military-armed police is endemic to protests around the United States, especially after 9/11, the date viewed by many Americans as the watershed date between pre- and post-Constitutional America.

Someone in the St. Louis County Coroner’s Office also leaked information on Brown’s blood test, saying that it showed past use of marijuana. The leak appeared timed to hurt a number of referenda around the United States on the legalization of marijuana. Many police departments are campaigning against the referenda and it would appear that the St. Louis authorities leaked the information as some sort of proof, albeit bogus, that marijuana legalization will lead to an increase in «violence.»

Many media commentators also drew comparisons between the scenes of the heavy paramilitary presence on the streets of Ferguson to scenes of Israeli soldiers in Gaza and on the West Bank. There are valid reasons for the comparisons.

In 2011, St. Louis County Police Chief Timothy Fitch received training from Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and Israeli National Police officials during a trip to Israel sponsored by the right-wing Anti-Defamation League (ADL). That same year, Oakland, California police who received similar training from former members of the IDF, shot Iraqi war U.S. Army veteran Scott Olsen in the head. Olsen suffered a severe brain injury from the assault.

Companies associated with Israel’s military-law enforcement infrastructure, including those specializing in Israeli Krav Maga martial arts techniques and other Israel crowd control tactics, have not only trained state and metropolitan police forces in the United States, but also state National Guard units. Police departments receiving such training include the St. Louis County Police, as well as the police departments of New York, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, Louisville, Richmond, Charlotte, Nashville, Albuquerque, Tulsa, and Atlantic City.

American police departments have a seemingly unlimited supply of military gear, weapons, and vehicles at their disposal. Under the Pentagon’s 1033 program, the Defense Department has made available, often free-of-charge, surplus military equipment to police departments from St. Louis County and Ferguson to Lewiston, Maine and Ohio State University.

Among the excess military equipment distributed to local, metropolitan, county, and state police by the Defense Logistics Agency are highly-mobile multi-wheeled vehicles (Humvees), militarized water craft, mine-resistant ambush protection (MRAP) vehicles, long-range acoustic device (LRAD) sound cannons, assault rifles, night scopes, flash bang grenades, and helicopters.

In addition to receiving population control training from Israelis, American police departments have also been trained by the constantly name-changing firm once known as Blackwater. Formerly known as Xe Security and Academi, the CIA-linked private military company, now merged with Triple Canopy under the Constellis Holdings, Inc., trained a number of U.S. police departments at its military base-like facility in Moyock, North Carolina. One of the police patches on the firm’s training alumni board in Moyock is that of the St. Louis County Police.

In addition to the St. Louis County Police, other U.S. law enforcement agencies trained by Blackwater include the Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff’s Department; Atlanta Police; Chillicothe, Ohio Police; Charleston, South Carolina Police; Metropolitan Washington, DC Police; Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Police (Dulles and Reagan National Airports); Prince George’s County, Maryland Police; the FBI SWAT Team; New York Police Department; Fairfax County, Virginia Police; Tampa Police; U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); DeKalb County, Georgia Police; Arlington County, Virginia Police; Baltimore Police; U.S. Coast Guard; University of Texas Police; Norfolk, Virginia Police; Chicago Police Department; Oregon State Police; Los Angeles Police Department; Harvey Cedars, New Jersey Police; City of Fairfax, Virginia Police; Alexandria, Virginia Police Special Operations; Illinois State Police; and Dallas Police.

Based on the actions of the St. Louis County police and their cache of Pentagon weapons, as well as their Israeli and Blackwater training, the next dead U.S. citizen – African American, Caucasian, Hispanic, or otherwise – could be found lying in a pool of his or her own blood, drawn by a militarized police officer, from the Jersey shore to the streets of Los Angeles.

Local Police and Much Else Will Be Militarized As Long As Federal Government Is

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By David Swanson

Source: OpEdNews.com

“Groups on the ground in St. Louis are calling for nationwide solidarity actions in support of Justice for Mike Brown and the end of police and extrajudicial killings everywhere.”

As they should. And we should all join in.

But “nationwide” and “everywhere” are odd terms to equate when discussing police militarization. Are we against extrajudicial killings (otherwise known as murder) by U.S. government employees and U.S. weapons in Pakistan? Yemen? Iraq? Gaza? And literally everywhere they occur? The militarization of local police in the United States is related to the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, which has now reached the point that bombing and “doing nothing” are generally conceived as the only two choices available. Local police are being militarized as a result of these factors:

A culture glorifying militarization and justifying it as global policing.
A federal government that directs roughly $1 trillion every year into the U.S. military, depriving virtually everything else of needed resources.
A federal government that still manages to find resources to offer free military weapons to local police in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Weapons profiteers that eat up local subsidies as well as federal contracts while funding election campaigns, threatening job elimination in Congressional districts, and pushing for the unloading of weapons by the U.S. military on local police as one means of creating the demand for more.
The use of permanent wartime fears to justify the removal of citizens’ rights, gradually allowing local police to begin viewing the people they were supposed to protect as low-level threats, potential terrorists, and enemies of law and order in particular when they exercise their former rights to speech and assembly. Police “excesses” like war “excesses” are not apologized for, as one does not apologize to an enemy.
The further funding of abusive policing through asset forfeitures and SWAT raids.
The further conflation of military and police through the militarization of borders, especially the Mexican border, the combined efforts of federal and local forces in fusion centers, the military’s engagement in “exercises” in the U.S., and the growth of the drone industry with the military, among others, flying drones in U.S. skies and piloting drones abroad from U.S. land.
The growth of the profit-driven prison industry and mass incarceration, which dehumanize people in the minds of participants just as boot camp and the nightly news do to war targets.
Economically driven disproportionate participation in, and therefore identification with, the military by the very communities most suffering from its destruction of resources, rights, and lives.

But policing is not the only thing militarized by what President Eisenhower called the “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual” of the military industrial complex. Our morality is militarized, our entertainment is militarized, our natural world is militarized, and our education system is militarized. “Unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex” is not easily opposed while maintaining the military industrial complex. When Congress Members lend their support to a new war in Iraq while proposing that the U.S. Post Office and a dozen other decent things not be defunded, they are speaking out of both sides of their mouths. The United States cannot live like other wealthy nations while dumping $1 trillion a year into a killing machine.

The way out of this cycle of madness in which we spend more just on recruiting someone into the military or on locking them up behind bars than we spend on educating them is to confront in a unified and coherent manner what Martin Luther King Jr. called the evils of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism. Not racism, extreme materialism, and what the military does to the local police. Not racism, extreme materialism, and what the military does to weapons testing sites. Not racism, extreme materialism, and what the military does to the people of Honduras causing them to flee to a land that then welcomes them with an attitude of militarism. Not any of these partial steps alone, but the whole package of interlocking evils of attitude and mindset.

There is a no-fly-zone over Ferguson, Missouri, because people in the U.S. government view the people of the United States increasingly as they view the people of other countries: as best controlled from the air. Notes the War Resisters League,

“Vigils and protests in Ferguson — a community facing persistent racist profiling and police brutality — have been attacked by tear gas, rubber bullets, police in fully-armored SWAT gear, and tank-like personnel carriers. This underscores not only the dangers of being young, Black, and male in the US, but also the fear of mobilization and rebellion from within racialized communities facing the violence of austerity and criminalization.

“The parallels between the Israeli Defense Forces in Palestine, the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro, the Indian police in Kashmir, the array of oppressive armed forces in Iraq, and the LAPD in Skid Row could not be any clearer. . . .

“This is not happening by accident. What is growing the capacity of local police agencies to exercise this force are police militarization programs explicitly designed to do so. As St. Louis writer Jamala Rogers wrote in an article on the militarization of St. Louis Police this past April, ‘It became clear that SWAT was designed as a response to the social unrest of the 1960s, particularly the anti-war and black liberation movements.’ Federal programs such as DoD 1033 and 1122, and the Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), in which St. Louis Police are active participants, provide weapons and training to police departments across the country, directly from the Pentagon. Commenting on the ominous growth of the phenomenon, Rogers continues: ‘and now, Police Chief [of St. Louis Police] Sam Dotson wants to add drones to his arsenal.’

“The events in Ferguson over these last few days demonstrate that the violence of policing and militarism are inextricably bound. To realize justice and freedom as a condition for peace, we must work together to end police militarization and violence.”

The War Resisters League is organizing against Urban Shield, an expo of military weapons for police and training event planned for Oakland, Calif., this September 4-8. The Week of Education and Action will take place in Oakland from August 30-September 5. Read all about it here.

David Swanson is a member of the National Committee of the War Resisters League and wants you to declare peace at http://WorldBeyondWar.org His new book is War No More: The Case for Abolition. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.uson

Saturday Matinee: Drug War Double Feature

Posted on August 16, 2014 by Reid Mukai

Source: AmericanDrugWar.com

The War on Drugs has become the longest and most costly war in American history, the question has become, how much more can the country endure? Inspired by the death of four family members from “legal drugs” Texas filmmaker Kevin Booth sets out to discover why the Drug War has become such a big failure. Three and a half years in the making the film follows gang members, former DEA agents, CIA officers, narcotics officers, judges, politicians, prisoners and celebrities. Most notably the film befriends Freeway Ricky Ross; the man many accuse for starting the Crack epidemic, who after being arrested discovered that his cocaine source had been working for the CIA.

AMERICAN DRUG WAR shows how money, power and greed have corrupted not just dope fiends but an entire government. More importantly, it shows what can be done about it. This is not some ‘pro-drug’ stoner film, but a collection of expert testimonials from the ground troops on the front lines of the drug war, the ones who are fighting it and the ones who are living it.

Source: AKATommyChong.com

At the height of popularity of the Bush administration — the federal government entrapped and subsequently imprisoned Tommy Chong. Josh Gilbert began documenting the federal case against his long time friend, for the terrible crime of selling bongs.

This film examines the personal effects on Tommy, the motivations and tactics of the politicized Justice Department under George Bush, set against the back drop of the War on Drugs and the legal issues involved. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival to huge press and critical acclaim, and appeared at many other film festivals. It premiered theatrically at Film Forum in New York City and went on to a successful arthouse theatrical release throughout North America. It was recently broadcast on Showtime and the CBC in Canada.

	You Don’t Have To Wa… on You Don’t Have To Wait For Hal…
	ALL OUT WAR ON THE L… on ALL OUT WAR ON THE LIFE F…
	Pacific.scoop.co.nz… on Killing the Biosphere to Fast-…
	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: police state

Saturday Matinee: Drug War Double Feature