Category Archives: society

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

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These Are Gnostic Times

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Christopher Knowle’s “The Secret Sun” is a blog I’ve followed with great interest since there’s some overlap in our pop-culture tastes and philosophical views. However, he’s been noticeably absent for the past year. Chris recently posted an update sharing his personal struggles and current concerns on The Secret Sun:

It’s been nearly a year since I’ve posted here, having been overwhelmed by the two irreducible realities in my life; work and chronic pain. Many a plan and project has been sacrificed on the altar to these unrelenting gods. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve gotten started on a project only to have to back burner it when the need to pay the bills rears its head. 

These gods are like some Janus-faced thing; one a stern taskmaster that nonetheless allows me to maintain some semblance of a middle class American life, the other a wild beast that seems to serve no purpose at all but make everything in my life more difficult, more tiring, less enjoyable. I’ve learned that my particular condition is known as the “rabid dog” of chronic pain conditions among health care professionals, and that even fibromyalgia specialists (who are used to dealing with a vexing disorder) find themselves exasperated by it.

I recently discovered that even a floatation tank aggravates it. Any normal chronic pain condition would benefit from floating in a nice, warm epsom salt bath, but with me it just irritated all of the damaged nerve clusters (known as “trigger points”). So needless to say most of my surplus energy has been spoken for.

For my part, I think the local environment is the primary stressor with my condition (particularly the humidity, barometric pressure, static electricity and mold), which is all too appropriate for a diehard AstroGnostic. I’ve tried everything but it beats back everything you throw at it. Because I don’t belong here.

The problem is that I want my daughter to be able to take advantage of the outstanding public school system as her brothers did, since that experience allowed her oldest brother to graduate with highest honors from a major university this year and score a good paying job even before he was finished with school. The notion of self-sacrifice has taken a beating in the Selfie Decade, but as my grandpappy used to say, fuck that shit. Do the best for your children.

So this Janus-like lord that’s parked itself over my life like a permanent Saturn transit basically drove me to close up shop, for the very immediate and compelling reason that I very much didn’t want to die.

I hadn’t planned to make a book-length series out of the Secret Star Trek thing, it simply imposed itself upon based on a random detail in Star Trek into Darkness. But in addition to putting in 12 to 14 hour work days I found myself driven to capture this story as each new revelation came to light. It was insane. Obsessive-compulsive workaholic binge madness.

For sure a lot of it had been percolating in my unconscious for some time, but that weird tingling in my sinuses just wouldn’t leave me alone, that signal that drives me on to dig up hidden connections. But that’s not always the healthiest thing to do when your energies are required elsewhere.

What’s more, I have to say the response to the post didn’t feel commensurate to the information that was being revealed. This is very much a product of the new Internet reality, one I can’t exactly say I’m crazy about but one that needs to be adapted to nonetheless. I’ve come to understand that longform posts (like, say, this) are self-defeating in an age when more and more people are accessing the Internet through their phones.

Which goes to show you that the notion that evolution leads to things getting better is one of our culture’s most pernicious myths. 

 Nearly everything is getting demonstrably worse.

But it’s OK- I’m addressing a small core of people here intentionally. I don’t plan to be doing a lot of long-form blogging in the long run.

 My longterm plan is to reactivate The Secret Sun Radio Mystery Hour, which I had already planned to do before hardware problems made that an impossibility (ie., my computer got all messed up). 

I still haven’t fully solved those problems. I have a new computer but now we’ve been having a lot of problems with our current ISP and the router (if it’s not one thing…). But once those are addressed- hopefully by summer’s end- I hope to start up the Mystery Hour again. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a couple years now, but if you’ve gotten this far you’ll understand how events have conspired to keep me away from the microphone

With the onetime major alt.research podcast becoming something very much unrecognizable to those of us who were there in its early days, there seems to be an opening for something interesting to fill the vacancy. But I will only pursue this if I can do so with the highest level of professionalism I can muster. I have to admit that I got complacent with a few podcast appearances in the past, simply because I was too busy or preoccupied to prepare like should. I regret that and don’t intend to repeat that in the future.

I’m taking suggestions for hosting services. My experience with FraudBean was a nightmare.

 SPEAKING OF NIGHTMARES

I don’t think I need to go into too much detail as to how much worse things have gotten out there in the past year, how the world seems perched on the brink of a conflagration the likes of which it hasn’t seen in 70 years. 

 The past few days I was going through some old posts and it was depressing to see news stories of people’s expectations for Obama (that Peace Prize seems like the sickest joke imaginable now), and how they’ve been dashed.

The American Republic has given way to Empire, of that we can all agree. Liberals say nothing at all about it (well, besides mocking the Kulaks in flyover country) because they are hypnotized into believing they will be the courtiers in the new Imperial palace, but in reality the rugs are slowly being pulled from beneath them. By the time they notice it will be too late and they’ll all be out on the street.*

One of these rugs is publishing. Borders is gone and Barnes and Noble is in very serious trouble. Ebook sales are falling as well. The major publishers are fighting Amazon for the right to charge full price for Ebooks (which benefits neither authors nor consumers), a fight that may go down in history as their Waterloo.

I’m seeing this from the inside and can’t say more than it’s much worse than it looks from the outside. I haven’t published anything in 4 years because my experience with Secret History of Rock n’ Roll didn’t whet my appetite for another go-round. I simply can’t deal with the limitations imposed on my work by commercial publishing.

My work needs the tools of academic publishing- footnotes, bibliographies, indices, appendices- otherwise it’s too easy for skeptics to dismiss out of hand. I also need as much room as I need to put my points across. All of this is anathema to commercial publishers who are convinced their customer pool is made up of idiots. But I don’t. I think the people who are drawn to alternative points of view want as much data as you can give them.

My first book was self-published and I must say it was the only truly positive experience I’ve had in the two decades I’ve had my work in print. And with publishers expecting authors to do more and more of the promotional work, there’s really very little reason to continue with conventional publishing anymore.

So that is something else I wish to pursue in the future. I’ve got quite a few projects in various stages of development so finding compelling material won’t be a problem. Finding time might be, but that’s another story…

THE WORK

The Work (as in the Great Work) continues on. I’ll save that for a later post but all I can say for now is that it’s been rather stunning and has seriously fucked with my previously held beliefs in causality, agency and whatever hell else you want to throw in. And this is from a guy who’s been messing around with Synchronicity and the rest of it for decades now.

What is the point of it? The point seems to be to find strength to carry on with the work in a world seemingly hellbent on making miserable, mindless robots of us all. 

And that’s quite a point.

I’d like to say the bad guys will lose because good always triumphs but right now that’s a pretty hard prediction to make. But people like us have been here before, and maybe by looking at how they dealt with the Black Iron Prison we too can work up some coping strategies of our own.

32 years ago The Bad Brains wrote a song that declared “These are Coptic Times.” I don’t know if they really understood the meaning of the word, maybe they thought it just sounded heavy and Biblical. What these are are Gnostic times, there are no two ways about it.

These are the times prophesied by the Gnostics and the times most conducive to Gnostic thought. Not necessarily Alexandrian or Bogomil Gnostic thought- the genius of Gnostic thinking is its elasticity and adaptability. A Gnostic canon is an oxymoron.

I think in the days to come a new Gnostic thinking– one that has shaken off the dust and cobwebs of the library and the lecture hall– might be the difference between sanity and the Abyss.

There’s a strange symmetry of history as we stand on the brink of a new Cold War with Russia and China; the Gnostic Gospels unveiled themselves in 1945 at the dawn of the first Cold War, now a major diaspora of Gnostic peoples- Mandaeans, Ismailis, Yezidis, Druze- looms as Obama’s ISIS mad dogs run rampant through Mesopotamia and Syria.

Already many of these Gnostic people have sought refugee status, it will be fascinating if they break centuries of separation and seek to make connections in their new homes.

Scholar Harold Bloom saw Gnosticism as America’s native religion and perhaps the already waning atheist/nihilist phase is a necessary step in shaking off the last vestiges of Puritanism and evolving into a purer, more self-aware variety of Gnosis. One that has broken away from the stifling Medieval past.

2000 years ago Gnosticism and Christianity struggled for the hearts and minds of an Empire, but the world wasn’t yet ready for Gnosis and Gnosis wasn’t yet ready for the world. Then too the Empire’s cosmopolitans and sophisticates shunned all gods and mysteries, only to see their legacy wiped forever from the face of the earth. The same fate awaits their counterparts today. The question remains who will inherit the future?

 * Literally. Worse still, they may well be served up as scapegoats to the burgeoning far right, that is angrier than I’ve seen in my lifetime.

 

The Awakening – Clash of Civilizations

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By Zen Gardner

Source: ZenGardner.com

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

We’re in the thick of it now.

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

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

Major Signs of Awakening

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

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

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

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

Financial, Governmental and Mad Scientific Schemes are Increasingly Obvious

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

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

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

Our EMF Bombardment

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

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

Brazilian Courts order lower electromagnetic pollution

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

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

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

GMO Rejection

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

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

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

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

The awakened civilization rolls on.

The List Continues

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

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

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

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

Much love always, keep on, Zen

Saturday Matinee: Get to Know Your Rabbit

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“Get to Know Your Rabbit”(1972) is an offbeat comedy Brian DePalma directed early in his career about a successful but unsatisfied corporate executive Beeman (Tommy Smothers) who quits his job to become a tap dancing magician under the mentorship of Mr. Delesandro (Orson Welles). When his new venture becomes a successful corporation, Beeman finds his path has come full circle. The film features a brief uncredited cameo by cult character actor Timothy Carey as a cop.

The Political Dimension of Breakdown

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detroit_07101

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BONUS: Who Bled Detroit Dry? (Vice):

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

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

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

The Conflation Trap

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By Roderick Long

Source: Bleeding Heart Libertarians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn describes an intriguing experiment:

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

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

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

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

Kuhn is helpful here too:

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

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

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

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

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

Malaysian Airlines MH17 Was Ordered to Fly over the East Ukraine Warzone

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By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Source: Global Research

suuuu.si

On the matter of MH17’s flight path, Malaysian Airlines confirms that the pilot was instructed to fly at a lower altitude by the Kiev air traffic control tower upon its entry into Ukraine airspace.

 ”MH17 filed a flight plan requesting to fly at 35,000ft throughout Ukrainian airspace. This is close to the ‘optimum’ altitude.

However, an aircraft’s altitude in flight is determined by air traffic control on the ground. Upon entering Ukrainian airspace, MH17 was instructed by Ukrainian air traffic control to fly at 33,000ft.”

( For further details see press releases at : http://www.malaysiaairlines.com/my/en/site/mh17.html)

33,000 feet is 1000 feet above the restricted flight altitude (see image below). The request of the Ukrainian air traffic control authorities was implemented.

Deviation from the “Normal” Approved Flight Path

With regard to the MH17 flight path, Malaysian airlines confirms that it followed the rules set by Eurocontrol and the International Civil Aviation Authority  (ICAO) (emphasis added):

I would like to refer to recent reported comments by officials from Eurocontrol, the body which approves European flight paths under ICAO rules.According to the Wall Street Journal, the officials stated that some 400 commercial flights, including 150 international flights crossed eastern Ukraine daily before the crash. Officials from Eurocontrol also stated that in the two days before the incident, 75 different airlines flew the same route as MH17.MH17’s flight path was a busy major airway, like a highway in the sky. It followed a route which was set out by the international aviation authorities, approved by Eurocontrol, and used by hundreds of other aircraft.

It flew at an altitude set, and deemed safe, by the local air traffic control. And it never strayed into restricted airspace. [this MAS statement is refuted by recent evidence]

The flight and its operators followed the rules. But on the ground, the rules of war were broken. In an unacceptable act of aggression, it appears that MH17 was shot down; its passengers and crew killed by a missile.

The route over Ukrainian airspace where the incident occurred is commonly used for Europe to Asia flights. A flight from a different carrier was on the same route at the time of the MH17 incident, as were a number of other flights from other carriers in the days and weeks before. Eurocontrol maintains records of all flights across European airspace, including those across Ukraine.

What this statement confirms is that the MH17 ‘s “usual flight path” was similar to the flight paths of some 150 international flights which cross Eastern Ukraine on a daily basis. According to Malaysian Airlines “The usual flight route [across the sea of Azov] was earlier declared safe by the International Civil Aviation Organisation. The International Air Transportation Association has stated that the airspace the aircraft was traversing was not subject to restrictions.”

That approved flight path is indicated in the maps below.

The regular flight path of MH17 (and other international flights) over a period of ten days prior to July 17th ( day of the disaster), crossing Eastern Ukraine in a Southeasterly direction is across the Sea of Azov. (see map below)

–

The flight path on July 17th was changed.

The flight and its operators followed the rules. But on the ground, the rules of war were broken. In an unacceptable act of aggression, it appears that MH17 was shot down; its passengers and crew killed by a missile. (MAS, ibid)

While the audio records of the MH17 flight have been confiscated by the Kiev government, the order to change the flight path did not come from Eurocontrol.

Did this order to change the flight path come from the Ukrainian authorities? Was the pilot instructed to change course?

British Media: “Lets Conjure Up a Storm”

British news reports acknowledge that there was a change in the flight path, casually claiming without evidence that it was to “avoid thunderstorms in southern Ukraine”.

MAS operations director Captain Izham Ismail has also refuted claims that heavy weather led to MH17 changing its flight plan.“There were no reports from the pilot to suggest that this was the case,” Izham said. (News Malaysia   July 20, 2014)

What is significant, however, is that the Western media acknowledged tthat he change in the flight path did occur.

Ukraine Fighter Jets in a Corridor Reserved for Commercial Aircraft

It is worth noting that a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet equipped with air-to-air R-60 missiles was detected within 5-10 km of the Malaysian aircraft, within an air corridor reserved for commercial aircraft.

–Image courtesy of the Russian Defense Ministry

Image courtesy of the Russian Defense Ministry

What was the purpose of this air force deployment? Was the Ukraine fighter jet “escorting” the Malaysian aircraft in a Northerly direction towards the war zone?

The change in the flight path for Malaysian airlines MH17 on July 17 is clearly indicated in the map below. It takes MH17 over the war zone, namely Donetsk and Lugansk.

CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE

Comparison: MH17 Flight Path on July 16, 2014, MH17 Flight Path Over the warzone on July 17, 2014

IngoGraph

Screenshots of Flight Paths of MH17 for July 14-17, 2014

14th July Route15th July Route  16th July Route17th July Route

The first dynamic map compares the two flight paths: The second flight path which is that of July 17th takes the plane over the Donesk oblast warzone, bordering onto Lugansk oblast.

The four static images  indicate screen shots of the Flight Paths of MH17 for the period July 14-17, 2014

The information conveyed in these maps suggests that the flight path on July 17 was changed.

MH17 was diverted from the normal South Easterly route over the sea of Azov to a path over the Donetsk oblast.

Who ordered the change of  the flight path?

We call upon Malaysian Airlines to clarify its official statement and demand the release of the audio files between the pilot and the Kiev air traffic control tower.

The transcript of these audio files should be made public.

Also to be confirmed: was the Ukrainian SU-25 jet fighter in communication with the M17 aircraft?

The evidence confirms that the flight path on July 17th was NOT the usual approved flight path. It had been changed.

The change was not ordered by Eurocontrol.

Who was behind this changed flight path which spearheaded the aircraft into the war zone, resulting in 298 deaths?

What was the reason for the change in flight path?

The damage incurred to Malaysian Airlines as a result of these two tragic occurrences must also be addressed. Malaysian airlines has high safety standards and an outstanding record.

These two accidents are part of a criminal undertaking. They are not the result of negligence on the part of Malaysian Airlines, which potentially faces bankruptcy.