Government, Terrorism, Money, Education and Other Important Discussions

Posted on July 10, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Phillip J. Watt

The elite power structure – which uses the monetary system, war, false flags and the monopolized media as their primary mechanisms of control – has infiltrated every major government of the Western World. How do we know this? It’s simple; if they hadn’t been hijacked, then governments would have already begun a process of revolutionizing the way in which our societies are organized so that it benefits all of us, not just a select few.

The US Presidential race and two of its candidates have shown a small amount of hope for real change in America, something that not just its citizens desperately need, but the entire world too. Once the game is changed in the US – so that the government no longer works for those in control of the multinational and banking corporations – it will undoubtedly reverberate around the world.

Clinton is obviously a mouthpiece of the status quo and therefore cannot be trusted to enact real change. After all, she is an oligarch. On the other hand, Sanders and Trump appear to be anti-establishment, but are they really? It’s difficult to really know, because they could be controlled opposition. Yet even if they are separate to the existing order, can we really trust that they’ll do the job that the world’s peoples, and the environment, truly need?

Actions always speak louder than words, so regardless of the rhetoric of Trump and Sanders, does their policy agenda actually align to the truths that have been exposed by the many independent social researchers who are doing a wonderful job for the betterment of humanity?

Read below and decide for yourself.

The Real Policies for Change

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it reflects the fundamental shifts that we should be implementing in the short term to move into a new era of health and prosperity for humanity, and the environment we inhabit. In other words, these changes are the first essential steps if we want to overcome the dysfunction and deception that plague the hearts and minds of the people, as well as the systems that guide our collective activity.

If a political party or politician does not discuss these topics in general, then they are not aligned to the changes that we need, and therefore true progress. This is most likely because of two reasons; ignorance and/or corruption.

In any case, the exact way forward in each area is of course open for debate, but there must be an open and transparent dialogue held among the people. Simply, we all need to understand not just the issues, but the potential solutions to them.

This is obviously happening within conscious circles and progressive movements, however it’s not yet active within the mainstream mentality. This is just more evidence which illustrates that our politicians have failed us; that’s because it’s their job to bring these issues to the light of day so that everybody can participate in their resolution, if they so choose.

1. Monetary Policy: The way the economy is designed must rid society from the saturation of debt, move beyond indebtment to the oligarchs, cease the creation of fake currency by banks, overcome economic slavery by making the currency supply one of value and guarantee that local economies prosper.

2. Taxation Policy: The tax burden put on the people and the evasion of tax by multinational corporations needs to be resolved. One such method is abolishing all taxes and implementing a 2% debit-transaction taxso that citizens pay less tax, all individuals and businesses pay their fair share and there is an abundance of revenue to heal the wounds of a decaying society.

3. Budgeting Policy: Government revenues must be effectively and efficiently utilized to ensure the development of robust social services, increased wealth equality, the eradication of poverty, widespread sustainable practices, appropriate national defense programs and necessary infrastructure.

4. Defense and Foreign Policy: With unjust wars and false flag terrorism being the norm of the 21st Century, any decision to go to war must be sanctioned by the people via referendum. The reasons must be transparentally documented and validated as based in truth. All events at home and abroad that impact the decision-making of defense and foreign relations must be subject to robust and open investigations. Because national security is the first priority, all international relations should be treated diplomatically as the first line of defense.

5. Media Policy: The way in which information is disseminated throughout society must not be managed by monopolies, or a government. Media must be an open source platform where independent investigations are implemented and presented without bias. Any monopoly on the media must be disassembled so that the populace has unrestricted access to all the information necessary for the health and well-being of each individual and the community as a whole.

6. Education Policy: The way in which our children are educated is an indoctrination into the status quo, particularly economically and politically. The education system must therefore ensure that all children exercise their right to gain access to information that will help them to grow into healthy, happy and honorable adults, as well as question the way in which we organize society so that we can evolve it in alignment with our needs.

7. Governmental Policy: The amalgamation of government and business needs to be dissected. Politicians and bureaucrats are servants of the people and therefore must be representative of the needs and wants of the people. Moreover, government intervention of individual liberty and the free market must be also reduced.

8. Energy Policy: There is no longer any need to rely on fossil fuels, so creating the energy that society needs must be replaced with renewable resources – such as solar, air, water, wave, plant and free-energy technologies. Energy must also be made cheaply available to the public.

9. Health Policy: All foods and so-called medicines which impact the long-term health of the people must be labelled appropriately. Health programs that support emotional, psychological, philosophical, physical, spiritual, social and behavioral vitality must also be deeply embedded into schooling and other educational platforms. Holistic and preventative approaches to dis-ease must also be brought to the forefront of health education instead of relying on a symptomatic and prescriptive medical framework.

10. Medicine Policy: The pharmaceutical monopolies must be transformed into meeting the needs of the people, not shareholders and their profits. All natural and cheap remedies to disease – such as plant-based medicines and meditation – must be fully documented and reincorporated back into health education.

11. Housing Policy: Every person has a right to live in safe, comfortable and affordable housing. No individual should be homeless, unless by choice. Employment and Housing Policy must also be designed to ensure that the purchase of land is affordable and achievable for all.

12. Food Policy: The damaging impacts of industrial agriculture on earth’s natural systems, as well as the erosion of local economies (which is the direct result of trade agreements that primarily benefit the multinationals), needs to be reversed. One such way is by replacing it with a localized/regionalized Permaculture model where individuals and communities are supported to grow their own produce. This will help to increase local employment, as well as reconnect people to nature, the food they eat and their health requirements. In addition, all foods must be properly labelled and contain no toxic ingredients. GMOs must also be abandoned and organic foods must be readily available.

13. Water Policy: All citizens have a right to access safe and clean water. They should be supported to capture their own water needs. Where this is not possible, no toxins such as fluoride will be added to the water supply.

14. Animal Policy: All animal agriculture systems must respect the health and happiness of those animals. They must not subject them to any conditions in which they consistently suffer. One particular approach would be to incorporate it into a widespread permaculture model, in which animals are treated humanely.

15. Environmental Policy: Any practice that is environmentally unsustainable and negatively impacts the health and diversity of our natural systems is to be transformed into the opposite. The increasing extinction of animal and plant life must be reversed, as well as the trends of deforestation, ocean acidification and desertification.

16. Drug Policy: The war-on-drugs has been an epic failure because it has generated more crime, addiction, mental health problems and sent the market underground. It has also stigmatized the natural right to explore one’s own body and consciousness. The therapeutic and developmental aspects of so-called illegal drugs must be holistically researched so that society can be educated on both their positive and negative impacts. All illegal substances must be made legal, as they have begun to do in some countries, and a thoroughly-informed society must have safe access to pure substances for their own therapeutic, developmental and leisurely needs.

17. Sovereignty Policy: All citizens have natural rights, some of which have eroded through the recent policies of Western Governments. One example is privacy and another is the right to protest. This stripping of our rights needs to immediately stop and all rights aligned with natural law are to be reintroduced. No flesh and blood person should be treated as a legal fiction that works for a corporation impersonating as a government. This means that no legislation can impede on the natural laws that all individuals have a right to exercise.

18. Immunization Policy: All vaccines must be robustly studied independent of the pharmaceutical industry and the results made available to the public. All previous disease and death resulting from vaccines must also be publicly available. None will contain any ingredients other than to immunize against a specific disease. In addition, no child or adult will be forced or coerced into taking vaccines; every person must have their natural right to choose intact.

19. Atmospheric Policy: All geoengineering and chemical spraying programs are to immediately cease. The impacts that these programs have already had on the health of humanity, as well as the environment, must be holistically investigated and reversed.

20. Social Security Policy: Pensioners, people with a disability and other persons who require financial support must be treated with respect and must be able to comfortably live above the poverty line. Where possible, they will be supported to increase their education, training and skills so that they reenter the workforce. There should also be widespread volunteering programs with inherent incentives so the knowledge, skills and services of the elderly can be utilized for the benefit of the community.

Further Thoughts

There are many more areas that need to evolve, but its important to focus on the priorities in such as short piece. No doubt, many of you reading this would have been shocked and confused by some of the information herein. You might have even rejected elements to it, because it might have seemed too conspiratorial or challenging to believe. That’s okay; every single one of us who have woken up to these realities felt the same the first time we heard them too.

In any case, if you’d like to do follow up research, the links provided above will help you to initiate the process. Go deep too; it’s only when we individually undertake our own independent and robust research that we can come to a solid understanding of the true state of the world. The tip of course is to not be fooled by the propaganda narratives of the matrix-media and ensure we undertake research through the independent channels and progressive social researchers.

Furthermore, the above plans of attack are designed for the short to mid term. This does not discount the deeper agenda of moving from an economy of scarcity, to one of abundance. There are many models to achieve this, such as several resource-based economies, but until we build the foundations and start moving in that direction we have to work with what’s in front of us, right now.

In addition, of course it’s necessary to build new systems outside of the existing model to make the old ones redundant, yet we still need to use the systems that we’ve got and aim to transform society from within. After all, a balanced and holistic approach, is always the right approach.

Final Thoughts

Never has a government exposed all of the above issues. They might touch on some of them to some degree, but unfortunately we don’t have so-called leaders who actually call out the real challenges that we collectively face. There’s no doubt that some politicians know about these actualities, but the reality is they don’t publicly disclose it in fear of losing their credibility, or their livelihood.

But things are changing. Not only are more and more people joining the awakening community by educating themselves and taking action in response to these dysfunctions, but there are also political parties forming who dare to expose these truths to their audience and design robust policies in response. One such group is The Australian Sovereignty Party (ASP); in fact, many of the links above will direct you to the policies they’ve designed to rectify the failures of past governments.

Many parties around the world could learn a thing or two from this political force.

If you’re Australian, I highly encourage you to read the policy material at their website and join if their ethos resonates with you. Any person from around the world can join as an affiliate member too, so anyone is more than welcome to sign up to learn about how a true political party works. In addition, share this article and the ASPs progressive policies among your friends and family so that the momentum builds to bring Australians (and others) up-to-date with a political outfit that actually represents the real needs of you, me and all of us.

If you also believe in transforming our world into a better place, then at the very least research their policies. I know you’ll be pleasantly surprised (view their website here and follow them on facebook here). Furthermore, following is an interview I did with the President of the ASP, Daniel Huppert. In it he discusses many of the issues found in this article and the ASPs policy response to them. Enjoy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phillip J. Watt lives in Australia. His written work deals with topics from ideology to society, as well as self-development. Follow him on Facebook or visit his website.

Welcome to the Empire of Chaos

Posted on July 4, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Ulson Gunnar

Source: New Eastern Outlook

When globe-trotting journalist and keen geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar refers to the United States as the “Empire of Chaos,” it may seem like hyperbole. But upon looking deeper at both Escobar’s coverage and the United States’ foreign policy itself, it is perhaps the most accurate title for this political entity and its means of operation, perhaps more apt than the name “The United States” itself.

In the wake of World War II, the US and its allies set out upon the reclamation of the West’s lost colonies, many of which took advantage of Europe’s infighting to either establish independence from their long-standing colonial masters, or begin the conflicts that would inevitably lead toward independence.

Perhaps the most well-known of these conflicts was the Vietnam War. The United States would involve itself in the dissolution of French Indochina at the cost of some 4 million lives in a conflict that would embroil not only Vietnam, but much of Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Covert coups and brutal insurgencies were underwritten by Washington across the planet, from the Middle East to South and Central America. And while this too seems chaotic, the goal always seemed to be the destruction of independent states, and the creation of viable client states.

These client states included the Shah’s Iran, Saudi Arabia, much, if not all of Western Europe and even to varying degrees, some of the enduring autocracies of the Middle East until for one reason or another they fell out of favor with Washington. The idea was to create an international order built upon the concept of globalization.

Globalization was meant to be a system of vast interdependencies governed by international institutions created by and for the United States and more specifically, the special interests that have long since co-opted America’s destiny.

However, the concept of globalization seems to have neglected any anticipation for rapid technological advances in both terms of information technology and manufacturing. There are very few real interdependencies left to stitch this vision of globalization together with many of them being artificially maintained at increasing costs. The idea of using sanctions to ‘starve’ a nation by isolating it from this global order has been exposed as more or less impotent by nations like Iran and North Korea who have sustained themselves for decades despite everything besides air and gravity being denied to them.

Indeed, nations understand the value of self-sufficiency in both terms of politics and the basic necessities which constitute any state’s infrastructure. Russia’s recent encounter with Western sanctions has caused it to look not only eastward, but inward, to secure its interests and to transcend sanctions wholly dependent on the concept of “globalization.”

As this “carrot and stick” method of working the world into Wall Street and Washington’s international order becomes less effective, some of the uglier and less elegant tools of the West’s geopolitical trade have taken a more prominent role on the global stage. It appears that if the West cannot rule this international order built upon the concepts of globalization, it will rule an international order built on chaos.

The Empire of Chaos

The unipolar geopolitical concepts that underpin globalization have eroded greatly. Nations no longer have to pick between an existence of lonely isolation and socioeconomic atrophy or subordination within this international order. Instead, they can pick to associate with the growing community of what the West calls “rogue states.” So large has this list grown that the US may soon find itself and Western Europe the last remaining members of its failed international order.

The real danger for an aspiring global empire is to find a planet that has suddenly begun to move in tandem out from under its shadow and moving on without them in relative peace and prosperity. To prevent this from happening we have seen a concerted effort focused on disrupting and destroying this emerging multi-polar world.

In Europe, the refugee crisis is being used to polarize European society and allow governments to increase their power domestically and further justify wars abroad. Along Western Europe’s borders, facing Russia, a relative stable balancing act maintained by former Soviet territories attempting to benefit from associating with both East and West has been turned into outright war.

Throughout North Africa and the Middle East, any nation that even so much as slightly resembles a sovereign nation state has been undermined and attempts to violently overthrow them pursued. The goal is no longer to create viable client states, but rather to Balkanize and leave them in ruins so as to never contest Western ambitions in the region again. This can be observed clearly in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen where none of the groups backed by the US and its allies could ever realistically run a functioning nation state.

And in Asia, in state after state, those leading political parties marked by Washington for future client status are being removed from power and their leaders, long backed by the US, being either exiled or jailed.

Where these political gambits are crumbling, a steady stream of violence perpetrated by terrorist groups not even indigenous to the region has begun to build in strength.

Divide and Conquer

Divide and conquer is a geopolitical maxim that has served as empire’s bread and butter since the beginning of recorded human civilization. When the British could not subdue a targeted territory just beyond the grasp of its empire, it would divide and destroy them. A ruined nation that can be plundered and trampled may not be as desirable as a loyal client state run by a British viceroy, but it is better than a pocket of national sovereignty serving as an example for others of the merits of resisting “Great Britain.”

Today, it is clear that the idea of creating a client state in the midst of a general public increasingly aware of the features and fixations of modern empire is becoming ever more tenuous. Such client states are less likely to be accepted by a local population who, with minimum effort, can put up significant resistance against even the best funded of foreign proxies.

Globalism required more and more illusions to convince people they needed a global system controlled by far-off special interests to do what can now be done through advances in technology nationally and even locally. Now all that is left is the sowing of chaos to prevent people from leveraging this technology nationally and locally, to keep them divided and distracted for as long as possible, to perpetuate the West’s global hegemony for as long as possible.

Moving Beyond the Chaos

An empire built on chaos is not meant to last. Chaos, like the international order of globalization that preceded it, requires illusions and manipulation to perpetuate itself. Unfortunately, stirring chaos among a population is a lot easier than convincing them of the non-existent interdependencies of globalization.

Nations leading the way out of this chaos include those who have suffered the most because of it. Their leaders have realized the necessity of closing off the vectors through which the West feeds this chaos within their borders, which include socioeconomic disparity, foreign-funded propaganda, foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and of course extremist groups used to carry out the actual terrorism and agitation required to create the worst sort of chaos.

Russia and China in particular have been busy creating alternatives not only for the remnants of the West’s globalization racket, but alternatives for the unipolar world the West was trying to create. They are both looking within and across their borders to create a patchwork of nations ready to move beyond the chaos and toward a more widespread balance of power.

By in turn, placing sanctions on the West, Russia is forcing itself to not only produce raw materials for export, but to become a more capable producer of finished goods. By doing so, Russia has begun a process that turns America’s sanctions game back onto itself. While many believe Washington drives American policy, it is unrealistic to discount Wall Street’s role. By cutting the corporations trading on Wall Street down to size, one cuts down their unwarranted power they wield on the global stage.

Nations choosing to trade rather than being forced to because of an ungainly system of globalization ensures that any given people have more control over not only what they buy and sell, but how and where their natural resources are used.

With the Empire of Chaos in terminal decline and with a new multi-polar order emerging, the only question left to ask is; will chaos spread and destroy faster than this new multi-polar order can be built? It is certainly a close race pushing both sides into acts of increasingly unimaginable confrontation.

How The Deep State’s Two-Dimensional Engineered Reality Actually Works

Posted on June 12, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Bernie Suarez

Source: Waking Times

It is refreshing to see more and more of humanity wake up to the functional real-time political reality of the world we now live in. There are many human beings throughout the planet who now understand that corruption has taken over. They understand that criminals run the world. They understand that in America a powerful ruling elite bought out politicians and corporations to get what they want. They understand that the ruling elite operate in networks that transcend the boundaries of nation states in an agenda intended to lead to global domination using their military might.

People are understanding that government propaganda is real, and that the U.S. government has gotten away with one false flag attack on its own people after another; 9/11 being just one of them, all for the purposes of justifying endless war. People also understand that the war on terror, which was ushered in by 9/11, is a lie and that because of this phony war on terror the Pentagon and U.S. military is swimming in billions of dollars of free money to do whatever they want. But what does all of this mean? Do we really understand how they’ve done it and how all of this works?

In 1999 Directors Andy and Lana Wachowski brought us an interesting film called The Matrix which nicely depicts how two alternate realities simultaneously exist: one in which the people in it have no clue what is real and what is not because the sum of the two-dimensional parts they are exposed to seems real, even though it’s not, and another reality where you are irreversibly awakened from that fictional reality.

Over the past 17+ years since the release of The Matrix film many people have awakened to the political reality we live in. For many people it is not difficult to see the parallels between the world we live in and the world depicted in The Matrix. We can see that there is an artificial reality in play that looks and feels real, but it is not. It’s a system designed to keep you enslaved, keep you disempowered, keep you in fear and keep you dependent on big government for survival. Most importantly it’s a system designed to keep itself in power and to preserve whatever agenda it has. Ultimately, this artificial reality is tending towards a global order where the ruling elite hope to absolutely control humanity forever in a way that is absolutely and uncompromisingly in line with their wishes.

The question we should be asking is, How does this matrix work and how does it relate to the three-dimensional physical reality we live in? To answer that, the concept of the “Deep State” was originally proposed to describe the political corruption in Turkey as a secret state acting within a state.

Though we had been warned about these ruling elite, banksters and shadow government by previous presidents going back 200+ years, following the post 9/11 period more and more people began wrapping this concept around their heads. To many, the idea of a group of elite running the world, deemed for years by the U.S. mainstream media and propaganda machine as lunatic “conspiracy theories”, suddenly didn’t seem so crazy after all. Today the concept of a “Deep State,” perhaps because of its roots in Turkey, is much more believable and is seen as more plausible.

In an interview for his book The Road to 9/11, author Peter Dale Scott describes the “Deep State” saying:

It refers to a parallel secret government, organized by the intelligence and security apparatus, financed by drugs, and engaging in illicit violence, to protect the status and interests of the military against threats from intellectuals, religious groups, and occasionally the constitutional government. In this book, I adapt the term somewhat to refer to the wider interface in America between the public, the constitutionally established state, and the deep forces behind it of wealth, power, and violence outside the government. You might call it the back door of the Public state, giving access to dark forces outside the law.

Since the publishing of Scott’s book, the term “Deep State” has gained increased attention and now serves as a practical model to describe how the shadow government operates.

And as humanity continues to awaken to the political reality that surrounds us, the concept of the Deep State becomes more a reality and much less fictional than the idea of the “matrix”, though these two are very intricately related as we’ll see.

The Matrix refers to the illusory engineered pseudo-reality that many people live in. The Deep State is the apparatus that allows that engineered and artificial two-dimension reality to be put out by the control system for daily consumption by the masses.

In order to appreciate this relationship consider the quote from former CIA director William Casey in 1981 when he said that:

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

This is an example of how the Deep State, which is led by Intelligence and their control and manipulation of news, is at the root of the creation of the false engineered world of lies that many people live in. As we can see by the Casey comment, the goal is not to tell a few lies but to actually create an entire reality based on those lies (think Sandy Hook, Bin Laden death hoax, etc).

Manufacturing the 2-Dimensional Reality

What many people don’t realize is that this false world of lies and deceit which is presented to the masses as “reality” is nothing more than a series of two-dimensional items strung together by the controlled media to create an artificial reality. Like the individual frames in a movie reel, each frame seems insignificant until you look at all the frames in a timed sequence. The sequential frames then present an artificial perceived reality.

This is the reason why every time the controllers pull off a staged crisis actor event or a false flag attack like 9/11, those defending the event including the media never seem to think it’s important to provide actual evidence for their claims. That’s because the three-dimensional evidence that truth seekers ask for always conflicts with the two-dimensional presentation they are putting out. The organic presentation of the truth itself, however, is never two-dimensional. It is actual, concrete, multi-dimensional truth which can be reasonably, logically and scientifically verified in real-time on multiple levels and reproduced endlessly without government interference due to its realistic and often simplistic nature.

This is why the demand for “proof” of government and mainstream media claims surrounding false flags and staged events always tends to become the thing that gets truth seekers demonized, attacked, accused, and even profiled as a “harassers” and criminals.

I recently wrote about the attack on Truth that we are seeing today and how it’s not just Truth that is under attack but the very search for Truth. That’s because today, searching for truth is a direct threat to the Deep State, it’s hypnotic control of the masses and its web of lies that make up the matrix, which in turn is keeping people enslaved.

The last thing the ruling oligarchs want is for people to wake up from the matrix of lies which the Deep State has put in place. Thus identifying the Deep State then logically becomes the first step in all of this. Most people in the U.S. don’t realize the degree to which the CIA and the Pentagon are secretly controlling the illusion of government. Even in an election year like 2016, Americans continue to believe the illusion of choice and Democracy which is actually one of the most important features to the operation of the Deep State.

As I’ve written about recently, in 2016 too many Americans are going in circles, like Groundhog Day, believing the same exact lies and promises told to them by the puppet politicians who are running for president, not realizing that this is precisely how the Deep State works. They put out their puppets and pseudo-promises, they ratchet up the campaign hoopla, and they have the candidates tell you anything you want to hear before they select their next puppet president mouthpiece.

Though most Americans know full well that to repeatedly do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results constitutes insanity, they do this very thing each time a presidential election year comes around. These same Americans witness this process with their own eyes every 4 years; another election, another president, the same results.

The result every time is more war, billions of dollars to the Pentagon slush fund, more false flags to justify more wars, more corruption and less accountability from government officials who get caught lying and committing crimes, more lies and propaganda sold to us by CIA’s mainstream media, more police state and tyranny against the people, less freedoms, more staged mass shootings, more globalization and illegal trade agreements, more medical and scientific fraud and false claims to feed the pockets of the pharmaceutical industries and vaccine industries, and, among other things, bigger steps to get us closer and closer to the permanent establishment of a new world order to be sold as United Nations’ “sustainable” living and “global peace and prosperity.”

It is incredible to think that at the smallest level, all of this is possible because unaware and naive Americans continue to believe the phony, artificial and engineered two-dimensional reality presented to them every day by mainstream media and Hollywood. They continue to misconstrue fiction for reality.

That simple inability to discern two-dimensional proof of a claim (a picture, a video, an empty claim by mainstream media or politicians) from three-dimensional proof (all the factors that make a story true including the full collection of physical, and scientific easily reproducible proof, real non-crisis actor eyewitnesses, real blood, real logical spontaneously captured sequences of events, open investigations, etc.) now threatens the survival of the human race and is dooming humanity to a potentially very dark future. This is a future which only those who are awakened to the difference between the presented two-dimensional reality and the actual three-dimensional reality, can potentially save humanity from.

Because this is so, those who realize the reality of the Deep State are therefore the greatest threat to the plans of the ruling elite who run the Deep State. This is why so many online trolls and shills are actually paid to spread State propaganda, lies, create division, insert doubt about topics and post State-sponsored “rebuttals” to key arguments on blog sites and social media. This is why they are fighting so hard to control the Internet, to criminalize activists, and to profile them as “domestic extremists”. This is also why sports fans are mesmerized with pro-military propaganda commercials and fake military worship pre-game ceremonies. This is why so many video games have pro-military and pro-war components to them. This is also why America is always told to “honor” the military. That’s because the military and the Intelligence is the enforcement arm of this evil Deep State. But they do know that as long as they deliver you entertainment, laughter and fun times, you’ll never question what or who the Deep State is. To the blind sheep it’s not something worth interrupting their life to believe, to try to recognize or to find answers for.

In the end, you can call it whatever you want but it’s still the matrix of lies we live in. It operates simultaneously with reality. It looks, feels and tastes real even though it is not. Can you taste it? Can you feel it? It’s all around us as we speak, but whether you see it for what it is, is entirely up to you.

Keep Fear Alive

Posted on May 31, 2016 by Reid Mukai

The bald-eagle boondoggle of the terror wars

By Kade Crockford

Source: The Baffler

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

—Thomas Fuentes, former assistant director, FBI Office of International Operations

Can we imagine a free and peaceful country? A civil society that recognizes rights and security as complementary forces, rather than polar opposites? Terrorist attacks frighten us, as they are designed to. But when terrorism strikes the United States, we’re never urged to ponder the most enduring fallout from any such attack: our own government’s prosecution of the Terror Wars.

This failure generates all sorts of accompanying moral confusion. We cast ourselves as good, but our actions show that we are not. We rack up a numbing litany of decidedly uncivil abuses of basic human rights: global kidnapping and torture operations, gulags in which teenagers have grown into adulthood under “indefinite detention,” the overthrow of the Iraqi and Libyan governments, borderless execution-by-drone campaigns, discriminatory domestic police practices, dragnet surveillance, and countless other acts of state impunity.

The way we process the potential cognitive dissonance between our professed ideals and our actual behavior under the banner of freedom’s supposed defense is simply to ignore things as they really are. They hate us for our freedom, screech the bald-eagle memes, and so we must solemnly fight on. But what, beneath the official rhetoric of permanent fear, explains the collective inability of the national security overlords to imagine a future of peace?

Incentives, for one thing. In a perverse but now familiar pattern, what we have come to call “intelligence failures” produce zero humility, and no promise of future remedies, among those charged with guarding us. Instead, a new array of national security demands circulate, which are always rapidly met. In America, the gray-haired representatives of the permanent security state say their number one responsibility is to protect us, but when they fail to do so, they go on television and growl. To take but one recent example, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared before the morally bankrupt pundit panel on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to explain that intractable ethnic, tribal, and religious conflict has riven the Middle East for more than a century—the United States, and the West at large, were mere hapless bystanders in this long-running saga of civilizational decay. This sniveling performance came, mind you, just days after Politico reported that, while choreographing the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld had quietly buried a report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff indicating that military intelligence officials had almost no persuasive evidence that Saddam Hussein was maintaining a serious WMD program. Even after being forced to resign in embarrassment over the botched Iraq invasion a decade ago, Rumsfeld continues to cast himself as an earnestly outmanned casualty of Oriental cunning and backbiting while an indulgent clutch of cable talking heads nods just as earnestly along.

And the same refrain echoes throughout the echelons of the national security state. Self-assured and aloof as the affluenza boy, the FBI, CIA, and NSA fuck up, and then immediately apply for a frenzied transfer of ever more money, power, and data in order to do more of what they’re already doing. Nearly fifteen years after the “Global War on Terror” began, the national security state is a trillion-dollar business. And with the latest, greatest, worst-ever terrorist threat always on the horizon, business is sure to keep booming.

The paradox produces a deep-state ouroboros: Successful terrorist attacks against the West do not provoke accountability reviews or congressional investigations designed to truly understand or correct the errors of the secret state. On the contrary, arrogant spies and fearful politicians exploit the attacks to cement and expand their authority. This permits them, in turn, to continue encroaching on the liberties they profess to defend. We hear solemn pledges to collect yet more information, to develop “back doors” to decrypt private communications, to keep better track of Muslims on visas, send more weapons to unnamed “rebel groups,” drop more cluster bombs. Habeas corpus, due process, equal protection, freedom of speech, and human rights be damned. And nearly all the leaders in both major political parties play along, like obliging extras on a Morning Joe panel. The only real disagreement between Republican and Democratic politicians on the national stage is how quickly we should dispose of our civil liberties. Do we torch the Bill of Rights à la Donald Trump and Dick Cheney, or apply a scalpel, Obama-style?

Safety Last

Both Democrats and Republicans justify Terror War abuses by telling the public, either directly or indirectly, that our national security hangs in the balance. But national security is not the same as public safety. And more: the things the government has done in the name of preserving national security—from invading Iraq to putting every man named Mohammed on a special list—actually undermine our public safety.

That’s because, as David Talbot demonstrates in The Devil’s Chessboard, his revelatory Allen Dulles biography and devastating portrait of a CIA run amok, national security centers on “national interests,” which translates, in the brand of Cold War realpolitik that Dulles pioneered, into the preferred policy agendas of powerful corporations.

Public safety, on the other hand, is concerned with whether you live or die, and how. Any serious effort at public safety requires a harm-reduction approach acknowledging straight out that no government program can foreclose the possibility of terroristic violence. The national security apparatus, by contrast, grows powerful in direct proportion to the perceived strength of the terrorist (or in yesterday’s language, the Communist) threat—and requires that you fear this threat so hysterically that you release your grip on reason. Reason tells you government cannot protect us from every bad thing that happens. But the endlessly repeated national security meme pretends otherwise, though the world consistently proves it wrong.

When it comes to state action, the most important distinction between what’s good for public safety (i.e., your health) and what’s good for national security (i.e., the health of the empire, markets, and prominent corporations) resides in the concept of the criminal predicate. This means, simply, that an agent of the government must have some reasonable cause to believe you are involved with a crime before launching an investigation into your life. When the criminal predicate forms the basis for state action, police and spies are required to focus on people they have reason to believe are up to no good. Without the criminal predicate, police and spies are free to monitor whomever they want. Police action that bypasses criminal predicates focuses on threats to people and communities that threaten power—regardless of whether those threats to power are fully legal and legitimate.

Nearly fifteen years after the “Global War on Terror” began, the national security state is a trillion-dollar business.

We can see the results of this neglect everywhere the national security state has set up shop. Across the United States right now, government actors and private contractors paid with public funds are monitoring the activities of dissidents organizing to end police brutality and the war on drugs, Israeli apartheid and colonization in Palestine, U.S. wars in the Middle East, and Big Oil’s assault on our physical environment. In the name of fighting terrorism, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, which gave state and local law enforcement billions of dollars to integrate police departments into the national intelligence architecture. As a result, we now have nearly a million cops acting as surrogates for the FBI. But as countless studies have shown, the “fusion centers” and intelligence operations that have metastasized under post-9/11 authorities do nothing to avert the terror threat. Instead, they’ve targeted dissidents for surveillance, obsessive documentation, and even covert infiltration. When government actors charged with protecting us use their substantial power and resources to track and disrupt Black Lives Matter and Earth First! activists, they are not securing our liberties; they’re putting them in mortal peril.

Things weren’t always like this. Once upon a time, America’s power structure was stripped naked. When the nation saw the grotesque security cancer that had besieged the body politic in the decades after World War II (just as Harry Truman had warned it would) the country’s elected leadership reasserted control, placing handcuffs on the wrists of the security agencies. This democratic counterattack on the national security state not only erected a set of explicit protocols to shield Americans from unconstitutional domestic political policing, but also advanced public safety.

Mission Creeps

As late as the 1970s, the FBI was still universally thought to be a reputable organization in mainstream America. The dominant narrative held that J. Edgar Hoover’s capable agents, who had to meet his strict height, weight, and dress code requirements, were clean-cut, straight-laced men who followed the rules. Of course, anyone involved with the social movements of that age—anti-war, Communist, Black Power, American Indian, Puerto Rican Independence—knew a very different FBI, but they had no evidence to prove what they could see and feel all around them. And since this was the madcap 1970s, the disparity between the FBI’s glossy reputation as honest crusaders and its actual dirty fixation on criminalizing the exercise of domestic liberties drove a Pennsylvania college physics professor and anti-war activist named William Davidon to take an extraordinary action. On the night of the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier fight of March 8, 1971, Davidon and some friends broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. They stole every paper file they could get their hands on. In communiqués to the press, to which they attached some of the most explosive of the Hoover files, they called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.

Not one of the costly post-9/11 surveillance programs based on suspicionless, warrantless monitoring stopped Tsarnaev from blowing up the marathon.

When Davidon and his merry band of robbers broke into the FBI office, they blew the lid off of decades of secret—and sometimes deadly—police activity that targeted Black and Brown liberation organizers in the name of fighting the Soviet red menace. According to Noam Chomsky, the Citizens’ Commission concluded that the vast majority of the files at the FBI’s Media, Pennsylvania, office concerned political spying rather than criminal matters. Of the investigative files, only 16 percent dealt with crimes. The rest described FBI surveillance of political organizations and activists—overwhelmingly of the left-leaning variety—and Vietnam War draft resisters. As Chomsky wrote, “in the case of a secret terrorist organization such as the FBI,” it was impossible to know whether these Pennsylvania figures were representative of the FBI’s national mandate. But for Bill Davidon and millions of Americans—including many in Congress who were none too pleased with the disclosures—these files shattered Hoover’s image as a just-the-facts G-man. They proved that the FBI was not a decent organization dedicated to upholding the rule of law and protecting the United States from foreign communist threats, but rather a domestic political police primarily concerned with preserving the racist, sexist, imperialist status quo.

In a cascade of subsequent transparency efforts, journalists, activists, and members of Congress all probed the darker areas of the national security state, uncovering assassination plots against foreign leaders, dragnet surveillance programs, and political espionage targeting American dissidents under the secret counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO. Not since the birth of the U.S. deep state, with the 1947 passage of the National Security Act, had the activities of the CIA, FBI, or NSA been so publicly or thoroughly examined and contested.

Subsequent reforms included the implementation of new attorney general’s guidelines for domestic investigations, which, for the first time in U.S. history, required FBI agents to suspect someone of a crime before investigating them. Under the 1976 Levi guidelines, named for their author, Nixon attorney general Edward Levi, the FBI could open a full domestic security investigation against someone only if its agents had “specific and articulable facts giving reason to believe that an individual or group is or may be engaged in activities which involve the use of force or violence.” The criminal predicate was now engraved in the foundations of the American security state—and the Levi rules prompted a democratic revolution in law enforcement and intelligence circles. It would take decades and three thousand dead Americans for the spies to win back their old Hoover-era sense of indomitable mission—and their investigative MO of boundless impunity.

False Flags

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began Hoovering up our private records in powerful, secret dragnets. When we finally learned about the warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, it was a national scandal. But just as important, and much less discussed, was the abolition of Levi’s assertion of the criminal predicate. So-called domestic terrorism investigations would be treated principally as intelligence or espionage cases—not criminal ones. This shift has had profound, if almost universally ignored, implications.

Michael German, an FBI agent for sixteen years working undercover in white supremacist organizations to identify and arrest terrorists, saw firsthand what the undoing of the 1970s intelligence reforms meant for the FBI. And German argues, persuasively, that the eradication of the criminal predicate didn’t just put Americans at risk of COINTELPRO 2.0. It also threatened public safety. The First and Fourth Amendments, which protect, respectively, our rights to speech and association and our right to privacy, don’t just create the conditions for political freedom; they also help law enforcement focus, laser-like, on people who have the intent, the means, and the plans to harm the rest of us.

Think of it like this, German told me: You’re an FBI agent tasked with infiltrating a radical organization that promotes violence as a means of achieving its political goals—the Ku Klux Klan, for example. KKK members say horrible and disgusting things. But saying disgusting things isn’t against the law; nor, as numerous studies have shown, is it a reliable predictor of whether the speaker will commit an act of political violence. When surrounded by white supremacists constantly spouting hate speech, a law enforcement officer has to block it out. If he investigates people based on their rhetoric, his investigations will lead nowhere. After all, almost no white supremacist seriously intending to carry out a terrorist attack is all that likely to broadcast that intent in public. (Besides, have you noticed how many Americans routinely say disgusting things?)

Today, more than a decade after it shrugged off the Levi guidelines, the FBI conducts mass surveillance directed at the domestic population. But dragnet surveillance, however much it protects “national security,” doesn’t increase public safety, as two blue-ribbon presidential studies have in recent years concluded. Indeed, the Boston bombings, the Paris attacks, and the San Bernardino and Planned Parenthood shootings have all made the same basic point in the cold language of death. The national security state has an eye on everyone, including the people FBI director James Comey refers to as “the bad guys.” But despite its seeming omniscience, the Bureau does not stop those people from killing the rest of us in places where we are vulnerable.

The curious case of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev demonstrates the strange consequences of sidelining criminal investigations for national security needs. In 2011, about eighteen months before the bombings, Tsarnaev’s best friend and two other men were murdered in a grisly suburban scene in Waltham, Massachusetts—their throats slashed, marijuana sprinkled on their mutilated corpses. These murders were never solved. But days after the marathon bombings, law enforcement leaked that they had forensic and cellphone location evidence tying Tamerlan Tsarnaev to those unsolved crimes. Not one of the costly post-9/11 surveillance programs based on suspicionless, warrantless monitoring stopped Tsarnaev from blowing up the marathon. But if the police leaks were correct in assigning him responsibility for the 2011 murders, plain old detective work likely would have.

If security agencies truly want to stop terrorism, they should eliminate all domestic monitoring that targets people who are not suspected of crimes. This would allow agents to redirect space and resources now devoted to targeting Muslims and dissidents into serious investigations of people actually known to be dangerous. It’s the only reasonable answer to the befuddling question: Why is it that so many of these terrorists succeed in killing people even though their names are on government lists of dangerous men?

After the terrorist attacks in November, the French government obtained greater emergency powers in the name of protecting a fearful public. Besides using those powers to round up hundreds of Muslims without evidence or judicial oversight, French authorities also put at least twenty-four climate activists on house arrest ahead of the Paris Climate Change Conference—an approach to squashing dissent that didn’t exactly scream liberté, and had nothing to do with political violence. As with the Boston Marathon and countless other attacks on Western targets, the men who attacked the Bataclan were known to intelligence agencies. In May 2015, months before the attacks in Paris, French authorities gained sweeping new surveillance powers authorizing them to monitor the private communications of suspected terrorists without judicial approval. The expanded surveillance didn’t protect the people of Paris. In France, as in the United States, the devolution of democratic law enforcement practice has opened up space that’s filled with political spying and methods of dragnet monitoring that enable social and political control. This is not only a boondoggle for unaccountable administrators of mass surveillance; it also obstructs the kind of painstaking detective work that might have prevented the attacks on the Bataclan and the marathon.

Our imperial government won’t ever admit this, but we must recognize that the best method for stopping terrorism before it strikes is to stop engaging in it on a grand scale. Terrorist attacks are the price we pay for maintaining a global empire—for killing a million Iraqis in a war based on lies, for which we have never apologized or made reparations, and for continuing to flood the Middle East with weapons. No biometrics program, no database, no algorithm, no airport security system will protect us from ourselves.

The U.S. Military Suffers from Affluenza

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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Showering the Pentagon with Money and Praise

By William J. Astore

Source: TomDispatch.com

The word “affluenza” is much in vogue. Lately, it’s been linked to a Texas teenager, Ethan Couch, who in 2013 killed four people in a car accident while driving drunk. During the trial, a defense witness argued that Couch should not be held responsible for his destructive acts. His parents had showered him with so much money and praise that he was completely self-centered; he was, in other words, a victim of affluenza, overwhelmed by a sense of entitlement that rendered him incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. Indeed, the judge at his trial sentenced him only to probation, not jail, despite the deaths of those four innocents.

Experts quickly dismissed “affluenza” as a false diagnosis, a form of quackery, and indeed the condition is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association. Yet the word caught on big time, perhaps because it speaks to something in the human condition, and it got me to thinking. During Ethan Couch’s destructive lifetime, has there been an American institution similarly showered with money and praise that has been responsible for the deaths of innocents and inadequately called to account? Is there one that suffers from the institutional version of affluenza (however fuzzy or imprecise that word may be) so much that it has had immense difficulty shouldering the blame for its failures and wrongdoing?

The answer is hidden in plain sight: the U.S. military. Unlike Couch, however, that military has never faced trial or probation; it hasn’t felt the need to abscond to Mexico or been forcibly returned to the homeland to face the music.

Spoiling the Pentagon

First, a caveat. When I talk about spoiling the Pentagon, I’m not talking about your brother or daughter or best friend who serves honorably. Anyone who’s braving enemy fire while humping mountains in Afghanistan or choking on sand in Iraq is not spoiled.

I’m talking about the U.S. military as an institution. Think of the Pentagon and the top brass; think of Dwight Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex; think of the national security state with all its tentacles of power. Focus on those and maybe you’ll come to agree with my affluenza diagnosis.

Let’s begin with one aspect of that affliction: unbridled praise. In last month’s State of the Union address, President Obama repeated a phrase that’s become standard in American political discourse, as common as asking God to bless America. The U.S. military, he said, is the “finest fighting force in the history of the world.”

Such hyperbole is nothing new. Five years ago, in response to similar presidential statements, I argued that many war-like peoples, including the imperial Roman legions and Genghis Khan’s Mongol horsemen, held far better claims to the “best ever” Warrior Bowl trophy. Nonetheless, the over-the-top claims never cease. Upon being introduced by President Obama as his next nominee for secretary of defense in December 2014, for instance, Ash Carter promptly praised the military he was going to oversee as “the greatest fighting force the world has ever known.” His words echoed those of the president, who had claimed the previous August that it was “the best-led, best-trained, best-equipped military in human history.” Similar hosannas (“the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known”) had once been sprinkled liberally through George W. Bush’s speeches and comments, as well as those of other politicians since 9/11.

In fact, from the president to all those citizens who feel obliged in a way Americans never have before to “thank” the troops endlessly for their efforts, no other institution has been so universally applauded since 9/11. No one should be shocked then that, in polls, Americans regularly claim to trust the military leadership above any other crew around, including scientists, doctors, ministers, priests, and — no surprise — Congress.

Imagine parents endlessly praising their son as “the smartest, handsomest, most athletically gifted boy since God created Adam.” We’d conclude that they were thoroughly obnoxious, if not a bit unhinged. Yet the military remains just this sort of favored son, the country’s golden child. And to the golden child go the spoils.

Along with unbridled praise, consider the “allowance” the American people regularly offer the Pentagon. If this were an “affluenza” family unit, while mom and dad might be happily driving late-model his and her Audis, the favored son would be driving a spanking new Ferrari. Add up what the federal government spends on “defense,” “homeland security,” “overseas contingency operations” (wars), nuclear weapons, and intelligence and surveillance operations, and the Ferraris that belong to the Pentagon and its national security state pals are vrooming along at more than $750 billion dollars annually, or two-thirds of the government’s discretionary spending. That’s quite an allowance for “our boy”!

To cite a point of comparison, in 2015, federal funding for the departments of education, interior, and transportation maxed out at $95 billion — combined! Not only is the military our favored son by a country mile: it’s our Prodigal Son, and nothing satisfies “him.” He’s still asking for more (and his Republican uncles are clearly ready to turn over to him whatever’s left of the family savings, lock, stock, and barrel).

On the other hand, like any spoiled kid, the Defense Department sees even the most modest suggested cuts in its allowance as a form of betrayal. Witness the whining of both those Pentagon officials and military officerstestifying before Congressional committees and of empathetic committee members themselves. Minimalist cuts to the soaring Pentagon budget are, it seems, defanging the military and recklessly endangering American security vis-a-vis the exaggerated threats of the day: ISIS, China, and Russia. In fact, the real “threat” is clearly that the Pentagon’s congressional “parents” might someday cut down on its privileges and toys, as well as its free rein to do more or less as it pleases.

With respect to those privileges, enormous budgets drive an unimaginably top-heavy bureaucracy at the Pentagon. Since 9/11, Congressional authorizations of three- and four-star generals and admirals have multipliedtwice as fast as their one- and two-star colleagues. Too many generals are chasing too few combat billets, contributing to backstabbing and butt-kissing. Indeed, despite indifferent records in combat, generals wear uniforms bursting with badges and ribbons, resembling the ostentatious displays of former Soviet premiers — or field marshals in the fictional Ruritarian guards.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of brass in turn drives budgets higher. Even with recent modest declines (due to the official end of major combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan), the U.S. defense budget exceeds the combined military budgets of at least the next seven highest spenders. (President Obama proudly claims that it’s the next eight.) Four of those countries — France, Germany, Great Britain, and Saudi Arabia — are U.S. allies; China and Russia, the only rivals on the list, spend far less than the United States.

With respect to its toys, the military and its enablers in Congress can never get enough or at a high enough price. The most popular of these, at present, is the under-performing new F-35 jet fighter, projected to cost $1.5 trillion (yes, you read that right) over its lifetime, making it the most expensive weapons system in history. Another trillion dollars is projected over the next 30 years for “modernizing” the U.S. nuclear arsenal (this from a president who, as a candidate, spoke of eliminating nuclear weapons). The projected acquisition cost for a new advanced Air Force bomber is already $100 billion (before the cost overruns even begin). The list goes on, but you catch the drift.

A Spoiled Pentagon Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

To complete our affluenza diagnosis, let’s add one more factor to boundless praise and a bountiful allowance: a total inability to take responsibility for one’s actions. This is, of course, the most repellent part of the Ethan Couch affluenza defense: the idea that he shouldn’t be held responsible precisely because he was so favored.

Think, then, of the Pentagon and the military as Couch writ large. No matter their mistakes, profligate expenditures, even crimes, neither institution is held accountable for anything.

Consider these facts: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are quagmires. The Islamic State is spreading. Foreign armies, trained and equipped at enormous expense by the U.S. military, continue to evaporate. A hospital, clearly identifiable as such, is destroyed “by accident.” Wedding parties are wiped out “by mistake.” Torture (a war crime) is committed in the field. Detainees are abused. And which senior leaders have been held accountable for any of this in any way? With the notable exception of Brigadier General Janis Karpinskiof Abu Ghraib infamy, not a one.

After lengthy investigations, the Pentagon will occasionally hold accountable a few individuals who pulled the triggers or dropped the bombs or abused the prisoners. Meanwhile, the generals and the top civilians in the Pentagon who made it all possible are immunized from either responsibility or penalty of any sort. This is precisely why Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling memorably wrote in 2007 that, in the U.S. military, “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” In fact, no matter what that military doesn’t accomplish, no matter how lacking its ultimate performance in the field, it keeps getting more money, resources, praise.

When it comes to such subjects, consider the Republican presidential debate in Iowa on January 28th. Jeb Bush led the rhetorical charge by claiming that President Obama was “gutting” the military. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio eagerly agreed, insisting that a “dramatically degraded” military had to be rebuilt. All the Republican candidates (Rand Paul excepted) piled on, calling for major increases in defense spending as well as looser “rules of engagement” in the field to empower local commanders to take the fight to the enemy. America’s “warfighters,” more than one candidate claimed, are fighting with one arm tied behind their backs, thanks to knots tightened by government lawyers. The final twist that supposedly tied the military up in a giant knot was, so they claim, applied by that lawyer-in-chief, Barack Obama himself.

Interestingly, there has been no talk of our burgeoning national debt, which former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen once identified as the biggest threat facing America. When asked during the debate which specific federal programs he would cut to reduce the deficit, Chris Christie came up with only one, Planned Parenthood, which at $500 million a year is the equivalent of two F-35 jet fighters. (The military wants to buy more than 2,000 of them.)

Throwing yet more money at a spoiled military is precisely the worst thing we as “parents” can do. In this, we should resort to the fiscal wisdom of Army Major General Gerald Sajer, the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner killed in the mines, a Korean War veteran and former Adjutant General of Pennsylvania. When his senior commanders pleaded for more money (during the leaner budget years before 9/11) to accomplish the tasks he had assigned them, General Sajer’s retort was simple: “We’re out of money; now we have to think.”

Accountability Is Everything

It’s high time to force the Pentagon to think. Yet when it comes to our relationship with the military, too many of us have acted like Ethan Couch’s mother. Out of a twisted sense of love or loyalty, she sought to shelter her son from his day of reckoning. But we know better. We know her son has to face the music.

Something similar is true of our relationship to the U.S. military. An institutional report card with so many deficits and failures, a record of deportment that has led to death and mayhem, should not be ignored. The military must be called to account.

How? By cutting its allowance. (That should make the brass sit up and take notice, perhaps even think.) By holding senior leaders accountable for mistakes. And by cutting the easy praise. Our military commanders know that they are not leading the finest fighting force since the dawn of history and it’s time our political leaders and the rest of us acknowledged that as well.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatchregular. He blogs at Bracing Views.

Pugnacious Parasites and the Provocation

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Zen Gardner

Source: ZenGardner.com

Everyone knows the unscrupulously manipulative always accuse others of what they themselves are guilty of. It’s an age old trick to obfuscate the obvious and buy time to accomplish their purposes.

Lying is their pathological language.

Such behavior, especially in high profile public figures, is unthinkable, yet for some inexplicable reason it is not just tolerated, but ironically readily expected.

People still buy into it. And the reaction always remains the same. Complacency on the most part, and a rising sense of anger in others. No doubt a byproduct of cognitive dissonance and range of other deliberately triggered mechanisms, but surreal just the same.

A Bald Faced Lie is a Punch in the Face

This is essentially what transpires when someone knowingly lies to your face. It jars your mind and pushes you back on the defensive and you’re left to try and understand why your heart and head are not matching up with what you just heard.

Everyone, except these willingly possessed psychopaths, has a conscience. And it’s faithful to speak to us. This is why humanity has been conditioned to not respond to it, and also why fear is so essential to their game. When our signals are scrambled, our gut reaction belittled and intuition denied we’re left in a daze.

This is exactly what they want to happen. It gives them time to keep executing their programs, especially when a complicit media candies and bandies it about as if it’s true and nothing to question.

This is the whirled we’re in and up against. Again, another reason to stay fully conscious and circumspect and thoroughly educated as to their techniques and true nature. Not pretty stuff to look at, but understand it we must.

Abject bullies like Israel are relatively easy to spot – if we grasp their obvious odious nature and where they’re coming from. The bully in the playground works by pure intimidation and force and will resort to any form of expression they can – loud mouthed intimidation, brandishing weapons, and all bathed in swaggering bravado right up to and including physical force to get their point across.

Send a signal is their MO. And those who don’t cower, teach them a lesson. Again, just look at the abject genocidal insanity of the Israeli occupiers. Now that they’ve gained control of most of the world’s media, especially in the west, what they say goes. And if the media or governments don’t toe their line well enough they’ll hear from these vociferous, self serving elitist beasts.

The Provocation

Another aspect of bullying is provoking your supposed enemy. The US is at this big time, deliberately firing up the conservative right and constitutionalists. It’s full on deliberate. The opulent extravagance of the Obamas, the clearly deliberate crashing of the economy, the flagrant trashing of patriotism and removal of individual rights are all carefully planned. Threatening to disarm fiercely independent Americans is an essential part of this agenda.

The mass migration agenda is the same. While the US gets inundated with needy Central Americans with clear governmental manipulation, Europe is similarly being swept with an influx that threatens their economies and cultural identities.

What’s most amazing about this is anyone can read this agenda for themselves from UN statements and documents and the Agenda 21 or 2030 programs. That so many can’t be bothered to look into much of this is outright frightening.

Israel again is a master example of aggressive agendas designed to push back common sense and reason as well as true empathy for the plight of others. A clearly apartheid state while claiming they were the victims of such treatment is completely nonsensical. It flies in the face of simple reason and logic. Yet they get away with it. How? They’ve taken over the media and political structures through the same tactics of intimidation and potential consequence by their massive Mossad/CIA/MI6 black hand of control.

Strategy of Tension and Not Just Provoking, but Demonizing Your Subjects

What’s amazing is the thoroughness of psychopathic social engineers. This is where we need to wake up and get smart.

They operate according to something called the Strategy of Tension, keeping peoples and nations nervous and afraid and more inclined to rely on government and enforcement to protect them. It also homogenizes cultures in a form of group think and a state of malleability due to this state of fear.

The extension of their influence is far and wide. Mass shootings, weird mass “accidents” at certain interims, and most of all false flags, never mind assassinations and the like. This has been the weapon of choice for every totalitarian regime for eons and a real favorite of this latest push for world dominion by these psychopaths.

The end result, ironically, is not entirely to direct everyone’s attention to a foreign enemy. That’s just a ruse and excuse for genocide and expansion. The enemy to them is within – us. We must be contained like animals and malleable to their every whim.

So-called domestic terrorism has been a meme on the rise. The deliberate migration of “potential muslim extremists” is a key part of this, as any and every incident they stage can more and more be justified and conveniently blamed on outside influences. The end result is the same: clampdown on the populace.

Just look at this propaganda piece brought to you by the Rothschild/Rockefeller owned and CIA/Mossad/MI6 et all run Reuters news agency:

U.S. eyes ways to toughen fight against domestic extremists

The U.S. Justice Department is considering legal changes to combat what it sees as a rising threat from domestic anti-government extremists, senior officials told Reuters, even as it steps up efforts to stop Islamic State-inspired attacks at home.

Extremist groups motivated by a range of U.S.-born philosophies present a “clear and present danger,” John Carlin, the Justice Department’s chief of national security, told Reuters in an interview. “Based on recent reports and the cases we are seeing, it seems like we’re in a heightened environment.” (source)

The agenda is obvious. If we’re looking. The language as well is a giveaway, the smooth talking and use of buzz phrases like “clear and present danger”, “national security” and the like are rife.

The Subtler Techniques of Deceit

This may seem a bit tangential to the main point I’m making here but is nonetheless essential information if we’re to more fully understand how these tactics are carried out on subtler levels.

You’ll see the following logical fallacy tactics in use continually, but unfortunately most people fall for them for lack of discernment as well as awareness of just what deceitful people are capable of doing.

This is a big subject well worth researching on your own but here are a few to get you started:

1. The Strawman Argument – Misrepresenting someone’s argument to make it easier to attack.

Example: After Will said that we should put more money into health and education, Warren responded by saying that he was surprised that Will hates our country so much that he wants to leave it defenseless by cutting military spending.

You’ll see this in use continually especially in the political and government arenas. It’s very clever really, side-stepping the real issue and misdirecting the argument to a false issue having nothing to do with the original question or discussion.

2. The False Choice Dilemma – Giving an extremely narrow range of choice to an issue or situation that is much wider than is being portrayed with virtually unlimited possibilites.

Baby Bush’s carefully framed post 9/11 statement is the classic geopolitical example: “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.”

You have to admit that’s pretty damn galvanizing. But in what way? Now you can’t question what the “good guys” are doing or you might be with “axis of evil”? That’s what it’s since come down to. Again, cleverly staged propaganda by these very intelligent psychopaths. Keeping the public drugged and dumbed down would sure work in their favor, wouldn’t it?

3. Correlation versus Causation. You can apply this across the board. It’s so easy to assume what we’re told is true in this context. Beware.

The easiest example is when two events occur at the same time, or in close apparent relation with each other. One is then seen as the cause of the other. An increase in robberies occurs at the same time that jobs cuts are announced, for example. There is no evidence to support the claim that the expected job losses caused the increase in robberies.

This is best seen in false flag events when the enemy or culprit is named before any investigation whatsoever. If someone “claims” responsibility it’s case closed, as they go after their pre-selected patsy to confirm this or already executed this planted persona on the spot. Done deal.

4. Overgeneralization or Oversimplification.

This is another framework for logical fallacies. Generalizing from too small of a population, or reducing complex social issues to only one choice or the other, and leaving out the complex issues that do not support the claim are examples of fallacies that stem from overgeneralization and oversimplification. (source of last two citations)

These are just a few examples. It’s a field well worth exploring and getting a handle on. When you dissect and analyze these mechanisms it is extremely empowering.

All That To Say…

Be on the look out. Stay alert and awake and aware. What we see around us is not what we get, unless we fall for it and thereby make it our reality. Personal empowerment in such an environment as we’re living in is essential.

But you have to do the work.

Psychopaths are running the external world. It’s more evident by the day to more and more people. Those not fully on board even at higher and middle levels are being bullied into it within the power structure. They can see who the apparent heirs are to the coming positions of power so they’re buckling under the pressure in an effort to save their hides.

Others at many levels of society are waking up and looking for ways to expose this nefarious agenda and help humanity push back in whatever way it can. We need to keep our voices loud and clear and distinctly truthful and helpful.

There may be many vectors by which they’re coming at us, be they geoengineering, manipulated food, societal crackdowns, media programming and the like, but we’re clearly up to the challenge.

After all, we’re here! We’re thriving just fine in spite of all they do, and we’re growing stronger by the day.

Never forget that, let down your guard, nor grow weary in well doing.

This is our day – not theirs. Let’s fulfill our mission, and use the massive spiritual weapons at our disposal – love, truth, our connection to Source and essential eternal nature which can never be taken away.

Stay true.

Love always, Zen

Blood Money: Four More Years of Drug War Horror with HRC

Posted on April 25, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Floyd

(Empire Burlesque)

The Drug War, like the Terror War, is essentially a vast machine for profiteering by the purveyors of weapons and tools of repression. Like the Terror War, the Drug War demonstrably exacerbates the problems it purports to address, and has led to widespread chaos, death and state corruption of almost unfathomable levels. And Hillary Clinton, almost certain to be the next president, is deeply complicit in both of these malevolent enterprises.

Clinton’s extensive and eager involvement in the genuinely insane hyper-militarizataion of American policy in the so-called War on Terror is well-attested. Indeed, she boasts of it, trumpeting how she urged a reluctant Obama into destroying Libya, for example: a “great victory” which she famously celebrated by crowing over the rape and murder of Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died!” The neocons who pressed for the war of aggression against Iraq — which Clinton supported — are now flocking to her banner, as are the war profiteers and their Wall Street allies. And why not? Clinton is the most hawkish Democratic candidate since Henry Jackson. The blood money will continue to flow like the Nile in flood under her watch.

But Clinton’s role in the Drug War is perhaps less well-known. Jesse Franzblau remedies this with an excellent article at CounterPunch, noting her instrumental role in the slaughterfest and corruption feast that the Drug War has spawned in Mexico. Franzblau writes of the $2.5 billion Merida Initiative:

Negotiated behind closed doors in the last years of the Bush administration, the plan was originally proposed as a three-year program. Yet Hillary Clinton’s State Department pushed aggressively to extend it, overseeing a drastic increase of the initiative that continues today.

Much of this aid goes to U.S.-based security, information, and technology contracting firms, who make millions peddling everything from helicopter training to communications equipment to night-vision goggles, surveillance aircrafts, and satellites.

This aid comes in addition to the direct sales of arms and other equipment to Mexico authorized by the State Department, as Christy Thorton pointed out in a 2014 New York Times op-ed. Those sales reached $1.2 billion in 2012 alone, the last full year of Clinton’s tenure. Indeed, as the Mérida Initiative has grown, Mexico has become one of the world’s biggest purchasers of U.S. military arms and equipment.

But while sales have boomed for U.S.-based contractors, the situation in Mexico has badly deteriorated. The escalation of U.S. counter-drug assistance in the country has paralleled a drastic increase in violence, fueling a drug war that’s killed more than 100,000 people since 2006.

Turning Mexico into a major fountain of war profits: quite another accomplishment for a secretary of state whose skills have been lavishly praised by no less than Henry Kissinger, her close friend and advisor. Franzblau goes on to lay out, in grim detail, how Clinton’s State Department, openly flouting U.S. law, increased its cooperation with Mexican military and law enforcement units known to be perpetrating horrific human rights abuses:

Human Rights Watch reported in 2011, for example, on widespread cases of torture in Guerrero going back to 1994. The group noted regular abuses by police and military forces, including “cases of homicide, torture, and extortion” overseen by the judicial police chief in the northern part of the state. The same report highlighted strong evidence of the involvement of military officials from Chilpancingo in cases of kidnapping and disappearances in 2010, as the U.S. embassy was clearing officials for training from the same military base.

The payoff for these illegalities has been sweet for the future president:

Notably, several of the contractors that profited from U.S. security assistance in Mexico — such as General Electric, Lockheed Martin, and United Technologies Corporation, which owns Sikorsky — reportedly contributed to the Clinton Foundation. And according to the transparency group Open Secrets, Clinton currently tops the list of all 2016 presidential candidates in campaign contributions from the military contracting industry.

By the end of Clinton’s first term in 2021, we will be in the 20th year of the Terror War — and the 50th year of the Drug War. How many more lives, how many more communities, how many more countries will be laid waste by these inhuman engines of greed and power — and their “progressive” champions — in that time?

The glorification of Antonin Scalia

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Tom Carter

Source: WSWS.org

The sickening tributes across the official US political and media spectrum to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly on Saturday at the age of 79, are a barometer of the putrefaction of American democracy.

The universal deference towards Scalia from what passes for the “liberal” faction of the establishment is particularly repulsive. The statements of the Democratic presidential candidates, the supposed “socialist” Bernie Sanders no less than Hillary Clinton—echoing similarly sycophantic drivel from the likes of the New York Times—are monuments to political cowardice.

One would say these people lack the courage of their convictions if they had any convictions to lack!

They have sprung into action to join their Republican counterparts in hailing Scalia as a towering figure in American jurisprudence. Virtually every description of the deceased justice includes the words “brilliant” and “intellectual.” One is reminded of the programmed acclamation of Sergeant Raymond Shaw recited by his brainwashed fellow soldiers in the film The Manchurian Candidate: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

Sanders took time off from his hollow calls for a “political revolution” to demonstrate his political obeisance to the ruling class, declaring, “While I differed with Justice Scalia’s views and jurisprudence, he was a brilliant, colorful and outspoken member of the Supreme Court.”

Clinton praised Scalia as “a dedicated public servant who brought energy and passion to the bench.”

President Obama called Scalia a “towering legal figure.” The New York Times’ Ross Douthat hailed Scalia for “putting originalist principle above a partisan conservatism,” and for his “combination of brilliance, eloquence, and good timing.”

No one dares say what needs to be said. The object of their veneration was a black-robed thug and sadist who used his position on the bench to attack the basic civil liberties laid down in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights—separation of church and state; due process; protection from arbitrary arrest, search and seizure; the right to trial by jury; protection from cruel and unusual punishment; the right to vote.

His supposed juridical brilliance boiled down to starting with the political outcome he desired (invariably reactionary) and then cobbling together pseudo-legal arguments to justify his ruling—often with flagrant disregard for legal precedent and the unambiguous language of statutes and constitutional provisions.

In one case last year, Scalia argued that a police officer did not use “deadly force” when he climbed onto an overpass and used an assault rifle to kill an unarmed man fleeing in a car. According to Scalia’s reasoning, it was not deadly force because the officer claimed to have been aiming at the car, not the person in the car.

Perhaps the most infamous example of this method—absurdly described in the media as “constitutional originalism”—was the 2000 Supreme Court decision Scalia engineered to halt the counting of votes in Florida and hand the White House to the loser of the election, Republican candidate George W. Bush.

The 5-4 decision to steal the election all but acknowledged its own speciousness when it declared that the justifications it advanced could not be applied to any future cases. In his separate concurring opinion, Scalia declared that the Constitution did not give the people the right to elect the president.

At the time of the theft of the 2000 elections, the World Socialist Web Site wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the counting of votes, and the acceptance of that ruling by the Democrats and the entire political establishment, demonstrated that there was no longer any significant constituency for democratic rights within the American ruling class. The reaction to Scalia’s death is a measure of the further erosion of democratic sentiment in the ruling elite.

Scalia personified the decay of bourgeois democracy in the United States over a protracted period of time. Appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, he flourished and exerted increasing influence in the decades of political reaction, militarism and Wall Street criminality that ensued, continuing without a hitch under Obama. Not only in the anti-democratic substance of his rulings, but also in his methods and bearing, he embodied the promotion by the ruling elite of backwardness, prejudice and outright cruelty.

He was corrupt and made no bones about his corruption, proudly voting to remove limits on corporate bribes in elections and flaunting his private outings with Vice President Dick Cheney while the latter was a party in a case before the court. He was a bully, making a practice of baiting and harassing lawyers who came before him.

Throughout his career, Scalia consistently advocated positions that can only be described as barbarous and fascistic. Fittingly, his last judicial act was to deny a stay of execution. He was a figure who relished the power and trappings of the state, openly defending torture and internment camps.

Scalia worked tirelessly to break down constitutional and democratic limits on state power, infiltrating fascistic doctrines into Supreme Court jurisprudence. His theory of executive power, according to which the American president has unlimited and unreviewable powers for the duration of the “war on terror,” resurrects Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” doctrine in all but name.

Scalia’s mere presence on the court testified to the advanced decay of American democracy. That decay is linked, on the one hand, to the extreme growth of social inequality, accompanied by the rampant parasitism and criminality of the ruling class, and on the other hand to unending war, which has its domestic reflection in the build up of the repressive state apparatus that Scalia championed.

The bitterness of the disputes over his replacement is a reflection of the importance of his role in American politics over three decades during which the political establishment shifted violently to the right.

The deference shown to such a figure from all quarters of the political establishment should be taken as a warning by the working class. The ruling elite fears above all the growth of social opposition and class struggle. It exalts the legacy of Scalia because it is preparing police state methods to defend its power and property against an insurgent working class.

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After the Crash

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

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