* THERE’S A REVOLUTION AND IT’S NOT BEING TELEVISED
By David Swanson, NewClearVision
Hundreds gathered in Dallas to reject the Bush Lie Bury, and three went to jail. I flew from Dallas to Syracuse, where hundreds protested Obama’s drone-murder program, and 32 went to jail and are still there (and will stay until trial unless bail can be raised)
some of them risk major jail time because they violated a protective order that the commander of a U.S. military base gained to protect himself from nonviolent peace activists. Another drone protester in Missouri, Brian Terrell, is just finishing a six-month sentence. Climate activist Tim DeChristopher just got out. The people locked in Guantanamo are refusing to eat, and groups around the world are making plans to fast with them. The people of Vieques, Puerto Rico, rallied on May 1st to demand that the U.S. military truly depart their island. Big plans are being made to rally for Bradley Manning on June 1st. This week I’m heading to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee’s meeting in North Carolina, after which — just over in Tennessee — three courageous activists go on trial, facing major time in prison, for having entered and protested a nuclear weapons facility.
The revolution will not be televised.
Oak Ridge, Tenn., was created during World War II as a secret city (actually two, it was segregated by race) for producing nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have a history that marches hand-in-hand with U.S. human experimentation programs. I just had a chance to read Susan Griffin’s A Chorus of Stones, and she recounts a nuclear test in 1957, when the U.S. government was still marching Marines to various distances from nuclear explosions in Nevada to find out what would become of them. Marines with their eyes closed saw the bones in their hands. They died of leukemia years later, but not before speaking about what else they saw: 10 or 12 people in a stockade formed by chain link fence and barbed wire, their faces and hands deformed, their hair falling out, their skin peeling off. Or this: men on the ground in agony, the smell of burning flesh, blood running from mouth, ears, and nose, a man trying to tear away wires that had been attached to his head. […]
Europe is sinking into crisis and social regression under the pressure of austerity, recession and the strategy of “structural reforms”. This pressure is tightly coordinated at the European level, under the leadership of the German Government, the ECB and the European Commission. There is a broad consensus that these policies are absurd and even “illiterate”: fiscal austerity does not reduce the burden of the debt but generates a spiral of depression, more unemployment and despair among the European peoples.
Yet, these policies are rational from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. They are a brutal way – a shock therapy – for restoring the profits, for guaranteeing the financial rents and for implementing the neoliberal counter-reforms. What is going on is fundamentally the validation by the states of the financial claims on future production and GDP. That is why the crisis takes the form of a sovereign debt crisis.
A false dilemma
This crisis reveals that the previous neoliberal project for Europe was not viable. It presupposed that the European economies were more homogeneous than they actually are. Differences between countries increased due to their place in the global market, to their sensitivity to the euro exchange rate. Inflation rates didn’t converge and low real interest rates favored intense capital flows among countries and financial and housing bubbles. All these contradictions – exacerbated with the implementation of the monetary union – existed before the crisis but they have exploded with the speculative attacks against the sovereign debts of the most exposed countries.
The social and popular alternatives to this crisis require a daring refoundation of Europe, because European and international cooperation are required for the reconstruction of the industrial pattern, the ecological sustainability and the employment structure. But as such a global refoundation seems out of reach in the immediate relationship of forces, the exit from euro is proposed as an immediate solution in different countries. The dilemma seems to be between a risky ‘exit’ from the eurozone and a utopian European harmonization emerging out of the workers’ struggles. In our view, this is a false dichotomy and it is important to work for a viable political strategy for the immediate confrontation. Any social transformation implies the questioning of dominant social interests, their privileges and their power and it is true that this confrontation takes place primarily within a national framework. But the resistance of the dominant classes and their possible retaliatory measures exceed the national framework. The strategy of leaving the euro does not necessarily concentrate on this effort for a European alternative and in this sense, a strategy of rupture with “euroliberalism” is required in order to generate the means for an alternative policy. This text is not about the program for this rupture but rather concentrates on means to implement such a program.
What should a left government do?
We are in the midst of what can be technically called a “balance-sheet crisis”. This is a crisis triggered by private sector deleveraging and debt minimization, caused by the accumulation of an enormous amount of fictitious assets, not backed with real fundamentals. In practical words, it means that citizens have to pay for the debt or in other terms validate the claims of the finance on current and future production and taxes. The European states, in an action strictly coordinated at European and even at the global level, have decided to nationalize the private debts by converting them into sovereign debt and to impose austerity and transfer policies in order to pay for such debts. It is the justification, the motivation and the opportunity for the implementation of “structural reforms” whose objectives are classically neoliberal, shrinking the public services of the welfare state, cutting social spending and flexibilizing the labour markets, in order to lower the direct and indirect wage.
In our view, the political strategy of the left must concentrate on the fight for a majority for a left government, able to get rid of this straightjacket. […]
* CORRUPT GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS – MANY OF WHOM ARE ATHEISTS – USE THE MOST EXTREME FORMS OF RELIGION TO DIVIDE AND CONQUER US
Source: Washington’s Blog
Preface: Fundamentalist Christians, Jews and Muslims all think they are in a “holy war” against the other guy. As shown below, fundamentalists are being manipulated by the powers-that-be – many of whom are actually atheists – as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy to disempower people.
The 2,000 Year Old Strategy
The strategy of dividing and conquering one’s foes is ancient.
Ancient Roman emperor Julius Cesar successfully used it thousands of years ago.
The application of the strategy in controlling one’s own people – divide and rule – has been used for just as long. As Wikipedia notes:
Elements of this technique involve:
creating or encouraging divisions among the subjects to prevent alliances that could challenge the sovereign
aiding and promoting those who are willing to cooperate with the sovereign
fostering distrust and enmity between local rulers [or groups]
encouraging meaningless expenditures that reduce the capability for political [organization or opposition] …..
In discussing the use of “divide and rule” in the U.S., Wikipedia discusses the “Use of left-right politics“.
England invaded Ireland in 1170, but for the first 439 years it was a conquest in name only. In 1609, however, James I founded the Plantation of Ulster, imported 20,000 Protestant settlers, and introduced religious strife as a political tactic. By favoring Protestants over the native Catholics in politics and economics-the so-called “Ulster Privilege-the English pitted both groups against one another.
The tactic was enormously successful, and England used it throughout its colonial empire. Nowhere were the British so successful in transplanting the Irish model than in India. […]
* 3 TROUBLING THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT BILLIONAIRE PENNY PRITZKER
By David Moberg, InTheseTimes
On May 2, 2013, in the White House Rose Garden, U.S. President Barack Obama announces his nominee for Secretary of Commerce, Hyatt hotel heir Penny Pritzker. (SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
Despite her business-friendly history, billionaire heir Penny Pritzker, President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Commerce, will likely face standard Republican flak in her Senate confirmation hearings.
But progressive Democrats are the ones with real reasons to be upset with her record and that of her family, which is among the wealthiest in America. Here are just a few:
1) Union-busting. Pritzker’s family businesses have often engaged in anti-union practices. She is a director of the Hyatt Hotels, which fired and then replaced long-time room cleaners in its Boston hotels with non-union subcontracted workers. Hyatt has refused to settle several contract disputes with UNITE HERE, some lasting nearly four years, on terms similar to those accepted by other big hoteliers.
2) Conflicts of interest. The family’s $20 billion empire was built on a diverse base of businesses, including Hyatt, Marmon (an industrial conglomerate), the TransUnion credit rating agency, and many others in industries such as container leasing, insurance and travel.
The family has long had a reputation for not only accumulating its wealth through elaborate schemes of tax evasion, including offshore accounts, but also for using its political clout to win favored treatment.
For example, community and teacher union critics berated Pritzker, who recently resigned from the Chicago Board of Education, for supporting the closing of dozens of public schools because of financial pressures. At the same time, the highly profitable Hyatt was receiving financial assistance from a Tax Increment Finance fund (a pool of money intended to support blighted neighborhoods in the city) whose assets effectively had been diverted from support of the schools. Pritzker also has drawn fire for her leading role in promoting privately operated charter schools, including networks of non-profits to which she has contributed.
While some Pritzkers support Republicans, others, like Penny, are active patrons of corporate-oriented Democrats. Penny Pritzker, who knew Obama before he ran for president, served as financial chair of his first campaign and is credited with bringing in millions of dollars in donations. Many observers see her appointment to the relatively weak—if symbolically still important—commerce post as typical campaign spoils for big contributors.
But if she is approved, it will burnish her reputation and increase her potential influence. The Pritzkers, who have contributed large sums to education, medicine, architecture and the arts in their hometown of Chicago and elsewhere, gain protection from the fallout of their questionable business practices through their public image as philanthropists.
3) Shady business dealings. The Pritzkers have a long history of business malfeasance at the expense of people of modest means. In one notable case, Congress passed legislation in 2003 to address issues raised by widespread charges that the Pritzker’s credit rating agency, TransUnion, had made serious flaws in its credit reports on individuals—and then failed to correct them upon discovery. […]
* HERO OF THE AMERICAN LEFT, PROFESSOR NOAM CHOMSKY, DENOUNCES THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION
By Sam Rolley Personal Liberty Digest
Professor Noam Chomsky
Notable left-wing polemicist Professor Noam Chomsky has made a career of writing and speaking out against government abuses of civil liberties in the United States and abroad. In the 2008 Presidential election, the professor endorsed Barack Obama but contended that the youthful Presidential candidate would have little positive or negative impact on civil liberty.
Chomsky now says he is surprised and disgusted by the current President’s inexplicable “attack” on civil liberties, which he said goes beyond anything he could have ever imagined.
In an interview, Chomsky told the liberal blog Alternet:
I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors. The one thing that did surprise me is his attack on civil liberties. They go well beyond anything I would have anticipated, and they don’t seem easy to explain. In many ways the worst is what you mention, Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project. That’s an Obama initiative and it’s a very serious attack on civil liberties. He doesn’t gain anything from it — he doesn’t get any political mileage out of it. In fact, most people don’t even know about it, but what it does is extend the concept of “material assistance to terror” to speech. […]
* EUROPE’S SOUTH RISES UP AGAINST THOSE WHO ACT AS SADISTIC COLONIAL MASTERS
The more you obey the more you get punished – that’s the troika’s way. But a second spring of discontent is in the air
By Costas Douzinas, Guardian
Demonstrators hold banners as they protest outside the European Union House in the Cypriot capital Nicosia. Photograph: Yiannis Kourtoglou/AFP/Getty Images
The “new world order” announced at the end of the 1980s was the shortest in history. Protest, riots and uprisings erupted all over the world after the 2008 crisis, leading to the Arab spring, the Indignados and Occupy. A former director of operations at MI6, quoted by Paul Mason, called it “a revolutionary wave, like 1848“. Mason agreed: “There are strong parallels – above all with 1848, and with the wave of discontent that preceded 1914.”
Many on the left have been more circumspect. The philosopher Alain Badiou welcomed the Arab spring but did not think it would lead to a “rebirth of history”. For Slavoj Žižek, 2011 was the “year of dreaming dangerously”. A melancholy of the left descended as the protest wave started receding. But on this occasion the pessimism was premature. Resistance against austerity and injustice is again in the air. In Bulgaria and Slovenia, protesters unseated the government. In Italy, the overwhelming anti-austerity vote has shaken the parties committed to the Berlin orthodoxy. Large marches and rallies in Portugal and Spain have undermined governments and policies and a new push for anti-austerity unity is emerging in Britain. In Greece, the parties that brought the country to its knees and are now administering policies causing the well-documented humanitarian catastrophe and rise of fascism are on the brink of exit.
Finally, the Cypriot government agreed the unprecedented haircut of bank savings but was forced to renege after MPs of all parties under pressure from the public voted against it and ruling party MPs had to abstain. This was the first formal rebuff of austerity, something that the obedient governments of southern Europe had not dared. When the government finally accepted the European blackmail, it presented it as unavoidable and, under instruction from Germany’s foreign minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, refrained from putting it to parliament or the people. The words “democracy” and “referendum” create panic in the corridors of Brussels. But the symbolic value of a small nation rejecting the initial troika blackmail and protecting the savings of ordinary people is immense. The European debate has concentrated on the protection of savings. The protection of our democracy is perhaps more important. […]
The rioting police in Athens routinely attack peaceful protesters with chemical weapons, batons, arrest and torture.
The Cyprus Template
“What manner of men had lived in those days…who had so eagerly surrendered their sovereignty for a lie and a delusion?”-Taylor Caldwell
Cyprus is absolutely the template for Europe now. It is just that the template is far worse than what is narrowly imagined.
It is not the small nation of Cyprus nor is it that the specifics of the criminality that was transacted in Cyprus which is any sort of template. This is not the center of the issue. It is what Cyprus means and the horrible implications of what took place.
I cannot issue a stern enough warning here. No words that I write will adequately embrace the transgression that has taken place in Cyprus. Any thought that you have that the Cyprus experience is a lone and isolated event that will not be repeated, in some form in the future, is going to be proven wrong.
Yesterday the Parliament in Cyprus narrowly passed the EU bailout. Part of this package included seizing 90% of the depositors’ money to help pay for the bailout. There was no due process of law, no bankruptcy proceeding, no judicial review of assets and, in fact, no law of any sort applied. Deposits were confiscated as mandated by the European Union and agreed to by the Cyprus Parliament. Europe demanded the seizure and that is what is critically important to understand and appreciate.
In Greece the EU demanded that the bond holders be penalized and to accomplish this they had Greece retroactively change the laws. In Cyprus Europe demanded the confiscation of depositors’ money. One + one still makes two and the template, when properly recognized, is that the European Union will do whatever they like and when they like it and to whom they like with little or no regard for existing laws. This is, quite frankly, the Soviet Union under the control of Stalin. To be more precise, given that all of this is formulated and approved in Berlin; this is Germany making the rules for their vassal states.
There is one set of guidelines for Germany now and Germany still operates under their own laws but when it comes to other nations in the European Union that are in financial difficulty there are no real laws left. All that there is now is the tyrannical demands of Berlin that must be obeyed to receive funds.
“It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.” -Thomas Jefferson
[…]
The European Union is controlled by Germany. The European Union no longer operates under the law; their laws or the laws of any singular nation. Europe has, in fact, become a totalitarian State. This is the template. This is the new reality!
“Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing a people to slavery.” -Thomas Jefferson […]
* ROLLING FISTFIGHT ERUPTS IN VENEZUELAN PARLIAMENT OVER DISPUTED ELECTION
Brawl erupts after opposition members are banned from speaking until they accept Nicolás Maduro as president
Source: GuardianUK
A brawl has broken out in Venezuela‘s parliament between government and opposition members, leaving several people injured during an angry session linked to the nation’s bitter election dispute.
The opposition said seven of its parliamentarians were attacked and hurt when protesting against a measure that blocks them from speaking in the National Assembly because they have refused to recognise Nicolás Maduro‘s 14 April election as president.
Government legislators blamed their “fascist” rivals for starting the violence, which illustrated the volatile state of politics after the death of socialist leader Hugo Chávez in March.
“We knew the opposition came to provoke violence,” Maduro said of the incident. “This must not be repeated.”
The 50-year-old Maduro, who was Chávez’s chosen successor, defeated opposition candidate Henrique Capriles by 1.5 percentage points. Capriles, 40, has refused to recognise his victory, alleging that thousands of irregularities occurred and the vote was “stolen”. The election exposed a nation evenly divided after 14 years of Chávez’s hardline socialist rule. […]
By Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Washington Post
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work
These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
The investigation’s other findings include:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored. […]
I really hate to be negative… but this is positively revolting. Disgusting. Indescribably offensive.
In the Land of the Free recently, a California couple had their child kidnapped by the state. At gunpoint.
It all started in mid-April when Anna and Alex Nikolayev took their 5-month old son Sammy to the hospital in Sacramento to be treated for flu symptoms.
The parents didn’t particularly care for the treatment that their son was receiving. Doctors were pumping him full of antibiotics and soon began talking about performing surgery.
Anna and Alex argued with the doctors and said that they were going to get a second opinion; they took the baby and went to another hospital where another physician deemed it perfectly safe for the child to return home with his parents without the need for surgery.
The next day, with the family resting comfortably at home, the police showed up with Child Protective Services.
Alex, the father, went outside to talk to them where he was thrown to the ground by police. Officers then relieved him of his house keys and proceeded to let themselves into the house with hands on their pistols.
Then, still with their hands on their pistols, they told the mother “I’m going to grab your baby, and don’t resist and don’t fight me…”
The child was then ripped from his mother’s arms and placed into state custody, where he remained for a week. […]
* DR. CORNEL WEST – REMAKING AMERICA: FROM POVERTY TO PROSPERITY
Source: youtube
This video highlights Dr. Cornel West speaking at the Remaking America: From Poverty to Prosperity, a talk at George Washington University in Washington DC on Thursday, January 12, 2012.
Other panelists included Majora Carter, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Moore, Suze Orman, Vicki Escarra and Roger Clay, Jr.
The event was moderated by Tavis Smiley.
(The audio on this video is off slightly for the first 48 seconds only. Please forgive the quick edits at 4:05; 7:58; 12:16; 13:20; 15:19; 17:25 and 20:06, between Dr. West’s talks).
* THE MANIFESTO OF THE MEDITERRANEAN MEETING IN TUNISIA
Source: CADTM
We, the representatives of progressive political parties from the Mediterranean region, gathered in Tunis from March 23 to 24, 2013, at the call of the Popular Front, and adopted the following resolution.
1. – For more than a quarter of a century, neoliberal capitalist globalization has extended its dominance over the entire planet. The processes launched have accelerated the commodization of the world in favour of a minority and have confiscated peoples´ citizenship and nations´ sovereignty. They are exacerbating economic insecurity and social inequality in the North and South and further widening the gap between the rich countries and the so-called poor countries.
Peoples of the South are subjected to a particularly devastating regime of structural adjustment policies and free trade policies which impedes a fair development, destroys the environment and deprives them of their sovereignty, thus weakening them even more and exacerbating their dependence on dominant economic areas of the North.
The fate of humanity is now decided by a handful of transnational corporations and by the international financial institutions over which people have no control.
Since 2008, in the midst of a crisis of the world capitalist system, structural adjustment policies have been extended to the countries of the northern Mediterranean, the so-called contemptuously PIGS.
In Tunisia, these policies have been imposed since 1986 by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In 1995, these were reinforced by the Association Agreement imposed by the European Union and its Member States. The political dictatorship has ensured the application of such policies.
At present, the various neoliberal capitalist globalization actors intend to carry on with these policies, trying to take advantage of the revolutionary crisis, by strengthening and expanding their scope. Thus they seek to block the path that leads to the development of aspirations and the desire for radical change massively expressed by the masses, particularly youth, during the revolutionary uprising of December- January 2011.
2. – The removal of the dictator has disarmed the local neoliberal capitalist order without reversing it have led to some progress. The social system which is the historical product of imperialist domination and, more recently, of the restructuring of the neoliberal capitalist world, is still standing. But the revolutionary crisis that initiated the insurgency remains active. The victory of the democratic, social and national revolution in Tunisia, as in other countries in the region, still remains a possibility.
3. - The Tunisian revolution marked the beginning of the Arab revolution. To date, four dictators, whose average time in power exceeded 30 years, have been eliminated. These political changes are, without a doubt, the most important occurrence that has taken place in the Arab region and Maghreb in decades. This is clearly a turning point in the history of Tunisia and the Arab region.
This is, in the proper sense of the term, a “historic” moment. In fact, for the first time in their history, the peoples of the Arab region, who have not stopped fighting, are standing up today against their direct oppressors, bursting onto the political scene to take hold of their destiny in their own hands.
4. – The debt -odious, illegitimate- used under the dictatorship as a tool for political submission and as a mechanism for the transfer of income from labour to local but above all to world capital, currently serves the counter-revolution to maintain the neo-colonial economy and imperialist domination in Tunisia. Furthermore, in Egypt, Morocco, Greece, Cyprus, the Spanish State and in many other countries of the Mediterranean basin, debt continues to serve the interests of a minority against the interests of the vast majority. It is everywhere, it is the pretext for the implementation of austerity policies imposed by international financial institutions and the capitalistic states that violate human rights.
5. – Everywhere, both in the North and the South, the same logics of profit, domination and destruction of the planet operate and continue to be imposed on the peoples and on nature. The Tunisian revolution, the Arab revolution, the heroic struggles of all peoples of the world against a neoliberal capitalist order, such as in Greece, Portugal, Catalonia, Basque country or the Spanish state, are the political founding acts of a new world order; one based on solidarity, that is democratic, feminist peaceful that ensures popular sovereignty and self-determination of the peoples and environmentally friendly- for which all our respective political parties are fighting.
6. – But standing in opposition of this popular will for a radical shift are the ruling classes, the transnationals and global finance institutions. They form a united front to counter-attack and to implement even more antisocial and undemocratic policies in order to break through this liberating popular impulse and momentum, and thus continue to make the costs of the global capitalist system crisis fall on the same shoulders, those of the working people and the planet.
7. – We, the representatives of progressive political parties from the Mediterranean region in the world, are convinced that we must unite our efforts and our actions, both regionally and internationally, to support and contribute to the struggles of the people and of the exploited and oppressed classes, in the region and worldwide, who yearn for freedom, dignity and social justice. We support the revolutionary struggle of the Syrian people to achieve freedom, democracy, social justice, equality and national dignity. We condemn any foreign intervention that goes against the achievement of these objectives.
In order to work together in this direction, we the progressive political parties from the Mediterranean region, that participated in this meeting in Tunisia against debt, austerity policies and imperialist domination, advocate for a free, democratic, social, solidarity-based and environmentally friendly Mediterranean region. We therefore commit to:
Support the process of mobilization and struggle of social movements, trade unions and social organizations for a citizen audit
Promote motions for non-payment of illegitimate debt and the external debt relief in the institutions in which we participate.
Incorporate in our political programs the NON payment of the illegitimate debt and the promotion of citizen audit and the support of the struggle for the sovereignty of peoples and self-determination.
Advance on the development of a network of mutual support between the nations to assist those who decided not to pay the illegitimate debt
Establish a permanent communication network for the exchange of information and experiences.
Develop a concrete cooperation aiming at developing tools for the struggle and mobilization necessary to achieve our goals.
Organize the next meeting in the Spanish State.
The progressive political parties in the Mediterranean region and other parts of the world that participated in the Tunisian Mediterranean Meeting welcomed the World Social Forum that was held in Tunis from March 26 to 30, and that allowed to advance towards the realization of the objectives enshrined in the Charter of Porto Alegre.
Finally, we strongly condemn the killing of Chokri Belaid, Secretary General of the Unified Democratic Patriotic Party and leader of the Popular Front, which we refer to as a political crime. We demand the truth to be told about all those involved in this heinous crime. […]
* SCIENTIST CONFIRM! “AUSTERITY IS TOO BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH”
Source: KeepTalkingGreece
Scientists confirm what we already know: that recession-driven austerity measures are not just bad for your wealth, they are also harming your health. It’s not only that your pockets are robbed causing sleepless nights, depression and heart attacks. The austerity cuts that primarily target the health sector boost infectious diseases as medicine and treatment become prohibitively expensive.
British scientists examined the impact of austerity to health issues and thus on the example of Greece and Great Britain.
The after-effects of the financial crisis is driving a wave of suicide, depression and infectious diseases as medicine and treatment become prohibitively expensive across Europe and North America, according to new research by academics.
After examining a decade of studies , Oxford University political economist David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist at Stanford University, have concluded austerity is seriously bad for health.
More than 10,000 suicides and up to a million cases of depression have been diagnosed during what they call the “Great Recession” and the austerity that followed it , the pair conclude in a book due to be published this week.
They cite examples in Greece, which has seen the rate of the Aids-causing HIV virus increase by 200pc as the health budget have been cut. The more than 50pc youth unemployment rate has also seen drug abuse on the increase, hastening the spread of the virus.
Greece also experienced its first malaria outbreak in decades following budget cuts to mosquito-spraying programmes.
In Britain, the academics claim 10,000 families have been pushed into homelessness by the austerity budget, and in the US 5m people no longer have access to healthcare since the recession.
“Politicians need to take into account the serious – and in some cases profound – health consequences of economic choices,” said Mr Stuckler, a senior researcher at Oxford University and co-author The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills.
“The harms we have found include HIV and malaria outbreaks, shortages of essential medicines, lost healthcare access, and an avoidable epidemic of alcohol abuse, depression and suicide,” he said in a statement. “Austerity is having a devastating effect.”
Previous studies by Mr Stuckler published in journals such as The Lancet and the British Medical Journal have linked rising suicide rates in some parts of Europe to austerity measures, and found HIV epidemics to be spreading amid cutbacks in services to vulnerable people.
But he and Mr Basu said negative public health effects are not inevitable, even during the worst economic disasters. (full story Telegraph)
Greeks get really sick
Also Greek scientists have collected data on the impact of the austerity cuts on the people’s health. According to Christodoulos Stefanadis, cardiology professor at the University of Athens with experience at the country’s public hospitals:
Cardiovascular incidents increased by 20% in the last two years.
Increased is also the number of patients with high blood pressure.
One in six patients with cholesterol does not follow the prescribed treatment due to financial inability to come up with the self-participation percentage on prescribed medicine.
Unemployment, stress at work and depression are risk factors for cardiovascular diseases equal to risk factors like smoking, lack of exercise and unhealthy eating habits. […]
* CIA’s ‘BAGS OF CASH’ FUELED AFGHAN CORRUPTION, BOUGHT LITTLE INFLUENCE
By Jason Ditz, Anti-War
A Decade Later, CIA Still Throwing Money at Karzai
If you’re a top Afghan official money comes awfully easy. For Afghan President Hamid Karzai, you don’t even have to ask for it or leave your office, and people will show up with plastic shopping bags full of cash for you.
The “sacks of cash” phenomenon was unveiled in 2010, when officials revealed that Iran was showing up with $1 million in cash a few times a year for Karzai. The US was and is doing it too. The CIA has notoriously been showing up all the time with “ghost money” aimed at buying influence.
“It came in secret, and it left in secret,” noted Karzai’s former chief of staff. Over a decade later, the cash is still coming and going, but what influence if any was ever actually bought is unclear at best.
Officials are critical of the policy, saying that tens of millions of US dollars with no paperwork were actually a big part of how Afghanistan became one of the most corrupt nations in human history. Though there is of course no way of tracking all this money, US officials believe that large amounts were used to bribe politicians and warlords.
This is how all political business gets done in Afghanistan to this day, and despite officials insisting that the money is incredibly counterproductive, the CIA bags are still showing up regularly. […]
Mohamedou Ould Slahi began to tell his story in 2005. Over the course of several months, the Guantánamo prisoner handwrote his memoir, recounting what he calls his “endless world tour” of detention and interrogation. He wrote in English, a language he mastered in prison. His handwriting is relaxed but neat, his narrative, even riddled with redactions, vivid and captivating. In telling his story he tried, as he wrote, “to be as fair as possible to the U.S. government, to my brothers, and to myself.” He finished his 466-page draft in early 2006. For the next six years, the U.S. government held the manuscript as a classified secret.
When his pro bono attorneys were allowed to hand me a disk labeled “Unclassified Version” last year, Slahi had been a Guantánamo detainee for more than a decade. I sat down to start reading his manuscript nearly 10 years to the day from the book’s opening scene:
“[Redacted] July 2002, 22:00. The American team takes over. The music was off. The conversations of the guards faded away. The truck emptied.”
We’re in the middle of the action. Slahi’s life in captivity had begun eight months earlier, on Nov. 20, 2001, when Slahi, then 30, was summoned by Mauritanian police for questioning. He had just returned home from work; he was in the shower when police arrived. He dressed, grabbed his car keys—he went voluntarily, driving himself to the police station—and told his mother not to worry, he would be home soon. [...]
Editor’s Note: In recent months, many climate activists have focused their efforts on Canada’s tar sands and the companies set on extracting fossil fuels from them. With the debate raging louder than ever, Rolling Stone is in contact with one of the workers helping to build a pipeline to bring oil from the tar sands to the U.S. Read on for that anonymous correspondent’s first dispatch from one of the world’s most controversial jobs.
There’s something in the air in Fort McMurray, Alberta – and it’s not just fumes from the massive oil sands processing plants north of town. Spend enough time here, and you’ll pick up the pungent scents of machismo and money.
This is the heart of Canada’s controversial tar sands operation. If all goes as planned, this region will soon be sending its bitumen – the sticky, black petroleum byproduct colloquially known as “tar” – down the Keystone XL Pipeline. President Obama has yet to give the contentious project the green light, but work in the oil sands shows no sign of slowing down any time soon.
The region has 80,000 permanent residents, and hosts about 40,000 temporary workers at any given time – welders, pipefitters, heavy equipment operators, technicians, engineers and other hired hands who pass through Fort McMurray as the work ebbs and flows. I joined them this winter when, after hearing stories about Fort Mac for years, I signed on to help build a massive pipeline (not the Keystone XL). I was eager to see the tar sands for myself, experience life in Fort Mac firsthand – and, let’s be honest, I wanted to make some oil money, too. I’m writing this story anonymously to protect my friends, my colleagues and myself.
Much of the work here relies on ice roads and freezing temperatures, so when spring comes, the work ends. The obvious irony is that the carbon economy itself is very likely contributing to the early springs, late winters and wacky weather that keeps interrupting our work.
Few in northern Alberta seemed to notice when thousands gathered in Washington, D.C. to protest the Keystone project in February. Instead, everyone was talking about the southern extension project coming up later this year, and the 14,000 jobs it would bring.
The recent rupture of an Exxon pipeline in Arkansas, spilling tens of thousands of Canadian crude, made some noise here. But most chalked it up to “bad timing” –folks are quick to point out that the pipeline in question was installed in the 1940s, and my foreman assured us that Exxon would “make sure everyone is taken care of.” The prevailing logic seems to be that if you throw enough money at a problem, it’ll go away. […]
A lot of Americans know that the US government is out of control. Anyone who has cared enough to study the US Constitution even a little knows this. Still, very few of these people are taking any significant action, and largely because of one error: They are waiting for “the good guys” to show up and fix things.
Some think that certain groups of politicians will pull it together and fix things, or that one magnificent politician will ride in to fix things. Others think that certain members of the military will step in and slap the politicians back into line. And, I’m sure there are other variations.
There are several problems with this. I’ll start with the small issues:
It doesn’t happen. A lot of good people have latched on to one grand possibility after another, waiting for a good guy to save the day, and it just doesn’t happen. Thousands of hours of reading, writing and waiting are burned with each new “great light” who comes along with a promise to run the system in the “right” way, and give us liberty and truth. (Or whatever.) Lots of decent folks grab on to one pleasant dream after another, only to end up right back where they started… but poorer in time, energy and finances.
Hope is a scam. It’s a dream of someday, somehow, getting something for nothing. People who hope do not act – they wait for other people to act. Hope is a tool to neuter a natural opposition: they sit and hope, and never act against you. Even the biblical meaning of hope is something more like expectation (or sometimes waiting) than the modern use of hope.
Petitioning an abuser for compassion. The “good guys” are considered to be a few people inside the abusive government. But if the good guys were really good, wouldn’t they have dissociated themselves with an abuser some time ago? By pleading for the good guys to rise up, people are asking one sub-group of the abusers to save them from the rest of the abusers. However, they all work for the same operation; they all get paid out of the same offices; according to the same rulebook. And if the good guys are so willing to turn against their employers, why would they have waited until now?
Movies. We all grew up in the company of movie heroes who rode in at the last minute to save the noble victims. From John Wayne to Star Trek to Bruce Willis, the story line differs little. These are pleasant stories, of course, but cinema is not reality, and hoping for it to become reality is something that we should get over prior to adulthood.
But, as I say, those are the smaller issues. Let’s move on to the serious ones.
[…]
The Sad Truth
Let’s just say it:
No one is going to ride in and save you.
If you want things to get better, then YOU will have to make them better. YOU will have to stand up and take the arrows, yourself. Liberty, at this stage of human development, requires risk and pain. […]
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company
(Photo: Jorge Castro / Flickr)
If you want to see why the public approval rating of Congress is down in the sub-arctic range — an icy 15 percent by last count — all you have to do is take a quick look at how the House and Senate pay worship at the altar of corporations, banks and other special interests at the expense of public aspirations and need.
Traditionally, political scientists have taught their students that there are two schools of thought about how a legislator should get the job done. One is to vote yay or nay on a bill by following the will of his or her constituency, doing what they say they want. The other is to represent them as that legislator sees fit, acting in the best interest of the voters — whether they like it or not.
But our current Congress — as cranky and inert as an obnoxious old uncle who refuses to move from his easy chair — never went to either of those schools. Its members rarely have the voter in mind at all, unless, of course, that voter’s a cash-laden heavy hitter with the clout to keep an incumbent on the leash and comfortably in office.
How else to explain a Congress that still adamantly refuses to do anything, despite some 90 percent of the American public being in favor of background checks for gun purchases and a healthy majority favoring other gun control measures? Last week, they ignored the pleas of Newtown families and the siege of violence in Boston and yielded once again to the fanatical rants of Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association. In just the first three months of this year, as it shoved back against the renewed push for controls, the NRA spent a record $800,000 keeping congressional members in line. […]
Two years on from the Arab Spring, I’m clearer about what it was that it inaugurated: it is a revolution. In some ways it parallels the revolutions of before – 1848, 1830, 1789 – and there are also echoes of the Prague spring, the US civil rights movement, the Russian ‘mad summer of 1874’ … but in other ways it is unique. Above all, the relationship between the physical and the mental, the political and the cultural, seems to be inverted. There is a change in consciousness, the intuition that something big is possible, that a great change in the world’s priorities is within people’s grasp.
What is underpinning the unrest that has swept the globe? In reality it’s reducible to three factors. Firstly, the neoliberal economic model has collapsed, and this has then been compounded by persistent attempts to go on making neoliberalism work: to ram the square peg into the round hole, thereby turning a slump into what looks like being a ten year global depression. Secondly there has been a revolution in technology that has made horizontal networks the default mode of activism and protest; this has destroyed the traditional means of disseminating ideology that persisted through two hundred years of industrial capitalism, and has made social media the irreversible norm. Thirdly, there has been a change in human consciousness: the emergence of what Manuel Castells calls ‘the networked individual’ – an expansion of the space and power of individual human beings and a change in the way they think; a change in the rate of change of ideas; an expansion of available knowledge; and a massive, almost unrecordable, revolution in culture.
What we are seeing is not the Arab Spring, the Russian Spring, the Maple Spring, Occupy, the indignados. We’re seeing the Human Spring. We are seeing something that reminds us, long after the historians reduced it to a list of battles and constitutions, why they called 1848 the springtime of the nations; and why Hegel, in the aftermath of the first French revolution, wrote: ‘Our epoch is a birth-time. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation (Phenomenology of Mind, 1807)
The collapse of neoliberalism
As an economic model neoliberalism died on 15 September 2008. Alan Greenspan’s words in the subsequent House Committee hearing were prophetic: ‘I found a flaw’, he said: ‘A flaw in the model that I perceived [to be] … a critical functioning structure that defines how the world works… That’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I’ve been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well’ (October 2008). Neoliberalism told us that the market was self-regulating; that the self-interest of the deal participant was a better policeman than the regulator. It created a dominant finance sector and told that sector to enrich itself – and that sector has now crashed the world economy.
We are left with what Nomura economist Richard Koo calls a ‘balance sheet recession’ – in which fiscal stimulus, zero interest rates and a $6 trillion global money printing operation can only keep the patient alive. The Western elite can’t address this prolonged stagnation because it can’t bear to do any of the things that would end the depression: write off the debts, inflate them away, or step back from globalisation to protect their own populations from its depressive effect on living standards. So they’re left staring at the old model: and not only is the dynamo of it knackered, it is rapidly losing social legitimacy. All attempts to make the old model work without solving the global imbalances on which it rests lead to the policy of austerity: not just fiscal austerity, as in Britain and southern Europe, but a long-term strategy of reducing the wages, welfare benefits and labour rights of the workforce in the West.
And there is one massively important group that has been dealt not just a tactical setback but a strategic one. In Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere I called these ‘graduates without a future’ – the first generation in the West since the 1930s who will be poorer than their parents.[1] They will leave college with £30, 40, 50k debts. The jobs on offer are – as the famous Santa Cruz ‘Communiqué from an Absent Future’ told us in 2009 – the same jobs you do while on campus: interning, barista, waiting tables, sex work. The first post-college job is often working for free or for the minimum wage. There is no way onto the housing ladder, the ladder is now horizontal; and in retirement, pension schemes will be gone.
You can add in further specific grievances, country by country: medieval attempts to roll back reproductive rights; endless small wars conducted against civilians; racism everywhere; torture as the default option not just in anti-terrorism but in the policing of minorities. In Europe there is relentless austerity – of the kind that forces you to eat or pay the rent. A whole generation is being forced to live as drifters – to relive the plots of 1930s movies: to get on a bus to look for work, to migrate, to sofa-surf, to enter relationships that are stark compromises between love and economics.
For this generation it is not a question of simple economic grievance but of the theft of the promised future. And I’ve become sick of hearing that the movement has ‘petered out’. No. It has been massively repressed. Tear gas fired indiscriminately into crowds in Athens, rubber bullets in Madrid, tasers and pepper spray on campuses across America. Non-lethal policing is highly effective against non-violent protests. It tends to clear them away. But do not think it has cleared away the grievances in people’s minds that led them to demonstrate in the first place. What it does is push those who don’t want to get their heads broken into a more sullen, silent, passive resistance: a resistance of ideas; or a resistance of small, granular social projects; or, as in Greece, anomie – where people just embrace the beauty of being hopeless, roll a joint, stare into each other’s eyes.
The crisis of neoliberalism, compounded by the total failure to emerge of any alternative within official politics, simply leaves unanswered the next generation’s question: how does capitalism secure my future? […]
Some claim that the Boston marathon bombing, 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing were false flag attacks.
Others claim that anyone who uses the phrase “false flag” is a nut conspiracy theorist.
This post does not discuss Boston, 9/11 or Oklahoma City. It simply looks at whether there is any real historical concept regarding false flags.
What Is False Flag Terror?
“False flag terrorism” is defined as a government attacking its own people, then blaming others in order to justify going to war against the people it blames. Or as Wikipedia defines it:
False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations, and have been used in peace-time; for example, during Italy’s strategy of tension.
The term comes from the old days of wooden ships, when one ship would hang the flag of its enemy before attacking another ship in its own navy. Because the enemy’s flag, instead of the flag of the real country of the attacking ship, was hung, it was called a “false flag” attack.
Indeed, this concept is so well-accepted that rules of engagement for naval, air and land warfare all prohibit false flag attacks.
Leaders Throughout History Have Acknowledged False Flags
Leaders throughout history have acknowledged the danger of false flags:
“This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”
- Plato
“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
- U.S. President James Madison
“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”.
- Adolph Hitler
“Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
- Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.
“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened”.
- Josef Stalin
Governments from Around the World ADMIT that they Carry Out False Flag Terror
But don’t take our word for it.
Governments from around the world admit they carry out false flag terror: […]
As with many “terrorism” related events since 9/11, the Boston bombing official narrative proves to be a web of lies as important facts are revealed. It turns out that the FBI has lied about its knowledge of the alleged suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, already being presented as guilty not only in the mainstream press but by the President himself.
According to the suspects’ mother, the FBI had been following them for years:
The FBI originally feigned ignorance over the identity of the two Boston bombing suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as they appealed to an unwitting public to help them “identify” and “find” the suspects. […]
But her biggest suspicion surrounding the case was the constant FBI surveillance she said her family was subjected to over the years. She is surprised that having been so stringent with the entire family, the FBI had no idea the sons were supposedly planning a terrorist act.
She would say of the FBI to Russia Today:
They used to come [to our] home, they used to talk to me…they were telling me that he [the older, 26-y/o Tamerlan] was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him. They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremist sites… they were controlling him, they were controlling his every step…and now they say that this is a terrorist act! Never ever is this true, my sons are innocent!
We were also told that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in an exchange of gunfire after he and his brother had robbed a 7-Eleven:
When the shootout ended, one of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, a former boxer, had been shot and fatally wounded. He was wearing explosives, several law enforcement officials said. (Katharine Q. Seelye, William K. Rashbaum and Michael Cooper 2nd Bombing Suspect Caught After Frenzied Hunt Paralyzes Boston, The New York Times, April 19, 2013.)
With a bomb strapped to his chest, one of the Boston Marathon suspects was killed early Friday after he and his accomplice brother robbed a 7-Eleven, shot a police officer to death, carjacked an SUV and hurled explosives in an extraordinary firefight with law enforcement, authorities told NBC News. (Pete Williams, Richard Esposito, Michael Isikoff and Erin McClam, NBC News, One Boston Marathon suspect killed; second suspect, his brother, on loose after firefight, NBC News, April 19, 2013.)
The events surrounding Tamerlan’s death reported by the media are simply not true. It turns out that Tamerlan’ aunt identified him as a “naked, cuffed, clearly alive and well detaineeseen in video aired by CNN”:
* EVERYONE’S MISSING THE BIGGER PICTURE IN THE REINHART-ROGOFF DEBATE
Source: Washington’s Blog
You’ve heard that an incredibly influential economic paper by Reinhart and Rogoff (RR) – widely used to justify austerity – has been “busted” for “excel spreadsheet errors” and other flaws.
As Google Trends shows, there is a raging debate over the errors in RR’s report:
Liberal economists argue that the “debunking” of RR proves that debt doesn’t matter, and that conservative economists who say it does are liars and scoundrels.
Conservative economists argue that the Habsburg, British and French empires crumbled under the weight of high debt, and that many other economists – including Niall Ferguson, the IMF and others – agree that high debt destroys economies.
Researchers at the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund have weighed in with their own independent work. The World Economic Outlook published last October by the International Monetary Fund devoted an entire chapter to debt and growth. The most recent update to that outlook, released in April, states: “Much of the empirical work on debt overhangs seeks to identify the ‘overhang threshold’ beyond which the correlation between debt and growth becomes negative. The results are broadly similar: above a threshold of about 95 percent of G.D.P., a 10 percent increase in the ratio of debt to G.D.P. is identified with a decline in annual growth of about 0.15 to 0.20 percent per year.”
This view generally reflects the state of the art in economic research
***
Back in 2010, we were still sorting inconsistencies in Spanish G.D.P. data from the 1960s from three different sources. Our primary source for real G.D.P. growth was the work of the economic historian Angus Madison. But we also checked his data and, where inconsistencies appeared, refrained from using it. Other sources, including the I.M.F. and Spain’s monumental and scholarly historical statistics, had very different numbers. In our 2010 paper, we omitted Spain for the 1960s entirely. Had we included these observations, it would have strengthened our results, since Spain had very low public debt in the 1960s (under 30 percent of G.D.P.), and yet enjoyed very fast average G.D.P. growth (over 6 percent) over that period.
***
We have never advised Mr. Ryan, nor have we worked for President Obama, whose Council of Economic Advisers drew heavily on our work in a chapter of the 2012 Economic Report of the President, recreating and extending the results.
In the campaign, we received great heat from the right for allowing our work to be used by others as a rationalization for the country’s slow recovery from the financial crisis. Now we are being attacked by the left — primarily by those who have a view that the risks of higher public debt should not be part of the policy conversation.
But whether you believe that the errors in the RR study are fatal or minor, there is a bigger picture that everyone is ignoring. […]
* WHAT BP DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THE 2010 GULF SPILL
By Mark Hertsgaard, Daily Beast
The 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill was even worse than BP wanted us to know.
An agonizing 87 days passed before the BP oil spill was finally sealed off. According to US government estimates, 210 million gallons of Louisiana sweet crude had escaped into the Gulf, making this disaster the largest unintentional oil leak in world history. (Benjamin Lowy/Getty)
“It’s as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid.” That’s what Jamie Griffin says the BP man told her about the smelly, rainbow-streaked gunk coating the floor of the “floating hotel” where Griffin was feeding hundreds of cleanup workers during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, the workers were tracking the gunk inside on their boots. Griffin, as chief cook and maid, was trying to clean it. But even boiling water didn’t work.
“The BP representative said, ‘Jamie, just mop it like you’d mop any other dirty floor,’” Griffin recalls in her Louisiana drawl.
It was the opening weeks of what everyone, echoing President Barack Obama, was calling “the worst environmental disaster in American history.” At 9:45 p.m. local time on April 20, 2010, a fiery explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had killed 11 workers and injured 17. One mile underwater, the Macondo well had blown apart, unleashing a gusher of oil into the gulf. At risk were fishing areas that supplied one third of the seafood consumed in the U.S., beaches from Texas to Florida that drew billions of dollars’ worth of tourism to local economies, and Obama’s chances of reelection. Republicans were blaming him for mishandling the disaster, his poll numbers were falling, even his 11-year-old daughter was demanding, “Daddy, did you plug the hole yet?”
Griffin did as she was told: “I tried Pine-Sol, bleach, I even tried Dawn on those floors.” As she scrubbed, the mix of cleanser and gunk occasionally splashed onto her arms and face.
Within days, the 32-year-old single mother was coughing up blood and suffering constant headaches. She lost her voice. “My throat felt like I’d swallowed razor blades,” she says.
* EVERYTHING IS RIGGED: THE BIGGEST PRICE-FIXING SCANDAL EVER
By Matt Taibbi
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture. […]
Most publications talk about the 10B or 17B Cyprus bailout. Let’s take a pop quiz on the right answer:
(a) 17 B Euros (89% of GDP)
(b) 10B Euros (52% of GDP)
(c) 2.5B Euros (13% of GDP)
(d) -3.0B Euros (-15% of GDP)
(e) -7.5B Euros (-39% of GDP)
Now let’s work through the answers, in steps:
(a) The 17B figure was calculated assuming the bailout would provide 7B for the banks. The final number provided not a single Euro for the banks who were asked, against the approach taken in the last 147 banking crises worldwide tracked by the IMF, to find the whole 7B out of their depositor base. So, part (a) is wrong
(b) The remaining 10B is described as a bailout of the government. Of this 10B however, 7.5B is being used to refinance maturing debt.
This debt, I would guess, is mostly at this point beneficially held by ECB. This is just an assumption, but we know that 75% of it was held domestically, largely by the banks. This was probably the first collateral pledged by the banks via the ELA, so ultimately if the Central Bank and the government default it will ultimately fall on the ECB’s balance sheet. The 25% is probably traded internationally and, again outside of Cyprus hands.
So, the 7.5B is being lent to Cyprus in order to be paid right back to Europe. That is not charity, that is ‘hiding their embarrassing losses until later when someone else is in office’. If moral hazard requires clueless Cypriot retail depositors to pay for their banks’ decision to lend to the insolvent Greek government, then presumably it also applies to the financial wizards at ECB that lent to the insolvent Laiki, despite having full access to their financial information.
That leaves 2.5B of fresh financing for the government which I will concede is new money, though until we see the Memorandum and the terms under which we receive this money, I am not too excited about it. Cyprus could raise this amount domestically so long as it did not have to do it overnight (which it does not – it is to fund deficits over the next few years). […]
Antwerp diamond dealers “among most prominent” users of tax havens
The Belgian tax authorities will investigate the cases of any nationals named in the so-called Offshore Leaks – a major journalistic investigation of leaked files dealing with offshore companies and tax havens. Last week an international consortium of 86 magazines and newspapers, including Belgium’s Le Soir, revealed some of the names of approximately 130,000 wealthy individuals and companies accused of using offshore corporations to avoid up to €25 trillion in tax in their 170 respective countries.
No specific names were revealed by Le Soir journalist Alain Lallemand, but there were “hundreds” of Belgians involved, he said. He has been in touch with some of those whose names appear in the documents, and they have admitted involvement. “I think Antwerp diamond traders are among the most prominent names,” on the list, he said.
Belgium has a shield law protecting journalists’ sources, so the Offshore documents are only being handed over to authorities voluntarily. According to Kristof Spagnoli of the law office Eubelius, the fact that the data have been manipulated by the journalists handling the documents could make them useless if it came to a prosecution. […]
* GREEK GOVERNMENT TO LAUNCH LEGAL BATTLE FOR REPARATIONS FROM GERMANY
Source: RT
Photo taken in December 1944 in Athens. (AFP Photo)
Greece has officially declared it will seek reparations from Germany dating back to the Nazi occupation during World War II, which could amount to over €100 billion, likely putting further strain on relations between the two Eurozone countries.
“We will exhaust every means available to arrive at a settlement,” Greek Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos told parliament in Athens on Wednesday. “One can’t compare the times, but also one cannot erase the memories.”
A Greek Finance Ministry report leaked to local media earlier this month showed that Greece believes that Berlin owes it €162 billion – €108 billion for infrastructure damage during the occupation between 1941 and the end of the war, and €54 billion as compensation for an interest-free loan Germany took from the country to support its war effort.
If paid in full, the sum would nearly empty the national currency and gold reserves of Germany (€185 billion as of last month), though this would still not be enough to cover Greece’s national debt (over €350 billion).
Demands for such a reparation scheme have been voiced intermittently by Greek politicians over the past 60 years, but have gained renewed energy amid the recent financial crisis, in which the country has been subjected to tough austerity measures in exchange for largely German-backed loans.
The latest campaign is driven by radical Socialist opposition leader Alexis Tsipras, and is supported by 4 out of 5 Greeks, according to polls.
It remains unlikely that Germany will part with the money voluntarily. […]
* GREECE IS TRYING TO KILL ITS BIGGEST ANTI-GOVERNMENT WEBSITE AND RADIO STATIONS
By Yiannis Baboulias, Motherboard
Photo of police from a February protest in Athens via Vice
The Athens branch of Indymedia, an independent open network of journalists who report on political and social issues, was shut down last Thursday. Before its plug was pulled, the site was used for such principled purposes as reporting on cases of police brutality and exposing underground dealings between the Greek police force and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party. If you’ve somehow managed not to come across it before, it’s a kind of localised WikiLeaks, only without that tricky stigma that comes with rape allegations and overstaying your welcome at South American embassies.
You might also remember the case of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, whose death in 2008 at the hands of a Greek police officer spurred the riots that plunged Athens into apocalyptic tumult for almost a month. Indymedia helped to uncover the details of that shooting and played a large part in helping demonstrators mobilise and communicate in the riots that followed.
So it would be fair to assume, based on those facts, that neither Greece’s head of police, nor his bosses in the government were particularly enamoured by the website or the results its stories prompted.
Hours after the site went offline, a tweet from Adonis Georgiadis, an MP for the ruling New Democracy party, confirmed the suspicions many activists had already voiced online: that the government – specifically, MP Nikos Dendias – had decided it was time to silence the website that had been causing them all of this trouble. […]
* CHILD HUNGER IS EXPLODING IN GREECE – AND 14 SIGNS THAT IT IS STARTING TO HAPPEN IN AMERICA TOO
By Michael, TheEconomicCollapse
The world is heading into a horrific economic nightmare, and an inordinate amount of the suffering is going to fall on innocent children. If you want to get an idea of what America is going to look like in the not too distant future, just check out what is happening in Greece. At this point, Greece is experiencing a full-blown economic depression. As I have written about previously, the unemployment rate in Greece has now risen to 27 percent, which is much higher than the peak unemployment rate that the U.S. economy experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s. And as you will read about below, child hunger is absolutely exploding in Greece right now. Some families are literally trying to survive on pasta and ketchup. But don’t think for a moment that it can’t happen here. Sadly, the truth is that child hunger is already rising very rapidly in our poverty-stricken cities. Never before have we had so many Americans unable to take care of themselves. Food stamp enrollment and child homelessness have soared to brand new all-time records, and there are actually thousands of Americans that are so poor that they live in tunnels underneath our cities. But for millions of other Americans, the suffering is not quite so dramatic. Instead, they just watch their hopes and their dreams slowly slip away as they struggle to find a way to make it from month to month. There are millions of parents that lead lives that are filled with constant stress and anxiety as they try to figure out how to provide the basics for their children. How do you tell a child that you can’t give them any dinner even though you have been trying as hard as you can? What many families go through on a regular basis is absolutely heartbreaking. Unfortunately, more poor families slip through the cracks with each passing day, and these are supposedly times in which we are experiencing an “economic recovery”. So what are things going to look like when the next major economic downturn strikes?
A recent New York Times article detailed the horrifying child hunger that we are witnessing in Greece right now. At some schools there are reports of children actually begging for food from their classmates…
As an elementary school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old boy, Pantelis Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains.
“He had eaten almost nothing at home,” Mr. Nikas said, sitting in his cramped school office near the port of Piraeus, a working-class suburb of Athens, as the sound of a jump rope skittered across the playground. He confronted Pantelis’s parents, who were ashamed and embarrassed but admitted that they had not been able to find work for months. Their savings were gone, and they were living on rations of pasta and ketchup.
Could you imagine that happening to your children or your grandchildren?
Don’t think that it can’t happen. Just a few years ago the Greek middle class was vibrant and thriving.
[…]
#1 Today, approximately 17 million children in the United States are facing food insecurity. In other words, that means that “one in four children in the country is living without consistent access to enough nutritious food to live a healthy life.”
#2 We are told that we live in the “wealthiest nation” on the planet, and yet more than one out of every four children in the United States is enrolled in the food stamp program.
#3 The average food stamp benefit breaks down to approximately $4 per person per day.
#4 It is being projected that approximately 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps before they reach the age of 18.
#5 It may be hard to believe, but approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are currently living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.
#6 The number of children living on $2.00 a day or less in the United States has grown to 2.8 million. That number has increased by 130 percent since 1996.
#7 According to Feeding America, “households with children reported food insecurity at a significantly higher rate than those without children, 20.6 percent compared to 12.2 percent”.
#8 According to a Feeding America hunger study, more than 37 million Americans are now being served by food pantries and soup kitchens.
#9 For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.
#10 Approximately 20 million U.S. children rely on school meal programs to keep from going hungry.
#11 One university study estimates that child poverty costs the U.S. economy 500 billion dollars each year.
#12 In Miami, 45 percent of all children are living in poverty.
* AMERICA THE FALLEN: 24 SIGNS THAT OUR ONCE PROUD CITIES ARE TURNING INTO POVERTY-STRICKEN HELLHOLES
By Tyler Durden, zerohedge
What is happening to you America? Once upon a time, the United States was a place where free enterprise thrived and the greatest cities that the world had ever seen sprouted up from coast to coast. Good jobs were plentiful and a manufacturing boom helped fuel the rise of the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the planet. Cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Baltimore were all teeming with economic activity and the rest of the globe looked on our economic miracle with a mixture of wonder and envy. But now look at us. Our once proud cities are being transformed into poverty-stricken hellholes.
Did you know that the city of Detroit once actually had the highest per-capita income in the United States? Looking at Detroit today, it is hard to imagine that it was once one of the most prosperous cities in the world. In fact, as you will read about later in this article, tourists now travel to Detroit from all over the globe just to see the ruins of Detroit. Sadly, the exact same thing that is happening to Detroit is happening to cities all over America. Detroit is just ahead of the curve.
We are in the midst of a long-term economic collapse that is eating away at us like cancer, and things are going to get a lot worse than this. So if you still live in a prosperous area of the country, don’t laugh at what is happening to others. What is happening to them will be coming to your area soon enough.
The following are 24 signs that our once proud cities are turning into poverty-stricken hellholes…
#2 At this point, approximately one-third of Detroit’s 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.
#3 Back during the housing bubble, an acre of land in downtown Phoenix, Arizona sold for about $90 a square foot. Today, an acre in downtown Phoenix sells for about $9 a square foot.
#4 The city of Chicago is so strapped for cash that it is planning to close 54 public schools. It is being estimated that Chicago schools will run a budget deficit of about a billion dollars in 2013.
#5 The city of Baltimore is already facing unfunded liabilities of more than 3.2 billion dollars, but the city government continues to pile up more debt as if it was going out of style. […]
Last fall, Moyers & Company aired the United States of ALEC, a report on the most influential corporate-funded political force most of America has never heard of — ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. In statehouses around the country, hundreds of pieces of boilerplate ALEC legislation are proposed or enacted that would, among other things, dilute collective bargaining rights, make it harder for some Americans to vote, and limit corporate liability for harm caused to consumers — each accomplished without the public ever knowing who’s behind it.
The response from viewers has been amazing. We’ve received updates to our interactive map naming local legislators who are affiliated with ALEC, as well as hundreds of comments and emails about the revelations contained in the report. Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), one of the watchdog organizations keeping tabs on ALEC, recently visited our offices and updated us on what ALEC’s been up to lately.
Riley: On the PR Watch website last week, I saw that ALEC may be about to undergo a makeover, starting with its name. What happened?
Lisa Graves: ALEC is urging its members to no longer use the acronym. In a note to ALEC legislators and private sector members, ALEC’s spokesman said: “You may have noticed we are limiting the use of the acronym ‘ALEC.’ Over the past year, the word ‘ALEC’ has been used to conjure up images of a distant, mysterious, Washington alphabet organization of unknown intentions,” which he says could not be further from the truth, adding that “the organization has refocused on the words ‘Exchange’ and ‘Council’ to emphasize our goal of a broad exchange of ideas to make government work better and more efficiently.” This re-branding is a classic PR technique. Big Tobacco used it to try to distance some of its brands with negative consumer users.
This latest PR manuever underscores the success of ALECexposed.org, the investigation that we at CMD launched two years ago, to make more Americans aware of ALEC’s extreme agenda. This rebranding news comes from open records requests that CMD has been pursuing with Common Cause, to try to uncloak ALEC communications with public officials. […]
* CISPA – CORPORATIONS BUY POLITICIANS AND YOUR PRIVACY
Source: The Young Turks
“Activists and Internet users protesting the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act — a cybersecurity bill that passed the House of Representatives Thursday — have spun the battle as big business interests versus the privacy of individual citizens. If lobbying dollars are anything to go by, they’re right: Pro-CISPA businesses and interests have spent 140 times more money on lobbying than anti-CISPA interests, according to the Sunlight Foundation.”
CISPA passed overwhelmingly in the house, despite its promise to allow corporations and the government access to your private data, completely unchecked. It’s no wonder after seeing how much money was poured into lobbying for the invasive bill, and who stands to profit. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian break it down with Kim Horcher
* 2012 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE RACIST VIOLENCE RECORDING NETWORK
Source: Greek Left Reviews
Introduction
The present report consists of two parts: First, the quantitative and qualitative findings of recording incidents of racist violence, through interviewing victims, by organizations participating in the Racist Violence Recording Network during 2012; and, second the Network’s positions on state responses and initiatives to combat racist crimes, including the adoption or amendment of relevant legislation or initiatives to do so.
1) Findings
During the period January-December 2012, the Racist Violence Recording Network documented, through interviews with victims, 154 incidents of racist violence, of which 151 were committed against refugees and migrants and 3 against European citizens (1 Romanian, 1 Bulgarian and 1 Greek).
Location of incidents: 107 incidents occurred within the geographical area of the Municipality of Athens, and particularly in areas of the city centre, such as Aghios Panteleimonas, Attica Square, America Square and other areas around Omonia Square, while 23 incidents were recorded in the broader area of Attica prefecture. Moreover, 13 incidents occurred in Patras, 3 in Corinth, while 3 incidents recorded in Igoumenitsa and Evros have occurred in detention centers. Finally, incidents have also taken place in Rhodes, Chios, Konitsa and Nea Manolada Ilias.
The majority of incidents occurred in public places, while 6 were more particularly recorded on public transport. There are also 7 incidents which occurred in detention facilities (police stations and detention centers) and 16 were perpetrated in private places such as migrants’ houses, shops and places used as lodges.
Characteristics of the attacks: The majority of incidents concern physical attacks against foreigners, while the types of crimes are mainly severe body injuries (in 66 cases) and assaults (in 76 cases). Threats against foreigners have also been reported as well as cases of verbal abuse and property damage. It is worth noting that at least 22 incidents combine property damage and assault against a person (or persons), as shows the case involving the arson of a barber’s shop owned by a Pakistani national near the area of Metamorfosi. Most incidents occurred at night or in the early morning hours.
The Racist Violence Recording Network registered a homicide case in 2012, following communication with the victim’s family; the victim was a 31 year-old Egyptian citizen who died after 17 days in coma after being savagely beaten. This incident, like the atrocious murder of a 19 year-old Iraqi boy at the center of Athens in August 2012 and that of a 26 year-old Pakistani male who was fatally attacked by two people on a motorcycle near the area of Petralona at the beginning of 2013, constitute a dramatic reminder that violent attacks with racist motives are not merely a continuous phenomenon, but one the degree of violence of which is frighteningly increasing within the Greek society.
The victims: The victims who approached the members of the Network and reported the incidents, consisted of 149 men (average age 27 years old) and 5 women (average age 24,6 years old), mainly from Afghanistan (47), Pakistan (13), Algeria (12), Bangladesh (12), Egypt (10) Morocco (7), Somalia (6), Soudan (6), Guinea (6), Tunisia (5) and Iraq (4). Nationalities of victims also include Iran, Mauritania, Syria, Eritrea, Congo, Senegal, Palestine, Comoros, the Ivory Coast, Albania, Georgia, Gambia and Ghana. In addition, the Network recorded 3 European citizens: 1 Romanian, 1 Bulgarian and 1 Greek who was victim of homophobic attack.
As regards the legal status of the victims, except those who have the nationality of an EU Member State, 44 were asylum seekers, 4 were recognized refugees, 15 were holders of residence permits and 79 held no legal documents or were under deportation order (in 8 cases the victim’s status was unknown).
In the vast majority of cases, the victims consider the fact that their characteristic as foreigners is the reason for the attack; they believe that they were targeted because either of their skin color or of any other characteristic revealing the fact they were not natives (the majority of migrant victims were Muslims). It is worth noting that 2 out of 5 female victims believe they were attacked because they were wearing the hijab.
Also, in most cases, the victims themselves were able to identify the motive of the attack, since the attacks followed a question or a comment about the origin of the victims and were accompanied by verbal insults and threats against the foreigners. In many other instances (in particular cases where the victims were present in the country only for a short period of time and were unaware of racist violence incidents), the racist motive of the attack was clearly expressed to them by the perpetrators when victims requested on the reason of the attack.
Finally, the Racist Violence Recording Network recorded for the first time an attack where the motive was related to the sexual orientation of the victim. This record should not lead to the conclusion that there were no such attacks in recent years, but it is linked to the mobilization and participation of LGBT organisations in the Network only recently, and their active follow-up of relevant attacks.
The perpetrators: The perpetrators in the recorded attacks were men, with the exception of 8 incidents where the perpetrators acted as a group in which the participation of women has also been recorded. At least in those cases where victims could assess the age of the perpetrators, the average age was 27 years old and they were in the vast majority Greek citizens. Incidents where the perpetrators belonged to different ethnic groups have also been recorded (i.e. attack at the centre of Athens in which ethnic Albanian immigrants participated). In only 6 out of 154 incidents the perpetrator acted alone.
According to the victims’ testimonies, in 91 cases, the perpetrators are believed to belong to extremist group. This fact also emerges from the qualitative elements recorded concerning the attacks: in these instances, the perpetrators are believed to act in an organized manner and in groups, moving either by motorcycle or on foot, often being accompanied by aggressive dogs. They are dressed in black and at times with military trousers, wearing helmets or having their faces covered. In similar attacks the participation of minors is also recorded. Most incidents occurred after sunset or in the early morning hours. Motorcycle or foot “patrols” by people dressed in black are described as the most common practice; they act as self-proclaimed vigilante groups who attack refugees and migrants in the streets, squares or public transportation stops.
The victims speak of areas in Athens which have become inaccessible to them due to the fear of being attacked. In at least 8 cases, the victims or witnesses to the attacks reported that they recognized persons associated to Golden Dawn among the perpetrators, because either they wore the insignia of the organization, or they were seen participating in public events of the organization in the area, or they were known as associated with the local branch of the organization. […]
Flickr/Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Suzanne Nossel.
The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of PEN American Center is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire. Nossel’s appointment led me to resign from PEN as well as withdraw from speaking at the PEN World Voices Festival in May. But Nossel is only symptomatic of the widespread hijacking of human rights organizations to demonize those—especially Muslims—branded by the state as the enemy, in order to cloak pre-emptive war and empire with a fictional virtue and to effectively divert attention from our own mounting human rights abuses, including torture, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring, the denial of due process and extrajudicial assassinations.
Nossel, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under Hillary Clinton in a State Department that was little more than a subsidiary of the Pentagon, is part of the new wave of “humanitarian interventionists,” such as Samantha Power, Michael Ignatieff and Susan Rice, who naively see in the U.S. military a vehicle to create a better world. They know little of the reality of war or the actual inner workings of empire. They harbor a childish belief in the innate goodness and ultimate beneficence of American power. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the horrendous suffering and violent terror inflicted in the name of their utopian goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, barely register on their moral calculus. This makes them at once oblivious and dangerous. “Innocence is a kind of insanity,” Graham Greene wrote in his novel “The Quiet American,” and those who destroy to build are “impregnably armored by … good intentions and … ignorance.”
There are no good wars. There are no just wars. As Erasmus wrote, “there is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome” than war. “Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere?” Erasmus asked. But war, he knew, was very useful to the power elite. War permitted the powerful, in the name of national security and by fostering a culture of fear, to effortlessly strip the citizen of his or her rights. A declaration of war ensures that “all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few,” Erasmus wrote. […]
Whether the Boston Marathon murders were staged as a false flag, and if so, by whom, there are certainly contradictions in the media story line so far.
Mike Adams, at natural news, has pointed out several key absurdities in the official scenario, including the apparent controlled demolition of a bomb at the JFK library, a mile away from the explosions at the Marathon finish line.
This demolition, unreported by the press, was mentioned just before it took place, by a Boston Globe tweet: “There will be a controlled explosion opposite the library within one minute as part of bomb squad activities.”
The demolition would have taken place about an hour after the two explosions at the Marathon finish line, which means the bomb squad was able to find the Library device, rig it for demolition, and blow it up in record time.
Whatever the cause of the fire/explosion in the Library, that “incendiary device” was spent, and the bomb squad found another unexploded bomb on the premises.
A local Boston TV reporter, Eileen Curran, took a photo of the Library. The exterior of the building, at the employee’s entrance, shows blackened walls. If the “electrical fire” or the “incendiary device” caused this damage, the room in the Library where the fire or explosion took place must have been just inside the building. No media sources are specifically reporting that, which seems quite odd.
The press is merely stating there was a fire in a room in the Library. The fact that the fire was quite close to an entrance certainly rates a mention. It adds juicy media drama to the report. But there is no coverage of the fact.
All terror attacks, no matter who launches them, have a psychology. They have a purpose. Inducing fear, of course. Causing the public to give in to a new set of “security regulations,” which tighten the screws on freedom, of course. Painting some designated group as heinous, of course.
The third Monday in April, is Patriot’s Day. It commemorates the April 19, 1775, opening battles in the Revolutionary War against England, at Lexington and Concord. Previously celebrated on April 19th, it is also the anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing (1995), and the final FBI attack on the Waco, Texas, Branch Davidian compound that killed 76 men, women, and children (1993). April 15 is also tax day.
So some media commentators are already opining that “anti-tax-pro-patriot-anti-government” persons are behind the Boston murders.
At an elite level, where psyop research is conducted, the psychology of terror attacks involves disrupting the normal perception of reality.
Most people live their days in a more or less steady state of mind. They perform routine tasks over and over. They see their daily environment as quite familiar. All this produces what could be called a light trance.
If that seems improbable, notice what happens when something completely unexpected intrudes on habitual perception and experience. Shock is what happens.
It’s as if the person had been sleeping and suddenly and forcibly wakes up.
On a quiet residential street, a car plows into a lamp post. On a peaceful boulevard, a gust of wind blows a sign from its hinges into a store window, smashing it.
People are shocked. They look up. “Wow. Where was I?” Yes, it’s like waking from a dream.
Multiply that effect by a thousand. Bombs go off. The sounds of the explosions, the shock waves, people falling, people bleeding, grotesque injuries, death. In the space of a few seconds, and on a street where nothing ever happens.
And one layer removed from this, the world watches it unfold on television.
It’s a rip in the fabric of perceived reality. Right now.
Retired psyop planner, Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), told me in a 2002 interview: “People think it’s very esoteric to talk about disruption in the space-time wave. But setting up certain psyops is very much about that. The theory of these operations has everything to do with the fact that people exist in an average and consistent space-time wave.
“They become used to that. They’re not even aware of it. So a psyop can go two ways. It can encourage that form of sleep, to make it continue. Or it can blow people right out of their wave into something that’s very disorienting.
“In the latter case, you’re forcing people out of their average perception of space and time, but you’re not giving them anything to replace it. They’re hanging in a void, so to speak.
“What’s the result? People desperately want a resolution of the psyop, so they can return to their former continuum. And because they feel desperate, they’ll take whatever and whoever you give them. You can say a deer chewed on a power cable and blew out the power for the entire east coast for a week, and they’ll believe you.
“And that’s what you want. The ability to say anything and have people believe you.”
I asked Medavoy if this included peppering the public with contradictions in the official account of a terrorist attack.
“Of course,” he said. “They’ll overlook those contradictions. They won’t pay any attention to them. They’re so panicked, they just want a resolution. You can plug in anybody as the guilty party, and they’ll buy it.”
Later in the conversation, I went back to the subject of the “space-time wave.”
Medavoy said: “The psychology on this is clear. An overwhelming percentage of people deal with space-time in a passive way. They receive it, so to speak. They are presented with that fundament of reality and they blindly accept it. Therefore, when you take it away, they’re lost. A tiny percentage of the population, those who are intensely creative, react differently. That’s because they are, in a real sense, projecting their own space and time.”
Psyops planners who stage events are aware of these factors. They want to create a world, a picture of a world, that is in dangerous flux and absolutely requires our “leaders” to stop that flux.
One of my more vivid experiences of this came in the mid-1980s. I was interviewing a relative of a soldier who died in Vietnam. When the subject of whether the war was justified came up, he flew off the handle. He went into a towering rage.
The fact that his cousin had been killed there automatically made the war a necessary policy of the government, a correct action. That conclusion stopped the unbearable flux for him. Otherwise, he was lost.
It was, of course, that way on 9/11, too, and in many other such instances.
There is a psychology operating here, and it isn’t merely some academic brand of nonsense. It cuts to the heart of how people literally exist in reality, and how it affects their deep response to events managed by professionals, who understand that psychology.
Jon Rappoport, the author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com
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* SIBEL EDMUNDS ON THE BOSTON BOMBING: THE U.S. ROOTS OF “CHECHEN” TERRORISM
* FULL CRIMINAL COMPLAINT AGAINST DXHOKHAR TSARNAEV, INCLUDING NEW DETAILS
By Tyler Durden, zerohedge
The charges against Dzhokhar may have been filed under seal but it took minutes to find the full 11 page affidavit by FBI agent Daniel Genck, against the alleged bomber. And while there have been many discrepancies in various official versions of the narrative leading to the capture of the younger Tsarnaev, this is the final, final draft, which means any changes to the story from now on will be greeted by substantial popular skepticism.
Some of the newly emerging highlights:
From the day of the marathon:
At approximately 2:42 p.m. (i.e., approximately seven minutes before the first explosion), Bomber One can be seen detaching himself from the crowd and walking cast on Boylston Street towards the Marathon finish line.
Approximately 15 seconds later, he can be seen passing directly in front of the Forum Restaurant and continuing in the direction of the location where the first explosion occurred. His knapsack is still on his back.
At approximately 2:45 p.m., Bomber Two can be seen detaching himself from the crowd and walking cast on Boylston Street toward the Marathon finishing line. He appears to have the thumb of his right hand hooked under the strap of his knapsack and a cell phone in his left hand. Approximately 15 seconds later, he can be seen stopping directly in front of the Forum Restaurant and standing near the metal border among numerous spectators, with his back to the camera, facing the runners, He then can be seen apparently slipping his knapsack onto the ground. A photograph taken from the opposite side of the street shows the knapsack on the ground at Bomber Two’s feet.
The Forum Restaurant video shows that Bomber Two remained in the same spot for approximately four minutes, occasionally looking at his cell phone and once appearing to take a picture with it. At some point he appears to look at his phone, which is held at approximately waist level, and may be manipulating the phone. Approximately 30 seconds before the first explosion, he lifts his phone to his ear as if he is speaking on his cell phone, and keeps it there for approximately 18 seconds. A few seconds after he finishes the call, the large crowd of people around him can be seen reading to the first explosion. Virtually every head turns to the east (towards the finish line) and stares in that direction in apparent bewilderment and alarm. Bomber Two, virtually alone among the individuals in front of the restaurant, appears calm. He glances to the cast and then calmly but rapidly begins moving to the west, away from the direction of the finish line. He walks away without his knapsack, having left it on the ground where he had been standing. Approximately 10 seconds later, an explosion occurs in the location where Bomber Two had placed his knapsack. […]
Overshadowed by congressional action on guns and immigration is an Internet privacy bill that could affect most Americans, without them knowing it, on a daily basis.
Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (or CISPA) is making its way through Congress, and it’s passed a House vote on Thursday.
And like gun control, it’s far from a done deal after the House passes CISPA. It would need Senate approval, and President Barack Obama has indicated he’ll possibly veto CISPA if it comes to his desk.
Both sides of Congress would need to muster a two-thirds majority vote to override the president’s veto, which would seem unlikely in the current political atmosphere of Washington.
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” […]
* THERE’S NO NEED FOR ALL THIS ECONOMIC SADOMASOCHISM
By David Graeber, Guardian
Illustration by Andrzej Krauze
If Reinhart and Rogoff’s ‘error’ has discredited the prevailing policy dogma, now is the time for an alternative that works.
The intellectual justification for austerity lies in ruins. It turns out that Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, who originally framed the argument that too high a “debt-to-GDP ratio” will always, necessarily, lead to economic contraction – and who had aggressively promoted it during Rogoff’s tenure as chief economist for the IMF –, had based their entire argument on a spreadsheet error. The premise behind the cuts turns out to be faulty. There is now no definite proof that high levels of debt necessarily lead to recession.
Will we, then, see a reversal of policy? A sea of mea culpas from politicians who have spent the last few years telling disabled pensioners to give up their bus passes and poor students to forgo college, all on the basis of a mistake? It seems unlikely. After all, as I and many others have long argued, austerity was never really an economic policy: ultimately, it was always about morality. We are talking about a politics of crime and punishment, sin and atonement. True, it’s never been particularly clear exactly what the original sin was: some combination, perhaps, of tax avoidance, laziness, benefit fraud and the election of irresponsible leaders. But in a larger sense, the message was that we were guilty of having dreamed of social security, humane working conditions, pensions, social and economic democracy.
The morality of debt has proved spectacularly good politics. It appears to work just as well whatever form it takes: fiscal sadism (Dutch and German voters really do believe that Greek, Spanish and Irish citizens are all, collectively, as they put it, “debt sinners”, and vow support for politicians willing to punish them) or fiscal masochism (middle-class Britons really will dutifully vote for candidates who tell them that government has been on a binge, that they must tighten their belts, it’ll be hard, but it’s something we can all do for the sake of our grandchildren). Politicians locate economic theories that provide flashy equations to justify the politics; their authors, like Rogoff, are celebrated as oracles; no one bothers to check if the numbers actually add up.
If ever proof was required that the theory is selected to suit the politics, one need only consider the reaction politicians have to economists who dare suggest this moralistic framework is unnecessary; or that there might be solutions that don’t involve widespread human suffering. […]
The liquidity tsunami that started in September of 2012 in the Marriner Eccles building and continued with the BOJ’s own epic QEasing expansion three weeks ago, has so far provided the impetus for Europe to kick the can of its inevitable dissolution for a few more months, yet slowly but surely the market is starting to read through the artificial levels implied by Italian and Spanish bonds, driven by recycled ECB funding via bank and repo conduits and of course Japanese carry cash, and rumblings of a return to crisis conditions are back.
And as always happens, once the crisis talk is back, so is discussion of a fiscal union. Sure enough, earlier today Germany’s Angela Merkel once again reminded everyone just what the stakes are in order to achieve a truly stable, and sustainable European union: nothing short of ceding sovereignty to Germany. And with that we are back to square one, because that has always been the trade off – want a unified, fiscally and monetarily, Europe? You can get it: just bow down to Merkel.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday that euro zone members must be prepared to cede control over certain policy domains to European institutions if the bloc is truly to overcome its debt crisis and win back foreign investors.
Speaking at an event hosted by Deutsche Bank in Berlin alongside Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Merkel also defended her approach to the crisis against critics who argue she has put too much emphasis on austerity, saying Europe must find a way to deliver both growth and solid finances.
The comments came two months before European leaders are due to gather in Brussels to discuss moving towards a so-called “fiscal union”.
The punchline:
“We seem to find common solutions when we are staring over the abyss,” Merkel said. “But as soon as the pressure eases, people say they want to go their own way.
“We need to be ready to accept that Europe has the last word in certain areas. Otherwise we won’t be able to continue to build Europe,” she added. […]
Farm supervisors opened fire into a crowd of 200 migrant workers on a strawberry farm in the village of Manolada, western Greece, last week. They hit more than 30 workers, mostly from Bangladesh, and seriously injured eight of them.
The workers were demanding unpaid wages. They hadn’t received their meagre pay of just £2.70 an hour in seven months.
“They hit us and said, ‘We will kill you’” one of the workers told aid workers. “Three of them were shooting at us while the others beat us with sticks. The shooting went on for more than 20 minutes.”
But the workers are getting organised, along with activists from the anti-racist coalition KEERFA and the union of immigrant workers. Petros Constantinou from KEERFA said, “More than 1,000 migrant workers came to an open assembly.”
Workers voted for a mass demonstration in the centre of the village on Sunday of this week. Their slogans will be “stop the racist terror of the bosses,” and “legalise all immigrants now”.
Hundreds joined the union of migrant workers, and now plan to organise a strike on May Day. Petros and others have been visiting other unions in the region to build support. […]
* CCR CONDEMNS MIRANDA EXCEPTION IN BOSTON SUSPECT CASE
Source: Center for Constitutional Rights
Today, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) Executive Director Vincent Warren released the following statement in response to the news that the government had decided not to read the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings his Miranda rights before interrogating him for what is now the longest exception to date.
Our thoughts go out to the friends and families of victims of these horrific bombings. While it is difficult to turn to points of law in times of tragedy, those are, in fact, the times we most need to cling to the values, laws and rights that make us who we are as a nation.
The Miranda warnings were put in place because police officers were beating and torturing “confessions” out of people who hadn’t even been formally accused of a crime. We cannot afford to repeat our mistakes. If officials require suspects to incriminate themselves, they are making fair trials and due process merely option and not a requirement. To venture down that road again will make law enforcement accountable to no one.
Like Obama’s expanded killing program and his perpetuation of indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo, this is yet another erosion of the Constitution to lay directly at the President’s feet. Obama’s Justice Department unilaterally expanded the ”public safety exception” to Miranda in 2010 beyond anything the Supreme Court ever authorized. Each time the administration use this exception, it stretches wider and longer. However horrific the crime, continuing to erode constitutional rights invites continued abuse by law enforcement, and walks us down a dangerous path that becomes nearly impossible to reverse.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.
* IN TEXAS, POLICE IN SCHOOLS CRIMINALIZE 300,000 STUDENTS EACH YEAR
By Steven Hsieh, Alternet
The “good guy with a gun” seems to do a lot more policing than protecting.
In Texas, hundreds of thousands of students are winding up in court for committing very serious offenses such as cursing or farting in class. Some of these so-called dangerous criminals (also known as teenagers) will face arrest and even incarceration, like the honors student who spent a night in jail for skipping class, or the 12-year-old who was arrested for spraying perfume on her neck. These cases have at least one thing in common in that they were carried out by special police officers walking a controversial beat: the hallways and classrooms of public schools.
As political pressure from both sides of the aisle mounts to increase police presence in American schools, evidence suggests adding armed guards will only thrust more disadvantaged youth into the criminal justice system. Civil rights groups say policing our schools will further the institutionalization of what’s known as the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
To understand the potential consequences of putting police inside public schools, we can take a look at Texas, where students face one of the most robust school-to-prison pipelines in the country. According to the youth advocacy group Texas Appleseed, school officers issued 300,000 criminal citations to students in 2010, some handed to children as young as six years old. […]
Street fighters … an Israeli tank on the border of the Gaza Strip. Photograph: Jim Hollander/EPA
Nicholas Lezard is chastened by a book that reads like scaremongering but has the sources to back itself up
There’s a reproduction in this book of a recruitment poster for the US Special Forces. It shows three skydiving soldiers in formation, performing a High Altitude-Low Opening jump, seemingly propelling themselves towards the viewer. They look pretty scary. But the text above runs, in capitals: “The Halo jump wasn’t the hard part. Knowing which Arabic dialect to use when I landed was.”
This, as Professor Graham notes, was part of a Pentagon counterinsurgency strategy known as “the cultural turn” and centred on what they call the “Human Terrain System”. It was also, in Graham’s rather well-qualified opinion, “completely fraudulent”.
Look, you’re just going to have to read this book. Because what’s happening in Baghdad and other contested or occupied cities – not just the surveillance, but the militarisation too – is going to happen here. In some cases it already is, or there are in place contingency plans for it, should serious trouble arise.
Graham knows whereof he speaks. I wasn’t aware there was such a post as professor of cities and society, but that’s the one he holds at Newcastle University and on the evidence of this book alone I’m rather glad it exists. He’s making good use of it. He has the facts at his fingertips, and he is able to make connections, all of which, you may or may not be dismayed to hear, are disturbing.
If you are one of those – and we are, I gather, in the minority – who are made uneasy by the increasing ubiquity and reach of the surveillance society (one of the very few areas in which this country can claim world leadership) you should read this book, although unease will metastasise into full-blown sick fear. Those who think that only the guilty have anything to fear, and were never even slightly freaked by the London Transport “secure beneath the watchful eyes” poster, should buy and read this book in order to think again. (That advert, reproduced in the book, featured lots of eyes with the LT roundel in the iris reassuring us that CCTV was making us all safe. Was its cod-1940s design deliberately chosen in order to remind us of Orwell?) […]
* MEET THE 28-YEAR-OLD GRAD STUDENT WHO JUST SHOOK THE GLOBAL AUSTERITY MOVEMENT
By Kevin Roose, NYMag
Thomas Herndon, 28-year-old economics grad student at UMass Amherst,
Most Ph.D. students spend their days reading esoteric books and stressing out about the tenure-track job market. Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old economics grad student at UMass Amherst, just used part of his spring semester to shake the intellectual foundation of the global austerity movement.
Herndon became instantly famous in nerdy economics circles this week as the lead author of a recent paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” that took aim at a massively influential study by two Harvard professors named Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Herndon found some hidden errors in Reinhart and Rogoff’s data set, then calmly took the entire study out back and slaughtered it. Herndon’s takedown — which first appeared in a Mike Konczal post that crashed its host site with traffic — was an immediate sensation. It was cited by prominent anti-austerians like Paul Krugman, spoken about by incoming Bank of England governor Mark Carney, and mentioned on CNBC and several other news outlets as proof that the pro-austerity movement is based, at least in part, on bogus math.
We spoke to Herndon about his crazy week, and how he’s planning to celebrate his epic wonk takedown.
“This week has been quite the week,” Herndon told us in a phone call from UMass Amherst’s campus. “Honestly, I was not expecting at all the kind of attention it has received.”
Herndon, who did his undergraduate study at Evergreen State College, first started looking into Reinhart and Rogoff’s work as part of an assignment for an econometrics course that involved replicating the data work behind a well-known study. Herndon chose Reinhart and Rogoff’s 2010 paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” in part, because it has been one of the most politically influential economic papers of the last decade. It claims, among other things, that countries whose debt exceeds 90 percent of their annual GDP experience slower growth than countries with lower debt loads — a figure that has been cited by people like Paul Ryan and Tim Geithner to justify slashing government spending and implementing other austerity measures on struggling economies. […]
The World Bank and the IMF have the power to impose economic policies on developing countries even when voters and elected politicians in those countries unanimously reject them [AFP]
The crisis of capital, the rise of the Occupy movement and the crash of Southern Europe have brought the problem of income inequality into mainstream consciousness in the West for the first time in many decades. Now everyone is talking about how the richest 1 percent have captured such a disproportionate share of wealth in their respective countries. This point came crashing home once again when an animated video, illustrating wealth disparities in the US, went viral last month. When an infographic catches the attention of tens of millions of internet users, you know it is hitting a nerve.
But the global scale of inequality remains largely absent from this story. So we at /The Rules decided to put together a video that would give it some attention.
While this information is not new, it is still startling. In the video we say that the richest 300 people on earth have more wealth than the poorest 3bn – almost half the world’s population. We chose those numbers because it makes for a clear and memorable comparison, but in truth the situation is even worse: the richest 200 people have about $2.7 trillion, which is more than the poorest 3.5bn people, who have only $2.2 trillion combined. It is very difficult to wrap one’s mind around such extreme figures.
But we wanted to do more than just illustrate the brutal extent of inequality; we also wanted to demonstrate that it has been getting progressively worse. A recent Oxfam report shows that “the richest 1 percent has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years, with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process”, while the income of the top 0.01 percent has seen even greater growth.
The video shows how this widening disparity operates between countries. During the colonial period, the gap between the richest countries and the poorest countries widened from 3:1 to 35:1, in part because European powers extracted so much wealth from the Global South in the form of resources and labour. Since then, that gap has grown to almost 80:1. How is this possible?
Capital flows from poor to rich
The gap is growing in part because of the neoliberal economic policies that international institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have imposed on developing countries over the past few decades. These policies are designed to forcibly liberalise markets, prying them open in order to give multinational corporations unprecedented access to cheap land, resources and labour. But at a serious cost: poor countries have lost around $500bn per year in GDP as a consequence of these policies, according to economist Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts.
Millions of Americans still mired in poverty
As a result we see a clear net flow of wealth from poor places to rich places. We designed the video to help people visualise this flow, and to show how it pumps up the Global North at devastating expense to the Global South.
Few people know about this constant siphoning of wealth. One reason for this is that the discourse of aid takes up so much space. Consider the enormous publicity captured by Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Development Goals, or Bono and Bob Geldof, or even big charities such as Save the Children, Christian Aid and Action Aid.
Governments of rich countries constantly celebrate how much they spend in aid to developing countries, and multinational corporations splash CSR credentials across annual reports and product lines – neither of them confess how much they take out of developing countries. […]
* UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF A SUPPORT FOR INTELLIGENT ECONOMIES, QUALITY OF LIFE AND A CARING SOCIETY
By Anne Ryan, The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability
Introduction
The system for social security as it has developed in Ireland and many other European countries is not working. It was designed for a different era, to provide income security for the relatively small numbers of people who became temporarily unemployed from standard jobs. Efforts to patch it up in response to new needs have been piecemeal. On the other hand, some EU countries, such as Italy and Greece, have no social security system in place. We need a proactive new system, building on the old system’s principles of security and social solidarity, but far more inclusive. Basic financial security should be a right for all members of society. A system that could achieve this is universal basic income, sometimes called a citizens’ income or dividend, and referred to as basic income in this short introductory paper.
Basic income is a regular and unconditional distribution of money by the state to every member of society, whether they engage in paid work or not. Basic income is always tax-free and it replaces social welfare payments, child benefit and the state pension as we currently know them. It also extends to all those who currently receive no income from the state. Ideally, a basic income would be sufficient for each person to have a frugal but decent lifestyle without supplementary income from paid work.
Basic income would bring into the security net all those not served by the current system: casual and short-contract workers who get no or limited sick pay, holiday pay or pension rights; self-employed people and business owners; those doing valuable unpaid work, including care, which adds value to society and economy. Basic income would increase everybody’s capacity to cope with financial shocks and uncertainties and would improve general quality of life, while supporting many different kinds of work, with or without pay.
Currently, those receiving welfare are badly served by the system: if they take paid work, especially low-paid or temporary, they often lose out financially, in a ‘benefits trap’. With basic income, there would always be a financial incentive for people to earn a taxable income, should a job be available. Employers would also welcome the ending of the benefits trap.
For those in sporadic or seasonal employment, a basic income would eliminate the need to sign on and off and the payment delays that often occur. The possibilities for welfare fraud would be minimised, with everyone playing by the same rules in a simpler system. This would also eliminate the current bureaucracy and intrusive scrutiny of claimants’ circumstances. […]
* US TORTURE ‘INDISPUTABLE’, CNN’s HUMILIATION, AND IRAN SANCTIONS
By Glenn Greenwald, Guardian
Two separate bipartisan reports with surprising pronouncements, and a cable news debacle, highlight similar themes
Afghan villagers attend a protest against US special forces, who they accuse of overseeing torture and killings in Wardak province. More than 500 marched through the capital of the Afghan province, Maidan Shar. Photograph: Reuters
Today is a travel day for me, so I’ll use this opportunity to note some brief though significant items:
(1) It’s hardly news that the US instituted and for years maintained a systematic torture regime, but the success of the Obama administration in blocking all judicial proceedings has meant there has been no official decree that this is so. A comprehensive report just issued by a truly bipartisan group of former high-level Washington officials (including military officials) is as close as we are likely to get to such an official proclamation.
The Report explains that the impetus behind it was that “the Obama administration declined, as a matter of policy, to undertake or commission an official study of what happened, saying it was unproductive to ‘look backwards’ rather than forward.” It concludes – in unblinking and definitive fashion – that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture”; this finding is “offered without reservation”; it is “not based on any impressionistic approach” but rather “grounded in a thorough and detailed examination of what constitutes torture in many contexts, notably historical and legal”; and “the nation’s highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture.” It also debunks the popular claim that torture was confined to three cases of waterboarding, documenting that more than three people were subjected to that tactic and that the torture includes far more than just waterboarding.
This is not only a historical disgrace for the US and the responsible officials, but, as the New York Times article on this report inadvertently suggests, also shames two other institutions:
(2) President Obama, who barred all criminal prosecutions for Bush officials and other torturers and thus brazenly violated at least the spirit and probably the letter of the Convention Against Torture. That treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988 (exactly 25 years ago to the day: Happy Anniversary!), compels all signatories who discover credible allegations that government officials have participated or been complicit in torture to “submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution” (Art. 7(1)). It also specifically states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture” and “an order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture” (Art. 2 (2-3)).
The disgrace of the American torture regime falls on Bush officials and secondarily the media and political institutions that acquiesced to it, but the full-scale protection of those war crimes (and the denial of justice to their victims) falls squarely on the Obama administration. […]
* THE GOAL IS TO DESTROY ALL CONSTITUTIONAL CULTURE
By Brandon Smith, Alt-Market
In America, our cultural method of debate tends to divide individual issues into carefully separated spheres of discussion. This hyperfocus on single issues, from gun rights to illegal wars to invasion of privacy, draws us away from looking at the bigger interconnected picture, otherwise known as the “macro.” Each social or political conflict is compartmentalized by the mainstream, the dots are left isolated and the overwhelming overall threat to our foundational principles is marginalized.
The problem with this civic philosophy is that the general public is left without peripheral vision and unequipped to comprehend that there is a process in motion, an overarching plan that is eating away at the edges of our liberty from every angle, one small piece at a time. That is to say, we have been conditioned to obsess over the pieces and ignore the plan.
I want you to imagine the globalist establishment and the useful socialist idiots it employs as a hive of ants lurking in the grass around a bountiful picnic basket you (or your forefathers) worked very hard to procure. Now, one ant snatches a single crumb and races away, and you think to yourself that losing that one crumb is not such a sacrifice. A few more ants pilfer crumbs, and you shrug it off. A dozen more arrive, and you start to worry a little but are still too lazy to pull out the Raid. The rest of the hive sees your apathy and attacks, gobbling everything in a swarm of single-minded destruction. Left with nothing, you sit dumbfounded and hungry, wondering where you went wrong. The truth is, you went wrong with the first ant.
Not only are personal wealth and property ransacked by the collective in this way, but also personal freedom.
Every time a smaller attack on liberty is exposed or openly announced by the cult of statism, elitists invariably respond with a false face of rationality and common sense. They claim that they respect the line. They claim that they will take only the minimum. They claim that they are pursuing only a reasonable compromise. They expound on the “virtues” of their motives. They sing songs of unity, brotherhood and the greater good. They appeal to our diplomatic side; and if that doesn’t work, they try to shame us instead for being “selfish” or “ignorant” of so-called “social progress.” But this never has been and never will be about social progress.
Their goal is not to introduce greater understanding or awareness. It is not about public good or public safety. And at the very core, it is not about truth. If they cared about truth or principle and if their objectives were honorable, they would not feel the need to constantly lie, cheat, steal, manipulate and threaten in an effort to impose their own worldview on the rest of us. If their purpose was as righteous as they pretend, then deceit and subversion should be beneath them. Their philosophy should be able to carry itself, without their convoluted efforts.[…]
The theft takes different forms, but it all serves one purpose — to transfer wealth from the average Joe to the crony corporatists and their political lackeys. Here are but a few examples of how this has been accomplished:
Bailouts for the wealthy and well-connected are paid for by the unconnected middle class.
Subsidies are provided for unworkable schemes submitted by political donors and favorites. These schemes inevitably fail and the tax-payer is left holding an empty bag.
Laws are routinely ignored when “friends” need help. In identical circumstances, would you receive the same treatment as Jon Corzine?
Despite the biggest theft in world history, no one was prosecuted. The Savings and Loan crisis in the 1980s was trivial in comparison to the recent financial crisis. More than a thousand S&L executives were prosecuted.
Ever-increasing sacrifices in the form of higher taxes from the productive sector are demanded to continue the plush living of the ruling class.
Capitalism and free markets depend upon trust, integrity, property rights and the rule of law. Without these, there are no advantages to free markets. Nor are there any incentives to create wealth. Instead, an economy becomes little more than a massive plunder scheme where the powerful exploit the weak. No economic recovery is possible under such circumstances. […]
* DIGITAL DISCONNECT: ROBER McCHESNEY ON “HOW CAPITALISM IS TURNING THE INTERNET AGAINST DEMOCRACY
Source: Democracy Now!
Longtime media-reform advocate Robert McChesney looks at how the future of American politics could be largely determined by who controls the Internet in his newest book. Digital Disconnect talks about the difference between the mythology of the Internet, the hope of the Internet, that it would empower people and make democracy triumphant, versus the reality, which is that large corporate monopolies and the government, working together, are taking away the promise of the Internet to suit their interests,” says McChesney, the co-founder of Free Press and the National Conference for Media Reform. His book begins with a simple claim: “The ways capitalism works and does not work determine the role the Internet might play in society.”
“…By systems I mean governments, organizations, institutions that regulate human affairs. In his books, The Powers That Be and Engaging the Powers, theologian Walter Wink talks about domination systems being ones in which a few people control [many] to their own advantage. In domination systems you have to train people to think in ways that support the system, so they fit the system.
Domination systems require:
1. Suppression of self
2. Moralistic judgments
3. Amtssprache (This expression was used by Nazi officials to describe a bureaucratic language that denies choice, with words like: should, have to, ought.)
4. The crucial concept of deserve”
The above quote was taken from an edited transcript of a 1999 workshop Rosenberg gave on anger entitled “Anger and Domination Systems.”
Let me explain what Rosenberg means by these 4 characteristics of domination systems as revealed in the language we use:
1. Suppression of self means you deny your own feelings and needs. Before being exposed to Rosenberg’s work in nonviolent communication, I had great difficulty revealing how I was feeling and what I was needing. I lacked a language for feelings and the ability to ascertain what I was needing. I was not alone. Once, I asked a psychologist, who I presumed would be an expert in this area “How do you feel?” His reply was “I feel fine.” I asked him to be more specific, and to use some feeling words, because I said that I wanted to learn how to identify my own feelings more precisely and would like his assistance. He was unable to answer my question, so I told him that this was going to be my last appointment with him. I then asked him again how he felt, and you know what his response was? He said “I feel fine,” but the look on his face was not congruent. In fact, he got rather angry with me.
For the majority of us, the reason why we find it so hard to express our feelings and needs is because we are educated by our society to ignore them so we can become some kind of interchangeable part in a vast money making machine, where feelings and needs are not important. In a domination system, the language of feelings and needs is not necessary, only obedience to authority. My boss just wants me to come to work and do the job. If I don’t feel like it, well too bad because there are plenty of people waiting in the wings to take my place. […]
ATHENS — As an elementary school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old boy, Pantelis Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains.
“He had eaten almost nothing at home,” Mr. Nikas said, sitting in his cramped school office near the port of Piraeus, a working-class suburb of Athens, as the sound of a jump rope skittered across the playground. He confronted Pantelis’s parents, who were ashamed and embarrassed but admitted that they had not been able to find work for months. Their savings were gone, and they were living on rations of pasta and ketchup.
“Not in my wildest dreams would I expect to see the situation we are in,” Mr. Nikas said. “We have reached a point where children in Greece are coming to school hungry. Today, families have difficulties not only of employment, but of survival.”
The Greek economy is in free fall, having shrunk by 20 percent in the past five years. The unemployment rate is more than 27 percent, the highest in Europe, and 6 of 10 job seekers say they have not worked in more than a year. Those dry statistics are reshaping the lives of Greek families with children, more of whom are arriving at schools hungry or underfed, even malnourished, according to private groups and the government itself.
Last year, an estimated 10 percent of Greek elementary and middle school students suffered from what public health professionals call “food insecurity,” meaning they faced hunger or the risk of it, said Dr. Athena Linos, a professor at the University of Athens Medical School who also heads a food assistance program at Prolepsis, a nongovernmental public health group that has studied the situation. “When it comes to food insecurity, Greece has now fallen to the level of some African countries,” she said. […]
There’s new evidence that austerity measures being imposed by the government on the orders of international lenders to write down the country’s crushing debt is adding to the toll of suicides, murder and other health problems in Greece.
A study conducted by a team of Greek clinicians and American researchers has found when Greece’s economy began to collapse three years ago that murders and disease rates soared, suggesting the the effect of pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions is worse than believed.
Suicide and murder rates climbed from 2007 to 2009, particularly among men, and unusual outbreaks of malaria, West Nile virus and HIV took clinicians by surprise, said the findings in the American Journal of Public Health.
The decline in health came as Greece’s once robust economy collapsed into recession following the global economic crisis of 2007, with unemployment rising from 7.2 percent in 2008 to 22.6 percent in early 2012, and as austerity began in 2010 and continues today with more to come to satisfy the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) that is putting up $325 billion in two bailouts to rescue the country’s economy.
Among the big cuts made by the government was at the Ministry of Health, although some sectors remain protected, such as Parliament workers who were exempted from more austerity after threatening to stop work if their pay was cut. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras gave in to them. Meanwhile, health spending fell 24 percent from 2009-2011 and is taking more hits.
For patients, the cuts meant many services that were once free now cost money out of pocket. There were salary freezes and layoffs in the health sector, and many preventive programs were halted. That led to the joint Greek-American study.
“We were expecting that these austerity policies would negatively affect health services and health outcomes, but the results were much worse than we imagined,” said lead author Elias Kondilis, a researcher at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki.
Among the general population of some 11 million people, suicide rates rose 16 percent and murders climbed nearly 26 percent from 2007 to 2009, said the findings, which draw on Greek government data. Meanwhile, deaths from infectious disease increased 13 percent in those two years. […]
* VENEZUELA ACCUSES U.S. OF PLOTTING COUP AFTER DEADLY POST-ELECTION PROTESTS
Source: Democracy Now!
Venezuelan President-elect Nicolás Maduro has accused the United States and opposition of planning a coup against him after seven government supporters were killed and 60 people were injured in clashes after the election. Venezuela’s National Electoral Council has certified Maduro’s victory, but opposition candidate Henrique Capriles is refusing to accept the results. The Venezuelan opposition says it has collected more than 3,200 reports of problems and campaign violations that could have swayed the vote, but the Union of South American Nations said Sunday’s election was free and fair. Several Latin American nations have already congratulated Maduro on his victory, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba and Nicaragua. We go to Caracas to speak to Alex Main of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He served as an election monitor in Venezuela. […]
* ARGENTINA REVOLTS AGAINST THE GOVERMENT PUSH TO TAKE CONTROL OF THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM
By Tyler Durden, zerohedge
The streets of Buenos Aires are full of revolting Argentinians this evening as they protest President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s (CFdK) plans to ‘increase’ state control of the court system. CFdK’s proposal looks to limit the judicial system’s ability to bring actions against the state, as Bloomberg reports, leaving citizens and companies unprotected against state actions affecting their finance or assets (i.e. mass nationalization or confiscation). As the images below show, the people are angry, exclaiming “No to impunity.” CFdK’s actions follow previous attempts to take action against companies have failed or taken too long; but acting behind a facade of “increasing democracy and transparency,” it appears her intent is clear as the bankrupt nation struggles on. “The reform will do great damage,” warned one business leader, adding that limiting these injunctions, “undermines individual’s rights and freedom.”
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s proposals that would increase state control over courts are set to be approved by Congress as lawmakers ignore protests planned for later today.
Fernandez, 60, sent a bill to Congress on April 8 to limit injunctions against the state, which would only be applied in case of risk to someone’s life or health and would have a limit of six months. That would leave people and companies unprotected in attempts to seek an injunction against state actions if a law affects their finances or assets, said Gregorio Badeni, a professor of Constitutional Law at University of Buenos Aires.
… “This means a step back of 70 years.”
Fernandez’s proposal also seeks to expand the council of magistrates, a body that selects, monitors and evaluates the nation’s judges, to 19 from 13. The planned changes to the justice system come four months after the government failed to impose a deadline for Grupo Clarin SA, the country’s largest media group, to sell assets that exceed limits set in a 2009 media law. The opposition will protest in the streets of major cities today, the third nationwide protest against Fernandez’s government in eight months, to voice disapproval over the changes and what they see as the government’s increasing state control.
…
“The reform is a serious threat to constitutional guarantees,” said the Argentine Business Association in a in an e-mailed statement. “It would do great damage to Argentina’s investment environment and the creation of new jobs.” […]
Nigel Farage: Years ago, Mrs Thatcher recognised the truth behind the European Project. She saw that it was about taking away democracy from nation states and handing that power to largely unaccountable people.
Knowing as she did that the euro would not work she saw that this was a very dangerous design. Now we in UKIP take that same view and I tried over the years in this parliament to predict what the next moves would be as the euro disaster unfolded.
But not even me, in my most pessimistic of speeches would have imagined, Mr Rehn, that you and others in the Troika would resort to the level of common criminals and steal money from peoples’ bank accounts in order to keep propped up this total failure that is the euro.
You even tried to take money away from the small investors in direct breach of the promise you made back in 2008.
Well the precedent has been set, and if we look at countries like Spain where business bankruptcies are up 45% year on year, we can see what your plan is to deal with the other bailouts as they come.
I must say, the message this sends out to investors is very loud and clear: Get your money out of the Eurozone before they come for you.
What you have done in Cyprus is you actually sounded the death knell of the euro. Nobody in the international community will have confidence in leaving their money there.
And how ironic to see the Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev compare your actions and say, ‘ I can only compare it to some of the decisions taken by the Soviet authorities.’
And then we have a new German proposal that says that actually what we ought to do is confiscate some of the value of peoples’ properties in the southern Mediterranean eurozone states.
This European Union is the new communism. It is power without limits. It is creating a tide of human misery and the sooner it is swept away the better.
But what of this place, what of the parliament? This parliament has the ability to hold the Commission to account. I have put down a motion of censure debate on the table. I wonder whether any of you have the courage to recognise it and to support it. I very much doubt that.
And I am minded that there is a new Mrs Thatcher in Europe and he is called Frits Bolkenstein. And he has said of this parliament – remember he is a former Commissioner: ‘It is not representative anymore for the Dutch or European citizen. The European Parliament is living out a federal fantasy which is no longer sustainable.’
* CYPRUS PARLIAMENT TO VOT ON BAIL-OUT AFTER ALL: FIRE AND BRIMSTONE THREATS BEGIN
By Tyler Durden, zerohedge
When the final “bailout” structure of the Cypriot deposit-confiscatory bail-in was revealed in late March, the implied victory for the Troika (which has since notched up its demands for the insolvent country to now sell its 14 tons of gold) was that instead of the deposit haircut passing as a tax, and thus needing a parliament ratification, it would come in the form of a bank resolution, with Laiki bank liquidating and being subsumed by the remaining Bank of Cyprus, and with uninsured depositors in both banks ending up crushed. However, as previously reported, in the interim period deposit outflows have continued and accelerated despite the assorted ineffective “capital controls” which has led to additional underfunding for the local banks, and to a second bailout of Cyprus, this one rising to €23 billion or a 35% increase from the original, as part of which the Troika has demanded that Cyprus sell their gold in the open market. Now, a month later, it appears that the Troika’s initial victory may have been a Pyrrhic one, as yesterday the Cypriot attorney general announced, and today the government’s spokesman confirmed, that the parliament will have to ratify the €23 billion bailout of the tiny island nation after all, thereby refocusing the popular anger from some ephemeral technocrat in Europe to the country’s own elected representatives, thereby changing the calculus of the Cypriot decision by 180 degrees.
Cyprus‘ parliament must ratify a 23-billion-euro (30.3 billion dollar) international bailout deal in order for it to become valid, government spokesman Christos Stylianides said on Wednesday.
“It is not possible that Cyprus‘ bailout deal needs to secure the approval by other parliaments in the eurozone, while at the same time it is not voted on by our parliament,” Stylianides told state radio RIK.
“It looks like the parliaments of the other eurozone countries will pass it and we will now see what ours will do. I hope that the legislators will vote with wisdom and responsibility – I have this expectation,” he added. […]
* GREECE SLASHES CIVIL SERVICE JOBS IN NEW BAILOUT
Athens agrees to shed 4,000 public sector jobs in return for latest EU/IMF/ECB aid package worth €8.8bn
By Helena Smith, Guardian
Recent potests against austerity measures in Athens. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP
Greece has secured an aid package worth €8.8bn from the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund after the government agreed to cuts including 4,000 public sector job losses this year.
Officials representing the troika of international creditors agreed to release the funds following a government pledge to fire thousands of civil servants in return. The deal includes the disbursement of an initial €2.8bn tranche in the coming weeks, followed by a further €6bn in May.
“Greece is stabilising and its position is becoming more secure at a time when other countries are beginning to feel uncertainty,” said prime minister, Antonis Samaras.
The conservative leader said the time would soon come when Greece “no longer depends on [loan] memorandums”. He added: “Greece will have growth. It will be competitive and outward-looking… we will have a strong Greece.”
The IMF’s visiting mission chief, Pol Thomsen, applauded the country’s fiscal progress. “Greece has indeed come a long way. The fiscal adjustment has been exceptional by any standard,” he said. Thomsen, once a caustic critic of the nation’s economic performance, predicted that Greece would meet budget targets without further pay and pension cuts and would “gradually” return to growth in 2014.
The aid will be used to help recapitalise Greek banks. The comments also appeared to be carefully calibrated to offset the onerous terms Greece must also meet to get the aid. Under the deal, the government endorsed mass lay-offs in the civil service. Samaras said some 15,000 employees would be fired by 2015 with 4,000 redundancies by the end of the year. […]
Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Poul Thomsen, right, of the International Monetary Fund, with Greece’s finance minister, Yannis Stournaras, at a conference in Athens on Monday.
After nearly two weeks of tense negotiations, Greece and its troika of foreign creditors said Monday that they had clinched an agreement on economic measures that Athens must enforce to secure the release of further crucial rescue money. Those measures include thousands of layoffs in the civil service.
“We wrapped it up; we have a deal with the troika,” Yannis Stournaras, the nation’s finance minister, told reporters.
Greece has been offered two bailouts worth 240 billion euros, or about $310 billion, over the last three years through a memorandum of understanding with the troika, which comprises the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
In a televised address, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said the deal showed that years of austerity were beginning to pay off. […]
* BIPARTISAN REPORT: U.S. PRACTICED WIDESPREAD TORTURE, TORTURE HAS “NO JUSTIFICATIO” AND DOESN’T YIELD SIGNIFICAN INFORMATION, NATION’S HIGHEST OFFICIALS BEAR RESPONSIBILITY
Source: Washington’s Blog
We Can’t Just Look Forward … We Have to Admit What Went Wrong
Yesterday, a bi-partisan panel – co-chaired by the former undersecretary of homeland security under President George W. Bush, former Republican congressman from Arkansas and NRA consultant (Asa Hutchinson) and former Democratic congressman and U.S. ambassador to Mexico (James Jones) – released a 577-page report on torture after 2 years of study.
Former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Ambassador and Representative to the United Nations, and U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation, India, Israel, El Salvador, Nigeria, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan Thomas Pickering
“Torture occurred in many instances and across a wide range of theaters”
There is “no firm or persuasive evidence” that the use of such techniques yielded “significant information of value”
“The nation’s highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture”
“Publicly acknowledging this grave error, however belatedly, may mitigate some of those consequences and help undo some of the damage to our reputation at home and abroad”
The use of torture has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive”
“As long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United States could again engage in torture”
The Obama administration’s keeping the details of rendition and torture from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security”, and it should stop blocking lawsuits by former detainees on the basis of claiming “state secrets”
At a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, co-chair Hutchinson said:
We found that U.S. personnel, in many instances, used interrogation techniques on detainees that constitute torture. American personnel conducted an even larger number of interrogations that involved cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment. Both categories of actions violate U.S. laws and international treaty obligations.
This conclusion is not based upon our own personal impressions, but rather is grounded in a thorough and detailed examination of what constitutes torture from a historical and legal context. We looked at court cases and determined that the treatment of detainees, in many instances, met the standards the courts have determined as constituting torture. But in addition, you look at the United States State Department, in its annual country reports on human rights practices, has characterized many of the techniques used against detainees in U.S. custody in the post-9/11 environment—the State Department has characterized the same treatment as torture, abuse or cruel treatment when those techniques were employed by foreign governments. The CIA recognized this in an internal review and acknowledged that many of the interrogation techniques it employed were inconsistent with the public policy positions the United States has taken regarding human rights. The United States is understandably subject to criticism when it criticizes another nation for engaging in torture and then justifies the same conduct under national security arguments.
There are those that defend the techniques of—like waterboarding, stress positions and sleep deprivation, because there was the Office of Legal Counsel, which issued a decision approving of their use because they define them as not being torture. Those opinions have since been repudiated by legal experts and the OLC itself. And even in its opinion, it relied not only on a very narrow legal definition of torture, but also on factual representations about how the techniques would be implemented, that later proved inaccurate. This is important context as to how the opinion came about, but also as to how policy makers relied upon it.
Based upon a thorough review of the available public record, we determined that, in application, torture was used against detainees in many instances and across a wide range of theaters.
***
And while our report is critical of the approval of interrogation techniques that ultimately led to U.S. personnel engaging in torture of detainees, the investigation was not an undertaking of partisan fault finding. Our conclusions about responsibility should be taken very simply as an effort to understand what happened at many levels of the U.S. policy making. There is no way of knowing how the government would have responded if a Democrat administration were in power at the time of the attacks. Indeed, our report is equally critical of the rendition-to-torture program, which began under President Clinton. And we question several actions of the current administration, as well. It should be noted that many of the corrective actions that—were first undertaken during the Bush administration, as well.
But the task force did conclude that the nation’s highest officials, after the 9/11 attack, approved actions for CIA and Defense personnel based upon legal guidance that has since been repudiated. The most important decision may have been to declare the Geneva Convention did not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban captives in Afghanistan or Guantánamo. The administration never specified what rules would apply instead. The task force believes that U.S. defense intelligence professionals and servicemembers in harm’s way need absolutely clear orders on the treatment of detainees, requiring at a minimum compliance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. This was not done. Civilian leaders and military commanders have an affirmative responsibility to assure that their subordinates comply with the laws of war. President Obama has committed to observe the Geneva Conventions through an executive order, but a future president could change it by the stroke of a pen.
***
The task force believes it is important to recognize that—that is—that to say torture is ineffective does not require a demonstration that it never works. A person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information. Nor does the fact that it may sometimes yield legitimate information justify its use. What values do America stand for? That’s the ultimate question. But in addition to the very real legal and moral objections to its use, torture often produces false information, and it is difficult and time-consuming for interrogators and analysts to distinguish what may be true and usable from that which is false and misleading. Also, conventional, lawful interrogation methods have proven to be successful whenever the United States uses them throughout history—and I have seen this in law enforcement, as well. We’ve seen no evidence in the public record that the traditional means of interrogation would not have yielded the necessary intelligence following the attacks of 9/11.
Retired Brigadier General David Irvine, a former strategic intelligence officer and Army instructor in prisoner interrogation said:
Public record strongly suggests that there was no useful information gained from going to the dark side that saved the hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of lives that have been claimed. There are many instances in that public record to support the notion that we have been badly misled by false confessions that have been derived from brutal interrogations. And unfortunately, it is a fact that people—people will just say whatever they think needs to be said if the pain becomes more than they can bear. Other people are so immune to pain that they will die before they will reveal what an interrogator may wish to know.
I’ll just say, in conclusion, that in 2001 the United States had had a great deal of experience with tactical and strategic interrogations. We had been very successful over a long period of time in learning how to do this and do it very, very well. Unfortunately, when the policies were developed that led us to the dark side, many of those who were involved in formulating those policies had no experience with interrogation, had no experience with law enforcement, had no experience with the military, in how these matters are approached. One of the most successful FBI interrogators prior to 2001 was a guy named Joe Navarro. And Joe is noted for having said—and he was probably one of the handful of strategic interrogators qualified to interrogate and debrief a high-value al-Qaeda prisoner. But Joe said, “I only need three things. If you’ll give me three things, I will get whatever someone has to say, and I will do it without breaking the law. First of all, I need a quiet room. Second, I want to know what the rules are, because I don’t want to get in trouble. And third, I need enough time to become that person’s best and only friend. And if you give me those three conditions, I will get whatever that person has to say, and I will get it effectively and quickly and safely and within the terms of the law.” So, we can do it well when we want to. We need to do more, looking at our history, to remind us what worked and why it worked, and not resort to what may seem at the time to be expedient, clever or necessary.
5. Torture is not necessary even in a “ticking time bomb” situation
6. The specific type of torture used by the U.S. was never aimed at producing actionable intelligence … but was instead aimed at producing false confessions
7. Torture did not help to get Bin Laden
8. Torture did not provide valuable details regarding 9/11
ONE man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.
I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.
I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.
I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a “guard” for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don’t even seem to believe it anymore. But they don’t seem to care how long I sit here, either.
When I was at home in Yemen, in 2000, a childhood friend told me that in Afghanistan I could do better than the $50 a month I earned in a factory, and support my family. I’d never really traveled, and knew nothing about Afghanistan, but I gave it a try.
I was wrong to trust him. There was no work. I wanted to leave, but had no money to fly home. After the American invasion in 2001, I fled to Pakistan like everyone else. The Pakistanis arrested me when I asked to see someone from the Yemeni Embassy. I was then sent to Kandahar, and put on the first plane to Gitmo.
Last month, on March 15, I was sick in the prison hospital and refused to be fed. A team from the E.R.F. (Extreme Reaction Force), a squad of eight military police officers in riot gear, burst in. They tied my hands and feet to the bed. They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not even permitted to pray.
I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone.
I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they will come. Sometimes they come during the night, as late as 11 p.m., when I’m sleeping. [...]
Targeted assassinations by drone has enjoyed rare bipartisan support in America. But the debate about how the country eliminates its foes is getting more heated
The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth. By Mark Mazzetti. Penguin; 381 pages; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com
IN SEPTEMBER 2011 a fleet of Predator and Reaper drones took off from a secret CIA base in the Saudi desert. They crossed into Yemen and began patiently tracking a convoy of vehicles that was travelling near the border with Saudi Arabia. America’s spy agency had earlier recruited a source within al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula. He was now providing information about the movements of Anwar al-Awlaki, the group’s chief propagandist and strategist, and the man at the top of the CIA’s wanted list since the killing of Osama bin Laden a few months before.
The group had stopped for breakfast but, sensing the circling drones, they rushed back to the cars. Moments later, lasers from the Predators lit up the vehicles and the Reaper launched its missiles. Everyone was killed including al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, the editor of an online jihadist magazine. Both were Americans.
The targeted assassination of al-Awlaki, who had been behind a number of high-profile plots, from the Fort Hood shootings to the Christmas “underwear bomber” and an attempt to bring down cargo aircraft with exploding toner cartridges, created a minor stir among civil-liberties groups claiming that his citizenship entitled him to “due process”. But for most Americans it was further evidence that the secret war to protect them from their enemies was going pretty well. Drones had become the weapon of choice. To the surprise of some, a programme that had begun under George W. Bush had been dramatically ramped up by Barack Obama. The former Harvard student and Chicago law professor routinely approved what amounted to execution lists provided by John Brennan, his personal counter-terrorism adviser.
Mr Brennan, a former CIA analyst, is now back at the agency as its director. America’s drone campaign has become symbolic of a new kind of shadow war fought, as Mr Brennan has put it, with a “scalpel” rather than a “hammer”. It is the story of this war, waged in far-off lands by spies, special forces and robotised killing machines, that Mark Mazzetti, a Pulitzer-prizewinning New York Times reporter, tells with some verve and much new detail in “The Way of the Knife”. […]
President Ronald Reagan meeting with Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt.
Exclusive: Guatemala is finally putting ex-dictator Efrain Rios Montt on trial for genocide in the extermination of hundreds of Mayan villages in the 1980s, but Ronald Reagan remains an American icon despite new evidence of his complicity in this historic crime, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
The first month of the genocide trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt has elicited chilling testimony from Mayan survivors who – as children – watched their families slaughtered by a right-wing military that was supported and supplied by U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
As the New York Times reported on Monday, “In the tortured logic of military planning documents conceived under Mr. Ríos Montt’s 17-month rule during 1982 and 1983, the entire Mayan Ixil population was a military target, children included. Officers wrote that the leftist guerrillas fighting the government had succeeded in indoctrinating the impoverished Ixils and reached ‘100 percent support.’”
So, everyone was targeted in these scorched-earth campaigns that eradicated more than 600 Indian villages in the Guatemalan highlands. But this genocide was not simply the result of a twisted anticommunist ideology that dominated the Guatemalan military and political elites. This genocide also was endorsed by the Reagan administration.
A document that I discovered recently in the archives of the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, revealed that Reagan and his national security team in 1981 agreed to supply military aid to the brutal right-wing regime in Guatemala to pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but people associated with their “civilian support mechanisms.”
This supportive attitude toward the Guatemalan regime’s brutality took shape in spring 1981 as President Reagan sought to ease human-rights restrictions on military aid to Guatemala that had been imposed by President Jimmy Carter and the Democratic-controlled Congress in the late 1970s. […]
* GLOBAL LOOTING: HOW THE FAT CATS WILL RUIN US WITH FAT TAX
Source: The Slog
The debt-management stage of banks and globalist superpowers is over. The tax collection is now under way. In a frightening but entirely credible piece, The Slog plots the likely course of wealth transfer as the prelude to a victory for the dictatorial élite. As always, if they succeed we will only have our own cynical complacency to blame.
Jean-Claude Junker was yesterday abruptly told by the ECB to either reveal all details of Luxembourg’s money-hoarding…or face the consequences. The heist that was a one-off is looking increasingly like a template. Mario Draghi warned menacingly of “the precarious situation of countries whose banking sector is worth several times their GDP”. Some 40% of the offshore banking sector is controlled by British banks. Three days ago, George Osborne signed a tripartite EU agreement to ‘clamp down on tax evasion’. One day soon they’ll invent a tax involving our savings….and then simply grab the money because, by definition, it was evading the tax.
It’s getting increasingly easy to see where all this is going. But if you’re still convinced by the berks who keep calling this stuff ‘lunatic fringe conspiracy theory’, I suggest you look instead at yesterday’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard column. In a straight-talking piece, AEP revealed that the working documents for the Eurogroup meeting today contain a bombshell ‘tucked away in clause 29. “Sale of excess gold reserves: The Cypriot authorities have committed to sell the excess amount of gold reserves owned by the Republic. This is estimated to generate one-off revenues to the state of €400m via an extraordinary payout of central bank profits.”‘
So, your gold’s not safe either. Maybe that’s why Gordon the Mad sold all ours: he saw this coming. Maybe he invented the idea. You never knew with Brown.
It’s taking some people a long time to work this out, but the moment has finally come for those who scoff or snooze throughout this process to wise up: the Troika isn’t an agent of debt reduction any more. It might have started out with that intention, but today – right here and now in 2013 – it is purely designed to take money from the bailed and give it to the banks and Treasuries of the West. The final, undeniable sign came when the Cyprus rescue became a bail-in: “we’re here to help you, by helping ourselves to everything you’ve got”. […]
* BAIL-IN AND THE CONFISCATION OF BANK DEPOSITS: THE BIRTH OF THE NEW FINANCIAL ORDER
By James Corbett and Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
The recent bail-in in Cyprus has given the world a glimpse at the future of the banking landscape. Now, as Canada gets set to hardwire the bail-in process into law, analysts like Michel Chossudovsky are warning how the big banks can use this template to further consolidate their monopoly of economic control. This is the GRTV Backgrounder on Global Research TV.
Those who follow the markets closely know that, at base, the current financial system is founded not on the bedrock of sound economic principles but instead upon the quicksand of public perception. All it takes is one large bump in the road to upset even the largest of economic bandwagons and usher in a new financial paradigm.
In the ongoing meltdown of the European Union, perhaps the greatest single bump in the road so far just took place in Cyprus. In the immediate aftermath of the dramatic bank holiday and bail-in events of last month, many in the financial media began asking whether Cyprus represents a template for future bail-ins across the European Union or elsewhere around the globe.
If we are going to seriously ask this question, however, it is vital that we understand exactly what happened, and what kind of template this might represent. […]
* THE TERRIFYING REALITY OF LONG-TERM UNEMPLOYMENT
By Matthew O’Brien, The Atlantic
It’s an awful catch-22: employers won’t hire you if you’ve been out of work for more than six months
Close your eyes and picture the scariest thing you can think of. Maybe it’s a giant spider or a giant Stay Puft marshmallow man or something that’s not even giant at all. Well, whatever it is, I guarantee it’s not nearly as scary as the real scariest thing in the world. That’s long-term unemployment.
There are two labor markets nowadays. There’s the market for people who have been out of work for less than six months, and the market for people who have been out of work longer. The former is working pretty normally, and the latter is horribly dysfunctional. That was the conclusion of recent research I highlighted a few months ago by Rand Ghayad, a visiting scholar at the Boston Fed and a PhD candidate in economics at Northeastern University, and William Dickens, a professor of economics at Northeastern University, that looked at Beveridge curves for different ages, industries, and education levels to see who the recovery is leaving behind.
Okay, so what is a Beveridge curve? Well, it just shows the relationship between job openings and unemployment. There should be a pretty stable relationship between the two, assuming the labor market isn’t broken. The more openings there are, the less unemployment there should be. If that isn’t true, if the Beveridge curve “shifts up” as more openings don’t translate into less unemployment, then it might be a sign of “structural” unemployment. That is, the unemployed just might not have the right skills. Now, what Ghayad and Dickens found is that the Beveridge curves look normal across all ages, industries, and education levels, as long as you haven’t been out of work for more than six months. But the curves shift up for everybody if you’ve been unemployed longer than six months. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you’re young or old, a blue-collar or white-collar worker, or a high school or college grad; all that matters is how long you’ve been out of work. […]
* GREECE FIGHT OVER ELDORADO GOLD MINE PUTS RECOVERY TO TEST
By Jonathan Stearns, Bloomberg
A mountain of gold has divided Aristotle’s birthplace in northern Greece.
Vancouver’s Eldorado Gold Corp. and Glory Resources Ltd. are developing four mines that should turn Greece into Europe’s biggest producer of the precious metal by 2016
Cyprus’ bailout deal is the fifth agreed on so far in the 17-strong group of European Union countries that use the euro since the debt crisis began in late 2009.
Violent opposition to Eldorado Gold Corp.’s US$500-million project to develop the site prompted Mayor Christos Pachtas to flee the county’s seaside capital for his home village in the highlands. In some communities, locals shun each other because of the planned mine. Torched heavy equipment on the mountaintop area cordoned with barbed wire testifies to the dispute.
For Greece’s devastated economy, the fight is more than a conventional standoff between the forces of development and environmental protection. Authorities’ ability to navigate the conflicting demands in the nation’s biggest-ever metals project provides a telling clue to how soon Greece emerges from six years of recession, a pair of bailouts and the biggest sovereign debt restructuring ever. […]
