David Simon Discusses "Hypersegregation" in Public Housing,Katrina, The Wire, And Over Policing Of The Poor

OneLove

Musings

The US strategy to create a new global legal and economic system: TPP, TTIP, TISA

Just when you think that things couldn't get an worse......The words of Edmund Burke ring loud & clear: "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."  

  OneLove

Why Ignorant White Americans Are Terrified of Angry Black People by Chauncey DeVega

On the one-year anniversary of the death of 18-year-old black teenager named Michael Brown by a (now confessed racist) white police officer named Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, was asked if she forgave Darren Wilson for his cruel and wanton act of legal murder. She told Al Jazeera that she will “never forgive” Darren Wilson and that “he’s evil, his acts were devilish.”

Her response is unusual. Its candor is refreshing. Lezley McSpadden’s truth-telling reveals the full humanity and emotions of black folks, and by doing so defies the norms which demand that when Black Americans suffer they do so stoically, and always in such a way where forgiveness for racist violence is a given, an unearned expectation of White America.

The expectation that black people will always and immediately forgive the violence done to them by the State, or individual white people, is a bizarre and sick American ritual.

The necropolis of black bodies in the Age of Obama provides many examples of the ritual.

Less than a month after her son Samuel Dubose was executed by a thug cop, his mother, Audrey Dubose was asked during a press conference, if she forgave Ray Tensing. She answered “I can forgive him. I can forgive anybody. God forgave us."

After Dylann Roof massacred nine black Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina church their families were asked to forgive the white racist terrorist.

Rituals reinforce social norms, values, and beliefs. Rituals can empower some groups and individuals; rituals can also serve to weaken and oppress others.

The ritual of immediate and expected black forgiveness for the historic and contemporary suffering visited upon the black community by White America reflects the complexities of the color line.

Black Americans may publicly—and this says nothing of just and righteous private anger, upset, and desire for justice and revenge—be so quick to forgive white violence and injustice because it a tactic and strategy for coping with life in a historically white supremacist society. If black folks publicly expressed their anger and lack of forgiveness at centuries of white transgressions they could and were beaten, raped, murdered, shot, stabbed, burned alive, run out of town, hung, put in prisons, locked up in insane asylums, fired from their jobs, their land stolen from them, and kicked out of schools. Even in the post civil rights era and the Age of Obama, being branded with the veritable scarlet letter of being an “angry” black man or “angry” black woman, can result in their life opportunities being significantly reduced.

The African-American church is also central to the black American ritual of forgiveness. A belief in fantastical and mythological beings was used to fuel struggle and resistance in a long march of liberation and dignity against white supremacy, injustice, and degradation.

The notion of “Christian forgiveness” as taught by the black church could also be a practical means of self-medication, one designed to stave off existential malaise, and to heal oneself in the face of the quotidian struggles of life under American Apartheid.

Likewise, some used Christianity and the black church to teach passivity and weakness in the face of white terrorism because some great reward supposedly awaits those who suffer on Earth. The public mask of public black forgiveness and peace was also a tool that was used during the long Black Freedom Struggle as a means of demonstrating the honor, humanity, dignity, and civic virtue of black Americans--a group who only wanted their just and paid for in blood (and free labor) civil rights.

The ritual of immediate and expected black forgiveness fulfills the expectations of the White Gaze and the White Racial Frame. A lack of empathy from White America towards Black America is central to the ritual: if white folks could truly feel the pain of black people (and First Nations, Hispanics and Latinos, and other people of color) in these times of meanness, cruelty, and violence, then immediate forgiveness would not be an expectation. Many white Americans actually believe that black people are superhuman, magical, and do not feel pain. This cannot help but to somehow factor into the public ritual of black people saying “I forgive” the violence visited upon them by white cops, paramilitaries, hate mongers, bureaucrats, and the State.

Whiteness is central here too. Whiteness imagines itself as benign, just, and innocent. Therefore, too many white people (especially those who have not acknowledged, renounced, and rejected white privilege) view white on black racial violence as some type of ahistorical outlier, something that is not part of a pattern, a punctuation or disruption in American life, something not inherent to it, and thus not a norm of the country’s social and political life.

Here, the ritual of African-American forgiveness allows White America absolution and innocence without having to put in the deeds and necessary hard work for true justice, fairness, and equal democracy on both sides of the color line.

The black forgiveness ritual’s heaviest anchor is white anxiety and fear. As I wrote in an earlier piece, White America is deeply terrified, and has been since before the Founding, of black righteous anger, and that white people in this country would be held accountable for the actions done both in their name, and for their collective benefit against black people. This ahistorical and delusional dread (where in fact white Americans are experts in the practice of collective violence against people of color; the reverse has never been true) was summoned in the antebellum period by worries of “slave revolts”. It still resonates in the 20th and 21st centuries with white racial paranoia about “ghetto” or “black” riots, as well as the persistent bugaboo that is “black crime”.

When black people say “we forgive” it is a salve for those white worries and fears.

The absurdity and uniqueness of black Americans being naturally expected to immediately forgive the crimes and harm done to them by white people is highlighted precisely by how (White) America, both as an aggregate and as individuals, are not burdened with such a task.

One of the greatest privileges that comes with being “white” in America is the permission and encouragement to hold onto a sense of injustice, grievance, anger, and pain.

Consider the following.

The family of Kathryn Steinle—and whose death is the macabre subject for Donald Trump’s race-baiting obsessions with “illegal” immigrants from Mexico—has not been publicly asked to forgive Francisco Sanchez, the man who killed her.

The families of the children murdered by the gun toting mass shooter Adam Lanza in Newtown, Connecticut were not publicly asked during a press conference if they forgave the killer.

The families of the 70 people wounded and 12 killed by James Holmes in a Colorado movie theater were not asked during a press conference to publicly forgive him.

And of course, the families of those killed on September 11, 2001, when agents of Al Qaeda attacked the United States, were not asked several weeks after the event if they forgave Osama bin Laden and his agents.

More than ten years after that faithful morning when the United States was attacked by Al Qaeda—and an era of national derangement and perpetual war was ushered into being—there are survivors who will still not forgive those who wrought devastation onto their lives.

Some of them shared with the National Catholic Review how continue to nurture their anger:

Mr. Haberman admitted, “That’s a tough one for me. When I sit in court with these guys, can I forgive them? I have a hard time. I mean, they don’t want my forgiveness. I think justice is the word.”
Dorine and Martin Toyen of Avon, Conn., lost their daughter Amy, 24, in the World Trade Center. She was engaged to be married. “Her whole life was taken away from her,” said Ms. Toyen. “There is no way I could ever forgive them.”
Mr. Toyen concurred. “I want justice, not forgiveness,” he said. “I’m still very bitter. Rage.” If the accused “are found guilty, then I would have no qualms with the death penalty.”
Ms. Noeth said the death penalty would be too easy. “The people that we lost suffered a lot more than that. I think they deserve as much pain as can possibly be inflicted on them.”

If a reporter or other interviewer publicly asked those people who had their love ones stolen from them either on 9/11, at Newtown, or Littleton, if they forgave the monsters who hurt them so deeply, said person would (rightfully) be derided, mocked, and likely fired.

(White) Americans are not expected to forgive those who transgress them.

Black Americans who have lost their loved ones to police thuggery, violence, or other types of white on black racial terrorism and murder should be allowed the same latitude and freedom of expression and feelings. Of course, they are not—such a right exists outside the ritual that is Black America’s expected forgiveness for all the racist grievances and wrongs suffered by it.

This public ritual is a performance. It gives the white American public what they expect while concealing the true and private feelings of many black Americans, the latter being a people who are not foolish or naïve enough to perpetually forgive, forget, and turn the other cheek when faced with perpetual abuse.

Perhaps, one day there will be a moment when a black American who has suffered unjust loss and pain will tell the reporter who immediately asks them, “do you forgive the thug cop or racial terrorist who killed your unarmed child/friend/brother/sister/husband/wife?” and they will reply, “Hell no! Not now, not ever, and you can go fuck yourself for asking such a question.”

We are allowed to dream. Such a moment of honesty and sharing will be a true step forward for racial justice and respect across the color line, as opposed to the charade and Kabuki-like Theater that now passes for the obligatory and weak “national conversation on race” that the American people have been repeatedly afflicted with in the post civil rights era.

                                                                                 *********

OneLove

David Cay Johnston: 21 Questions for Trump on Kickbacks, Busting Unions, the Mob & Corporate Welfare

Interesting facts on that hideous orange-cream-flavored-cotton candy-ass bullshitter, Donald Trump. 

OneLove

The Long Distance Revolutionary

Former New York Times reporter-turned-polemicist Christopher Hedges sat down with long time New Jersey civil rights activist Lawrence Hamm to discuss the current state of African-American rebellion and how it fits into the larger historical continuum. The conversation is very illumnating, and like much of Hedges' writing attempts to show the intersection between poverty and race.

"Half of the prison population is African-American." Hamm pointed out. "There's no father for the children, no husband for the wife, and on and on and on. And it has a rippling effect that just never ceases to stop. Poor black folk live in a daily state of crisis. Daily life is one crisis after another."

The theme of on-going crisis is reflected in the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a broad-based effort defined by urgency and a resistance to typical political structures. For Hamm, the situation is a matter of real democracy vs. race-based illegitimate government -- marked by bourgeois white liberals and a "bought off" black middle class working to keep poor blacks poor.

"What we seem to be moving toward in the United States is a kind of de facto apartheid". Hamm said. "The United States is beginning to look and will look more and more like South Africa. You will have a white minority, very small minority controlling most of the wealth, and everybody else, including white lower class and elements of the white working class, on the outside."

 OneLove    

Poet's Nook: "Karma" by Dominique Christina

We Become poets in an attempt to tether words to righteousness'
Our notebooks to social consciousness.
Sitting anxious in wing bat chairs, we sip lattes to news of regimes,
firing American- made artillery into crowds of folk.

Dead bodies pickled by the sun,they line countries we never think about and we
suck our teeth and ask a thesaurus to become a machete and as romantic as pacifism
is,these days I dream of dictators falling head first into karma and forget to be
afraid.

If I could write this shit in fire, I would write this shit in fire.
This ain't poetry, this is rage unmated, a verb, a means and end.
This is my body. This is Sankofa, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, South side Chicago,
Compton, California. Redhook Projects in Jersey, Roosevelt Projects in Brooklyn.

This is severed hands and clubs against flesh, black boots to pregnant bellies.
Sterilizations masked as inoculations,leg irons and chains, the and the noose, this is a war- cry.
Tell 'Massa I coming back, carrying fire in my knapsack.
Tell him "Patrice Lumumba, Steven Biko, Fannie Lou Hamer."
Tell him " they have been born again in me."

Tell him," I found my mother tongue buried under the rubble of the World Trade Center."
Tell him, "this shit ain't no poem,this is me, running naked from sugar cane and cotton field having dropped my crocker sac."
Tell him, "He can call me Karma, I am refreshing the bones of a witch, a root worker,
a sorcerer, a priestess, a gangster.

Tell him, " this is the result of segregation."
Tell him, "this is the result of integration."
Tell him, "I have never been invisible."
Tell him, "He has never been invincible."

Tell him, " I am melting the steel bars of prison yards, they 'gon flow
over him like lava."
I am returned, I am blood thirsty, I am fangs, and hooks and swollen feet in welfare lines,
the gauntlet thrown down.
Lines dean in the sand. I am apocryphal- Historical deletions gathering themselves up
into textbooks.

I am the niece of exploitation on a rice and pancake box come to collect the royalties
for Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben.
I am the line of smoke, a rain dance, the Tomahawk used to kill the first invader.
I am a passbook in South Africa, A Whites- only sign on a courthouse door in Mississippi,
The streets of Benghazi pocked in prayer beads and shell casings, the juxtaposition
of faith and savagery.

Tell him, " I am African wide hips and American bulimia, peace symbols affixed onto assault
rifles."
It is the deepest kind of contradiction. If I could write this shit in fire, I would write this
shit in fire.

Tell 'Massa " I'm coming back. Howl in the wind I'm coming back, Burr in your heels I coming back
'Massa, I coming back 'Massa, I coming back."

                                                    ******

OneLove

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: The U.S. Military Is in Africa—But What Is It Doing There? by Marc Daalder

     

The United States military is a global force, with bases spanning six continents and dozens of countries. Its expansion in East Asia makes headlines and triggers protests around the world; forces fighting in countries as distant as Ukraine and Syria receive military aid; over the past several decades, it has crippled South American insurgent groups and still performs large scale training operations in Central America.

The one continent in which U.S. military action rarely receives any attention for is Africa. The U.S. maintains just one backwater base in Djibouti, Camp Lemonnier, and rarely advertises its military actions there.

Nick Turse, an award-winning journalist, looked deeper into the state of U.S. military affairs in Africa in a series of articles for TomDispatch.com, where he is an editor. These articles have been collected in a book entitled Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa. Turse spoke with In These Times recently to discuss what the U.S. military is up to in Africa.

How did you get the idea to write the book?

It had very humble beginnings. I asked the public relations people at U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, to answer a few simple questions about the scale and scope of their involvement on the continent. I asked these questions because I started seeing indications of increased U.S. operations for a couple years. But I got a public relations brush-off—prattle that didn’t match up to what it seemed to me they were actually doing in Africa.

I had seen the outlines of a very sophisticated logistics network being set up. Now you don’t build a logistics network—ferrying supplies all across the continent—unless you’re planning on sending personnel all across the continent, unless you’re planning to man outposts and bases. But when I asked about this, they talked about how light their footprint was. Because these things didn’t match up, I started digging more and more.

If they had told me anything that resembled the truth—what I was finding out through my reporting—I probably would have written one article and moved on. But because it looked like they had something to hide, I decided to dig.

The standard image of U.S. military involvement in Africa is one of almost entirely humanitarian work. You reveal in the book the astounding ineptitude in our humanitarian and aid work there, as well as the ulterior motives for helping out in the first place.

If you reach out to AFRICOM public affairs, they like to talk about humanitarian missions. To hear them talk about operations in Africa, you’d think that AFRICOM was some sort of cross between the Peace Corps and Doctors Without Borders.

They do a lot of humanitarian operations on the continent, or things that look humanitarian. This is the only thing they like to talk about. But if you listen when officers talk to each other, or talk to military contractors, or read internal memos, you hear a very different story. They don’t talk about the humanitarian operations—they talk about Africa as a battlefield or a continent where they’re “at war.” This is diametrically opposed to the humanitarian veneer that they try and project to the public.

One of the biggest questions that you work on answering in the book is why the U.S. wants to keep all of this secret. What are some of the top reasons the U.S. is hiding its military presence and military goals in Africa from the public?

One of the major reasons that gets mentioned (offhand, sometimes) by their commanders is that they’re afraid of the response in Africa. Commanders have sometimes obliquely mentioned the fact that Africa’s colonial past means they need to tread lightly. They aren’t operating with a very light footprint at this point, but they still want the perception to be out there.

This is also just the default position of the U.S. military for almost anything. I put in hundreds of FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests a year for basic information only to see them rejected. This is just part and parcel of how the military operates. They’d rather not answer any questions.

You say that since 9/11, the number of failed African states has almost doubled and many more terrorist groups are operating on the continent. Is U.S.-involvement to blame for this unrest?

It’s always difficult to pin down causation on any of these things. There are certainly underlying or internal issues in these countries that don’t have anything to do with the U.S. That said, the United States certainly contributed to destabilization in a lot of ways that have paved the road for increases in problems all across the continent.

One of these instances that I talk about in the book is of course the 2011 war in Libya, which I think the U.S. saw as a “no-brainer”—that you could fight it on the cheap, at least as far as U.S. lives go, fight it from the air. You have Libyan forces on the ground and then European partners that you can lean on. It was seen as a major win. But the U.S. government always has a problem of not understanding the repercussions of its actions down the road.

The problems with the revolution in Libya was that [mercenary] Tuaregs who were fighting for Gaddafi looted his arms stores, returned to their native Mali and destabilized the government there. That led to a coup by a U.S.-trained officer in Mali. He seemed to be incapable of fighting against the Tuareg insurgency, and that emboldened an Islamist insurgency that muscled the Tuaregs aside. That meant the U.S. had to back an African and French force to beat back the Islamists. Now, Mali is in a very fragile state.

This was once seen as a real bulwark for the United States, an anti-terror bulwark in West Africa. And beating back the Islamists as the French and Chadians and other forces did, just spread them out through other countries in the region and caused mass destabilization there.

Unintended consequences seems to be the U.S. stock and trade. So while they may not be completely responsible for any of these things, they certainly have played an important role in them. Besides the Libya example, you can see it all across the continent. In Somalia, Al-Shabaab was beaten back, but now is a regional threat instead of one that was confined to Somalia.

In the same way that Mali was a bulwark for the U.S. military and in general a success story, there’s a lot of other countries that for a while were success stories but now are starting to fall apart—South Sudan, for example. In the final chapter, you talk about how Chad is in some sense seen by the U.S. as the new anti-terror bulwark for Africa, but has many issues with an authoritarian regime and U.S.-trained forces who are actually prone to atrocities in other countries and at home.

The Chadians are seen as a real success. They’re seen to be very potent fighters on the battlefield and a proxy force that can be used in lieu of putting U.S. forces or even large numbers of European forces on the ground. But the issues you raised are ever-present.

In the State Department’s Human Rights reports that they put out every year, if you look at Chad, the country is cited every year for various forms of human rights abuses carried out by security forces: extrajudicial killings, torture, assault. Also United Nations reports, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, they’ve all cited Chad for military crimes outside of its borders. This is the force that the United States is hanging its hat on.

And even in Mali, when the Chadians were on the ground there—they’re supposed to be very powerful desert fighters, but they were taking casualties in the first few months and decided that their army, that we had trained, wasn’t suited to guerilla warfare, and withdrew their troops. These are the allies that we’re creating. It’s very problematic even from the U.S. military’s point of view. I would have to think if this is your top ally, that you’re really in very rough shape.

Are any of the United States’ proxy forces using child soldiers? Is that an issue that AFRICOM thinks about?

Chad’s forces just a few years ago were involved in a report from Amnesty International about a massive recruitment of child soldiers. So this is one of the U.S.’s main proxy forces and it institutes them. One that I’ve written about a couple times is South Sudan, where it’s well-known that South Sudan’s armed forces had child soldiers at the time of independence. They made a pledge to rid the army of child soldiers. And on this proviso, the United States, which is barred from giving military aid to forces overseas that employ child soldiers, issued a waiver for that first year, 2011.

South Sudan said by the end of the year that they would let all the child soldiers out of the ranks—but they never did. And the U.S. continued to issue waiver after waiver, allowing South Sudan’s armed forces to grow, to receive U.S. equipment and supplies, while they still had children in the ranks. When South Sudan exploded in civil war, all those years of waivers meant there were child soldiers who were already there and the government’s military and the offshoot rebel forces both began extensive recruitment of child soldiers.

This was engrained in both those militaries as they came out of the one which the US had funded. In many ways, the United States set the stage for it. Once the civil war began, both sides were looking for any advantage and they didn’t hesitate from recruiting children. Perhaps if they had already been eliminated from the armed forces, if there had been a culture change, that wouldn’t have been the first place these armies would have looked to increase their ranks.

One country that’s had a better track record in Africa than the U.S. is China. You have a whole chapter where you talk about the different approaches between China’s and the U.S.’s takes towards involvement in Africa, militarily but also economically.

If you look at the Chinese role in Africa since 9/11 and the U.S. role since 9/11, you’ll see that two diametrically opposed paths were taken. The Chinese decided that they would go an economic route—that that’s how they would build inroads. And the U.S. has decided on a “whack-a-mole” counterterror strategy where they would throw money at various terror problems that they saw on the continent and help build up allies that way.

China now has very deep ties with African nations all over the continent. It has created public works projects, big projects that Africans can see and touch with their hands, while the US is trying to build up militaries there. The Chinese have been much more successful at what they’ve done. There are a lot of problems with how China works on the continent in terms of the environment, labor rights—it’s not a rosy picture by any means. But I think it has been very effective, whereas the U.S. strategy hasn’t been.

What are the best steps to take in ensuring Africa’s stability? Or is that not really a U.S. responsibility?

If you look at the results of the last five years, terrorism on the continent has spiked by all objective measures at the same time the U.S. has been pouring more and more money into counterterror. Terror groups have spread as we’ve been trying to constrain them. I think that it might be time for the U.S. to rethink things.

If that means a completely hands-off policy, perhaps that’s it. Perhaps it’s an engagement strategy that’s more in line with what China has done to try and build economic ties and raise up African economies instead of trying to raise African militaries. But somehow, there has to be a rethink. When the exact opposite of your plans come to fruition after spending hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, obviously something’s gone wrong.

*************

OneLove

The Betrayal

OneLove

The Other Great Chaplin Speech - On The Tyranny of Authority

Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator has become famous as one of the most inspirational ever recorded. 17 years later, having been forced from the United States because of his political views, Chaplin made A King In New York, satarising McCarthyism and once again using an epic speech to share his views. This time it is his 10 year old son, Michael Chaplin, who delivers it...  

 OneLove    

It’s 460 AD in Rome: This Won’t Be Fixed by Paul Rosenberg

  Another American election cycle is upon us, and large numbers of people are lining up to pour their time and money into the sewer of politics, to be lost forever. This system will not be fixed. Period. This is Rome in 460 AD. The rulers, as in Rome, are liars, mad, or drunk (these days, drugged)… or all three. The “fall of Rome,” of course, was far more complex than we learned in school, but through all the many years of its decline, Rome was full of well-meaning people trying to reform and save it. And by the way, among the people who tried the hardest to keep the Roman game going were the Goths. They tried hard to keep Rome operational… and they failed too. Let me be clear on this: Once ruling hierarchies get beyond a certain point, they cannot be reformed. And I am sure that the modern West is beyond that point.

• Do we really believe that central bankers will just lay down their monopolies?
• Can we seriously expect a hundred trillion dollars of debt to be liquidated without any consequences?
• Do we actually believe that politicians will walk away from their power and apologize for abusing us?
• Do we really think that the corporations who own Congress will just give up the game that is enriching them?
• Does anyone seriously believe that the NSA is going to say, “Gee, that Fourth Amendment really is kind of clear, and everything we do violates it… so, everyone here is fired and the last person out will please turn off the lights”?
• And does anyone believe that the military-industrial complex will stop encouraging war, or that corporate media will stop worshiping the state, or that your local sheriff will apologize for training his cops to be vicious beasts?
• Do we really believe that public school systems will ever stop lauding the state that pays all its bills?

I could go on, but I think my point is made: This system will never allow itself to be seriously reformed. Trying to fix this is like trying to revive a long-dead corpse. The systems that rule the West will fail. Whether the wider Western civilization fails is up to us: Do we have civilization inside of us? Or was it all just a pattern that we followed?

A Few Bits of Support

I think an honest look around is all we really need to assess this situation – and I’m really not trying to play the “doomer” here – but a few bits of support seem to be in order. So, I’ll start with a quote from a man named Salvian, who lived in the Roman Empire a bit before 460 AD: Nobody thought of the state’s expenses, nobody thought of the state’s losses, because the cost was not felt. The state itself sought how it might squander what it was already scarcely able to acquire. The heaping up of wealth which had already exceeded its limit was overflowing even into trifling matters. Does this sound vaguely familiar? Salvian continues: But what can be said of the present-day situation? That old abundances have gone from us. The resources of former times have gone. We are already poverty-stricken, yet we do not cease to be spendthrift. Here’s another from Salvian: The state has fallen upon such evil days that a man cannot be safe unless he is wicked. With this last passage in mind, please consider Jon Corzine, Lois Lerner, and Hillary Clinton. Then think about Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning. Who among these six told the truth? And who among them lied? Which have suffered for their actions? Which have not? And what of the British elites who seem devoted to chasing underage girls? When do they go to jail? Shall we really keep pretending that these systems have anything to do with righteousness? At some point, doesn’t that become embarrassing? As I’ve written before, back in the 1960s I was surrounded by well-meaning people who tried very hard to reform the system and to make life better. And now, the very same problems they were devoted to solving are the problems de jour: war, poverty, welfare, racism, and police brutality – the very same list! 50 years of their efforts were fully wasted. Shall we really continue the waste? At some point, doesn’t patting ourselves on the back for accomplishing nothing become ridiculous?

Even If…

I think it’s very important to make this last point clearly: Even if this system doesn’t crash for another century, everything done within it is a waste. The decent people of Earth deserve better than this barbarity… much better. Not long ago, with these ideas in mind, I wrote this to a friend: It is fully corrupt, from top to bottom, and I don’t believe there are any “good guys” inside, waiting for “the right time.” It is OVER. I withdraw. I forsake them. I refuse to waste my energy on their politics. Humanity deserves better and I aim to do my part in building it. I will shed no tears when this system finally collapses – it will be a liberation. From here on, I’ll build new things and will have nothing to do with the old. My friend – a good man – agreed. The good and productive people of this world deserve something better than the abusive dominators that seek to control their every move, and we are more than capable of building it. But we have to stop waiting for permission from the lords of the status quo – they will never give us permission to bypass their domination. We have to make our own decisions and simply start building something better. We are able, and this system is unworthy of our efforts. Now would be a very good time to start. 

                                                                            *******  

  OneLove

Almost Fully Operational: The Mega Cartel Death Star by Steve Edwards

Racketeering as a Global Business Model

You’re like Han Solo. You know there’s an Empire. You’ve got a bad feeling but you can’t quite make out what you’re looking at. You’ve heard about the construction of a so-called free-trade deal, the impending Trans-Pacific Partnership (or TPP). Let me be your Obi-Wan Kenobi before we get sucked into the Mega Cartel Death Star.

                      Bad Feeling: Control of definitions is the supreme instrument of power.

Consulting my galactic dictionary I’ve had since my days at The Academy of Jedi Knights, a trope means the deployment of figurative language and imagery for creatively persuasive impact. I’m using the Star Wars’ tropes of the Death Star, The Force and the Jedi Knights as literary devices here to enlighten you to the grave danger of ignoring your worst fears by blocking them out, in the flawed belief that they won’t come to zap you. It is this fear that you need to face, because the oligarchs of the Anglo-American ‘Deep State’ are just as callous and vicious as the world’s most notorious tyrants.

Oligarchs are super-rich people who use their enormous economic wealth to accumulate political power, as Dr. Jeffrey Winters explained in his book Oligarchy. The ‘Deep State’ refers to an elite criminal networks that cross the corporate-state apparatus, as Dr. Peter Dale Scott defines in his book, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy. Due to their control of power structures, including intelligence agencies, and their exploitation of fast-moving engineered events (or speed-politics), the Deep State criminal network are far-better resourced, with more formidably powerful technology than their predecessors recorded in Earth’s history-as-war books. The Anglo-American oligarchs are also tooled with more cunning personas to hide their inherent psychopathic dreams of world domination, as corny and ‘conspiracy theory’ as that sounds.

As Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley writes in his Against Oligarchy e-book series, oligarchs are dangerous. Such super-rich people can only exist in societies where there is a great disparity in wealth. Oligarchies cause war, famine, poverty, pestilence, pandemics, environmental collapse and oppression, serfdom and slavery. Their vast control of economic resources leads to structural domination of the political trajectory of whole societies. Oligarchs thrive in crisis-ridden societies. Not surprisingly, given this scathing introduction about oligarchies, I’m going to point out there are several things extremely wrong about so-called free trade deals. Three such deals are the impending Trans-Pacific Partnership (or TPP), and its Atlantic Ocean fraternal sibling, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, (or TIPP) and the all-encompassing stealthy sibling, Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA).WikiLeaks describes the three deals as “the TPP-TISA-TTIP mega-treaty package” that together comprises two thirds of global economic activity across 78 states. These secret investor deals are so evil they would make most people across the political spectrum balk and join the rebellion – if they knew what they are really about.

As your Obi-Wan Kenobi Jedi-journalist, I have to tell you that you are witnessing the construction of totalitarian super-states. If my claim makes you guffaw and think I’ve been watching too many sci-fi movies, please entertain me by letting me ‘entertain’ you through to the end of this piece. One important aspect of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations is the secrecy about what exactly is in the TPP agreement. Recently, a US Congress Senator, Elizabeth Warren, told The Nation magazine, “Supporters of the deal say to me, ‘They have to be secret, because if the American people knew what was actually in them, they would be opposed.’ ” Captured governments are being persuaded to totally give in to the ‘dark side’ of The Force. Key insiders that comprise the transnational capitalist class learned this lesson of secrecy from their failed attempts to railroad through a similar multi-country investment deal, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), in the late 1990s. The deal-making is deliberately secret because the key players know that what they want will harm society and that if there is full disclosure, public opposition would be huge. From a leaked investment chapter supplied by WikiLeaks and its editor Julian Assange, we know that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) includes Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses that enable transnational corporations to sue the partnering governments if their boards and wealthy owners decide that their expectations about future profits are being blocked by pesky legislation, oversight and treaties. Conflicts over international trade are often taken to the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investments Disputes in downtown Washington D.C. As New Zealand documentary-maker Bryan Bruce says, big-shot lawyers can be working for transnationals one day and the next day they can play the role of judges in these secretive tribunals.

Shadow Puppets: Secret tribunals are intended to be venues to decide whether billionaires or taxpayers get top priority.

Indeed, as TPP critic Lori Wallach stated in The Nation (July 16-23/2012), “the TPPA is mainly about new corporate rights, not trade.” A senior scholar at York University in Toronto, David Cooke, argued that this means that the Trans-Pacific Agreement is really about “safeguards for investors to move jobs off-shore, rights for corporations to sue governments, and removal of regulations in financial services, land use, food safety, natural resources, energy, healthcare.” In this role-play as Obi-Wan Kenobi I’m essentially reporting in ‘polite company’. Despite this, I’m going to use the R-word: Racketeering. Racketeering is the fraudulent practice of covertly creating problems and then offering ready-made solutions for extortionate fees. When it comes to dominant capitalist ‘Coalitions of the Colluding’, profit is not so much a return on investment. Rather, when we are talking about massive transnational cartels that control finance, oil, minerals, food, water, electricity, transport, telecommunications and media propaganda, profit is the fee charged for not withdrawing supply, as political economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimson Bichler argue in their book, Capital as Power.

Indeed, real free trade agreements are in peril in an era where vast anti-competitive transnational corporations operate as cartels to restrain trade for the benefit of big monopolizing businesses. These huge corporate combinations – that dominate extraction, production, distribution, financing, marketing and indoctrination – undermine bona fide competition by fixing prices (both high and low), controlling supply (since ‘free trade’ agreements fix market access with quotas), and reduce diversity (by mass-producing similar soon-to-be obsolete products and services) through collusion. Their purpose is to make massive economic gains in order to accumulate political power and maintain the privileged lives of their super-rich owners on a permanent basis, as F. William Engdahl makes clear in his book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. It follows that one major cost for society is that cartels undermine new market entrants through these and other patterned behaviours that amount to racketeering. Therefore, cartels boil down to one feature. Cartels dominate markets by their scale. They get big through collusion and grow bigger through coercion, corruption, and capitulation, as the book Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty makes clear. When you have a trade deal that is being negotiated in secretive discussions, between the representatives of the biggest transnationals of 12 Pacific-rim countries, you have the construction of a collusive Mega Cartel Deal. When you combine that with a similar ‘investment and trade’ agreement to bind North America with the European Union, you have the construction of two huge economic blocs centred upon the United States ‘homeland’, or core, of the Anglo-American Empire. The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement excludes the industrial powerhouse China, as a means to undermine one of the world’s oldest civilizations from making the leap from regional power to a global military power, and thereby becoming a rival empire.

Mega Cartel Economic Bloc: 12 Pacific-rim countries are set to be sucked into the collusive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

Re-serfication of the Planet

Governments around the world are giving away a dangerous level of sovereign power to a transnational capitalist class. This strategy is known as ‘new constitutionalism’, as law scholar Stephen Gill identified. By exploiting new constitutionalism as a strategy, unseen oligarchs (or super-rich people) and their submissive elite professionals seek to expand markets by locking in the changes within supranational jurisdictions, thereby closing off democratic participation of citizens fixed by place and indigenous peoples marginalized in their own ancestral lands. The transformations in the global economy, such as these huge economic protective trade-blocs promoted under the slogan of ‘free trade’, are really about creating a slickly-marketed, hi-tech totalitarian superstructure, worldwide. American journalist Chris Hedges has reported a corporate totalitarian core thrives inside a fictitious democratic shell. When we consider, that from the perspective of dominant capitalist coalitions, or oligarchs, the public and private sectors are two divisions of capitalism and democracy is its administrative system, it becomes clearer that democracy is being replaced. As political economists Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan persuasively argue in their book, Capital as Power, capitalism is a private political system that uses economic means to control society. Their ‘capital as power’ theory aligns with Jeffrey Winters ‘oligarchy’ thesis. It turns out that Monopoly Capitalism’s core motive is social control. Monopoly Capitalism achieves this by limiting as many people as possible from having access to land and other resources, as Frances Hutchinson argued in What Everyone Wants to Know About Money and in The Politics of Money (as well as Nitzan and Bichler in Capital as Power). This political control is primarily achieved through a deliberate scarcity of cash and an abundance of manufactured credit/debt that banks whisk out of annoyingly thin-air through the possession of a metaphorical magical wand (or the power a fraternal Old Boys’ Network). Or, to put it another way, dynastic banking families and their global banking cartels sucker mass populaces to borrow credit funds into existence, as English economist Michael Rowbotham showed in his book, The Grip of Death: A Study in Modern Money, Debt Slavery and Destructive Economics and Goodbye America! Globalisation, Debt and the Dollar Empire. Therefore, Monopoly Capitalism is a private political system that is controlled by huge combinations of industrial, banking, service, and media corporations through highly networked elites, that implement the psychopathic vision of their super-rich owners (or oligarchs), who are protected by tax-sheltered trusts and captured governments.
Mechanisms of Coercion: 63,000 rich and super-rich people possess $39 trillion in wealth, while 800 million people are starving.


  If you’re still not convinced that the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its Atlantic fraternal sibling, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, (or TIPP) and the all-encompassing stealthy sibling, Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) are an evil conspiracy against humanity, then ponder this perspective. In a recent article, titled “The Trans-Pacific Partnership: the Totalitarian End-game of the Global Elite”, Dr. Gary G. Kohls said: “I realized that if the TPP had been the law of the land before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation [following the end of the American Civil War (1861-1865)], the tyrannical, apartheid-style (AKA, fascist) plantation slavery system in the South could have successfully sued the Lincoln administration and then fined the government hefty amounts of money for harming its economic bottom line and its future profits if it ever tried to end the highly lucrative business.” When your metaphorical Obi-Wan Kenobi landed in the disciplinary field of scholarly conspiracy law, he found white papers such as one by Neal Kumar Katyal’s titled, “Conspiracy Theory” published in The Yale Law Journal. I found that a conspiracy is a secret agreement made with the intent to harm society. As an intrepid Jedi-journalist who read Canadian journalist Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine and Laurence Shoup’s and William Minter’s book, The Imperial Brain Trust, I saw that even projects like the global deployment of ‘free market shock treatments’, which have a public profile, can have nasty hidden intent even as they are promoted as being in everyone’s interests.

While promoting the ‘free markets’ in the 1980s, key insiders claimed that an ‘Invisible Hand’ would price products and services efficiently through rigorous competition. The ‘Invisible Hand’, was a euphemism for a North Atlantic oligarchy and their army of unseen professionals, who have constructed a Worldwide Financial-secrecy Haven Complex (which are more commonly known as tax havens). However, the highly-networked North Atlantic capitalist class used private political mechanisms to ensure that wealth accumulated upward, so that there was only just enough income trickling-down to avert rebellion. Meanwhile, fees for ‘public’ services increased, even as the universal income tax system remained in place. Therefore, the apparent ‘mistakes’ and ‘failures’ that many economists, academics and social change agents resort to explain government policy that wrecks havoc on so many lives, needs to be reconsidered. 

Western governments are unrelenting in their commitment to ‘free market’ economic frameworks because their key insiders have consciously joined in systemic economic warfare, or a planetary-scale class war.  Trust your feelings: Open your brain-washed mind In the early 1970′s, elite planners that were part of the North Atlantic capitalist class met to discuss threats to their power under the auspices of the “1980’s Project;” the goal of which was to reconfigure control of the planet.  Central to this project was the deployment of neo-liberal ideology under the rubric of ‘free market reforms’. Despite the ideological claim of ‘prosperity for all’ used to promote the deployment of ‘free market economic shock treatments’, the intention was to reduce the material wealth of mass populaces so that they would be less able to assert their political independence. The purpose was to hinder the efforts of the ‘disobedient’ and thereby counter the cultural movements that had emerged in the 1960s, as well as the developmental demands of ‘Third World’ countries that sought to be decolonized. To this end, in April 1972, oligarch David Rockefeller, who was the chairman of a New York-based global-policy shaping group, the Council on Foreign Relations, presented his idea of a new alliance between the wealthy and politically connected of America, Europe and Japan to a another secretive global policy-shaping group called the Bilderberg Group, which convened in Knokke, Belgium. It’s difficult to overstate the role played by this oligarch. If there were a board game invented to make Monopoly obsolete, called Oligarchy, David Rockefeller would inspire a special oligarchic game-piece that looks, thinks and moves like an octopus, for he has been a prominent member of the Bilderberg Group since its first meeting in 1954. As Editor-in-Chief of the Voltaire Network, Thierry Meyssan, who has accessed the Bilderberg Group’s records for 1954 to 1966 (and numerous records pertaining to later years), stated, the Group is a lobbying tool for the NATO Alliance, or North Atlantic militarists, who intend to be a secret world government. Worse, NATO conducted terrorism operations in Europe, codenamed Operation ‘Gladio’ (Latin for Roman sword), up until its highly public exposure in 1990, as Madhi Darius Nazemroaya reported in his book, The Globalization of NATO.Operation Gladio was a low-grade war that exploited a ‘Strategy of Tension’ designed to frighten the mass populaces of Europe and thereby shift the political gravity to the ‘right’ by blaming ‘left’ wing groups for the carnage, and thereby create propagandist media events to equate a ‘free world’ with capitalism.

Committee for NATO: The Bilderbergers’ secret meetings have been largely  suppressed by major media outlets.

While the Anglo-American Deep State was busy frightening Europeans, in 1973, the brother of Bilderberger stalwart David Rockefeller, John D. III, published a book called The Second American Revolution, in which he argued for a radical transference of state “functions and responsibilities” to private interests. The following year, Columbia University academic Richard Gardner published an article called “Hard Road to World Order” in Foreign Affairs magazine published by the global-policy shaping think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations. Gardner wrote that the building of a new world economic order would require “an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece” because “the old-fashioned frontal assault” had become less effective. Gardner’s think-piece expressed the same sentiment as that espoused by another Columbia University professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who stated in his 1969 book called Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era that “[i]nternational banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the national-state”. Brzezinski, who later co-founded a taskforce group, the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller, stated that “political innovation” was unlikely to occur with open debate, but rather through covert incrementalism. Gardner, who had been a member of president Nixon’s Commission on International Trade and Investment Policy, argued that the construction of a new world economic order would appear as a “great ‘booming, buzzing confusion.” Indeed, such confusion was the linchpin of neo-liberal ideology. In other words, the ‘New constitutionalism’ strategy that seeks to permanently lock-in a new technocratic regime and replace democracy, is embedded into the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). Armies of professionals, sponsored politicians and elite technocrats are working on what I call the Global Neo-Colonial Project (of which one part is known as ‘globalization’). There are other more sinister reasons why I regard this new constitutional framework to permanently lock in the property rights of a transnational capitalist class with a status that amounts to ‘commercialized sovereignty’ as the world’s leading scholars on tax havenry, Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux argued in their book, Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works. This ‘free market’ economic framework began with a violent field-testing stage that occurred between the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. The field-testing ‘required’ US-backed terrorism to clear opposition for the ‘free market economic shock treatments’ that followed. Five countries – Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina – pursued a developmentalist economic framework and were all subjected to military juntas and/or CIA-backed coups. In the Chilean case, General Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup of September 11 1973 was ordered by US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who viewed president Salvador Allende’s socialist government as a “contagious example”, because he had nationalized key infrastructure and resources, owned by American and Chilean corporations, as is clear from viewing the documentaries, The Shock Doctrine, Why We Fight and The Trials of Henry Kissinger. But, these ‘developmentalist’ countries were not the only ones in need of ‘free market’ discipline.

Shock Treatments: Military violence, economic warfare and propaganda are required to spread the ‘economic medicine’ of ‘free markets’.

The entire world was targeted for the stiff therapy of economic warfare when Henry Kissinger conspired with his close accomplices, David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski at the May 1973 Bilderberg Group meeting that took place on the island resort of Saltsjöbaden, owned by the Swedish Wallenberg banking dynasty. As William Engdahl revealed in his book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, the Bilderbergers discussed a plot to trigger oil price shocks, which would return enormous profits for key banks and the oil majors, including Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank and the Standard Oil cartel. The Rockefeller-Kissinger-Bilderberger nexus needed a trigger event that would work as a cover for the Shah of Iran to hike oil prices by 400% so that he could buy US weaponry that Kissinger was inducing him to buy. Kissinger, with the assistance of ‘back channels’ in London, orchestrated the Yom Kippur War of 1973 by deceiving the Egyptians, Syrians and Israeli’s about each other’s agendas. (These shocks would also reinvigorate the indebted US dollar, through which oil was traded universally). The Bilderberger Nexus Oil Price Shocks of 1973-1974 were anticipated to cause a 400% hike in oil prices, according to the 1973 Saltsjöbaden Bilderberg Meeting Report, a copy of which William Engdahl found in a second-hand bookshop in Paris. In keeping with the anti-competitive behaviour of cartels, Henry Kissinger explained at one session of a US Federal Staff Energy Seminar held in Washington D.C., (which ran for four years), that the US was seeking to, create a world price for oil former US Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty.  This ‘energy crisis’ served as a pretext for the Wall Street-Washington-City of London Complex to increase the cost of credit to 20% (amid runaway inflation), and when combined with the underlying Bilderberg Nexus-induced economic crisis, a world debt crisis emerged. Thus, the oil price shocks designed by the Anglo-American ‘Deep State’ laid the groundwork for further ‘free market economic shock therapies’, which were themselves mechanisms of coercion, because all governments and sectors of society were thrown further into crisis. Everyone suffered, except key insiders, who became richer and accumulated more political power. Forty years on, so-called ‘free and open societies’ typically have a ‘Look, Don’t Touch’ democracy, wherein systemic political apathy has taken root. As is made clear in Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine; in Noam Chomsky’s book, Failed States and Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, Why We Fight; the United States continues to use military violence, or terrorism, to deliver the ‘freedom’ of ‘free markets.’ This situation has been sustained by excellent satirist-generated propaganda posing as news (reproduced by the Global Media Complex), which keeps a significant fraction of mass populations confused, misinformed and naïve, while conditioning new audiences to believe they are well informed. We’ve all been brain-washed with sanitized narratives. So, I hope it’s clear to you by now that the euphemistic term ‘austerity’ really means economic warfare, or the Shock Doctrine, and it is being inflicted upon the Western developed countries too. In short, what we know as democracy is being shelled-out, and is being replaced by the new administrative system – technocracy – to be run by scientists, engineers, and technocrats on behalf of an unseen oligarchy. A technocracy is a totalitarian system of government that administers resources with an ideology that they are fairly distributed. Technocracy fuses the market price system of capitalism with an obsession for measuring the flow of every object from extraction to waste by tracking everything with radio-frequency micro-and-nano-sized computer chips. In other words, technocracy seeks to extinguish the privacy of everyone who isn’t an oligarch, by building-out a control freak creepy Smart-Grid totalitarian nightmare, as Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre prove in their book, Spychips, Josh del Sol shows in his documentary,Take Back Your Power, and Patrick Wood compellingly argues in his book, Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation.

Spooky Tracking: Social control as a chilling science.

The first step to shining light on the transnational oligarchy is by the masses of Amazing People confronting that vulnerable area in ourselves that lacks self-esteem. That area is a neglected belief in the human spirit that together we can be powerful agents of ‘the rebellion’, who can harness the abundant transformative forces of the universe. It is totally necessary to build self-esteem in that neglected spot of ourselves where we lack confidence to be gutsy political people, if we are to fight when our ‘deal-breakers’ have been breached. Otherwise, we won’t be whole humans, but rather, not-so amazing grown-ups in children’s bodies with under-developed balls and ovaries. The only way to have un-shakable self-esteem is to face our fears. In the process, we build our self-respect and from this, our confidence grows, as I learned when I applied my Jedi-snooping powers to a conversation a filmmaker was directing with her lunch-date next to me when I was researching this piece. So, as your Obi-Wan Kenobi Jedi-journalist, I’m saying it is a slickly-marketed trap to think that by focusing on ‘the positive’, you’re not giving energy to ‘the negative’ and therefore you’re in control of your ‘fear space’. Even projects that seek to build resilient, self-sustaining, self-determining communities, which are essential to creating a world beyond Crony Monopoly Capitalism, can be slammed in less than a day if we don’t confront the Deep State criminal groups that remain at-large. All we need is one good bolt of light.                                                             


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  Steve Edwards completed a thesis on the Global Financial Crisis in 2012, titled “It’s the financial oligarchy, stupid”. It showed that global banking cartels applied a boom-bust-bailout formula to the deliberate engineering of the Global Financial Crisis. His Thesis has subsequently been vindicated by various banking scandals, including the rigging of loan interest rates around the world, known as the Libor scandal. He writes on Snoopman News at: http://snoopman.net.nz