The Emperor’s Rage: Let Chaos Envelop the World!

Chaos reigns and spreads as enraged leaders in the US, Europe and their clients and allies pursue genocidal wars. Mercenary wars in Syria; Israel’s terror bombing on Gaza; proxy wars in the Ukraine, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Somalia.
 
Tens of millions of refugees flee scenes of total destruction. Nothing is sacred. There are no sanctuaries. Homes, schools, hospitals and entire families are targeted for destruction.

Chaos by Design

At the center of chaos, the wild-eyed President Obama strikes blindly, oblivious of the consequences, willing to risk a financial debacle or a nuclear war. He enforces sanctions against Iran; imposes sanctions on Russia; sets up missile bases five launch minutes from Moscow; sends killer drones against Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan; arms mercenaries in Syria; trains and equips Kurds in Iraq and pays for Israel’s savagery against Gaza.


The Chaos President is blind to the fact that starving one’s adversaries does not secure submission: it unites them to resist. Regime change, imposing proxies by force and subterfuge, can destroy the social fabric of complex societies: Million of peasants and workers become uprooted refugees. Popular social movements are replaced by organized criminal gangs and bandit armies.

Central America, the product of decades of US direct and proxy military interventions, which prevented the most basic structural changes, has become a chaotic, unlivable inferno for millions. Tens of thousands of children flee from their ‘free market’- induced mass poverty and militarized state and gangster violence. Children refugees at the US border are arrested in mass, and imprisoned in makeshift detention camps, subject to psychological, physical and sexual abuse by officials and guards on the inside. On the outside, these pitiful children are exposed to the racist hatred of a frightened US public unaware of the dangers these children are escaping and the US government’s role in creating these hells.

The US-backed Kiev aviation authorities re-directed international passenger airlines to fly over war zones bristling with anti-aircraft missiles while Kiev’s jets bombed the rebellious cities and towns. One flight was shot down and nearly 300 civilians perished. Immediately an explosion of accusations from Kiev blaming Russian President Putin flooded Western media with no real facts to explain the tragedy/crime. War-crazy President Obama and the slavering prime ministers of the EU ejaculated ultimatums, threatening to convert Russia into a pariah state. ‘Sanctions, sanctions, everywhere . . . but first… France must complete its $1.5 billion sale to the Russian navy.’ And the City of London exempts the Russian oligarchs from the ‘sanctions’, embedded as they are in London’s money-laundering, parasitical FIRE (Fire, Insurance and Real Estate) economy. The Cold War has returned and has taken an ugly turn… with exceptions…for business.

Confrontation among nuclear powers is imminent: And the maniacal Baltic States and Poland bray the loudest for war with Russia, oblivious to their positions on the front lines of incineration…

Each day Israel’s war machine chews up more bodies of Gaza’s children while spitting out more lies. Cheering Israeli Jews perch on their fortified hills to celebrate each missile strike on the apartments and schools in the densely populated Shejaiya neighborhood of besieged Gaza. A group of orthodox and secular entrepreneurs in Brooklyn have organized group tours to visit the Holy Sites by day and enjoy the Gaza pyrotechnics by night . . . night goggles to view the fleeing mothers and burning children are available at a small extra charge…

Again the US Senate votes unanimously in support of Israel’s latest campaign of mass murder – no crime is depraved enough to ruffle the scruples of America’s leaders. They hew close to a script from the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations. Together they embrace a Beast from the Apocalypse gnawing on the flesh and bones of Palestine.

But, Sacre Bleu! France’s Zionists have prevailed on the ‘President-Socialiste’ Hollande. Paris bans all anti-Israel demonstrations despite the clear reports of genocide. Demonstrators supporting the Gazan resistance are gassed and assaulted by special riot police – ‘Socialist’ Hollande serves the demands of powerful Zionist organizations while trashing his country’s republican traditions and its sacred ‘Rights of Man’.

The young protestors of Paris fought back with barricades and paving stones in the finest traditions of the Paris Commune waving the flags of a free Palestine. Not a single ‘red banner’ was in sight: The French ‘left’ were under their beds or off on vacation.

There are ominous signs away from the killing fields. The stock market is rising while the economy stagnates. Wild speculators have returned in their splendor widening the gap between the fictitious and real economy before the ‘deluge’, the chaos of another inevitable crash.

In industrial America’s once great Detroit, clean water is shut-off to tens of thousands of poor citizens unable to pay for basic services. In the midst of summer, urban families are left to defecate in hallways, alleyways and empty lots. Without water the toilets are clogged, children are not washed. Roscoe, the master plumber, says the job is way beyond him.

According to our famed economists, the economy of Detroit is ‘recovering . . . profits are up, it’s only the people who are suffering’. Productivity has doubled, speculators are satisfied; pensions are slashed and wages are down; but the Detroit Tigers are in first place.

Public hospitals everywhere are being closed. In the Bronx and Brooklyn, emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Chaos! Interns work 36 hour shifts . . . and the sick and injured take their chances with a sleep-deprived medic. Meanwhile, in Manhattan, private clinics and ‘boutique’ practices for the elite proliferate.

Scandinavians have embraced the putschist power grab in Kiev. The Swedish Foreign Minister Bildt bellows for a new Cold War with Russia. The Danish emissary and NATO leader, Rasmussen, salivates obscenely at the prospect of bombing and destroying Syria in a replay of NATO’s ‘victory’ over Libya.
The German leaders endorse the ongoing Israeli genocide against Gaza; they are comfortably protected from any moral conscience by their nostalgic blanket of ‘guilt’ over Nazi crimes 70 years ago.

Saudi-funded Jihadi terrorists in Iraq showed their “infinite mercy” by… merely driving thousands of Christians from ancient Mosul. Nearly 2,000 years of a continuous Christian presence was long enough! At least most escaped with their heads still attached.

Chaos Everywhere

Over one hundred thousand agents of the US National Security Agency are paid to spy on two million Muslim citizens and residents in the USA. But for all the tens of billions of dollars spent and tens of millions of conversations recorded, Islamic charities are prosecuted and philanthropic individuals are framed in ‘sting operations’.

Where the bombs fall no one knows, but people flee. Millions are fleeing the chaos.

But there is no place to go! The French invade half a dozen African countries but the refugees are denied refuge in France. Thousands die in the desert or drown crossing the Med. Those who do make it, are branded criminals or relegated to ghettos and camps.

Chaos reigns in Africa, the Middle East, Central America and Detroit. The entire US frontier with Mexico has become a militarized detention center, a multi-national prison camp. The border is unrecognizable to our generation.

Chaos reigns in the markets. Chaos masquerades as trade sanctions: Iran yesterday, Russia today and China tomorrow. Washington, Watch out! Your adversaries are finding common ground, trading, forging agreements, building defenses; their ties are growing stronger.

Chaos reigns in Israel. War-obsessed Israelis discover that the Chosen People of God can also bleed and die, lose limbs and eyes in the alleyways of Gaza where poorly armed boys and men stand their ground. When the cheers turn to jeers, will they re-elect Bibi, their current kosher butcher? The overseas brethren, the fundraisers, the lobbyists and the armchair verbal assassins will automatically embrace some new face, without questions, regrets or (god forbid!) self-criticism –if it’s ‘good for Israel and the Jews’ it’s got to be right!

Chaos reigns in New York. Judicial rulings favor the pirates and their vulture funds demanding one-thousand percent returns on old Argentine bonds. If Argentina rejects this financial blackmail and defaults, shock waves will ripple throughout global financial markets. Creditors will tremble in uncertainty: Fears will grow over a new financial crash. Will they squeeze out another trillion-dollar bailout?

But where’s the money? Printing presses are working day and night. There are only a few life boats . . . enough for the bankers and Wall Street, the other ninety-nine percent will have to swim or feed the sharks.

The corrupted financial press now advises warlords on which country to bomb and politicians on how to impose economic sanctions; they no longer provide sound economic information or advise investors on markets. Their editorial rants will incite an investor flight to buy king-sized mattresses for stuffing as the banks fail.

The US President is on the verge of a mental breakdown: He’s a liar of Munchausen proportions with a bad case of political paranoia, war hysteria and megalomania. He’s gone amok, braying, ‘I lead the world: its US leadership or chaos’. Increasingly the world has another message: ‘It’s the US and chaos.’

Wall Street is abandoning him. The Russians have double-crossed him. The Chinese merchants are now doing business everywhere we used to be and we ought to be. They’re playing with loaded dice. The stubborn Somalis refuse to submit to a Black President: they reject this ‘ML King with drones’ . . . The Germans suck on their thumbs in total stupor as Americans monitor and record their every conversation…for their own safety! “Our corporations are ingrates after all we have done for them”, the First Black President whines. “They flee from our taxes while we subsidize their operations!”

Final Solutions: The End of Chaos

The only solution is to move on: Chaos breeds chaos. The President strives to project his ‘Leadership’. He asks his close advisers very hard questions: “Why can’t we bomb Russia, just like Israel bombs Gaza? Why don’t we build an ‘Iron Dome’ over Europe and shoot down Russian nuclear missiles while we fire upon Moscow from our new bases in Ukraine? Which countries will our ‘Dome’ protect? I am sure that the people of East Europe and the Baltic States will gladly make the supreme sacrifice. After all, their leaders were at the very front frothing for a war with Russia. Their reward, a nuclear wasteland, will be a small price to ensure our success!”

The Zionist lobby will insist our ‘Iron Dome’ covers Israel. But the Saudis may try to bribe the Russians to spare the oil fields as Moscow targets the US missile bases near Mecca. Our radio-active allies in the Middle East will just have to relocate to a new Holy Land.

Do Obama and his advisers imagine reducing the Asian population by a billion or two? Do they plan several hundred Hiroshimas because the Chinese crossed the President’s ‘red lines’: China’s economy and trade grew too fast, expanded too far, it was too competitive, too competent, too successful at gaining market shares, and they ignored our warnings and our unparalleled military might.

Most of Asia will inhale nuclear dust, millions of Indians and Indonesians will perish as collateral damage. Their survivors will feast on ‘radiated fish’ in a glowing sea.
Beyond Chaos: The New American Way:

Because our ‘Iron Dome’ will have failed us, we will have to re-emerge out of toxic ashes and crawl from our bunkers, dreaming of a New America free from wars and poverty. The Reign of Chaos will have ended. The ‘peace and order’ of the graveyard will reign supreme.

The emperors will be forgotten.

And we never will have found out who fired that missile at the doomed Malaysian airliner with its 300 passengers and crew. We will have lost count of the thousands of Palestinian parents and children slaughtered in Gaza by the Chosen People of Israel. We will not know how the sanctions against Russia panned out.
It won’t matter in the post-nuclear age, after the Chaos…

*   Professor James Petras, Boiling Frogs Post contributing analyst, is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in particular with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. He writes a monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, La Jornada, and previously, for the Spanish daily, El Mundo. Dr. Petras received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. You can visit his website here.


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OneLove

:::MME:::

Containment 2.0: Recipe for Disaster?

Do you remember the character of the big bad wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, Aesop's Fables & Grimm's Fairy Tales? These precautionary stories describe a menacing predatory antagonist that plots and destroys whatever crosses its path. You can cast the story of every empire in this way & right now the U.S is the blood-thirsty wolf roaming the planet for prey. Lively discussions like this is part of the process of decontaminating ourselves of all the bullshit we're being fed on a daily basis. Like Little Red Riding Hood, we stand the risk of being eaten by the wolf if we don't wise up.

OneLove

:::MME:::

Moral Outrage Still Exists

 

Where is this fire in our so-called leaders today? 

 Nofuckingwhere.... 

OneLove 

 :::MME:::

The Fourth Branch The Rise to Power of the National Security State By Tom Engelhardt

As every schoolchild knows, there are three check-and-balance branches of the U.S. government: the executive, Congress, and the judiciary. That’s bedrock Americanism and the most basic high school civics material. Only one problem: it’s just not so.

During the Cold War years and far more strikingly in the twenty-first century, the U.S. government has evolved.  It sprouted a fourth branch: the national security state, whose main characteristic may be an unquenchable urge to expand its power and reach.  Admittedly, it still lacks certain formal prerogatives of governmental power.  Nonetheless, at a time when Congress and the presidency are in a check-and-balance ballet of inactivity that would have been unimaginable to Americans of earlier eras, the Fourth Branch is an ever more unchecked and unbalanced power center in Washington.  Curtained off from accountability by a penumbra of secrecy, its leaders increasingly are making nitty-gritty policy decisions and largely doing what they want, a situation illuminated by a recent controversy over the possible release of a Senate report on CIA rendition and torture practices.

All of this is or should be obvious, but remains surprisingly unacknowledged in our American world. The rise of the Fourth Branch began at a moment of mobilization for a global conflict, World War II.  It gained heft and staying power in the Cold War of the second half of the twentieth century, when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, provided the excuse for expansion of every sort. 

Its officials bided their time in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when “terrorism” had yet to claim the landscape and enemies were in short supply.  In the post-9/11 era, in a phony “wartime” atmosphere, fed by trillions of taxpayer dollars, and under the banner of American “safety,” it has grown to unparalleled size and power.  So much so that it sparked a building boom in and around the national capital (as well as elsewhere in the country).  In their 2010 Washington Post series “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William Arkin offered this thumbnail summary of the extent of that boom for the U.S. Intelligence Community: “In Washington and the surrounding area,” they wrote, “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.”  And in 2014, the expansion is ongoing.

In this century, a full-scale second “Defense Department,” the Department of Homeland Security, was created.  Around it has grown up a mini-version of the military-industrial complex, with the usual set of consultants, K Street lobbyists, political contributions, and power relations: just the sort of edifice that President Eisenhower warned Americans about in his famed farewell address  in 1961.  In the meantime, the original military-industrial complex has only gained strength and influence.

Increasingly, post-9/11, under the rubric of “privatization,” though it should more accurately have been called “corporatization,” the Pentagon took a series of crony companies off to war with it.  In the process, it gave “capitalist war” a more literal meaning, thanks to its wholesale financial support of, and the shrugging off of previously military tasks onto, a series of warrior corporations.

Meanwhile, the 17 members of the U.S. Intelligence Community -- yes, there are 17 major intelligence outfits in the national security state -- have been growing, some at prodigious rates.  A number of them have undergone their own versions of corporatization, outsourcing many of their operations to private contractors in staggering numbers, so that we now have “capitalist intelligence” as well.  With the fears from 9/11 injected into society and the wind of terrorism at their backs, the Intelligence Community has had a remarkably free hand to develop surveillance systems that are now essentially “watching” everyone -- including, it seems, other branches of the government.

Think of Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who went over to the corporate side of the developing national security economy, as the first blowback figure from and on the world of “capitalist intelligence.”  Thanks to him, we have an insider’s view of the magnitude of the ambitions and operations of the National Security Agency.  The scope of that agency's surveillance operations and the range of global and domestic communications it now collects have proven breathtaking -- with more information on its reach still coming out.  And keep in mind that it’s only one agency.

We know as well that the secret world has developed its own secret body of law and its own secret judiciary, largely on the principle of legalizing whatever it wanted to do.  As the New York Times's Eric Lichtblau has reported, it even has its own Supreme Court equivalent in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.  And about all this, the other branches of government know only limited amounts and American citizens know next to nothing.

From the Pentagon to the Department of Homeland Security to the labyrinthine world of intelligence, the rise to power of the national security state has been a spectacle of our time.  Whenever news of its secret operations begins to ooze out, threatening to unnerve the public, the White House and Congress discuss “reforms” which will, at best, modestly impede the expansive powers of that state within a state.  Generally speaking, its powers and prerogatives remain beyond constraint by that third branch of government, the non-secret judiciary.  It is deferred to with remarkable frequency by the executive branch and, with the rarest of exceptions, it has been supported handsomely with much obeisance and few doubts by Congress.

And also keep in mind that, of the four branches of government, only two of them -- an activist Supreme Court and the national security state -- seem capable of functioning in a genuine policymaking capacity at the moment.

“Misleading” Congress  

In that light, let’s turn to a set of intertwined events in Washington that have largely been dealt with in the media as your typical tempest in a teapot, a catfight among the vested and powerful.  I’m talking about the various charges and countercharges, anger, outrage, and irritation, as well as news of acts of seeming illegality now swirling around a 6,300-page CIA “torture report” produced but not yet made public by the Senate Intelligence Committee.  This ongoing controversy reveals a great deal about the nature of the checks and balances on the Fourth Branch of government in 2014.

One of the duties of Congress is to keep an eye on the functioning of the government using its powers of investigation and oversight.  In the case of the CIA’s program of Bush-era rendition, black sites (offshore prisons), and “enhanced interrogation techniques” (a.k.a. torture), the Senate Intelligence Committee launched an investigation in March 2009 into what exactly occurred when suspects in the war on terror were taken to those offshore prisons and brutally interrogated.  “Millions” of CIA documents, handed over by the Agency, were analyzed by Intelligence Committee staffers at a “secure" CIA location in Northern Virginia.

Among them was a partial copy of a document known as the “Internal Panetta Review,” evidently a report for the previous CIA director on what the Senate committee might find among those documents being handed over to its investigators.  It reportedly reached some fairly strong conclusions of its own about the nature of the CIA’s interrogation overreach in those years.  According to Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee head, this document was among the mass of documentation the CIA turned over -- whether purposely, inadvertently, or thanks to a whistleblower no one knows.  (The CIA, on the other hand, claimed, until recently, that committee staffers had essentially stolen it from its computer system.)

The Agency or its private contractors (intelligence capitalism strikes again!) reportedly worked in various ways to obstruct the committee’s investigation, including by secretly removing previously released documents from the committee's "secure" computer system.  Nonetheless, its report was completed in December 2012 and passed on to the White House “for comment” -- and then the fun began.

Though relatively few details about its specific contents have leaked out, word has it that it will prove devastating.  It will supposedly show, among other things, that those “enhanced interrogation techniques” the CIA used were significantly more brutal than what was described to Congressional overseers; that they went well beyond what the “torture memo” lawyers of the Bush administration had laid out (which, mind you, was brutal enough); that no plots were broken up thanks to torture; and that top figures in the Agency, assumedly under oath, “misled” Congress (a polite word for “lied to,” a potential criminal offense that goes by the name of perjury).  Senators knowledgeable on the contents of the report have repeatedly insisted that when it goes public, Americans will be shocked by its contents.

Let’s keep in mind as well that committee head Feinstein was previously known as one of the most loyal and powerful supporters of the national security state and the CIA.  Until recently, she has, in fact, essentially been the senator from the national security state.  She and her colleagues, themselves shocked by what they had learned, understandably wanted their report declassified and released to the American people with all due speed.  It naturally had to be vetted to ensure that it contained no names of active agents and the like.  But two and a half years later, after endless reviews and a process of vetting by the CIA and the White House that gives the word “glacial” a bad name, it has yet to be released (though there are regular reports that this will -- or will not -- happen soon).

During this time, the CIA seemed to go to Def Con 2 and decided to turn its spying skills on the committee and its staffers.  Claiming that those staffers had gotten the Panetta Internal Review by “hacking” the CIA’s computers, it essentially hacked the committee’s computers and searched them.  In the meantime, its acting general counsel, Robert Eatinger, who had been the chief lawyer for the counterterrorism unit out of which the CIA interrogation programs were run, and who was mentioned 1,600 times in the Senate report, filed (to quote Feinstein) a “crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of congressional staff -- the same congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers -- including the acting general counsel himself -- provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about the program.”  (Back in 2005, Eatinger had also been one of two lawyers responsible for not stopping the destruction of CIA videotapes of the brutal interrogations of terror suspects in its secret prisons.)

In addition, according to Feinstein, CIA Director John Brennan met with her, lied to her, and essentially tried to intimidate her by telling her “that the CIA had searched a ‘walled-off committee network drive containing the committee’s own internal work product and communications’ and that he was going to ‘order further forensic evidence of the committee network to learn more about activities of the committee’s oversight staff.’” In other words, the overseen were spying upon and now out to get the overseers.  And more than that, based on a single incident in which one of its greatest supporters in Congress stepped over the line, the Agency was specifically out to get the senator from the national security state.

There was a clear message here: oversight or not, don’t tread on us.

By the way, since the CIA is the injuring, not the injured, party, there is no reason to take seriously the self-interested words of its officials, past or present, on any of this, or any account they offer of events or charges they make.  We’re talking, after all, about an outfit responsible for the initial brutal acts of interrogation, for false descriptions of them, for lying to Congress about them, for destroying evidence of the worst of what it had done, for spying on a Senate committee and its computer system, and for somehow obtaining “legally protected email and other unspecified communications between whistleblower officials and lawmakers this spring relating to the Agency and the committee’s report.”  In addition, according to a recent front-page story in the New York Times, its former director from the Bush years, George Tenet, has been actively plotting “a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report” with the present director and various past Agency officials. (And keep in mind that “roughly 200 people under [Tenet’s] leadership [who] had at some point participated in the interrogation program” are still working at the Agency.) 

The Age of Impunity in Washington

In December 2012, the report began to wend its way through a “review and declassification” process, which has yet to end.  Once again, the CIA stepped in.  The Senate was eager to declassify the report's findings, conclusions, and its 600-page executive summary.  The CIA, which had already done its damnedest to block the Senate investigation process, now ensured that the vetting would be interminable.

As a start, the White House vested the CIA as the lead agency in the review and vetting process, which meant that it was to be allowed to slow things to a crawl, stop them entirely, or alternatively remove crucial and damning material from the report via redaction.  If you want a gauge of just how powerful the various outfits that make up the Fourth Branch have become in Washington (and what limits on them still remain), look no further.

Fourteen years into the twenty-first century, we’re so used to this sort of thing that we seldom think about what it means to let the CIA -- accused of a variety of crimes -- be the agency to decide what exactly can be known by the public, in conjunction with a deferential White House.  The Agency’s present director, it should be noted, has been a close confidant and friend of the president and was for years his key counterterrorism advisor.  To get a sense of what all this really means, you need perhaps to imagine that, in 2004, the 9/11 Commission was forced to turn its report over to Osama bin Laden for vetting and redaction before releasing it to the public.  Extreme as that may sound, the CIA is no less a self-interested party. And this interminable process has yet to end, although the White House is supposed to release something, possibly heavily redacted, as early as this coming week or perhaps in the dog days of August.

Keep in mind again that we’re still only talking about the overwhelming sense of power of one of the 17 agencies that make up the Intelligence Community, which itself is but part of the far vaster national security state.  Just one.  Think of this, nonetheless, as a kind of litmus test for the shifting state of power relations in the new Washington.  Or think of it this way: on the basis of a single negative Senate report about its past operations, the CIA was willing to go after one of the national security state’s most fervent congressional supporters.  It attempted to intimidate her, tried to bring charges against her staffers, and so drove her “reluctantly” and in a kind of desperation to the Senate floor, where she offered a remarkable denunciation of the agency she had long supported.  In its wake, last week, the CIA director dramatically backed off somewhat, perhaps sensing that there was a bridge too far even in Washington in 2014.  Amid Senate calls for his resignation, he offered an "apology" for the extreme actions of lower level Agency employees. (But don't hold your breath waiting for real reform at the CIA.)

In her Senate speech, Feinstein accused the Agency of potentially breaching both the law and the Constitution. “I have grave concerns,” she said, “that the CIA’s search [of the committee’s computer system] may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the Speech and Debate clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function... Besides the constitutional implications, the CIA’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

In the process, she anatomized an agency covering its tail and its trail, unwilling to admit to error of any sort or volunteer crucial information, while it attempted to block or even dismantle the oversight power of Congress.  Her sobering speech should be read by every American, especially as it comes not from a critic but a perennial supporter of the Fourth Branch.

In retrospect, this “incident” may be seen as a critical moment in the still-unsettled evolution of governing power in America.  Her speech was covered briefly as a kind of kerfuffle in Washington and then largely dropped for other, more important stories.  In the meantime, the so-called vetting process on the Senate report continued for yet more months in the White House and in Langley, Virginia, as if nothing whatsoever had occurred; the White House refused to act or commit itself on the subject; and the Justice Department refused to press charges of any sort.  While a few senators threatened to invoke Senate Resolution 400 -- a 40-year-old unused power of that body to declassify information on its own -- it was something of an idle threat.  (A majority of the Senate would have to agree to vote against the CIA and the White House to put it into effect, which is unlikely indeed.)

Whatever happens with the report itself and despite the recent CIA apology, don’t expect the Senate to bring perjury charges against former CIA leaders for any lies to Congress.  (It didn’t do so, after all, in the earlier case of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.)  And don’t expect prosecutions of significant figures from a Justice Department that, in the Obama years, refused to prosecute even those in the CIA responsible for the deaths of prisoners. 

The fact is that, for the Fourth Branch, this remains the age of impunity.  Hidden in a veil of secrecy, bolstered by secret law and secret courts, surrounded by its chosen corporations and politicians, its power to define policy and act as it sees fit in the name of American safety is visibly on the rise.  No matter what setbacks it experiences along the way, its urge to expand and control seems, at the moment, beyond staunching.  In the context of the Senate’s torture report, the question at hand remains: Who rules Washington?


Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, to be published in September, is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World (Haymarket Books).

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OneLove

:::MME:::

Musings

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"Apathy and evil. The two work hand in hand. They are the same, really... Evil wills it. Apathy allows it. Evil hates the innocent and the defenseless most of all. Apathy doesn't care as long as it's not personally inconvenienced."

- Jake Thoene, “Shaiton's Fire”

 OneLove

:::MME:::

Why Israel Lies by Chris Hedges

All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories—required under the rules of American journalism—although we know they are untrue.

I saw small boys baited and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others. I was present more than once as Israeli troops drew out and shot Palestinian children in this way. Such incidents, in the Israeli lexicon, become children caught in crossfire. I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on overcrowded hovels in Gaza City. I saw the corpses of the victims, including children. This became a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. I have watched Israel demolish homes and entire apartment blocks to create wide buffer zones between the Palestinians and the Israeli troops that ring Gaza. I have interviewed the destitute and homeless families, some camped out in crude shelters erected in the rubble. The destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. I have stood in the remains of schools—Israel struck two United Nations schools in the last six days, causing at least 10 fatalities at one in Rafah on Sunday and at least 19 at one in the Jebaliya refugee camp Wednesday—as well as medical clinics and mosques. I have heard Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that the attacked spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites. I, along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have never seen any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.”

There is a perverted logic to Israel’s repeated use of the Big Lie—Große Lüge—the lie favored by tyrants from Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to Saddam Hussein. The Big Lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit—racism among its supporters and terror among its victims.

By painting a picture of an army that never attacks civilians, that indeed goes out of its way to protect them, the Big Lie says Israelis are civilized and humane, and their Palestinian opponents are inhuman monsters. The Big Lie serves the idea that the slaughter in Gaza is a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor on one side and Islamic barbarism on the other. And in the uncommon cases when news of atrocities penetrates to the wider public, Israel blames the destruction and casualties on Hamas.

George Orwell in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” called this form of propaganda doublethink. Doublethink uses “logic against logic” and “repudiate[s] morality while laying claim to it.” The Big Lie does not allow for the nuances and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is a state-orchestrated response to the dilemma of cognitive dissonance. The Big Lie permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good and evil, righteous and unrighteous. The Big Lie allows believers to take comfort—a comfort they are desperately seeking—in their own moral superiority at the very moment they have abrogated all morality.

The Big Lie, as the father of American public relations, Edward Bernays, wrote, is limited only by the propagandist’s capacity to fathom and harness the undercurrents of individual and mass psychology. And since most supporters of Israel do not have a desire to know the truth, a truth that would force them to examine their own racism and self-delusions about Zionist and Western moral superiority, like packs of famished dogs they lap up the lies fed to them by the Israeli government. The Big Lie always finds fertile soil in what Bernays called the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All effective propaganda, Bernays wrote, targets and builds upon these irrational “psychological habits.”

 This is the world Franz Kafka envisioned, a world where the irrational becomes rational. It is one where, as Gustave Le Bon noted in “The Crowd: A Study of the Public Mind,” those who supply the masses with the illusions they crave become their master, and “whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” This irrationality explains why the reaction of Israeli supporters to those who have the courage to speak the truth—Uri Avnery, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Norman Finkelstein, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ilan Pappé, Henry Siegman and Philip Weiss—is so rabid. That so many of these voices are Jewish, and therefore have more credibility than non-Jews who are among Israel’s cheerleaders, only ratchets up the level of hate.
 
But the Big Lie is also consciously designed to send a chilling message to Gaza’s Palestinians, who have lost large numbers of their dwellings, clinics, mosques, and power, water and sewage facilities, along with schools and hospitals, who have suffered some 1,650 deaths since this assault began—most of the victims women and children—and who have seen 400,000 people displaced from their homes. The Big Lie makes it clear to the Palestinians that Israel will continue to wage a campaign of state terror and will never admit its atrocities or its intentions. The vast disparity between what Israel says and what Israel does tells the Palestinians that there is no hope. Israel will do and say whatever it wants. International law, like the truth, will always be irrelevant. There will never, the Palestinians understand from the Big Lie, be an acknowledgement of reality by the Israeli leadership.

The Israel Defense Forces website is replete with this black propaganda. “Hamas exploits the IDF’s sensitivity towards protecting civilian structures, particularly holy sites, by hiding command centers, weapons caches and tunnel entrances in mosques,” the IDF site reads. “In Hamas’ world, hospitals are command centers, ambulances are transport vehicles, and medics are human shields,” the site insists.

“... [Israeli] officers are tasked with an enormous responsibility: to protect Palestinian civilians on the ground, no matter how difficult that may be,” the site assures its viewers. And the IDF site provides this quote from a drone operator identified as Lt. Or. “I have personally seen rockets fired at Israel from hospitals and schools, but we couldn’t strike back because of civilians nearby. In one instance, we acquired a target but we saw that there were children in the area. We waited around, and when they didn’t leave we were forced to abort a strike on an important target.”

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, in a Big Lie of his own, said last month at a conference of Christians United for Israel that the Israeli army should be given the “Nobel Peace Prize …  a Nobel Peace Prize for fighting with unimaginable restraint.”

The Big Lie destroys any possibility of history and therefore any hope for a dialogue between antagonistic parties that can be grounded in truth and reality. While, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, the ancient and modern sophists sought to win an argument at the expense of the truth, those who wield the Big Lie “want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” The old sophists, she said, “destroyed the dignity of human thought.” Those who resort to the Big Lie “destroy the dignity of human action.” The result, Arendt warned, is that “history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility.” And when facts no longer matter, when there is no shared history grounded in the truth, when people foolishly believe their own lies, there can be no useful exchange of information. The Big Lie, used like a bludgeon by Israel, as perhaps it is designed to be, ultimately reduces all problems in the world to the brutish language of violence. And when oppressed people are addressed only through violence they will answer only through violence.


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OneLove

:::MME:::

The Unbearable Whiteness Of Moses by Jack Jenkins

Director and creepy alien enthusiast Ridley Scott has a new Moses epic coming out later this year: Exodus: Gods and Kings. The trailer for the upcoming film, which stars Christian Bale, hints that the movie has all the hallmarks of a truly enjoyable Scott flick: action, drama, and impossibly giant walls of water.


But as several critics have been quick to point out, the film does appear to have one glaring problem: Moses, Rhamses, and most of the starring cast are all white.

The debate over Hollywood’s tendency to cast white actors for biblical roles has emerged several times over the past few years, what with the History Channel’s lily-white Jesus in their The Bible series and Darren Aronofsky’s painfully-white (and inexplicably Australian) Noah. With each new example of Hollywood “whitewashing” the Bible, critics are quick articulate the multitude of reasons why white biblical figures are inherently ridiculous: given the region and time period in which biblical stories are set, figures such as Jesus, Noah, and Moses were almost assuredly not white; the Bible says little about the appearance of most of these biblical figures, except that Jesus was probably not much to look at, so forcing them to be white shows clear bias; by endorsing all-white depictions of the Bible, Christians are cheapening the power and reach of the biblical narrative; and really, at this point, even white people are just generally tired of seeing white people in movies (including this white male).


Despite this litany of arguments, film critics have offered two largely economic explanations — sometimes posited as justifications — for tinsel town’s preference for Caucasian/British/Australian actors in biblical films. One is that everything revolves around the racial dynamics of star power. The other is that that the whiteness of biblical movies is simply a reflection of the whiteness of America.

On the first point, the theory goes that film executives want to make money on biblical movies, and so usually opt for the “most recognizable” (read: lucrative and white) actors to play leading roles. Noah co-writer Ari Handel, who said he “nearly abandoned” the film over the issues of race, made a similar argument when confronted with the question about why his movie was almost entirely white. Handel explained that the team didn’t want to make it look like some people from different races were being left off the Ark, so he and director Darren Aronofsky set the goal of making everyone in the film the same race of the protagonist. Thus, when the (predictably white) box-office behemoth Russell Crowe signed on as the star, everyone else in the film had to be white as well. Or something.


But the racial economics of Hollywood are changing, and Handel, Scott, and others are no longer “required” to pick white actors to make money. Yes, the register of top-grossing actors is mostly white (and male), but Will Smith and Denzel Washington are also consistently listed among the top moneymakers in Hollywood, and the top-grossing actor of 2013 was actually Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, according to Forbes. It’s an open question as to whether or not someone like The Rock would make a “good” Moses (although Denzel certainly would), but it’s worth noting that director Brett Ratner apparently thought Johnson lucrative enough to cast him as another traditionally-white character in an equally big-budget film: Hercules. There are dozens of other non-white actors who could portray a stunning Moses and turn a profit, and while conventional wisdom tells us that “race-themed” movies (e.g., films with predominantly non-white casts) don’t perform as well, last year the mostly-black ensemble of The Best Man Holiday nearly beat out Thor at the holiday box office. And lest we forget, Dreamworks’ stunning 1998 epic The Prince of Egypt— which grossed more then $200 million — starred a non-white Moses, albeit an animated version voiced by a white man.


Here we run into another supposed truism orbiting around this subject — that the whiteness of biblical movies is simply a reflection of the whiteness of America. Depictions of Jesus often resemble the local population, such as the more eastern-looking “Chinese Jesus” in China or the dark-skinned “Black Christ” in many parts of Africa and the Caribbean. The prevailing logic then becomes the following: since (1) directors like Ridley Scott are making biblical films for a largely American audience, and (2) the United States is a majority-white nation (for now), biblical movies produced in America will naturally feature white stars so they can appeal to as wide of a domestic audience as possible. Hence Mel Brooks in History of the World Part I and Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. The “American Moses,” it would seem, is doomed to be white.


But this conclusion ignores the complex role Moses has played in American history and culture. As any student of American religious activism can attest, when it comes to public discourse in the United States, the title of “American Moses” is not owned by white people. Comparisons between military leaders and the savior of the Jewish people were popular during the American Revolution (George Washington) and the Civil War (Robert E. Lee), but Exodus was just as passionately invoked by abolitionists who fought to free American slaves in the early 1800s. Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who risked her life to save dozens of others, was even dubbed “Moses” by her fellow activists. Fast-forward a century to the 1960s during the African American Civil Rights Movement, where protestors walked arm-in-arm as they sang Moses-themed variants of hymns such as “Go Tell It On The Mountain” (they replaced the line “Jesus Christ Is Born” with the phrase “Set my people free!“). Moses metaphors were also a constant among the sermons of Civil Rights pastors, and Martin Luther King Jr’s last public speech before he died — commonly called “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” — closed with a powerful allusion to the prophet:


“I’ve seen the Promised Land,” King said. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”


The Exodus narrative extends to other champions of racial equality in America as well, such as Cesar Chavez, head of the United Farm Workers of America, who was called a “Moses figure” by the likes of President Bill Clinton. In short, while numerous groups have made claim to Moses in American history, the “race” of the “American Moses” is far from settled, and the Exodus narrative remains deeply important to many people of color.


Obviously no one racial group gets a monopoly on Moses, and Ridley Scott, as an artist, isn’t “obligated” to cast non-white actors. But Scott is a groundbreaking filmmaker who has busted stereotypes before, such as casting Sigourney Weaver and other strong female actors to headline iconic science fiction films — a traditionally male-dominated genre. As such, it is surprising and disappointing that, when given the profound opportunity to do justice to Moses’ prominent position as the spiritual leader of America’s oppressed — and make money doing it — Scott has opted to settle for the norm and take the easy way out. Moses, I imagine, would not be pleased.

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OneLove

:::MME::::

The Spirit of Ubuntu

Ubuntu: “I am what I am because of who we all are.” or “I am a person through other persons”. “A single straw of a broom can be broken easily, but the straws together are not easily broken.”

Ubuntu - the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity.

“We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.”

“A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.” (Desmond Tutu)

OneLove

:::MME:::

Unmasked by George Monbiot

When inequality reaches extreme and destructive levels, most governments seek not to confront it but to accommodate it. Wherever wealth is absurdly concentrated, new laws arise to protect it.

In Britain, for example, successive governments have privatised any public asset which excites corporate greed. They have cut taxes on capital and high incomes. They have legalised new forms of tax avoidance. They have delivered exotic gifts like subsidised shotgun licences and the doubling of state support for grouse moors ( tracts of open uncultivated upland where you'll find medium-sized game birds called grouse). And they have dug a legal moat around the charmed circle, criminalising, for example, the squatting of empty buildings and most forms of peaceful protest. However grotesque inequality becomes, however closely the accumulation of inordinate wealth resembles legalised theft, political norms shift to defend it.

None of this should surprise you. The richer the elite becomes, and the more it has to lose, the greater the effort it makes to capture public discourse and the political system. It scarcely bothers to disguise its wholesale purchase of political parties, by means of an utterly corrupt and corrupting funding system. You can feel its grip not only on policy but also on the choice of parliamentary candidates and appointments to the cabinet. The very rich want people like themselves in power, which is why we have a government of millionaires.

But that describes only one corner of their influence. They fund lobby groups, thinktanks and economists to devise ever more elaborate justifications for their seizure of the nation’s wealth. These justifications are then amplified by the newspapers and broadcasters owned by the same elite.
Among the many good points Thomas Piketty makes in Capital in the 21st Century – his world-changing but surprisingly mild book – is that extreme inequality can be sustained politically only through an “apparatus of justification." If voters can be persuaded that insane levels of inequality are sane, reasonable and even necessary, then the concentration of income can keep growing. If they can’t, then either states are forced to act, or revolutions happen.

For the notion that inequalities must be justified sits at the heart of democracy. It is possible to accept that some can have much more than others if one of two conditions are met: either that they reached this position through the exercise of their unique and remarkable talent; or that this inequality is good for everyone. So the network of think tanks, economists and tame journalists must make these justifications plausible.

It’s a tough job. If wages reflect merit, why do they seem so arbitrary? Are the richest executives 50 or 100 times better at their jobs than their predecessors were in 1980? Are they 20 times more skilled and educated than the people immediately below them, even though they went to the same business schools? Are US executives several times as creative and dynamic as those in Germany? If so, why are their results so unremarkable?

It is, of course, all rubbish. What we see is not meritocracy at work at all, but a wealth grab by a nepotistic executive class which sets its own salaries, tests credulity with its ridiculous demands and discovers that credulity is an amenable customer. They must marvel at how they get away with it.

Moreover, as education and even (in the age of the intern) work becomes more expensive, the opportunities to enter the grabbers’ class diminish. The nations which pay the highest top salaries, such as the US and Britain, are also among the least socially mobile. Here, you inherit not only wealth but opportunity.

Aha, they say, but extreme wealth is good for all of us. All will be uplifted by their god’s invisible hand. Their creed is based on the Kuznet’s curve, the graph which appears to show that inequality automatically declines as capitalism advances, spreading wealth from the elite to the rest.

When Piketty took the trouble to update the curve, which was first proposed in 1955, he discovered that the redistribution it documented was an artefact of the peculiar circumstances of its time. Since then the concentration of wealth has reasserted itself with a vengeance. The reduction in inequality by 1955 was not an automatic and inherent feature of capitalism, but the result of two world wars, a great depression and the fierce response of governments to these disruptions.

For example, the top federal income tax rate in the US rose from 25% in 1932 to 94% in 1944. The average top rate throughout the years 1932 to 1980 was 81%. In the 1940s, the British government imposed a top income tax of 98%. The invisible hand? Hahaha. As these taxes were slashed by Reagan and Thatcher and the rest, inequality boomed once more, and is exploding today. This is why the neoliberals hate Piketty with such passion and poison: he has destroyed with data the two great arguments with which the apparatus of justification seeks to excuse the inexcusable.

So here we have a perfect opportunity for progressive parties: the moral and ideological collapse of the system of thought to which they were previously in thrall. What do they do? Avoid the opportunity like diphtheria. Cowed by the infrastructure of purchased argument, Labour fiddles and dithers
.
But there is another party, which seems to have discovered the fire and passion that moved  Labour so long ago: the Greens. Last week they revealed that their manifesto for the general election will propose a living wage, the renationalisation of the railways, a maximum pay ratio (no executive should receive more than 10 times the salary of the lowest paid worker), and, at the heart of their reforms, a wealth tax of the kind Piketty recommends.

Yes, it raises plenty of questions, but none of them are unanswerable, especially if this is seen as one step towards the ideal position: a global wealth tax, that treats capital equally, wherever it might lodge. Rough as this proposal is, it will start to challenge the political consensus and draw people who thought they had nowhere to turn. Expect the billionaires’ boot boys to start screaming, once they absorb the implications. And take their boos and jeers as confirmation that it’s onto something. You wanted a progressive alternative? You’ve got it.

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OneLove

:::MME:::

Poet's Nook: "Cosmic Shit" by Peter Payack

From random atoms

floating around the cosmos

14 billion years ago,

you have to admit

we humans, as a species,

have come pretty far.

We have this thing we call intelligence,

and then this self-consciousness thing.

We are pretty much all set,

or are we?

With this in hand,

humans not only have been able

to ponder on the inner workings

of the cosmos,

build a civilization

that supports 7 billion beings,

but to realize,

in the deepest and most intimate sense,

that it is ultimately

a pile of cosmic shit.

~taken from Book of Conceptual Anarchy

                                                    



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 OneLove

:::MME:::

Yogic Breathing for Relaxation by Carolanne Wright

Forget the detox pills, fasts and other painful cleansing techniques – instead, take a cue from the yogis of India and look to the breath. Using yogic breathing techniques, we can effortlessly detoxify, burn fat and increase metabolism. With the basic act of bringing in more oxygen, vitamins and minerals are more easily absorbed, white blood cells multiply and the lymphatic system is enhanced. Through the exhale toxins are removed from the bloodstream, which revitalizes the organs and clarifies the intellect. Techniques range from a few deep breaths before a meal to more complex practices. Either way, by using this free detoxification method daily, we can easily (and economically) cleanse the body and mind.

The time-honored art of breathing

Yogis of long ago recognized the merit in calming, cleansing and balancing the body and mind with the breath. Developed over 5,000 years ago, pranayama (Sanskrit for ‘vital energy’ and ‘extend’) is an integral aspect of yogic practice. Below are several examples of how to use the breath to keep the system healthy on all levels.

Simple breath

Before each meal, take three deep breathes. Inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth. Although seemingly basic, this technique sharpens the senses of smell, taste and texture while promoting clarity. When we are clear and focused during our meals, digestion is improved and over-consumption minimized. The end result: efficiency of digestion and weight loss.

Relaxing breath

Lie flat on your back with knees bent together, bringing the feet close into the buttocks. Place hands on both sides of the naval region. Breath in a slow, deep rhythmic manner for 20 repetitions. Since the naval region is dense with nerves, relaxing this area calms emotions, strengthens the nervous system and fortifies the immune system – ultimately aiding in the removal of unnecessary thoughts and toxins from the body.

Bhastrika (Breath of Fire)

This technique helps to slim and tone the belly, boost metabolism and detoxify the body. Sit cross-legged on the floor and place both hands on the lower abdomen. Take a deep breath then begin to ‘pump’ the breath rapidly through the nose, expanding and contracting the entire belly. For visual instructions, see here.

Ujjayi (Victorious Breath)

Sitting in a comfortable position, inhale through the nose and lift the chest. Hold for two seconds. While exhaling through the nose, guide the breath to the back of the throat, creating a ocean wave like sound (sometimes referred to as the ‘Darth Vader breath’). When practiced properly, ujjayi pranayama should energize and relax. It also oxygenates the blood, builds internal body heat and removes toxins.
 
A note of caution: Pranayama is not recommended for those with high blood pressure.


OneLove

 :::MME:::

Witness To Modern Slavery

Let's do something about this. 

Is there slavery in your shopping cart?

It’s hard for consumers to know which of the products we buy are tainted by slavery. But that could change, if you want it to.

U.S Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) have introduced the Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and Slavery Act of 2014 (H.R. 4842). The bipartisan bill requires major U.S. companies to publicly disclose measures they are taking to prevent human trafficking, slavery and child labor in their supply chains.

Now it’s your turn to help. Get your members of Congress to cosponsor this groundbreaking anti-trafficking legislation. Become part of the Business Transparency Campaign by signing their online petition.

“Enactment of supply chain transparency legislation will provide consumers with information about companies that are – and are not – taking substantial steps to address slavery. It will also help investors better understand the reputational and other risks of investing in particular companies,” according to the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking, a coalition of leading anti-trafficking organizations, including FTS.

If the bill is passed, every consumer will have an opportunity to make educated decisions when shopping.

If you want to make it happen, take action. Now. Click here.


 OneLove 

:::MME:::

It’s Lonely At The Top -The Last Human Species (Us)

I think one reason for the notion that we are so special comes from the fact that there’s only one species of humans on the planet. There is such a wide gap in intelligence, culture and technology between us humans and other intelligent animals, that we could be forgiven for believing that we are absolutely unique.

This has not always been the case, however. Just 50,000 years ago almost half a dozen species of humans (including us modern Homo sapiens) inhabited Earth. Back then, you could come across fast-running Homo erectus and hobbit-sized Homo floresiensis in Asia, Denisovans in eastern Russia and Neanderthals in Europe. Our planet was crawling with species of humans, each with their own cultures, technology and languages.

As we moved out of Africa and into the Middle East, the first ones we would have encountered would have been the Neanderthals. They were short and stocky, with pale skin, blonde or red hair (and probably freckles) – a stark contrast to our long, slender African bodies with dark skin and hair. The Neanderthals had been a highly successful species with many adaptations to the Glacial European landscape, but as our own kind expanded westward they disappeared.

Further east, in modern-day Siberia and Mongolia, we would have come across the Denisovans. Nobody knows what they were like, as all we’ve found is a finger bone and a tooth, but DNA suggest they were a sister species to the Neanderthals. It is therefore highly likely they also were pale skinned and fair-haired.

Down south, in tropical Asia, we might have encountered a real oldie: Homo erectus, the most long-lived human species of all and an offshoot of our own ancestor Homo ergaster.  Whilst ergaster never left Africa, erectus did, and populated most of the Asian continent for several million years. They were tall and slender like us, used fire and tools, and lived in closely knit family groups as hunter-gatherers. They would have been awesome runners, easily as fast as a modern-day Olympic athlete.

Far east in Indonesia we might have found the hobbits: Homo floresiensis. At just 1m (3 ft 6 in) tall, they were the smallest of all humans, and probably lived as hunter-gatherers deep in the tropical rain forests.

We can only imagine what it would have been like for our ancestors to meet these ‘other’ humans. Did we see them as people? Or perhaps as trolls and goblins? Did we trade with them or did we fight them? And why are they all gone and we’re the sole survivors?

Is this boy an actual descendant of the mysterious Denisovans?

As it happens, we aren’t. Or at least not entirely. Recent studies have shown that all non-African humans have a percentage of Neanderthal-DNA in their genome. We’re literally carrying around the remnants of the Neanderthal populations in our genes. Perhaps that is where we got the genes for blonde and red hair from? And people living in Papua New Guinea can boast another set of genes: those of the Denisovans. In fact, they are the only known population that have both dark skin and fair hair.

So regardless of if we saw these other species as ‘humans’ or not, we did mate with them. And perhaps that is how they disappeared – they weren’t killed or out-competed. Instead they were simply absorbed by our growing population, and their species were assimilated. Which would make us kind of like the Borg - but a kinky and oversexed type of Borg that would do whoever they came across.

Also check out Our Human Story.

OneLove

:::MME:::