The HandShake Times

2011-11-09T14:28:00.000-08:00

The End of Silver Manipulation

2011-11-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

The story of the Hunt Brother's—Nelson and William Herbert—attempt to corner the silver market in the 1980’s is one of the best known examples in the commodity markets of financial heavyweights purchasing enough stock so as to be able to manipulate it as they please. The Hunt brothers did not keep the greatest market share for long, but they certainly did help to make completely lopsided, in favor of finance capital, the silver market since that time.

In the mid-to-late 1970s, the world was a very unstable place, much like today. Not only did the American economy experience during this period inflation and even stagflation, but fear of international communism pulled at the shoulders of nearly everyone. Bunker Hunt believed that silver was undervalued and could only rise in price. In the middle of the 1970s the Hunt brothers owned nearly 10% of all silver stock and, from then on into the 1980s, they put increasing pressure on the market and caused the price of silver to rise from $2 per ounce to $6 per ounce.

All of their capital was invested into silver. Further, they were salesmen of the stock, doing what they could to convince others to do the same as them. Eventually, they partnered with a group of Arabian investors who were in such a position to purchase voluminous amounts of silver. The Hunts and these Arabs, over time, gained increasing influence over the silver market, allowing them the means to loan more money and buy more silver, creating a feedback loop of manipulated price discovery.

By 1979 the price of silver was $35 per ounce. By then, other investors started looking to silver as a viable investment opportunity, thus giving the price an even larger boost. In the 1980s, the Hunt Brothers had made a market. Inside of one decade they had inflated the price from $2 per ounce to $50 per ounce at the beginning of the 80’s. Some believed that silver would rise to $200/$300.

But, in the early 80’s, the prices of silver started to stall and fall. The market had grown so inflated that the Hunt brothers could not find paper enough to purchase enough silver to keep the market rising. Investors began investing money into bank certificates for higher interest rates. Moreover, the Brothers had taken on massive loans to fund their silver scheme but could not repay the debts. The brokers, who had made the loans, such as Bache, A.G. Edwards, Merrill Lynch and others, began to protect themselves from a market crash by shorting the price.

The Federal Reserve then changed the rules on speculative silver investments, and the price plunged. A broker demanded a $100 million dollar payment. The Hunts defaulted. Out of desperation, the Hunt brothers tried to counterfeit paper obligations backed by their 200 million ounces of silver. Essentially, they tried to create a new international currency backed by silver. By then, however, silver was linked in the public mind with the unstable situation of the Hunts. On Blood Thursday—March 27, 1980—the price hit an all time low. Many of these banks were bailed out by taxpayer money, and investigations found that the Hunts owned considerable stake in Bache.

The banks involved in this silver play had gained insight into the silver market. What they had gained was the ability to suppress the price of silver whenever it began to go up. The price of silver became divorced from supply and demand.

Today, upward pressure on silver stems from somewhat similar circumstances to what the U.S. was experiencing in the mid 1970’s: a lack of confidence in the US economy and therefore the dollar. Not only do such global circumstances and fears of currency devaluation cause the public and institutional buyers—such as central banks—to run to commodities, like gold and silver and agriculture, but increasing transparency regarding manipulation in the silver market by big players such as JPMorgan and HSBC put the precious metals market in the headlines—and with negative sentiment towards Wall Street right now, silver offers people an exciting way of not only preserving purchasing power, but also exposing big banks to risk.

In short, JPMorgan, HSBC and other international financial institutions have over the long-term bet on the price of silver to fall. The capital expended to ensure the price did act in such a way has “artificially depressed the price of silver dramatically downward.” Thus, class-action lawsuits have been filed against the banks.

The CFTC began investigating the manipulation through its Enforcement Division three years ago after issuing letters in 2004 and 2008. As yet, no findings have been made public. Backed by taxpayer money, as it is, one can imagine it has been a rather expensive investigation.

Western economies are bankrupt. Silver and gold will not meet demand in the coming years, which is why platinum and palladium—historically, for the most part, viewed as only industrial metals—will play large roles as monetary hedges. Today, central banks and other large institutions are net buyers of gold, and many are even scooping up large positions in platinum. They were late to the gold game, entering in a meaningful way in 2007 and 2008, more than five years after the start of the extraordinary bull market. Tomorrow, these same institutions will be net buyers of silver in a big way. Again, they will be late. Either way, this will cause the price of silver to snowball in a manner similar to what has been seen in gold over the last fifty years.

The US mint has seen periods this year where they sold just as many dollars in silver as gold, despite that gold is priced in dollars around 40 times the price of silver at any given time. In the Spring, world markets bore witness to a rise in silver of near $50, before heavy manipulation—that is, large sell-offs—took advantage of a quiet market on a Sunday night and early Monday morning, when few trades were being made.

Silver works at times as a sort of schizophrenic precious metals. It has moments where the underlying demand for it as a monetary hedge causes the price to run north quickly. Other times, dismal industrial outlook causes it to follow the coattails of platinum and fall. But, as many young people—and not to mention wealthy folks and institutions— are looking to silver as an investment, a hedge or a savings account, demand for the metal as a monetary instrument is sure to drive price discovery.

Silver prices are poised to rise, thus putting pressure on the JPMorgan stock price. As the JPMorgan stock price and the silver price conflate, investors will concern themselves, in regards to the bank’s stock price and derivatives holdings, with their risky short position in silver. Usually a firm will short a stock 8-1, whilst JPMorgan holds a short of about 40-1.

For every ounce of silver sold on the COMEX, JPMorgan sells between twenty to fifty ounces of silver, similar to fractional reserve banking. This is called naked short selling; that is, they sell silver that does not exist. In fact, it is estimated that the bank has sold between one billion and three billion ounces of non-existent silver. They have sold more silver than exists above ground. In terms of derivatives, JPMorgan has about $1.5 trillion in exposure, much of which are silver shorts. Knowing this, large hedge funds can purchase large quantities of silver, and eventually force JPMorgan to go long.

Silver has a myriad of uses today. Not only is it an investment or a hedge, but for many it is a savings account. It also has industrial purposes and, for some, is representative of a political movement to expose too-big-to-fail banks to risk. It is also the jewelry metal of choice among the youth in the US and Europe, for it is more affordable than gold. Many simply like the color.

Just as the gold cartel eventually lost its control over gold in the late sixties, causing its price to begin running upwards from $35 an ounce, the silver cartel sees its days numbered. Today gold is a de facto world reserve currency, and everyday more people catch onto this reality. Silver has historically traded in tandem with the yellow metal. Many analysts see $10,000 an ounce as a given for yellow. At the very feasible 20-1 ratio, that lands silver at roughly $500 an ounce.

*this is an opinion piece and is not designed to be taken as investment advice.
*disclosure: we are bullish on silver

Occupy Everything & Begin Anew

2011-10-29T00:34:00.000-07:00

A constant motif of the Occupy movement is that there is elite’s money in “our government.” But, what Occupiers must comprehend is that there is no such thing—and never was—as “their government.” For ages governments, referred to oft as States, have been used as a tool of submission and domination by ruling classes. States, no matter how small, have served elite interests against populist needs. That’s the way it’s always been.

And so therefore, it is trite for any populist movement on any continent, in any country, to call upon a government to regulate the managers of the global economy. Populist reform and regulation of ruling classes is not what governments are designed to do. They protect ruling classes. Many protestors are calling on the government to regulate the ruling class through taxes and laws.

In the event new legislation is passed and new taxes collected, Occupiers would be ignorant and weak-minded to believe that this wealth would be redistributed to actually improve the plight of the poor. What would happen, contrarily, is that the government would eagerly tax millions who make an honest, albeit privileged, living, and then use the newly generated wealth for its own largesse—for aggressive wars, general imperialism and self-rewarding corruption—as well as for welfare to the illuminist corporate and banking establishment.

The State steals money and gives it to those who have fought for control over society and culture for millennia. This culture, above and beyond the money system, above and beyond trends and styles, has studied and tried to perfect a philosophy of control that goes back centuries. This bounty is then handed over by those above and beyond this System.

Through a systematic, psychological torture, those who are born individuals, become slaves to a mythological greater good, which boils down to merely servicing the State. People generally believe the State is a formidable means by which to develop people morally, to teach them to be virtuous individuals. Therefore, they believe the State is necessary to ensure people work towards virtuous and good means.
To believe the State is a means towards a more virtuous world is akin to believing the study of Justin Bieber lyrics could bring enlightenment. Albert Einstein once said the very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

Governments have been tried before, and the result is clear: they implement taxation schemes through straight taxes, fines and fees, which represent nothing more than theft. It is these government tools that have allowed Wall Street—a front for international demise-of-the-state globalist institutions—to conduct the largest wealth confiscation in the history of mankind in the form of money owed by future generations.

Occupiers know this. They know the solutions to their problems are not political, not through government. The first solution to all of our problems is a move away from the political. To simply become less dependent on the systems into which we were all born. Thus, first and foremost we must work hard, and save our hard earned cash in alternative monies, such as gold and silver, to stock up on necessities anticipating a further devaluation of the US Dollar—in other words, to build up our assets, viewing assets as everything from the aforementioned precious metals to food and water to toilet paper.

We must envisage our problems as natural problems, not political. The order of our community has a foundation in our natural. By design, politics is everything, as George Orwell said. But, in a truer sense, nature is everything. By embracing that which makes us human—such as empathy, ethics, love and consciousness—we can begin imagining how it is we can tear down the matrix and learn to be free.

To the State for Peace, Away from the Free-Market, And Into Chains

2011-10-27T11:31:00.000-07:00

Nineteenth century Western Culture, generally speaking, was marked philosophically, at least in part, by the belief in man’s innate goodness. This belief had its roots in the eighteenth century when it appeared to many that man was born good and free, but, all over the world, was corrupted and enslaved by society’s institutions. Rousseau once said, “Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains.”

During this period, what arose was a romanticism for nature (hence, perhaps, the popularity of evolutionary theory at that time), and the belief that, if only man could be freed of the corruption of society and its contrived conventions—of the state, of the clergy and, for some, of matrimony and of private property—then man, therefore, would be poised to achieve heights undreamed of hitherto.

It was these conditions which gave rise to the French Revolution, which, ironically, came to depend on the keystone mechanism of the State—violence—and gave way to a period during which France conquered swathes of Western Civilization. Still, from 1770 until 1914, many have argued that a culture of staunch self-reliance generally attitudinized Western Civilization, sometimes summarized by the concept of laissez-faire.

Much of this self-reliance held that, if society is evil, then the State—which is merely the organized vertical force of society—is doubly evil. If man is innately good, then, he ought to be completely freed from this coercive power of the State. Indeed, nineteenth century Liberalism believed man should be freed from all coercive power, among which might be included the church, army and other institutions. Society, in this case, would have little power other than the power required to restrain the strong from oppressing the weak.

The idea of a “community of interests” was also very strong during this period. This “community of interests” was a realm in which what was good for one was good for all. Somewhere, according to this belief, there did exist a reality where everybody would be secure, free, and prosperous, and that this pattern could be achieved over time. In it, each person could fall into that place in society best suited to his abilities. Implicit in this belief was that human ability is innate and can only be suppressed or altered by social discipline and that each individual is the best judge of his own self-interest.

In 1880, the belief that the current generation,and indeed all generations,was the culmination of a long process of history. Oftentimes, this long process is referred to as progress, a phenomenon that had lasted millennia and would continue forevermore. This belief ran so deep that progress, by many, was seen as inevitable and automatic.

These nineteenth century epistemes have, in the twentieth century, been considerably modified—or so it would seem at first glance. Wherefore such a change? Four traumatic decades at the onset of the twentieth century, and five decades of intense militarism by two premier Empires, led to a perceivable sea change in the disposition of men. Included in these shattering experiences are the First World War, world depression, world financial crisis, and the Second World War. These were then followed by the Cold War.

On the byway of these traumas, major adjustments were made in the western brain. Men now had viable reason to doubt their entrenched belief in the innate goodness of man. Evil was no longer merely the absence of good.

In the course of these events, millions were killed and billions of dollars wasted. Impossible to comprehend for most, such a blow altered man’s disposition on their own species. The First World War was seen as an aberration—and one from which they must quickly move on and forget.

For ten years a façade was created, a lie. In 1929, the stock market crashed. World depression ensued, and was followed by financial crisis. In the late thirties, sabers rattled as rearmament and aggression.

After 1945, a new world was evident. Opposed with the nineteenth century view of man as innately good and society as corrupting, increasingly the belief that man had a seemingly infinite capacity for untold evil insinuated itself into the minds of men. Without a society—that is, large institutions designed to quell man’s beastly desires, to nudge them towards desired beliefs and behaviors—man would certainly destroy himself. Efforts hinting at such a belief can be seen in the attempted erection of the League of Nations after the First World War, and the establishment of the United Nations (UN) after the Second World War.

The former western belief that human philosophies and abilities are innate and should be free from social duress in order to display individuality was replaced by the idea that the personality is a result of social repetition and training and must be coerced to socially acceptable ends. The laissez-faire economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were to be replaced by social discipline and central planning.

The “community of interests” of the free market would take backseat to the welfare community, which must be organized by wise-men. An intellectual environment would arise friendly to assertions of some sort of “de-evolution” or social retrogression or human extinction. Democracy would now be replaced by authoritarianism, and the laissez-faire Capitalism by State-Enterprise or command-and-control.

Now, here in the twenty-first century, it has grown clearer that progress is not a steady force with inevitable outcomes. Rather, man’s social development can be seen as a more anarchic, spontaneous process, no matter how much rulers attempt to ensure things remain predictable. These same notions are increasingly amending Darwin’s theory of evolution, or progress, towards more perfect forms.

The eighteenth and nineteenth century were schizophrenic times, as has been so much of human history. Nationalistic tendencies undermined royal empires, and out of this flux came a vibrant forum of idea sharing. Thoughts of a laissez-faire lifestyle wherein individuals were freed from the European caste system led to the mythology of the New World, even if the New World only reflected such a lifestyle pre-Constitution, and scantily so.

A way of understanding that was promoted, if too often implicitly and not explicitly, by eighteenth and nineteenth century sentiments, holds that the natural ought to be esteemed before the political. Even today, too often do our philosophies on how life should be grow politicized, thereby undermining their original power. Humans are not political beings. They are natural beings. The questions of how we should live our lives are unanswerable by politics, for politics is merely a means of ordering life by way of the state or government. The questions of how we should live our lives are answerable only by naturalism; that is, by recognizing that which makes us humans.

Our consciousness blossoms as a beautiful aberration from other life in the natural world as we know it. The cognitive niche, inherited from nature, that we inhabit gives us an axiom from which our understanding of the world stems. This can be easily interrupted and distorted by the data and information we are fed. Whether it be outright war, depression or manipulative fiction on television or in the movies, we are all easily victimized by the campaigning of pathological behavior by the trendsetters-that is, the ruling class—and our peers who follow. They have adopted the cynicism passed down by a century marred by two Great Wars, a deep depression, and a long standoff between two nuclear powers.

The cynicism bequeathed unto us by a violent twentieth century has led us to the belief that we need centralized governments and rulers to keep us from doing violence to one another. But, what we see are large institutions, instead of forcing people to be peaceful, projecting violence down civilization's ladder, and turning individuals against themselves, thus creating the precise environment people hoped the behemoth Institution of the State would prevent. Indeed, governments and private tyrannies were all along the impetuses of the bloodletting and carnage people were attempting to escape.

How Transnational Corporations and Governments Will Destroy The Occupy Movement

2011-10-15T19:29:00.001-07:00

The Occupy movement now dances along the streets of the world, growing like a dandelion in sunlight. It is impossible to predict when such passionate awakenings will spring onto the scene, since this movement comes three years after the 2008 banking revolution which transformed the global economic structure into an Occupation by the Ruling Class of the People of the World, and more than a decade after 9/11 and the invasions of the Middle East.

Either way, the movement has arisen, and we can be sure that the powers-that-be will do EVERYTHING they can to ensure that this movement is CO-OPTED (commercially adopted), repackaged and USED for the furthering of their command-and-control agendas. If this cannot be done, then the movement will be destroyed through hard power; i.e. bloodletting.

As does any movement at its incipience, this growing movement has much to learn about its enemy, who currently maintain a way of the world that ensures subservience of the so-called “99%”, a phrase that really functions as a catchy metaphor. It, like the way in which the movement uses the term “Wall Street,” is really a catch-all phrase referring to a deeply embedded power structure run by a merciless ruling class that views this 21st century as “the century of change.” This ruling class, like all ruling classes down through history, have inherited a matured philosophy of control that instructs in the techniques of control. By “century of change,” this ruling class sees this century as a prime-time to overthrow freedom on the planet, and institute dismal conditions so that no people could ever undermine their power.

They implement the aforementioned techniques of control in accordance with the ages in which they rule, and they makeup a percentage of the world's population that is more like .000001%. The cabal atop the world inherits an ancient task, sometimes referred to in religions and some political dossiers as The Great Work, and that is to standardize global culture—in effect, to bring in a World State composed of myriads of aligned national and local institutions (like the UN, which means one in French, national governments, state governments, city governments, non-government organizations, non-profit foundations, and corporations).

By envisaging this century as a sort of turning point, the powers-that-be have decided that a revolution must take place, but not the sort of revolution Occupiers believe they are taking part in. Rather, this revolution falls more in line with the revolutions of the past—like the French Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution—whereby a more concentrated and acute power structure becomes the way things are.

Knowing that, in order to achieve the transformation of society desired—towards a more totalitarian way—wealth confiscations through economic warfare are mandatory. Thus, we have seen in the second half of the 20th century and on into the current one the “structural readjustments” of nation after nation, the world over, through IMF and World Bank programs. Today we see that, since the world is satisfactorily standardized in the eyes of the central planners of the neo-soviet, it is now time to overturn the economic order of the United States; i.e. make us a much poorer.

It is the establishments' obsession with data and information, wealth accumulation, and the maintenance of their own power that allows them to function as a sort of oracle of the way of the world. That is why in government documents for at least the past decade institutions, like the State Department, have predicted the protests we now see today in Europe, the Middle East, South America, Africa and the United States. They also predict these will soon turn into food riots.

For many technocrats—a technocrat being an empowered expert in the controlling of resources—movements like the worldwide Occupy movement are mouth-watering, for it provides an opportune time to utilize the technique of “cognitive infiltration.” This is a technique in controlling the mind, which is considered by the self-declared “masters of the universe” an economic resource. Platforms like Occupy create fertile environments in which new ideas can flourish. Using their vast and easily acquired resources—made possible by their manipulation of the money supply through the Federal Reserve System—illuminist transnational corporations can ensure that it is their ideas which gain the most support through sophisticated –although outwardly simple—and well-financed advertising and marketing campaigns, and the institutionalization of these platforms through their control of virtually each government in the world.

They WILL intend to STEER the Occupy movement towards DESIRED OUTCOMES, and therefore catchy slogans imploring the government to raise TAXES, increase CONTROL, and call for radical, more TOTALITARIAN ways of society and culture will become popular. The REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED, but only those revolutionary ideas conjured up by think-tanks who work tirelessly on the algorithms of everyday life. They WILL NOT promote FREEDOM and LIBERTY. Instead, they WILL promote COLLECTIVISM and GOVERNMENTAL INTERVENTION into the economy; i.e. our daily lives.

Of course, not everyone will be fooled. We are wise, and the flux of society, brought on by the “global insurrection against banker occupation” and the actions of these hijackers of mankind themselves, will cause increasing numbers of people to awaken to the true power-structure. So then, how will the establishment maintain their management of man?

There are many cards the powers-that-be could play, such as a false flag terror attack, wherein the transnational corporations plot some sort of fear-inducing event to be televised on the world stage. The powers-that-be could invade some country, such as Iran, by way of the US military, thereby furthering the current world war started and stoked by the United States and its management.

Seeing as how they control amounts of wealth well in excess of the GDP of the planet, planetary rulers essentially dictate the economy. They will, eventually, pull the rug out completely from underneath the people in the west, plunging the entire world into a collapse surpassing conditions during the Great Depression. While I believe this is already bound to happen, this event can be hastened if a global awakening begins to threaten the real power structure. Anybody who wishes to be free must prepare themselves mentally and physically for such conditions. Stock up on water and stock up on food. There are myriads of supplies that we must have on hand, if we wish to become independent from any system of exploitation.

Food riots will be thwarted by force, and people will depend on government welfare programs for food. In order to maintain order on the streets, TSA-like checkpoints will be rolled-out onto city streets, whilst a monumental surveillance system will be utilized. Inside those stores which do have food, food prices will be setup in such a way so that the poor and middle classes can only afford GMO food and food loaded with preservatives and pesticides. Thus, another way in which any true movement for freedom will be neutralized is through genocide. The critical mass any such movement would need to affect true change will be impossible, due to endemic sickness and death of the population.

That is why not only demonstrations and protests are the way towards a freer society. We must also become less dependent on any system. If the power goes out, we need to have flashlights, candles, transistor radios, access to clean water and nourishing food, et cetera. That is one way in which to become freer. Worst case scenario, put away canned food now, and save on the inflation later.

At the level of ideas, any freedom movement must move beyond the collectivization of the individual. Women's rights, black rights, gay rights, pothead rights: these are collectivist movements that define the individual in terms of a grouping. It is this collectivist belief system which got these aforementioned groups ostracized in the first place. Instead, we must stress the value of the individual, and his or her right to engage in the complex fabric of human relationships in the way he or she pleases, so long as this individual does not engage in any form of violence against others. Fostering an environment in which the individual can excel and find him or herself is the first step towards realizing cultural freedom.

2011-09-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

America

My life

I always had to think twice

Spend time to ponder, my mind started to wander

Down the less traveled path, geometric shapes and shadows cast

Up on the wall, esoteric wisdom

Lost in the mainstream

Hidden wisdom

Mystery religions and mythical facts

Changed my life far more than science has

lost loves and battle chat

Carefully crafted relationships never last

The realness is what brings us back

Not the rationality or the money

No excuses when where on the hunt for honey

Everyone wants to look lovely

Feeling so stunny

In a society where ignorance seems to be the new funny

Celebrity gossip and death machine money

America the land of the hungry and the cunning

Will one day restore the freedom of those who dream not to go to sleep hungry

Facebook status, we need more magic

The technology of separation makes us feel so tragic

Society of class and grandeur built on one another’s sadness

Whether you’re a disciple or an addict they want you to believe its still classic

But really it’s just the same madness jihadist extremist ego based passion

The enemy of the people anyone who wants to open fire and start blasting

Emotions that leave smoking holes in lifeless bodies whether you’re American or Saudi

Atheist or godly, nobody should kill for religion that seems like it would be the most ungodly.

Crusaders wars reframed as humanitarian interventions makes the picture a little foggy

The deception of war seems like Americas new favorite hobby

Especially when you have the military industrial lobby

Stacking bodies, with no numbers, lost in the sand

No rain, only thunder

Collateral damage one hell of a fucking way to rename murderous blunders

Cruise missiles rain down like the fires that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah

Except they choose to read the Koran instead of the torrah

The ego the only enemy of the people

Hidden inside our own mind making us feel scared and deceitful

Seeing enemies around us when really its us we the people

Our differences seem so feeble when we think about all that we could heal.

When things seem like they are just to real

Were here with words of wisdom helping yall to chill

When things seem like they are just to real

Were here with words of wisdom helping yall to chill

When things seem like they are just to real

Were here with words of wisdom helping yall to chill

When things seem like they are just to real

Sit back and chill, perfect your skills

Focus and build, Meditative essence the real way to heal

Emotions so real, Thoughts that heal, Magical energy of esoteric will

A tribe on a quest it’s a rainbow for real

The light shades

The prisms of energy

Pyramids of light let me feel your symmetry

Magnificent, magnetic connectivity

To my brothers and sisters there are no real enemies

The true battlefields of life are fought internally

So this journey I began will be the new birth of me

Liberty Coin and Precious Metals Market Update

2011-08-12T23:20:00.000-07:00

Amid global market turmoil, gold’s parabolic run-up from $1500 per ounce to $1800, about a 15% rise in price, spells a clear shift for the global economy. Firstly, anybody shorting the gold price leading into such a parabolic move upwards has lost much. They will not be participating in gold shorts any longer. Presumably, many of them have transferred their shorts to the smaller PM market, silver. As they try and convince the world silver is not a monetary instrument, they will trade all the paper they can to keep the price of silver below $40. Recently, they’ve had no trouble doing so. That these shorts have been moved to the silver market, thus keeping silver below $40, therefore leaves gold looking vulnerable, taking some of the steam out of its historic, 1982-esque, price run. JP Morgan, HSBC, and other keystone financial institutions cannot keep silver down for much longer, as traders of gold and silver, worried about buying gold near its top, will look to the quiet silver for potentially quick returns.

One possible effect of these shorts being shaken out of the market is that we might not see gold dip $150, retracing half of its recent run-up as bull-market stocks tend to do (not to say that gold is a stock, but just to compare). Rather, as volatility picks up in the currency markets, as suggested by the Swiss Franc’s drop of 5% compared when compared with the Dollar and the Euro, gold might head towards $2,000 in the near-term.

Supply is being squeezed as the rush continues in the gold market, as 24K gold bars were delayed this last week for delivery. Further evidence of financial panic, rumor has it that Swiss 20 francs and Rooster French 20 Francs in Europe are being sold at premiums of 8.5% and 10.7%, respectively. The French are withdrawing money from banks, nervous that the instability plaguing Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy will soon come to France.

As for silver, as an industrial metal as well as a monetary metal, it is prone to wild fluctuations. Over the past couple of weeks, though, the price of silver has traded between the $38 and $40 range. Considering the wild fluctuations in global markets, this betokens a surprisingly quiet silver market. Not only ought the fear that has gripped the global market spur safehaven buying into the metal, but so too should the violent crashes in the markets spur serious moves to the downside for the silver. Instead, silver has moved up-and-down only 2% in either direction, representing a schizophrenic couple of weeks. The take-home point of such a steady silver price is that silver has broken the chains, if not from the paper manipulators, from its status as an industrial metal. Instead, increasingly so, the white metal is being viewed as tangible money.

History shows that political volatility and financial crisis drive silver up. Consumer confidence today has reached its lowest point since 1980, that year in which silver ran to $50 per ounce. In 2008, the DOW crashed 1,874 points over the course of one week, and the silver price was cut by more than half. These past two weeks, the DOW has crashed 2,000 points, but, instead falling to $20 per ounce, silver has held in the high $30’s, a price which it has tested now seven or eight times. Expect silver to takeoff in the near future.

The volatility, as CNN reports, is here to stay. “Massive volatility and headline-to-headline driven trading are now just part of the average day.” Firms with high-frequency trading technologies benefit most from such wild swings. Thus, panic will drive average investors away from paper assets into tangible assets, such as gold and silver.

*the aforementioned is not financial advice by which to trade, but a look at possible outcomes in the ongoing, long-term silver and gold PM market.

College Debt Freedom?

2011-06-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

It is said that the amount of college loans in the System amounts to approximately $1 trillion. It is also said that small debts are a risk to the borrower, whilst many are a risk to the lender. Therefore, it is in the ideal interest of not only the great many college graduates struggling to balance their food, shelter and fun needs, as well as their debt burden, but also of the familiar international financial institutions, who— surprise-surprise—over-lent, to reach some sort of sensible payment accord.

Today there is legislation in both the Senate and the House to “restore fairness” in private student loans by treating them “in bankruptcy the same as other types of private debt.” The bill is introduced by U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Al Franken (D-MN) today joined U.S. Representatives Steve Cohen (D-TN), Danny Davis (D-IL), George Miller (D-CA) and John Conyers (D-MI).

An article posted at Senator Durbin’s .gov website states:

Before changes were made to the bankruptcy code in 2005, only government issued or guaranteed student loans were protected during bankruptcy. This protection has been in place since 1978 and was intended to safeguard federal investments in higher education. Today’s bill would restore the bankruptcy law, as it pertains to private student loans, to the language that was in place before 2005, so that privately issued student loans will once again be dischargeable in bankruptcy.

In a culture where a college degree is celebrated as the surefire way in which to get ahead in life, protections and safety nets must be in place when graduates soon realize that, in fact, their college degrees are a dime-a-dozen, and not worth the thousands they now owe. Instead, they work menial jobs for meager wages or find themselves learning skillset’s anew, on the job, and often in the capacity of “intern.”

Representative Cohen said:

People who seek higher education to better their futures should not be dissuaded from doing so by the threat of financial ruin…The bankruptcy system should work as a safety net that allows people to get the education they want with the assurance that, should their finances come under strain by layoffs, accidents, or other unforeseen life events, they will be protected. My bill takes a modest but important step in achieving this goal.

Durbin introduced such legislation in 2007, and Congressman Cohen held a hearing on the dischargeability of student loan debt during bankruptcy in September 2009.
Said Senator Whitehouse:

By repealing special treatment for private lenders, we will hold big banks accountable, protect young people from abusive lending practices, and provide relief for graduates trapped by loans that can too often carry high interest rates and unfair terms.

Unlike government loans, private loans do not include interest rate caps, flexible repayment options, and limited cancellation rights. College loans are managed in a perverse way by big banks, who take advantage of the lack of life experience among young people in order to saddle them with debt. This serves two purposes: Either to extract wealth from baby-boomer parents who must foot the bill or towards the same outcome from those students who must pay-back the loans by themselves. Many students, with the average college debt between $20,000-$60,000, end up being asked to pay back money that cuts into their ability to shelter themselves, feed themselves, and thus begin upon a path of financial independence and family-building.

Few debts are held to such a standard by bankruptcy law, wherein discharge is only allowed in the most “extreme circumstances.” The bankruptcy code makes it especially difficult for people to escape child support responsibilities, overdue taxes, and criminal fines. College debt ought not be lumped in with these debts.
This legislation is supported by 35 groups and organizations:

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities, American Council on Education, American Federation of Teachers, Americans for Financial Reform, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, The Institute for College Access and Success, National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, National Consumer Law Center and U.S. PIRG.

To paraphrase that which monsieur Max Keiser has recently said: people used to work for money, today they work to go into debt. This is a paralyzing social structure, not only for the individual, but for culture itself.

The bill is indeed a small step, and there is little awareness, among the public, of its presence in both houses. For such legislation to move forward, and help to create a nationwide movement intent on bankrupting the illimunist financial conglomerations, students must be aware of those attempting to protect their financial livelihoods.

There are many methods of paying back student loan debt. The only accepted one is to simply pay. But, there are other options. As the dollar weakens, for example, an indebted student will, later, have the opportunity to pay-back loans in cheaper dollars. Furthermore, commodities such as gold and silver offer interest rates that outpace the interest rates on many student loans.

Has Silver Topped?

2011-03-26T12:38:00.000-07:00

Bob Moriarty recently wrote an opinion piece on Friday, March 25, asking the question “Is Silver Topping?” He writes that silver is at a “temporary top.” He goes on saying, “silver has doubled since late August. It's gone up about 45% since a small correction at the end of January and all sorts of pundits are claiming that silver is moving from weak hands into strong hands. Silver was up today for the 7th day in a row before collapsing.” (1)

Bob is correct in stating that the price of silver has doubled since late August. For sure this is a monumental rise for anything with a price tag. Also true is silver has made large gains since a small correction at the end of January. Still, when viewed in relation to global food prices—which, in February, were up 61% since their most recent low in December 2008 according to the IMF—as well as an increase in political and economic volatility arisen from global awakening, the silver price does not seem too unreasonable.

In December of 2008, silver had a low of $9.50. From that point, today's silver price has risen about 295%. Through August of 2010 it had risen, since that December 2008 low, about 100%. Assuming the IMF under-reported true spikes in food prices, and that the market crash in the Fall of 2008 suppressed silver prices, the recent gains in silver are certainly intimidating, but can be explained by a number of factors: such as, commodity inflation, investor demand, and the futility of silver manipulation,which we will touch upon shortly.

Moreover, the silver price has barely “collapsed,” as Moriarty claims. $37.30, down from $38.13, is not a collapse with silver reaching the underbelly of $40. The higher the price, the greater the fluctuations. There have been periods recently where silver has moved dramatically downwards and seemed very soft, as happened during the dip in January. Silver, obviously, rebounded to make the gains which brought it to about $38.13 an ounce on 25 March. This is not the month of January, when silver fell from about $30 to about $26.50. To many, these current prices might seem inflated, but old economic paradigms are irrelevant when analyzing new market movements.

For example, in his article, Bob states that “commodities go up and down in a far more random manner than anyone wants to admit.” In turn, I would flip this argument on its head, and submit that, rather, commodities go up and down in a far more controlled manner than anyone wants to admit. Raw market manipulation and speculation in futures markets, just as it does with oil prices, practically dictates gold, and especially, silver prices.

Whereas, heading into the 2011 summer, oil prices are heading upwards based on speculation regarding middle east turmoil and rising demand in developing markets, gold and silver prices have been kept artificially low, by transnational private-public partnerships, so as not to compromise confidence in Federal Reserve Notes. The FRN is a key instrument for“Full Spectrum Dominance” through the demise-of-the-state globalism practiced by keystone transnationals and NATO.

However, with markets quickening their way towards another crash, which will then naturally drive down the prices of commodities, perhaps keystone financial players like JPMorgan and HSBC have thrown in the towel when it comes to manipulating these markets, anticipating a market crash that will do this work for them.

This could partially explain the recent monumental gains in silver. Think of holding a beach-ball under water: the deeper one pushes it under water, the more energy one must exert, and the more momentum the ball will hold once it is let go to rush towards waters' surface. This seems to be what has happened to silver. The more economic capital invested in keeping the price of silver low resulted in more upward momentum once the manipulation ceased or decreased. Hence, the quick, large gains.

Certainly, I believe that the recent gains made in silver might encourage a psychological-top for silver. Many are selling, as these gains seem to good to be true, and there's nothing wrong with a profit. Thus, silver might enter into a period of prolonged consolidation, entailing even a considerable decline in the price down to around $30 or slightly below. To be sure, however, demand for silver as a hedge against inflation and economic warfare might prove to be an enduring support for the price of silver. In other words, the absence of confidence in the ability for the world to avert certain tragedy in the form of wars and economic holocaust will promote a higher silver price; listen to the news.

Bob states that silver may have a couple more days of increases, but the market is tired. He claims that “silver has no more to do with Portugal and their financial problems or nuclear melt down in Japan than it has to do with the price of kitty litter...Hell, half the silver bugs don't know anything about silver, it's the most over rated investment in the universe right now.”

Pet food companies have been struggling with inflation in food prices for the past couple years. Food price rises typically are tied to the increase in the price of commodities like silver. Economic crisis in Portugal could increase physical demand in that country, and then Europe generally, for hedges like silver. Nuclear meltdown in Japan is sure to have ongoing reverberations throughout world markets. In fact, as news rolls in regarding the economic impact of disaster on the world's third largest economy, world markets could see a quickening in their next leg down, as QE programs cannot remedy the economic collapse of Japan, and, in fact, do more damage than good. The week after the earthquake, tsunami, meltdown trifecto, world markets displayed transparent volatility, but rebounded firmly. I think herein lie gains more suspect than those gains made recently in silver.

Furthermore, forthcoming news of the Japanese car industry halting manufacturing will put immense downward pressure on platinum and palladium. Alongside the collapse in prices of these industrial precious metals, gold and silver will rise on momentum from investors, though not industry. (3)

In the near-term, any crisis, like that of 2008, will place downward pressure on precious metals. Silver could drop significantly, but will gain as downward pressure on the USD resumes once investors are done seeking in it a panic safe-haven. If the gains in silver as of late make silver-holders nervous, it might serve them well to ask themselves a simple question: If I exchanged my silver, what would I exchange it for? Certainly FRN's do not offer a promising option. If anything, with gold consolidating between $1,392 and $1,430 for a couple months, maybe exchanging silver for gold anticipating a rise in gold prices and possible consolidation in silver, in the near-term, will do away with the nervousness.

1.Moriarty, Bob. Is Silver Topping, 321 Gold, March 25, 2011

2. Whitehouse, Mark. Numbers of the Week: Food Inflation Foments Political Unrest. Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2011.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/03/26/number-of-the-week-food-inflation-foments-political-unrest/
3. Alerigi, Alberto, Jr. GM to assess Japan parts problem in two weeks: CEO. Reuters, March 18 2011
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/18/us-japan-quake-gm-idUSTRE72H7RH20110318

Our Very Own Special Radio Show S2E1 with Flyin' Ryan and Enviot von Beardio 3-13-11

2011-03-13T22:06:00.000-07:00

OVOSS w F Ryan and Neckbeard f Garrett Prange 21311

2011-02-13T16:01:00.000-08:00

OVOSS w F Ryan and Neckbeard feat. Jamie the lovely Stripper+Athan o Hector's Revenge 2911

2011-02-10T01:15:00.001-08:00

Listen in to get the insider tips on how little you mean to a stripper, but there is still hope.

Our Very Own Special Show w F' Ryan and Beerd w music o Garrett Prange 2611

2011-02-06T23:36:00.001-08:00

Garrett Prange of Vandersteeze and Cuckoo Chaos on 2.6.11

OVOSS NECKBEARD > RT (legal names) + DJ HEDROCK

2011-02-02T23:58:00.000-08:00

RT and Beard lay it down 2-2-11

ovoss 1/30/2011

2011-01-30T22:04:00.000-08:00

A Message from the past

2011-01-28T02:01:00.000-08:00

http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3361

Farewell Address (January 17, 1961)

Dwight David Eisenhower

Eisenhower again calls for peace, but, acknowledging that new crises arise, cautions the United States to maintain balance in its relations. He also also warns against the rising power of the military-industrial complex that could threaten the democratic process.

My fellow Americans:

Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.

This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.

Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all.

Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation.

My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years.

In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.

II.

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

III.

Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology--global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle--with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research--these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs-balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage--balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.

IV.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system--ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we--you and I, and our government-must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

VI.

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war--as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years--I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.

VII.

So--in this my last good night to you as your President--I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.

You and I--my fellow citizens--need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals.

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration:

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.

Our Very Own Special Show with Flyin' Ryan and Neckie 1.26.2011 (Bruce Illis)

2011-01-27T12:55:00.001-08:00

Our Very Own Special Show w/ Flyin' Ryan and Neckbeard 1/23/11

2011-01-23T22:42:00.001-08:00

Our Very Own Special Show 1-19-11 Part 2 with Tyson K and Gordon Downs

2011-01-21T17:22:00.001-08:00

Our Very Own Special Show w/ Flyin' Ryan and Neckbeard and comedian Stephan Caddell 1/19/11 Part 1

2011-01-20T10:31:00.000-08:00

Our Very Own Special Show S1E5 1/16/11 w/ Flyin' Ryan and Neckbeard

2011-01-16T23:05:00.000-08:00

Our Very Own Special Radio Show with Flyin' Ryan and Enviot von Beardio1-12-11

2011-01-13T01:28:00.001-08:00

Austerity Measures for San Diego and State?

2011-01-10T09:59:00.000-08:00

With Monday's unveiling of Gov. Jerry Brown's cost eliminating budget proposal, which he claims will effectively transfer numerous state services to local government control, nearly all San Diego County officials are unanimous in their response: that, while well-funded counties could run many state-mandated services cheaper and more effectively, they can only do so when they have available the money to fund such endeavors.

Continue reading on Examiner.com: Austerity measures for San Diego and state? - San Diego civil rights | Examiner.com

http://tinyurl.com/4qakyt6

Our Very Own Special Radio Show 1-9-11: Tom Waits, Pavement, The Hive, BlackBirds falling, NPR, and so on,

2011-01-10T00:25:00.000-08:00

Handshake Times Radio 1-7-2011: The end of money, the reign of credit, blackbirds from the sky, but i have no car in which to hide

2011-01-07T21:25:00.000-08:00

Bank-Owned House Fire in Santee

2011-01-05T08:43:00.000-08:00

“By the time you get this letter, (my wife) and I will be dead and our house will be burned down. ...We have nothing to live for.”

http://www.examiner.com/civil-rights-in-san-diego/bank-owned-house-fire-santee

Our Very Own Special Radio Show 1-2-11 w/ RT and Beard Featuring Garrett Prange (Cuckoo Chaos, Vandersteeze)

2011-01-02T22:24:00.001-08:00

Handshake Times New Years Eve Broadcast!! Top Ten Stories o' 2010 (In new Hi-Def)

2010-12-31T19:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.divshare.com/download/13662891-6bd

Handshake Times Radio Dec. 18 2010 with Jim and Justin

2010-12-29T17:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.divshare.com/download/13644977-ddd

Our Very Own Special Radio Show with RT and Beard 12 28 2010

2010-12-28T21:04:00.000-08:00

download:

http://www.divshare.com/download/13635641-cc7

Annoying Vacuum Cleaners and Still Stealth Bombers

2010-12-05T09:50:00.001-08:00

Your vacuum cleaners sound like overwhelmed tractors and sick factories
and meanwhile stealth planes spy down on you
...from up on high...
is that more than an iota of unfair?
Is it not all so clear?

It wouldn't be hard for Them
to tell a bazillion more lies (sic)
Naw, they wouldn't even have to try
to lead you an abyss away
a sadistic,mechanical albatross leading you astray

worldwide...holocaust
end of...history
am I exaggerating
Or just doing the math?
Just doing the math?

So what's it gonna be?
Their reign or your lives?

Handshake Times Radio Nov. 29 with Benji and Justin

2010-11-30T07:42:00.000-08:00

Handshake Times Radio Nov. 24

2010-11-24T21:19:00.000-08:00

Handshake Times Radio Nov. 22

2010-11-22T22:42:00.000-08:00

Handshake Times Nov. 21 with Justin and Benji

2010-11-21T12:53:00.000-08:00

Handshake Times Nov. 17

2010-11-17T20:28:00.000-08:00

Handshake Times Radio November 15

2010-11-16T20:32:00.001-08:00

Reaganomics of Resistance

2010-09-18T17:11:00.000-07:00

The Reaganomics of resistance. To some, this turn of phrase rings oddly to the ears. For others, it seems an honest submission to debate about how to change civilization for fairer. Reaganomics assumes that market makers create the conditions, in which humanity lives. By investing money in certain sectors, the capstone income earners create the markets, in which most people work and earn money. I think most well-learned men , no matter the source, would agree with this.

Within the resistance movement, there exists classes just as their does in society. From millionaires to recent college graduates, the latter of whom exist at net worths in the red, individuals have taken it on themselves to inform their brothers and sisters.

A contradiction inherent to this model, unfortunately, is that the allocations of wealth are concentrated among the older and more established people. Therefore, upstarts, and even some well-established truthers, have difficulties, not only breaking into the movement in online journalism and analog self-organization, but even finding the time to prepare contributions or a business plan, since a vast majority of the the youth (and many adults, of course) have to work more than full-time to try and gain some semblance of financial sustainability, and, they hope, an eventual financial independence, though i doubt such a thing exists.

Innumerable are those who seek to enlighten. From a diverse array of backgrounds they emerge, contributing daily tiny actions friendly to peace and decentralization--lawyers, Professors, graduates, students and well-rounded people everywhere. The material, out of which the peace patriots (those in favor of truth, peace and decentralization) are crafted, is indeed diverse. But, a considerable amount of this economic volume lies among few individuals.

This is not a call to a socialist re-organization of the peace and decentralization movements. This is a call for a broad investment program, in which people with insights and skills are made available to the peace patriots, who constitute a broad-base and diverse opposition movement to the historically-rooted status quo.

In some ways, the concept is reminiscent of the New Deal initiatives enacted under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, although instead of creating organizations, it turns individuals into one-man-or-woman NGO's, to put it coldly.

The subsidies need not be great, for the results to prove historical. Individuals from all neighborhoods of society have great capacity to affect change.

Empire and Depopulation in the Land of Blood and Fire, Latin America

2010-09-13T11:41:00.001-07:00

Rooted in conquest, the United States has a long history of imperial expansion. Even George Washington called the United States an “infant empire.” With increasing power, especially after World War II, imperial strategies by the US grew bolder, and high-level planners maintained that the US should “hold unquestioned power” in the chosen global order.

These ambitions pertained not only to the Western hemisphere, but also the former British Empire, the Far East, and Eurasia. These goals represented, and still do, the aspirations for “full spectrum” territorial holdings. As if from fiction, dyed by Machiavellian irony, the social Darwinism of a new empire danced upon civilization’s fulcrum. The American empire, as has been consistently noted by thinkers, seemed to almost pick up seamlessly from where the waning British Empire left off.

As was the America's policy with Native Americans, the British Empire pursued similar, if not the same, depopulation policies in lands the world over, such as in Ireland, as evidenced by the “Printed Book,” which outlined how Britain would turn Ireland into, in their words, a plantation. It might therefore be concluded, that policies of depopulation have been a keystone component to the expansion of the British Empire, and its descendent the Anglo-American Empire.

In the southern Hemisphere, these imperial yearnings rear themselves plainly.

In July 2009, the US and Colombia made public a secret deal to permit the US to use seven Colombian military bases. The official purpose is the prevention of narcotrafficking and, of course, terrorism, “but senior Colombian military and civilian officials familiar with negotiations told The Associated Press that the idea is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations.”

Colombia has become the leading recipient of US military aid, despite a terrible human rights record in the hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980’s. The establishment of US military bases in Colombia represents steps towards restoring Washington’s capacity for military intervention in the region. Not only as US military aid increased to the region, but so too has the training of Latin American officers, whose focus is on light infantry tactics to combat “radical populism.” (Chomsky)

It is relevant to note that, in Latin America—as is so in Africa—rather progressive depopulation policies have been fully implemented and supported by Empire plenipotentiaries. In Brazil, in my personal experience, it is highly difficult to find a bottle of water devoid of a cocktail of added ingredients, such as the former rat-poison, sodium floride. This in, of all places, one of the more affluent regions of Latin America.

On Dec. 10, 1974, National Security Council under Henry Kissinger published, “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The study posits population growth in “Lesser Developed Countries” (LDCs) as a sustained threat to U.S. national security. In November 1975, President Gerald Ford adopted the memorandum as official policy in the LDC’s through birth control, and also, implicitly, famine and war. Brent Scowcroft, who followed Kissinger as national security adviser, CIA Director George Bush, secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture were publicly tasked with the assignment.

Kissinger’s arguments were not original, since the Royal Commission on Population served as a major source. In that commission report, King George VI (1936-1951) considers “what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population.” It advanced the thesis that Britain was under great duress from population growth in its colonies, because “a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production.”

Increasing population and industrialization in her colonies “might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West,” especially effecting “military strength and security.”

NSSM 200 singled out 13 “key countries” of “special political and strategic interest”: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. Population growth in these states, according to the memorandum, was particularly troubling, since it would increase their relative political, economic, and military strength. http://www.schillerinstitute.org/food_for_peace/kiss_nssm_jb_1995.html

Not just military strength has been used against “third world” populations. Also, sophisticated methods of domination, such as divisive and developmentally torturous propaganda and covert tampering with food supplies in service of a eugenics philosophy; and tampering of overall environmental quality through technologies such as terraforming, whereby planes and jets of various types line the sky with aerial spray constituted with barium salts, aluminum, as well as other chemical-melanges.

There have been hints of these latter programs in pop-music. Off the album “Modern Guilt,” presented by Beck, the song “Chemtrails” highlights that which is officially known as “terraforming”:

I can't believe what we've seen outside
You and me watching the jets go by
You and me watching a sky full of chemtrails
That's where we belong

And with the “third world” sneaking into places like Troy, New York, whose mostly black residents paid little attention to the 2008 Presidential campaign—since it would minutely affect, if at all, their personal plights, no matter the color of the President—it is rather obvious that this military operation is, and will continue to be, a globalizing phenomenon.

In his book, Listen, Yankee, published early on in the Cold War, U.S. sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote in the voice of Cubans, who felt threatened by US hubris. The book was highly sympathetic to the violent Cuban Revolution.

“We Cubans are part of Latin America—not of North America. We speak Spanish, we are mainly rural, and we are poor. Our history is not like your history; it is part of Latin American history. And Latin America is 180,000,000 people, growing faster than you are growing, and scattered over a territory more than twice as large as the U.S.A.”

John F. Kennedy saw the relationship between Latin America and the United States differently. In his 1961 Alliance for Progress speech, he said:

“Our continents are bound together by a common history, the endless exploration of new frontiers. Our nations are the product of a common struggle, the revolt from colonial rule. And our people share a common heritage, the quest for the dignity and freedom of man…”

A quick review of who has, historically, owned what in the former colonies—say, for instance, central banks, military dictatorships, and agriculture—ought to quickly dispel any notions that there are many places in Latin America—in the world, upon further research—that have lastingly escaped from under the boot of the British Empire.

In the post-World War II world, the United States armed forces acquired an expansive know-how about the methods of military operations effective against guerrilla armies, mostly by way of US military operations in Latin America, and, in particular, southeast Asia. Virtually every Latin American country, by 1967, had a U.S. Military Group (MILGRP in Pentagonese) to invoke US military assistance to Latin American military forces. The groups were under the command of the United States Southern Command.

Along the way, the “economic medicine” (the catchall phrase for the process of “structural adjustment” or “austerity measures”) of the keystone global financial institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, helped to exacerbate the problems, while furthering the interests of the Anglo-American rulers.

Upon taking office, Richard M. Nixon instructed one of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, to travel to Latin America and advise police recommendations for the new administration.

Protest met Rockefeller most everywhere he went. Peru, Chile, and Venezuela requested he not come.

In “The Rockefeller Report,” Rockefeller laid out a convincing case that Latin America and the United States faced friction in their historical interrelationship. He suggested that a new accord ought to bond the regions together thereafter. Included in this new deal, would be entailed a discriminatory lenience by the United States for authoritarian rule in Latin America. By the late 1960’s, indeed, Rockefeller championed the claim that “no one country today can effectively protects its own internal security by itself,” hinting of a future regionalism in which entire continents would share a singular system of finance and governance. In Rockefeller's episteme, what would be needed was an ideology supportive of the axiom that “only through hemisphere cooperation can these problems, which so vitally affect internal security, be adequately dealt with.” Not only was the power of the US, Britain and Europe to be fused together, but so too were the remnants of colonial rule which kept Latin America moving forward , in an orderly manner, towards progress.

February 1946 saw F. Kennan, the US State Departments former lead expert on the Soviet Union, send the famous “Long Telegram” to the state department from the US embassy in Moscow. The Long Telegram embodies his version of realist views regarding US-Soviet relations during the Cold War. Needed, in his view, was a “long-term, patient, but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies…the military significance to us of the Latin American countries lies today rather in the extent to which we may be dependent upon them for materials essential to the prosecution of a war, and more importantly in the extent to which the attitudes of the Latin American peoples may influence the general political trend in the international community…”

He is a near hopeless cynic, stating that “it seems to me unlikely that there could be any other region of the earth in which nature and human behavior could have combined to produce a more unhappy and hopeless background for the conduct of human life than in Latin America.” (Holden & Zolov)
The United States Central Intelligence Agency, since its inception in 1948, has been a key tool for high-level policy planners in its projects and programs throughout the world. The Doolittle Commission Report, published in 1954, outlined as an official policy of the United States to deter and stop Communism.

Needed was “an aggressive, covert, psychological, political and paramilitary organization more effective, more unique and, if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the enemy. No one should be permitted to stand in the way of the prompt, efficient and secure accomplishment of this mission.” In their song Washington Bullets (album: Sandinista!), The Clash work the covert action of the CIA into their lyrics:

And in the Bay of Pigs in 1961,
Havana fought the playboy in the Cuban sun,
For Castro is a colour,
Is a redder than red,
Those Washington bullets want Castro dead
For Castro is the colour...
...That will earn you a spray of lead

When Bolivia was defeated by Paraguay in the Chaco War of the 1930’s, a government perceived by the people to be loyal only to the upper class had lost much of its legitimacy. There was widespread dissatisfaction amongst the working class and farmers of Bolivia. The loss of territory and lives had discredited the ruling class, whilst participation in the armed forces had given farmers a political consciousness. From the end of war until the Revolution of 1952, new ideologies stirred amongst the working classes and their demands became more audible.
The Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) grew to be a party with a broad and more useful base of support. Denied victory in the president election of 1951, the party thereafter succeeded in coming to power the following year through revolution, which began with a hunger march through La Paz that was supported by most sectors of civil society.

The military was demoralized and calls by the high-command for unity in the armed forces, against the revolutionary movement, failed. Many officers, in fact, either went abroad during the period, charged each other with coup attempts, or deserted.

By the onset of 1952, the MRN attempted to gain power by force, plotting with General Antonio Seleme, the junta member in charge of the internal administration and the national police. The party, on April 9, seized arsenals and distributed them to civilians. Armed miners marched on La Paz, successfully blocking troop access to the city. At the close of three days fighting, the army had surrendered, and Paz Estenssoro assumed the Presidency on April 16, 1952. (Global Security)

Many referred to the multiclass MNR as “reluctant revolutionaries.” The party did not look to the Soviet Union for a model of government, but, instead, to Mexico. During the first year of Estenssoro’s presidency, however, the more radical faction in the party compelled MNR to carry about high-frequency reform. And so therefore, universal suffrrage was established in July 1952, and the party quickly purged officers from the armed forces considered to be sympathetic with Conservative Parties, reduced troop size and military budget. Plagued by infighting, the party eventually dissolved in 1964, leaving Bolivia in chaos.

The U.S. government responded to the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 with massive economic assistance, despite that the country was one of the weakest in Latin America. By the end of the 1950’s, Bolivia was the largest recipient of U.S. aid in Latin America. By 1958, one-third of the Bolivian national budget was aid from the U.S. government. The aid funded highways construction, food imports, health and educational services and the country’s military forces. The U.S. received Bolivia’s cooperation in blocking or moderating some of the social and economic reforms embarked upon by the radical wing of the revolutionary movement.

The implementation of economic stabilization measures was carried out based on demands from Washington, and further U.S. aid was a condition of the nation’s success. In 1956, put in charge of the stabilization effort in Bolivia was U.S. lawyer George Jackson Eder, a stark monetarist, who deemed the only way in which inflation could be controlled was through the cutting of government spending; cuts in government spending, as a rule, hit social services first. These are the sorts of policies vehemently pursued by keystone global financial institutions, the IMF and World Bank. (Holden & Zolov)

In Cuba, revolution brewed at the end of the 1950’s, when Fidel Castro led an insurgent army of eighty two guerrilla fighters into Cuba on Dec. 2 1956. This attempted revolution was a failure. But, the small guerillas force received a boost when senior staff writer at the New York Times, Herbert L. Mathews, published a number of articles on the movement. Having been taken to Castro’s camp, in order to interview the revolutionary leader, Mathews secured for the times—and Castro and his men—not only articles in the Times, but, also, a picture of the armed leader, along with his signature. This demonstrated that Castro was, indeed, alive and active. The articles represented a sensational coup of sorts for the Times, a la classical American-style yellow journalism of the early twentieth century. Years later, at the tail-end of the 1970’s, Castro boasted how he had tricked Mathews into believing his force was much larger than it had, in reality, been. In his article, Mathews wrote: “General Batista cannot possibly hope to suppress the Castro revolt… Havana does not and cannot know that thousands of men and women are heart and soul with Fidel Castro…it does not know that hundreds of highly respected citizens are helping senor Castro, that bombs and sabotage are constant.”

As soon as Fidel’s July 26 movement succeeded in January 1959, relations between Cuba and the U.S. took a certain downturn. In question were the sweeping economic reforms carried out by Cuba, which were taken by Washington as signs of a communist takeover. In early 1960, Cuba re-embarked on diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, eventually sovietizing the Cuban political system in the 1970’s.

In March 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower began the process that would, eventually, manifest into the Bay of Pigs, for which President John F. Kennedy would take the blame. Eisenhower secretly authorized the CIA to develop an invasion force of anti-Castro exiles. As the new Cuban government expropriated ever more property owned by U.S. investors, tensions mounted. Washington responded with an economic embargo on October 13, a mere two weeks before the U.S. presidential election. Both Kennedy and Nixon made statements in favor of U.S. government backing of an exile invasion force; this after both candidates had been briefed on the situation by the CIA. Nixon even spoke of “cutting off the significant items that the Cuban regime needs in order to survive, by cutting off trade…”
Operation Zapata, a U.S. sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, was only one of myriad covert operations conducted by and on behalf of U.S. state-enterprise interests against the Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

The CIA, with Eisenhower’s authorization, had trained 1,300 Cubans. On April 17, 1961, the exile force invaded Cuba with the belief that its arrival would spark a revolution, but, on the other hand, the force was easily suppressed by the regime and people. The failure worked against the United States, helping to legitimize Castros' control, for his regime had, after all, defeated the imperial United States. Kennedy would have to admit the operations' incipience was of origin in the United States. (Holden & Zolov)

In 1973, the CIA, with the help of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, engineered the overthrow and assassination of democratically elected leader Salvadore Allende in Chile. Allende had engaged in a campaign to nationalize American-owned firms and land. The CIA enabled General Augusto Pinochet to replace Allende, who then tortured and murdered thousands of Chileans in a brutal domestic purge. To ensure Allende would never come to power, before having to resort to “jackals,” the United States, through the CIA, spent three million dollars campaigning against him, mostly through radio and print social marketing. Allende had a warm relationship with Cuba and had openly criticized the invasion of the Bay of Pigs.

This all was in line with the earlier outlined U.S. policy which invoked control of Latin American countries as key to U.S. primacy. In 1971, Nixon’s National Security Council articulated, that if the U.S. could not control Latin America, then how could it expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world?” (Nimmo)

The expense of control meant depopulation towards a more manageable level. The weapons in this war are, by no means, merely economic and military, but technological in the highest sense of the word. To be sure, just as lengthy an article could be dedicated to the “radical populism” igniting many peoples across Latin America.

1. Holden, H. Robert. (2002) Latin America and the United States: A documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press, doc. No. 71 A Realist Views Latin America George F Kennan.

2. Holden, H. Robert. (2002) Latin America and the United States: A documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press, doc. No.68 A Charter for Covert Action? The Congress of the United States and the Doolittle Commission.

3. _____. Bolivian Revolution, 1952, Global Security 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/bolivia.htm

4. Holden, H. Robert. (2002) Latin America and the United States: A documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press, doc. No. 77 Taming a Revolution in Bolivia George Jackson Eder.

5. Holden, H. Robert. (2002) Latin America and the United States: A documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press, doc. No. 78, 81,84 With Castro in the Sierra Maestra Herbert L. Mathews, Debating Cuba and Castro, Lessons of the Bay of Pigs John F. Kennedy.

6. Nimmo, Kurt. CIA Assasination Program Revealed: Nothing New Under the Sun, Infowars.

Accessed at: http://www.infowars.com/cia-assassination-program-revealed-nothing-new-under-the-sun/

Conquering Naivete and Channeling Active Resistance

2010-09-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

In the peace and decentralization movements, as if by bio-psychological defense mechanism, critical analysis is clipped by a nagging propensity to incorporate the unobjectivity of naivete in its dialogue and action. Although the ere in understanding might not be fundamental in the ongoingness of cultural events and sociality, it is a phenomenon worthy of illumination. To be sure, it seems quite a natural desire to, now and then, fantasize that the way things are aren’t truly so dire.

Analysts of current affairs, from all backgrounds and dispositions, showcase a tendency to underestimate the dark genius driving the world’s political economy, if only periodically. This bio-psychological urge speaks to the mind’s knack for protecting the individual by not uploading it with a torrential flood of data and information that seem to imply that, survival in the long-term, might not be readily attainable. Similar discipline is demonstrated in most people’s perception of death, assuming, as we generally tend to do, that our death’s are reserved for a day far off in the future. In a more dramatic manifestation of this, many people disbelieve in death as an ending.

It is a fundamentally unscientific process to observe and participate in the events of our own daily lives, since we are already the participants. The cognitive tick of thinkers to trick themselves into believing falsities, when pondering their own lots, comes into play for a variety of reasons, from vanity to strategy. Vanity when one doesn’t wish to come to terms with a perceived lack of stuff, things or the popular conception of beauty; strategy when the desperate individual needs all strength and energy to pull through adversity, and cannot spare any for mere worrying. In other words, when action is the order of the day.

When unobjectivity or, in other words, the absence of flawed premise, becomes colored by naivete, in a movement where the determined search for a truth of crystalline purity favors the drivers of civilization, found in truthful and moralistic exploration, discovery and research, the said movements methods of understanding and knowing are undermined.

For instance, when pro-peace and pro-decentralization economists talk of the state of the global financial and economic systems, they often declare the present as a time of international recession, and the future as a time of international depression.

Many of these same economists, in a perhaps negligible manifestation of doublethink, simultaneously perceive the total magnitude of today’s systemic cataclysms as an entirely different transpiration. That, in fact, we are not experiencing a recession-soon-to-be-depression, but, rather, a social, political and economic re-engineering of the way things are--that is, the status-quo--towards a new, singular international order, in which no other population groups enjoys a standard of living above another population group.

Still, this no-brainer does not remain at the nucleus of economic discourse,and the remaking of civilization and political-economic society continues to be conceived of as a cyclical recession and depression, with the most pessimistic of this lot conjecturing that the hardships will continue for thirty to fifty years. But, as these same recession-turned depression “pessimists,” in many cases, also acknowledge, if the re-engineering process towards a transnational and corporate feudal order succeeds to varying degrees, we can seek no reprieve for, probably, the duration of a neo-dark age (a couple centuries).

This re-engineering, to be sure, is experienced by those who must live through it as a linear process, and so divvying it up in stages, such as recession and depression, is a useful tool in facilitating an understanding of the unfolding. Eventually, though--say, in fifty years--it will be useless to claim we are still in a depression that has it seeds in the 2008 “banking crisis.”

Considering that the pre-eminent mode of social organization, other than the planet, is the nation-state--in nearly all cases, not only a public, but also a private initiative--in this contemporaneously engineered world order, transnational conglomerates, the planet’s keystone centralizing forces, will attack nation-states so as to ensure they endure at subsistence level until the nation-state fades as a means for the individual, and his group, to “find themselves.”

From then on, theoretically, what’s left over of humanity, will live lifetimes on communitarian-style plantations devoid of technology for personal use. A hyper-rational and hyper-scientific social environment, in which goods and services are issued as opposed to earned and owned, will delegate all high technology to “authorities,” who are appointed according to habits reminiscent of crony capitalism. Conservatively, such an order could entrench itself, in a near complete manner, by mid-point this century.

In this social environment, the individual will have been so propagandized and therefore developmentally tortured--first by public education, then by television and film--that the processes of networking certain ideas in the mind, and the associated neural arrangements, will be, in many individuals, dramatically inhibited. This will then inhibit the potential for free thought outside authorized philosophies and worldviews. .

Therefore, fundamentally so, the conditions needed for the smooth functioning of a truly free market culture, in the infrastructural, cultural and psychological realms, will have been demolished. What mainline economists and many alternative economists are not incorporating into their analyses, solutions and philosophies is that, with a manufacturing base stalled decades in the past, the west’s economic woes cannot be solved in the economics paradigm alone or, for that matter, in any single paradigm. Does this, then, proceed the need for a re-conceptualization of mainline western scholarship, reason and logic?

The magnitude of the crisis in mind, the vertically-managed disassembling of culture, society and civilization, by a well-organized cabal of capstone market makers and their assets--who, through investment, created, conservatively, the last 150 years of culture and political economy in the former British Empire--cannot be reformed or recovered, with the hope of stopping there and having things truly improved for the better. Instead, a reorganization movement, of centrifugal flow, must counter a radically unequal allocation of wealth.

Re-engineering the economy down to such a size, by confiscating the capital and hoarding it amongst a ruling elite--saved for investments in line with the downsizing--is convenient for market makers, who, aware that the modern world was designed in the eyes of the British Empire, learned a lesson when the Empire’s wealthiest and most privileged subjects--New Englanders--were the ones to revolt most definitively. The poorer a people, the less likely the success of any sort of revolutionary and reformative skirmishes. Indeed, the less likely the people are to stand up for themselves. Therefore, the safer the fortunes of those proclaiming a neo-divine right of corporate kings.

In light of the desperation, to be certain, objectivity need not be the driver of exploration, discovery and research in the truth movement, although it must be divinely valued. Emotion and feeling can inform the individual, as well as objectivity itself, therefore making these bio-chemical exchanges important to the processes of understanding and knowing. Of most importance, emotion and feeling can inform the individual of what action to take, beyond ratiocination.

The sorts of action to be taken promote independence. By self-organization, the individual not only weans himself off dependence and domestication--two conditions of citizenry amid deference--but, moreover, learns how to take care of himself.

Direct action includes initiatives like growing one’s own food (with the expectation of feeding oneself and others), protecting wealth through diversification (into gold and silver), learning self-defense, informing oneself about circumstantial problems and solutions. Community action includes informing others, while building up a social network of awakened and proactive individuals who are seeking, not only to help themselves, but, also, others.

By partnering with local farmers, offering them assistance in their endeavoring, business or information (by, for example, strategically informing them of their industry’s plight, and offering them solutions), one increases his likelihood of enjoying access to pure food in times of crisis, shortage or famine.

In summation, what I am trying to get across here (in an arrogantly convoluted manner), is that we cannot deny that the collapse of cultures, societies and civilization is upon us, and those who are sitting on the planet’s wealth seek to profit from it. Therefore, we must now be responsible by obsessing over our shortcomings and the solutions thereto. By returning earnership and ownership to the estate of the individual, and giving what’s earned and owned value by denying the use of forceful theft and violence as a viable means of wealth attainment, power can be returned to the increasingly empty lives of global consumer-peasant and peasant classes.

There Is No Incrementalism in Resistance

2010-08-16T01:49:00.001-07:00

There is an old story, which tells of a frog in a pot. When the frog was put in the pot while the water inside was boiling, the frog would immediately leap out to safety. But, when the frog was placed into a cool pot, which was then heated up, it would remain in the pot until, eventually, it was cooked and dead. Now, I’ve never put a frog in boiling pot of water, nor have I ever tried to steam a frog, but the thought remains. Then again, maybe it depends on the frog.

For ages, however, this old tale has served as a metaphor for rulers, who, with their instinct of self-preservation intact, have used symbols along specific lines to lead individuals and the collective-mind, according to their self-declared jurisdiction and oft dark desires. Just as the latter frog might have only cooked because the process was incremental, those who make global policies rule by a philosophy of control that can be termed “incrementalism”; in other words, they are ever-so-patient in getting their way.

The capstone income-earners, the rulers--that is, those to whom the mass of wealth and power, in a contrived, yet natural manner, flows--direct investments, actions and reactions so as to unendingly consolidate, secure and promote their unswerving pre-eminence on earth. As monopoly men, they steer economic society in such a way that they increase their profit share. With goods and services on a centralizing course, those at the core of an economic system manage to perpetuate this arrangement. After all, that is how they view it: as managing the planet.

That such behavior is maintained, even when it is only those at the core of the system who benefit, at the fatal expense of a great many, speaks to the psychopathic nature of those who, in their minds, have successfully worked towards becoming CEO’s of the planet. In the captain’s helm of the neo-politburo, which guides the command-and-control economy of Western Civilization in its current stage, conscience is composed of an entirely different arrangement of matter as down below in the gallows, “where the men hang on for their dear lives.”

In incrementalism, the rulers persuade people to follow the path which, in their minds, will most likely result in the preservation of power for themselves. There is too, of course, a pseudo-spiritual or pseudo-religious aspect to this power, as the abuse of it, and the masochistic wielding of it, satiates their sick yearnings, perceived to be of luciferan origin by some of the players. Preserving the power, to be sure, is merely a means to an end, and this is where incrementalism comes in.

Totally authoritarian rule, complete domination and subordination, are the makings of a well-organized and orderly system in which rule is guaranteed to those who have previously wielded it. According to their logic, why they deserve to rule is quite simple: because they have previously ruled, and so therefore it is natural.

However, it is far from easy to implement such measures of control. Historically, in order to do so, ruling classes have, without fail, resorted to bringing in such systems slowly, so that, just as the frog won’t jump from slowly boiled water, people won’t notice and, therefore, act. In incrementalism, there are naturally stages through which society passes, and, as each stage comes into view, the paradigm of society shifts, although the general trajectory is logical in light of its predecessor.

There is no incrementalism in resistance. In a civilization scientifically dissected by/ for the capstone class, opposition to the dominant culture and its overseers would be futile were it to be bit-by-bit; that is, slow motion resistance can never re-create such a civilization towards less nihilistic and grotesque movements. Therefore, our civilization cannot incrementally be reoriented, not when “full spectrum dominance”, the literal construction of an omnipotent God as the system, is the never-ending agenda.

For these reasons, it is crucial for those who seek to help to become self-sustainable. This is done by learning skills such as acquiring even small plots of land, gardening for food, learning weapons skills, investing and securing wealth through gold and silver, seeking a network of reliable friends and family, and educating oneself and others in the techniques of control, consistently utilized by rulers, to protect the cognitive fabric of man.

"Top-Secret America" covered by Washington Post

2010-08-03T09:42:00.001-07:00

The Washington Post Covers “Top-Secret America”

According to the official line, in order to ensure the safety of US citizens in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States government created a panoply of agencies. But, after a two-year investigation, the Washington Post--a paper known to have a considerable connections to the Central Intelligence Agency, and to actively promote opinion pieces linked to the intelligence realm-- argues that this complex of agencies and institutions “has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

The particular course of recent events, which sprouted from 9/11, rhymes with those in the wake of the Reichstag burning in 1933 Germany, encompassed by the Reichstag Fire Decree (officially called the ‘Order of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State.’) Like the Patriot Act for the American people, the Reichstag Fire Decree served to nullify most civil liberties enjoyed by the German people. “The sadistic machine simply rolls over us,” Victor Klemperer, a German Jew married to an Aryan, wrote from underneath the fledgling Nazi Regime in the early thirties.

To be sure, one notable difference between the two policies is that, while the Patriot Act has been accused of vagueness, the Reichstag Decree, according to Wikipedia, “was not accompanied by any written guideliness from the Reich government.” Now, that’s vague.

And then, when you consider what took place in those late February days of 1933, amidst the brisk air of a waning winter, one sees how the streets could grow so cold; that is, how the Reichstag Decree made way for the atrocities of the Nazi Regime.

Here are some important differences between Germany post-Reichstag fire and the US Patriot Act:

Less than two years after the Reichstag Decree, in mid-1934, a wave of terror helped to give further meaning to the Decree. This “Night of the Long Knives (Nacht der Langen Messer) successfully purged the SA (Sturmabteilung) and Nazi Party generally of those opposed to Hitler’s cult of personality and the dictatorial status of his decrees arisen from its intriguing veneer.

Moreover, long before the purge of key members of the Nazi leadership,in the months after Hitler’s appointment to Chancellor and the burning of the Reichstag, the Dachau concentration camp was already created. In this period, the “sadistic Nazi Machine” lent its support of those in its ranks who had little or no aversion to arresting Communists, Socialists, and labor leaders not in line with the Party. At Dachau, conditioning ensued to normalize the dehumanization of concentration camp prisoners.

In a parallel move designed to promote internal coordination among the Nazi leadership, Special Courts were created to try political dissidents.

For a time after 9/11, life on the domestic front in the US stayed rather politically open and economically stable, although Washington furthered its racket of war in pursuit of “full spectrum dominance” abroad. The legal framework of the United States, just as it was in Nazi Germany after the Reichstag burning, had been, nonetheless, revolutionized.

There is, to be sure, a difference in policy sequence between the two states. While the Nazi’s transformed the domestic front into an active police state, and then went to war in Europe; in the United States, foreign war policies in the Mid-East were pursued first, while a brutal crackdown on the domestic front was put on the backburner.

All the same, the US state-enterprise apparatus and the policy planners who steered it did erect a National Security State to, allegedly, ward off terrorists who were fundamentally terrorists, unable to be re-educated, and unendingly enraged at how freely we lived. The way in which the National Security State has been unraveled, on the domestic front, does differ from the way in which the similar system of Nazi Germany was unraveled there.

In the United States, incrementalism-- a theory of governance designed to lead a population towards a particular outcome, slowly so they don’t notice--has been the technique employed, in the first decade of the 21st century, to transform the state towards a neo-socialistic fascism aimed towards keeping the American population in control amidst a long-lasting economic Downturn (depression and collapse), which just so happened to be engineered by the financial wing of this governing body.

It appears that, in the most dangerous time in our world’s history, “Top-Secret America” inherits a crumbling, yet vast empire. The general attitude of this “top secret world,” as the Post refers to it, dictates our future.

Top-Secret America inherits a newly transformed legal framework, partially hidden by an incessant propaganda machine with the potential to evolve the atomized, though historically part-free American population into accepting collectivized austerity, and their role in the new dark ages. Warren Buffett defined this new role as “a nation of sharecroppers.”

The parallel government of which the Post writes--the paper refers to it as a “top-secret world,”--“amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.

The investigation found: about 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States; an estimated 854,000 people, upwards of 1.5 times more people as live in Washington D.C., have top-secret security clearances; in greater Washington, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been erected since September 2001. They stand on the equivalent of nearly three Pentagons or 22 US Capitol buildings.

More than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside in the Department of Defense. In these intelligence programs, very few senior officials - called Super Users - have access to information regarding all of the department’s and their activities.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq, was stunned by the complexity of this system.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."

Direct of the CIA, Leon Panetta, said he has begun outlining a five-year plan for his agency. The reason? Spending levels since 9/11 are unsustainable.

“Particularly with these deficits, we’re going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that,” he said. “Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence should be doing that.”

What is this wall, to which Panetta refers? Many renowned economists and, increasingly so, mainstream economists are forecasting a continuing economic Downturn and eventual collapse in the United States. This coming collapse is helped along by the gutting of US industries over the past 20-30 years through the phenomenon popularly known as “outsourcing,” as well as unsustainable tax revenue allocation on the part of Washington and the uberclass lobbyists who run it.

According to the trickle-down theory of economics, the investments of those who hold the greatest volume of wealth in any given economic system make that society and culture. Along this line of thinking, in the present day, that uberclass which makes such investments value war and austerity for the globe.

The business plans, whose logic support these values, depend on standardization of global commerce, and a world population that continues to be consenting to coercion and manageable.

The article further details how, daily in the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors holding top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices electronically guarded by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras, and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

The Post contends: “this is not exactly Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ‘military-industrial complex,’ which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.” Now, that the laws on the books for the US domestic front are reminiscent of those of a police state, who are the “transnational violent extremists” among us.

Most of the details about this Mission are classified, including how money is spent. Last year, the budget of US intelligence was publicly announced as $75 billion. This figure, to be sure, leaves out many military operations and/or domestic counter-terrorism programs.

Washington Post Article:

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/

On the Awakening at Western Civilization's Sunset

2010-07-19T01:27:00.000-07:00

In the present day, individuals live between ways of life. In our temporal age of constant flux, existence can be dizzying. As things change, most exercise the powers of hope so as to cope, and, in the process, lose their will to act, for hope is a passive occupation. But, as many people these days are commenting on, many have chosen not to settle for a pair of fingers merely crossed for a better tomorrow. While most countries lose their sovereignty to interdependence through globalization of the current international system-- the process of which empowers a very real uberclass that lives above and beyond common law and traditions--many populations have begun to more fervently identify with their native countries, and even their local communities.

These “stirring” individuals have had enough of the long Anglo-American treadmill of exploitation and domination. They wish to restore Basic Freedoms given to them by Nature or God. In this essay, we’ll focus on the US-based part of the overall Global Awakening dubbed by US foreign policy hawk, Zbigniew Brzezsinki, the “global political awakening.” Although the ideas corresponding to the Peace and Patriot Movement--participants of which henceforth referred to as Peace Patriots-- are revolutionary in scope, many do not wish for the typical sort of Revolution. In other words, their work is not designed to replace one Regime with Another.

On the contrary, a radical revision of the role of Institutions--Institutions which, in the eyes of a near-majority of those who associate themselves either with the Peace Movement or the Patriot Movement are the obsolete, but everpresent machinery of a deep power structure designed to steer society--should work towards fostering conditions of freedom in all nations.

This would entail knowing the true leaders of the Corporations, Foundations (as the joke goes, especially those with “free” or “private” in their literature), Steering Committees and Governments which make economic and social society, instead of focusing on Presidents and Prime Ministers, who are once removed from the true policy makers in Government and Corporate Directorships; that is, those who truly make the decisions about what to promote in the mainstream.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, as the Business Plans of contemporary Corporations called for the expansion of markets into foreign countries, this power structure became globalized. And today, unlike in any other time period, the reach of the elite (elites have always existed, and, as Aldous Huxley assumes, always will) extends across the entire planet. To see this, one need only look at the transnational dealings of market maker Goldman Sachs or the transnational eco-terrorism of British Petroleum (in the Gulf), the War Racketeer, Shell (in Iraq), other Big Oil players, BigPharma, the chemical industry and so on. The gross sum = Eisenhower’s Military-Industrial Complex.

Some of the big-picture-economic philosophies (“big picture” meaning the large brushstroke, an overview of the present age, and not its opposite, the countless micro-policies giving rise to the big picture, the way thing are at any given time) of the Peace Patriots, regarding how to fairly remake society, are typically associated with the right-wing of the political spectrum. As an aside, this right-to-left-wing political spectrum doesn’t hold in water, if not for it’s over-simplicity, for the apolitical nature of many people, who do not see themselves primarily as the citizens of political organizations.

Those aforementioned “right-wing” ideas stem from the work of Adam Smith who wrote in detail of Free Markets and Capitalism, which he saw as coming to fruition in conditions of “perfect freedom” and given to “natural liberty.” By way of “free associations,” individuals could enter into the marketplace, sell their labor, and acquire the goods they needed and wanted, with little or no third-party interference. Theoretically, ubiquitous competition would team-up with its partner cooperation to set fair prices and weed out poor quality. Many of these people most readily identify themselves as libertarians.

It is not, however, only libertarians who give attitude to the American-Global Awakening to the elitist colorization of power structures, but also many people who, had they not awoken and unsubscribed to what some have termed the “false right-left wing paradigm”, would consider themselves liberals or democrats, not Republicans, the close cousin of libertarianism. These individuals collectively give the Peace Patriots its progressive tones.

The Progressives among the Peace Patriots value a responsible environmentalism, and scoff at the political-environmentalist rhetoric highlighting as our gravest threat “Global Warming” and “Overpopulation.” They might instead choose to bring up legal charges against the world’s largest polluter--the United States Department of Defense and Pentagon--on the road to abolishing these war making machines altogether. As Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated marine in US history, wrote: War is a Racket. War benefits those psychopathic individuals and Corporations with the resources enough to make wars.

Another element of this section of the Peace Patriots is a progressive economic policy, whereby public representatives invest for the country based on fair formulas and an altruism that is first rewarded, and then adopted in the culture of the elected leaders. Progressive-Libertarianism in economics would promote the values of entrepreneurship through free associations, the new organizations and Institutions arisen therefrom, and a framework designed to give Representatives the privilege to be a conduit for beneficial collective endeavors.

The Peace Patriots represent an unprecedented progressive-libertarian political movement. Not only is the movement globalized yet diverse, but, also, its main-progenitors are scholastically informed activists, who, in an important demonstration of nuance, are wholly uninterested in the Presidents, Prime Ministers and Political Parties historically used to distract such movement’s away from those whom truly guide their lives.

This movement is very much skeptical of revolutions and the solutions handed-down from mass media and in spectacular speeches.

The history of Revolutions is not one of populist--that is, for the people-- victories, but, rather, social cataclysms that oft led to the splintering, decay and eventual elitist-driven remaking of cultures. As these societies came closer to Revolution, what is today termed “partisanship” increasingly ruled. This is precisely what we see transpiring today.

In France, at the end of the eighteenth century, that Revolution gave rise to the Reign of Terror and the attempted consolidation of Europe, and beyond, in the form of the Napoleonic Wars; In Russia in 1917, Revolution gave rise to Leninist and Stalinist Gulags and Great Purges, and a highly stratified socialist System in which psychological domination by education and the manipulation of the command-and-control economy greased the wheels; the National Socialist Revolution of 1933 Germany gave rise also to dictatorship and genocide.

Instead of Revolution, Peace Patriots champion a global spiritual and psychological Awakening, which is posited to then propel humanity to a next stage of maturity. The “unwashed masses” will then understand, and choose to deal with, the techniques of domination designed to coerce and control their lives and species: for instance, psychological terrorism in the form of toxic stimuli (the sounds and images of propaganda and public relations), contrived crises (false flag), crises generally, fear-mongering, economic scarcity, the alteration of human biochemistry by the introduction of toxic chemicals into the environment (through food, inoculation, and aerial spraying), and other forms of new eugenics.

The Awakening will function to undermine the usefulness of such techniques.

What does an awakening at civilization’s sunset entail?

The term “global political awakening” can be attributed to Zbigniew Brzezinski. He has referred to the phenomenon as “a truly transformative event on the global scene.” He goes on:

“For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. There are only a few pockets of humanity left in the remotest corners of the world that are not politically alert and engaged with the political turmoil and stirrings that are so widespread today around the world. The resulting global political activism is generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination.”

Brzezinski sees the Global Awakening as among the most dramatic and significant phenomenon in geopolitics that has ever taken place, and it “is apparent in radically different forms from Iraq to Indonesia, from Bolivia to Tibet.” Brzezinski asserts, “the worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening.” He writes further:

“America needs to face squarely a centrally important new global reality: that the world's population is experiencing a political awakening unprecedented in scope and intensity, with the result that the politics of populism are transforming the politics of power. The need to respond to that massive phenomenon poses to the uniquely sovereign America an historic dilemma: What should be the central definition of America's global role?”

In his book, “Out of Control,” Brzezinski defines two issues of “major importance”: how to define concepts freedom and the good life. He argues, “the first pertains to the meaning of citizenship and the second to the essence of the human being.” In the same book, he discusses the conflation of morality and law. That, increasingly, what is legal is considered moral, and that which is illegal, is considered immoral, not the other way around. So, therefore, by making new law, one can make new morality.

In the book, Brzezinski outlines the way in which corporate-dominated mass media gives to the child his view of the world. He pens:

“On the whole, the values conveyed by the media repeatedly manifest what justifiably might be called moral corruption and cultural decadence.

“Today, for much of the world--and especially for the young-- television is the most important instrument both for socialization and education. In that respect, it is rapidly replacing the roles traditionally played by the family, by the church, by the school.

“Television gives the young viewer a first glimpse of the outside world. It first defines--and does so compellingly, by combining the visual and the audio impact--the meaning of the good life...It conditions desires, defines aspirations and unacceptable behavior.”

Brzezinski continues by enunciating the “staggering” facts on televisions effects on behavior. How so many people spend so much time glued to their television sets. As far as the so-called “programming” televisions offers, the “programs” “clearly extol self-gratification...normalize violence and brutality, encourage sexual promiscuity through example and stimulated peer pressures...the result is loss of control over social behavior.”

As Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, historian, mathematician, and social critic wrote in his book, “The Impact of Science on Society,” the importance of mass psychology “has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called “education.”

A nagging question, which has gone under-emphasized by most analysts of the Global Awakening, is what exactly Brzezinski means with his term?

Could it be that he truly means that, because the mass media extends to almost every corner of the globe, the ability to plug people into the grids of power has worked to be a coup over people’s minds? Is his language consciously doublespeak intended to confuse Peace Patriots and their colleagues the world-over into thinking they can take it easy? Or, more optimistically and, I think, more likely, as the present continues to shape a future System more desperate and hopeless than the current one, are larger numbers of people becoming inclined towards, or welcoming of, Populist Activism?

For each action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Let’s now take a walk in our minds on one of Einstein’s thought dreams. Imagine the development of an immense power, abused and expanded upon. A tyrant leading an exhaust-less War of Terror aimed to so change the environment of a people, that they themselves are also changed in the process. Imagine the remaking of societies and purges by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, but not just within their imaginary-line borders; instead, by way of a Global State, a World Regime--if you will. Imagine the power such a Global Institution causes. According to Newton’s laws of motion, there is to this series of tyrannical Actions myriad opposite Reactions.

What one observes in the reading of history is that, often as power centralization quickens, decentralizing tendencies arise and contradict that primary trend, thereby at least slowing it. Andrew Gavin Marshall elaborates on the primary way in which Technological Globalization has changed the world:

“The Technological Revolution has led to a diametrically opposed, antagonistic, and conflicting geopolitical reality: never before has humanity been so awakened to issues of power, exploitation, imperialism and domination; and simultaneously, never before have elites been so transnational and global in orientation, and with the ability to impose such a truly global system of scientific despotism and political oppression. These are the two major geopolitical realities of the world today. Never in all of human history has mankind been so capable of achieving a true global political psycho-social awakening; nor has humanity ever been in such danger of being subjected to a truly global scientific totalitarianism, potentially more oppressive than any system known before, and without a doubt more technologically capable of imposing a permanent despotism upon humanity. So we are filled with hope, but driven by urgency. In all of human history, never has the potential nor the repercussions of human actions and ideas ever been so monumental.”

Generating these countering trends is a sort of information war, ongoing. Although it might sound cliche, the impact of today on history is unimaginable. The volume of the vector that jet-propels modern man’s exchange of symbols and language on is greater than all those ages we consider the turning points of our Civilization: greater than European fascism and World War II; greater than the American and French Revolutions; greater than the Renaissance; the Black Plague, and on and on down the ages.

The exchange of symbols and language is not repeating history, or even rhyming with history--as Twain would have it--but truly making it. As high technology and communications have divorced the present from bygone ages, the associated quickening in society’s primary events, also known as “progress”, have enlarged the impact of decisions and actions by individuals like never before.

Moreover, we live today in the digital age, like flies through a digital matrix of widow webs. Although many futurists envisaged, and still do, the nature of a technetronic society as non-intimate, and likely to usher in a near-totally atomized public of robot zombies, the truth of the situation points towards a near-opposite reality.

Issues such as those brought up by the 9/11 Truth Movement have become mainstream political issues, according to Time Magazine. As the incrementally creeping Abuse of Power protects, first and foremost, the “witting” Uberclass, as well as the armies of opulent and psychopathic cronies, the Global Awakening reacts and intensifies.

Make no mistake that, by any historical standards, the fast flux of man’s modern society is, in religious terms, truly a transfiguration. Websters defines “to transfigure” like this: “to give a new and typically exalted or spiritual appearance to.” To Christians, one keystone example of this is Jesus’ appearance upon the mountain. Matt. 17: 1-9

Now, how do You live and pray while wide-awake at Civilization’s Sunset?

Please see: Andrew Gavin Marshall. The Global Political Awakening and the New World Order, published by Global Research:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19873

Poway Skatepark now under Boot of Big Bro?

2010-07-13T21:07:00.000-07:00

All around us, technological innovations have digitalized society to such a point that the whereabouts of each of us can be known at all times. From GPS in passports, cell phones and cars, to computer cameras and microphones, privacy today is little more than a fading memory.

The bizarre surveillance grid, easily observable by each of us, represents a grave threat to the harmonious functioning of society, as data collection empowers the collectors. In the suburbs of San Diego, California, where, alongside southern California generally, skateboarding was born to relieve surfers of boredom on days when the surf was flat, skateboarding culture’s clash with overbearing city and county statutes has reached a new level.

The official reason behind biometric identification at a skatepark in Poway, California is to prevent vandalism, bullying, blah blah blah (read: et cetera). But the new requirement for skaters and parents to enter the park through a “biometric” thumb scanner represents one small instance amidst an American landscape increasingly dotted by militarized architecture.

In order to access the park, skaters and others visitors must go through the turnstile after their thumbprint is taken by the device.

Park users were asked to register at the park and will be required to sign a liability waiver, provide a thumbprint and have their photo taken, which will then be uploaded to a computer. Registration and admittance to the park is free--how considerate.

Not surprisingly, considering their near ubiquitous presence on US streets, computerized surveillance cameras were also installed at the park. Thereby, city officials can match video of violators with filed photos. Depending on the severity of actions, park-goers may be denied access to the park for days, weeks or indefinitely.

Poway senior recreation supervisor, Greg Sundberg, claims the skate park has experienced many problems in the recent past, such as vandalism in restrooms, graffiti, fires and visitors bringing bicycles into the park, which is not permitted.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Poway parent Shelly Smart said of the scanner.

Manufactured by NextgenID, the scanner cost the city $5,700, according to Frank Casteleneto, a city engineer. Altogether, the city spent $91,000 on recent security upgrades to the park., despite California’s 28% unemployment rate. City staff believe the scanner will also help prevent minor violations, like skaters not wearing helmets or kneepads, or kids sneaking bicycles into the park.

Identification cards were originally planned to help secure the park, but the idea was scrapped due to the likely prevalence of card-swapping among people. Out-of-town visitors will be required to provide a thumbprint for temporary access to the park. Sundberg said the new system would enable the city to restrict usage to certain age groups on specific days.

“We can program these scanners so that we can have a kids-only day … or an adults-only day,” he said.

Poway residents, Josh Thomas, 17, and Rancho Bernardo resident Matt Valencia, 18, said they see the scanner as violating their rights. The two did, however, plan on submitting their prints so that they could continue to use the park.

“I don’t want (the park) to be trashed, but I don’t think this is the way to go about doing it,” Josh said.

Ramona residents Erika Jacons and Adam Small visit the park several times throughout the week. Although Jacobs said she undesrstands the city’s want to create a safe environment and maintain the park, she believes the security camers would have sufficed as deterrent enough.

There are “so many ways to get around [the thumbscanner],” said Jacobs, 20. “Kids are smart.”

Is the biometric scanner at Poway an isolated incident? Or is it merely a symptom of an increasingly monitored everyday life in the United States?

In the first decade of the 21st century, much of the world has witnessed the unveiling of a total information network, whose stated purpose is to defend against terrorists, namely Al Qaeda. Could it instead be to ensure that people and society are highly predictable? In countries like Britain, all e-mails and telephone conversations, after having been handed over to the proper authorities by Internet Service Providers, are organized and stored by supercomputers. In the United States, electronic wiretapping goes back 150 years. The technology has been a seriously contested issue in the US on and off for 50 years.

Technocract (read: unelected leader)Zbigniew Brzezinski has written extensively on what he terms “a distinct new historical era,” particularly in his book "Between Two Ages." The ages referenced here are the industrial era and technetronic era. Part of this new age entails a move by the US, and most of the west, away from industrial society and into a technetronic society. He wrote:

“The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”

ECHELON is a code word for an automated global interception and relay system operated by the intelligence agencies of five nations, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is the capstone of the project. The earth-orbiting listening posts of which ECHELON is comprised are, officially, on the front lines in the United States-led war on terrorism. The signal-seeking spacecraft play a crucial role in eavesdropping on nations, as well as within the borders of the US itself. Some reports suggest that cell phone traffic, ground line chats and faxes, telexes and satellite telecommunications links, as well as Internet emails are intercepted across the globe. The information, once electronically recorded, is organized by supercomputers running with state-of-the-art software.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s nephew, Mathew Brzezinski, penned a book called “Fortress America,” which details what he argues is an emerging siege mentality in the US intended to create a maximum security state, such as those security states the United States has financed all over the world in "periphery" countries; that is, countries on the fringe of the anglo-american empire. Other terms for these lands are the vestigial "Third World" moniker and "developing countries" label.

Mathew writes that the manufacture of such sophisticated surveillance technology is simple, but that getting it into place and solving legal issues is not.

"The technological and legal foundations for blanket surveillance had already been laid in 2003," Brzezinski wrote in his book. "All that was lacking was the political and social will to bring all this technological wizardry to bear in the war on terror. It wouldn't happen overnight or without another catastrophic incident, something that upped the ante and put America in the same survival mode on par with Israel: a nuclear detonation, a biological outbreak, a mass casualty event. But if the stakes were high enough, would we be more willing to accept life in a maximum security surveillance state?"

Brzezinski’s scrupulous book centers on this question: How much disruption will the American people tolerate as its government tries to find “the balance between security and liberty?”

So, as the everyday lives of US citizens are monitored in perpetuity, will the invasive nature of such surveillance technologies remain tolerated? Although the main purpose of such an infrastructure might be to collect revenue through fines, the machinations could be abused further, aiding in a sort of domestic purge as economic and social tensions reach a crescendo.

The thumbscanner at Poway can be seen as a relatively harmless measure taken by city officials concerned about the safety and appearance of the park. But, considering the generally non-threatening nature of young adults, except for the to-be-expected hooliganism, one must ask: will the thumbscanner, alongside the surveillance cameras, pay itself off to the benefit of Poway residents, all the while without sucking young skateboarders and their parents out of cash for minor offenses?

Special Alert: Language Update from Pentagon

2010-07-09T14:53:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of July, the Associated Press reported that the Army planned to drop the Vietnam Era moniker “psychological operations,” citing that it can seem ominous.

Drilled into soldiers of the Vietnam Era and after, the goal of such techniques have been to win “hearts and minds” of peoples, foreign and domestic.

The Defense Department’s new, more neutral term, is “Military Information Support Operations,” or MISO. The name-change parallels the early 2009 move away from the Bush Administration terms, “The Global War on Terror” and “Long War” to the term “Overseas Contingency Operation.” For now, the term “War on Terror” remains the dominant one.

U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman, Ken McGraw, said the new designation, adopted in June, is a more accurate reflection of the unit’s job of producing leaflets, radio broadcasts, and loudspeaker messages to influence enemy soldiers and civilians.

Psychological warfare operations have been a keystone feature of US foreign policy techniques in especially the latter half of the twentieth century, and on into the current one. In the early years after the Second World War, for example, the new Central Intelligence Agency, taking the place of the Office of Strategic Services, found itself unprepared to counter a monolithic propaganda blitz, and organization effort, based out of the Soviet Union. Western Culture was portrayed by Soviet propagandists as decadent and degenerate. Soviet culture, so went the official myth, was the culture of the future.

The western intelligence community, with US organizations like the CIA-bankrolled Congress for Cultural Freedom at the pyramid’s top, countered the Soviets by portraying Soviet society as America’s antithesis: instead of a society based in freedom and democracy, like American society, communist culture was totalitarian , dictated, gray and unfree.

These psychological operations were dubbed “covert action” by early intelligence community operatives in the post-war era, and included everything from books and symphonies to Hollywood films. There indeed was an atmosphere of imperialism about such efforts, and Hollywood even called its post-war markets, not markets, but “territories.” Discussion by the public of such phenomenon is historically belittled and brushed under the rug, called by the hard-of-thinking mere “conspiracy theory.”

These propaganda-derived, present day public relations techniques were helped along, in the early twentieth century, by the godfather of propaganda, Edward Bernays, who wrote:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.

In a republican society, that is a society based in law designed to protect the Supreme Rights of all, especially the poor against the opulent, “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses” is illegal. Obviously, it is also highly amoral.

For more on Bernays and the birth of modern public relations, one need only You Tube the great BBC documentary, “The Century of Self.”

“One of the catalysts for the transition is foreign and domestic sensitivities to the term ‘psychological operations’ that often lead to a misunderstanding of the mission,” McGraw said about the July 2010 name change.

The change of name is to be extended to all military services, though the form in which the change will take across the many army agencies remains unknown. The Army’s only active duty psychological operations unit, based in Fort Bragg, is called the 4th Psychological Operations Group.

The change was directed from the top, by Pentagon policy makers working for Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The old term is considered to be an atavistic artifact of the Cold War Era, and one that implies subterfuge and misinformation. Presumably, the new term is designed to avoid the implications associated with the old.

Language is passed down the culture creation chain to smaller information distributors, thereby causing a change in word choice among participants in the information and language exchange. An analogy might be the process whereby public drinking water arrives at consumers through the private sector. In the private sector, business of all sizes tend to use public water for their products, since the water is cheaper to use. Through the distribution of private products constituted with public water, many of the chemicals, such as lithium and sodium fluoride, reach the public. Therefore, it’s an inevitability that, a US citizen for example, will drink fluoridated water in his lifetime.

In a process of mass Synesthesia (synesthetes experience a muddling of the senses), the algorithm of the symbols, words and laws of cultures produce a certain way of knowing and understanding in that culture’s participants.

Another analogy of how language spreads comes from economics, specifically the concept of trickle-down theory, oft associated with Reaganomics. The term trickle-down was coined by humorist Will Rogers, who said during the Great Depression that “money was all appropriated from the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.” Proponents of such policies argue that, when the top income earners invest heavily into business infrastructure and equity markets, more goods will be produced and available on the market at lower prices, thereby spurring job growth for middle and lower class individuals. This logic sees economic wealth flowing from top to bottom. What astute observers point out, is that the trickle-down effect in this construct is very minimal.

The allegiance of many individuals in the Reagan administration to trickle-down premises might have been due to the fact that the concept is a truism. Clearly the largest investments by the apex income earners make markets. That is, after all, what Goldman Sachs claims to be its main service to the global economy, and, after a zero trading loss during the first quarter of 2010, there’s no denying that that firm is a top income earner. Just like how in trickle-down theory only bread crumbs fall from the table of the uberclass, the true meanings behind changes away from terms like ‘psy-ops’ go unannounced to the lower and middle class “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.” As I mentioned beforehand, the change of moniker is one towards a more neutral choice of words.

One of the premiere enunciators of Reaganomics under Reagan was former assistant secretary the Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts, who today is a force in the public US policy discussion. A staunch opponent of primary trends in US public and corporate culture, Roberts recently said of US propaganda techniques:

An article in the journal, Sociological Inquiry, casts light on the effectiveness of propaganda. Researchers examined why big lies succeed where little lies fail. Governments can get away with mass deceptions, but politicians cannot get away with sexual affairs.

The researchers explain why so many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, years after it has become obvious that Iraq had nothing to do with the event. Americans developed elaborate rationalizations based on Bush administration propaganda that alleged Iraqi involvement and became deeply attached to their beliefs. Their emotional involvement became wrapped up in their personal identity and sense of morality. They looked for information that supported their beliefs and avoided information that challenged them, regardless of the facts of the matter.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained the believability of the Big Lie as compared to the small lie: “In the simplicity of their minds, people more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have such impudence. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

What the sociologists and Hitler are telling us is that by the time facts become clear, people are emotionally wedded to the beliefs planted by the propaganda and find it a wrenching experience to free themselves. It is more comfortable, instead, to denounce the truth-tellers than the liars whom the truth-tellers expose.

All-in-all, the big lie is composed of innumerable and oft contrived little lies, such as the switch away from the vaguely violent “psy-op” to the more neutral “Military Information Support Operation.” I suspect that, just as the “Global War on Terror” has yet to be superseded by “Overseas Contigency Operation,” “psy-op” will remain the popular catchphrase.

Alfred H Paddock Jr., a retired colonel and former Director for Psychological Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 1986 to 1988, dislikes the new name both because it is vague and misleading, uncatchy and unmarketable.

"Somehow it gives a nefarious connotation, but I think that this baggage can be overcome," said Paddock of the old term. In Vietnam an Laos, Paddock served three combat tours with Special Forces.

"Military Information Support Operations, or MISO, is not something that rolls off the tip of your tongue," Paddock said. "It makes it even more difficult for psychological operations personnel to explain what they do. That they still have the capability to employ programs and themes designed to influence the behavior of foreign target audiences."

From 9/11 to 4/20: BP Gulf Oil Leak and a Planned Course for History

2010-06-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

A Kickoff for the Century of Change: 9/11
Evidence and September 11th fit well together, like puzzle pieces. The amount of data pointing towards alternative solutions to the who, what, why, and where’s of that fateful day leave many questions officially unanswered; not to mention millions of people perplexed about how their brethren just don’t seem to see what they see. Even former assistant secretary to the Treasury under Reagan and father of Reaganomics, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, has extensively questioned that day’s events. In February, Roberts wrote an article about that month’s Washington Times article by Jennifer Harper, called “Inside the Beltway,” which detailed 31 press conferences held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which has 1,000 members, in cities in the US and abroad on February 19. [1]

This organization cites as suspicious the following in regards to the collapse of the north and south towers and WTC 7: for starters, that fires in high rises have never brought down a steel-framed high rise building; in the case of building 7, the tower collapses straight down into its own footprint at freefall acceleration in the first 100 feet or two and a half seconds; in that building, there were 40,000 tons of structural steel designed to resist the collapse of the 47 storey structure, which stood a football field away from the Twin Towers, as well as important Enron and WorldCom records. In the north and south towers, several tons of pooled molten iron—reported by first responders, structural engineers, and documented by FEMA—were detailed, although jet plane impact and normal office fires don’t produce molten iron or steel, since it doesn’t begin to melt until 3,000 degrees. The 9/11 fires probably produced upwards of 1,600 degree temperatures.

Chemical evidence of a high-tech incendiary called nano-thermite—used to cut through steel—was found in all the dust sprinkled throughout lower Manhattan. In this dust, there are several tons of tiny spheres of previously molten iron, a by-product of thermite. [2]

Retired army Major General Albert Stubblebine, who, in his last assignment, was responsible for all of the army’s strategic intelligence forces around the world, is one of many authoritative personalities on the 9/11 events; in his last command, he held the responsibility for signals intelligence, photos intelligence, counter-intelligence and human intelligence. While speaking out for 9/11 truth, he warrants his suspicious by citing his vast experience analyzing photos, and for all sorts of evidence at that. About his conclusions regarding the Pentagon explosion, the former Major General has said: “from the photographs that I have analyzed and looked at very carefully, it was not an airplane…for one thing, if you looked at the hole that was made in the Pentagon, the nose penetrated far enough so that there should have been wing-marks in the wall of the Pentagon…so where were they?” [3]

“A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7,” reports the Washington Times. The Times reports that the architects and engineers have concluded that FEMA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology garnered “insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction” and are “calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials.” [3]

Further implications abound, like pseudo-sophisticated trades made on insider information that caused huge profits for manipulators who foresaw the stocks of certain airline and insurance companies plummeting in the days after Sept. 11 2001.

The Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT), in Herzliya, Israel, printed an article entitled, “Black Tuesday: World’s Largest Insider Trading Scam?” on Sept. 19, 2001. Author Don Radlauer, an expert in stock options and derivatives, gave details of the types and volumes of the trades, saying: “Obviously, anyone who had detailed knowledge of the attacks before they happened was, at the very least, an accessory to their planning; and the overwhelming probability is that the trades could have been made only by the same people who masterminded the attacks themselves.” According to Radlauer, the timing, specificity, size and unusual nature of the trades made them suspect. “The trading is sure to have been done under false names, behind shell corporations, and in general to have been thoroughly obfuscated.”

Up there with the most suspicious spikes in trading activity were high increases in “put options,” which are highly leveraged bets that a certain stock’s share price will fall. The spike in “put options” placed on the two airlines involved in the hijackings of Sept. 11, United Airlines (UAL) and American Airlines, have not been officially or satisfactorily investigated.

A 9,000 percent jump in United Air Lines (UAL) put options between Sept. 6 and Sept. 10, with a 285 percent jump on the Thursday before the attack, coincides with a 6,000 percent jump in American Airlines put options. There was no similar trading activity on other airlines, according to market reports. Major brokerage houses with offices in WTC, Morgan Stanley and Merrill-Lynch, had 27-fold and 12-fold increases in put option purchases on their respective shares between Sept. 7 and Sept. 10.

“The afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market,” the CBS program 60 Minutes reported on Sept. 19. Investigator Michael C. Ruppert ensures: “These trades were certainly noticed after the attacks.”

“This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you’ve ever seen in your entire life . . . this would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence,” Bloomberg Business News’ Dylan Ratigan said Sept. 20.

Although the chief of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, William McLucas, said regulators would “certainly be able to track down every trade, where the trade cleared, where the trade was directed from,” no U.S. or foreign agency has made public arrests as a result of investigations into these trades. [4]

Making Economic Society for a Specific Transformation

Evidently, there was quite a bit of insider information to trade on in the days and weeks leading up to 9/11. That major Wall Street firms protected themselves and prospered from “lucky” trading, evidences perceived usefulness of 9/11 to major players of the planet’s increasingly total corporatocracy. A section entitled “Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force” in the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century’s document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, vaguely, but clearly to those fluent in technocraticese, outlines what is needed to spur societal change: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” Many analysts see 9/11 as the “Pearl Harbor” prophesized by PNAC, whose membership includes Richard Dick Cheney, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Donald Rumself, Paul Wolfowitz, Steve Forbes, Jeb Bush, among others. Therefore, 9/11 can be seen as a multi-faceted opportunity on which policy makers could capitalize in favor of long-desired plans.

Shorting the Gulf Region: environmental and financial terrorism?
Just like trades before 9/11 should cause concern and questions, so too do trades made by major players in the days leading up the BP oil leak. Goldman Sachs, a premiere brokerage firm, sold 4,680,822 shares of BP in the first quarter of 2010. Goldman’s sales represented the largest of any firm during that period. If the firms’ shares been sold at the average price of BP’s stock that quarter, it would have gained more than $266 million from its holdings. Had the firm sold those shares today, their investment would have lost 36+ percent on its value; so, roughly $96+ million. Shares sold were 44 percent of Goldman’s position in the Big Oil firm, the largest sales of oil shares in its trading history. Of course, the remaining holdings have lost tens of millions in their value. [5]

Paul Noel, an expert on the Gulf Oil subject, provided intelligence on the shorting: [6]

There is a reason they could have known the rig was going to fail up to two weeks ahead of its failure. The nature of these wells is that they leave the drill mud in the well and compress using very heavy drill mud to keep the well from blowing up unlimited. The well would begin to bump (similar to boiling a big bubble) and the acoustic signals would tell the rig was in trouble that far ahead. Goldman Sachs could just have had inside info. They also know the scale of things. This is the best explanation. It could be otherwise.

If you were going to sabotage a drilling team, all you would have to do is load a lighter mud in the mix as they pulled a drill pipe…There are lots of ways to have this happen either accidentally or deliberately. Goldman teams are great on statistical stuff sort of like the odds of rolling dice. They might just have figured stats for probability of failure??? Of course we could surmise other reasons are possible.

Such movements of volume—such as those seen before 9/11 and 4/20, the first day of the oil leak—are not atypical of large asset management firms, for Wall Street brokerages regularly buy and sell huge blocks of shares, not only for themselves, but for their oftentimes uber-rich clients as well. That such a voluminous movement of economic power preceded incomprehensible destruction is par for the course in the embryonic, soviet modeled command-and-control global economy of today (and other deference systems before that, for that matter). By way of economic democracy, intriguing, but delicate super-alliances and their under-the-table agreements forge the future. For centuries, society has been made economically, and clearly today fits in well with the pattern: to usher in crises as a means to justifying artificial scarcity, presenting new solutions previously unviable, followed by the policy’s and courses to which those solutions lead.

Goldman was not the only asset firm to sell huge blocks of BP stock in the first quarter, though these other firms sold off fractions of what Goldman did. Wachovia, owned by Wells Fargo, sold 2,667,419 shares, while UBS—a Swiss bank—sold 2,667,419 shares. A staggering fact that points towards numerous interesting conversational rabbit holes, especially concerning Goldman Sachs’s clout, Wachovia and UBS sold greater percentages of their BP stock; those being, 98 percent and 97 percent respectively.

BP Chief Executive, Tony Hayward, also sold considerable stock in BP. Four weeks before the oil leak, the BP chief cashed in about a third of his holdings in the company. By doing so, he avoided losing £423,000 pounds when BP's share price plunged after the leak. His decision, however, helped him to avoid losing more than £423,000 when BP’s share price plunged after the oil spill began six weeks ago. [7] Further, on April 12th, more than a week before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, Haliburton, the world's second largest oilfield services corporation, unexpectedly acquired Boots & Coots, a small but much experienced oil well-control company. The company handles fires and blowouts on oil rigs and oil wells. [8]

Wellington Management, a large asset firm, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were reported to be purchasing BP’s stock. [5]

Corporate Operational Defiance Disorder and the Management of Globalization

BP officially admits to just a few thousand barrels hemorrhaging into the ocean each day. Contradictorily, experts estimate the true figure at 60,000 barrels or 2.5 million gallons daily. Truth being, the real figures are unknowable, considering that BP has barred independent engineers from looking at the breach. When this part of the Earth will run out of oil, nobody can be certain. Meanwhile, under the radar of the corporate media, Transocean Ltd.—the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP—has made $270 million off the oil leak through post-disaster insurance payouts. [9]

On May 20th, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered the London-based BP to cease dispersant of Corexit 9500 (used to break up the leaked oil) or to describe in detail why other dispersants do not meet environmental standards. BP stated that the chemical product now in use is “the best option for subsea application.” [10]

The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill leaked nearly 11 million gallons of crude, killing vibrant and diverse wildlife and damaging the reputation of Exxon. In fact, the leader of containment efforts in the hours just after the tanker began leaking was not Exxon Mobil Corp, but, truly, BP, owing to their 1989 ownership of a controlling 50.01 percent share in the consortium.

Watching the crisis in the Gulf unfold is akin to reliving the Valdez disaster for attorney Zygmut Plater, who conducted the legal team for the state-appointed Alaska Oil Spill Commission that investigated the Exxon spill. “I feel this horrible, sickening feeling,” said Plater, now a teacher at Boston College. “What happened in Alaska was determined by decisions coming from (BP in) Houston,” he said.

Today, Plater laments an approach in regards to the ’89 spill that attempted to avoid pointing fingers. “In retrospect, it could’ve focused attention on BP and created transparency which would’ve changed the internal culture,” he said. “As we see the internal culture appears not to have changed with tragic results.” [11]

One defense yet to be tried to stop the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico is billions of hydrocarbon-chewing microbes, like Alcanivorax Borkumensis. One purpose of the 830,000 chemical dispersants used to combat the oil slick is to break the oil into smaller droplets, which are easier for bacteria to consume. Nature hosts innumerable types of organisms who, as a community, combine to decompose oil. No single microbe has proved more efficient than this natural defense. “Every ocean we look at, from the Antarctic to the Arctic, there are oil-degrading bacteria,” says Atlas, who analyzed genetically engineered microbes and other cleanup methods in the wake of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska. “Petroleum has thousands of compounds. Its complex and the communities that feed on it are complex. A superbug fails because it competes with this community that is adapted to the environment.” Marine-dwelling bacteria and fungi use hydrocarbons as fuel by breaking up hydrocarbons with enzymes and oxygen, their populations growing exponentially in days. [12]

Basis for Legal Action

A clause buried in the U.S. Clean Water Act means that BP and others could be charged with, for all intents and purposes, near unlimited fines. The act enables the government to seek civil penalties in court for each drop of oil that spills into US navigable waters, including the area of the leaking well. The US government could fine BP or others up to $4,300 for each barrel leaked into the Gulf and surrounding marine ecosystems, say legal experts familiar with official documents. Should the US government aggressively pursue legal action, the amount of fines could potentially bankrupt BP. [13]

Those investors who divested from BP could have done so due to information regarding pipe conditions, since BP knew of equipment problems on the Deepwater Horizon rig at least hours before the explosion, implicating them as accessory to the events. In mid-May, the House of Representatives energy and commerce committee learned that documents and company briefings were suggestive that BP, the well’s owner; Transocean, the rig owner; and Haliburton, the company which cemented into place the casing for the well, ignored 20 April tests that indicated faulty equipment. Among the failures are a dead battery in the blowout preventer, suggestions of a breach in the well casing, and “failure” in the shear ram, which was the device responsible for cutting through and sealing the drill pipe in the event of blowout.

While the energy and commerce committee reviewed the gross negligence on the part of the oil industry, Senator John Kerry and Joe Lieberman introduced a climate and energy bill that for the very first time will put a price on carbon and impose cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is a bill for energy independence after a devastating oil spill, a bill to hold polluters accountable, a bill for billions of dollars to create the next generation of jobs and a bill to end America’s addiction to foreign oil,” said Kerry, who believes the oil spill would help get the American Power Act passed. The passage of this law is viewed by experts as essential to a global deal on climate change. [14]

Or maybe the stocks were sold pre-spill due to predicted drops in the price of the oil due to a poor economy. The US Energy Information Administration reduced its 2010 and 2010 forecasts for oil prices. The change represents a drop in oil prices since the last report, the reason being concerns over an elusive economic recovery. To cite this as a reason for Goldman Sach's largest divestment from an oil company in its history would be unsatisfactory. [15]

Trickle Down Terror

Like the 9/11 events were used to justify “transformation” towards a more totalitarian order in not only the United States, but myriad countries, 4/20 could give way to its own transformations. Thus far, all evidence suggests it is the largest environmental catastrophe in US history. While actions taken after 9/11 were officially said to be crucial to America’s collective safety, the aftermath of 4/20 might result in a quickening of the U.S. economy’s greening. The ‘green’ economy program has been criticized by many for its ultimate results, which mirror IMF and World Bank austerity measures and structural adjustments, also known as “economic medicine.” Spain’s experience with a ‘green’ economy speaks to that trend.

Spain’s current unemployment rate is 18.1 percent, more than twice the European Union average. Gabriel Calzada has furnished a report arguing that Spain’s high-velocity spending on the production of electricity from renewable sources, higher than any other nation, creates only temporary jobs. Moreover, each job devoted to wind farms and other alternative energy projects entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs lost or not created due to politicized investment towards a ‘green’ economy.

The sub-optimum allocation of capital was accompanied by European media reports on so-called “eco-corruption,” which entailed a “footprint of sleaze”—subsidy systems were gamed, profiteering from land sales for wind farms, etc. According to Calzada, the alternative energy job program has subtracted approximately 110,000 jobs from other sectors in Spain’s economy. To further de-industrialize the US economy would be in-line with arrangements of the last decade, such as NAFTA and GATT treaties, which have all abetted the transformation of the US economy into an interdependent service economy. [16]

It comes as no surprise that BP finds itself at the center of controversy on President Obama’s watch, who received a hefty campaign contribution from British Petroleum (the largest of any of the candidates). [17] Overall, the foremost concerns of both BP and the President—Goldman Sachs, by the way, was his largest campaign contributor—have centered on public relations and marketing. The apologist corporate-media have been complicit, but BP has taken further and absolute measures to ensure they control their image. The Big Oil firm bought terms like “oil spill” from search engine providers such as Google Inc. “to help direct users to its website as it attempts to control the worst oil spill in U.S. history.” Taking Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein’s theory of “nudging people” to make better decisions, BP has invested capital in the art of “nudging people” away from the environmental catastrophe they were complicit in bringing about. BP will pay fees so its own website would rank higher or top the list of results when Internet users search on terms such as “oil spill,” “volunteer” and “claims.” On the “boob tube”, BP has spent $50 million on TV advertising to bolster its image during the crisis. [18]

As I highlighted earlier, Bloomberg Business News’ Dylan Ratigan said this of the insider trading before 9/11:

“This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you’ve ever seen in your entire life . . . this would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence.”

In these times, is there such a thing as coincidence? Has 4/20 outdone even 9/11?

1. Roberts, Paul Craig, Phd. 9/11: The Road to Armageddon, CounterCurrents, 26 February 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.countercurrents.org/roberts260210.htm

2. Richard Gage video interview
Accessed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssuAMNas1us

3. Major General Stubblebine video interview:
Accessed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssuAMNas1us

4. Bollyn, Christopher. Revealing 9-11 Stock Trades Could Expose The Terrorist Masterminds. Global Research, 18 December 2004.
Accessed at: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BOL412B.html

5. Byrne, John. Goldman Sachs sold $250 million of BP stock before spill. Raw Story, 2 June 2010.
Accessed at: http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0602/month-oil-spill-goldman-sachs-sold-250-million-bp-stock/

6. Sterling, Allan. No Joke: Goldman Sachs Shorted Gulf of Mexico. Examiner, 5 May 2010.
Accessed at:
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-8199-Breakthrough-Energy-Examiner~y2010m5d5-No-joke-Goldman-Sachs-shorted-Gulf-of-Mexico

7. Swaine, John and Winnett, Robert. BP chief Tony Hayward sold shares weeks before oil spill. Telegraph UK, 05 June 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/7804922/BP-chief-Tony-Hayward-sold-shares-weeks-before-oil-spill.html

8. Watson, John Paul and Alex Jones. Evidence Points To BP Oil Spill False Flag. InfoWars, 8 June 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.infowars.com/evidence-points-to-bp-oil-spill-false-flag/

9. Perdono, Daniela. Ten Things You Need (But Don’t Want) To Know About the BP Oil Spill. Global Research, 27 May 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19408

10. Roosevelt Margot and Carolyn Cole. BP Refuses EPA order to switch to less toxic oil dispersant. LA Times, 23 May 2010.
Accessed at: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/23/nation/la-na-oil-spill-0100523

http://blog.al.com/live/2010/05/bp_had_a_key_role_in_the_exxon.html

11. Schwartz, Noaki. BP Had a Key Role in the Exxon Valdez Disaster. Associated Press, 25 May 2010.
Accessed at:

12. Biello, David. Slick Solution: How Microbes Will Clean Up the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Scientific American, 25 May 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-microbes-clean-up-oil-spills

13. Schneyer, Joshua. Civil Fine in Gulf Oil Spill Could Be $4,300 barrel. Reuters, 26 May, 2010.
Accessed at:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64O75Q20100526

14. Goldenberg, Suzanne. Gulf Oil Spill: firms ignored warning signs before blast, inquiry hears. UK Guardian, 13 May 2010.

Accessed at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/12/deepwater-gulf-oil-spill-hearing

15. Baskin, Brian. EIA Cuts Oil Price Outlook As Uncertainty About Economy Weighs, NASDAQ 8 June 2010.
Accessed at: http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news-story.aspx?storyid=201006081243dowjonesdjonline000349&title=eia-cuts-oil-price-outlook-as-uncertainty-about-economy-weighs#ixzz0qHZIM2CN

16. Will, George. Spain’s experience with the ‘green’ economy: Save the planet, lose some jobs. The Seattle Times, 25 June 2009.
Accessed at: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2009385016_will26.html

17. Burkart, Karl. Coast Guard and BP threaten journalists with arrest for documenting spill. Mother Nature Network, 18 May 2010

17.Young, Sarah and Bergin, Tom. BP buys search term “oil spill” from Google. Reuters, 9 June 2010.
Accessed at: http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/bp-buys-search-term-oil-spill-from-google-reuters_molt-c8ff670e72dc.html;_ylt=Al_QfhKyykBmyN4XkTc1oqnBXGwF;_ylu=X3oDMTE2djI4c2liBHBvcwMxMgRzZWMDdG9wc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDYnBidXlzc2VhcmNo?x=0

Truth About California’s Gubernatorial Election 2010

2010-05-19T13:57:00.000-07:00

California is renowned for all the obvious reasons. As the most populous state in the United States, California holds unprecedented power: often estimated as roughly the eighth largest economy in the world, the region is the second largest national subentity on the globe, behind Sao Paulo, Brazil. Californians mostly dwell on the concrete islands that constitute the Los Angeles-San Diego and San Francisco-San Jose agglomerations, artificial human constructs which are products predominantly of last century. With an economy roughly the size of Italy's, California makes up one of the U.S.'s "FnCOMA" states (Florida, Nevada, California, Oregon, Michigan and Arizona). Between two ages, California today sits at distinct crossroads. Will the 59th largest political entity in the world work for a fairer world or will its superlative-filled ecology—the state boasts the largest, tallest and oldest trees—have its destiny dictated by the most efficient paths to profit by an increasingly consolidated state-enterprise, working as a rule out of New York, City of London, France, and Germany?

That, as of 2005, 57.59 per cent of California residents age five and older spoke English as a first language at home, while 28.21 per cent spoke Spanish, indicates the degree to which the modern keystone border doesn't divide nation-states and citizens of nations. The world's true borders divide the generations living at one time, families and, of course, entire people's based on something as shallow as the color of one's skin, which is an illusion basically conjured by the sun, melanin and time. Nation-states are units of control, influenced as a rule by transnational entities, such as corporations, foundations and think tanks. Today, nearly all of the premiere conglomerations and their subsidiaries—from banking and finance, military and security, to agriculture and medicine—all act as if they're one, influencing the markets and therefore everyday commerce. The current poster-child for such "market making" corporations has been Goldman Sachs, and for considerably good reason. In California, the news is no different: all three leading candidates in the race do business with G-Sachs; they are, Meg Whitman (R), Scott Poizner (D), and Jerry Brown (D). We'll begin with the multi-billionaire CEO, Meg Whitman.

Of her long record of involvement with Goldman Sachs, Whitman says she "regrets" doing business with the investment and securities firm. Whitman, former CEO of eBay, served on Goldman's board from October 2001 to December 2002. The position paid $475,000 in cash and stock options. Still earlier in 1998, she had hired Goldman to advise eBay's Initial Public Offering. The firm advised a second eBay stock offering and also helped the takeover of online biller PayPal in 2002. Meanwhile, Whitman was also a personal banking client of Goldman and engaged in "spinning," a now-illegal practice in which the bank enabled her some of the first shares in companies going public. Once the shares were made widely available, their prices soared. Thus, stock belonging to preferred clients such as Whitman was sold for a quick profit. Whilst spinning was legal, Whitman made $1.78 million through it. [1]

In the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik ponders Whitman's involvement with Goldman Sachs:

Eight years ago, it came out that Whitman was among an elite group of favored executives who had accepted preferential stock deals from Goldman Sachs while it was seeking business from their companies.

In spinning, executives would typically get shares in coveted initial public stock offerings, which they would "spin," or resell, into a soaring market, usually within days and sometimes within hours. Their quick and almost entirely risk-free profits were effectively gifts, and the investment banks the givers.

Whitman attempted to dodge responsibility for her actions by claiming that there was "nothing illegal" about them at the time.

"Such investment opportunities were common at the time," Whitman wrote in her autobiography released this year. "And I had never seen anyone in the government, the media, or anywhere else raise the idea that this practice was a conflict of interest."

In 2002, Congress looked into spinning, and, a year later, the Securities and Exchange Commission banned it. "I supported those changes," she insisted in her book. The day she left the Goldman Sachs board, the government announced a $1.4 billion settlement with Goldman and nine other firms that included a ban on stock spinning. EBay shareholders sued Whitman for conflict of interest. She maintained that she received insider information only through her personal banking relationship with Goldman. Whitman and two other eBay executives settled the suit in 2005, having admitted no wrongdoing.

Seventy-three percent of Americans believe it to be "somewhat likely" that Goldman is guilty of fraud in the home mortgage market after hearing of the Securities and Exchange Commission's lawsuit against the firm last week, says a Rasmussen poll. 75% also don't oppose the auditing of the Federal Reserve, in which Goldman holds stock, according Bob Chapman of the International Forecaster. [2]

Whitman has publicly received $110,500 in campaign contributions last year from Goldman contacts, among whom are two former executives who are members of Whitman's campaign finance committee, according to her website. Investment adviser Brad DeFoor, a Goldman Sachs managing director in San Francisco, gave her campaign $24,900 and Gene Sykes, who co-chairs Goldman's global mergers and acquisitions group in Los Angeles, donated $25,900.

Further, records detail that Whitman's family foundation is managed by a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, the Ayco Company out of New York,that manages money for wealthy families, according to the description on its website. The Griffith R. Harsh and Margaret C. Whitman Charitable Foundation had $48 million in assets at the time of its 2008 tax filing.

"It is highly disingenuous and hypocritical for Team Brown to make accusations surrounding Meg's service on a board for only 15 months nearly 10 years ago, when Jerry Brown's own sister oversees Goldman Sachs' dealings with the state of California," said Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Whitman. Brown's sister, Kathleen Brown, has led the West Coast region of municipal finance for Goldman Sachs since 2003.

"Unsurprisingly, Meg Whitman and her campaign is once again trying to avoid her taking responsibility for her actions. Jerry's sister is an adult who needs no one's permission to take a job," said Jerry Brown's campaign spokesman, Sterling Clifford.

His sister oversaw a deal with the city of Oakland, where he "served" as mayor for eight years. The deal, known as an "interest rate swap," was advertised as guaranteeing Oakland stability in its debt payments, but now costs the cash-strapped city $5 million a year. The agreement goes until 2021, with an estimated cancellation cost of $19 million. The city is trying to renegotiate it, and union officials representing government employees are calling on Goldman to let Oakland and other municipalities free of such agreements.

The swap, like those of many governments, began in 1998, one year before Brown assumed office. City officials renegotiated it in 2003, just before his sister, who was also a former state treasurer, began working for Goldman as the West Coast head of municipal finance. In 2005, when the city paid off the debt Goldman had packaged, it left the interest rate swap in place. Municipal servants argued the decision made sense because they would have had to pay $15 million to cancel the deal. In doing so, a major revenue stream for Goldman Sachs remained in place, benefiting them further during the Downturn, while hurting the city.

Bounds called the agreement "a big-money deal for Wall Street that is costing California taxpayers millions of dollar a year...no matter how you look at it, Jerry and his sister were on both ends of a bad deal for taxpayers, and Goldman Sachs pocketed millions." Not only was Brown mayor, responsible for appointments to city administrator and finance officials who oversaw the city borrowing, Brown was president of the Oakland Joint Powers Financing Authority, though in a non-voting capacity, as it renegotiated the deal and repaid Goldman's debt in 2005. Sterling Clifford, Brown's campaign spokesman, claimed he was not involved.

Poizner borrowed $500,000 to finance his 2004 state assembly race with the help of Goldman Sachs, and state financial records detail his history of investments with the firm. "Attacking a candidate for flimsy ties to a private company is exactly what you would expect from a desperate liberal - and I guess that includes Steve Poisner, too," said Whitman's spokesman, Bounds.

Looming in the shadows of campaign rhetoric, is the continued collapse of California. Almost one year ago, the state government was so deeply indebted that it began to issue IOUs instead of wages. It's current unemployment rate nudges 30 per cent. Unannounced and generally ill-perceived austerity measures and structural adjustments have commenced, with spending for education and healthcare slashed, mass layoffs and forced unpaid leave. An epicenter of suburban living, the housing bubble collapse has impoverished millions and forced tens of thousands of families out of their homes. The political system "is locked in paralysis" and the two-term rule of former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger seen as a disaster. Professor Kevin Starr, who wrote an acclaimed history of the state, recently stated that "California is on the verge of becoming the first failed state in America."

Starr has a history of mulling over the future of the golden state. In 1988, following three years of debate, a who's who of corporate and civic celebrities handed to then Mayor Bradley a detailed plan for the future of Southern California. L.A. 2000: A City for the Future devotes itself to hyperbolic rhetoric about Los Angeles's certain destiny as a "world crossroads" a la imperial Rome or LaGuardian New York. In a section of the epilogue, Starr, showing his colors as a devotee of totalitarian measures, considered what might happen if the city failed to create a new "dominant establishment" to manage the city and regions diverse peoples. He wrote, "there is, of course, the Blade Runner scenario: the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic polyglotism ominous with unresolved hostilities."

At LittleSis.org, there is a list of Goldman Sachs cronies who have worked as U.S. government officials. To be sure, an international version of the list would show connections with key players in countries such as Germany and Greece, as a small example. U.S. connections from LittleSis: [3]

NAME
POSITION
Gary D Cohn
President and COO of Goldman Sachs
Pete Coneway
Investment Banker, Goldman Sachs & Co
Diana Farrell
Deputy director of Obama's National Economic...
Jose Fourquet
Investor, Goldman Sachs & Co.
Stephen Friedman
Chairman of Stone Point Capital; director of...
Gary Gensler
ex-Goldman Sachs executive, Chairman of Commodity...
Dick Gephardt
US Representative from Missouri
Bob Hormats
Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy,...
Robert J Hurst

Reuben Jeffery III
Undersecretary of State for Economic, Energy, and...
James A Johnson
Vice Chair of Perseus and Goldman director;...
Neel Kashkari
Treasury official in charge of TARP; former...
James C Langdon Jr
Senior Executive Partner at Akin Gump and Bush...
Philip D Murphy
Ambassador to Germany-Designate
Mark Patterson
Chief of Staff to Tim Geithner
Henry M Paulson Jr
Secretary of Treasury under George W Bush; former...
Karthik Ramanathan
Domestic Finance: Acting Assistant Secretary for...
Robert E Rubin
Former Treasury Secretary and senior advisor at...
Faryar Shirzad
Global Head of Government Affairs at Goldman...
Robert K Steel
CEO of Wachovia; Under Secretary of Treasury...
Adam Storch
SEC Chief Operating Officer; former Goldman Sachs...
Larry Summers
Director of the National Economic Council ...
John Whitehead
Banker and public official (ex-Goldman Sachs)
Robert Zoellick
US Trade Representative and World Bank president...

The allegations against Whitman and her ties to G-Sachs have received the most press. For that reason, desperation is setting in at her campaign headquarters. In Roseville on Monday, she told a small audience that she would appoint a grand jury to eliminate the more than $7.5 billion in fraud she claims occurs every year in programs for the poor, seniors, and people with disabilities. Many claim, however, those numbers have little or no basis in reality. [5]

Greg Lucas analyzed her claim from California's Capitol:

Logic suggests hospitals, case workers, emergency room physicians, state administrators, nurses, drug companies, employment training facilities, childcare providers, in-home care workers and the myriad other participants in the three programs would have to work serious overtime to do their jobs and bilk the state 60 cents on the dollar.

SEIU State Council Communications Director Mary Gutierrez:

If Meg Whitman were truly committed to protecting taxpayer dollars, she'd be fighting to protect home care services that fare more cost-effective and compassionate than the alternative -- forcing people with disabilities and our elderly into nursing homes at five times the cost.

In 2008, Goldman Sachs was criticized for proposing ways for investment clients to profit from California's financial Downturn. It urged some of its biggest clients to place investment bets against California bonds despite having collected millions of dollars in fees to help the state sell some of those same bonds. Goldman Sachs financial transactions in Greece reveal that such trades are a uniform policy in Goldman Sachs’s international business model.

1. Jamison, Jane. Meg Whitman's Troubling Connection to Goldman Sachs. Red County, 30 April 2010

Accessible at:

http://www.redcounty.com/meg-whitmans-troubling-connection-goldman-sachs/39291

2. Marinucci, Carla; Williams, Lance. Whitman feels heat as Goldman's image tarnishes. SFGate, 22 April 2010.

Accessible at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/22/BA6C1D2B0H.DTL#ixzz0oP7be0UP

3. O’Connell, Justin. Profiling the Power-That-Be. DissidentVoice,

Accessible at:

3. Rothfeld, Michael. Whitman, Brown have ties to Goldman Sachs. Los Angeles Times, 24 April 2010.

Accessible at:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/24/local/la-me-jerry-brown-20100424

4. Harris, Paul. Will California Become America's First Failed State? Guardian UK, 4 October 2009.

Accessible at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/04/california-failing-state-debt

5. Smith, Steve. Whitman Uses Bogus Claims of Fraud to Attack Workers, Seniors and People with Disabilities. California Progress Report, 18 May 2010.

6. ______. Firm urged to hedge against state bonds it helped sell. Los Angeles Times, 11 November 2008.

7. Liberto, Jennifer. Fed probing Goldman trades with Greece. CNNMoney, 25 February 2010.

Reality Check with Alan Watt

2010-05-05T11:27:00.000-07:00

The Rest, videos 6 through 9 at Youtube

IMF and World Bank Plan Austerity For All

2010-05-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

Below is posted an article on protests in Greece.

The measures being implemented by the central bank of Greece, the government, at the benefit of large international financial institutions, must, due to systemic contradictions, be implemented all over the world.

That is the logic of The Downturn.

The IMF and World Bank plan on downgrading credit scores of major first world nations, such as the United States and Britain, as well as countries across the E.U.

Greece is a protectorate, without sovereignty.

The United States can expect a further collapse of the economy due to crippling debt and mal-investment. There is no sane debate regarding ways to redirect technology and capital in order to become the pre-eminent producer of any ideal good. As Buffet said, we can expect to become a nation of sharecroppers. This will, effectively, take away US economic sovereignty.

Considering Canada produces most of our weaponry, can we argue that we have sovereignty now? Even without the ability of weapon production??

Restructuring and austerity by IMF and World Bank are well-documented. They are headed for the US, and that is why American's are being blamed for acts of terrorism. Resistance is expected, as should be a police state.

Greece Erupts As Men From IMF Prepare Axe

2010-05-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

Mathew Campbell in Athens

MAY DAY protests in Greece turned violent yesterday as youths in gas masks and hoods set fire to vehicles, smashed shop fronts and threw molotov cocktails and rocks at police in an explosion of fury over austerity measures they claim will hurt only the poor.

Tourists were cut off from their hotels as thousands of communists, civil servants and private-sector workers converged on a main square in Athens to vent their rage at the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

“No to the IMF’s junta,” they chanted as a youth in a black hood produced a hammer to try to smash windows of the luxury Grande Bretagne hotel.

Another painted anti-capitalist slogans on the facade, and demonstrators intervened to prevent him from spraying an Australian woman with paint as she tried to get back into the hotel. Japanese tourists stood taking photographs of the mayhem with mobile phones before being forced to retreat, coughing and sneezing, under a cloud of tear gas.

RELATED LINKS
Spain downgrade sparks European sell-off
Cost of covering Greek debt heads higher
The violence came as negotiations were concluding between the socialist government of George Papandreou, the IMF and the EU over a multi-billion-euro rescue package for Greece.

Anger has grown against the EU for insisting on tough austerity measures in return for a bailout worth an estimated â‚¬45 billion (£39 billion) this year alone, and up to €120 billion (£104 billion) over three years.

Some young Greeks prefer to blame their elders for the mountain of debt that has resulted in Greece, like a wayward child, being placed under the tutelage of the men from the IMF.

“I cannot help but blame my parents a little for what’s happened,” said Achilles Zacharoulis, a 36-year-old cardiologist. “They were here all that time,” he added, referring to the past three decades of mismanagement and fiscal insanity. “But what did they do to stop it?”

Vaggelis Gettos, 24, is just as alarmed at the burden being heaped on the young by austerity measures expected to be announced today, and has pledged to resist them in more protests this week against what he sees as a plot to impoverish Greece.

“We will live much worse than our parents,” he said. “Why should we be made to pay for their mistakes?”

The question of who was to blame and who should pay for the greatest crisis to afflict the single currency was a subject of heated debate, particularly after a leading credit rating agency put the cradle of civilisation in the same category as Azerbaijan by reducing its government bonds to “junk” status.

Economists regard the bloated civil service with its jobs for life and generous pensions as a cancer consuming the country’s resources. The older generation, the experts grimly concur, turned the state into a giant cash machine to be plundered at will.

Today the party is over, however, and that makes some experts optimistic: Greece now has no choice but to implement much-needed reforms that will bring swift results. “It’s like a dentist putting a child in braces,” said one observer. “It’s not nice, but necessary for growth in the right direction.”

Even before it was announced, the rescue package had provoked angry outbursts. On Thursday, Gettos and friends tried to break through a police cordon outside the finance ministry only to be forced back by tear gas.

They were in the thick of things again yesterday when police used tear gas to prevent protesters from marching on the American embassy.

Even greater social unrest is expected as resentment simmers among poorer families at being told to tighten their belts when wealthy Greeks can protect their fortunes by moving their money abroad, some of it into property bargains in London.

“It’s always the poor people who pay,” complained Katerina Ioannou, 20, in the cafeteria of the Athens University law faculty, a hotbed of student activism. “If I get a job as a trainee lawyer I’ll only earn €300 [£260] a month,” said Thanos Petrou, 21. “How can anyone survive on that?”

Some are already referring to a “lost generation” who will never find jobs or security, but the students, proud of their university’s reputation for being at the forefront of the uprising against the military dictatorship in 1973, are not the only ones planning resistance.

Mikis Theodorakis, the 84-year-old musician who composed the score for the film Zorba the Greek, calls for revolt against what he sees as an American plot to turn Greece into a “protectorate”. Bureaucrats will raise their fists at the barricades in a general strike and protests on Wednesday to protect their considerable perks from the IMF.

They and other public sector workers are virtually unsackable, can retire as early as 45 and get bonuses for using a computer, speaking a foreign language and arriving at work on time.

Some of them get as many as four extra months’ salary a year, compared with the 14 months that are paid to other Greek workers. One of the most generous bonuses is paid to unmarried daughters of dead employees in state-controlled banks: they can inherit their parents’ pensions.

Stefanos, 49, seems to embody the Greek good life. He retired as an army captain last year on a full pension and says he is quite happy planting his garden. He worries, though, about how to protect his savings from the crisis. “What about banks in Germany?” he asked friends around a dinner table in Athens.

“There’s an awful lot of fat to cut from the system,” says Yannis Stournaras, a former government financial adviser, in what sounded like understatement. He is considered one of the architects of Greece’s entry into the euro zone in 2001 but dismisses as “utter nonsense” allegations that Greece fudged its figures in order to be admitted.

Today the country’s budget deficit is 13.6% of GDP and the overall debt stands at â‚¬300 billion (£260 billion). Unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds has risen to 30%, according to government figures. Crime, too, is increasing in Athens.

“I feel like a prisoner here,” says Ilias Iliopoulos, head of the powerful civil servants’ union, gesturing to new bars on his windows after two recent burglaries of his office.

“People are stealing so they can live, so they can eat,” he said. “And it will only get worse. These [IMF] measures will drag hundreds of thousands of Greek citizens into a life of poverty.”

Resentment among Greeks at being singled out as lazy and corrupt has hardened into outrage at Germany, whose leaders complain that the Mediterranean country should never have been allowed into Europe. Greeks were particularly hurt by German suggestions that they sell their islands to pay off the debt.

Yannis Criticos, who works for an international ferry operator, said that one of his secretaries had written an angry letter to a German tour operator client to complain about “bloody Germans” being jealous of Greece’s sun-drenched Mediterranean lifestyle.

“He was very upset about it,” said Criticos, who was attending the launch of a tourism fair in Athens last week. “It took a while for him to calm down.”

Vitriol is also being heaped on Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, by Giorgos Trangas, a popular radio talk show host.

“She looks like an apple strudel that’s been squashed by a Wehrmacht lorry,” he said on his programme.

In an evocation of Greece’s wartime suffering, Trangas has taken to introducing the show with a rendition of Deutschland Uber Alles and the sound of goose-stepping soldiers. This is to highlight what he describes as “another German occupation”.

As if in the path of an advancing army, Greeks are hiding their money. In the end, Stefanos, the retired captain, opted like his friends for a safety deposit box. The super rich, for their part, have shifted an estimated â‚¬11 billion to Cyprus and other havens since the start of the year, according to Konstantinos Michalos, president of the Athens chamber of commerce.

“I try to be optimistic,” he sighed. But things had got to “a tragic level”.

There was hope, he believed, if the government lifted numerous restrictions on business. It costs more to transport a sack of potatoes from northern Greece to Athens than from Athens to Dusseldorf, because haulage, like many other sectors of the Greek economy, is an impenetrable cartel.

When Michalos started a commodities trading business in London in the 1980s, the paperwork took him 48 hours, he said. In Greece’s “Soviet-style” economy he had to go through 117 bureaucratic procedures to get the right government permits. A wealthy friend of his had taken 10 years to win permission to put up a hotel.

“It would have taken him another 10 years or a large payment under the table if he wasn’t a friend of very important politicians,” said Michalos. Stournaras, an Oxford-educated economist, who believes that lifting these restrictions and trimming fat from the public sector will have an extraordinary effect on the Greek economy.

“I’m sorry because poor people will suffer, but this could get us back on our feet within three to five years,” he predicted.

Others believe the country is in for a much longer haul.

Zacharoulis, the cardiologist, is far from being alone in thinking that it may be time to leave in search of a more secure future, perhaps in America or Britain. Gettos, the radical, would also like to get out.

“I’ve always wanted to see the world,” he said. “But you need money for that and I don’t have any.”

That is likely to become a Greek chorus.

Bad Religion- American Jesus

2010-05-05T11:15:00.001-07:00

Sublime -We're Only Gonna Die

2010-05-01T10:07:00.000-07:00

Cutting Through Book 1 Alan Watt: The Androygynous

2010-05-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

Buy the Book: http://www.alanwattsentientsentinel.eu/english/booksEnglish.html

Cutting Through Book 1 by Alan Watt
The Androgynous (Hermaphroditic) Agenda

SAMPLE PAGE FROM BOOK 1

Page 5

To form is to Shape. People are shaped by IN-Forming. Information is neutral, like law, neither true nor false. Masters of Gnosis dispence the sequences of directives which, in scientifically designed order, form the ideas, opinions and life, the beliefs, reality AND DESTINY of the receiver YOU. When IN-DOCTRINATION is complete you have been MASTERED. To "doctor" means "to fix" by a science or Discipline. YOU ARE NOW A MASTER-COPY, not original but ABORIGINAL. Original people saw things in entirety. Pythagorus taught a science of controlling the mind, by reducing all thought down to mathematical formulae. The REAL priesthood call this THE TRINITY. It's as easy as A1B2C3

The Greek philosophers taught the method in story form. An imaginary Dialogue would occur between two or more people. By "logic" every societal problem was reduced to the BINARY CODE. EITHER-OR. We know it better as the Dialectic Process. By how LOGOS(the WORD) is used, those following the conversation are brought to a conclusion. The conclusion BEE-comes their own. They are now INFORMED. The purpose is to usurp power from the individual and have him slave willingly towards "the betterment of humanity." The beehive has always been the symbol of the perfect society in ancient Egypt, the Minoan culture and Freemasonry. Behave is from Beehive. Plato discussed the types of bees in relation to classes of people. The majority were workers who brought home the nectar. The drone priests sorted it into grades of honey. The best is Royal Jelly for themselves and the "Queen" while the workers are given denaturalised refuse.

Unlike modern freemasonry where the initiate must say "I AM" pre-Jaques- Pierrian English had no Am. The candidate said "I BEE". The number of masonry is Four. "To bee or not to bee=2xb(2)=4. Jaques is French for Jacob, Pierre is Peter, Rock etc.. This is typical masonic "allegory" for Jacob's Pillow (foundation) on which he had his "dream". This is a re-hash from the Egyptian Book of the Dead story of Ascended Masters to-day known as M ITREAS. The nobility ruling Egypt and their empire were called Hamites. The priesthoods taught their own race the doctrine of REINCARNATION. Those who ruled were "spirits" which had completed many cycles with such perfection, they only returned to "help rule" the "poor masses" which "could not rule themselves". Elitists Murderers, Thieves and liars, a Brotherhood which hi-jacked reality and gave illu(light)si(spirit of)on. Every Lodge has its picture of Jacob's ladder(rungs are degrees) symbolizing the ascention of the novice, returning as angels(angles) to earth, perfected.

Minutemen- King of the Hill and History Lesson Part II

2010-04-30T10:38:00.001-07:00

Dr. Bowman and Alex Jones speak with soldiers: staged crises and troops

2010-04-30T03:04:00.000-07:00

Finance Capital's Agenda of Serfdom For Their "Human Capital"

2010-04-30T02:29:00.000-07:00

In recent years we have seen a windfall of corporate crime and esurience. Along with the current Depression there have been banking failures, a collapse in the auto industry, bailouts of companies like AIG who awarded executives exotic junkets and large bonuses, ad infinitum. Through this crisis, the inner workings of the global financial system have been stripped of all raiment and the fraudulent nature of the entire economy exposed. From Ponzi schemes to rackets, banksters, politicians and corporate executives have abused crony-capitalism and in net-effect hijacked the structural machinations of civilization. Meanwhile, a steady diet of entertainment and the subtle inculcations that comes packaged therewith leaves a great number of what once were citizens of democratically represented republics in the West, now more aptly termed subjects, incapable of analyzing and thinking for themselves. The economy is understood as an autonomous blanket on which influence is democratically impinged by persons. The truth, however unfortunate, is that the amount of influence exercised by a stunningly tiny minority gives them a sort of reign over the entire globe, thanks largely to traditional military imperialism and the more recent advent of economic warfare spearheaded by the IMF and World Bank. These finance capital and political generalists, who theorize about how best to use their volume or influence, scrutinize in the context of decades, and have effectively used the centralizing motif of civilization, so blatantly obvious in this day and age it has a palatable name in globalization, to further an agenda of power accumulation by dispossesion of peoples. The political, financial and power elites at the top of the global deference pyramid heed Machiavelli’s advice still to this day: “Knowingly…adopt the beat.”

Gross inequalities exist in the U.S.:

Top 1% own 38.1%
Top 96-99% own 21.3%
Top 90-95% own 11.5%
Bottom 40% of population has 0.2% of all wealth.

In the language of the founding fathers, citizens “owned” property, which implies one was not indebted to a creditor.1 But, such stark inequality, which effectively undermines the ability of markets to function at equilibrium, has to a great extent been normalized in the minds of many — a system in which modern indentured servitude is seen as the path to prosperity, despite that over the past thirty years, as Americans have had to take out loans to make up the difference for falling wages, the standard of living in the US has fallen dramatically. The distribution of wealth represents a system in which rent is owed by the people to finance capital. Recently, a Goldman Sachs International adviser argued in favor of the finance industry’s extravagant compensation and his company’s plans for a near-record year in pay. He argues the spending will boost the economy.

“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” said Brian Griffiths, formerly a special adviser to then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, at a panel discussion in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. Discussed was the question, “What is the place of morality in the marketplace?”

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., based in New York, put aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, an increase of 46 percent when compared with a year earlier. This total is enough to pay each worker $527,192 for the period in question. In many states, the nation is suffering from Depression level unemployment, whilst government figures drastically understate true levels by half. 100,000 teachers, also, have been laid off, and class sizes have exploded to more than 40 students per class. Over one million US students are homeless. Foreclosures are at a record high.2

The bailout programs were designed in such a way, that the destination of the money cannot be accounted for, according to Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor who oversaw the bailout for Congress. Instead of taking the saner approach of the taxpayer purchase of all major US banks, since total market capitalization of all major US banks was less than $300 billion or less than a tenth of the amount given away, we’ve insured the major financial institutions at the cost of stability for the taxpayer. Now, should there be any future volatility in the markets, the taxpayer owns shares in the companies.

Instead of a corporate bailout, the banks should have been forced to write-down the value of the mortgages they, according to the FBI, illegally filed, and negotiated a new loan at a lesser price for the homeowners. The power of monetary policy ought to be shifted to the Treasury for the payment of public goods and services and the cost of credit for people should be minimized.

The federal budget deficit is $1.4 trillion, and the federal debt $12 trillion with annual interest rate payments of $450 billion each year. No coherent debate about how to alleviate these problems has been brought to the public. The US debt altogether is $70 trillion.

Since last October the taxpayer has bore witness to the largest transfer of wealth in, perhaps, the history of man, with potentially $23.7 trillion going to banks and financial institutions after the socialization of their risk on illegal sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps. The FBI concluded that 80% of all sub-prime criminal fraud began with the lenders.3 There is an old proverb: “The creditor becomes the lenders slave.”

Carrol Quigley, a mentor of former President Bill Clinton, had this to say about finance-capital’s motives:

The Power of financial capitalism [has a] far reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.

This system was to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences.

The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks, which were themselves private corporations.

Each central bank sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence co-operative politicians by subsequent rewards in the business world.4

In short, the motives of these firms were and are to expand market share and make profits for the shareholders.

Due to the breakdown in trade, pointedly demonstrated by a ghost fleet larger than the US and British fleets combined anchored east of Singapore, also the largest group of ships in the history of maritime travel without crew, no cargo and no destination, the concept of deglobalization has been floated around. Whereas the definition offered by Quigley points towards a collection of impotent localities unable to exercise sovereignty, other more positive definitions exist, such as that offered by Walden Bello.5

He envisages deglobalization as a process that enables production for domestic markets to become central to the economy rather than production where labor is cheap for export markets. Subsidies should be encouraged for projects at the level of the city-state, state and at the national level if this can be done at a reasonable economic and environmental cost with an agenda of preserving community and creating abundant, inelastic resources. Trade policy including quotas and tariffs should protect local economies from predatory corporate-subsidized commodities and their artificially low prices. Equitable income distribution and urban land reform creating a vibrant internal market would kickstart parts of the economy and make available capital for local financial resources for investment. Investment should emphasize not growth, but, rather the quality of life. Environmentally congenial technology in both agriculture and industry would be a massive, New Deal style endeavor, and funds for such projects should be diffused equitably, as opposed only to the energy cartel. Economic decision-making ought not be left to technocrats, but instead to Congress and the Treasury — in other words, those agencies accountable to the public. Questions include what industries to develop or phase out, what proportion of the government budget to devote to agriculture, etc. Markets should refer to a mixed economy of community cooperatives, private enterprise, state enterprise, and no transnational corporations. To replace the transnational corporation, networks of free associations with demarcations or firewalls between local associations may develop.

Despite an unresponsive Washington, overextended budget and rampant corruption which seems hopeless, there are still ways in which our economic problems can be stabilized indefinitely. During the Civil War, for example, English bankers exercised an astonishing amount of influence over Lincoln’s government, just as Wall Street determines Congresses policies today. The North needed money to fund the war, and the bankers lent them money at impossible-to-repay interest rates of 24 to 26 percent. Lincoln noted that this would bankrupt the North and requested that Colonel Dick Taylor of Illinois search for a solution. Taylor informed the President that under the Constitution the US had the power to solve its financing problem by printing its money as a sovereign government. Taylor said:

Just get Congress to pass a bill authorizing the printing of full legal tender treasury notes … and pay your soldiers with them and go ahead and win your war with them also. If you make them full legal tender … they will have the full sanction of the government and be just as good as any money; as Congress is given that express right by the Constitution.6

And so Lincoln funded the war by printing paper notes supported by the credit of the government. These legal-tender U.S. Notes, otherwise known as “Greenbacks,” represented receipts for labor and goods sold to the United States. Soldiers and suppliers received them as pay and they were tradable for goods and services of a value equivalent to their service to the community. The period of the Greenback was also one of large-scale economic expansion. During this period, the steel industry was launched and the continental railroad system was initiated; farm machinery and cheap tools were bankrolled, free higher education was offered, government support was provided to the sciences, the Bureau of Mines was organized, and labor productivity was increased by 50 to 75 percent.

The Greenback was not the lone currency used to bankroll these projects, but it was key to the process. Such growth, moreover, would not have been achieved by money borrowed at the rates London was demanding.

Lincoln’s presidency represents an era in which the government recognized its power to issue a national currency, despite being opposed by powerful special interests. Believed to have been published in the London Times in 1865, the following report sums of the establishment spirit of times in regard to the monetary issue:

If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic during the late war in that country, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.

Eventually a private institution was put in charge of the technocratic printing of money within the country. The Federal Reserve is a privately-owned central bank bequeathed the power in 1913 to print Federal Reserve Notes or dollar bills and lend them to the government. Since that date, the government has suffered an increase in debt which today stands at $11 trillion.

About this system, Henry Ford noted: “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

California’s current economic woes portend a fate that awaits the rest of the country. The Golden State is currently attempting to solve its $26 billion budget deficit through massive cuts in public funding. California’s residents, making up the world’s eighth largest economy, have refused further tax hikes, and Democratic leaders have refused further cuts in services or auctioning of public assets. California should not pay for the crisis with increased taxes or decreased services or public parks.7

In the meanwhile, the state has begun paying the State’s bills with IOU’s.

Such was the idea, in fact, that helped the colonies emerge from under a pile of British debt back in the 18th century, a time during which they lacked the silver and gold used in the Old World for conducting trade. The Massachusetts Assembly then proposed a different kind of paper money, a “bill of credit” representing the government’s “bond”; in other words, an IOU. The new fiat currency was backed by no more than “full faith and credit” of the government.

Following such a model, the Federal Reserve’s current Quantitative Easing Program could potentially represent the correct monetary policy in a time of high unemployment and threat of inflation or deflation. Historically, Quantitative Easing has resulted in hyperinflation and currency devaluation, but this does not necessarily need to lead to a doomsday scenario. According to Paul Krugman, a weaker dollar might serve as benefit for the U.S.:

Although there has been a lot of doom saying about the falling dollar, that decline is actually both natural and desirable. America needs a weaker dollar to help reduce its trade deficit, and it’s getting that weaker dollar as nervous investors, who flocked into the presumed safety of U.S. debt at the peak of the crisis, have started putting their money to work elsewhere. But China has been keeping its currency pegged to the dollar — which means that a country with a huge trade surplus and a rapidly recovering economy, a country whose currency should be rising in value, is in effect engineering a large devaluation instead. And that’s a particularly bad thing to do at a time when the world economy remains deeply depressed due to inadequate overall demand.8

One reason why China has yet to let their currency rise against a weakening dollar is due to their being more concerned about sustaining consistent demand than weaknesses with the greenback.

According to the Economist:

The simplest explanation for the currency’s decline is based on risk aversion. On the days when risky assets fall, the dollar tends to go up. When risky assets rise, the dollar falls. The dollar has fallen fairly steadily since March, a period which has seen stockmarkets enjoy a phenomenal rally. Domestic American investors may be driving the relationship, repatriating funds in 2008 when they were nervous about the state of financial markets and sending the money abroad again this summer because of a perception that the global economy is reviving.9

Many concern themselves with record deficits, creating headwinds for more stimulus, which might be useful were it printed through Congress or another public entity within the government concerned with the well-being of citizens. Japan, however, has deficits twice the size of GDP and bond yields hovering below 2 percent. The Japanese are staving off deflation. On the other hand, US deficits represent 12 percent of GDP. The dollar does not need to be crushed by deficits even much greater than this. Nonetheless, as soon as the government stops spending money and running up the deficit, unemployment will soar, banks and business already tottering on the brink will default, foreclosures will go up, and the economy will slip further into Depression. Important to note, is that the US economy, unlike Japan, is nearly 50 percent based in the financial and service sector. It also boasts the world’s reserve currency.10

Currently, to be sure, consumer credit is decreasing at a year-over-year rate of 5 percent, whilst savings are up and spending is down. Unemployment sits at U6 20 percent. The nation is suffering record foreclosures, delinquencies, bankruptcies, and defaults are sucking credit from the system. Should the Federal Reserve terminate Quantitative Easing, there would be no way to increase jobs or spending.

This line of reasoning suggests that the debate about the fall of the dollar is misdirected, and that the jugular of the issue lies in wage growth and full employment. One way in which these two issues can be resolved is by printing up the two trillion in another stimulus, which, regrettably, would amount to another bailout, unless, of course, the public money creation model was followed.

The nation’s only state-owned bank, the Bank of North Carolina, was created 90 years ago, in 1919, as a result of a populist movement across the northern plains. The movement, led by the Nonpartisan league, created an industrial program, out of which both the Bank of North Dakota and a state-owned mill were created. The funding and deposit model is what truly makes the bank unique, for the bank functions as the depository for all state collections and fees, has a captive deposit base, and pays a competitive rate to the state treasurer. From those funds the banks then pays those deposits back to North Dakota as loans. Therefore, it invests back into the state in economic development type of activities.

The bank employs certain programs designed to spur growth in certain sectors of the economy, be it agricultural or economic development programs useful in the state or energy, as well as education in the form of student loan financing. Certain loan programs with low interest rates promote activity along certain lines. The bank even promotes the movement of cash to disaster loan programs meant to aid businesses, enabling the state to act quickly should it need.

The bank all on its own, however, is not the sole reason the state has avoided such the hardships of other states. Rather, the bank’s choice to stay away from subprime lending and inability to get into the derivatives markets and put on swaps and callers and caps and credit default swaps. The bank also provides a dividend back to the state: approximately half of what it makes goes to the state general fund. Over the last 12 years, the bank has contributed a third of a billion dollars to this general fund to alleviate taxes or to aid in funding public sector type of needs. This in a state of 650,000 people.

And how has the current crisis affected the state of North Dakota? According to bank president Eric Hardmeyer:

“The State of North Dakota does not have any funding issues at all. We in fact are dealing with the largest surplus we’ve ever had. So our concern is how do we spend it wisely and make sure we save it for the future.”11

Corruption in New York City and Washington DC amounts to a collusion between the political and corporate centers of power; in a word, corporatism. Representatives of finance capital are funded in elections, and quite often money talks to get certain cronies elected. When the numbers are considered, this is surely the case in the last presidential election. The expansion of Bush’s militarist and economic policies on the part of Obama is an argument in favor of the idea that the US political system is composed of one party with two factions, whose policies overlap on issues important for the aforementioned top 1-10 percent. There is very little debate carried out in the public forum and a general trajectory of centralized power continues.

The Federal Reserve enables money to be printed at near-zero interest. Along with the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve controls the purse strings of the US. Taxation and Debt have reached such crippling levels that the majority of citizens are dispirited, hopeless, and exhausted. We should all take a breather: debts that can’t be repaid, won’t. The system of taxation and debt is an old one and has been effective in keeping people in line.

The world’s economic and financial superstructure is, at present, very weak. Policies in Washington and the movement of volume for volatility on behalf of the major financial institutions hint that this is desired by the movers of money. Thankfully, through the internet many more people today are aware that crises, more often than not, do not arise by mysterious and trans-human social forces, but from insatiable greed.

HR1207 and SB604, bills in Congress to audit and investigate the Federal Reserve, have helped to further inform people of the heretofore secretive nature of policy making in these two institutions. In democratic and open societies, nothing less than total transparency are deserved by the people. The job of monetary policy belongs to the Treasury under the Constitution. A firewall between Wall Street and Washington is the next step.

The credit crisis and the breakdown of our economic and financial institutional infrastructure began two years ago. The system of so much fraud and corruption has been kept functioning through cheap money and interest rates, as well as bailouts and stimulus packages. A majority of citizens in the US do not comprehend the problems we all face. The Uberclass, as Griffith’s comment at the top of this article reflects, exist outside the realm of traditional morals and laws and maintain a malfunctioning system or status quo.

Meanwhile, the US is held captive by its creditors, while the state, due to deindustrialization and financialization, stark inequality, a minor tax revolt, and lavish spending will experience inability to pay its debts to foreign creditors and respond to future crises at home or abroad.

But some of the solutions above remind us that there is still a world of hope out there.

What is desirable is a centrifugal system in which the exchange of goods and services follows a decentralizing or peripheral trajectory. Under the current system, centripetal forces attract goods, services and therefore wealth and power to the center, in this case not Marx’s industry, but instead creditors’s industry.

U.S. Wealth Distribution: 10% of US Citizens own 70.9% of all US Assets. Daily Paul, October 18. [↩]
Caroline Binham. Goldman Sachs’s Griffiths Say Inequality Helps All, October 21. Bloomberg. [↩]
Carl Herman. 2009 US Economy: largest transfer of wealth to financial/political elite in global history, October 20. Examiner. [↩]
Carrol Quigley. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time. The Macmillan Company. [↩]
Waldon Bello. The Virtues of Deglobalization. Global Research, October 25. [↩]
Ellen Brown. Revive Lincoln’s Monetary Policy: An Open Letter to President Obama. April 8, 2009. [↩]
Ellen Brown. California Dreamin’: How the State Can Beat It’s Budget Woes, July 8 2009. [↩]
Paul Krugman, “The Chinese Disconnect,” New York Times. [↩]
“Down with the Dollar,” The Economist, Oct, 2009. [↩]
Mike Whitney, Dollar Collapse Update: “Obama Demands Pay in Euros.” Global Research, October 25. [↩]
Josh Harkinson. How the Nation’s Only State-Owned Bank Became the Envy of Wall Street. Mother Jones, March 27. [↩]

Social Engineering from a Social Engineer

2010-04-29T21:52:00.001-07:00

Pavement Video: "Shady Lane"

2010-04-29T00:53:00.000-07:00

And Oh-So Austere: globalization coming into view

2010-04-29T00:43:00.000-07:00

The globalization of cultural symbols and concepts has left the world in between two ages, a temporal space where persons and their generations find it hard to find themselves. Thanks to technological developments, the ability for culture to be diffused to distant regions of globe—from, say, a European or American cosmopolitan center to less influential nations and cities—is vastly expanded. Still, despite this intermixing in a global melting pot, with populations fleeing far westward or eastward for reprieve, promotional worlds are built up around users hunched over computers and laptops, where advertisements are personally tailored for them, divorcing them from their cluster of friends.

Whilst most of the literature on the topic of globalization argues that, as fewer and fewer transnational corporations compete to expand market share, once diverse cultures have fallen victim to a homogenization process, some research sees the reality differently. By arguing the case for blowback or resistance to trends of global cultural standardization, these analysts seemingly borrow from laws of physics that state for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

This reaction from below is newfangled nationalisms in nations that perceive a whittling away of their national sovereignty by the vector of global governance, business, and sociality as anti-republican traditions, totally devoid of respect for common law.

In his essay, Learning to be local in Belize, Richard Wilk puts his hand on this transpiration in Belize, where a mere two decades ago, at a time when foreign cultural influence was scarcely so pervasive as now, most Belizeans denied that such a thing as ‘Belizean culture’ existed at all. They did, after all, live where the United States considered backyard. For example, in the realm of cuisine, the honored guest from the north, Wilk, was usually treated to something from a can.

Such observations by Wilk turn his paper not into further proffering of the “progressive penetration of global commodities into every crevice of daily life,” but, instead, as an account of local diversification amid global standardization. To be sure, the global standardization remains, but there is community blossoming and counter-trends taking part that is very much important to the makeup of the dominant culture. In other words, Belizean absorption into international markets and contests has resulted in the people of the country flexing their distinctiveness and diversity apart from other nations. This process represents their entering into, what Wilk terms, the “structure of common difference.” (Wilk 1995)

This Belizean expression of difference positions itself contrary to the ideologies of nonpareil professional marketing managers, who attempt to invoke a transformation in consciousness, in terms of consumer behavior, from an episteme that holds for truth the existence of a universal rationality based on the western model. Put succinctly, a basic premise of their marketing techniques holds that consumers, markets and competitors around the world will behave the same; that, when put in environments more similar than different, the differences in people will tend to blur, to fade with time. This managerial rationality is an “undisputed instrument of knowledge.”

For instance, the field of neuro-marketing helps to make a science of predicting—more to the point, dictating—global consumer habits. The foundational study that gave rise to this field analyzed how, in test subjects shown products with which they identified and, therefore, enjoyed, blood rushed to a small location at the front of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain responsible for self-identification and the formation of personality. Such knowledge of human behavior can help to globalize a certain type of commoditization, a professional marketing manager might reason. (Lone 2009)

For some, globalization is an ideology, a fact of life. It certainly is a reality in every person on the plants life. Moreover, its process is a political one. As George Orwell told, everything is politics. Policies of deregulation and philosophies of free trade—a euphemism for corporate expansion—abet globalization and justify not just the macroeconomic axiom of comparative advantage, but, also, the microeconomic foundations of neuro-economics in the neo-classical economic model—including therein basic assumptions of inherent maximizing inclination of ‘Homo-economicus’ in an environment of scarcity. For historically powerful global elite financiers, internationalists and their national bureaucrats, globalization serves as a rationale for the recent history’s restructuring of states and economies; “a historically specific project of global economic management.” It is, for such entrenched power interests, “a view of ordering the world.”

Managers and experts of transnational corporations are particularly strong advocates of globalization because they view it as offering opportunities of boundless proportions; the concept by which to judge quality, mere efficiency. For them, globalization represents the possibility of doing business without restriction; that, de facto, supply and demand does not do autonomous market making and eradication, they can and do. And will continue doing so, in their “view of ordering the world.” They ensure this progression persists.

Such a worldview stands in contraposition to the free market capitalist ideology, by its mainstream definition. The vision of TNC managers, consultants and management academics is a global one. In fact, they are referred to by many as “globalist,” with “globalist” occasionally being prefaced with the qualifier “demise-of-the-state,” meaning, essentially, they hold no allegiances to any nation-state or its culture. TNC marketers built a worldview upon the maxim of globalization, thereby forming theories about consumers and competitive strategies. Although a complex abstraction, globalization daily becomes increasingly the true superstructure of our daily lives. (Applbaum 2002)

1.Wilk, Richard. (1995) Learning to be local in Belize: global systems of common difference,

2.Frank, Lone. “How the Brain Reveals Why we Buy.” Scientific American, 2 November 2009.
Accessed at:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=neuromarketing-brain

3.Applbaum, Kalman. (May 2000). Crossing Borders: Globalization as Myth and Charter in American Transnational Consumer Marketing, American Ethnologist, Vol. 27, No.2, pp. 257-282.

Town and Country Unedited: Chapter 2 or Partaking in a Hunch

2010-04-29T00:20:00.001-07:00

The following day, Sunday, while so many fraternized in their churches, Danny and Landon met. As they had planned, they drank before golf in the Seraville cantina next to the pool. The sun splashed the vast island of concrete on which Los Angeles was situated. Its earliest rays were warm on this day, as if to inspire the young birds to stumble early onto new songs. Considering today’s ripe warmth, Danny and Landon felt less guilty about their orders, many Corona’s and limes. The two played golf together on a monthly basis. Danny dominated, incontestably, the score sheet. Landon didn’t mind.

“Excellent morning for golf, eh?” asked Landon in the form of a greeting.

“Definitely,” said Danny, taking a sip of his beer. “Did you participate in any shenanigans last night?”

“Sure. I met up with a couple friends of mine, hung around and did the usual, but I slumbered early—I need to beat you someday.”

“Well, today might be your day. After last night I drank a coffee mug of wine, listened to Led Zeppelin and smoked my hookah with weed in it. I by no means feel athletic or capable, but you know what they say: Golf is 90% mental and just 50% physical,” Danny philosophized comedy with a smile smeared across his face.

“Didn’t Yogi Berra say that about baseball?”

“Last night, Landon, I looked up pot in the dictionary.” Danny suddenly said and a silence fell upon their table.

“You looked pot up in the thesaurus?”

“Yes.”

Without segue, Landon reverted back to the earlier topic: Anyway, I think Yogi Berra had a point. He had his own logic. Good for him. Logic is little more than the standardization of thought within an individual.

“I know not to question the logic passed down from our forefathers, Landon. It paved the way for someone as successful as I, did it not?”

“Weren’t you deemed clinically insane a couple years ago? Remember, that nervous breakdown you had where you…?”

“Nervous breakdown? Psh!” Danny interrupted in a deep voice. “Was that really a nervous breakdown? I didn’t know they could last the better part of a decade. I thought I had just lost it.”

“Lost what?”

“Lost, you know, it. Don’t they teach you anything at the University?”

“What, how to be sane? Are you crazy? Society is made up of belief processes that birth action institutionalized, Danny, which behave like and are viewed as persons. Religious, political, academic, monetary, ecclesiastical, all of which play some role in the order of shit and the shit has been hitting the roof for the better part 6,000 years; it just so happens that these days University serves the purpose of indebting the better-to-do classes while they’re horny and young. It’s the modern vehicle of indentured servitude parading under the moniker of knowledge and enlightenment.”

“Oh, Landon, how would you get a good job without the good education?” a half-hearted Danny said before he took a gulp of his now half-finished beer.

“At University, you learn from an authority, who learned from an authority, who learned from an authority. The titles people wear and the mythology of borders are in minds, just like the rules that give this lawn of eighteen holes a form and a meaning. The President showers naked, but in $3,000 suit nobody can imagine he’s spent a moment of his life vulnerable and unsure.”

“Hmm,” Danny replied, and then called over the morning bartender and paid the tab, where after the two made their way to the first hole. They did not use caddies for their highly scripted sojourn along the golf course, for privacy liberated themselves to each other. On the way to their tee off they walked in silence, save for a few quick quips regarding the outmoded attire of others. Their tee-time was scheduled for 9:15 AM. It was now 9:22, rather punctual for these two. “What’s your favorite Led Zeppelin album?” Landon asked. “I’m not sure, Lando, but that’s a good question. Led Zeppelin was a premonition. They gave rock n’ roll balls. Most people don’t associate punk and Led Zeppelin, but was Led Zeppelin not punk as fuck?”

“I’m probably not old enough to tell, but when I think of punk in the seventies I think of Strummer and the Clash, and try not to think of the Sex Pistols. Strummer nailed down the motifs of the counter culture: Vietnam, bankers, what have you.”

“Or what have you not. All right Lando, point taken. But, I’ll go on thinking Led Zeppelin was punk.”

Danny then took a step back from the ball he had placed upon the tee and looked in the direction of the hole ahead. He scrunched his eyes, positioned himself and took some practice swings before taking a step forward, aligning himself with the tee. Then, after peering once more with scrunched eyes at the offing, he took a shot—a solid one, indeed.

“I thought you had stayed up all night.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t matter. I got game.”

Then Landon went through his personal routine, faring well with his shot; in fact, better than Danny. The two departed from the tee of the first hole, opening up further a landscape between them and the club lobby which stood adjacent to a walking path behind the first hole. On their left-hand side was the chosen hill which carried the Country Club like a tray upon a servers palm. The landscape wore cactuses, whose pyrogenic seeds cracked while besieged by past conflagrations, and was dotted by an array of shrubs covering the land—like a pimple rising to the surface of skin. During the sunlit hours, hawks and crows surveyed the sand and dirt for snakes and rodents, killing time until they bestowed the day unto owls and orchestral crickets. Danny took a three-iron out of his bag and rounded his ball.

“You mentioned something about institutions earlier. Do you disbelieve in them? And believe that if all institutions were abolished, humanity would evolve complementary and become beneficial to all,” asked Danny.

“That is probably a gross oversimplification of what I think.”

“Probably?”

“The institutions are to the social environment what erratic rocks from the Ice Age are to the environment’s biology: archaic and mammoth boulders difficult to move, but prone, nonetheless, to the violent and displacing seizures of Nature.” Landon said. “Our institutions obfuscate the myriad ways in which they hail from failed times, simply because they helped gives rise to ourselves,” Landon said, more or less wondering out loud.

“Thus, we fail cumulatively.”

“You know that in hunter and gatherer societies the people are the masters of their institutions, not the other way around; when some practice or ritual needs revision, the community tends to do the revising. Their institutions bend to the will of the people: One not attached to form, need not be reformed—advice we ought, perhaps, to heed.” With that said, Danny drove the ball to the green, setting himself up for one final putt.

Landon exhaled a bit, not out of panic, but instead to tune his focus. Seemingly free from the consideration of taking a practice shot or two, he drove the ball directly into a rough patch nudged up against the underbelly of the graded green. Face down, he got his bag and they walked toward their lies.

“Do you have any idea what you’d like to do, Landon? You have just a year left in a college career you started late, your earning power is in this day and age, well, dust like in terms of the global economy, and there’s no need to mention your golf game.”

“Dust like, eh? That’s good enough for me. I was thinking sort of atom like. Anyway, in the survival of those who fit in best, I don’t matter. I’ve got plenty to offer, despite, and so I think you should invest in me.”

“Thank you Landon, but there’s no need for that—I invest in gold bullion.”

Landon reeled his facial features inwards and scrunched his eyes, shooting Danny a terse look that was met with a grin and a glare smeared by design like sophisticated finger painting. The two smiled and Danny made his putt. So too did Landon, albeit by way of a nice shot from the rough. Meanwhile, whilst walking along the path next to the Club’s Lobby, Mr. Avery spoke to a new employee, Sutekh Skorzeny, who was but one part of the torrent of changes rolling over the club.

“What sort of safety system do you have in mind, Mr. Avery?” the new Director of Safety inquired.

“Well, I plan on throwing a healthy sum of money at this project. I don’t want it to be obsolete in two weeks time, you know.”

“Of course, sir, of course. Might I then suggest—since the land sits on a 150 acre swathe—say, 200 cameras for now; the businesses in the mall, as private enterprise, will already be required to install their own.”

“Yes, and the way in which the land was used makes for wide open spaces, just the terrain on which a lion hunts for cattle.

“Sure—we’ll begin there,” Mr. Skorzeny replied hesitatingly, thrown of by the symbolism. “I imagine coordination with the mall will lead to new ideas.” He looked his counterpart up and down for good measure.

Mr. Avery and Mr. Skorzeny strolled past George, the head gardener at Seraville, while he trimmed back a bushel of blueberry plants growing parallel to the walkway separating the lobby from the first hole. George spoke with a lisp and walked with a limp. He never did well at school and was once told by a seventh grade teacher that his penmanship resembled that of Helen Keller. George carried that remark with him through all these years. Thankfully, he thought it a compliment. Helen Keller wrote beautiful prose, hadn’t she? And with that thought he was exactly correct, but few others saw the merit in his line of reasoning.

And now, tending the clean cut acreage, he mumbled to himself various non-sequiturs. Clouds scrolled across the sky, and a dose of sun aided him in his task. The Los Angeles sky was a foray of sounds as the birds and the insects lived incessantly to outdo one another, both gaining and losing, all an attempt merely to strike a balance. Although the natural was suppressed by the cacophony of the city, the city had no pity. On the course that day, also, was Charles Huntington, known as Chuckie while he was a young child, and these days, simply, Chuck. He seldom humored George with drivel, even less often with dialogue of inter-essence, but decided to do so now—that momentaneous certain uncertainty.

“George, how do ya do?”

“Howdy sir, I’m doing well, sir. How about you, sir?” George shifted from one foot to the other and stared at the hefty sheers in his hands.

“Oh, I’m doing just fine, thanks. Enjoying a day on the course. You do a great job with the upkeep of the place. Do you know that, George?”

“Thank you sir, that really does mean a lot. People mention it from time to time, but I tend to just take it as a manners thing.” His lisp forced an f at the beginning of ‘thing.’

“Well, it’s not just that George, we mean it—if you ever want anything, you can ask a good number of us for uh favor.”

“Thanks, Mr. Huntington. Enjoy the back half of your game.”

“And you enjoy the rest of your day.” Mr. Huntington turned from George and headed back towards his gear, where his golfing partners and two club caddies were left in waiting. They continued their game and George continued his work. George felt well after his encounter with Chuck, once Chuckie, and officially Charles. From the offing reverberated hip-hop, seductively taming molecules of air and easing George’s attention, as he liked the rhythm for the orgy of emotions it conjured within. In Mr. Avery’s second storey office above the lobby, the obsessive-compulsive conversation between him and Sutekh lingered on.

“Now, Mr. Skorzeny, I want to think big. There is a lot of flux in the markets right now, and I don’t want to be elbowed out. We’ve got to give our members a stake in the sort of moral club we’d like to see.”

“Well, how big are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking as big as we can; for instance, ways of making our members mentally and physically prepared for their lives—electromagnetic frequencies pushing out a certain amount of hertz, those frequencies known to affect human biological and mental functioning for the better.” Sutekh cocked his head to the side and he wondered what sort of insanity he had gotten himself into by accepting the job. He should have stayed with his Intelligence job, he thought. He suppressed the thought deep inside himself, nodding his head and forcing a smile. But seriously, he thought—still to himself—what sent Avery off the deep-end?

“Yeah okay, I guess I’ve heard of such things,” In science-fiction, he thought to himself.

“We’ll look into it. Let’s ask some of our members connected with companies involved in such operations.”

“Oh, I’m sure we can get into touch with the military directly, living in Southern California and all. We are a well known club, been around since the days of the sons of the railroad tycoons, since the days when the California bight was scarcely populated. It should be no problem, Mr. Skorzeny.”

“I’m on it, Mr. Avery.” He pushed back his chair and straightened his knees. With a wink and a nod, he left the office. Avery took a cigar from his desk drawer and lit it. He leaned back in his recliner.

The yoke which knitted skies, seas and continents made feelers, shapers, introducers of novelty, ears and eyes out of creatures great and small. The club—crude in its relative youth—was but a vault swinging finitely amidst this infinite orb. While its collectivity was a pendulum, and the roles the members played their guides, interchange spawned the refashioning in blinks of time enclaved in geologic seizures and yawns. Addicted to the tyranny of belonging, their selves were increasingly subjugated to a carapace that let them be among such a felicitous crowd as this. This carapace, upon removal from one setting to another, was swiftly shed for a total change in conversation, opinion, and idea—new skin: each was one, but plural too. Yet, without trees of assorted shapes and sizes—and the advices and ancient secrets each timber acquired from its own interactions with expression—there can be no forest erupting in choral diversity.

The club would, as all things, one day wither and fade under the stress of monotony. Saliva swapped in the affair of existence and furthered the raveling and unraveling of all there is, and a subsequent creativity festooned the details. Windy kisses swirled around the club and the city, wrapping themselves around the trees and the buildings and the people. Much as the people gave to the city its character, the people meshed with the animals. Once students in the ways of the hunt, curiously studying the leopard, the jaguar, the eagle, wolf, and bear, and now attired in furs and imitations of other species, their human persistence was not solely of their own accord. Flora and Fauna, reptiles and mammals are vestiges in the forgetful minds of humans, overlooked by people in ivory towers in the city centers.

Club members and city dwellers surrendered what they saw to what the others had already and will have seen; the multitude of the past and the multitude of the future. Borrowing ghostly memories from our ancestors and partaking in a hunch that passes for reality, they themselves were the only learning devices they would ever need. They sacrificed this ultimately finite, but combinatorial infinite, knowledge in order to suffer silently alone, rarely discovering suffering alone they were not and never had. With Avery’s speech the club had been born anew, and accumulation of experiences fresh with the scent of change lied ahead.

Danny squared himself up to the last drive of the day, when a great break in calm moments erupted as an earthquake. He looked forward, towards Landon, whose eyes were hard-boiled eggs in sockets. Mouth agape, he uttered the obvious: “That’s an earthquake!”

On the golf course, everyone stood still. Elsewhere, in the buildings of the club and in the city, sequestered persons scattered about, stripped of the illusion of safety. The drinks before the game had made Landon’s and Danny’s stomachs uneasy. As they stood in the tide of seismic ripples, they slowly turned blue. As the quake began, Danny and Landon had made eye contact with the players around them, but now their concentration collapsed in on itself and converted all of its energy towards remaining composed. The shaking did not stop, however, for what seemed to be a very long time. Their needle vision was a laser piercing through all distraction as they tried to focus.

Danny opened his mouth and held his breath, and started to heave. He began to vomit. Landon turned to avoid the sight, but the movement itself was too much and he followed suit. The slimy yellow-red liquid turned the grass below from a dark green to a cocktail of primary colors. The shaking subsided. Hands on their knees, Danny and Landon stood ass-to-ass. Huntington and his partners looked on.

“You two okay over there?” he asked.

“Yes, sir!” Landon yelled, hands on knees, hoping this incident was not to get him fired.

“That just took us a little bit by surprise,” Danny said.
“Mmhmm,” Mr. Huntington responded. “Have a late night last night?”

“An early morning,” Danny replied.

“Shut up, Danny! I work here,” Landon whispered angrily.

Rihanna's "hard" macht Nazi Proganda aus den USA

2010-04-28T01:46:00.000-07:00

Just look at 23 seconds in! That is a "heil Hitler." What irony, to think such "coincidences" have penetrated musical space where Public Enemy taught "Fight the Power."

It's also oh-so Wagnerian.

Chalk one up for Freud while you're at it. Damn Rihanna looks sexy on that tank.

a great website for analysis on pop culture is Vigilant Citizen. They point out the mickey mouse hat refers to mind control. Didn't Walt Disney have Nazi proclivities?

Town and Country Unedited: Chapter 1 or "With a wrinkled brow and his head cocked to the side"

2010-04-28T00:45:00.000-07:00

Seraville Country Club sat atop a hill not only in physical space, but also in the minds of those who mingled there. To them it was a kingdom on a hill not just in somewhere, but nearer to the heavens, where those made up of the most meaningful matters fit in. The continents of fantasy which gave form to pallid thought were oft made to be real in that all-encompassing, open-ended conglomeration of spacetime. Seraville was no exception, and all of this was made possible in that place plush with uncertainty, otherwise known as “now.” If there was one thing that was certain to the Country Club membership, it was that playing there was a privilege. Politicians, lauded business men, clergymen, judges, media anchors, bank owners, the sons of bank owners, and one closet drug-handler spent their days together discussing the weather and the things to which their money was connected. Of temporal course, deference was no stranger at Seraville, for it had a hologram hierarchy broadcast by minds.

The peak of the Roman Catholic pyramid is occupied by what amounts to few officials. There are one Pope, 55 cardinals, 22 apostolic delegates, 256 vicars apostolic, 245 archbishops, 1, 578 bishops. And so, they hang around tables eating and musing about how comfy they live underneath the heaven’s floorboards. In the Soviet Union, the Communist party had its pointy heavenward end in the Political Committee of only nine or ten members. They didn’t concern themselves much with God, but watched their own backs and feared for their lives just the same. The relatively loose structure of the United States confers considerable influence upon a Supreme Court of nine, a Presidency of one, the Congress of a few hundred congressmen, and the American Senate for 480 Senators. Deference pyramids are over time sheer and steep. Seraville, whose members—just as all Good Catholics, Comrades, Germans and Americans—thought of themselves as the center of the universe, came to a head in a 10 person Board of Governors. Democratic, one might argue, considering only a few hundred were members.

The club covered approximately 250 acres of planet Earth owned by Randolph Avery, the proud owner of Avery Real Estate, the second largest Real Estate firm in the United States. His concern for his under lords, his subjects, had no end. He made a point of reminding them this intermittently throughout the years. He knew that their dedication to the cause was pertinent to the continuity of their little abode away from the doldrums of most other people’s experiences. The club is just as much theirs as his, he would tell them, though they were his capital and not vice versa. Everyone had been contented by a decade of prosperity and a growth they envisaged as unswerving, linear and perdurable. And so Mr. Avery began his speech for the night within a room enveloped by a clear night, underneath stars punched in the fabric of space, hinting of universes without.

“Gentlemen of the Seraville Country Club, their better-halves,” the crowd chuckled robotically, as if little signs appeared above stage right and stage left:

Chuckle Appropriately

What a neat trick.
“I would like to welcome you to one of the most important banquets in this country club’s young life,” Mr. Avery carried on. Seraville’s most distinguished members were on hand this evening awaiting the formal announcement of something they already knew. Judge Finestone was there, as well as Senator Mathewson, Pastor Schroeder, Head News Anchor for BEST News, Skippy Style, and even the owner of BEST News and the myriad associated news centers, Clemens Roger. Some other people were there too. Behind Avery on stage sat a number of personages, some unfamiliar to club members. Investors and city officials celebrated the new era for Seraville, many of whom had put much at stake in the name of club progress. “In its long and colorful history, some of Los Angeles’ most prominent have called Seraville their second home. There is no denying that Seraville is one of the best Country Clubs in this great land and that you, the members of Seraville, are among the privileged elite.”

Applause

Mr. Avery’s body was hardly decrepit, in spite of its sixty years. The slicked-backed, phony black of his hair hid a plastic bag gray with the same polymers in the acrylic paints that protested the scene on the concrete walls in the city, with such slogans as:

“Is anybody out there?”

And,

“Ahhhhh”

Furthermore, Avery’s gray, two-piece suit hinted at party-line. In the last row and furthest chair on the right, Danny Tolstoy paid with attention, at a cost of wandering thoughts in five minute intervals, sometimes four or even three.

“It is a surprise that he still has to read his speeches, considering they are all the same,” said Danny to a Mervin Montague, a man who happened to be as deaf as a worm. Danny knew this; nevertheless he persisted, certain the others would notice. “His speeches are pop songs.”

Avery: “In 1896, when Seraville first opened, it was an escape for the most important people of the day—from the military and the press—and it is clear to see not much has changed. Many of your great, great grandfathers and uncles were here when my great, great grandfather presided over club affairs more than 85 years ago,” Avery went on and on, for he had the persistent vector of tradition, and only tradition, at his desperate defense. He molded it with a fierce accuracy. Knowing precisely the right time to pluck the fruit from the tree, he told the others that, they too shared the thousand-point light bright nexus.

“While I was a boy I used to help out my father as he managed the grounds, trying my darndest to learn everything he taught me about how to be a successful in real estate and otherwise courtly in my conduct. Oh, how surprised our forebears would be today to see how far the club has come. With the addition of more than 200 acres and the residential area Freedom Ridge, it is hard to counter the assertion that Seraville is truly a place for the blessed,” Mr. Avery contended, convincingly enough, thereby making some in the audience to absolve themselves from church in the morning. “Freedom Ridge, if you didn’t already know, is seventy-five enormous mansions within Seraville territory, safely gated and watched 24 hours a day by top-of-the-line security guards—so that you and your family may be safe at night.”

“Top of the line security guards? Where has this wrinkly-old, senile cracker been? I sleep for seventy-five percent of my night shifts at that gate, and then I have sex,” said Marlon, a young man of twenty-five, fresh on the force of mercenaries at Holy Security. “This asshole pays us $7.50 an hour and then calls us top of the line. Shit, if I was top of the line…”

“The minimum wage is like $8.40 an hour, that’s what we’re making, I think. But, you seriously get laid during your shifts!?” Tim, another security guard, interrupted eagerly in a whisper. “And I am always paranoid during my shifts because I am getting stoned.”

“I do that, too. How do you pass the mandatory drug tests?” Marlon quietly snapped, his curiosity piqued.

“Cranberry juice,” Tim answered in a deadened but somehow uplifting tone, as one does when reminding another. “I think I give about one-half of my paycheck to those goddamn cranberry drink companies.”

“Hope you get the shit without any high fructose corn syrup in it,” Marlon said. “I hear that shit is like in everything nowadays.”

“Yeah, so what if I do? A homie’s got to pay for his weed. Cheap cranberry drink is just that—cheap. You apparently stay away from that stuff, and you aren’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed.”

Meanwhile, the speech: “In 1997 the Seraville Club Center was opened up providing you, the members and therefore the bosses of Seraville, with a gym, gourmet restaurant and gambling room.”

“We’re onboard, you had us at hello,” said the audience through their applause. “And now ladies and gentlemen, it is time to announce the most crucial point of the history of Seraville,” after which Avery exhaled and looked at the special guests sitting mannerly behind him.

In the kitchen of the ballroom, two young servers hid in a corner obstructed by an ice machine where they attempted to hastily polish off two water glasses filled halfway with vodka.

“We have to drink these fast, Avery is almost finished with his speech,” said Landon, a brown eyed, lightly skinned student with short, wavy hair.

“Oh, to hell with Avery,” snapped Landon’s corpulent colleague, Barbeque, quietly. “Without these drinks I’d never be able to look him in the face and inform him not only was his speech bullshit, but that he’s an asshole too. The way I see it, we’re doing him a favor getting wasted.”

“The way you see it got you fired from your last job, Barbeque,” Landon riposted. “You even told me so.”

Knowing perfectly well the speech was coming to a close, the two took deep breaths and let the clear, pungent liquid slide along the glasses and down their throats, filling their stomach with a hot sensation as if a stove in their stomachs had been turned on. Filling up these very moments in the ballroom, the chicanery lingered as it had: “It is time for us to hoist Seraville up on our shoulders and carry it among the most adept classes of society, where we and it belong.”

With a wrinkled brow and his head cocked a little to the side, Danny curiously glanced around the room before leaning to Merv and whispering, “You should have somebody explain that to you later. I would, but we don’t speak the same language.” “On this date, I, Randolph Avery, formally announce the consolidation of the Seraville Country Club into the proper town of Seraville, California, and name myself Mayor; effective immediately. Confusion the semi-colon conveyed was lost on the crowd, as they erupted into a rogue applause that was not to be tamed for some time. Danny curled over in laughter struggling for breath as he incontinently exhaled, and Merv was stuck in the interstitial of audio-less visuals.

Those who noticed Danny whispered deride to their neighbors, plenty familiar with his customary fracas. Mr. Avery, now finished with his speech, walked the length of stage right shaking the hands of those that presided from atop the stage over the preceding and their wives. The crowd grew tired of ovation and adulation, and dispersed, the lion’s share seeking hors d'oeuvres and alcohol. Landon and Barbeque placed the dirtied glasses in their proper places so as to not make unnecessary work for others and wore proudly the smiles stirred to veracity by the vodka.

“Let’s do this quick as we can. Just make it look nice, you know,” Landon said. As the two left the white, sterile kitchen, they were stopped by the one whose role was Manager. It crossed Barbeque’s mind that the two likely exuded the smell of alcohol, but remained calm and cool, and focused his attention patiently at the divergence in his way. Landon, aloof in thoughts whose foundation was that of arrogance, did not fear the Manager, for he had, over the years, learned to let himself be free of traditional worries. He feared only that the history found in the past, lay as well in the future.

“Good smiles,” the Manager praised.
“Now, be sure the two of you make this place so clean you’d drink from the ground,” like a cat might do. A degrading remark from a superior to subordinates, although the workers were used to such maltreatment, and their obsequiousness set the stage for still further discomfiture.

“Yes, sir,” they said together, all at once. The two began their work. Landon was filled with the satiating energy of affirmation he found in the alcohol. The two hastily crowded as much dinnerware as they could onto their thin, round trays, walked into the kitchen and crowded everything around Manuel—whose duty it was at the end of the night to wash the dishes—and repeated, ever so often nattering or making offhanded remarks to each other about the soup of gobbledygook in which they wasted away.

The addressees at the banquet mostly ignored the presence and surface diligence of Landon and Barbeque. Save for now and then as someone articulated to them something they believed to be pointed, but was, in an honest reality, the defeated nudging of air molecules. In all probability, to be sure, these assorted espousals or nippy jokes or irrelevant and nosy inquiries were stabs for attention or camaraderie or something of the sort.

“Be aware not to miss a napkin or a used rum and cola glass!” shouted a lowly club member from a nearby table as Landon cleaned. Landon customarily smiled. “Come here,” the man said, gesturing with his index finger, pulling it in towards his chin.
“What’s your name?”

“Landon, what is yours, Sir?” in a contrived cheerfulness, he answered.
“And where do you go to school and church, young man?” the man said, ignoring Landon’s question.

“Well, I went to high school at San Juarez Academy. Now I am at the University. And I don’t go to church.”

“Well, perhaps that can be forgiven as you went and got yourself into an academy. You must at least have potential to earn your keep.”

“Yes sir.”

“I tell you what, here is my business card. Give me a call sometime and if you need anything, and you’re on Mr. Avery’s good side, I might just see what I can do,” said the drunken man, tripping over phonemes. Landon was prescient enough to notice that the man in the striped suit addressed him with a drunk sincerity and, also, had trouble stringing together sense. But he didn’t care enough to ask for sense to be made, or think much of it, for that matter; for he had been conditioned to associate others with balderdash.

Without having consciously tried, Danny found himself within earshot of Mr. Avery, who was placing onto his plate assorted cheeses and small slices of white bread. Danny couldn’t think of much to say worth his own while, and so he mulled over the cake provided. Antagonistically, Avery gestured in his direction, breaking his hobnob with important folk to talk to the eccentric fellow nobody much cared for. They spoke seldom, Avery and Danny, although the newly self-appointed mayor had learned to respect Danny, for his myriad talents endowed him with an air of exceptionable mystery.

“So, what do you think Danny, to be part of such a community?”
“Well, I’m honored—what else can I say? Rumor has it there’s even going to be a new shopping center? Wow, this is really something—a historic day, for sure.”

“You betcha,” Avery said. “We have just about our own little country here. Next thing you know we’ll write a constitution.”

“Well, is that so? I’m sure some of the corporations our members work for have larger GDP’s than most countries, but you and I both know that that’s par for the course these days. But a constitution? Have you thought about just opening up a PR office? I’d love to run it. I’ve always thought I’d have a knack for pulling at heart strings.”

“By golly, that’s an idea.”

“An idea indeed,” Danny rejoindered, taken aback by the mayor’s keenness for observation.

“All we’d need is a simple slogan people could latch onto. How about, ‘come join us, you rich hunk, you.’ Isn’t that the latest marketing trend: hitting on your consumer base?’” “We’ll see Danny. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to return to the members at hand.”
“Or wait, I’ve got another one,” Danny rushed to get it out before the Mayor had departed the conversation. “’Be Rich, bitch.’ What do you think?”

Mr. Avery pretended not to hear. Although Danny had known for quite some time that he was not a part of the membership in the minds of most of the members, per se—he did, all the same, enjoy being on the outside looking in—he had never anywhere else been so blatantly ostracized as he had been at the Club—not in school, not at work, not ever. He was always among the most popular. That this was not the case at Seraville did not deflate his ego. After pondering the affront, Danny made his way towards Landon, whom he’d always tipped lavishly, despite that such loyalty to a meager club worker elicited suspicion among the courtlier members.

“What’s up, Danny?” Landon inquired. \

“Not much, Landon. What do you think of all this self-indulgent frippery?”

“It’s a contumacious bunch, these shitheads. It’s pleasurable at one level, though, to watch them all lick spit-filled water out of a bowl at master’s feet. By Master I mean Mayor, of course. Not so pleasurable when you consider they have no idea they’re doing it.”

“Karma is on a round trip, right back to them in the end.”

“Karma’s not in demand.”

“Oh Landon, you’re a cynical bastard. How old are you—thirty ?”
“No, twenty-six.”
“You ought to muster up some pep and spare some of the chagrin for later on. There’ll be plenty of time for that.”

“But Danny, by then I will be a member of the club,” Landon said in a rising, expectant voice. “What more could a working class white boy ask for, but the steady climb up; you know, a little upward mobility?”

“All right, I need to get one more glass of wine for the road; when the kids are this sardonic we must be on the edge of a new dark age. I should also mingle once more so everyone’s last memory of me on this night isn’t commiserating with a modern day Karl Marx.” He started on the wend.

“I’d prefer Malcom X,” said Landon with a grin. Danny stopped moving, one foot already started in front of the other—direction wine—and looked at Landon for an extra second in blasé bewilderment.

“Yeah okay, farewell my boy—see you tomorrow for our golf game,” Danny said, palm of his hand now on Landon’s shoulder blade. Danny walked briskly to the seat in which he had sat during the newly anointed mayor’s speech, where he nodded his head forward to acknowledge Montague, and then bent at the waist to pick up his portable coffee cup.

“Not to worry Mr. Montague, the lights are prettier than the sounds,” he said, albeit without successfully luring the attention of his deaf friend. He said it again, but this time to himself: “The lights are prettier than the sounds. What does that even mean?” he wondered, and decided he ought to attempt to cut back on his dosage of pharmaceutical pills.

With a look of earnestness—so as to disguise his intent—he set off for the bottles of wine, knowing full-well it would take a smooth maneuvering of blather and stealth to pour wine into the coffee cup without alluring too much attention towards himself. He had done this before, but remained nervous in spite—nevertheless, he parted not from determination and the task. As a gist of thought made him aware that everyone had turned away, he seized the opportunity, and started over towards the table on which the wine sat. He walked over confidently and briskly, uncorked the already opened bottle of wine and then poured smoothly.

The coffee cup filled to the brim, the bottle found its way back to the table and on the bed of ice. Danny glanced around the room. The others busied each other while he made for the door. He stepped outside where his body interrupted a fragment of breeze that splashed around his body—it was neither cold nor hot nor warm for that matter: Usually, so long as vanity was excluded from the equation, one felt as at home in the air of a Los Angeles eventide as in one’s own skin.

On his way to the valet, he kept his nose to the sky and watched the wind bully, in slow motion, colluviums clouds; nudging them like marching prisoners of war herded by officers, on and on for some vague eternity. He then handed the valet a card on which a description of his car was written: A silver hybrid, the only one at Seraville. Danny felt hip in it. The valet said thanks and went off to fetch the auto. Danny turned his body in circles and wondered if an owl turning only its head had it any easier. More and more, as his eyes adjusted to the night, the scenery around him emerged out of an ebon formlessness like fresh hallucinations. The valet returned with the hybrid, Danny handed him a scrunched up twenty dollar bill—one of the better tips the young valet would receive on this night—and drove off, but not before taking a sip from his “coffee.” On the inside, Landon and Barbeque finished their duty. Although they would soon be free to carry on with their night, the bulk of the fun elsewhere—at parties and bars, etc.—waned. For, in a contrivance of work, the hour was always growing later. Still, they made haste.

Muse - United States of Eurasia

2010-04-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

Years Have Passed Since Twain Outlined, History Rhymes. The Return of the Robber Barons

2010-04-21T12:38:00.000-07:00

So, obviously, the richest are getting much, much richer and luxuriating in a modern Gilded Age. With a cesspool of corruption as its core, a cartel of western financial institutions and the much documented military industrial complex—especially in the United States, United Kingdom and France—have formed a “black hole” alliance, out of which nothing seems to escape. Think “bailout.” Passed under the guise of stimulating a zombie economy, it seems we’ve been left with zombie banks and bankers, preying on the blood of its victim, humanity. Unemployment in the U.S. remains over 22 percent, and an economy dissembled by outsourcing—by way of agreements such as NAFTA and GATT—still wavers due to a grave lack of industrial export capacity and uncertainty surrounding the Federal Reserve Note as the world’s reserve currency. In the interim, a global market correction leaves domesticated populations—dependent upon the most voluminous investments made, typically, by demise-of-the-state globalists—fearful of the precarious present and future. For the global brain, the fear is cognitively and physically paralyzing.

As the economic union that, ultimately, became known as the European Union passes into its second phase—continental austerity—the world watches as guinea pig economies such as Iceland and Greece are forced to restructure their economies based on the new model, a lower and less-free standard of living. Iceland, God bless them, is putting up a fight against their banking masters. Resistance in Greece is mounting. Many other countries, such as the U.S. and Britain, are “putty in the hands of the police state,” as former assistant secretary to the treasury under Ronald Regan, Paul Craig Roberts, put it. Alongside a burgeoning multinational, coordinated police state apparatus, global institutions—such as the International Monetary Fund—take the reign of sovereign nations in the newfangled post-democratic era, directing their futures while anticipating dissent and riots.

While the “unwashed masses” bemoan a coincidental and inevitable banking collapse and depression, more astute minds understand the true nature of the ominous and indicative era-defining downturn. Last week, it was announced, the investment bank Goldman Sachs is to face civil charges for fraud. This is but one case among many against financial institutions around the world. As the Guardian UK reports, “Big Finance in the 21st century turns out to have been Big Fraud.” The paper reports, also, that Britain—the epicenter of the world financial system at present—has, as of yet, not brought a single bank up on charges. “We have to live with the fiction that our banks and bankers are whiter than white, and any attempt to investigate them and their institutions will lead to a mass exodus to the mountains of Switzerland. The politicians of the Labour and Tory party alike are Bambis amid the wolves.” (1)

In Ireland, Sean FitzPatrick, the ex-chair of the Anglo Irish bank was arrested last month and interrogated over—more likely nicely requested to provide some fuzzy details—alleged fraud. Last week, the parliament of Iceland handed a dossier on the Icelandic banks to its public prosecution service. Lehman, a court-appointed examiner discovered, consciously manipulated its balance sheets to appear stronger than it was. UBS, in Switzerland, has had to defend itself from the U.S.’s Internal Revenue Service for allegedly running 17,000 offshore accounts to evade tax.

Deception by banks and bankers, says the Guardian, is the root of the charges. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Goldman Sachs created financial instruments that were designed to transfer wealth to one favored client from other, less favored ones. The charge indicts Goldman’s vice-president, Fabrice Tourre, as having designed financial instruments composed of valueless sub-prime mortgages at the instruction of a hedge fund client. The exotic instrument, known by the higher echelons of Goldman Sachs to be valueless, was sold to ignorant investors. Goldman says the buyers were “among the most sophisticated investors” in the world. Goldman Sachs was the top campaign contributor to Brand Obama.

Hope and Change, Hope and Change, Hope and Change, Hope and Change.

Mark Twain’s Gilded Age doesn’t compare to todays, although many of the elite players remain the same. Robert Frank dubbed the world of this rising superclass “Richistan.” In Richistan Rolex watches are junk, akin to cheap watches worn by patrons of Wal Mart. Instead, Richistanians wear proudly $736,000 Franck Muller timepieces, and write with $700,000 Mont Blank jewel-encrusted pens, while their bodyguards carry $42,000 Louis Vuitton handbags for wives and mistresses. Their social lives take place at clubs open only to those with $100 million and more, they play golf on $650,000 gold club memberships, eat $50 hamburgers and $1,000 dollar omelettes, drink $90 bottle Bling mineral water and drink $10,000 “martinis on a rock.” Not sure what that last delicacy is? Oh, nothing other than gin or vodka poured over a diamond at New York’s Algonquin Hotel.(2)

The Richistanians are the CEOs who have outsourced their companies and exchanged American wages for $100 million bonuses for none other than themselves. They are investment bankers and hedge fund managers, the creators of subprime mortgage derivatives that threaten to collapse the economic foundation of western civilization. These proprietors—the self-proclaimed fittest, the elitists, illuminists, masters of the universe, slave owners; whatever you wish to call them—are the owners of wealth unimaginable to the average person; and their values and morals equally unimaginable to most, the inverse of the honest person.

The real wages and salaries of American workers are plummeting. Their debts are at all time highs, while the prices of their main asset—the home—falls due to overbuilding and fraud-based financed. For investment bankers, life is good. These persons let their “invisible trade” do their work for them. They collect fees for creating financing packages for debt. Many officials across the board have outright admitted that, in fact, the real values of repackaged debt instruments are unbeknownst to both buyer and seller. Most derivatives are never priced by the market. Never before in the history of the United States has an elite exercised such control over the state and, therefore, people. Without millions of dollars, ones hope of even running for public office is decimated early on.

The Gilded Age of old does offer us some perspective. Those thirty five-years, from the Civil War’s end until the end of the First World War, saw the United States race from a war torn nation to a global power broker. Not only was the U.S. recovering from a bloody war, but, also, from the loss of a divisive, but respected President in Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had foreseen what the future had in store: (3)

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

The hyper-industrialization that took place after the war emphasized the development of railroads, steel mills, and oil fields. In fact, at the turn of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was a huge oil producing region—a la Saudi Arabia—and would give rise to “car culture” at the turn of the twentieth century, in which we all drive by feel, usually solo, to our offices in the sky—or the unemployment office. (4)

Like today, the period from 1865-1900 was one of very rapid change. Efforts to circumvent the rights gained for blacks during the preceding decades were quite successful, and the country was to be segregated for another one-hundred years. Further, the Fourteenth Amendment, originally drafted to give blacks more rights, was eventually used by a paid-off Supreme Court to imbue corporations with personhood and, therefore, rights under the Constitution. This period represents the time when corporations began expanding their activities across state lines—and eventually across national borders—with the help of robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller and J.P Morgan.

As United States society figured how what to do with newly freed slaves, big business was on the rise. To many of these corporations, the Fourteenth Amendment—drafted to free slaves—offered an opportunity to expand their power. Of the 150 cases regarding the Fourteenth Amendment leading up to the end of the nineteenth century, 15 involved blacks and 135 involved firms. Blacks won only one case of those 15. Corporations, on the other hand, succeeded in utilizing the Fourteenth Amendment to shield them from governmental regulation. (5) In an 1886 tax dispute between the Southern Pacific Railroad and the state of California, Chief Justice Morrison Waite evidently advised attorneys to skip testimony regarding whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause included corporations, for “we are all of the opinion that it does.” (6)

It was The Gilded Age: a booming exterior only covered the devastated undertow. The industrial and political elites in both the north and south had organized the largest streak of economic growth in human history, albeit amidst a familiar and fantastic culture of corruption. Extraordinary wealth laid in the hands of very few individuals, who drove, not only the policy of major industries and finance, but, also, politics itself. The laborers of these men came from a number of different backgrounds: black, white, Chinese, European immigrants, as well as women. Despite a laboring “masses,” no longer was human muscle the keystone of production. Rather, steam and electricity dominated, as iron replaced wood, and steel replaced iron. Between 1870 and 1910, due to new farming techniques and agricultural mechanization, the number of Americans who farmed fell by a third. Cities grew and grew up on through to the present day, when 75% of men live in the overcrowded “human habitats.” In the years between 1860 and 1914, New York’s population boomed from 850,000 to 4 million; Chicago’s from 110,000 to 2 million; Philadelphia’s from 650,000 to 1.5 million. (7)

Clearly, despite the unparalleled wealth creation, it was a costly time for workers. For each mile of railroad built, each ton of coal or iron ore mined, thousands of them died, like so many laboring ants at the mercy of child’s play. Abundant were the tricks up the sleeves of the entrenched oligarchy. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1877 was intended to regulate the railroads on behalf of consumers. But, “from a railroad point of view,” one lawyer explained, “the [Act]…is or can be made of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal…” It is this sort of dark brilliance for which Wall Street is known.

The Central Pacific railroad started on the West Coast headed east. $200,000 dollars in bribes to Washington were needed to acquire the nine million acres of free land and $24 million in government bonds. The construction was carried out, over four years, by three thousand Irish and ten thousand Chinese. The wages were one to two dollars a day. The Union Pacific had received, for free, 12 million acres and $27 million in bonds. Both railroads were built along longer, impractical routes, in order to gain subsidies from the towns through which they passed.

The fraud of the railroads meant more control of the railroad finances by bankers. By the 1890’s, the lion’s share of the railroad was concentrated into six large organizations. Four of these were under the partial or full control of the House of Morgan, and two other by the bankers Kuhn, Loeb, and Company. J.P Morgan linked railroads to railroads, the railroads to banks, and the banks to insurance companies, creating an intertwined network under his influence as a distributor of credit. By 1900, he held 100,000 miles of railroad; that is, half of the country’s mileage.
Another baron is John D. Rockefeller. Having started as a bookkeeper in Cleveland, John D. Rockefeller accumulated money while being a merchant, and then bought his first oil refinery in 1862. By 1870, he had started Standard Oil Company of Ohio. His secret agreements with railroads allowed him to ship his oil with rebates and discounts, thusly driving competitors out of business. By 1899, The Standard Oil Company, acting as a holding company, controlled the stock of many firms, with $110 million in capital, and $45 million in profit a year. John D. Rockefeller’s fortune was estimated at $200 million.

It was not and is not an unusual tale, the one in which clever businessmen builds empires by mercilessly defeating competition, keeping prices high and wages low, and using government subsidies. At the turn of the century, American Telephone and Telegraph had a monopoly over the nation’s telephone system, and International harvester made 85 percent of all farm machinery. The banks had interests tied up in many of these monopolies. This created an interwoven network with overlapping, and powerful, corporate directors, each of whom sat on the boards of many corporations other than their own. A Senate report in the early twentieth century revealed that Morgan, at his peak of power, sat on the board of forty-eight different corporations, and Rockefeller thirty-seven corporations.

While the government attempted to appear neutral, its policies greatly benefited the rich, whether it was passing legislation to enable corporations to exist in multiple states at once or in the form of massive land subsidies to few corporations for the railroad. The irrelevance of the fallacious two-party system was made obvious when, in 1877, the Democrats and Republicans arranged to elect Rutherford Hayes. No matter which party was elected, national policy would not change in any significant way.
In 1844, when Grover Cleveland was elected president, he assured industrialists: “No harm shall come to any business interest as the result of administrative policy so long as I am President…a transfer of executive control from one party to another does not mean any serious disturbance in existing conditions.” Despite past subsidies to corporations, Cleveland refused to provide relief to Texas farmers to help them purchase grain during a drought. In the same year, Cleveland used his surplus of gold to pay wealthy bondholders at $28 dollars above the $100 value of each bond, representing a gift of $45 million.

In the United States, political debate of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were largely defined by the tariff. Historically, protectionism and free trade have been central to the ways in which we scrutinize possible trade policies. At present, this remains similar, as controversies over NAFTA and GATT have proven. Following the Civil War, the single most lucid issue delineating the Democratic from the Republican Party was the tariff. “The controversy was a maze of rhetoric, greed, and statecraft befogged by myth,” one historian reflects. When we examine the jugular of the issue, the tariff debate turns out to be a clever deterrent from the real issues in the economic nation. Economic nationalism functioned as a smoke screen for divergent class interests, just as it had during the American Revolution.

Underneath the apparent difference of opinion regarding the tariff, their indeed existed a deep consensus: despite the quarreling, both sides by the 1870’s agreed the nation’s economy should be an economy beneficial to elite capital interests. Both sides, moreover, agreed in hyper-industrialization—no matter the cost to workers at that time. Reviewing the debate in the Journal of American History, James L. Huston stated: (8)

“Protectionists lauded property rights as the basis of civilization, urged the lower classes to climb the ladder of success,…and deprecated any attempt of laborers to form unions….The free trade position…was not different from that of the protectionists. They too were stout supporters of capitalism, and they envisaged greater wages for the employee arising from the expansion of business.”
Muckraker journalist Mathew Josephson exposed in a 1938 expose, called The Politicos, “There were coal and iron industrialists on both sides….In the case of Henry Havemeyer of the Sugar Trust, and the Standard Oil men, the practice of making contributions to both parties was…openly reported.”

The spread of education during this period meant the proliferation of literate workers, both skilled and semiskilled. In the middle and late nineteenth century, high schools aided the industrial system. History, for example, was used to encourage patriotism. The educational and political demeanor of the teachers was controlled by loyalty oaths, teacher certification, and the requirement of citizenship. School officials, furthermore, controlled what textbooks were used— not the teachers. It is during this period when the factory like nature of the classroom revealed itself fully. Many commentators of the time noticed how unenthusiastic were the schoolchildren, and stern were the teachers. By 1939, the students would be shepherded in school buses decorated in yellow jackets and black stripes, as if an allegory for their preparation's to be obedient future worker bees.

In U.S history classes—then and now—students learn “consensus history.” We are taught of a “them vs. us” paradigm in which the Democratic and Republican parties have always been, and by assumption always will be, at odds. The role of a relatively few men in the hyper-industrialization of the United States, hailing from finance and industry, demonstrates the deferential nature of historical change and innovation systems development.

Despite the rise of education system designed to stabilize the industrial system as it evolved, large workers movements, which typically interrupted the industrial system, swept the country in the 1880’s and 1890’s, at a time when European immigrants were coming to the country at rates higher than ever. A severe depression, in 1893, caused elites to look overseas to battle the problem of under-consumption at home. A populist movement at the time tried to forge a new and independent culture for the nation's farmers.

The Farmer is a man

The farmer is the man
lives on credit till the fall
with the interest rates so high
it is a wonder he don't die
and the mortgage man's the one who gets it all.

At the height of the 1877 depression, a "farmers alliance" began on a farm in Texas. It took only a few years for it to spread across the state, and by 1886, 100,000 farmers had joined in two thousand suiballiances. They had alternatives to the old way of doing things: join the alliance and form cooperatives; buy things together and get lower prices. In order to keep up with the pace of change, farmers had to borrow money, with the hope the prices of their harvest would stay high.

What they found was rising prices in transporation, for grain, and the price of their produce going down. A poor working-man in Philadelphia wrote a book about the times. A sampling: “It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general: In them the lowest class do not share.”

Farmers were up against more than the weather, as eastern banks controlled credit; manufacturing monopolies controlled the price of machines; eastern railroad trusts picked freight prices; depression destroyed asset values. But, farmers and city workers alike reached out to one another as a means of forming new political alliances. “We meet in the midst of a nation bourght to the verge of moral, poltical, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized and the newspapers largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced.”

Many of the same dynamics are at work today. On 21 January 2009, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 5-to-4 split decision “that labor unions and corporations can spend unlimited amounts to influence federal elections, throwing out a ban that had been in effect for 63 years and adding an explosive new element to this year’s midterm elections.” The courts current majority, therefore, sees corporations as “associations of citizens,” and therefore reserves for them the same free-speech rights as individuals. The line of reasoning sees all disseminated information as beneficial to the national debate. The ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, “dismayed lawmakers and public interest groups that fought for decades to limit the influence of wealth special interests in politics.” Those who favored the decision argued that the ban in stood in contraposition to the First Amendment, for it controlled free speech in election campaigns. The decision is destined to have wide scale political and practical consequences on American political ideology, as well as refashioning the way elections are carried out. (9)

According to David Million, a law professor at Washington and Lee University, “a positive way to put [constitutional rights for corporations] is that the economy is booming, American productions is leading the world and the courts want to promote that;” less apologetically, “it’s all about protecting corporate wealth” from taxes and other governmental initiatives. Later opinions worked to expand the rights of corporations, such as a 1928 court decision by which a Pennsylvania tax on transportation corporations was rejected because taxicab drivers were exempt. Corporations are afforded “the same protection and equal laws [as] natural persons.”

Anticipated popular movements and rioting have started. Legal measures have been taken to prosecute the appropriate players: those individuals with the wealth volume and information enough to crash global markets so as to enrich themselves and their cronies. These persons and their corporate associations influence a high enough percentage of the global economy that, in fact, they benefit on the way and way down. They influence the direction of economic society based on an agenda. History is a planned affair. Oftentimes, just as Rockefeller and Morgan of old, they sit on the Board of Director’s of multiple corporations, and intimately work with public servants to forward their agenda. Concerned police chiefs across the United States have recommended citizens arm themselves, for, due to cuts in public services (as a means of reallocated that wealth to private financial institutions), they do not have the resources enough to properly keep the public safe.

The pace of global change today far outpaces anything humanity has seen for the last few centuries, and the direction of this change is only minutely influenced by Democratic or Republican (based in law) traditions. Among the central motifs in the evolution of society, at present, is globalization: that complex of intertwining economic, political, cultural and social processes. It is this tool by which western leaders—the alpha males of the Uber Class—are able to influence the political and social climates in diverse nations across the globe. Influence upon the vector of globalization is, first and foremost, exercised in a top-down manner, whereby elite interests are pursued with scant public input.

When the public does go along with the agenda of technocrats and policy planners—valuable citizens in Richistan—public consensus is contrived through technology, where people tune into fictitious predictive “programming” on the television, false axiomatically newspaper reports, and movies. With the viewer’s guard down, a lifestyle insinuates itself into synaptic connections, priming them for future action in accordance with the desires of the self-declared “masters of the universe.” Despite psychological warfare campaigns on the public, according to a recent poll, four out of five American’s do not trust their government. Still, the program remains the same: crony capitalism is the rule, the power to manage a significantly decreased world population, packed into “human habitats”—overcrowded cities—the goal.

Nothing new here under the sun, and so the consensus history with which we are all indoctrinated implores us to resign: this is the way it’s always been, and, therefore, always will be. We have no agency, for we are objects—human capital—happy with a walk-on part of a background shot from a script we, in the near future, aren’t envisaged to be in.

1.Hutton, Will. Now we know the truth. The financial meltdown wasn’t a mistake—it was a con. Guardian UK, 18 April 2010.
Accessible at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/18/goldman-sachs-regulators-civil-charges
2. Robert, Craig Paul. “In Richistan: Fantastic wealth for a few; steady decline for many: The Return of the Robber Barons.” CounterPunch, 2 August 2007.
Accessible at: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08022007.html

3. Renehan, Edward. (2005) The Dark Genius of Wall Street. New York: Basic Books
4. Davis, Mike. (1991) City of Quartz
5. Hammerstrom, Doug. (2002) The Hijacking of the Fourteenth Amendment, Reclaim Democracy. Online

6. Bravin, Jess. Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law. Wall Street Journal, 17 September 2009.
Accessed at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125314088285517643.html
7. Zinn, Howard. (1980) A People’s History of the United States. London: HarperCollins

8. Frank, Dana. (2003) “Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism.” Boston: Beacon Press

9. Kirkpatrick, David. Lobbyists Get Potent Weapon in Campaign Ruling, New York Times, 21 January 2010.

Accessed at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22donate.html?fta=y