As the New Year comes to a close and 2012 beckons, Alex Jones talks to Infowars writer and 21st Century Wire editor Patrick Henningsen about the current geopolitical scene, also discussing Monsanto’s GM plague, Syria, Iran and the digital revolution. Watch in two parts:
Below is a clip from Al Jazeera’s Empire, where Professor Dan Plesch and Patrick Henningsen discuss the cause and effect scenarios should the US and Israel go in unilaterally with an attack on Iran. Watch here:
The following interview with American hip-hop artist and activist ‘Immortal Technique’ was film earlier this year by Infowars and serves as a great reference piece for anyone who is interested in getting involved in the fight for truth and freedom when the bell rings in for 2012.
A truly inspirational segment from one of the great communicators on the scene today:
The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.
The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.
For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, “we are going after these scruffy hippies”. Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women’s wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).
In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.
But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the “scandal” of presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s having been paid $1.8m for a few hours’ “consulting” to special interests…
The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies’ profits is less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.
Patrick Henningsen, a political analyst from the US-based Infowars.com online magazine and Editor of 21st Century Wire, believes that the escalation of tensions over Syria between the world’s major powers may lead to a new chilling in world politics.
“I think we are going to see a new Cold War emerge in the next two years, and we are seeing the initial steps of that new Cold War right now,” he told RT.
Another chief concern is Russia’s close military co-operation with Syria – with reports of S-300 missile defense installations having been supplied from Moscow. Henningsen adds here:
“If the Western powers think they are going to get away with a no-fly zone in Syria, this is a very different prospect than Libya. This will be the first time, in Syria, and also, if you look forward – with Iran, that the West, actually, is engaging a country that has the ability to fight back”.
This week has seen round two take place in Egypt between the ruling elite and public reformers, as protests converged once again on Cairo’s central Tahrir Square. But this time, there will be no help on the way from the beacons of democracy in the west.
As thousands of Egyptians camped out on the square, military police were determined to exhibit the same show of force that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated his Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street activists have been intimidated, beaten and pepper sprayed by law enforcement. On state television yesterday Egypt’s military cited heavy US police action against the Occupy Wall Street movement across America in order to justify their own bloody suppression. Rather ironic.
Clearly let down by the broken promises of their Arab Spring, anti-government demonstrators in Egypt are now calling for a ‘million-man march’ after being met with a violent government crack-down which has already claimed 33 lives and over 1,500 injured, with a steady stream of injured being carried out by motorcycle or on the backs of other protesters to field hospitals set up by volunteer doctors near Tahrir Square.
But Egypt’s military junta is not flinching this time – especially after recently receiving the blessing and full backing of President Barack Obama and US Government to carry on and squash any and all domestic unrest.
Watch this shocking video of the junta’s violence towards demonstrators:
US investigative journalist Ralph Schoenman explained during his interview with Press TV today the relationship between Egypt’s ruling military junta and Washington DC. Schoenman states, ”The relationship between the US and the SCAF – the Supreme Council Armed Forces – is that of the imperial sponsor and sustainer relying upon the Supreme Council Armed Forces to maintain not merely the dictatorship, but the oligarchy in power; the protection of capitalism in Egypt on the part of the tiny oligarchy that has usurped all financial, economic and political power for itself.”
Exactly 11 months ago, the world watched as a seemingly organic movement arose in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, calling for the downfall of Egypt’s stalwart US puppet, Hosni Mubarek. It succeeded in capturing the imagination of the world. In terms of a real revolution however – or real progress, Egypt’s own Arab Spring was nothing more the a cruel, staged event used as political leverage by the west in order to shatter the prospect of real reform in Egypt, and also to topple a series of US-non-friendly regimes in the wider Middle East region.
Egypt’s transition last spring was no more than a progression of United States and Israeli long-range foreign policies and corporate goals for the region, and for whatever reasons –one which no longer required the services of President Hosni Mubarek.
New moves on the grand chessboard have been happening between Egypt, Israel, and Jordan, as well as regime change projects to the west in Libya – meaning that the US-UK-Israeli axis powers would require a much stronger police state in Egypt, acheivable only through a solid military dictatorship there.
In terms of geopolitical and economic power in the 21st century, controlling the supply and delivery of energy, particularly gas, has emerged as a key component for establishing dominance in any region. In Washington’s eyes, corporate interests will always trump issues of democratic reform. Currently, Egypt supplies roughly 40 percent of Israel’s natural gas, and neighboring Jordan depends on Egyptian gas to generate 80 percent of the Kingdom’s electricity, all through Egypt’s East Mediterranean Gas Company (EMG) and its Arish–Ashkelon pipeline.
It turns out that EMG is controlled by a US-Israeli holding company called the Ampal-American Israel Corporation (AAIC). The firm also has regional holdings in chemicals, telecommunications, real estate and leisure. Four partnering Israeli firms initially signed 20-year contracts worth up to $10 billion dollars to import Egyptian gas, but a series of sabotage incidents have disrupted the pipeline causing Moody’s to downgrade AAIC’s debenture rating, a condition which could be stifling investment into the gas firm’s major capital infrastructural projects.
Not surprisingly, this joint venture has been opposed by the various cadres of opposition in Egypt, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood, who called for Cairo to revoke the US-Israeli gas deal, as far back as 2008.
What any off-shore corporate giant requires when setting up shop overseas is corporate stability,coupled with zero social dissent in the region. To be sure, the best tried and tested stable interface for the international globalist corporation has always been an unelected military dictatorship, and Egypt has delivered exactly this to her benefactors in American, Israel and the Jordan. All Egypt’s military government requires out this arrangement is its annual $4 billion in US military aid, as well as pay-offs from the corporation to key members of the Egyptian military junta.
Similarly, Libya’s unelected National Transitional Council was appointed by the US, Great Britain, Israel and France early in 2011, in order to prepare the country for a complete globalist takeover and the complete privatisation of the country’s industries, resources and assets. This type of nation-building was clearly the case in Iraq, and may soon ring true for both Syria and Iran.
The mainstream media’s global brainwashing operation was a success in terms of framing the 2011 Arab Spring as genuine grass roots event, spreading freedom across the lands. Even today, many Occupy Wall Street supports and participants credit the legendary Arab Spring as the pretext for popular uprisings in Spain, and eventually in USA and Europe.
In this case, and once again, people have allowed the Establishments power players and clandestine foundations to dictate a popular version of history. The genius in this globalist technique of social engineering to allow protesters to believe that it was they themselves, who designed and executed these recent waves of popular dissent. US journalist Schoenman added here, ”That is what the basic dynamic is – namely to prevent the revolution unfolding in Egypt from actually transforming Egyptian society”.
Caught in this web of deception, ordinary citizens on the ground are then left to blame, and fight with each other when the story does not conclude with a happy ending – totally unaware that their political destinies have already been written ahead of time by government departments, think tanks and foundations, mainly in the US and Great Britain.
We now that it was not Egyptian and Tunisian students working in a political vacuum, but the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), a professional consultancy, who took students from the Middle East and trained them overseas as early back as 2009. CANVAS are still touting their recent role in working with Egyptian and Tunisian protesters, after teaching them the skills that helped bring down their presidents and spark regional revolt.
There are also reports of CANVAS activity during the early days of Occupy Wall Street, including a video of CANVAS founder Ivan Marovic, himself addressing the OWS General Assembly.
Formerly known as OPTOR!, and known for its role in bringing down the Milosevic regime in the former Yugoslavia, CANVAS is part-funded and supported by a number of ‘pro-democracy’ foundations, with links to George Soros’s Freedom House and Open Society Institute, as well as CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy and USAID.
Although mostly hidden from the public eye, these globalist foundations, professional think tanks and NGOs undertake research, host training seminars, and supply material which are then used to influence regime change all over the world. Theirs is the venue of choice for activities that cannot officially be conducted on the government clock.
By the time it’s all said and done, the death toll in Egypt could reach to the hundreds, or thousands? The truth is, Washington and the UN are not interested in the people of Egypt anymore than they are genuinely interested in the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have been beaten out and pepper sprayed out of New York’s Zuccotti Park. These people simply do not represent enough $dollar signs – or business opportunity – to matter for Washington and the UN.
The US-led rhetoric regarding freedom and democracy in Egypt was – and still is, a complete hoax. Egypt knows this now but sadly, the last people to ever figure this fact out will be the people in the US and Europe, blinded by ideals they still believe they have.
It’s not rocket science. If you wish to get vocal and active on the subject of the global financial collapse, then it is key that you learn the basic fundamentals of the argument and commit them to memory. Here is short film that will get you started on your path to social enlightenment, including a good Ska tune to learn…
A disturbing new trend has quietly taken hold over simultaneous nationwide protests in the United States over the last few weeks.
Visible throughout the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests, is a technique dubbed as “The People’s Microphone”. It has been deployed nationwide, and is fast becoming the dominant vehicle for group interaction and communication. So what is it?
Well-behaved crowds use call-and-repeat with a series of basic hand signals to protest the establishment
“New York City requires a permit to use “amplified sound.” Since Occupy Wall Street does not have a permit, police have interpreted that to mean even the use of an electric bullhorn. As a response to such limitations, a phenomenon known as the “People’s Microphone” has evolved, where a person making a speech pauses while the nearby members of the audience repeats the previous phrase (somewhat) in unison.” The entry adds, “The (People’s Microphone) effect has been called “comic or exhilarating – often all at once.” Some feel this provided a further unifying effect for the crowd.”
Advocates of this new method claim that it is a work-around to restrictive city ordinances, serving as a ‘progressive communication’ tool which allows groups to speak and achieve “community consensus”, where the audience is asked to listen in a whole new way and to actually help transmit the message to others. They will tell you that accuracy and transparency are crucial elements of the People’s Microphone.
NLP device: the ‘call-and-return’ and technique
OWS’s new People’s Microphone is quite simply a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) application or technique. Its consensus arrival method, also known as “call-and-return”, has now become the audio device of choice- spreading across the country as quickly as the protests themselves.
How it works: crowd participants slowly repeat each phrase the leading speaker is saying to them, with a series of hand signs used to provide the speaker and the group with feedback.
To the casual observer, this new system of communication may appear as compelling as it is metaphoric. It might also remind you of the infamous ‘pass the conch’ scene from the Nobel Prize-winning novel by William Golding, Lord of the Flies.
It is a very slow and tedious process, often resulting in very few actual issues being fleshed out. In most cases, it takes triple the amount of time to convey the same amount of information that a normal speaker would accomplish by talking directly to the audience. But ‘call-and-return’ can only be done when the group is forced to repeat the words of the lead speaker, so this speaker is forced to talk slowly, using fewer words at once. In this way, it is also an extremely mesmerizing and hypnotic group communication tool.
Such NLP methods can also be used to promote ‘group-think’ and would be described by some as collectivist mind control education at its very finest.
It’s common knowledge that successful NLP systems like this are commonly used in the military, by sales people in business, as well as in advertising, and of course in politics, always working in restricted blocs of words and with restricted vocabularies.
Group moderators insist that this is done so that ‘everybody is safe’, and that the group is ‘doing things properly’. Any interaction with a speaker can only be done by employing a series of parochial, child-like hand-signs, normally reserved for children attending school in K-8 grades.
Participants insist that by using this method they get a feeling of ‘being part of the community’, where group leaders will ask the crowd for a ‘temperature check’ in order to determine “How ‘the bloc’ feels about what someone has said”… and if what someone said is in consensus with “the bloc”. The audience will offer up a hand signal of waiving both hands to show their approval. Once a consensus is identified, it’s typical that members of “the bloc” will feel that they are part of the group collective, and thus, “part of the change”.
Unfortunately, in this type of system, most of the group have little idea of the meaning of what they are actually repeating, or who and what they are supporting with their consensus hand signals, waving their hands, or making a triangle sign to communicate.
In terms of social engineering a group-think, creating passive crowds, this OWS development is quite surprising, as more sophisticated or even passionate communication techniques would be expected from the ranks of educated, ‘socially aware’ protesters.
Watch as the speaker in the following video explains to his ‘bloc’ that their ‘collective’ will be banning any applause because the clapping of hands might drown out someone within the collective who is trying to be heard. See this unfold in the bizarre Occupy Atlanta video below:
In the end, Occupy Atlanta organizers and the group became so enthralled with their People’s Microphone that Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis was not allowed an opportunity to speak to ‘the collective’. The ‘process’ took forever, and eventually sent the Congressman packing, even though the majority of the crowd were interested in what the Congressman had to say. Dominant members of ‘the bloc’ ruled that the goals of the collective outweighed, and “are more important than any single human being”, as was stated by a speaker early in that video. This is how using NLP to bind a ‘collective’ group can easily engineer a false consensus.
Many Americans are completely unaware of how this very same device has been used throughout history to compartmentalize and marginalize the true will of people.
This NLP ‘call-and-repeat’ mechanism can no doubt be used to hypnotic effect. Often these type of techniques are used in order to filter out the free thinkers, where intense self-policing at its most stringent. Notice that when group members are disagreeing, their hands are much lower, but at their maximum when ‘the bloc’ seems to all be in agreement.
What these protestors are hardly aware of, is that they may be participating a form of modern day group-think. It is a form of social control whereby everyone in the group believes that they must all agree and must all be of the same mind. Armed with this powerful new tool, professional consensus promoters can be bussed into sites around the country, training groups to chant key group-think talking points using various mnemonic phrases.
The collectivist trap
The concept of ‘the collective’ or ‘the community’ is a power one when applied to activism. For this reason it allowed a number of radical regimes to sweep into power during the 20th century.
Participants in a collective truly believe in the process and that their process is very ‘democratic’, civilized, radical, effective, and thus, revolutionary.
But few within these groups are actually aware of the NLP concepts they have opted into, nor are they familiar with tried and tested mind-control methods, or the powerful political tool of collectivism. So it is not surprising that most will enthusiastically join in the group and religiously abide by its laws of conversation, following some scripted agenda instead of being spontaneous or truly radical.
The People’s Microphone can also lead a group to believe by using these hand signal votes they can create a law and enforce it. This can often result in an oxymoronic “totalitarian-consensus”, whereby a perceived consensus occurs, but in reality, a consensus was only reached because each member of the group was afraid to be ejected from ‘the collective’. Other video examples include Occupy Amherst, Occupy Tampa, and Occupy DC filmed by Adam Kokesh. All three can be viewed below:
This form of mob mentality can be dangerous because the leader of a group is leading the flock in his or her direction of choice, whilst still offering them the illusion it is ‘what everyone in the community wants’. In the classic film Dr Zhivago, scenes appear in which leading “intellectual” group-thinkers demolish the private property of others because, according to the collective, “they don’t deserve to own it”.
Taking this concept is taken to its extreme form, a mob or individual within the mob might willfully intimidate, or even physically assault a person, during which time the mob believe they are just watching what ‘the collective’ or ‘community’ wants to happen.
Hardly grass roots
It is already well documented that the original Occupy Wall Street protest was seeded by a collectivist George Soros funded foundation called Ad Busters, and allegedly supported by the shadowy agitator hacker group called Anonymous.
For the last decade, globalist foundations promoting democracy and freedom have been active in fomenting uprisings all over the planet, and fresh off their international successes they have finally come home to roost within the OWS movement.
But what is not as well documented is the involvement of the international CIA front organization called the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies(CANVAS).This can be described as a kind of consultancy for would-be revolutionaries, an organization of professional agitators-for-hire who globe-trot, openly promoting their CFR-sponsored agenda- most notably in Egypt, where CANVAS trained and managed Egyptian protestors as early as 2009 in preparation for the fabled ‘Arab Spring’ in 2010-2011.
Their projects are clandestine, kept secret while in preparation, names of clients are not publically available, and are extremely well funded by American intelligence services. And yes, they are now active on US soil.
It is important that readers understand how CANVAS was created- from the Serbian political youth movement called OPTOR!(translated as ‘Resistance!), who’s initial project was the US-backed overthrow of the Slobodan Milosevic government in Yugoslavia in 2000.
OPTOR’s support and funding network reads like a who’s who of CIA and globalist front foundations, including well known CIA front organization USAID, George Soros’s collectivist front foundation Freedom House, and the National Endowment for Democracy whose operational successes include the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, each heavily financed and backed by groups funded by or connected to the U.S. government. Likewise, events in Tunisia, North Africa and Egypt were orchestrated out of the finest detail, and it seems that events surrounding the OWS movement are no different.
Key operatives in OPTOR!, and later for CANVAS are Serbians Ivan Marovic and Srdja Popovic. After the fall of Milosovec, the western media hailed Marovic as a democratic genius, but it came out later that his entire program came out of an elite Boston think tank’s ‘regime change’ manual, From Dictatorship to Democracy, written by a Harvard Professor Gene Sharp.
From the first days of OWS, it should be noted that Marovic was already on site, and guiding groups by demonstrating the power of The People’s Microphone. Watch here as Marovic himself leads crowds in the first days of the protests:
Some of the CANVAS professionally developed ‘subversive’ revolutionary methods are outlined in the incredible documentary film The Revolution Business, where paid facilitators are employed to train protesters, acting as a guide through the process which also includes communication techniques and the circulation of media talking points.
Mind control and the dumbing-down of America
“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality”
– H. L. Mencken
These NLP techniques have taken hold quickly across OWS events and are techniques that have been previously implemented throughout the America’s public education systems and also present in popular children’s programming.
Typically, participants in a mind-control exercise engage in group-think, not unlike the participants shown in these videos. Members of the group will also get an endorphin rush similar to what one might receive during an evangelical church performance, or even at hip-hop concert, where the MC shouts, “now wave your hands in the air, and wave ‘em like you just don’t care.”
Charlotte Iserbyt was a Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, where she blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America’s classrooms shown in the documentary film, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.
Most Americans participating in OWS have come through the state education system, whose chief objective, according to Charlotte Iserbyt, is teaching groups, and thus individuals… to be obedient.
The dominant message which is now coming out of the OWS protests across the US appears to be the collectivist idea of an unequal distribution of wealth in the United States, which looks a lot like any social engineer’s blueprint for a 21st century Bolshevik Revolution in America, and it is playing out right before our eyes as the millions of young, disaffected Americans search for simple collectivist answers to society’s many complex ills.
One can certainly argue here, that the dumbing-down of America would serve such an agenda.
Establishing fear in a police state
Notice that we already have “free speech zones” in the US, while prospective protesters in the UK must apply with the city police for a ‘public license to demonstrate’.
Aside from the incessant need by most young Americans to be led by a lone, some singular voice, the underlying social engineering tool which has enabled the intellectual and sovereign castration of Americans, is quite simply… the fear of being arrested.
One singular thing that a decade of free speech zones, homeland security, surveillance and a comprehensive dismantling of the Bill of Rights(equally under both Bush and Obama) has achieved – is just that – a constant fear of a shadowy police state. Without this underlying fear, the repressive Soviet-style group-think scenes we see in these video could never have been possible.
The whole existence of ThePeople’s Microphone is down to the fact that NYC police have imposed draconian measures like banning megaphones. As far as requiring a license to protest in public, not using a PA system in public, or restricting filming in a public space, true patriots and believers in a free society should not seek ‘permits’ for anything, nor should they respect ‘prohibitions’ on a citizen’s right to free speech and assembly.
Notice that not all cities in the USA prohibit bull-horning or amplified speakers, yet, American activists have still voluntarily defaulted back to the collectivist NLP method, The People’s Microphone, initially unveiled at OWS in NYC.
More than anything, these videos of mindless call-and-repeat chanting show the deep problems any true freedom movement must overcome in reaching ‘the 99%’ in America.
Where it’s heading
From its onset, many writers and pundits within the independent media and freedom movement threw their support behind OWS, with the sincere hope it focused on the deeper, fundamental globalist control issues- like restoring the Constitution, the need for smaller government, the creation and counterfeiting our currency through the Federal Reserve System, causing the inflationary boom and bust cycles that have been periodically culling the world’s upwardly mobile working and middle classes. Instead, the focus of both protesters and media has drifted towards system actors like corporations, CEO’s, bankers and politicians, rather than addressing the very system itself.
If you take into account the level by which the Occupy Wall Street movement has already been co-opted by the ‘progressives’ and the Democratic Party, and endorsed whole-heartedly by staunch globalists within the US power-structure like Ben Bernanke, President Obama and Nancy Pelosi, this writer believes strongly that OWS will likely morph into a permanent left wing counter-weight to the now Republican co-opted Tea Party movement.
The movement may appear to be growing organically, but as we saw with Ron Paul’s initial Tea Party spark back in 2007, once a movement’s political gravity reached a certain stage, the establishment will have already deployed its professional agitators, political operatives and mainstream media gate keepers in order to control its motion and shepherd its evolution. This was as true back in 1968 as it is in 2011. Already, the mainstream media have injected the talking point which most Americans are already parroting, that is: “America’s Occupy Movement is the Democrats’ equivalent to the Tea Party”.
What these movements do is function as an easy access, pressure-release valve for the controlled Left and Right wings. Both parties in the US have become too rigid, offering little to a 21st century society that is now information-rich, but still insight poor, and generally cater to the lowest common social denominator. With unemployment and debts high, and opportunities sparse, the simplified message of collectivism championed by OWS celebrity filmmaker Michael Moore, will certain hold an attractive appeal to many Americans who are unfamiliar with collectivism’s well documented past horrors.
Soon, the Occupy London movement will begin in the UK. Based on recent trends in the US, this writer will also strongly predict that OWS’s British counterpart will quickly morph into anti-Tory government, pro-socialist, climate change/green movement, not least because the majority of protesters in the UK will be among the ranks of the unemployed, indebted students, and chronic state benefit recipients- a fact which almost guarantees their loyal support of the UK’s social entitlement control-grid, as well as memberships to the ultra collectivist EU and UN supra-national organizations.
In times of economic strife, populations are easily lured into the simple, Marxist ideological trap of collectivism. Under these conditions, most participants in the OWS movement would be completely unaware that an organization like CANVAS or Freedom House is directing and steering their new ‘grassroots’ conversation.
To avoid the collectivist trap, participants in OWS events all across the US must first learn to read between the lines, or they may unwittingly become party to something completely different to what they thought they had signed up for in the first place.
If you are a seasoned boxing fan, it’s easy to tell when a boxer is fighting out of his weight division. He looks bloated and puffy, mostly from over-hydration and a taper in training. But most of all, the fighter is obviously punching well above his genuine weight.
Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, who was described by the US President Barrack Obama as “a lightweight” in that infamous Wikileaks cable last year- is such a boxer – bloated, puffy and clearly out of his league. Now that’s a US lightweight calling a Brit a lightweight, which would really make that Brit afeatherweight.
David is not bothered. With his flabby Tory/Lib-Dem Coalition mandate falling apart at home, Cameron is trying to seize the day overseas, fresh off Britain’s little VJ Day field trip to Libya.
Cameron’s big media slot was yesterday at the UN in New York City, where he spouted to world leaders about how we need to, ‘be prepared to intervene again when civilians are massacred by repressive regimes’.
NATO's new Girl Friday promotes template for a criminal enterprise (IMAGE: Infowars.com)
David’s message regarding Libya is that we should really be “quicker” to take military action to stop the slaughter of innocents.
No mention here of the thousands of Libyans who have been killed by NATO bombings and many thousands who were openly slaughtered or ethnically cleansed by NATO’s local partners, the al-Qaida aka “Rebel” fighters, whom they have hired to help dislodge Libyan leader Gaffafi from power.
But Cameron would not trade this experience for the world. He has gotten some actual ‘statesman’ mileage out of Libya (at least in terms of invitations to Berlusconi’s parties etc) so far, and remember last week when he was hailed by tiny staged crowds Tripoli, reassuring them that their country ‘chose the path to freedom’.
“This revolution truly belongs to the Libyan people. The United Nations played a vital role authorising international action. But let’s be clear, the United Nations is no more effective than the nation states that come together to enforce its will.
“On this occasion a coalition of nations across the Western and Arab world had the will to act. In so doing, they stopped Benghazi from joining Srebrenica and Rwanda in history’s painful roll call of massacres the world failed to prevent.”
The truth, of course, is something else altogether.
The rape of Libya was quite possibly the most bold smash-and-grab crime in modern history.
It was even more bold than the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, following the whole “WMD thing”. The US-NATO looting of the sovereign state of Libya was worse because they didn’t even bother to come up with a big lie- like a suitcase nuke, or a WMD. They simply openly joined in under a UN banner, and supported one side militarily in an internal civil war, under the lightweight banner of “humanitarian intervention” via “kinetic actions”.
Western corporations were already beginning to carve up Libya’s assets as far back as March 2011, in the early days of the civil war. Now we have David Cameron running around Manhattan trying to promote this template for a criminal enterprise. Of course, this little war will spill over into other parts of Africa such as Sudan, Egypt, Chad, Niger and Mali, where the UN can send in the blue helmets.
But the facts cannot hide that while David Cameron is at the UN doing the job of Washington and NATO’s little PR girl (like Tony Blair did loyally in 2003), no amount of lies can hide forever what Libya really is- a complete disaster in the making. There is panic at the UN, because the UN knows that it is in grave danger of losing its nerve after being used by the US-NATO-Israeli Axis for this particular criminal campaign.
If there is any justice in the world, one would hope that Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and rest of the little European looters in Libya will be dragged into court for crimes against humanity, not least because that’s what they truly deserve.
That ‘special relationship’
Wikileaks jibes aside, Cameron now enjoys a good relationship with Mr Obama. Yes, it’s a return to that “special relationship” enjoyed by the US and Britain for so many years, made famous by those photo shoots at the Crawford Dude Ranch where George W. Bush and Tony Blair sported big belt buckles and pristine Stetsons.
Indeed, Barrack and David can now have cordial discussions about each other’s wives, and perhaps play a round of golf at St Andrews.
But the timing of Cameron’s little jolly in NYC says volumes about the new ‘special relationship’.
The real reason David Cameron is doing this UN junket this week is mainly because he will also be weighing in on Palestine, reminding us, on one hand, that their national aspirations are part of the fabled “Arab Spring”, and on the other hand, that Palestine should forget about statehood.
David will give Abbas a little nudge from England too. ‘No, that’s not the plan right now, Mr Abbas’. No, the proper aspiration is to put that idea of statehood aside for the moment, and opt instead for more, extended, somewhat protracted “peaceful negotiations” with Israel. Yes, it is a much better thing indeed.
He has made clear Britain’s disfavour with Mahmoud Abbas’s desire to make a declaration of statehood at the UN this week. We now know, because Uncle Barrack has told us, that Palestinian Statehood will not happen this year.
Cameron says that it’s a much better thing for Palestine to pursue diplomacy, “sit down and talk to each other, make compromises, build trust and agree”.
Yes, David. It would’ve been interesting to have tried to use that technique in Libya.
Ceremonies in the USA, Europe and in other regions and countries where 9/11 business is taken seriously have, with time, shifted focus. The annual show of gravitas and determination to fight and win the War on Terror, cranked up on back of the New York and Washington attacks of September 2001, has a new objective: deflecting, parrying and diluting a scary future.
FESTIVAL OF WAR
Trends forecasters will all tell you that future looks bad and the economy looks even worse. But George W. Bush and Barack Obama still stand together, united to fight evil, with a show of force at Ground Zero. As anyone can guess, putting white ribbons in the hair of US schoolchildren is more newsworthy(and cheaper) than treating cancer victims from the tens of thousands of tons of asbestos, insecticides and dioxin that spewed out as the Twin Towers, and building WTC 7(untouched by any airplane) dramatically crashed to the ground in seconds.
Public solidarity and national pride are important at this dangerous time, hence, 9/11 festivities have been internationalized with an attempt being made- like attempts in Europe and Japan, to import the US Halloween-style festival and to capitalize on its commercial spin-offs. For the 9/11 ‘festival of hope’, the goal is justifying the military invasions and occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq. This new war festival however generates nothing in revenues and costs vast sums of public cash on an unwinnable war – an exact remake of the Soviet Union’s lost war in Afghanistan – proving that other people can be just as stupid as the Soviets.
Never mind the blowback of pure hatred against the west that the 9/11 farce generates right across the Muslim world and south Asia. What counts is the official, reassuring and idiot-friendly version of “what really happened” in New York and Washington in Sept 2001. This is now a mass market comfort theme, belted out by all mainstream media and is a precious link with a receding and different past.
FEAR OF THE FUTURE
In September 2011 the US political, corporate and media elites and their European fellow travellers- call them running dogs or yippy poodles, have saturated world media with all-day-long special reports on the Atrocity of the Century. Time is also shrewdly allocated for marginalizing skeptics, or “truthers”. Shame on you, if you don’t believe.
The real focus has changed however:
9/11 is now a strange mixture of alternate reality and new religion.
9/11 is now the official way to forget the present and future of debts, deficits, unemployment and economic crises – if only for an excruciatingly long weekend.
9/11's ten year anniversary has morphed into a morbid "festival of war" for the US and the world.
For the American economy – and most other developed economies, from the European Union to Japan – the real crisis is the amount of money paid to commercial bankers and insurers over the last four years. What happened to it? Will Greece collapse, taking Europe’s banks with it, like a collapsing Twin Tower as the fires of its sovereign debt light the higher floors of the Tower of Doom?
For American banks, filings to the US Securities and Exchange Commission show that the bailout sums handed to them by G W Bush and Barry Obama now stands, in September 2011, at an astounding $2 200 billion, or $2.2 trillion, racked up in a little more than 4 years. European commercial banks have received less well-defined, better hidden bailouts from public funds, but likely amounts to September 2011 are probably $ 1.75 trillion; Japan’s ruined banks have received more than $ 750 billion.
Still, all the banks will require more, a lot more. This is because, like the 9/11 fantasy, the show has to go on. The serial rout of banks and their related and dependent insurance companies, brokers and investment houses will continue. Extrapolating over the coming decade and only for the USA, the total amounts to be taken by the financial sector, led by the banks, will approach over $5 trillion.
Yet, no European, Japanese or American political decider, either in power or in opposition, so terribly and publicly concerned about 9/11 once a year, shows any sign of being willing to cut future debt-driven bailouts for private banks. This will inevitably produce further and deeper government deficits.
This stubborn refusal to face reality can be compared with the child-like official belief the Twin Towers and WTC 7 fell down almost instantly due to burning jet fuel and “all by themselves”. Ignoring reality and denying the future, the critical banking crisis is also another whipped-dog attempt to not admit failure and muddle through another day. Doing this, increasingly surely, the ultimate economic catastrophe becomes possible: the collapse of all world moneys, the complete implosion of the global economy. Real war would almost certainly follow – not playacting with bearded hermits in Afghan caves and drone attacks on Yemenite brigands, Pakistani goatherders and bandits – but even the playact War on Terror does not come cheap.
WAR AND DEBT
For the USA, the ultimate big spender on supposedly small surgical conflicts and humanitarian interventions “over the horizon”, the amounts spent are relatively well known: probable US war spending in the 10 years since 2001 totals between $ 2.2 and $ 2.8 trillion – much less than the banks have been able to siphon, in the last 3 years.
The ugly truth of this matter is that none of this cash can be invested in protecting US jobs, building roads, schools, factories, hospitals, offices, public transport or any other long-term projects. Public cash is showered on the financial, defense sectors, and overseas contracts creating a few high cost jobs but in general this money is directly transferred from spending in the real economy, to the shadow economy of bank executives, employees and shareholders, off-shore holding companies and our clean fingernailed Indiana Jones heroes killing villagers and rendering taxi drivers somewhere over the horizon.
While the bank executives come out as big winners, this is not at all the case for bank employees faced with recurring and massive redundancy programs, nor for bank shareholders, or the average grunt soldier. Real bank and finance sector share values in the USA, Europe and Japan are again in free fall, tumbling in unison, by 33 percent to more than 65 percent in the 5 weeks from August 1st, 2011 to the present.
More transfers – politely called “bank recapitalization” – will soon be needed. These transfers represent a cunning tax on everyone else, whether private citizen and consumers or economically active entities.
Most incredibly, these are rich rewards for those “players” who helped cause, and then intensify today’s financial and economic troubles that affect all countries of the developed world. This tiny percentage (well below 5 percent) of all persons and all economic entities in the affected countries is the only class that is not suffering from the crisis they have caused – and in many cases the perpetrators of the crime are massively benefiting from the aggravation of the global crisis.
Their operating mode and methods can seem puzzling in many respects. Combining some aspects of classic and crude Ponzi chain letter scams, with large and sophisticated compensation schemes for their partners (notably in the insurance sector), masking the risks of supposedly low-probability, high-impact “Black Swan” events with complex multi-stage financial instruments, these inveterate but losing gamblers have only one backstop.
At all times they count on implicit public guarantees. When things get worse, they ask for more.
The military and security services, whether the US Army or the new Afghan Army supposedly loyal to Hamid Karzai, whether the USA’s FBI and CIA or France’s DGSE and the UK’s MI5 and MI6 are all similar in the dependence on the public purse. When things get worse – they also ask for more. Using the financial analogy of leverage rather than skills, of pouring oil on fires already burning, then demanding public money to quench the fires and calm the rout, the defence and security establishment has only mimicked the blackmailing scam of failed financial gamblers.
RISK AND REWARD
As we know, the corporate kleptocracy which operates the world’s biggest banks and insurance companies has a simple strategy: privatize the profits and offload the losses to anybody else, meaning governments and taxpayers. Simply because of this, all central banks and monetary authorities have no choice at all but to keep interest rates at artificially low levels. Both publicly, and secretly they give loans at extreme low rates of interest to the banks, like obedient poodles.
The defense and security mafias, establishment or sector operates a strategy of self preservation and profiteering that is also simple. Without war, it cannot continue to grow, but war is no longer possible with new, potential, and very dangerous enemies such as China and India, and other large well-armed nations – able to hit back devastatingly hard. War must now be targeted at small countries with small armies – and of course no nuclear weapons. The search for enemies is also brought back home, inside the home countries of this evil doctrine, creating the police state at war with its own population.
Since 2001, the search for, and manufacture of new enemies has been crowned with success. The reward for the defence and security elites is immense: although well behind the grab made by the banking elites, the equivalent of around $2.5 trillion dollars has been spent by the US alone in a single decade on fantasist and unreal enemies, without ever facing any armed forces able to hit back with deadly force. What could be more courageous and progressive?
For the banking and financial mafia, like the defense and security establishment, the risk of massive or total loss was always hidden, always denied. But with another hollow celebration of the 9/11 farce, and another intensification of the European and US banking and debt crises, the potential for total loss on all fronts rises, yet again. For private bankers and insurers, brokers and exchange operators who systematically lied about the risks of their 24/7 gambling spree, and the defense and security mafia who promote the lie about 9/11 and the risk of “asymmetric” wars – we have moved so close to the precipice that denying this reality is harder and harder, each and every day.
As Barack Obama said on Sunday September 11, 2011: “God is our refuge”.
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Andrew McKillop is guest writer and energy markets analyst with more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. He trained at London UK’s University College, and has extensive experience in energy policy, project administration, including the development and financing of alternate energy, including projects for OPEC and the EU.
No doubt September 11, 2001 changed everything. But the business of actually measuring those changes has been as overlooked by most as the nationalities of the hijackers. The following is presented in the interest of truth, justice and the American way.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
21st Century Wire
