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Unheard Martin Luther King Jr. recording found in attic

August 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Originally posted by Lucas L. Johnson II, Associated Press

In this 1960 file photo, Martin Luther King Jr. speaks in Atlanta. (AP File Photo)

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – Stephon Tull was looking through dusty old boxes in his father’s attic in Chattanooga a few months ago when he stumbled onto something startling: an audio reel labeled, “Dr. King interview, Dec. 21, 1960.”

He wasn’t sure what he had until he borrowed a friend’s reel-to-reel player and listened to the recording of his father interviewing Martin Luther King Jr. for a book project that never came to fruition. In clear audio, King discusses the importance of the civil rights movement, his definition of nonviolence and how a recent trip of his to Africa informed his views. Tull said the recording had been in the attic for years, and he wasn’t sure who other than his father may have heard it.

“No words can describe. I couldn’t believe it,” he told The Associated Press this week in a phone interview from his home in Chattanooga. “I found … a lost part of history.”

Many recordings of King are known to exist among hundreds of thousands of documents related to his life that have been catalogued and archived. But one historian said the newly discovered interview is unusual because there’s little audio of King discussing his activities in Africa, while two of King’s contemporaries said it’s exciting to hear a little-known recording of their friend for the first time.

Tull plans to offer the recording at a private sale arranged by a New York broker and collector later this month.

Tull said his father, an insurance salesman, had planned to write a book about the racism he encountered growing up in Chattanooga and later as an adult. He said his dad interviewed King when he visited the city, but never completed the book and just stored the recording with some other interviews he had done. Tull’s father is now in his early 80s and under hospice care.

During part of the interview, King defines nonviolence and justifies its practice.

“I would … say that it is a method which seeks to secure a moral end through moral means,” he said. “And it grows out of the whole concept of love, because if one is truly nonviolent that person has a loving spirit, he refuses to inflict injury upon the opponent because he loves the opponent.”

The interview was made four years before the Civil Rights Act became law, three years before King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, and eight years before his assassination. At one point in the interview, King predicts the impact of the civil rights movement.

“I am convinced that when the history books are written in future years, historians will have to record this movement as one of the greatest epics of our heritage,” he said.

King had visited Africa about a month before the interview, and he discusses with Tull’s father how leaders there viewed the racial unrest in the United States.

“I had the opportunity to talk with most of the major leaders of the new independent countries of Africa, and also leaders in countries that are moving toward independence,” he said. “And I think all of them agree that in the United States we must solve this problem of racial injustice if we expect to maintain our leadership in the world.”

Raymond Winbush, director of the Institute for Urban Research at Maryland’s Morgan State University, said the tape is significant because there are very few recordings of King detailing his activity in Africa.

“It’s clear that in this tape when he’s talking … about Africa, he saw this as a global human rights movement that would inspire other organizations, other nations, other groups around the world,” said Winbush, who is also a psychologist and historian.

“That to me is what’s remarkable about the tape.”

U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Freedom Rider who organized Tennessee’s first lunch counter sit-in at age 19 in Nashville, said hearing King talk about the sit-ins took him back to the period when more than 100 restaurant counters were desegregated over several months.

“To … hear his voice and listen to his words was so moving, so powerful,” said Lewis, adding that King’s principles of nonviolence are still relevant today.

“I wish people all over America, all over the world, can hear this message over and over again,” he said.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, who worked with King while a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, agreed.

“I can’t think of anything better to try,” Lowery said of nonviolence. “What we’re doing now is not working. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Matching violence with violence. We’ve got more guns than we’ve ever had, and more ammunition to go with it. And yet, the situation worsens.”

A spokeswoman for King’s daughter Bernice, head of The King Center in Atlanta, said she was traveling and couldn’t comment on the audio.

Tull is working with a New York-based collector and expert on historical artifacts to arrange a sale. The broker, Keya Morgan, said he believes that unpublished reel-to-reel audio of King is extremely rare and said he’s confident of the authenticity of the recording based on extensive interviews with Tull, his examination of the tape and his knowledge of King. He’s collected many of the civil rights icon’s letters and photos.

“I was like, wow! To hear him that crisp and clear,” Morgan said. “But beyond that, for him to speak of nonviolence, which is what he represented.”

 

Source:  http://www.kpic.com/news/national/Unheard-Martin-Luther-King-Jr-recording-found-in-attic-167043495.html

Filed Under: Equality, Human Rights, Media, Racism, Revolution, Rights, Social Unrest

Iceland Was Right, We Were Wrong: The IMF

August 22, 2012 by 1 Comment

Originally posted by Jeff Neilson for thestreet.com on August 15, 2012

VANCOUVER (Silver Gold Bull) — For approximately three years, our governments, the banking cabal, and the Corporate Media have assured us that they knew the appropriate approach for fixing the economies that they had previously crippled with their own mismanagement. We were told that the key was to stomp on the Little People with “austerity” in order to continue making full interest payments to the Bond Parasites — at any/all costs.

Following three years of this continuous, uninterrupted failure, Greece has already defaulted on 75% of its debts, and its economy is totally destroyed. The UK, Spain and Italy are all plummeting downward in suicide-spirals, where the more austerity these sadistic governments inflict upon their own people the worse their debt/deficit problems get. Ireland and Portugal are nearly in the same position.

Now in what may be the greatest economic “mea culpa” in history, we have the media admitting that this government/banking/propaganda-machine troika has been wrong all along. They have been forced to acknowledge that Iceland’s approach to economic triage was the correct approach right from the beginning.

What was Iceland’s approach? To do the exact opposite of everything the bankers running our own economies told us to do. The bankers (naturally) told us that we needed to bail out the criminal Big Banks, at taxpayer expense (they were Too Big To Fail). Iceland gave the banksters nothing.

The bankers told us that no amount of suffering (for the Little People) was too great in order to make sure that the Bond Parasites got paid at 100 cents on the dollar. Iceland told the Bond Parasites they would get what was left over, after the people had been taken care of (by their own government).

The bankers told us that our governments could no longer afford the same education, health care and pension systems which our parents had taken for granted. Iceland told the bankers that what the country could no longer afford was to continue to be blood-sucked by the worst financial criminals in the history of our species. Now, after three-plus years of this absolute dichotomy in economic policymaking, a clear picture has emerged (despite the best efforts of the propaganda machine to hide the truth).

In typical fashion, the moment that the Corporate Media is forced to admit that it has been serially misinforming us for the past several years; the Revisionists are immediately deployed to rewrite history, as shown in this Bloomberg Businessweek excerpt:

…the island’s approach to its rescue led to a “surprisingly” strong recovery, the International Monetary Fund’s mission chief to the country said.

In fact, from the moment the Crash of ’08 was orchestrated and our morally bankrupt governments began executing the plans of the bankers, I have written that the only rational strategy was to put People before Parasites. While I wouldn’t expect national policymakers to take their cues from my writing, when I wrote out my economic prescriptions for our economies I didn’t base my views on compassion, or simply “doing the right thing.”

Rather, I have consistently argued that it was a matter of simple arithmetic and the most-elementary principles of economics that “the Iceland approach” was the only strategy which could possibly succeed. When Plutarch wrote 2,000 years ago “an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all Republics,” he was not parroting socialist dogma (1,500 years before the birth of Socialism).

Plutarch was simply expressing the First Principle of economics; something on which all of the modern capitalist economists who followed in his footsteps have based their own theories. When modern economists produce their own jargon, such as the Marginal Propensity to Consume; it is squarely based on the wisdom of Plutarch: that an economy will always be healthier with its wealth in the hands of the poor and the Middle Class instead of being hoarded by rich misers (and gamblers).

So when the Bloomberg Revisionists attempt to convince us that Iceland’s strong (and real) economic recovery was a “surprise”; this could only be true if none of our governments, none of the bankers and none of the media’s precious “experts” understood the most-elementary principles of arithmetic and economics. Is this the message the media wants to convey?

What is even more disingenuous here is the congratulatory tone in this exercise in Revisionism, since nothing could be further from the truth. As I detailed in a four-part series one year ago, the campaign of “economic rape” perpetrated against the governments of Europe over the past two and half years (in particular) has been expressly designed to take away “the Iceland option” for Europe’s other governments.

IMF headquarters in Washington, DC

One of the reasons for Iceland being able to escape the choke-hold of the Western banking cabal is that its economy (and its people) still retained enough residual prosperity to tough it out — as the banking cabal tried to strangle Iceland’s economy as retribution for rejecting their Debt Slavery.

Thus, austerity has been nothing less than a deliberate campaign to destroy these European economies so that the Slaves would be too economically weak to be able to sever their own choke-holds. Mission accomplished!

One can only assume that neither the Corporate Media nor their Banker Masters would have allowed this clear acknowledgment that Iceland was right and we were wrong to appear within its own pages, unless it felt secure in the knowledge that all the remaining Debt Slaves had been crippled beyond their capacity to ever escape this economic oppression.

Indeed, for evidence of this we need only look to Greece: the one other European nation where there had been “rumblings” (i.e. riots) aimed at toppling the Traitor Government that served the banking cabal. After two elections, the combination of fear and propaganda bullied the long-suffering Greek people into choosing another Traitor Government — which had expressly pledged itself to reinforcing the bonds of economic slavery. When the Slaves vote for slavery, the Slave Masters can afford to gloat.

Here, the purpose of this Bloomberg propaganda was not to praise Iceland’s government (when both the bankers and Corporate Media despise Iceland with all of their considerable malice). Rather, the goal of this disinformation was to manufacture a new Big Lie.

Instead of the Truth: that from Day 1 Iceland’s approach was the only possible strategy which could have succeeded, while our own governments chose a strategy intended to fail; we get the Big Lie. Our Traitor Governments were acting honestly and honourably; and Iceland’s success and our failure was yet another “surprise which no one could have predicted.”

We saw precisely the same Revisionism following the Crash of ’08 itself, where the mainstream media trotted out all their expert-shills to tell us they had been “surprised” by this economic event; while those within the precious metals sector had been predicting precisely such a cataclysm, in ever more-assertive terms, for several years.

The real message here for readers is that when an economic strategy of People before Parasites succeeds that there is nothing the least-bit “surprising” about this. As with all the remainder of the world around us, promoting the health of Parasites is only good for the Parasites themselves.

Source:  http://www.thestreet.com/story/11665082/1/iceland-was-right-we-were-wrong-the-imf.html

Filed Under: Banks, Corporations, Corruption, Debt, Economy, Financial Crisis, Human Rights, Iceland, International Monetary Fund, Justice, Law, Money, Politics, Protests, Revolution, Social Unrest

Max Igan’s Trance-Formation (Full)

April 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Full film available for download at:
http://thecrowhouse.com
IP: http://67.20.81.143
from May 15th 2012

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. – Howard Zinn

Universal Law trumps all others.

1. No man or woman, in or out of government shall initiate force, threat of force or fraud against my life and property and, any and all contracts I am a party to, not giving full disclosure to me, whether signed by me or not, are void at my discretion.

2. I may use force in self-defense against anyone that violates Law 1.

3. There shall be no exceptions to Law 1 and 2.

Filed Under: Banks, Corporations, Corruption, Crime, Education, Environment, Equality, Featured, Human Rights, Illuminati, Politics, Population, Privacy, Revolution, Rights, Safety, Technology

Egypt’s Doomed Election

November 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Egypt, the largest and most important country to overthrow its government during the Arab Spring, is careening toward a disastrous parliamentary election that begins on Nov. 28 and could bring the country to the brink of civil war.

As protesters fill Tahrir Square once again and violence spreads throughout Cairo, the military government’s legitimacy is becoming even more tenuous. The announcement Tuesday of a “National Salvation Government” may stem the violence for now, but the coming vote will not lead to a stable democracy. 

The election is likely to fail, not because of vote-stealing or violence, but because the rules cobbled together by Egypt’s military leaders virtually guarantee that the Parliament elected will not reflect the votes of the Egyptian people.

While advising civil society groups and political parties on election issues earlier this year in Cairo, I found that the voices of Egyptians who were at the forefront of the revolution were stifled during the secretive election-planning process.

On countless occasions, political parties went to the ruling military council to object to drafts of the electoral law and were brushed off with piecemeal changes. Civic groups concerned about the representation of women and minorities were not even given a seat at the table. And the United Nations, which played a major role in assisting Tunisia with its election, was denied access to election planners in Cairo.

Source: http://warincontext.org/2011/11/25/egypt%E2%80%99s-doomed-election

Filed Under: Politics, Revolution, War

Has Capitalism Ever Existed in America?

October 29, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about capitalism in the news and among activists. Many people are taking stances on either one side of the issue or the other, but very few are stopping to consider the fact that capitalism may have never even existed. This concept may come as a surprise to some, but it shouldn’t.  If you examine most of the words used to describe our society such as democracy, freedom, representative or capitalism, you will find that these words are simply abstract euphemisms which are used to disguise the true nature of authoritarian civilization.

We are supposed to believe that we are represented by people who don’t represent us, that we are somehow “free” in a situation where we are constantly being exploited and ordered around. Much in the same way that we are told we are “free” in our personal lives, we are also told that we are “free” in our financial lives. The word “democracy” is used to make our oppressive political system seem more benevolent and legitimate, while the term “capitalism” is used to give the impression that we operate under a “free market” economy. Obviously, neither are true.

Capitalism itself has been defined many different ways, but the rights to private property, as well as private production of goods and a free market economy, cross over between all of these definitions. Currently none of the above rights are being fully respected in the United States and most Western countries that claim to be capitalist. Sure, at face value it may seem like these ideas are prevalent in Western culture, but when you take a look at property taxes, government subsidies for big corporations and the mountain of red tape faced by entrepreneurs it should become painfully obvious that capitalism has probably never existed in this country; perhaps it has never even existed in this world.

The system that we have in place today could more accurately be called fascism, mercantilism or cartelism. These words describe a system where the elite use their power in government to control the rest of society, as well as prop up their businesses by eliminating competition through the political system. The monolithic corporations that now exist would have never been able to grow into what they are today without the help of government intervention and protection. Without government intervention, the infamous lobbyists in Washington would become obsolete because there would no longer be any ability to manipulate the marketplace through bribes or coercion. Government intervention and protection is the primary means by which the world’s biggest corporations have devastated their competition and developed massive monopolies.

In a system of true free market capitalism there would be absolutely no need for a government, because any “service” that is apparently provided by the government can actually be better handled by entrepreneurs. In today’s system we don’t have independent businesses working on a level playing field, instead we are left with a few massive corporations and cartels that use their power in government to maintain their monopolies and stomp out their competition. This is the very definition of fascism — the merger of state and corporate power — this is the dominant economic system in the world, and has been for centuries, in various different forms.

In fascist countries there is really no line between government and big corporations; both types of organizations use legislative power to establish and maintain monopolies. When it comes down to it, both of these organizations rely on violence and threats of violence as a means of getting their way in the marketplace. Essentially, the government is an organization that is used to justify violence, from the military to the tax collectors to the police. This constant use of force is said to be keeping us safe, but in reality it just instigates further conflict and makes our lives more chaotic and violent.

For any authoritarian government to stay in power they must convince their subjects that they are providing them with safety and security. This is the typical public relations scheme of every oppressive government; the idea that they are providing worthwhile services. This is sadly a myth. The government doesn’t provide services; they monopolize services. In other words, they make sure that they are the only organization that can provide schools, hospitals, roads and other utilities to the public because this creates a situation where the people are completely dependent upon the state for survival. This doesn’t mean that a government is the only type of organization that is capable of providing these services. In fact, community groups and entrepreneurs would most likely do a far better job at providing these services because they would actually be judged by the integrity of their work, unlike politicians and corporations.

Oftentimes when the government is providing a service they are actually doing a very poor job, but no one can really tell the difference because there is no competition to judge it by. If you look at the goals that government organizations apparently set out to achieve, you will see they always fail miserably. Therefore, if the government is claiming to provide maximum safety and security, it would be safe to assume that this goal will not be achieved. In the most authoritarian countries where the “leaders” claim to have established an extreme level of security, things are actually very unsafe and citizens in these kinds of countries live in constant fear. Just because there is a very high level of control does not mean that there will be adequate safety or order within a society. The most controlling type of government in today’s world is without a doubt a fascist one.

Fascism is defined as an authoritarian system of government that has strong nationalist and corporatist values. Fascist governments often have strong military cultures and use force to establish themselves as authority figures, both at home and abroad. A Fascist government never refers to themselves as such; to do so would be to admit that they run unjust and oppressive regimes. Fascism exists in many economic systems that claim to be capitalist or communist and can develop even in countries that call themselves democratic.

In fact, most fascist “leaders” tell their people that they live in a free and democratic society so the public takes their grievances to the polls, instead of taking them into the streets where they could actually make an impact. Currently one of the most fascist nations on Earth is called the “Democratic Republic of North Korea”. Likewise, the government in America and the European Union are some of the most fascist regimes in history, yet they still claim to operate under systems of “capitalism” or “democratic socialism”. Like anything else in politics and economics, it’s a word game that’s designed to disguise the truth.

Personally I believe that the economic system of the future that will finally bring us peace, freedom and opportunity has yet to be discovered. However, there are some basics of capitalism and voluntarism that should be considered necessary if we are going to establish a new economic system that is designed to empower the people. The rights to private property, the freedom for people to open businesses and trade freely amongst themselves are elements of capitalism that will ensure freedom in a future economic system. The idea that all interactions in society should be voluntary and free from threats, coercion and violence will ensure peace. These are some good places to start our discussion, but to establish a system that will actually work in our best interest, we, the 99% need to hit the books and put our heads together.

Today, almost every economy in the world is totally dictated by the ideas of two long-dead aristocrats. Karl Marx on one end representing communism, and Adam Smith on the other end representing capitalism. Our whole way of doing business on this planet has changed very little since the time that these two characters were alive, and that right there is the root of our problem. Imagine if a few people in every city across the world wrote their own economic manifestos and got together to respectfully discuss their ideas. We refuse to accept yesterday’s television shows, IPods and PlayStations but without thinking we have accepted ways of living that are centuries old. It’s time for us to work together in creating strategies where everyone can meet their needs without violating the rights of others.

Source: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/8093-wall-street-isnt-winning-its-cheating

Filed Under: Capitalism, Democracy, Equality, Occupy, Revolution