January 20, 2013

Global Rebellion: The Coming Chaos?

Global elites are confused, reactive, and sinking into a quagmire of their own making, says author.

As the crisis of global capitalism spirals out of control, the powers that be in the global system appear to be adrift and unable to proposal viable solutions. From the slaughter of dozens of young protesters by the army in Egypt to the brutal repression of the Occupy movement in the United States, and the water cannons brandished by the militarised police in Chile against students and workers, states and ruling classes are unable are to hold back the tide of worldwide popular rebellion and must resort to ever more generalised repression.

Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy can no longer be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. The ruling classes have lost legitimacy; we are witnessing a breakdown of ruling-class hegemony on a world scale.

To understand what is happening in this second decade of the new century we need to see the big picture in historic and structural context. Global elites had hoped and expected that the “Great Depression” that began with the mortgage crisis and the collapse of the global financial system in 2008 would be a cyclical downturn that could be resolved through state-sponsored bailouts and stimulus packages. But it has become clear that this is a structural crisis. Cyclical crises are on-going episodes in the capitalist system, occurring and about once a decade and usually last 18 months to two years. There were world recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the early 21st century.

Structural crises are deeper; their resolution requires a fundamental restructuring of the system. Earlier world structural crises of the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s were resolved through a reorganisation of the system that produced new models of capitalism. “Resolved” does not mean that the problems faced by a majority of humanity under capitalism were resolved but that the reorganisation of the capitalist system in each case overcame the constraints to a resumption of capital accumulation on a world scale. The crisis of the 1890s was resolved in the cores of world capitalism through the export of capital and a new round of imperialist expansion. The Great Depression of the 1930s was resolved through the turn to variants of social democracy in both the North and the South - welfare, populist, or developmentalist capitalism that involved redistribution, the creation of public sectors, and state regulation of the market.

Globalisation and the current structural crisis

To understand the current conjuncture we need to go back to the 1970s. The globalisation stage of world capitalism we are now in itself evolved out the response of distinct agents to these previous episodes of crisis, in particular, to the 1970s crisis of social democracy, or more technically stated, of Fordism-Keynesianism, or of redistributive capitalism. In the wake of that crisis capital went global as a strategy of the emergent Transnational Capitalist Class and its political representatives to reconstitute its class power by breaking free of nation-state constraints to accumulation. These constraints - the so-called “class compromise” - had been imposed on capital through decades of mass struggles around the world by nationally-contained popular and working classes. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, globally-oriented elites captured state power in most countries around the world and utilised that power to push capitalist globalisation through the neo-liberal model.

Globalisation and neo-liberal policies opened up vast new opportunities for transnational accumulation in the 1980s and 1990s. The revolution in computer and information technology and other technological advances helped emergent transnational capital to achieve major gains in productivity and to restructure, “flexibilise,” and shed labour worldwide. This, in turn, undercut wages and the social wage and facilitated a transfer of income to capital and to high consumption sectors around the world that provided new market segments fuelling growth. In sum, globalisation made possible a major extensive and intensive expansion of the system and unleashed a frenzied new round of accumulation worldwide that offset the 1970s crisis of declining profits and investment opportunities.

However, the neo-liberal model has also resulted in an unprecedented worldwide social polarisation. Fierce social and class struggles worldwide were able in the 20th century to impose a measure of social control over capital. Popular classes, to varying degrees, were able to force the system to link what we call social reproduction to capital accumulation. What has taken place through globalisation is the severing of the logic of accumulation from that of social reproduction, resulting in an unprecedented growth of social inequality and intensified crises of survival for billions of people around the world.

The pauperising effects unleashed by globalisation have generated social conflicts and political crises that the system is now finding it more and more difficult to contain. The slogan “we are the 99 per cent” grows out of the reality that global inequalities and pauperisation have intensified enormously since capitalist globalisation took off in the 1980s. Broad swaths of humanity have experienced absolute downward mobility in recent decades. Even the IMF was forced to admit in a 2000 report that “in recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th century”.

Global social polarisation intensifies the chronic problem of over-accumulation. This refers to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, so that the global market is unable to absorb world output and the system stagnates. Transnational capitalists find it more and more difficult to unload their bloated and expanding mass of surplus - they can’t find outlets to invest their money in order to generate new profits; hence the system enters into recession or worse. In recent years, the Transnational Capitalist Class has turned to militarised accumulation, to wild financial speculation, and to the raiding of sacking of public finance to sustain profit-making in the face of over-accumulation.

While transnational capital’s offensive against the global working and popular classes dates back to the crisis of the 1970s and has grown in intensity ever since, the Great Recession of 2008 was in several respects a major turning point. In particular, as the crisis spread it generated the conditions for new rounds of brutal austerity worldwide, greater flexibilisation of labour, steeply rising under and unemployment, and so on. Transnational finance capital and its political agents utilised the global crisis to impose brutal austerity and attempting to dismantle what is left of welfare systems and social states in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, to squeeze more value out of labour, directly through more intensified exploitation and indirectly through state finances. Social and political conflict has escalated around the world in the wake of 2008.

Nonetheless, the system has been unable to recover; it is sinking deeper into chaos. Global elites cannot manage the explosive contradictions. Is the neo-liberal model of capitalism entering a terminal stage? It is crucial to understand that neo-liberalism is but one model of global capitalism; to say that neo-liberalism may be in terminal crisis is not to say that global capitalism is in terminal crisis. Is it possible that the system will respond to crisis and mass rebellion through a new restructuring that leads to some different model of world capitalism - perhaps a global Keynesianism involving transnational redistribution and transnational regulation of finance capital? Will rebellious forces from below be co-opted into some new reformed capitalist order?

Or are we headed towards a systemic crisis? A systemic crisis is one in which the solution involves the end of the system itself, either through its supersession and the creation of an entirely new system, or more ominously the collapse of the system. Whether or not a structural crisis becomes systemic depends on how distinct social and class forces respond - to the political projects they put forward and as well as to factors of contingency that cannot be predicted in advance, and to objective conditions. It is impossible at this time to predict the outcome of the crisis. However, a few things are clear in the current world conjuncture.

The current moment

First, this crisis shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises of the 1930s and the 1970s, but there are also several features unique to the present:

The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. We face the real spectre of resource depletion and environmental catastrophes that threaten a system collapse.

- The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. Also unprecedented is the concentration of control over the mass media, the production of symbols, images and messages in the hands of transnational capital. We have arrived at the society of panoptical surveillance and Orwellian thought control.

- We are reaching the limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism, in the sense that there are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism. De-ruralisation is now well-advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Like riding a bicycle, the capitalist system needs to continuously expand or else it collapses. Where can the system now expand?

- There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a planet of slums, alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to crises of survival - to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This raises in new ways the dangers of a 21st-century fascism and new episodes of genocide to contain the mass of surplus humanity and their real or potential rebellion.

- There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a “hegemon”, or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. Nation-states cannot control the howling gales of a runaway global economy; states face expanding crises of political legitimacy.

Second, global elites are unable to come up with solutions. They appear to be politically bankrupt and impotent to steer the course of events unfolding before them. They have exhibited bickering and division at the G-8, G-20 and other forums, seemingly paralysed, and certainly unwilling to challenge the power and prerogative of transnational finance capital, the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale, and the most rapacious and destabilising fraction. While national and transnational state apparatuses fail to intervene to impose regulations on global finance capital, they have intervened to impose the costs of the crisis on labour. The budgetary and fiscal crises that supposedly justify spending cuts and austerity are contrived. They are a consequence of the unwillingness or inability of states to challenge capital and their disposition to transfer the burden of the crisis to working and popular classes.

Third, there will be no quick outcome of the mounting global chaos. We are in for a period of major conflicts and great upheavals. As I mentioned above, one danger is a neo-fascist response to contain the crisis. We are facing a war of capital against all. Three sectors of transnational capital in particular stand out as the most aggressive and prone to seek neo-fascist political arrangements to force forward accumulation as this crisis continues: speculative financial capital, the military-industrial-security complex, and the extractive and energy sector. Capital accumulation in the military-industrial-security complex depends on endless conflicts and war, including the so-called wars on terrorism and on drugs, as well as on the militarisation of social control. Transnational finance capital depends on taking control of state finances and imposing debt and austerity on the masses, which in turn can only be achieved through escalating repression. And extractive industries depend on new rounds of violent dispossession and environmental degradation around the world.

Fourth, popular forces worldwide have moved quicker than anyone could imagine from the defensive to the offensive. The initiative clearly passed this year, 2011, from the transnational elite to popular forces from below. The juggernaut of capitalist globalisation in the 1980s and 1990s had reverted the correlation of social and class forces worldwide in favour of transnational capital. Although resistance continued around the world, popular forces from below found themselves disoriented and fragmented in those decades, pushed on to the defensive in the heyday of neo-liberalism. Then the events of September 11, 2001, allowed the transnational elite, under the leadership of the US state, to sustain its offensive by militarising world politics and extending systems of repressive social control in the name of “combating terrorism”.

Now all this has changed. The global revolt underway has shifted the whole political landscape and the terms of the discourse. Global elites are confused, reactive, and sinking into the quagmire of their own making. It is noteworthy that those struggling around the world have been shown a strong sense of solidarity and are in communications across whole continents. Just as the Egyptian uprising inspired the US Occupy movement, the latter has been an inspiration for a new round of mass struggle in Egypt. What remains is to extend transnational coordination and move towards transnationally-coordinated programmes. On the other hand, the “empire of global capital” is definitely not a “paper tiger”. As global elites regroup and assess the new conjuncture and the threat of mass global revolution, they will - and have already begun to - organise coordinated mass repression, new wars and interventions, and mechanisms and projects of co-optation in their efforts to restore hegemony.

In my view, the only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st-century democratic socialism in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.

 

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111130121556567265.html

 

Germany Supplies Israel With Submarines Capable Of Carrying Missiles With Nuclear Warheads

Germany has approved the sale of a sixth Dolphin submarine to Israel and will pay for a third of its cost, government sources told DPA on Wednesday.

Israel already has three German-made Dolphin submarines, which are capable of carrying missiles with nuclear warheads. Berlin paid for two of the submarines and the cost of the third was shared between the two countries. Two more are being constructed.

The government sources said Germany had allocated up to 135 million euros (180 million dollars) in next year’s budget to pay for its share of the cost for the sixth submarine, the sale of which is part of a deal finalized in 2005.

The submarines are seen as a strategic asset for Israel in any future confrontation with Iran…Israel is believed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal, a claim it neither confirms nor denies.

 

Source: https://flipthepyramid.com/index.php/entry/germany-supplies-israel-with-submarines-capable-of-carrying-missiles-with-nuclear-warheads

Trade In Surveillance Technology Raises Worries

Northern Virginia technology entrepreneur Jerry Lucas hosted his first trade show for makers of surveillance gear at the McLean Hilton in May 2002. Thirty-five people attended.

Nine years later, Lucas holds five events annually across the world, drawing hundreds of vendors and thousands of potential buyers for an industry that he estimates sells $5 billion of the latest tracking, monitoring and eavesdropping technology each year. Along the way these events have earned an evocative nickname: The Wiretappers’ Ball.

The products of what Lucas calls the “lawful intercept” industry are developed mainly in Western nations such as the United States but are sold throughout the world with few restrictions. This burgeoning trade has alarmed human rights activists and privacy advocates, who call for greater regulation because the technology has ended up in the hands of repressive governments such as those of Syria, Iran and China.

“You need two things for a dictatorship to survive — propaganda and secret police,” said Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), who has proposed bills to restrict the sale of surveillance technology overseas. “Both of those are enabled in a huge way by the high-tech companies involved.”

But the overwhelming U.S. government response has been to engage in the event not as a potential regulator, but as a customer.

The list of attendees for this year’s U.S. Wiretappers’ Ball, held in October at the North Bethesda Marriott Hotel and Conference Center, included more than 20 federal agencies, said Lucas. Representatives of 43 countries also were there, he said, as were many people from state and local law enforcement agencies. Journalists and members of the public were excluded.

On offer were products that allow users to track hundreds of cellphones at once, read e-mails by the tens of thousands, even get a computer to snap a picture of its owner and send the image to police — or anyone else who buys the software. One product uses phony updates for iTunes and other popular programs to take control of personal computers.

The Commerce Department regulates exports of surveillance technology, but its ability to restrict the trade is limited. Intermediaries sometimes redirect sales to foreign governments, even those subjected to economic sanctions, once products leave the United States. The State Department, which has spent $70 million in recent years to promote Internet freedom abroad, has expressed rising alarm over such transactions but has no enforcement authority.

Industry officials say their products are designed for legitimate purposes, such as tracking terrorists, investigating crimes and allowing employers to block pornographic and other restricted Web sites at their offices.

U.S. law generally requires law enforcement agencies to obtain court orders when intercepting domestic Internet or phone communications. But such restrictions do not follow products when they are sold overseas.

“This technology is absolutely vital for civilization,” said Lucas, the president of TeleStrategies, which hosts the events, officially called Intelligent Support Systems World Conferences. “You can’t have a situation where bad guys can communicate and you bar interception.”

But the surveillance products themselves make no distinction between bad guys and good guys, only users and targets. Several years of industry sales brochures provided to The Washington Post by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, and released publicly Thursday, reveal that many companies are selling sophisticated tools capable of going far beyond conventional investigative techniques.

“People are morally outraged by the traditional arms trade, but they don’t realize that the sale of software and equipment that allows oppressive regimes to monitor the movements, communications and Internet activity of entire populations is just as dangerous,” said Eric King of Privacy International, a London-based group that seeks to limit government surveillance. Sophisticated surveillance technology “is facilitating detention, torture and execution,” he said, “and potentially smothering the flames of another Arab Spring.”

Surging demand worldwide

Demand for surveillance tools surged after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as rising security concerns coincided with the spread of cellphones, Skype, social media and other technologies that made it easier for people to communicate — and easier for governments and companies to eavesdrop on a mass scale.

The surveillance industry conferences are in Prague, Dubai, Brasilia, the Washington area and Kuala Lumpur, whose event starts Tuesday. They are invitation-only affairs, and Lucas said he bars Syria, Iran and North Korea, which are under sanctions, from participating.

The most popular conference, with about 1,300 attendees, was in Dubai this year. Middle Eastern governments, for whom the Arab Spring was “a wake-up call,” are the most avid buyers of surveillance software and equipment, Lucas said. Any customers who come to the event are free to buy the products there.

“When you’re selling to a government, you lose control of what the government is going to do with it,” Lucas said. “It’s like selling guns to people. Some are going to defend themselves. Some are going to commit crimes.”

The suppliers are global as well. About 15 of the vendors for the conference in Bethesda were based in the United States, said Lucas. Others were from Germany, Italy, Israel, South Africa and Britain; many of these also have U.S. offices targeting the market for law enforcement agencies and other government buyers.

Of the 51 companies whose sales brochures and other materials were obtained and released by WikiLeaks, 17 have secured U.S. government contracts in the last five years for agencies such as the FBI, the State Department and the National Security Agency, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal procurement documents.

Privacy experts say the legal framework governing the industry has not kept up with its growth, and products sold for legitimate purposes, such as blocking access to certain Web sites or investigating sexual predators, can easily be adapted for broader surveillance purposes.

Far-reaching tools

The brochures collected by WikiLeaks make clear that few forms of electronic communication are beyond the reach of available surveillance tools. While some simple products cost just a few hundred dollars and can be purchased on on eBay or Amazon, the technology sold at the trade shows often costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Customization and on-site training can provide years of revenue for companies.

One German company, DigiTask, offers a suitcase-sized device capable of monitoring the Web traffic of users at public Wi-Fi hotspots such as cafes, airports and hotel lobbies. A lawyer representing the company, Winfried Seibert, declined to elaborate on its products. “They won’t answer questions about what is offered,” he said. “That’s a secret. That’s a secret between the company and the customer.”

The FinFisher program, which creates fake updates for iTunes, Adobe Acrobat and other programs, was produced by a British company, Gamma International. The Wall Street Journal reported on this product, and several other surveillance tools described in sales brochures, in an article last month. Apple said it altered iTunes to block FinFisher intrusions on Nov. 14.

A Gamma spokesman, Peter Lloyd, said FinFisher is a vital investigative tool for law enforcement agencies and that the company complies with British law. “Gamma does not approve or encourage any misuse of its products and is not aware of any such misuse,” he said.

The WikiLeaks documents, which the group also provided to several European news organizations and one in India, do not reveal the names of buyers. But when “Arab Spring” revolutionaries took control of state security agencies in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, they found that Western surveillance technology had been used to monitor political activists.

“We are seeing a growing number of repressive regimes get hold of the latest, greatest Western technologies and use them to spy on their own citizens for the purpose of quashing peaceful political dissent or even information that would allow citizens to know what is happening in their communities,”said Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for human rights, in a speech last month in California. “We are monitoring this issue very closely.”

In Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad’s efforts to crush an uprising have left 3,500 dead by U.N. calculations, police have reportedly been using surveillance technology to eavesdrop on electronic communications and block access to Web sites.

Syrian activist Rami Nakhle said that after he set up an online newspaper and started blogging about human rights issues, Syria’s secret police began summoning him for regular interrogations that involved threats of torture and a day in solitary confinement. Officers made it clear that they had watched him online despite his efforts to conceal his identity.

Police also had hacked into fellow activists’ Facebook accounts, said Nakhle, 29. “Before, they were not very good at this, but now they are getting more advanced.”

Nakhle fled to Lebanon in January and now lives in suburban Washington as a political exile. Many of his friends are still in Syrian prisons. “I am not that idealistic. I know that companies need money, but this is about people’s lives.” he said.

A spokesman at the Syrian Embassy did not respond to messages seeking comment on the government’s use of surveillance technology.

Customers in Syria and China

The Commerce Department is investigating how monitoring devices made by Blue Coat Systems, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., reached Syria despite sanctions, according to several U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing an ongoing investigation. Blue Coat Systems has said it didn’t know its products were being used by Syria and that the devices in question were intended for the Iraqi communications ministry. A distributor, the company said, shipped the products to a reseller in Dubai.

NetApp, also of Sunnyvale, produced hardware and software that the Syrian government was using to build a system to intercept and catalogue vast amounts of e-mail, according to Bloomberg News. NetApp has denied selling equipment to Syria. The project, which was never finished, also included computer equipment from another California company and two European businesses.

The spread of such technology is not limited to the Middle East. A federal lawsuit filed in May accuses Cisco Systems, a Silicon Valley company, of helping China monitor the Falun Gong spiritual group.

The lawsuit, filed by the U.S.-based Human Rights Law Foundation, alleges that Cisco helped design and provide equipment for China’s “Golden Shield,” a firewall that censors the Internet and tracks government opponents. Cisco has acknowledged that it sells routers, which are standard building blocks for any Internet connection, to China. But it denies the allegations in the suit, saying that it has not customized any items for censorship.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy did not respond to messages seeking comment.

U.S. companies that want to export devices “primarily useful for the surreptitious interception of wire, oral or electronic communications” must apply to the Commerce Department for a license to sell to overseas buyers, according to the Export Administration Regulations.

But it can be hard to prove whether an export is “primarily useful” for surveillance. Some products need to be used in combination with other equipment in order to eavesdrop. Even standard anti-virus software can be retooled to read e-mails and attachments.

Daniel Minutillo, a Silicon Valley-based lawyer who advises technology companies, says that in most cases his clients can show that their products have multiple uses, making them exempt from export licensing rules.

Human rights groups want this loophole closed.

“As long as the market is increasing and there is a lack of regulation, it’s a perfect mix,” said Arvind Ganesan, who studies online surveillance for Human Rights Watch. “The Obama administration has not led in this regard, and there are only a few voices in Congress talking about this. It’s a massive oversight.”

Smith’s bill, which has stalled in committee several times in recent years, would prevent sales to countries, such as China and Syria, that restrict Internet freedom. Yet more aggressive U.S. laws may just push the industry overseas if other nations don’t impose similar restrictions. Indian and Chinese vendors have attended Wiretappers’ Balls in recent years.

A State Department official who attended the event in October was pessimistic that government regulation could curb a fast-changing technology sector. “We’ve lost,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “If the technology people are selling at these conferences gets into the hands of bad people, all we can do is raise the costs. We can’t completely protect activists or anyone from this.”

Source:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trade-in-surveillance-technology-raises-worries/2011/11/22/gIQAFFZOGO_story.html

War On Drugs Revealed As A Total Hoax

Afghanistan is, by far, the largest grower and exporter of opium in the world today, cultivating a 92 percent market share of the global opium trade.

But what may shock many is the fact that the US military has been specifically tasked with guarding Afghan poppy fields, from which opium is derived, in order to protect this multibillion dollar industry that enriches Wall Street, the CIA, MI6, and various other groups that profit big time from this illicit drug trade scheme.

Prior to the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Afghanistan was hardly even a world player in growing poppy, which is used to produce both illegal heroin and pharmaceutical-grade morphine. In fact, the Taliban had been actively destroying poppy fields as part of an effort to rid the country of this harmful plant, as was reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on February 16, 2001, in a piece entitled Nation’s opium production virtually wiped out.

But after 9/11, the US military-industrial complex quickly invaded Afghanistan and began facilitating the reinstatement of the country’s poppy industry. According to the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP), opium cultivation increased by 657 percent in 2002 after the US military invaded the country under the direction of then-President George W. Bush.

CIA responsible for reinstating opium industry in Afghanistan after 9/11

More recently, The New York Times (NYT) reported that the brother of current Afghan President Hamid Karzai had actually been on the payroll of the CIA for at least eight years prior to this information going public in 2009. Ahmed Wali Karzai was a crucial player in reinstating the country’s opium drug trade, known as Golden Crescent, and the CIA had been financing the endeavor behind the scenes.

“The Golden Crescent drug trade, launched by the CIA in the early 1980s, continues to be protected by US intelligence, in liaison with NATO occupation forces and the British military,” wrote Prof. Michel Chossudovsky in a 2007 report, before it was revealed that Ahmed Wali Karzai was on the CIA payroll. “The proceeds of this lucrative multibillion dollar contraband are deposited in Western banks. Almost the totality of revenues accrue to corporate interests and criminal syndicates outside Afghanistan” (https://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/A…).

But the mainstream media has been peddling a different story to the American public. FOX News, for instance, aired a propaganda piece back in 2010 claiming that military personnel are having to protect the Afghan poppy fields, rather than destroy them, in order to keep the locals happy and to avoid a potential “security risk” — and FOX News reporter Geraldo Rivera can be heard blatantly lying about poppy farmers being financially supported by the Taliban, rather than the CIA and other foreign interests.

So while tens of thousands of Americans continue to be harmed or killed every year by overdoses from drugs originating from this illicit opium trade, and while cultivation of innocuous crops like marijuana and hemp remains illegal in the US, the American military is actively guarding the very poppy fields in Afghanistan that fuel the global drug trade. Something is terribly wrong with this picture.

 

Source: https://flipthepyramid.com/index.php/entry/war-on-drugs-revealed-as-total-hoax

The Senate Just Voted Against The Afghanistan War. Here’s The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly.

The Senate just voted against the Afghanistan war. Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly.

THE GOOD

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday voted by voice vote to pass an amendment that concludes thus:

“Resolved, That it is the sense of the Senate that—1) the President of the United States should expedite the transition of the responsibility for military and security operations to the Government of Afghanistan;2) the President shall devise a plan based on inputs from military commanders, the diplomatic missions in the region, and appropriate members of the cabinet, along with the consultation of Congress, for expediting the drawdown of U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan and accelerating the transfer of security authority to Afghan authorities prior to December 2014; and3) and not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Resolution, the President shall transmit to Congress a plan with a timetable and completion date for the accelerated transition of all military and security operations in Afghanistan to the Government of Afghanistan.”

This would be an extremely weak demand from a peace group, but coming from that seat of militaristic corruption, the U.S. Senate, it stands a good chance of actually being acted on by President Obama, and acted on in a meaningful way, such as withdrawing in 2012 rather than by November 2014 instead of December 2014. It is also vague enough that it can be built on with something stronger in the coming months without any contradiction.This amendment came from Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, where Portland has seen a strong Occupy movement. Of course, the whole country has seen a burst of activism. The amendment had bipartisan support. And its rhetorical value, which is most of its value, cannot be undone by a conference committee or a veto.

THE BAD

Three more years of a campaign of mass murder is not an acceptable policy. The Senate has merely asked for something better than the current plan. And the emphasis is on “merely asked.” The Senate is funding the war in the same bill in which it is asking its executive to do its job. The constitutional role of Congress is to make decisions and enforce them with the power of the purse.

Here the Senate is asking the President to decide what to do, but to decide something not quite as bad as his current plan. There is no indication that if the President refuses, funding for a longer war will be cut off. Congress recently stated its opposition to a war in Libya while funding it. Individual senators and House members swore they opposed the War on Iraq while funding it for several years. The President himself did that when he was a senator.

There is also no indication of whether a new president, should we have one, would be bound by the current president’s plan. Also missing is any requirement that all U.S. forces depart, as opposed to, say, remaining as “trainers”. What would help would be a pivot from this bill to a better one in the House. The Senate has now opposed endless war in Afghanistan. In the House there is a bill with 64 cosponsors that would end the war by ceasing to fund it. That bill, HR 780, would be a serious step forward. And it need only pass the House if those who vote for it follow through by voting against all war funding.

THE UGLY

The Merkley amendment is not helped by the assorted whereas clauses that precede the concluding resolution:

“Whereas, after al Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, the United States rightly sought to bring to justice those who attacked us, to eliminate al Qaeda’s safe havens and training camps in Afghanistan, and to remove the terrorist-allied Taliban government;”

Really? This is your antiwar statement? The majority of people in the United States tell pollsters they disagree with this, and they have good reason. “Bringing justice” by bombing people is not just. Overturning foreign governments by force, even horrible ones, is not benefitting the world.

“Whereas, the Afghanistan War is now the longest in American history; “Whereas, United States’ troops, intelligence personnel and diplomatic corps have skillfully achieved these objectives, culminating in the death of Osama bin Laden;”

Really? Skillfully? Ten years to extrajudicially murder one man, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, many thousands of innocent lives, a further devastated nation, and increased hostility toward our own? I’d hate to have seen that done less skillfully.

“Whereas, national security experts, including Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta, have noted that al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan has been greatly diminished;“Whereas, over the past ten years the United States’ mission has evolved to include a prolonged nation-building effort, including the creation of a strong central government, a national police force and army, and effective civic institutions;”

You’re joking, right?

“Whereas, such nation-building efforts in Afghanistan are undermined by corruption, high illiteracy, and a historic aversion to a strong central government;”

Is that a retraction?

“Whereas, members of the United States military have served in Afghanistan valiantly and with honor, and many have sacrificed their lives and health in service to their country;”

Honor? Invading someone else’s country? Kicking in doors? Imprisoning? Murdering? Cutting off fingers as trophies? Where is the honor in this?

“Whereas, the United States is now spending nearly $10 billion a month in Afghanistan at a time when at home there is high unemployment, a flood of foreclosures, a record deficit, and a debt that is over $15 trillion and growing;”

There are the same problems and much worse in Afghanistan. The question isn’t where you spend the money, but on what you spend the money.

“Whereas, the United States has now accomplished its original objectives in Afghanistan;”

The pipeline is up and running? The bases are permanent? The natural resources have been exhausted? The nuclear weapons are positioned? The campaign funders have satisfied their need for profits? The troops have begun moving into Iran?

“Whereas, the continued concentration of American and NATO military forces in one region, when terrorist forces are located in many parts of the world, is not an efficient use of resources; “Whereas, the battle against terrorism is best served by using our troops and resources in a counter-terrorism strategy against terrorist forces wherever they may locate and train;”

Are you f—ing serious? The best defense against terrorism isn’t ceasing to kill people and occupy their countries? The best approach is to use troops to provoke yet more hostility but to do so in multiple places?

“Whereas, the United States will continue to support the development of Afghanistan with a strong diplomatic and counterterrorism presence in the region;”

What about withdrawal and reparations?

Source: https://www.washingtonsblog.com

Update: Egypt Imports 21 Tons Of Tear Gas From The Us, Port Staff Refuses To Sign For It

CAIRO: The arrival of 7 and half tons of tear gas to Egypt’s Suez port created conflict after the responsible officials at the port refused to sign and accept it for fear it would be used to crackdown on Egyptian protesters.

The shipment has been moved by the ministry of interior to its Cairo storage facility, amidst strict and secretive security measures. Local reports say the staff, initially under investigation, have been spared investigation after having a discussion over the matter with their superiors.

Local news sites published documents regarding the shipment shows that the cargo that arrived in 479 barrels from the United States was scheduled to be delivered to the ministry of interior.

The reports also mentioned in the documents that a second shipment of 14 tons of tear gas was expected, making the total 21 tons, in one week.

The importing of tear gas comes after thousands of tear gas canisters were fired at Egyptian protesters last week as clashes raged in downtown Cairo, just off from the iconic Tahrir Square, where thousands of protesters had gathered.

The gas used has angered activists, who say the effects of exposure has yet to wear off, with a number of protesters telling Bikyamasr.com that they have coughing fits, chest pains, blurred vision and their arms often shake. According to the Journal of Royal Medicine, the use of CS Gas – the most common choice of Egypt’s police last week – can have lasting symptoms for over one year.

Egypt’s al-Shorouk newspaper reported that upon the arrival of the shipment, massive disagreements broke out between employees, where five employees refused to sign for the shipment, one after the other.

The five, being dubbed by activists as the “brave five”, were to be refereed to a investigative committee as to why they refused to perform their duties, which has since called off.

The news about the shipment’s arrival stirred the Twittersphere, after it was consumed all day with the country’s first post-revolution elections, and activists mocked the reinforcement of weapons that is being used against them.

Many commented, saying that “gas bombs are definably more important than importing wheat to make bread”.

Source: https://bikyamasr.com/49799/egypt-import-tear-gas-from-us

UN Report on Syria: Based on Witness Accounts … OUTSIDE of Syria

Wall Street and London’s media machine eagerly churned out headlines like BBC’s “Syria security forces ‘commit crimes against humanity” announcing the conclusions of a recent UN Human Rights Council report regarding the ongoing violence in Syria.

However, even upon reading the BBC article it is soon discovered that, “the investigation team members say they were denied entry into Syria itself,” and that the entirety of their “evidence” is garnered solely from interviews with “223 victims, witnesses and also army defectors to investigate alleged human rights violations.”

BBC’s article raises immediate suspicion over the veracity of the report, as “victims, witnesses, and defectors,” interviewed outside of Syria is not evidence, but rather more hearsay by groups of people with a vested interest in painting the Syrian government in the worst light possible.

However, upon actually reading the full text of the UN Human Rights Council report, we see just exactly “how” the report was compiled.

Under a section titled, “Methods of Work” we find a shocking admission of the utter lack of substance and immense conflict of interest behind the UN’s predetermined conclusion, that Syria is guilty of “crimes against humanity” and that the UN Security Council must act.

The report states:

First-hand information was collected through interviews with victims and witnesses of events in the Syrian Arab Republic.The interviewing process began in Geneva on 26 September 2011. Overall, 223 victims and/or witnesses, including personnel who defected from the military and the security forces, were interviewed.

A public call was made to all interested persons and organizations to submit relevant information and documentation that would help the commission implement its mandate. It held meetings with Member States from all regional groups, regional organizations, including the League of Arab States and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, non-governmental organizations, human rights defenders, journalists and experts. Reports, scholarly analyses and media accounts, as well as audio and visual material, were also duly considered.

The information collected is stored in a secure database governed by United Nations rules on confidentiality

Quite obviously this is not an investigation, nor is the information provided within the report “evidence” by any stretch of the imagination. The report would go on to admit that it received no cooperation from the Syrian government meaning that this publication by the UN is but a one-sided exercise to provide the worst possible image of the Syrian government as told by opposition groups now on record fully armed, foreign-backed, and trying to seize power by force.

The inclusion of “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) should also raise immediate concerns. While the report is entirely negligent in listing any of these contributing NGOs, it is more than likely they include the US government and corporate-funded army of sedition emanating out of the National Endowment for Democracy, Geroge Soros’ Open Society Institute, and their myriad of subsidiaries. It has been these very NGOs supplying a steady stream of similarly baseless “witness accounts” since the unrest began earlier this year, as they’ve done in Libya, Belarus, Tunisia,Thailand, and beyond.

“Alleged” is used throughout the report in various forms further illustrating the tenuous nature of the UN Human Rights Council’s “evidence” while all of the testimony, those who gave it, and apparently the NGOs involved in compiling the UN report are conveniently kept “confidential.” This may be because the United Nations believes that its reputation coupled with global faith in its work is all that is necessary to lend their report the legitimacy it needs to bring Syria one step closer to NATO inflicted genocide.

However, considering Iraq and more recently Libya, and the UN’s complicit role in facilitating genocide in both nations based on similarly tenuous “human rights” reports, a clear pattern emerges. Human rights activists, their Wall Street and London-funded NGOs, and the disingenuous UN are merely dressing up with humanitarian concerns an otherwise naked campaign of military conquest.

In Part 1 & 2 of the video: “Lies behind the “Humanitarian War” in Libya.” The outrageous, confirmed, confessed “humanitarian-based” lies used with UN complicity to justify NATO’s invasion by proxy of Libya. Libya is now run by a corporate-backed proxy Abdurrahim el-Keib, formally of the British Petroleum (BP), Shell, France’s Total, Japan Oil Development Company, and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company-sponsored Petroleum Institute.

It has been pointed out in April’s “Globalists Coming Full Circle,” and more recently in Salon’s “Wes Clark and the neocon dream” that the unrest unhinging the Middle East, North Africa, and slowly creeping toward Moscow and Beijing, is part of a plan 20 years in the making. Those behind it just so happen to populate the boards of the faux-humanitarian front, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), have affiliations with the so-called “liberal” George Soros and his Open Society Institute, and have signed their names to Hitlerian declarations of world conquest within the notorious “Project for a New American Century.”

You’re not expected to read the report, let alone research the authors.

Without a doubt, the UN has compiled a tenuous and transparent fabrication of such little substance, those involved in writing it, Paulo Pinheiro, Yakin Ertürk, and Karen Koning AbuZayd, are clearly conspiring to justify an otherwise unjustifiable escalation in Syria’s current unrest. If they did indeed have evidence of Syrian brutality, they surely would have included it in their report and the voices at the BBC, on CNN, in Reuters and beyond would ceaselessly air it. Instead, the impact of the report solely depends on people trusting the legitimacy of the UN and not bothering to even objectively read it. It equally depends on members of the media, including the disingenuous hand-wringing “humanitarians” amongst NED’s vast global network to keep their heads down and not expose this willful duplicity.

The impact of the UN’s report also depends on people not bothering to research the associations of those who compiled it. Should they, they will find that Karen Koning AbuZayd is concurrently a member of the Washington D.C. based Middle East Policy Council, along side current and former associates of Exxon, the US military, the CIA, the Saudi Binladin Group, the US-Qatari Business Council and both former and current members of the US government. It is more than just a coincidence that the UN Human Rights Council report has given the US exactly what it wanted to hear regarding Syria, and one of those compiling the report just so happens to sit amongst an organization full of corporate-financier interests clamoring to despoil the Middle Eastern republic. Clearly, claims that the UN is merely a tool of corporate fascists on Wall Street and within the City of London represent a truth that confronts anyone who researches any of the claims coming out of the UN.

Indeed with this tissue of lies and the associations of the liars peddling them, the UN is truly a disingenuous tool of the world’s elite, used to strip the freedom and humanity of its enemies while simultaneously claiming to uphold such values in the process. The Syrian people are facing a criminal conspiracy of vast proportions in a world increasingly devoid of empathy, intelligence, or courage. Like the Libyans who fought for the better part of a year against the militant aggression of global corporate fascism, the Syrians will soon be fighting too.

For those indeed repulsed by what has transpired in Libya and what is facing Syria at the hands of the global elite, it should be obvious that the corporations, banks, and institutions involved need to be exposed, boycotted, and promptly replaced. It was Libya yesterday, Syria today, and inevitably you tomorrow.

Collectively after World War II we said, “never again,” regarding fascism and the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, yet here we are . . . again.

Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/11/un-report-on-syria-based-on-witness.html

Senate rejects effort to ease terrorist detainee policy in defense bill

By Josiah Ryan on November 29, 2011 - 02:59PM ET

The Senate rejected an amendment on Tuesday that would have removed a provision from the pending Defense spending bill to toughen U.S. policy towards suspected terrorists captured on the battlefield or on the home front.

The amendment, defeated 37-61, would have struck a section of the spending bill that authorizes the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” to detain people suspected of terrorism and instead would have implemented a timeline to allow further hearings and opportunities for the military to make recommendations on how detainee policy ought to change.

Prior to the vote, the amendment’s author, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), argued that military and law enforcement professionals ought to be given a louder voice in the deliberation over a policy that could so drastically affect the execution of their duties.

“We are ignoring the advice and the input of the director of the FBI, the director of the intelligence community, the attorney general of the United States, the Secretary of Defense and the White House,” said Udall.

“My amendment would take out these provisions, and give us in the Congress an opportunity to take a hard look at the needs of our counterterrorism professionals, and respond in a measured way that reflects the input of those who are actually fighting our enemies,” Udall had said on the Senate floor. “The secretary of Defense is warning us that we may be making mistakes that will hurt our capacity to fight terrorism at home and abroad.”

Udall also said he feared the provision could apply to U.S. citizens, which he said would be an “unprecedented threat to our constitutional liberties.”

But Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Carl Levin (D-Mich.) fired back, addressing concerns voiced throughout the day by both progressives and liberals in the Senate that the law would allow American citizens to be detained without a civilian trial.

“The Supreme Court has recently ruled there is no bar to the United States holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant,” said Levin. “This is the Supreme Court speaking.“

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), said that any U.S. citizen suspected of aiding al Qaeda would be entitled to a trial. “The idea that an American citizen helping al Qaeda doesn’t get due process is just a lie,” Graham said.

The White House had opposed the detainee language, describing it as an effort to handcuff the administration’s ability to develop their own policies on the handling of suspected terrorists.

“The Administration strongly objects to the military custody provision of section 1032, which would appear to mandate military custody for a certain class of terrorism suspects,” the White House said in a Nov. 17 release. “This unnecessary, untested, and legally controversial restriction of the President’s authority to defend the Nation from terrorist threats would tie the hands of our intelligence and law enforcement professionals.”

Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Jim Webb (Va.) supported Udall’s amendment, however there was strong opposition from a bipartisan group of senators who said that the detainee language at issues had already been approved in committee.

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) both spoke in favor of the detainee language.

Pete Kasperowicz contributed.

Source:

https://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/195949-senate-defeats-amendment-to-remove-terrorist-detainee-language

Iran Threatens 150,000 Missile Response To Israeli Jerichos

Saber-rattling rhetoric in the Middle East is reaching new heights. Israel is reportedly deploying its long-range Jericho missiles around Jerusalem, while the Iranian defense minister threatened massive missile retaliation against Israel.

The threat to launch “150,000 or more” missiles was voiced by Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi on Sunday as he was delivering a speech before army volunteers. Earlier Iranian officials threatened retaliation against both Israel and NATO, should an attack on Iran be carried out.

Meanwhile Israel is reportedly deploying its own missiles around Jerusalem and in the West Bank. The missiles carried into position by military tracks resemble the Jericho missiles, says Aaron Klein, head of the Jerusalem bureau for WorldNetDaily, citing several eyewitness accounts.

The reporter speculates that this may be a military drill, possibly linked to the earlier rocket test fire. The missile launched from the Palmachim test center was reportedly meant to test a new engine for the long-range Jericho III design. Its specifications are classified, but military experts believe the Israeli missile to be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to any destination in the Middle East, most of Europe, North America and Africa.

Klein believes such a drill may be carried out either as a step in the escalating conflict over Iranian nuclear program or due to the unstable situation in Syria.

Israel’s ongoing row with Iran came back to the fore in the wake of a critical UN nuclear watchdog report, which alleged that Tehran may be working on creating a nuclear weapon and, as some commentators said, gave Israel the grounds for a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear sites.

Syria’s civil unrest and governmental crackdown on the opposition has led to several rounds of sanctions imposed on the country and speculations that an intervention similar to that in Libya may follow. President Assad warned that such a move would result in a major regional conflict. Israel would then become a natural target for Syrian allies like Hamas and Hezbollah in such a scenario.

The Israeli Defense Force would not comment on the alleged missile deployment.

Source:

https://rt.com/news/missile-tossing-iran-israel-457

25 Reasons To Absolutely Despise Bankers And Their Minions

1) Bankers, according to the London Times, launder about 400 billion dollars a year or more in illegal weapons sales. The next time you hear of an African war lord killing families so he can kidnap young boys to become child soldiers and young girls to become child sex slaves, please remember that this could not have happened without the active assistance and cooperation of the bankers and the politicians they own.

2) Bankers told American businessmen that entering World War I would make the Great War last longer which would be good for the United States because it would bankrupt England, France and Germany. Calvin Coolidge on Veterans Day in 1928 said America had lost only 30,000 soldiers during the war but another 100,000 since the war ended. Those men had died of their wounds after the Armistice was signed. Everyone who died after 1915 in WW I died for bankers and Israel.

3) Bankers have been laundering drug money at least since the Opium wars. Currently bankers launder a trillion dollars a year in drug money. That these illegal drugs are killing millions of people and destroying cities one family and one neighborhood at a time is of no concern to them.

4) Gordon Duff of Veterans Today tells us that the Global Hawk which is a pilotless drone version of the U2 Spy plane is frequently used to carry 3,000 pound payloads of opium paste out of Baluchistan Pakistan. This lucrative opium trade is one reason why Afghanistan in America’s longest war. America has killed millions of innocent civilians for nothing. America will one day have to pay that debt.

5) On 9-10-2001 Donald Rumsfeld told us that he could not trace 2.3 trillion dollars in Pentagon spending. On 9-11-2001 four planes were electronically hijacked which together with pre-planted explosives killed 3,000 Americans that day and many more since in needless wars. 189 people died at the Pentagon. Most of these were auditors trying to find the missing trillions the bankers and their friends stole. American taxpayers are treated as indentured servants by the bankers. We are not allowed to audit the books and demand the return of the stolen money. Trillions more have gone missing since Rumsfeld promised on 911 to do a better job tracking down that money.

6) On March 22nd 2000 Susan Gaffney, the Housing and Urban Development Inspector General, testified before the House Governmental Affairs Committee detailing the 59.6 billion dollars that went missing from HUD during the previous two years. When asked if she did anything to recover the missing money she said No. If we were equal to a banker, we would have demanded audits. Years earlier Catherine Austin Fitts was at HUD under Bush I. She found one block in San Diego that had 20 million dollars in HUD guaranteed loans for buildings that never ever existed. All of these loans defaulted and were paid for by taxpayers who do not have the right to audit the books.

7) Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert are both American financial experts who now report on gross banking fraud from their base in Paris. They have made several trips to Dubai and have told us what multiple bankers told them. American contractors returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan have deposited suitcases full of money in Dubai banks. If we did not have a government owned and operated by the bankers, would any of this be possible?

08) Bankers financed the Soviet Revolution which allowed their Communist minions to kill over 60,000,000 real human beings. They deliberately starved 10,000,000 to death in the Ukraine.

9) The UN estimates that worldwide the slave trade traffics 250,000 mostly women and children a year. Many young children are killed for snuff films by Russian Jewish mobs. None of this could happen without the active participation and cooperation of bankers and the governments they own in the United States, England, Israel, Belgium, France, Portugal and elsewhere around the globe.

10) Several years ago documents revealed that the African slave trade was financed through front men like Aaron Lopez . The African slave trade resulted in the deaths of millions of human beings en route to North and South America. No estimate has been made of the numbers killed by the wars over 3 and one half centuries engendered by the desire to capture their fellow Africans to be sold to the bankers and their minions. The slave trade would not have been possible without the active participation and cooperation of the bankers and their governments. Did I neglect to mention the other end of the African slave trade? Every school book cites the trade of rum made in Newport Rhode Island by the 21 Jewish distillers for the slaves of Africa. What they do leave out is the fact that those distillers also sold rum to Indians who routinely massacred white settlers while in drunken rages. Then the settlers would take revenge so all sides except for the distillers and the bankers lost in this trade.

11) Asia Times told us that the big international banks launder 500 billion dollars a year in bribes for politicians. This does not include campaign contributions and cash payments. Remember the congressman in 2008 who said he had two types of calls from his constituents about the proposed Banker Bailout. He said some said No and the rest said Hell No. Yet the Bailout was passed by both Houses and approved by both Presidential candidates. Now you know why the Congress, the news media and the President do not listen to you and do not care what happens to you and your friends and your family.

12) Bernie Sanders revealed the Federal Reserve Bank created 16 trillion dollars in loans over the past couple of years. Many of these loans went overseas. But many of these sweetheart loans made at negative real interest rates (i.e. below the rate of inflation) were made to news organizations like NBC-MSNBC-Comcast. This company is owned by a defense contractor and two Zionist business partners. MSNBC, which is supposedly the most liberal news source in America, has been firing and disciplining liberal anti-war newscasters and hosts. This would be surprising to the casual observer if he or she was not aware of the loans made by the privately owned Federal Reserve bank.

13) Back to that 16 trillion dollar money bomb dropped on the people of the world by the Federal Reserve. Bankers were bundling up home mortgages into bonds and used MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration System) to register their deeds. The bankers allowed their minions to sell one home mortgage into five different bonds in effect selling five different people a legal claim to your house. These bonds were worthless. The ratings agencies Standard and Poor, Fitch and Moodys gave these bonds triple A ratings in exchange for hefty fees. The banks did not do due diligence before selling them to banks overseas. They knew the loans were bad because they bought insurance (Credit Default Swaps) to cash in on the inevitable losses. More than 6 trillion dollars was paid by the FED to overseas banks. Why? Because they wanted to keep New York bankers out of jail. You see those bonds had to go into default and the bankers knew that. A bondholder whose underlying mortgage went bad would not ask for the return of his money. But if the mortgages were good, five different companies would come to collect from one homeowner and the courts might actually have to send bankers to jail. All the inflation you will see over the next few years will be due to the active participation of the Federal Reserve in financial fraud. Obviously those bankers in New York owe Zero Mostel and the writers of the movie script for the Producers a sizable bonus.

14) Do you remember the Presidential election of 2000? I knew Bush would become President years before. But I remember telling my friends that it was obvious to me that the Federal Reserve Board was spiking the election in Bush’s favor so we could go to war. My reasoning was thus: the FED was raising interest rates and tightening credit so the stock market would go down before election day. If the market declines in an election year, the incumbents lose seats in both Houses of Congress and a couple million votes in the Presidential race. Alan Greenspan made George W Bush President of the United States allowing Bush to invade Iraq and Afghanistan for Israel. Can I prove Greenspan knew in advance 911 would happen? One of the Rockefellers told Aaron Russo 911 was coming years in advance. What Greenspan knew about 911 and when he knew it, we will not know until we have war crimes trials.

15) Let’s revisit the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) of 1994. Since that date, America has lost 50,000 manufacturing plants. America has a little over 3,000 counties with an average population of 100,000. If you divide 3,000 into 50,000, you get an average loss of 16 to 17 manufacturing plants closing and going overseas per county. This has destroyed local tax bases, government revenues and jobs resulting in millions of unemployed and millions of foreclosed homes. Instead of testifying before the Congress and telling the nation what would happen Greenspan covered it up by printing lots of money. There was no price inflation, because traditionally a manufacturing based economy has to bid workers and raw materials away from competitors. Not so since NAFTA. We had no manufacturing base left to create price inflation. All the monetary inflation went into the stock market. Greenspan crashed the stock markets to end the dot com bubble and elect the warmonger Bush. After the dot com bubble went pop, Greenspan ignited the Housing Bubble. Why do we have a Bubble economy? The Bankers and their minions sent all the jobs overseas so the only way to make money in America today is through the Subsidized Bubble Machine known as the Federal Reserve and the Federal government. Citizens are required to buy insurance under penalty of law. But the insurance companies who wrote the Obamacare bill are not required to treat you when you get sick. This is a subsidized medical system which when the Bubble pops will send wages down, down down for nurses, doctors, pharmacists, EMTs and others in the health care field. Local schools and police were in the subsidized Bubble economy but the implosion of the tax base is forcing layoffs in many cities and states. Providence Rhode Island gave pink slips to every teacher. Ashtabula county Ohio (population 102,000) laid off all of the Sheriff deputies save those working in foreclosures for the courts. This means they have one deputy per shift for the entire county. A local judge told the residents to buy a gun. We have reached the point where the only Bubbles left are war and other subsidized government endeavors. The next sucking sound you hear will be civil service and healthcare jobs evaporating. This will send the unemployment rate above 30% from its current 22%. By definition and by law, Bubbles cannot give the illusion of productive employment and real wealth without the participation and cooperation of the bankers and the politicians they own.

16) President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed on November 22nd 1963. He had issued Executive Order 11110 on June 4, 1963 which returned the power of the Sovereign to issue currency to the Treasury from the FED. JFK was killed and that Executive Order was never rescinded but his US Treasury Notes which were non-interest bearing were recalled. I keep making the point on public and in print everyone else fears to whisper in secret that Kennedy was murdered on the anniversary of the day the bankers first met in 1910 to draft the legislation their hired politicians would pass on December 23rd, 1913 during Christmas break. My point is that the bankers were giving us a message by killing JFK on the anniversary of their secret meeting. We are peasants and they were born to rule over us. They have the right to kill your President and you do not have the right to try them for their crimes.

17) Martin Luther King was killed on April 4th, 1968. He was killed on the first anniversary of his famous anti-war speech at Riverside church in New York City. King planned to have a Summer of Ant- War protest in Washington D.C. He was going to use passive resistance and civil disobedience to stop the Vietnam War. The Bankers, the Zionists and the Imperialists could not allow King to win so they killed him. The message to the American people was that you are peasants, we are the feudal lords and you cannot refuse to die in our wars. You do not have the right to say No. Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy and his nephew JFK Jr. were also killed by the same people though for different reasons.

18) Dr Alan Sabrosky is a former Director of Studies at the US Army War College. Dr Steve Pieczenik was deputy Secretary of State for three Presidents. They are both of Jewish descent. They both say 911 was an inside job and that Israel did it with the help of traitors inside the US government. Sabrosky has been telling his former colleagues at the Army War College that Israel did 911. Do you for one minute believe that Israel could have done 911 and gotten away with it without the active participation and cooperation of Jewish Americans on Wall Street and in the government and news media?

19) When you go into a bank for a $10,000 loan, the bank is not lending you Mrs Jonses’ life savings. What the bank is doing is creating a $10,000 deposit in your checking account. There a few points of interest in this transaction. The banker only created enough money for you to pay the principal and not the interest on the loan. The interest on the debt can only be paid if the banker loans more money out and increases the total money supply so there is money to make the payments. This is called monetary inflation and usually leads to price inflation. Another point of interest is that the banker gets all of the benefit of making the loan and you, even if you are not part of this transaction, pay for it. How so, you ask? Because your purchasing power was diminished every time the banker made a loan. Years ago I remember reading a study of the loss of savings due to banker induced inflation. It was twice as great as the value of all Social Security payments received by the elderly. Bot a good deal for anyone involved except bankers who now want to cancel Social Security benefits but not the taxes you pay in so we can afford to continue to pay the Banker Bailouts.

20) The federal government under Presidents Kennedy and Lincoln issued non-interest bearing currencies. They saw no reason why the Treasury should not just issue a currency. They did not want to allow the bankers to create money (i.e. Federal Reserve Notes) they would trade for Treasury bonds which would require the taxpayers to pay interest on ever increasing national debts. Eventually, we would create what I have called a Debt Bomb of Unpayable Debts. The burden of those interest payments becomes unbearable and we all go in to bankruptcy at which point the bankers buy everything from us for pennies on the dollar in foreclosure sales with money they stole from us. Then we and our descendants are permanently reduced to the status of a landless serf. There is no reason for a national debt other than to transfer wealth from us to the bankers.

21) Since there is no reason for a national debt, there is no reason for Austerity Cuts so wages and benefits to be matched by taxes on the working and middle classes. The only reason for the European banks to bailout Greece is so that the banks can keep the Ponzi scheme going long enough to trade their Greek debts for euro bonds which they can sell and use to buy gold, silver and oil. All of our sacrifices are for nothing and only increase their ill gotten gain.

22) Harry Markopolos took in more than 300 pages of documented evidence to the SEC to prove to them that Bernie Madoff was stealing tens of billions of dollars from his mostly Jewish clients. The case was not hard to prove. Catherine Austin Fitts said the SEC had to do was to match Madoff’s bank transactions up with his brokerage accounts. So if he was moving lots of money around in his bank accounts but not buying stocks, then he was an obvious fraud who needed to be arrested in time for the Evening News. This is not the end of the story. Markopolos told us that a much greater fraud was waiting in the wings called Credit Default Swaps (CDS) which he valued at a potential loss of 600 trillion dollars. This is ten times the total output of the world’s goods and services. Yet to date neither the House nor the Senate nor the Obama nor Bush Departments of Justice and SEC have seen fit to ask Mr Markopolos to come and give evidence. Why? Because all politicians are frightened little cowards.

23) CDS were invented by a Jewish girl from England named Blythe Masters. She is the VP for Global Commodities at JP Morgan. Her boss is Jamie Dimon who is also Jewish. In 1999 Brooksley Born was Chairwoman of the CFTC and attempted to regulate CDS which are a hybrid between insurance and a derivative which is a bet on the future value of a bond or a commodity. Four Jewish men (Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan and Arthur Levitt) told her that she was not allowed to regulate CDS. That would spoil their fun. If you remember, I previously mentioned that the purchase of a CDS enabled the banks to sell bonds they knew to be worthless. It is illegal to do this. The purchase of a CDS gave the ratings agencies cover to give AAA ratings to zero value, fraudulently induced, no recourse bonds. Now remember the bailout of AIG. The banks knew AIG could not cover the losses they knowingly passed on when they bought CDS, because they both created the moral hazard of less than junk grade bonds and insured against it. They then went to their kept whores in the Congress and had them pass legislation that Bush, Obama and McCain approved of to cover AIG’s losses. It must be so much fun to be a banker, to steal a nation’s wealth, to start wars, to kill millions of people around the world and to make up assassination lists of honest politicians.

24) Jim Willie has a PhD in Statistics. He is so despised by the bankers that he, Bob Chapman and a few others can no longer safely live in the United States. He told Max Keiser that in the 1990s the US Treasury Department sold 2.2 trillion dollars more in Treasury bonds than were needed to fund the federal deficit. Remember that this was a deficit already swollen by missing trillions from HUD, Defense and other agencies. Did I tell you that Indira Singh who worked as a high level computer consultant for the Big Three New York banks until 911 said the bankers were even stealing from Social Security. They would enter say a million non-existent recipients into the computers, give them monthly checks. Those frauds were not part of the 2.2 trillion the bankers put directly into their pockets from the sale of bonds. Nor does it count those gold bars at Fort Knox which were sold and replaced with gold plated tungsten. Nor does it include the gold bars the bankers leased from the government and sold as if the gold were theirs.

25) Do you remember the newscasters during the recent Egyptian uprising saying that they lived on two dollars day in Egypt? The reason for their poverty was that the bankers used the IMF and World Bank to stop the Egyptians from developing agriculture so they could raise their standard of living and they could say No to bankers. The banks have forced Africans to accept Genetically Modified Organisms knowing that they emit pesticides into your blood and also increase your risk of cancer and sterility. They also force poor nations like Bolivia to privatize their water resources. When the bankers did this in Africa, people died of cholera. The bankers grind every last dollar out of the poor before they kill them. They are taking all those trillions of dollars from the Bailouts and buying commodities and sending the price of food and energy higher. In fact prices in a year will be so high that people who used to have jobs will no longer have enough to pay their bills and buy food. Those already poor will simply just fie from starvation, or in riots and revolutions. Maybe the bankers will be kind to the poor and release a plague that will kill a billion or two billion people.

Finally, I must tell you why I despise bankers. It might be one of the reasons why all decent and intelligent people everywhere should hate them. They serve no useful purpose. They have no redeeming qualities. They steal our money. They lie to us. They impoverish nations They ridicule our traditions and our way of life. They casually destroy countries. They destroyed my country America. America was on the road to ruin before I was born. The bankers are not real human beings. No real man or woman would look for honest, intelligent men and women who are well respected and then run to a phone to have them put on a Death List. When the dollar collapses, the bankers will go down their lists of honest and intelligent and courageous men and women killing them until we say No More.

Have I convinced you that bankers are pond scum?

Source:

https://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/25-reasons-to-absolutrly-despise-bankers-and-their-minions