Journalists’ Complicity in Hiding Those Guilty for MH17

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Eric Zuesse.

Eric Zuesse

Robert Parry headlined on July 9th, “MH-17 Case Slips into Propaganda Fog,” and he wrote: “Many investigative journalists, including myself, have been rebuffed in repeated efforts to get verifiable proof about the case or even informational briefings.” His phrase “have been rebuffed” was linked to a July 3rd article by nsnbc’s Christof Lehmann, “MH17 — The Methodology of an International Cover-Up,” which included the following:

The Firewall against Transparency

Numerous journalists, the author included, have made considerable efforts to elicit independently verifiable evidence from all of the involved parties. This includes mails and phone calls to relevant ministries in Ukraine, the USA, UK, Russia, Australia, Malaysia, and the Dutch Safety Board in The Netherlands.

All requests to provide independently verifiable data have remained unanswered. That includes requests for a certified copy of radar data released by the Russian Ministry of Defense, certified copies of communications between Ukrainian Air Traffic Controllers and the flight crew on board the downed Boeing 777-200, and not least a certified copy of the Comma Separated Variable (CSV) file from the downed Boeing 777-200’s flight data recorder.

To mention but a few examples that demonstrate the significance of the need for full transparency. The DSB [Dutch Safety Board, which is running the entire investigation] published a “transcript” of ATC – Flight Crew communications. Investigative journalists have, in other words, no possibility to see whether the audio has been tampered with or for that matter, if the voices even are consistent with those of the flight crew.

Lehmann then dropped a bombshell, just in passing, a communication from a representative of the investigation-team, which communication had been made individually to Lehmann:

Sara Vernooij from the Dutch Safety Board implicitly provided the key to the puzzling question why non[e] of the involved parties is forthcoming with regards to independently testable and verifiable data end evidence by stating to the author:

“The investigation information is protected by Dutch law (Dutch Kingdom Act). This act determines that only the information issued in the Final Reports is public; sources and files containing investigation information are not publicly accessible. … The Kingdom Act concerning the Dutch Safety Board excludes investigation information from [being covered under] the WOB [Open Government Act]. There is [consequently] no possibility to get any access to investigation information by the Dutch Safety Board if you are not a member of the investigation team.”

… That is – no independently testable and verifiable information will be made available to the public.

This wasn’t the first time that the Dutch Safety Board has made clear that it will prohibit the public from having access to the evidence. The Dutch Safety Board had received its authority over the MH17 investigation by the Dutch Government. The Dutch Government had participated in the planning for the Maidan demonstrations and the overthrow of the prior Ukrainian Government. On 24 August 2014, I had headlined, “MH-17 ‘Investigation': Secret August 8th Agreement Seeps Out,” and reported that, 

Regarding what caused the downing of the Malaysian airliner MH-17 in Ukraine on July 17th, the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, reported in a brief Russian-language news story on August 12th, that four days earlier (August 8th) a representative of that nation’s [Ukraine’s] Prosecutor General office, Yuri Boychenko, had said that (as auto-translated by google), “the results [of the investigation] will be announced upon completion of the investigation and with the consent of all the parties who signed the corresponding agreement.” This UNIAN report said that, “As part of the four-party agreement signed on August 8 between Ukraine, the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia [all of which nations are allies of the United States and are cooperating with its new Cold War against Russia], information on the investigation into the disaster Malaysian ‘Boeing-777’ will not be disclosed.” In other words: the official ‘investigation’ is being carried out by four nations that, as U.S. allies, are hostile toward Russia. One of those four nations, Ukraine, is … a prime suspect in possibly having shot this airliner down.

Any intelligent person understands that giving a suspect in a crime a veto-power over the ‘findings’ of the official investigation into the crime means that the ‘investigation’ is dishonest; it is corrupt. And yet journaliststs continue to play along with this game as if it weren’t corrupt. Instead of publicizing its corruptness, they pretend that the official ‘investigation’ isn’t corrupt. More is needed than merely to talk about “transparency,” or “propaganda fog.” The appropriate charge here is: “corrupt.” The official ‘investigation’ is corrupt. It is dishonest.

How, then, should investigative journalists deal with this matter?

First of all, they need to publicize that the official ‘investigation’ is corrupt (not only as was just indicated, but in other respects also). Any ‘investigation’ into a crime, where a suspect in the crime possesses veto-power over the ‘findings,’ is corrupt, and cannot be trusted by a journalist who has integrity and basic intelligence. But furthermore, all four national ‘investigators’ were in league with this Ukrainian Government even prior to the downing.

Secondly, it is crucial that journalists identify and point out what constitutes the highest-quality, least-likely-to-have-been-fabricated-or-tampered-with, item of evidence regarding this crime, and that they then build their theory of the case upon that item of evidence, by interpreting every other item of evidence only in ways that are consistent with what is proven to be so on the basis of that one highest-quality item of evidence.

Such a highest-quality item of evidence does, in fact, exist here, and it’s already publicly available; and it is the side-panel of the cockpit right next to where the plane’s pilot was sitting. That side-panel has an enormous gash shot through it, right where the pilot’s belly would have been. This gash is a few feet in diameter, and its ragged edge shows that it was caused not by a huge object like a canonball but instead by a fusillade of much smaller projectiles that had been fired at the pilot and which ripped through the panel to his body, and killed him. This is shocking evidence. It demonstrates that whatever ripped into the pilot’s body was fired sufficiently close-in so as to target him, and not merely target the plane itself, which, of course, is much larger than a pilot’s belly. Here is that side-panel shown positioned onto the plane prior to the downing, so that you can recognize where it had been located on the airliner. And here is a view of this side-panel shown very close up, in high detail. And here it is shown so that you can see the full side-panel and the enormous gash into it from those projectiles that had been fired at the pilot’s belly.

Now, in order to see an analysis of what is proven by this side-panel, click here. That walks a reader through this and the other reliable evidence, so that you can make your determinations for yourself, rather than relying upon Robert Parry’s statements, or Christof Lehmann’s statements, or my statements — or anyone’s. The case there is presented by me, but it constantly links directly to the actual evidence, and it interprets all of the other evidence in a way that is consistent with this side-panel as you see it in those photographs, all of which were taken within just hours of the shoot-down. This will enable you to make up your own mind about everything, entirely on your own, on a best-evidence basis, and with minimal reliance upon other people’s statements, because your analysis will be entirely upon a best-evidence-based analysis, which is the way that a jury in a court of law in a democratic country is supposed to reach its verdict about a crime.

However, if you are reading this article for the first time, then you might first want to see the case presented in a different way, which points out the reason why the ‘history’ of this event, the cause of that crime, cannot be what the official versions of it say that it is: it cannot be a ground-fired missile that brought down this airliner 33,000 feet above. That ‘explanation’ isn’t only false; it is actually absurd. However, that explanation includes stills from a Russian documentary about the standard ground-based-missile (“Buk”) ‘explanation’ of the shoot-down; and some people in the West have been so indoctrinated to disbelieve everything that comes out of Russia, so that they won’t even want to see that case, which is a preliminary case, demonstrating the U.S.-Ukrainian or Western theory of this event to be absurd on its face. If you want to see that preliminary case (of the absurdity of the U.S.-Ukrainian ‘explanation’), it’s here.

That link, for anyone who isn’t simply closed-minded to Russian sources, is the best single summary presentation of the evidence on the MH17 matter, as I have been able to reconstruct the event.

More recently, I have updated my account in order to deal with the second-most-reliable item of evidence on the case, which is the pilot’s corpse, the autopsy on which is still being hidden, but the cover-up of which is consistent with what one would expect on the basis of my analysis. That update, concerning what would likely be the conclusive proof in the case if it were ever to become public, is here.

And what about the black box and the other items of evidence that are so much the foci of the public’s attention in the West? Well, not only will that evidence never be made public, and so it’s not a rational basis for the public to rely upon in whatever dubious form that might some day become publicly released, but, it’s in the hands of an investigating-team that’s committed to produce a report, if any, that will be acceptable to the Ukrainian Government, which is one of the suspects.

By contrast, the cockpit side-panel was superbly photographed and uploaded to the Internet within only hours of the shoot-down. And no country, and no agent for any country, had had an opportunity to manipulate it before it was made public.

That’s extraordinary. It’s golden. Trusting anything else as constituting the primary item of evidence doesn’t make legal/forensic sense. And, as the last-given link here opens by explaining, wikipedia’s article about the downing of this airliner is deeply untrustworthy, because it altogether ignores the one best item of evidence.

So, the complicity of even the best journalists about this hoax has been that they play along with the pretense that the official authorities on the matter are honest. They make this assumption, even where the authorities persist in hiding evidence from them. Instead, every reader should make up his or her own mind about the downing of this airliner, if a person is interested in the matter at all. Distrust has to be the default assumption for any reader, on this. But what that means in practical terms is: Start only with the least-likely-to-have-been-manipulated item of evidence, and then reason from there, by means of interpreting every other item of evidence on the basis of its consistency with that one, the most-reliable-of-all, item of evidence. And any ‘evidence’ that is inconsistent with it must be presumed to be likely manipulated; it’s legal/forensically inadmissible.

The MH17 shoot-down occurred within the context of U.S. President Barack Obama’s frustration at the EU’s reluctance to increase economic sanctions against Russia, and the downing of this plane was used as the excuse for increasing those sanctions, and it worked — his (and Ukraine’s) ‘explanation’ of the event was accepted right away (though the official ‘investigation’ still has not been completed, if it ever will be). So, this was one of the cardinal historic occurrences in 2014. Anyone seriously interested in the history of our times will need to determine for him or her self how that airliner was shot down. Understanding this event accurately will then open doors to an accurate understanding of our times, and of the world we live in. Not only the victims’ families need to know the truth about this. We all do, actually.

———-

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Posted in General, Media, Politics / World News, propaganda | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

You’re Worried About the WRONG Things … Here Are the REAL Dangers that Could Kill You

Posted on July 10, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog

You’re Much More Likely to Be Killed By Deer, Cows, Dogs, Brain-Eating Parasites, Toddlers, Lightning, Falling Out of Bed, Alcoholism, Food Poisoning, Choking On Your Meal, a Financial Crash, Obesity, Medical Errors or “Autoerotic Asphyxiation” than by Terrorists

Preface: Bad government policy has increased the level of terrorism. And corruption in our security agencies has allowed attacks to succeed which should have been stopped.

Even so, the levels of terrorism are still much lower than many assume. Government officials and counter-terror experts may hype the terror threat to promote their agendas. But – as shown below – your risk of being killed in a terror attack is actually much lower than being killed by virtually any other cause.

Daniel Benjamin – the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the United States Department of State from 2009 to 2012 – noted in January (at 10:22):

The total number of deaths from terrorism in recent years has been extremely small in the West. And the threat itself has been considerably reduced. Given all the headlines people don’t have that perception; but if you look at the statistics that is the case.

Time Magazine noted in 2013 that the chance of dying in a terrorist attack in the United States from 2007 to 2011, according to Richard Barrett – coordinator of the United Nations al Qaeda/Taliban Monitoring Team – was 1 in 20 million.

Let’s look at specific numbers …

The U.S. Department of State reports that only 17 U.S. citizens were killed worldwide as a result of terrorism in 2011.* That figure includes deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq and all other theaters of war.

In contrast, the American agency which tracks health-related issues – the U.S. Centers for Disease Control – rounds up the most prevalent causes of death in the United States:

Comparing the CDC numbers to terrorism deaths means:

– You are 35,079 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack

– You are 33,842 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack

– You are 4,311 times more likely to die from diabetes than from a terrorist attack

– You are 3,157 times more likely to die from flu or pneumonia than from a terrorist attack

– You are 2,091 times more likely to die from blood poisoning than from a terrorist attack

– You are 1,064 times more likely to die as your lungs swell up after your food or beverage goes down the wrong pipe

(Keep in mind when reading this entire piece that we are consistently and substantially understating the risk of other causes of death as compared to terrorism, because we are comparing deaths from various causes within the United States against deaths from terrorism worldwide.)

Wikipedia notes that obesity is a a contributing factor in 100,000–400,000 deaths in the United States per year. That makes obesity 5,882 to 23,528 times more likely to kill you than a terrorist.

The annual number of deaths in the U.S. due to avoidable medical errors is as high as 100,000. Indeed, one of the world’s leading medical journals – Lancet – reported in 2011:

A November, 2010, document from the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services reported that, when in hospital, one in seven beneficiaries of Medicare (the government-sponsored health-care programme for those aged 65 years and older) have complications from medical errors, which contribute to about 180 000 deaths of patients per year.

That’s just Medicare beneficiaries, not the entire American public. Scientific American noted in 2009:

Preventable medical mistakes and infections are responsible for about 200,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, according to an investigation by the Hearst media corporation.

And a new study in the Journal of Patient Safety says the numbers may be up to 440,000 each year. But let’s use the lower – 100,000 – figure. That still means that you are 5,882 times more likely to die from medical error than terrorism.

The CDC says that some 80,000 deaths each year are attributable to excessive alcohol use. So you’re 4,706 times more likely to drink yourself to death than die from terrorism.

Approximately 38,329 Americans die each year from drug overdoses. That’s 2,255 times more than from terrorists.

Wikipedia notes that there were 32,367 automobile accidents in 2011, which means that you are 1,904 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack. As CNN reporter Fareed Zakaria wrote last year:

“Since 9/11, foreign-inspired terrorism has claimed about two dozen lives in the United States. (Meanwhile, more than 100,000 have been killed in gun homicides and more than 400,000 in motor-vehicle accidents.)”

Even President Obama agreed.

According to a 2011 CDC report, poisoning from prescription drugs is even more likely to kill you than a car crash. Indeed, the CDC stated in 2011 that – in the majority of states – your prescription meds are more likely to kill you than any other source of injury. So your meds are thousands of times more likely to kill you than Al Qaeda.

The financial crisis has also caused quite a few early deaths. The Guardian reported in 2008:

High-income countries such as the UK and US could see a 6.4% surge in deaths from heart disease, while low-income countries could experience a 26% rise in mortality rates.

Since there were 596,339 deaths from heart disease in the U.S. in 2011 (see CDC table above), that means that there are approximately 38, 165 additional deaths a year from the financial crisis … and Americans are 2,245 times more likely to die from a financial crisis that a terrorist attack.

Financial crises cause deaths in other ways, as well. For example, the poverty rate has skyrocketed in the U.S. since the 2008 crash. For example, the poverty rate in 2010 was the highest in 17 years, and more Americans numerically were in poverty as of 2011 than for more than 50 years. Poverty causes increased deaths from hunger, inability to pay for heat and shelter, and other causes. (And – as mentioned below – suicides have skyrocketed recently; many connect the increase in suicides to the downturn in the economy.)

The number of deaths by suicide has also surpassed car crashes. Around 35,000 Americans kill themselves each year (and more American soldiers die by suicide than combat; the number of veterans committing suicide is astronomical and under-reported). So you’re 2,059 times more likely to kill yourself than die at the hand of a terrorist.

The CDC notes that there were 7,638 deaths from HIV and 45 from syphilis, so you’re 452 times more likely to die from risky sexual behavior than terrorism. (That doesn’t include death by autoerotic asphyxiation … discussed below.)

The National Safety Council reports that more than 6,000 Americans die a year from falls … most of them involve people falling off their roof or ladder trying to clean their gutters, put up Christmas lights and the like. That means that you’re 353 times more likely to fall to your death doing something idiotic than die in a terrorist attack.

The same number – 6,000 – die annually from texting or talking on the cellphone while driving. So you’re 353 times more likely to meet your maker while lol’ing than by terrorism.

Some 5,000 Americans die each year from eating contaminated food. That’s 294 times more than from terrorism. And see this.

The agency in charge of workplace safety – the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration – reports that 4,609 workers were killed on the job in 2011 within the U.S. homeland. In other words, you are 271 times more likely to die from a workplace accident than terrorism.

Approximately 4,000 Americans drown each year … 235 times more than from terror attacks.

The CDC notes that 3,177 people died of “nutritional deficiencies” in 2011, which means you are 187 times more likely to starve to death in American than be killed by terrorism.

About 2,200 Americans die each year from acute alcohol poisoning (i.e. extreme binge drinking) … 129 times more than from terror attacks.

Some 2,000 Americans die each year from heat or cold. That’s 118 times more than from terrorism.

Approximately 1,000 Americans die each year from autoerotic asphyxiation. So you’re 59 times more likely to kill yourself doing weird, kinky things than at the hands of a terrorist.

There were an average of 928 Americans killed by police officers in the United States each year in “justifiable homicides”. That means that you were more than 55 times more likely to be killed by a law enforcement officer than by a terrorist. That number does not include unjustifiable homicides.

Some 411 Americans are electrocuted each year … 24 times more than die from terrorism.

Nearly 400 Americans die each year due to allergic reactions to penicillin. More than 200 deaths occur each year due to food allergies. Nearly 100 Americans die due to insect allergies. And 10 deaths each year are due to severe reactions to latex. See this. There are many other types of allergies, but that totals 710 deaths each year from just those four types of allergies alone … making it 42 times more likely that you’ll die from an allergic reaction than from a terror attack.

Some 450 Americans die each year when they fall out of bed, 26 times more than are killed by terrorists.

Scientific American notes:

You might have toxoplasmosis, an infection caused by the microscopic parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which the CDC estimates has infected about 22.5 percent of Americans older than 12 years old

Toxoplasmosis is a brain-parasite. The CDC reports that more than 375 Americans die annually due to toxoplasmosis. In addition, 3 Americans died in 2011 after being exposed to a brain-eating amoeba. So you’re about 22 times more likely to die from a brain-eating zombie parasite than a terrorist.

200 Americans are killed each year when they hit deer … 12 times more than from terrorism.

100 Americans die a year due to scalding hot tap water, 6 times more than due to terrorists.

58 Americans are killed each year by bees, wasps and hornets … 3 times more than by terrorism.

Some 34 Americans a year are killed by dogs … around twice as many as by terrorists.

20 Americans are killed each year by cows … more than by terrorists.

The 2011 Report on Terrorism from the National Counter Terrorism Center notes that Americans are just as likely to be “crushed to death by their televisions or furniture each year” as they are to be killed by terrorists.

The Jewish Daily Forward noted in May that – even including the people killed in the Boston bombing – you are more likely to be killed by a toddler than a terrorist. And see these statistics from CNN.

Reason notes:

[The risk of being killed by terrorism] compares annual risk of dying in a car accident of 1 in 19,000; drowning in a bathtub at 1 in 800,000; dying in a building fire at 1 in 99,000; or being struck by lightning at 1 in 5,500,000. In other words, in the last five years you were four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist.

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) has just published, Background Report: 9/11, Ten Years Later [PDF]. The report notes, excluding the 9/11 atrocities, that fewer than 500 people died in the U.S. from terrorist attacks between 1970 and 2010.

Scientific American reported in 2011:

John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, and Mark Stewart, a civil engineer and authority on risk assessment at University of Newcastle in Australia … contended, “a great deal of money appears to have been misspent and would have been far more productive—saved far more lives—if it had been expended in other ways.”

chart comparing annual fatality risksMueller and Stewart noted that, in general, government regulators around the world view fatality risks—say, from nuclear power, industrial toxins or commercial aviation—above one person per million per year as “acceptable.” Between 1970 and 2007 Mueller and Stewart asserted in a separate paper published last year in Foreign Affairs that a total of 3,292 Americans (not counting those in war zones) were killed by terrorists resulting in an annual risk of one in 3.5 million. Americans were more likely to die in an accident involving a bathtub (one in 950,000), a home appliance (one in 1.5 million), a deer (one in two million) or on a commercial airliner (one in 2.9 million). [Let’s throw a couple more fun facts into the mix … The risk of choking to death on food is 1 in 4,404, and the risk of dying by falling out of furniture (including couches, chairs and beds) is 1 in 4,238. So you’re almost a thousand times more likely to die from one of these rare causes of death than terrorism.]

The global mortality rate of death by terrorism is even lower. Worldwide, terrorism killed 13,971 people between 1975 and 2003, an annual rate of one in 12.5 million. Since 9/11 acts of terrorism carried out by Muslim militants outside of war zones have killed about 300 people per year worldwide. This tally includes attacks not only by al Qaeda but also by “imitators, enthusiasts, look-alikes and wannabes,” according to Mueller and Stewart.

Defenders of U.S. counterterrorism efforts might argue that they have kept casualties low by thwarting attacks. But investigations by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies suggest that 9/11 may have been an outlier—an aberration—rather than a harbinger of future attacks. Muslim terrorists are for the most part “short on know-how, prone to make mistakes, poor at planning” and small in number, Mueller and Stewart stated. Although still potentially dangerous, terrorists hardly represent an “existential” threat on a par with those posed by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

In fact, Mueller and Stewart suggested in Homeland Security Affairs, U.S. counterterrorism procedures may indirectly imperil more lives than they preserve: “Increased delays and added costs at U.S. airports due to new security procedures provide incentive for many short-haul passengers to drive to their destination rather than flying, and, since driving is far riskier than air travel, the extra automobile traffic generated has been estimated to result in 500 or more extra road fatalities per year.”

The funds that the U.S. spends on counterterrorism should perhaps be diverted to other more significant perils, such as industrial accidents (one in 53,000), violent crime (one in 22,000), automobile accidents (one in 8,000) and cancer (one in 540). “Overall,” Mueller and Stewart wrote, “vastly more lives could have been saved if counterterrorism funds had instead been spent on combating hazards that present unacceptable risks.” In an e-mail to me, Mueller elaborated:

“The key question, never asked of course, is what would the likelihood be if the added security measures had not been put in place? And, if the chances without the security measures might have been, say, one in 2.5 million per year, were the trillions of dollars in investment (including overseas policing which may have played a major role) worth that gain in security—to move from being unbelievably safe to being unbelievably unbelievably safe? Given that al Qaeda and al Qaeda types have managed to kill some 200 to 400 people throughout the entire world each year outside of war zones since 9/11—including in areas that are far less secure than the U.S.—there is no reason to anticipate that the measures have deterred, foiled or protected against massive casualties in the United States. If the domestic (we leave out overseas) enhanced security measures put into place after 9/11 have saved 100 lives per year in the United States, they would have done so at a cost of $1 billion per saved life. That same money, if invested in a measure that saves lives at a cost of $1 million each—like passive restraints for buses and trucks—would have saved 1,000 times more lives.”

Mueller and Stewart’s analysis is conservative, because it excludes the most lethal and expensive U.S. responses to 9/11. Al Qaeda’s attacks also provoked the U.S. into invading and occupying two countries, at an estimated cost of several trillion dollars. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have resulted in the deaths of more than 6,000 Americans so far—more than twice as many as were killed on September 11, 2001—as well as tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.

***

In 2007 New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that people are more likely to be killed by lightning than terrorism. “You can’t sit there and worry about everything,” Bloomberg exclaimed. “Get a life.”

Indeed, the Senior Research Scientist for the Space Science Institute (Alan W. Harris) estimates that the odds of being killed by a terrorist attack is about the same as being hit by an asteroid (and see this).

Terrorism pushes our emotional buttons. And politicians and the media tend to blow the risk of terrorism out of proportion. But as the figures above show, terrorism is a very unlikely cause of death.

Our spending on anti-terrorism measures is way out of whack … especially because most of the money has been wasted. And see this article, and this 3-minute video by professor Mueller:

Indeed, mission creep in the name of countering terrorism actually makes us more vulnerable to actual terrorist attacks. And corrupt government policy is arguably more dangerous than terrorism.

Sadly, the terrorism deaths Americans have suffered were unnecessary … and were largely due to corruption in our security agencies. And see this.

* Note: Subsequent official reports – published in 2012 and 2013 – show that even fewer Americans were killed by terrorists than in the previous year.

Posted in General, Politics / World News | 1 Comment

Help Rebuild Al-Awda Hospital in Gaza and Support Scholarship by Dr. Norman Finkelstein

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Robert Barsocchini

Dr. Norman Finkelstein (PhD, Political Science, Princeton), is writing a crowd-funded column at Byline.  All funds contributed will go towards medical equipment for Al-Awda hospital in Gaza, which was badly damaged by Israel during its latest assault on the refugee camp.  If Dr. Finkelstein reaches his goal of raising $100,000.00, he will continue the fortnightly column for a year.

Topics will include:

“the ‘new anti-Semitism’ (I argue it’s concocted by Israel to stifle criticism of its criminal policies)”

“on the betrayal of human rights organizations (I expose Amnesty International’s apologetics for Israel in its recent reports on Gaza)” [His first column is on this topic and is posted at Byline.  For example, he shows that, after the 2014 assault, Amnesty devoted 78 pages to indicting Israel, and 107 to indicting Hamas.]

“on the meaning of academic freedom (I reveal, for the first time, the sordid details of my tenure-denial case).”

“I also hope to comment on breaking news. There’s a fair chance that the UN Security Council will soon table a resolution that fatally compromises Palestinian rights, and that Israel will attack Lebanon this coming summer. I want to use my column to alert and guide readers as these ominous developments unfold.”

After two days, he has raised over $14,000.00.  Supporters pledging $10.00 or more can have their names included on a plaque that will be placed in the Al-Awda hospital in honor of Dr. Finkelstein’s parents, survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Maijdanek and Auschwitz Death Camps.

The staff at Al Awda welcomes the initiative and says it is “vitally important for ensuring the continuation of health services for the poorest and most disadvantaged in the Gaza strip.”

Dr. Finkelstein’s first column at Byline.

This is a unique a chance to both support the besieged people of Gaza and foster scholarship and reporting by one of the best researchers on the topic, whose work has been praised by Raul Hilberg, the preeminent Holocaust scholar.

Posted in General, Media, Politics / World News, propaganda | 1 Comment

Document Shows CIA Reaction to Finding No WMD in Iraq

Posted on July 10, 2015 by DavidSwanson

By David Swanson, teleSUR

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The National Security Archive has posted several newly available documents, one of them an account by Charles Duelfer of the search he led in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, with a staff of 1,700 and the resources of the U.S. military.

Duelfer was appointed by CIA Director George Tenet to lead a massive search after an earlier massive search led by David Kay had determined that there were no WMD stockpiles in Iraq. Duelfer went to work in January 2004, to find nothing for a second time, on behalf of people who had launched a war knowing full well that their own statements about WMDs were not true.

The fact that Duelfer states quite clearly that he found none of the alleged WMD stockpiles cannot be repeated enough, with 42% of Americans (and 51 percent of Republicans) still believing the opposite.

A New York Times story last October about the remnants of a long-abandoned chemical weapons program has been misused and abused to advance misunderstanding. A search of Iraq today would find U.S. cluster bombs that were dropped a decade back, without of course finding evidence of a current operation.

Duelfer is also clear that Saddam Hussein’s government had accurately denied having WMD, contrary to a popular U.S. myth that Hussein had pretended to have what he did not.

The fact that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their team knowingly lied cannot be overemphasized. This group took the testimony of Hussein Kamel regarding weapons he’d said had been destroyed years ago, and used it as if he’d said they currently existed. This team used forged documents to allege a uranium purchase. They used claims about aluminum tubes that had been rejected by all of their own usual experts. They “summarized” a National Intelligence Estimate that said Iraq was unlikely to attack unless attacked to say nearly the opposite in a “white paper” released to the public. Colin Powell took claims to the U.N. that had been rejected by his own staff, and touched them up with fabricated dialogue.

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller concluded that, “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even nonexistent.”

On January 31, 2003, Bush suggested to Blair that they could paint an airplane with U.N. colors, fly it low to get it shot at, and thereby start the war. Then the two of them walked out to a press conference at which they said they would avoid war if at all possible. Troop deployments and bombing missions were already underway.

When Diane Sawyer asked Bush on television why he had made the claims he had about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, he replied: “What’s the difference? The possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons, if he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger.”

Duelfer’s newly released internal report on his hunt, and that of Kay before him, for the figments of propagandists’ imagination refers to “Saddam Hussein’s WMD program,” which Duelfer treats as an on-again, off-again institution, as if the 2003 invasion had just caught it in one of its naturally cyclical low tides of non-existence. Duelfer also describes the nonexistent program as “an international security problem that vexed the world for three decades,” — except perhaps for the part of the world engaged in the largest public demonstrations in history, which rejected the U.S. case for war.

Duelfer openly states that his goal was to rebuild “confidence in intelligence projections of threat.” Of course, having found no WMDs, he can’t alter the inaccuracy of the “projections of threat.” Or can he? What Duelfer did publicly at the time and does again here is to claim, without providing any evidence for it, that “Saddam was directing resources to sustain the capacity to recommence producing WMD once U.N. sanctions and international scrutiny collapsed.”

Duelfer claims that former Saddam yes men, rigorously conditioned to say whatever would most please their questioner, had assured him that Saddam harbored these secret intentions to start rebuilding WMD someday. But, Duelfer admits, “there is no documentation of this objective. And analysts should not expect to find any.”

So, in Duelfer’s rehabilitation of the “intelligence community” that may soon be trying to sell you another “projection of threat” (a phrase that perfectly fits what a Freudian would say they were doing), the U.S. government invaded Iraq, devastated a society, killed upwards of a million people by best estimates, wounded, traumatized, and made homeless millions more, generated hatred for the United States, drained the U.S. economy, stripped away civil liberties back home, and laid the groundwork for the creation of ISIS, as a matter not of “preempting” an “imminent threat” but of preempting a secret plan to possibly begin constructing a future threat should circumstances totally change.

This conception of “preemptive defense” is identical to two other concepts. It’s identical to the justifications we’ve been offered recently for drone strikes. And it’s identical to aggression. Once “defense” has been stretched to include defense against theoretical future threats, it ceases to credibly distinguish itself from aggression. And yet Duelfer seems to believe he succeeded in his assignment.

Posted in General | 3 Comments

Encryption Is As American As Apple Pie: The Founding Fathers Frequently Used It … And It Helped Win the Revolutionary War

Posted on July 9, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog

Spying v. Privacy: An Ancient Battle

The NSA, FBI and other government agencies are pushing to outlaw encryption.  And see this.  On the other hand, many Americans want privacy.

This is the same battle fought by the Founding Fathers more than 2oo years ago.

After all, the NSA is doing to modern Americans what King George did to Colonial America … which was one of the main reasons the Founders launched the Revolution.  And see this.

And Benjamin Franklin was called a traitor (like Edward Snowden) for blowing the whistle on the government’s actions.

Encryption During the Revolution

While encryption might seem like a new affair, it is actually very old school … and something which the Founding Fathers extensively used.

John Fraser noted in 1997 in the The Virginia Journal of Law and Technology (I’ve bolded names of Founding Fathers):

The generation of actors that framed the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were sophisticated users of secret communications, and … they used secret communications to protect and advance the political objectives that they most valued. Encryption was speech.

***

From the beginnings of the American Revolution in 1775 until the adoption of the United States Constitution, Americans used codes, ciphers and other secret writings to foment, support, and carry to completion a rebellion against the British government. In the words of one author, “America was born of revolutionary conspiracy.” Moreover, “[a]s rebels and conspirators, the young nation’s leaders … turned to codes and ciphers in an effort to preserve the confidentiality of their communications.” Americans also continued to use secret communications methods for purely private correspondence, and for political correspondence where a restricted audience was desired. The leading lights of the Revolution and the founding generation were frequent users of secret communications during the Revolution.

George Washington, as commander of the Continental Army, was forced to deal with encryption and espionage issues shortly after taking command of the Army when it was conducting a siege of the British forces in Boston….  Washington also was forced, through the circumstances of the War, to deal with encryption and decryption issues on a constant basis.

***

John and Abigail Adams, his wife, used a cipher provided by James Lovell for family correspondence while John Adams was away from home.

***

During the Revolution, [Thomas] Jefferson frequently made recourse to encrypted communications to protect his private thoughts, to convey confidential information, and to protect valuable political insights from prying eyes.

James Monroe … took a cipher with him to Paris in 1803, and used the cipher to communicate with Jefferson regarding the progress of negotiations concerning the Louisiana Purchase. A number of the codes that he used in communicating with Jefferson and others have survived.

James Madison was … a frequent and extensive user of secret communications during the Revolution, utilizing a number of different ciphers for private correspondence, correspondence with state officials in Virginia, and correspondence with fellow actors in the Revolution.

***

John Jay … used a secret code as early as October 1779, and he used a secret code to correspond, evidently on personal matters, while on government business in Europe, and was required to use a cipher for all significant diplomatic correspondence. Jay was instrumental early in the Revolution in obtaining “secret ink” from his brother James in London.

***

The “nomenclator” [i.e. cipher] used by [Benjamin] Harrison for correspondence with Madison and others has survived in the Virginia records, and much of the correspondence has been deciphered.

Edmund Randolph … and Madison conducted an extensive encrypted correspondence on private matters over a number of years.

William Lee … was the brother of Arthur and Richard Henry Lee, discussed infra. For correspondence between the brothers, a dictionary code was used.

***

While in Europe, Arthur Lee‘s encrypted correspondence and reports were repeatedly stolen or reviewed in transit by British espionage officers.

Richard Henry Lee, the third Lee brother in this paper, was a diplomat, Member of the Continental Congress, President of the Continental Congress, and United States Senator. The Lee brothers’ correspondence and their efforts to maintain secrecy are good examples of the wide knowledge and practical use of encryption from the Revolutionary era. It should also be noted that the Lee brothers’ enciphered correspondence remained unbroken until the 1920s, due to the complexity of the cipher.

Benjamin Franklin was not only the printer of the 1748 text on ciphers cited above, but was also a prominent diplomat, supporter of the Revolution, and inventor of a “homophonic substitution cypher” while representing the United States in Paris in 1781. Franklin worked with a number of other codes and ciphers in his international correspondence on behalf of the Continental Congress, and a number of examples of his coded correspondence have survived.

***

One of [Robert R.] Livingston‘s contributions to the Revolutionary cause was a 1700-part code that he designed for the Foreign Affairs Department in 1781. The same code was used for private correspondence as well as government business. Livingston sent George Washington a 1017-part code in 1782…. While Livingston was in Paris on government business in 1802, Jefferson sent him a private letter and a cipher that could be used for their correspondence.

***

James Lovell … designed codes and ciphers for the Continental Congress and for use in private correspondence by members and their families. David Kahn refers to Lovell as the “Father of American Cryptanalysis.” One of Lovell’s codes was used by Madison and Randolph to replace a code that was compromised by a mail robbery.

***

John Laurens used the codes supplied to him by Robert Livingston while he was in France.

***

Numerous other examples of the use of ciphers and codes during and shortly after the Revolution could be provided, but the materials cited so far should amply demonstrate that the Revolutionary era was a time of intense use of ciphers and codes by the Founders.

Encryption After the Revolution

Fraser shows that the Founding Fathers continued their use of encrypted communication after the Revolutionary War:

After the adoption of the Constitution, and before the ratification of the Bill of Rights, codes, ciphers and other forms of secret communication were used by the Founders to speak freely only to those people they wanted to address. For example, in March 1789, after the Constitution was ratified and before the new President took office, George Washington corresponded with Henry Innes on the topic of the threatened secession of Kentucky from the newly-formed federal Union. Washington promised to send Innes a “cypher” for their correspondence, and enjoined Innes to use it to cover their concerted efforts to defeat the secessionists.

***

George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, a French nobleman and Brigadier General of the Continental Army under Washington, used a cipher for correspondence while LaFayette was in Paris in 1785.

***

Another example from the period prior to the adoption of the Bill of Rights is compelling evidence of the importance of codes and ciphers to the Founders. While Jefferson was in Paris representing the new Republic, James Madison was a member of the House of Representatives. In the First Session of the First Congress, Madison introduced legislation that, when ratified by the states, became the Bill of Rights. The correspondence between Jefferson and Madison from the period covering the introduction and the Congressional debates over the Bill of Rights is partially enciphered. It is revealing that Jefferson’s August 28, 1789 letter to Madison in which he comments on the proposed First Amendment is partially enciphered, and that the comments about the text that became the First Amendment are contained in a paragraph immediately following a partially enciphered paragraph.

Prior to the adoption of the Bill of Rights, Madison and Jefferson also used a 1700-word code for confidential discussion of sensitive personal and political issues.

***

From 1791 through the patenting of Samuel Morse’s telegraph and beyond there has been widespread and common use of codes, ciphers, and other modes of secret communication. Perhaps the most compelling example of continued use of secret modes of communication is provided by the correspondence of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson during the administration of John Adams, who served as President from 1793 to 1801.

***

There is evidence that Alexander Hamilton and his relatives and political associates used ciphers for secret communications at least between 1800 and 1803. On June 6, 1799, Hamilton’s father-in-law General Philip Schuyler wrote to Hamilton promising to send him a “cypher” for their correspondence. Hamilton wrote to Rufus King on January 5, 1800, conveying some information and indicating that he would wait for a cipher before communicating other information.

***

Aaron Burr, a former Vice President, sent a “political code” to Congressman Edward Livingston in 1806, and Burr and his associates used secret, enciphered correspondence ….

Before taking office as President in 1801, Jefferson invented one of the most sophisticated cipher devices of the Nineteenth Century. It was a “cipher cylinder,” and has been described as “far ahead of its time,” and as a device that “would have withstood any cryptographic attack of those days.”

***

“In the years after 1780, Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and a covey of other political leaders in the United States often wrote in code in order to protect their personal views on tense domestic issues confronting the American nation.

***

The need for secrecy and confidential communications has continued throughout American history.

The Courts Have Always Treated Encryption As Lawful

Fraser notes that the courts have always treated encryption as legal:

The Constitution protects all forms or types of expression or communication that meet the following three-part test. Those modes of expression or communication are protected which (1) are historically demonstrated to have been in widespread use as of the adoption of the Bill of Rights; which (2) are shown to have been sanctioned in use by the Framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and which (3) are shown to have long continued in use. Those modes of expression or communication which meet this three-part test may not be prohibited to the people, and may only be regulated when they are abused to accomplish some otherwise illegal purpose.

***

The courts have not treated those persons who have used encryption, ciphers, and codes with any presumption of illegality.

So the government is on the wrong side of history … and acting in an extremely anti-American manner. See this and this.

Posted in Politics / World News | Leave a comment

Jeb Bush: “People Need to Work Longer Hours.” Media Soften It.

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Eric Zuesse.

Reuters & CNBC, Etc.: “Bush says Americans should have chance to work longer hours in improved economy.”

Eric Zuesse

Jeb Bush, on July 8th:

“My aspiration for the country, and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours, and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this rut that we’re in.”

Here is his statement in a youtube video of just that 30-second passage (+ 8 seconds): 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zLYmwgKPmU

Republican U.S. Presidential candidate Jeb Bush was interviewed in a grainy video on 8 July 2015, by New Hampshire’s far-right (i.e., authoritarian) newspaper, Manchester Union-Leader, which interview they buried on their website, but the newsworthy comment in it (cited just above) is at 16:11-16:40 on their buried and muddy-sounding 54-minute-long boring interview video here, where Bush had been asked about his plan for the U.S. economy.

In what follows, you will see the openings of the media reports about this statement by Bush. You will see ‘news’ media trying to soften the candidate’s statement, by adding their own commentary to it, some of which commentary is outright false [and my own commentaries about the ‘news’ reports about Bush’s comment will be in brackets, like here]:

——

REUTERS:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/07/09/us-usa-election-bush-idUKKCN0PJ04T20150709

Bush says Americans should have chance to work longer hours in improved economy

[That headline is false. Bush did not say “chance to work longer hours.” Furthermore, instead of “in improved economy,” he said “to get out of this rut that we’re in,” so a euphemistic paraphrase was used instead of simply an honest quotation, which is only a few words longer than the paraphrase. Reuters apparently wants to provide its own softened interpretation, perhaps fearing that to provide an actual quotation instead would generate in the reader an interpretation that’s less accepting of the basic aristocratic system, which the media are being paid to propagandize for.]

Thu Jul 9, 2015 3:23am BST. HUDSON, NEW HAMPSHIRE | BY STEVE HOLLAND — Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said Americans should have the chance to work longer hours, a remark that drew criticism from Democrats but which he said was intended to highlight that an improved U.S. economy could create more full-time jobs. …

[That lead sentence is false. Bush did not say that “Americans should have the chance to work longer hours.”]

——

GUARDIAN:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/09/jeb-bush-says-americans-need-to-work-longer-hours-to-earn-more-for-their-families

Jeb Bush says Americans ‘need to work longer hours’ to earn more

Reuters, Thursday 9 July 2015

Jeb Bush has said Americans should have the chance to work longer hours. …

[That lead sentence is false. Guardian failed to verify the ’news’ report from Reuters.]

——

POLITICO:

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/jeb-bush-people-should-work-longer-hours-119884.html

Jeb Bush: ‘People should work longer hours’

[That headline is false. Bush did not say “People should work longer hours.”

By HANNA TRUDO 7/8/15 10:05 PM EDT Updated 7/9/15 12:56 PM EDT

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Wednesday seemed to propose a bold solution for economic troubles: “People should work longer hours.” …

[That lead sentence is false. Bush proposed no “bold solution for economic troubles.” And — as noted about the headline — he did not say “People should work longer hours.”]

——

WASHINGTON POST:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/07/08/jeb-bush-people-need-to-work-longer-hours-means-they-need-full-time-not-part-time-work/

Jeb Bush: ‘People need to work longer hours’ means they need full-time, not part-time work

By Ed O’Keefe, July 8 at 8:45 PM.  HUDSON, N.H. — Jeb Bush raised eyebrows on Wednesday by suggesting that “people need to work longer hours” in order to grow the economy.

But he later clarified the comment, moving quickly to quell a fresh assault by Democrats eager to characterize the Republican presidential front-runner as out of touch. …

——

NEW YORK TIMES:

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/07/09/jeb-bush-and-hillary-clinton-spar-over-worker-hours/

Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton Spar Over Worker Hours

Alan Rappeport, Jul. 9, 2015, 8:44 AM ET — The sparring between the presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton has started early, and in this case the fight is over who better understands the plight of the American worker.

Mr. Bush caused a stir on Wednesday when he appeared to suggest in New Hampshire that Americans needed to start putting in more hours.

“We have to be a lot more productive,” Mr. Bush said, referring to how to 4 percent economic growth could be achieved. “Work force participation has to rise form its all time modern lows, it means that people need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families.”

Democrats seized on the notion that Americans were not working hard enough. … The former Florida governor, a Republican, later clarified his remarks, explaining that he was referring to the glut of part-time workers who have not been able to find full-time employment in the aftermath of the recession. …

——

OTHERS:

The general news coverage on Bush’s remark was like the Post  and the Times:  it emphasized the criticisms that Hillary Clinton and some other Democrats had of Bush’s statement, but buried and truncated Bush’s statement itself, so that the predominant impression was: Democrats are lunging at Bush. The ‘coverage’ was of the game, not of the policy-prescription itself, as if the public are too stupid to care about a Presidential candidate’s policy-prescription.

——

CONCLUSION

The ‘news’ media treat well-financed political candidates as if they are fragile creatures who need to be protected from the stupid public, by ‘clarifying’ what they ‘really meant to say.’ And, then, when the ‘opposite’ political party attacks, the ‘news’ reporting is about the battle between the two parties, not about the battle between both of those parties (both wings of the U.S. aristocracy) versus the public.

Unlike the many other ‘news’ reports about Bush’s statement, the present one will not pollute Bush’s statement with any commentary about it. His comment stinks enough on its own. As usual, the more important, and far more interesting, news is actually the corruptness of the ‘news’ media, and the resulting difficulty for voters to make accurately informed electoral choices between the various candidates that the aristocracy offer us, which accurately informed choices might terrify the ’news’ media, if that were ever to happen. However, when the choice is between candidates such as the Bushes and the Clintons, or the Obamas and the Romneys, etc., the aristocracy have nothing whatsoever to worry about. And, if somehow an anti-aristocratic candidate were to win one of the two parties’ nomination, the aristocracy would probably still win, because they own the ‘news’ media too. There are many things, such as Obama’s ‘trade’ deals, that the public don’t like but that get ‘democratically’ rammed through no matter what. What the public want doesn’t make any real difference in America.

Any Presidential candidate who insults voters by asserting that the solution to the nation’s economic problems is “People need to work longer hours,” shouldn’t even be in the race: he’s not only a callous aristocrat; he’s stupid, if not outright bigoted, and overflowing with blatant self-righteous arrogance.

And any ‘news’ reporting of such a comment, that consists of either the political game-play, or else interpretation of the comment on the part of ‘news’ media, isn’t worthy of being printed onto even toilet paper. It should have less attention paid to it than that, and it stinks as bad. It simply shouldn’t be touched. But the comment itself should receive lots of public attention, because it blatantly displays the candidate’s callous trashiness, which the ‘news’ media are trying to hide from the public, as best they can.

So: don’t expect to see this news-article and commentary published in many ‘news’ media, though it has been submitted to virtually all of them. The ‘news’ media always refuse to publish anything that exposes the fraudulence of ‘our’ ‘democratic’ ‘free’ ‘press.’ Exposing that is an absolute no-no, in the ‘press.’

“Freedom of the press?” What’s that? And where can one read about it? You just did — here (and maybe it’s available noplace else).

———-

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Posted in Business / Economics, General, Media, Politics / World News, propaganda | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

30-second video: Officer powerfully honors Oath to US Constitution – this path stops .01% crimes, looting, lies

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Carl Herman

hat tip: Activist Post

This unidentified law officer models exactly what Americans need to experience and express to reclaim our virtuous republic.

America currently suffers from .01% “leaders” in government, banking/finance, and corporate media who execute literal “Crimes against Humanity” that intentionally murder human beings by the tens of millions each and every year. The .01% choose policies of crimes centering in war and debt (what they fraudulently call “money”) that create conditions for these tens of millions to die gruesomely slow and painful deaths from war and debt-induced poverty, while ignoring their promises to the world over decades to end global poverty with just 0.7% of the developed nations’ income (Americans want to give up to 10%).

Most of the millions of victims are children.

The Emperor’s New Clothes obvious, overwhelming, irrefutable evidence:

  • Unlawful and lie-began wars,
  • So-called “money” that is actually debt created by the .01% banksters that must be repaid to them with interest, rather than creating debt-free money for the best infrastructure we can imagine, full-employment, and falling prices from more efficient work.
  • “Covering the crimes” with Orwellian lies of corporate media.

US military, law enforcement, and all with Oaths to support and defend the US Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, face an endgame choice:

  1. Honor your Oaths, virtue, and families to arrest the .01% literal psychopathic oligarch “leaders” (and here) to end these crimes, with result for freedom to build a brighter future in honest good-faith effort.
  2. Participate in escalating “Jade Helm” type training that “justifies” ongoing removal of Constitutional rights to Americans and unlimited government, ignores/ridicules OBVIOUS evidence and history of false flags (Star Wars analogy here) while fear-mongering of foreign terrorists “who hate us for our freedoms,” and eventually arrest the Americans for FEMA camps who are warning you of the history you already know: Earth’s few republics get manipulated into tyranny (from the Romans to Founding Americans’ strong language for YOU to uphold freedom).

In my July 4th series, we’ve documented what Americans already know from basic education beginning in elementary school and fully completed in high school:

  • The ideals of the Declaration of Independence are expressions of the ridiculous gap between the rights promised to be upheld by government and the reality of those violated promises from massive crimes centering in war and money that annually kill millions, harm billions, and loot trillions (full documentation with videos).
  • The US .01% crimes centering in war are especially egregious, as they are so obviously unlawful from two treaties after each of the two world wars that all our families sacrificed dearly to win. These crimes are Emperor’s New Clothes obvious, and require those of us with Oaths to the US Constitution to exercise our Oaths, with those in military and law enforcement to enact arrests of obvious War Criminal suspects (full documentation with video).
  • The .01% Crimes against Humanity viciously kill ~20,000 children each and every day, in absolute hypocrisy that government act to uphold unalienable rights of Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness (full documentation with video).

Choose your future wisely. You’ll have what you work for.

Be the Americans you’ve always wanted to be.

**

Note: I make all factual assertions as a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History, with all economics factual claims receiving zero refutation since I began writing in 2008 among Advanced Placement Macroeconomics teachers on our discussion board, public audiences of these articles, and international conferences. I invite readers to empower their civic voices with the strongest comprehensive facts most important to building a brighter future. I challenge professionals, academics, and citizens to add their voices for the benefit of all Earth’s inhabitants.

**

Carl Herman is a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History; also credentialed in Mathematics. He worked with both US political parties over 18 years and two UN Summits with the citizen’s lobby, RESULTS, for US domestic and foreign policy to end poverty. He can be reached at Carl_Herman@post.harvard.edu

Note: Examiner.com has blocked public access to my articles on their site (and from other whistleblowers), so some links in my previous work are blocked. If you’d like to search for those articles other sites may have republished, use words from the article title within the blocked link. Or, go to http://archive.org/web/, paste the expired link into the box, click “Browse history,” then click onto the screenshots of that page for each time it was screen-shot and uploaded to webarchive. I’ll update as “hobby time” allows; including my earliest work from 2009 to 2011 (blocked author pages: here, here).

**

Posted in General | Leave a comment

As New US History Books Downplay White Supremacy, “Bible Defence of Slavery” a Top Downloaded Book

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Robert Barsocchini

In Texas, the latest State Board of Education history books “downplay slavery’s role” in the Civil War, and entirely “omit [the] KKK” as well as Jim Crow segregation dictates, which remained in place until 1965, with “de jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States, while Northern segregation was generally de facto“.

At the same time, numerous black churches are burned or attacked, black and brown people, including children, are regularly gunned down in the streets by state forces, neo-slavery continues, and on the audiobook provider Librivox, the “overtly racist” Bible Defence of Slavery, by Josiah Priest, is a top free download, and is rated five stars.

tempFileForShare_2015-07-09-10-48-00

“Josiah Priest (1788–1861) was a popular American nonfiction writer of the early 19th century.

…his work was widely read and several of his works were published in multiple editions [and] his books were characterized by theories that were used to justify the violent domination over both the Native American and African-American peoples. Priest’s works were among the most overtly racist of his time. Priest’s offensive works help set the stage for the genocide of the Trail of Tears and the defense of slavery that contributed to the conflicts of the American Civil War.”

In Bible Defence of Slavery, “Priest seeks to use references from the Bible to prove that God created black people to be slaves.

Priest writes, ‘The appointment of this race of men to servitude and slavery, was a judicial act of God, or in other words was a divine judgment.'”

“The popularity of his works allowed Americans of his time to indulge in romantic fantasies about the past that encouraged their own racism”, as also seen today in the issue of the Confederate and American flags:

Alternet reports: “According to a new Gallup poll, a majority of Americans still view the Confederate flag as ”a symbol of Southern pride” rather than “a symbol of racism” but that figure is mainly comprised of Republican support, with a whopping 78 percent of Republicans viewing the flag as positive symbol.”

And this does not touch the issue of the American flag itself, as noted by Frankie Boyle.  North and South were originally united in favor of slavery (and always remained united in favor of extermination of indigenous peoples for white living-space expansion).  The North only eschewed slavery once it had used slavery, in collaboration with the South, to create a stable economic base (the US used slavery to such an unprecedented extent that it created the world’s biggest economy).  Once their economy was well established, Northerners then decided slavery was bad, until after the Civil War.  Then, the Northern economy, which had been based on slavery, began to crash, so to save itself the North supported slavery again in the form of black imprisonment and prison labor, a practice which continues today, as noted above, also, though to a far lesser extent, exploiting poor whites.

Max Blumenthal reports, in discussion with an independent researcher of the topic of Neo-Confederacy:

Very few Americans know that President Barack Obama has participated in the annual tradition of sending a wreath to the memorial to Confederate veterans at Arlington National Cemetery. You’ve organized a series of letters signed by scholars of Southern history demanding Obama end the practice. But it seems you’ve been ignored, or dismissed, and that Obama is still sending the wreaths.

ES: That’s right, Obama has continued to send the wreath. UDC has photos of the wreath in one of the issues of their magazine. They considered it a great victory that I wasn’t able to get the White House to stop and Obama continued to send it. He also sent wreaths to the African American Civil War Memorial as some kind of compromise. But that’s just stupid. How it is okay to send a wreath to the Holocaust Memorial Museum and then place one on Nazi graves?

Author focuses on force dynamics, national and global.  @_DirtyTruths

Posted in General, Media, Politics / World News, propaganda | 3 Comments

President Obama Accepts Slavery in Order to Win TPP Trade Deal

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Eric Zuesse.

Eric Zuesse

So that U.S. President Barack Obama can end a roadblock and win the agreement of other nations for his proposed Trans Pacific Partnership, he has decided to remove one of the nations, Malaysia, from the U.S. State Department’s official list of countries that allow slavery. Malaysia, which recently found over a hundred graves of discarded slaves, has been on the U.S. State Department’s “Tier 3” list of slave nations, along with North Korea, Zimbabwe, Syria, and Iran, but, unlike those other countries, Obama wants Malaysia to be included in his Trans Pacific Partnership; so, he has decided to remove Malaysia from that official list.

This was first reported by Reuters on July 8th, under the headline “Exclusive: U.S. Upgrades Malaysia in Annual Human Trafficking Report.” Reuters announced: “The United States is upgrading Malaysia from the lowest tier on its list of worst human trafficking centers, U.S. sources said on Wednesday, a move that could smooth the way for an ambitious U.S.-led free-trade deal with the Southeast Asian nation and 11 other countries.”

Zach Carter at Huffington Post headlined, later on July 8th, “Obama To Upgrade Malaysia On Human Rights Despite Mass Graves,”  and he reported that U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) issued a statement saying: “If true, this manipulation of Malaysia’s ranking in the State Department’s 2015 TIP report would be a perversion of the trafficking list and undermine both the integrity of this important report as well as the very difficult task of confronting states about human trafficking.” 

However, Senator Menendez, himself, has, behind the scenes, pushed for Obama’s TPP and other mammoth ‘trade’ deals, including TTIP and TISA, even despite these deals allowing participating countries to look the other way and not prosecute when international corporations hire killers to assassinate labor union organizers in a given U.S. trade ‘partner’ country. So, Sen. Menendez is in no position to accuse this President of allowing slavery and even mass-murder of slaves, and he is not making any such accusation. In fact, Menendez was a no-show at the key vote in the Senate on Fast-Tracking — reducing from the Constitutionally required 67 down to the ordinary-law-required 51 Senators, which will be needed in order to approve, as constituting a U.S. law, a treaty — each one of this President’s three gigantic ‘trade’ treaties. Menendez did this even though the Obama Administration has acknowledged that it considers a nation’s murders of labor union organizers to be irrelevant to that country’s suitability to be included in a ‘trade’ treaty as a favored nation and ‘trading’ partner, such as will be in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), or in its Atlantic equivalent, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Allowing murder of trade-union officials, and allowing slavery, are not, in either case, matters of law in any given country, because nowhere are those things technically legal. They are instead matters of not enforcing laws that are technically on the books. When corporations can become more internationally competitive by employing such tactics and paying public officials to look the other way, it’s just a matter of economic competition and of minimizing government regulation of the economy. These are unofficial ways of boosting competitiveness, which — the U.S. President and his “Fast Track” supporters in Congress are now on record as accepting — do not disqualify a given country from being included as one of the treaty “Partners.”

Recently, on May 25th, Britain’s Guardian headlined “Malaysia migrant mass graves: police reveal 139 sites, some with multiple corpses,” and reported that the corpses were probably Bangladeshi but that this had not yet been confirmed. “The revelation is likely to focus new attention on Malaysia’s record in battling a scourge that activists say is carried out by criminal syndicates, likely with the complicity of authorities.” It helps Malaysia stay internationally competitive. And the use of foreigners for this, reduces the likelihood of serious domestic political blowback from this particular means of the nation’s increasing its economic competitiveness. This technique additionally helps to drive down wages within the given nation, and by that indirect means, makes the entire nation even more economically competitive. The Obama Administration is now officially categorizing the entire matter as simply expanding “free trade.”

When the United States provides favored-nation treatment to nations where slaves are used, or where labor-union organizers are murdered, the United States is allowing U.S. international corporations to lower their production-costs by “shipping those jobs overseas” to countries where labor is cheaper (or even free, if the cost of bribes is not included). The beneficiaries of those lower (if any) wages are the owners of these international corporations. U.S. consumers might also benefit, if the lower production-costs get passed along to them; but, sometimes, that doesn’t happen, and all of the benefits from other nations’ union-busting and/or outright slave labor go only to the stockholders of the international corporations.

Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which allows corporations to donate unlimited funds anonymously to U.S. political campaigns, there is no longer any way to prevent international corporations from participating in U.S. electoral politics — it’s now “free speech” (no matter where the corporation is headquartered or incorporated), and any corporation is a “person,” which has unlimited “free speech” regarding political matters. If those corporations (or, actually, their controlling stockholders) decide to do business that way, it’s now only a private decision that they are entirely free to make, according to the U.S. Supreme Court.

An independent economic analysis was done of TPP, and it showed that international corporations will benefit enormously, but that the publics everywhere will become far worse off, if it goes into effect. An independent economic analaysis was also done of TTIP, and it produced the very same findings. However, corporate-backed economic analyses have produced contrary findings, and those are the studies that are officially cited. In current economic theory, the more that things are privatized, the better. Some economists personally object, but most economists who have successful careers do not. Endowed chairs in economics are sparse for dissenters. As the late economist Robert E. Prasch noted:

“Positions at the top twenty research universities are simply closed to scholars working outside the mainstream, and the next twenty on the list have every incentive to become caricatures of the top schools. The reason for this de facto policy of exclusion is not solely ideological. In this era of austerity, research faculties are expected to garner substantial outside funding, and these funds are typically granted to scholars whose work serves the funders ends.”

In other words, there is a “free market” in economists, too.

And so, the “free market” will be expanded, no matter what; and there is likely to be considerable public cheering about it, regardless of what slaves, or non-unionized workers, or other possible objectors, might happen to think about it. International corporations might have lots of “free speech,” but the real people who are at the bottom — not nearly as much. And, in Malaysia, perhaps, not at all.

———-

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Posted in Business / Economics, General, Media, Politics / World News, propaganda | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

No Jobs for the Young, No Retirement for the Old

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Charles Hugh Smith

You may have seen a variation of this chart of employment in the U.S. by age group. This chart–courtesy of mdbriefing.com— shows the number of those employed (with any kind of job–full-time, part-time, self-employed) as a percentage of the Civilian Noninstitutional Population (CNP), which includes everyone 16 years of age and older who is not institutionalized or on active duty in the Armed Forces.

A number of striking features pop out of this chart:

1. Employment in the 16-19 age cohort has been dropping for 35 years, and fell off a cliff in 2008.

2. Employment in the 20-24 and 25-54 age cohorts topped out in 2001 and has yet to recover the pre-recession levels of 2008.

3. The only age cohort with employment growth since 2000 is the 55 and older group.

There are many theories as to why youth employment has plummeted while 55+ employment is rising, but demographics and financial insecurity likely play major roles. Back when Social Security was established, few people lived beyond their 60s. A retirement age of 65 meant most people lived only a few years beyond retirement.

Now people live into their 80s, and medical technologies are enabling many to remain active even in their advanced years.

As people live longer, those reaching retirement age (early to mid 60s) often have elderly parents in their 80s who need care and financial support. People living into their late 80s, once a rarity, are now commonplace.

As the economy has stagnated, financial demands on their own children (in their 30s and early 40s) have increased, leaving many of those reaching retirement age with two generations needing help. Retirement is not much of an option when every scrap of income is needed.

Over the past 35 years, defined pension plans that were once common benefits of corporate employment have vanished and been replaced by 401K plans which transfer the risk to the employee. As the stock market has soared and crashed twice in the past fifteen years, those approaching retirement can no longer trust that their pension fund is secure.

The Federal Reserve’s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) has destroyed low-risk yields on retirement funds (401Ks, IRAs, etc.), greatly reducing the yield on retirement savings. As a a direct result of Fed policy (designed to recapitalize banks at the expense of savers and retirees), those hoping to retire have been forced to put their savings at risk (investing in risky assets such as junk bond funds) or working longer because the low-risk yield on retirement savings are now meager.

The reality is that financial insecurity is rising for everyone heading into retirement. Even state and local government workers are concerned that their pensions aren’t as secure as they were a generation or two ago, as the fiscal imbalances of many local government budgets are the New Normal.

The Federal government can effectively create money to pay Social Security, veterans and federal employee pensions, but there is no guarantee that these pensions will keep up with inflation or not be taxed to oblivion. One key source of financial insecurity is the growing awareness that the rules will be changed without consent of the governed to preserve the perquisites of the Ruling Class and powerful vested interests.

It would be foolish in the extreme to trust that the Powers That Be won’t change the rules in a heartbeat when their power and wealth are threatened by instability. The Nobility will change the rules and the peasants will pay–end of story.

In this context, we shouldn’t wonder why people are working into their 70s–we should wonder why anyone retires, assuming they’ll still be receiving their full pension in five years.

How to forge a career in a collapse-prone economy:
Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy,
a mere $9.95 for the Kindle ebook edition and $18 for the print edition.

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Call for Sanity on Sixtieth Anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto

Posted on July 9, 2015 by DavidSwanson

Sixty years after Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell issued their manifesto about the growing threat of world war, the globe continues to face the prospect of nuclear annihilation — coupled with the looming threat of climate change.

Sign the new manifesto today at http://diy.rootsaction.org/p/man

By ,

The original Einstein-Russell manifesto

It was exactly 60 years ago that Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein gathered together with a group of leading intellectuals in London to draft and sign a manifesto in which they denounced the dangerous drive toward war between the world’s Communist and anti-Communist factions. The signers of this manifesto included leading Nobel Prize winners such as Hideki Yukawa and Linus Pauling.

They were blunt, equating the drive for war and reckless talk of the use of nuclear weapons sweeping the United States and the Soviet Union at the time, as endangering all of humanity. The manifesto argued that advancements in technology, specifically the invention of the atomic bomb, had set human history on a new and likely disastrous course.

The manifesto stated in harsh terms the choice confronting humanity:

Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?

The Russell-Einstein Manifesto forced a serious reconsideration of the dangerous strategic direction in which the United States was heading at that time and was the beginning of a recalibration of the concept of security that would lead to the signing of the Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968 and the arms control talks of the 1970s.

But we take little comfort in those accomplishments today. The United States has completely forgotten about its obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty, and the words “arms control” have disappeared from the conversation on security. The last year has seen the United States confront Russia in Ukraine to such a degree that many have spoken about the risks of nuclear war.

As a result, on June 16 of this year Russia announced that it will add 40 new ICBMs in response to the investment of the United States over the last two years in upgrading its nuclear forces.

Similar tensions have emerged between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Isles and between the United States and China over the South China Sea. Discussions about the possibility of war with China are showing up in the Western media with increasing frequency, and a deeply disturbing push to militarize American relations with Asia is emerging.

But this time, the dangers of nuclear war are complemented by an equal, or greater, threat: climate change. Even the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Locklear, told the Boston Globe in 2013 that climate change “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

More recently, Pope Francis issued a detailed, and blunt, encyclical dedicated to the threat of climate change in which he charged:

It is remarkable how weak international political responses (to climate change) have been. Consequently the most one can expect is superficial rhetoric, sporadic acts of philanthropy and perfunctory expressions of concern for the environment, whereas any genuine attempt by groups within society to introduce change is viewed as a nuisance based on romantic illusions or an obstacle to be circumvented.

As the 60th anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto drew near, I became increasing disturbed by the complete inaction among the best-educated and best-connected in the face of the most dangerous moment in modern history and perhaps in human history, grimmer even than the catastrophe that Russell and Einstein contemplated. Not only are we facing the increased likelihood of nuclear war, but there are signs that climate change is advancing more rapidly than previously estimated. Science Magazine recently released a study that predicts massive marine destruction if we follow the current trends, and even the glaciers of the Southern Antarctic Peninsula, once thought to be the most stable, are observed to be melting rapidly. And yet we see not even the most superficial efforts to defend against this threat by the major powers.

I spoke informally about my worries with my friend John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy in Focus and associate of the Asia Institute. John has written extensively about the need to identify climate change as the primary security threat and also has worked closely with Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies on efforts to move the United States away from a military economy. Between the two of us we have put together a slightly updated version of the manifesto that highlights climate change — an issue that was not understood in 1955 — and hereby have published it in the form of a petition that we invite anyone in the world to sign. This new version of the manifesto is open to the participation of all, not restricted to that of an elite group of Nobel Prize winners.

I also spoke with David Swanson, a friend from my days working on the Dennis Kucinich campaign for the Democratic nomination back in 2004. David now serves as director of World Beyond War, a broad effort to create a consensus that war no longer has any legitimate place in human society. He offered to introduce the manifesto to a broad group of activists and we agreed that Foreign Policy in Focus, the Asia Institute and World Beyond War would co-sponsor the new manifesto.

Finally, I sent the draft to Noam Chomsky who readily offered to sign it and offered the following comment.

Last January the famous Doomsday Clock was moved two minutes closer to midnight, the closest it has been since a major war scare 30 years ago.  The accompanying declaration, which warned that the constant threat of nuclear war and “unchecked climate change” severely threaten human civilization, brings to mind the grim warning to the people of the world just 60 years ago by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, calling on them to face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?” In all of human history, there has never been a choice like the one we face today.

The declaration on the 60th anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto is displayed below. We urge all people who are concerned about humanity’s future and about the health of the Earth’s biosphere to join us in signing the declaration, and to invite friends and family members to sign. The statement can be signed at the petition page on DIY RootsAction website:

Declaration on the 60th Anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto

July 9, 2015

In view of the growing risk that in future wars weapons, nuclear and otherwise, will be employed that threaten the continued existence of humanity, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them.

We also propose that all governments of the world begin to convert those resources previously allocated to preparations for destructive conflict to a new constructive purpose: the mitigation of climate change and the creation of a new sustainable civilization on a global scale.

This effort is endorsed by Foreign Policy in Focus, the Asia Institute, and World Beyond War, and is being launched on July 9, 2015.

You can sign, and ask everyone you know to sign, this declaration here:

http://diy.rootsaction.org/p/man

Why is this declaration important?

Exactly 60 years ago today, leading intellectuals led by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein gathered in London to sign a manifesto voicing their concern that the struggle between the Communist and anti-Communist blocs in the age of the hydrogen bomb guaranteed annihilation for humanity.

Although we have so far avoided the nuclear war that those intellectuals dreaded, the danger has merely been postponed. The threat, which has reemerged recently with the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, has only grown more dire.

Moreover, the rapid acceleration of technological development threatens to put nuclear weapons, and many other weapons of similar destructiveness, into the hands of a growing circle of nations (and potentially even of “non-state actors”). At the same time, the early possessors of nuclear weapons have failed to abide by their obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to destroy their stockpiles.

And now we are faced with an existential threat that may rival the destructive consequences even of a full-scale nuclear war: climate change. The rapacious exploitation of our resources and a thoughtless over-reliance upon fossil fuels have caused an unprecedented disruption of our climate. Combined with an unmitigated attack on our forests, our wetlands, our oceans, and our farmland in the pursuit of short-term gains, this unsustainable economic expansion has brought us to the edge of an abyss.

The original 1955 manifesto states: “We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings,” members of the human species “whose continued existence is in doubt.”

The time has come for us to break out of the distorted and misleading conception of progress and development that has so seduced us and led us towards destruction.

Intellectuals bear a particular responsibility of leadership by virtue of their specialized expertise and insight regarding the scientific, cultural, and historical forces that have led to our predicament. Between a mercenary element that pursues an agenda of narrow interests without regard to consequences and a frequently discouraged, misled, and sometimes apathetic citizenry stand the intellectuals in every field of study and sphere of activity. It falls to us that it falls to decry the reckless acceleration of armaments and the criminal destruction of the ecosystem. The time has come for us to raise our voices in a concerted effort.

Initial Signers

Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus, MIT

Last January the famous Doomsday Clock was moved two minutes closer to midnight, the closest it has been since a major war scare 30 years ago.  The accompanying declaration, which warned that the constant threat of nuclear war and “unchecked climate change” severely threaten human civilization, brings to mind the grim warning to the people of the world just 50 years ago by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, calling on them to face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?” In all of human history, there has never been a choice like the one we face today.

Helen Caldicott, author

It was the Russell Einstein manifesto on the threat of nuclear war 60 years ago that started me upon my journey to try to abolish nuclear weapons. I then read and devoured the three volumes of Russell’s autobiography which had an amazing influence upon my thinking as a young girl.

The manifesto was so extraordinarily sensible written by two of the world’s greatest thinkers, and I am truly amazed that the world at that time took practically no notice of their prescient warning, and today we are orders of magnitude in greater danger than we were 60 years ago. The governments of the world still think in primitive terms of retribution and killing while the nuclear weapons in Russia and the US are presently maintained on hair trigger alert, and these two nuclear superpowers are practicing nuclear war drills during a state of heightened international tension exacerbated by the Ukrainian situation and the Middle East. It is in truth sheer luck that we are still here on this lovely planet of ours.

Larry Wilkerson, retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

From central Europe to Southwest Asia, from the South China Sea to the Arctic, tensions are on the rise as the world’s sole empire is roiled in peripheral activities largely of its own doing and just as largely destructive of its power and corruptive of its leadership. This, while humanity’s most pressing challenge–planetary climate change–threatens catastrophe for all.  Stockpiles of nuclear weapons add danger to this already explosive situation.  We humans have never been so powerfully challenged–and so apparently helpless to do anything about it.

Benjamin R. Barber, president, Global Parliament of Mayors Project

Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything

David Swanson, director, World Beyond War

John Feffer, director, Foreign Policy in Focus

Emanuel Pastreich, director, The Asia Institute

Leah Bolger,  chair, coordinating committee, World Beyond War

Ben Griffin, coordinator, Veterans For Peace UK

Michael Nagler, founder and president, The Metta Center for Nonviolence

John Horgan, science journalist & author of The End of War

Kevin Zeese, co-director, Popular Resistance.

Margaret Flowers, M.D., co-director of Popular Resistance

Dahr Jamail, staff reporter, Truthout

John Kiriakou, associate fellow, Institute for Policy Studies and CIA Torture Whistleblower

Kim Hyung yul, president of the Asia Institute and professor of history, Sook Myung University

Choi Murim, professor of medicine, Seoul National University

Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis Division legal counsel

Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army Colonel and former US diplomat

Mike Madden, vice president, Veterans For Peace, Chapter 27 (veteran of the US Air Force)

Chante Wolf, 12 year Air Force, Desert Shield/Storm veteran, member of Chapter 27, Veterans For Peace

William Binney, former NSA technical director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis and co-founder of the SIGINT Automation Research Center.

Jean Bricmont, professor, Université Catholique de Louvain

 

Emanuel Pastreich is the director of the Asia Institute in Seoul, South Korea.

 

 

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15-minute video: Solutions to upside down economics

Posted on July 8, 2015 by Carl Herman

Mark Anielski and Ellen Brown’s powerful 15-minute response to an interview at the Seizing an Alternative conference (and here, with videos here) with former World Bank economist Herman Daly and co-author John B. Cobb of For the Common Good (video should start at 1:04:43):

Mark and Ellen emphasize shifting what we use for money today (created as debt) to maximize public benefits with monetary and credit reform.

Explanation and documentation of monetary and credit reform:

**

Note: I make all factual assertions as a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History, with all economics factual claims receiving zero refutation since I began writing in 2008 among Advanced Placement Macroeconomics teachers on our discussion board, public audiences of these articles, and international conferences. I invite readers to empower their civic voices with the strongest comprehensive facts most important to building a brighter future. I challenge professionals, academics, and citizens to add their voices for the benefit of all Earth’s inhabitants.

**

Carl Herman is a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History; also credentialed in Mathematics. He worked with both US political parties over 18 years and two UN Summits with the citizen’s lobby, RESULTS, for US domestic and foreign policy to end poverty. He can be reached at Carl_Herman@post.harvard.edu

Note: Examiner.com has blocked public access to my articles on their site (and from other whistleblowers), so some links in my previous work are blocked. If you’d like to search for those articles other sites may have republished, use words from the article title within the blocked link. Or, go to http://archive.org/web/, paste the expired link into the box, click “Browse history,” then click onto the screenshots of that page for each time it was screen-shot and uploaded to webarchive. I’ll update as “hobby time” allows; including my earliest work from 2009 to 2011 (blocked author pages: here, here).

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Wikipedia as Propaganda Not History — MH17 as An Example

Posted on July 8, 2015 by Eric Zuesse.

Screen Shot 2015-07-08 at 7.17.43 PM

Eric Zuesse

Wikipedia articles are more propaganda than they are historical accounts. And, often, their cited sources are misleading, or even false.

On 15 August 2007, the BBC headlined “Wikipedia Shows CIA Page Edits,” and Jonathan Fildes reported that, “An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organizations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.” I.e.: What the CIA doesn’t like, they can (and do) eliminate or change.

More recently, on 25 June 2015, an anonymous reddit poster, “moose,” listed and linked directly to 18 different news reports, in such media as New York Times, Washington Post, Telegraph, Mirror, Guardian, and Newsweek, reporting about wikipedia edits that were supplied not only by the CIA but by other U.S. Government offices, and by large corporations. That person opened with a news report which implicated Wikipedia itself, “Wikipedia honcho caught in scandal quits, defends paid edits,” in which Wikipedia’s own corruption was discussed. Most of the other news reports there concerned unpaid edits by employees at CIA, congressional and British parliamentary offices, the DCRI (French equivalent of the U.S. CIA), large corporations, self-interested individuals, and others. One article even concerned a report that, “All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) changed a Russian language version of a page listing civil aviation accidents to say that ‘The plane [flight MH17] was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers’.” Basically, wikipedia has been revealed to be a river of ‘information’ that’s polluted by so many self-interested sources as to be no more reliable than, say: “New York Times, Washington Post, Telegraph, Mirror, Guardian, and Newsweek.”

And that’s not reliable at all. For example, everybody knew in 2002 and 2003 that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling WMD “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” because they had read it in such ‘news’ sources as that. Consequently, even when wikipedia links to those sorts of articles, it can be propagating lies. After all, The New York Times and Washington Post were stenographically ‘reporting’ the lies from the White House as if those lies were truths (not challenging them at all); so, the fame of a publisher has nothing to do with the honesty (the integrity and carefulness) of its ‘news’ reporting. Stenographic ‘news’ reporting isn’t news-reporting; it is propaganda, no matter how famous and respected the ‘news’ medium happens (unfortunately) to be. Some of the most unreliable ‘news’ media have top prestige.

THE MALAYSIAN AIRLINER OVER UKRAINE

As an example: wikipedia’s English-language article about the 17 July 2014 shoot-down of the MH17 Malaysian airliner is a shameless propaganda-piece by the U.S. Government and its agents. Its (at present) 320 footnote-sources don’t include any of the many reports (virtually all in the foreign press) that present evidence the Ukrainian government shot down this airliner. Among the important issues that aren’t even raised, are: why was the Ukrainian government given veto-power over any final report which will be issued by the official four-nation MH17 investigating team: Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, and Ukraine? Why was Ukraine even included in this team to investigate a crime in which one of the two main suspects is the Ukrainian government itself?

Why was the presence of 30mm bullet-holes in the side-panel next to the pilot not mentioned in this lengthy wikipedia article? (If this plane had been brought down by only a missile, such as wikipedia assumes, there wouldn’t be any bullet-holes — much less, hundreds of them, as there are.) Why was the first analysis of that side-panel — which is the best and most reliable piece of evidence that exists about how this disaster actually happened — ignored altogether in the wikipedia article? After all, that analysis of the side-panel has subsequently been further confirmed by other reliable evidence, all of which the article also ignores.

I have edited some wikipedia articles, but I won’t edit the one on MH17: it’s too thoroughly rotten with speculative and other bad sources, so that it would need to be entirely rewritten — and bogus ‘evidence’ removed from it — in order for the article to present an account that’s based upon the best evidence regarding each of its particulars. Wikipedia’s article is thoroughly based on anti-Russian propaganda; it might as well have been written by the CIA (like the case that was presented about “Saddam’s WMD” was).

Here is the wikipedia article, so that you can see what U.S. propaganda says about the downing of MH17.

Here is my latest article about the downing of the MH17.

Here is my most comprehensive article reconstructing, on a best-evidence basis, how and why and who shot down this airliner.

The core of my case there is the same item of evidence to which Haisenko first called the public’s attention: that side-panel. I basically accept his reconstruction of how the plane came down, but I supplement it with additional evidence. Please click onto any link in the article, to see the evidence more fully analyzed, in the given linked-to source, wherever you have further questions that aren’t directly addressed in the article.

My articles present far fewer items of ‘evidence’ than does the wikipedia article, because I exclude all but the most-reliable evidence about any given detail. There is so much speculation that’s published, and so much bogus ‘evidence’; my guiding principle is therefore to rely only upon the least-speculative argument that refers to only the most-reliable, assuredly untampered-with, items of evidence. This is what one is supposed to do in a court of law; it’s the reason why judges are authorized to exclude from being presented to jurors any ‘evidence’ that fails to meet modern legal/forensic standards of authenticity and reliability. It’s the only way that an unprejudiced verdict can even become possible. It’s the prerequisite to history, as opposed to mere myth.

That’s the contrast between my articles about the MH17 disaster, and the 320 articles from which the wikipedia article about MH17 is constructed. And it also separates my articles from wikipedia’s article itself about the subject, “Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.”

What’s especially wrong about the wikipedia account is that it doesn’t even refer to the 30mm bullet holes in that side panel — evidence that is inconsistent with the U.S.-Ukrainian account (wikipedia’s account) of how this airliner was shot down. (Wikipedia’s article is instead obsessed with “a Buk missile launcher” — the theory of the case that’s pumped by America’s and Ukraine’s governments, and which is entirely inconsistent with such bullet-holes. You don’t get bullet-holes from 33,000+ feet away.) And the wikipedia article also doesn’t refer to Peter Haisenko, the brilliant former Luftahansa pilot who first pointed out those bullet holes in the side-panel, and who noted that there wouldn’t be any, much less hundreds of, bullet-holes firing directly into the pilot’s body, if the only thing that had brought down this airliner were shrapnel from some missile fired from 33,000 feet below. You simply can’t target the pilot’s belly and pump perhaps a thousand bullets into it from 33,000 feet down. This side-panel decimates the American-Ukrainian theory of the case — and so decimates wikipedia’s propagandistic article.

And why wasn’t the autopsy on the pilot made public? Everyone needs to know what was inside that corpse. But wikipedia and the ‘news’ media show no interest in that crucial question, either.

We don’t live in a democracy. This is a dictatorship. The ‘news’ media cannot be trusted by any intelligent and open-minded person. To find the truth, one (unfortunately) needs to investigate on one’s own and take the attitude that only the most solid evidence and the least speculative argument constitutes authentic history, on anything. All else — any casual trusting of the ‘news’ media — is merely accepting lies and myths, which are designed to manipulate people (like when we invaded Iraq), instead of to inform them. There is more than ample reason to distrust the ‘news’ media. And wikipedia is just as manipulated as the rest.

We live now in a culture where lies and myths drown out truth. In other words: we live in a dictatorship. That’s today’s USA. This is the reality, in which we live. And the Big Lie is: it’s not so. But the evidence sadly proves: it’s so; it clearly is the case.

———-

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Posted in Business / Economics, General, Media, Politics / World News, propaganda | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 22 Comments

Peace Lessons

Posted on July 8, 2015 by DavidSwanson

I just read what may be the best introduction to peace studies I’ve ever seen. It’s called Peace Lessons, and is a new book by Timothy Braatz. It’s not too fast or too slow, neither obscure nor boring. It does not drive the reader away from activism toward meditation and “inner peace,” but begins with and maintains a focus on activism and effective strategy for revolutionary change in the world on the scale that is needed. As you may be gathering, I’ve read some similar books about which I had major complaints.

No doubt there are many more, similar books I haven’t read, and no doubt most of them cover the basic concepts of direct, structural, and cultural violence and nonviolence. No doubt many of them review the 20th century history of nonviolent overthrows of dictators. No doubt the U.S. civil rights movement is a common theme, especially among U.S. authors. Braatz’s book covers this and other familiar territory so well I was never tempted to set it down. He gives some of the best answers available to the usual questions from the dominant war-based culture, as well: “Would you shoot a crazed gunman to save your grandma?” “What about Hitler?”

Braatz introduces basic concepts with crystal clarity, and then proceeds to illuminate them with a discussion of the battle of Little Bighorn from a peace perspective. The book is worth acquiring for this alone, or for the similarly insightful discussion of John Brown’s use of nonviolent strategies in combination with his use of violence. Brown established a constructive project, a cooperative interracial non-patriarchal community. Brown had concluded that only the death of white men could awaken Northerners to the evil of slavery, prior to his failure to flee Harper’s Ferry. Read Braatz on Brown’s Quaker roots before assuming you understand his complexity.

A summary of Braatz on the “But what about Hitler?” question might go something like this. When Hitler first asphyxiated mentally ill Germans, a few prominent voices raised in opposition led to the cancellation of that program, known as T4. When most of the German population was displeased by the Crystal Night attacks on Jews, those tactics were abandoned. When non-Jewish wives of Jewish men began demonstrating in Berlin to demand their release, and others joined in the demonstrations, those men and their children were released. What might a larger, better planned nonviolent resistance campaign have accomplished? It was never attempted, but it is not hard to imagine. A general strike had reversed a rightwing coup in Germany in 1920. German nonviolence had ended a French occupation in the Ruhr region in the 1920s, and nonviolence would later remove a ruthless dictator from power in East Germany in 1989. In addition, nonviolence proved moderately successful against the Nazis in Denmark and Norway with little planning, coordination, strategy, or discipline. In Finland, Denmark, Italy, and especially Bulgaria, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, non-Jews successfully resisted German orders to kill Jews. And what if the Jews in Germany had understood the danger and nonviolently resisted, magically managing to use techniques developed and understood in the decades that followed, and the Nazis had begun to slaughter them in the public streets rather than in distant camps? Would millions have been saved by the reaction of the general public? We cannot know because it wasn’t tried.

I might add, from a complementary perspective: Six months after Pearl Harbor, in the auditorium of the Union Methodist Church in Manhattan, the executive secretary of the War Resisters League Abraham Kaufman argued that the United States needed to negotiate with Hitler. To those who argued that you couldn’t negotiate with Hitler, he explained that the Allies were already negotiating with Hitler over prisoners of war and the sending of food to Greece. For years to come, peace activists would argue that negotiating a peace without loss or victory would still save the Jews and save the world from the wars that would follow the current one. Their proposal was not tried, millions died in the Nazis’ camps, and the wars that followed that one have not ended.

But belief in the inevitability of war can end. One can easily understand, as Braatz notes, how wiser behavior in the 1920s and 1930s would have avoided World War II.

Braatz’s history of post-World War II nonviolent action is well done, including his analysis of how the end of the Cold War allowed successes in the Philippines and Poland to spark a trend that earlier successes had not. I do think that the discussion of Gene Sharp and the color revolutions could have benefitted from some critical consideration of the role played by the U.S. government — something done well in Ukraine: Zbig’s Grand Chessboard and How the West Was Checkmated. But after initially labeling several actions successes, Braatz does later get around to qualifying that label. In fact, he is very critical of most nonviolent successes as insufficiently correcting structural and cultural violence, effecting only superficial change by overthrowing leaders.

He’s also quite critical of the U.S. civil rights movement, not in a childishly arrogant sense of looking down on any participants, but as a strategist hunting for lost opportunities and lessons going forward. Lost opportunities, he thinks, include the March on Washington and a couple of different moments in the Selma campaign, including the moment when King turned the march around on the bridge.

This book would make a terrific series of discussions in a course on possibilities for peace. As such a course, however, I think it lacks — as virtually the entire academic discipline of peace studies lacks — a substantial analysis of the problem of twenty-first century U.S. wars and global militarism — where this unprecedented war machine is, what drives it, and how to undo it. Braatz does, however, offer the idea that many of us had at the time and some (such as Kathy Kelly) acted on: What if in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq a huge peace army including famous figures from the West and around the world had made its way to Baghdad as human shields?

We could use that now in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Ukraine, Iran, and various parts of Africa and Asia. Libya three years ago was a stellar opportunity for such an action. Will the war machine present a better one, with sufficient warning? Will we be ready to act on it?

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U.S. Wealth-Concentration: The Most-Accurate Current Estimates

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Eric Zuesse.

Eric Zuesse

CURRENT REALITIES:

Wealthiest Tenth (10%) of Americans Own 75% of America; They Draw 40% of All U.S. Income.

Wealthiest Hundredth (1%) of Americans Own 43% of America; They Draw 20% of All U.S. Income.

Wealthiest Thousandth (0.1%) of Americans Own 22% of America; They Draw 8% of All U.S. Income.

Wealthiest Ten-Thousandth (0.01%) Own 11.2% of America; They Draw 5% of All U.S. Income.

Wealthiest 0.0025% (Forbes 400) Own 2.75% (of all trackable privately-held wealth, not including ‘non-profits’ that are controlled by them).

That last (2.75%) is this $2.29 trillion divided by this $83,296 billion (representing all of the privately owned wealth in the U.S.), in the final quarter of 2014.

Incidentally, the wealthiest tenth are worth over $1 million and draw incomes above $200,000; so: they’re all “millionaires” in common parlance; all of the “top 10%” are.

Following will be mirror-images of the above-cited breakdowns:

Poorest 90% of Americans Own 25% of America; They Draw 60% of All U.S. Income.

Poorest 99% of Americans Own 57% of America; They Draw 80% of All U.S. Income.

Poorest 99.9% of Americans Own 78% of America; They Draw 92% of All U.S. Income.

Poorest 99.99% of Americans Own Less Than 88.8% of America; They Draw Less Than 95% of All U.S. Income.

Poorer 50%: Comprehensive figures for the wealthier and poorer 50% of Americans haven’t been published as recently. However, for the year 2010, the wealthier 50% of Americans owned 98.9% of America, and the poorer 50% of Americans owned 1.1% of America. That was the year after the crash had supposedly ended in 2009. The last prior year in that same study was 2007, the economic peak, and it showed the wealthier half owning 97.5% of America, and the poorer half owning 2.5% of it. In other words: the losses from the Wall Street economic crash went overwhelmingly to the poorer half of the U.S. population (their wealth going down from 2.5% to only 1.1% of America’s total), because of the bailouts to Wall Street. Wall Street complains about “welfare programs,” as if it’s the poor who get bailed out; but those complaints are merely part of Wall Street’s — and their billionaires’ — scams that are targeted to sway fools. The figures show the exact opposite to be the actual truth. America is overwhelmingly a kleptocracy by the top against everybody else; not a “welfare state for the poor.” That’s just aristocrats’ scam, pumped by the economists they hire, and by the ‘news’ media which are controlled by aristocrats, and believed by suckers they fool.

HERE ARE THE TRENDS:

Right before the crash, in 2006 and 2007, the top 1% owned 33.8% of America; they drew 21.4% of all U.S. income.

A Congressional Research Service study, “An Analysis of the Distribution of Wealth Across Households, 1989-2010,” found that between the economic peak in 2007, and the end of the opening phase of the Wall Street bailouts in 2010, wealth-inequality in America soared, rising even faster than it had been rising during the George W. Bush years. As a consequence, whereas in 2007, the top 1% owned 33.8% of America, by 2010 this figure had risen to 34.5% — and the latest figure is 43%; so, this soaring is continuing (it wasn’t occurring only at the start of Obama’s Administration). What was bad under Bush has thus become lots worse under Obama, despite all of Obama’s rhetoric against wealth-inequality. And yet the Wall Street bailouts continue (under the guise of “QE”), as if the trickle-down policies of Obama and the Republicans had “ended” the “recession” for Americans generally, instead of only for the top 1% — which latter was the reality, and which reality makes a mockery of economists, who say that the “recession ended in 2009.” “Ended,” for whom? The policy is to bail out the megabanksters who made trillions from the MBS scams that brought the economy down — those people were bailed out when they were deep in the hole — while not bailing out their homeowners and cheated investors, who never recovered; statistics show they continue to suffer from those crimes. As a consequence, under Obama, wealth has risen only for the wealthiest of Americans.

However, incomes have been rising slightly for everyone else. For example, the “Bottom 99% Incomes Real Growth” during “2009-2014” was only 4.3% — less than 1% per year — while for the “Top 1%” it was 58% during that 5-year time-expanse. But that — bad as it is — is nonetheless an improvement, on income.

Throughout Obama’s first term, 2009-2012, the “Bottom 99% Incomes Real Growth” had been only 0.4% — less than 1% throughout that entire four-year period. The “Top 1%” received 95% of the “Incomes Real Growth” then. And yet, even though even the incomes of the bottom 99% of the U.S. population were stagnant throughout that four-year period ending in 2012 (all of Obama’s first term), economists still say that the “recession ended in 2009.” And the reality was even worse than this incomes-picture shows, because, in terms of wealth, which is even more important than income, there hasn’t yet  been a “recovery,” in the U.S., for the bottom 99% of Americans. What there has been, instead, is continuing scams, misinforming the public, about what’s actually happening, and what happened, and what caused it to happen. It’s just a racket.

THE DEEPER MEANING:

Under Presidents G.W. Bush and Barack Obama, economic inequality in America has been more extreme, for more years, than under any Presidents in all of the previous U.S. history. But, at least, Bush didn’t pretend to care about it. Obama does. He pretended to a concern for justice which he never really had; he was always merely faking liberalism. It was thus entirely true-to-form that President Obama had his Solicitor General present an argument to the U.S. Supreme Court that lying in politics is Constitutionally protected “free speech.”

But what, then, is really left of ‘democracy’ in the U.S.? After all, even before Obama, democracy in America was already dying, if not yet dead. And what meaningful democracy can even possibly exist in a nation where lying in politics is constitutionally protected ‘free speech,’ which no state may penalize, under any conditions? How may “the people” even conceivably rule in a republic where politicians can reasonably be expected to win only lying-contests, because not to lie in such a nation is not to be politically competitive there at all? Can democracy really consist of contests in deception? Is such a political race-to-the-bottom consistent with democracy?

Or, is it instead the case that such extreme wealth-disparities as exist in the U.S. are the natural result of decades of politics being (perhaps increasingly within recent times) little more than lying-contests? Is that the deeper truth, behind the deplorable figures here?

Is this extreme inequality the result of state-imposed reduction of ‘democracy’ to being basically contests in deceiving the public? Is that what it’s really all about — a racket, basically, against the public, for and on behalf of the aristocracy?

Is this extreme inequality the intended result, or is it merely the result of the stupidity of those who just happen to win high national office in the United States?

Do the farm animals just happen to end up as burger-meat? Or is that what they are there for? We know. Do they?

———-

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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