DEMOCRATIC MIDTERM LOSSES ROOTED IN CORRUPTION

                                               

Explaining Democratic midterm losses by pointing to President Obama’s performance confuses cause and effect.   While many voters are tired of Obama and voted Republican to register their protest, what really matters is that people are also disgusted with members of Congress from both parties. There is a historical tendency for voters to blame the President and his party and to vote accordingly, hoping that a change in party leadership will fix the problem. There was a time when politicians responded to the will of voters. In the post-Citizens United era, campaign contributions by special interests carry more weight than the wishes of the electorate. That is why voters support Democratic policies yet vote Republican.

America has divided along ideological lines, yet neither party is really guided by the basic principles they espouse. Republicans are arguably more honest, since they claim corporate profit is the source of America’s prosperity despite all evidence this has not led to economic benefit for workers.  Democrats acknowledge the economic disparities resulting from unchecked corporate power, but fail to challenge the chief source of their campaign contributions. Both parties kowtow to a Wall Street oligarchy focused on short-term profits. This rewards corporate executives who put immediate gain over the long-term interests of their companies and the national economy. Since CEOs have a responsibility to produce maximum profits, only regulations designed to protect the public interest can reverse the disastrous economic trends of recent years.

The root problem of corruption of campaign finance is obscured not only by partisan rhetoric but by a corporate-controlled media earning billions selling commercials marketing candidates like toothpaste. Given this incentive, broadcasters and newspapers largely owned by the same corporations are unlikely to highlight the problem. The result is voters who want to go with a winner choose between the well-funded candidates of the two major parties. Third party candidates are assumed to be incapable of winning. As long as this remains accepted wisdom, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

With an electorate evenly divided between red and blue, elections are decided by the small minority of truly independent voters. Their votes swing control of Congress back and forth between the major parties in a vain attempt to change the outcome without addressing the real problem.  Presidents beholden to powerful individuals cannot stop Congress from putting business interests over those of the rest of us.  Only when a Presidential agenda aligns with that of the interests of powerful corporations does it succeed. There is rarely gridlock when corporate interests collide with those of the People.

Faced with a choice between candidates whose important policy positions are getting more difficult to tell apart in congressional races funded by the same business interests, more voters walk away in each election. Those who remain tend to be the hard core partisans who feel they have no choice but to go along with their corporate candidates, lest the country fall into ruin even faster. Despite the obvious truth that it’s the corrupt system that is responsible for our dysfunctional Congress, they continue to assign blame solely to politicians of the other party. This tendency is reinforced by a corporate media that does not question the false framing of major issues by candidates to justify their corporate-friendly positions. Treating election coverage like horse racing leads to confusion among voters about who might be willing to put their interests over those who control the strings of puppet politicians in Washington.

The only solution is to be found in making willingness to deal with corruption the litmus test for voters in 2016. Move to Amend’s Pledge to Amend campaign is an essential step in that direction, calling on candidates to take a position on a constitutional amendment to declare that money is not speech and corporations are not people. Over the next two years, statewide coalitions such as Oregon Democracy Coalition, WAmend in Washington State and Money Out-Voters In (MOVI) in California will be organizing locally around the country to raise the prominence of the issue among the electorate with a goal of making support for a strong amendment the deciding factor in determining who they send to Congress. When we educate enough people about why they need to make this the most important issue to consider when casting their votes, we will elect a Congress that will pass the amendment. The time it will take to succeed will depend on how many are willing to get involved in the campaign. With global climate change setting an upper limit on how long we have to accomplish the goal, we have to start building those coalitions now. 
For more information, contact the author at staggenborg4senate@hotmail.com or (541) 217-8044

RETHINKING CONSPIRACY-ANALYSIS BY SHAWN HAMILTON

Today's blog was originally published in  Foreign Policy Journal.
 Rethinking Conspiracy

by Shawn Hamilton   |  October 27, 2014

Photo: Michael Foran/Flickr

The terms “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy nut” are used frequently to discredit a perceived adversary using emotional rather than logical appeals. It’s important for the sake of true argument that we define the term “conspiracy” and use it appropriately, not as an ad hominem attack on someone whose point of view we don’t share.

According to my Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, the word “conspiracy” derives from the Latin “conspirare,” which means literally “to breathe together” in the sense of agreeing to commit a crime. The primary definition is “planning and acting together secretly, especially for a harmful or unlawful purpose, such as murder or treason.”

It was in this sense that Mark Twain astutely observed, “A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public.”

Conspiracies are common. If they weren’t, police stations would not need conspiracy units to investigate and prosecute crimes such as “conspiracy to import cocaine” or any other collusion on the part of two or more people to subvert the law.

Unfortunately, too many people smugly chide “conspiracy theories” as if they imagine that such a derisive characterization reflects superior intellect—whether or not they know anything about the issue in question. It’s a pitiful display of ego inflation and intellectual dishonesty, yet it appears to be a common approach preferred by those either short on information and critical thinking skills or harboring a hidden agenda.

Here are a few examples of past “conspiracy theories” that have been commonly derided but were later determined to be credible:

1933 Business Plot:  Smedley Butler, a decorated United States Marine Corps major general, who wrote a book calledWar is a Racket, testified before a congressional committee that a group of powerful industrialists, who had tried to recruit him, were planning to form a fascist veterans’ group that intended to assassinate Franklin Roosevelt and overthrow the government in a coup. While news media at the time belittled Butler and called the affair a hoax, the congressional committee determined that Butler’s allegations were credible, although no-one was prosecuted.

Project Paperclip:  After “winning” World War II, the US imported hundreds of Nazis and their families through “Project Paperclip,” so-named because ID photos were clipped to paper dossiers. It was set up by an agency within the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA. Along with creating false identities and political biographies, Paperclip operatives expunged or altered Nazi records and other criminal histories in order to illegally circumvent President Truman’s edict that prohibited Nazis from obtaining security clearances. Thus, high-level Nazis waltzed into sensitive positions of authority and secrecy in the US military-industrial establishment, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), major corporations, and universities. These Germans were conveniently referred to as “former Nazis,” but “former” was commonly just a euphemism for “active” and “ardent.”

Consider the irony of the United States’ moon mission. In order to successfully land men on the lunar surface and return them to Earth, the US depended almost exclusively on Nazis. A notable example was rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, a member of the Allgemeine SS, who would eventually lead the US space program. Von Braun had exploited concentration camp labor in Germany to build V-2 rockets at Peenemünde, and German aviation doctors’ gruesome and often fatal experiments at Dachau and other prisons afforded information that would help keep American astronauts alive in space.

While many Americans would prefer to call it a conspiracy theory, the United States defeated the Nazi organization in Germany only to transplant that ideology directly into the US after the war, and not just among members of the lay population but, more significantly, among members of the very “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower (a five-star general during WWII) had presciently warned the nation about in his 1961 message of leave-taking and farewell.

Operation Northwoods:  Declassified documents revealed that in 1962 the CIA was planning to execute false flag terrorist attacks, such as killing random American citizens and blowing up civilian targets, including a US airliner and ship, in order to blame Castro and justify invading Cuba.

Gulf of Tonkin:  President Lyndon Johnson used a contrived version of this 1964 event to justify escalation of the Vietnam War. It was claimed that Vietnamese gunboats had fired on the USS Maddox. It never happened—or at best was grossly distorted and overblown—yet the story served to prompt Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which provided the public justification Johnson needed to attack North Vietnam. This led to the deaths of about two million Vietnamese people and fifty thousand Americans.

MK-ULTRA:  As its code name suggests, MK-ULTRA was a mind control program run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence for the ostensible purpose of discovering ways to glean information from Communist spies although its applications were undoubtedly more far-reaching. It employed various methodologies including sensory deprivation and isolation, sexual abuse, and the administration of powerful psychotropic drugs such as LSD to unwitting subjects, including military personnel, prisoners, and college students. Many of them suffered serious consequences. One biochemist, Frank Olson, who was secretly slipped a strong dose of LSD at a CIA meeting, suffered a severe psychotic break and died when, for whatever reason, he plummeted from his apartment window to the pavement below. Such revelations came to light in 1975 during hearings by the congressional Church Committee (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) and the presidential Rockefeller Commission. These investigations were hindered by CIA Director Richard Helms who in 1973 had ordered the MK-ULTRA files destroyed.

Operation Mockingbird: This was a CIA media control program exposed by the Church Committee in 1975. It revealed the CIA’s efforts from the 1950s through the 1970s to pay well-known foreign and domestic journalists from “reputable” media agencies such as the Washington Post, Time Magazine, Newsweek, the Miami Herald, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, Miami News, and CBS, among others, to publish CIA propaganda, manipulating the news by planting stories in domestic and foreign news outlets. During the hearings, Senator Church asked an agency representative, “Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?” The speaker eyed his lawyer then replied, “This I think gets into the details, Mr. Chairman, that I’d like to get into in executive session.” In other words, he didn’t want to admit the truth publicly. He gave the same response when asked if the CIA planted stories with the major wire services United Press International (UPI) and the Associated Press (AP). In his 1997 book, Virtual Government — in the chapter “’And Now a Word from Our Sponsor – The CIA': The Birth of Operation Mockingbird, the Takeover of the Corporate Press & the Programming of Public Opinion” — Alex Constantine claims that during the 1950s “some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts.” I’m curious to know what the estimate would be today.

CIA Drug Smuggling: It’s no longer a secret that clandestine arms of US Intelligence have profited from running drugs for many years. I first became aware of the issue when a Vietnam veteran claimed he had helped load opium cultivated in Laos onto military transport planes. The opium was turned into heroin and shipped around the world, sometimes in the visceral cavities of dead soldiers. A Hollywood version of these events is portrayed in the film Air America, but the movie is based on historical truth. When the US military presence in Southeast Asia declined and the focus shifted to Central America, cocaine became the new revenue source. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb ran a well-documented three-part series in theSan Jose Mercury News called “Dark Alliance” alleging that traffickers with US intelligence ties had marketed the cocaine in Los Angeles and other cities where it was turned into the new and highly addictive form known as “crack,” inflicting a scourge that claimed the lives and freedom of thousands. One guy I met in Compton who had been arrested for crack possession described the drug this way: “It doesn’t really get you high,” he said. “You just want more.” Webb’s allegations were confirmed by an LAPD Narcotics Officer and whistleblower, Michael Ruppert, and the story received additional confirmation from CIA contract pilot Terry Reed, whose story is revealed in his 1994 book Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA. According to Reed, the sale of cocaine was used to finance the Contras in Central America when congressional funding was blocked by the Boland Amendment. He claimed the operation was run out of Mena, Arkansas when Bill Clinton was governor. Military cargo planes were flown to Central America with military hardware, he said, and then returned to Mena loaded with coke.

I could add to the list, and it would be a long one. The Iran-Contra scandal, Watergate, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), the Tuskegee syphilis experiment—there is no shortage of crimes that were planned and committed by two or more people and thus constituted conspiracy. Conspiracies happen, and before any crime is solved it spawns theories. There are people who look at these theories rationally using logic and discernment, and there are others who are illogical, engaging in fallacious, emotion-based thinking and jumping to unjustified conclusions based on little or no evidence. The term “conspiracy theorist,” however, has been manipulated to suggest only those in the latter category.

The John F. Kennedy assassination provides a good example of how the term “conspiracy” has been misapplied to disparage people who find fault with official versions of major events. After Kennedy was murdered, very few people questioned the Warren Commission’s verdict that Lee Oswald had shot the president unassisted, and anyone who challenged that belief was branded a “conspiracy nut” (or buff) unworthy of respect or consideration. Forty years later, a 2003 Gallup poll revealed that 75% of the US population believed there had been a conspiracy to kill JFK.

Apparently some people have a psychological need to protect themselves from unpleasant realities, so it’s easier for them to label others as conspiracy nuts than to assimilate hard but discomforting facts. In the case of the John Kennedy assassination, even a congressional committee, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, concluded in 1979 that there had been a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. They tried to soften that reality by calling it a “limited conspiracy” as if Oswald’s drunken cousin had helped him and not elements of US Intelligence, but the fact remains that the US government has officially admitted there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. “Conspiracy theorists” were finally vindicated, but I’ve never heard anyone apologize for disparaging their names and questioning their sanity.

“9/11,” of course, is the current topic that yields the most accusations of conspiracy nuttiness. Anyone who challenges the 9/11 Commission’s conclusions are branded “conspiracy theorists” (or nuts, wackos or kooks) as were their predecessors when JFK was killed.

History repeats itself.

One of the strange truths about the 9/11 affair is that members of the 9/11 Commission also called the event a conspiracy. That alone shows the term is being intentionally manipulated. In the Commission’s view, the conspirators were exclusively fanatical Muslims, but somehow that investigative body has been exempt from accusations of conspiracy theorizing even though they called the event a conspiracy. Apparently one must challenge the official version of events to qualify as a “conspiracy theorist.”

I asked Jim Marrs, the popular author and critic of various official versions of history, what he considered to be the origin of “conspiracy” as a derogatory term and how it has been manipulated: “The term ‘conspiracy theory’ was consciously submitted to assets of the CIA back in a document from the 1960s to be used to counter factual information that was continually being made public regarding the Kennedy assassination. From there, these assets, including media personalities, pundits, academics and government officials, expanded the term to become a pejorative for any statements not complying with the Establishment line,” Marrs said. “However, its repetitive overuse, plus the fact that the 9/11 attacks obviously involved a conspiracy, today has lessened the impact of the term.”

Many critics of the 9/11 Commission report make some valid points, and it’s not fair to simply dismiss them as conspiracy theorists when the very people they’re countering also claim there was a conspiracy. The question is simply: whose conspiracy was it?

Even officials tasked with investigating 9/11 knew there was plenty of deception involved. Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, John Farmer, said on page four of his book The Ground Truth, “At some level of government, at some point in time, there was an agreement not to tell the people the truth about what happened.” In their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, the two co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, outlined reasons they believe the government established the Commission in a manner that ensured its failure. These reasons included delay in initiating the proceedings, too short a deadline for the scope of the work, insufficient funding, and lack of cooperation by politicians and key government agencies including the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, and NORAD. “So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail,” the chairmen said.

How much clearer can they be?

Conspiracies exist. They have always existed, and not wanting them to be true does not invalidate their existence. I think it’s time we reject the intentional misappropriation of the term “conspiracy” by forces attempting to manipulate public opinion and restore the term to its original and proper meaning. As long as we observe logic and reason, there is no intellectual dishonor in contemplating and discussing conspiracies, and doing so is imperative if we wish to retain what’s left of our liberties.

A version of this article was originally published at OpEdNews.com.

[Correction, Oct. 28, 2014: An earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that a chapter title of Alex Constantine's 1997 book Virtual Government is "Mockingbird: The Subversion of The Free Press by the CIA". The chapter is titled "'And Now a Word from Our Sponsor - The CIA': The Birth of Operation Mockingbird, the Takeover of the Corporate Press & the Programming of Public Opinion." The text has been revised to correct the error.]
Shawn Hamilton is a writing teacher and has taught in the United States and Taiwan. He is the author of Be All You Can Be. It is the story of his father, an Air Force major who in the latter part of his life rejected use of the military as an instrument of US imperialism. He has worked as a capitol reporter in Sacramento for KPFA Radio (Pacifica)and written for various print publications. He received a Project Censored award in 2011 and writes poetry for fun.

Hamilton was a guest on SFPI Radio on May 11, 2014. Listen to the interview here.

ZIONISM AND RACISM

                                                                                                                                                                                            

If you want to see a granfalloon, just peel the skin from a toy balloon. 

-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.


The claim is often made that Zionism is based on racist assumptions. The matter is rarely discussed in any detail, since those bringing different viewpoints to the question tend to be so defensive that neither listens to the other side. Given that the only prospect for peace in the Mideast depends on resolving the conflict, it is imperative that defenders of Israel and its critics learn to engage in reasoned debate on fundamental questions such as this. Whether one’s sympathies lie primarily with Israelis or with Palestinians, it is hard to argue that the continuing violence benefits either.

The problem is not only that the two sides are starting with different interpretations of facts. It is that one or both are ignoring essential truths for understanding the conflict. These universal truths are often hidden beneath layers of unconscious beliefs that are so ingrained that they are hard to recognize. Since few people want to think of themselves as racist, they are even harder to acknowledge. Any discussion that might lead to the conclusion that one side is racist therefore breaks down before it gets to the root of the problem.

A person who feels genuine compassion for Palestinians may blame all Jews for their plight, while those worried about the survival of Israel and perhaps the Jewish people themselves may demonize all Arabs as hostile and dangerous. Both are making the mistake of assuming that all members of one or the other group are essentially all good or all bad. Most people do not fall into the trap of accepting these racist beliefs, of course. The great majority of well-meaning people who disagree on the nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict want an outcome that is fair to both. The problem is that in order to visualize such an outcome, we have to come to an agreement on what is “fair.” This is where unconscious biases lead to impasse.

The only way to a solution is to recognize and overcome the tribal mentality underlying the “us” versus “them” assumption at the root of all racist beliefs, conscious or unconscious. A common argument of defenders of Israel is that any criticism of its right to exist constitutes “anti-Semitism,” a charge that infuriates those who hold that Zionism is inherently racist. Ignoring the fact that the term anti-Semitism is a misnomer because the original inhabitants of the area were all Semitic, there is some merit to both arguments. There are among those on one side people who hate all Jews and on the other, people who hate all Arabs. It is easy to point at such examples to make the case that either group is racist, but in either case the argument itself is racist. People are individuals. Claiming that attitudes and behaviors are universal among any group ignores the reality that we are all more alike than different and that our commonalities are what make us human. Regarding an entire group of people as so evil that they deserve to be attacked because of who they are dehumanizes both the victim and the aggressor.

This is not to say that a group might not be more violent because of cultural influences. It is only an acknowledgement of the fact that such differences are culturally determined, not inherent in one group. It is in identifying with one group or the other to the exclusion of recognizing the common humanity of both that is the essence of the tribal mentality that is at the root of all racism. Thus, both groups claim that racism is endemic in the other group while denying it in theirs. The question of this essay is whether such attitudes are inherent in those who support Zionism, however.

A recent book by American reporter Max Blumenthal extensively documents that racism is rampant in Israel today. Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel traces the origins of this racism and describes how it manifests in Israeli public opinion. Blumenthal, like most prominent Jewish critics of Israel, is often called a “self-hating Jew,” which is a label intended to mark him as an extremist who does not accept his Jewishness. The fact that he does not place his ethnic background over his humanity is thus assumed to represent some sort of psychopathology. This in itself reflects the racist beliefs of rabid defenders of Israel, but is it inherent in Zionist beliefs? Clearly, not all Zionists are racists. Many are humanitarians when it comes to injustice in other situations. The truth is that decent people sometimes hold some racist beliefs. It is only when they consciously acknowledge and cling to them that they deserve to be called racists.

To rationally discuss the Israel-Palestine problem, we have to admit that a Jewish state is by definition exclusionist. If Israel is “Jewish,” as it wants Hamas and the world to acknowledge, then what are its non-Jewish citizens? In a democracy, all citizens are equal. The increasing number of discriminatory laws in Israel and the Occupied Territories refutes this claim. Blumenthal makes the case that these laws, the racist attitudes they reflect and anti-Arab violence are the natural result of accepting the idea that a nation based on an ethnic identify can be a democracy. Unfortunately, those who cannot see that a “Jewish democracy” is a contradiction in terms cannot see the evidence of it.

The claim that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic is the most clever lie of all. A growing number of Jews, including many thousands of Israelis, no longer believe the one-sided narrative of the Israeli government concerning Gaza, apartheid and occupation. To claim that the government of Israel represents all Jews is not just inaccurate, it is racist on its face. As former AIPAC member Rich Forer describes in Breakthrough: Transforming Fear into Compassion, A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict, the ongoing pattern of violence cannot be understood until you confront the tendency to view your tribal identity as somehow distinct from your universal human identity.

The crimes of the past cannot be erased, but continuing to allow them will not lead to a solution. Trying to justify any aggression against civilian populations on the idea that use of terror by one side is acceptable because the other uses it will make neither Israel nor Palestine safer. It is wrong when Hamas does it and wrong when Israel responds with overwhelming force.  However, the overwhelming superiority of the Israeli military over Hamas should lead any objective observer to ask whether Israel has any moral justification for repeatedly slaughtering thousands of civilians in the name of “defense.” If you look at the facts you find that it is Israel who has almost always broken any truce that has lasted any length of time.

Kurt Vonnegut defined a granfalloon as an artificial grouping of people who identified with something smaller than humanity itself. A nation, a religion, a racial or cultural group are all based on distinctions that are less important than those characteristics that define us as human. A survivor of the Battle of the Bulge and the Dresden firebombing, he was often depressed to see how tenaciously people cling to these false identities. If he had one great message to share, it was that only when we begin to put our humanity above all other considerations and work for justice for all can peace become possible.

OCCUPY HONG KONG IS A TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE OF NGOS IN COLOR REVOLUTIONS

Today's blog by Jeff J. Brown is from the website of 44 Days. It is a great analysis of not only the "Umbrella Revolution" but the history of the role of NGOs in color revolutions around the world.



The Skinny on Hong Kong’s Occupy Central Movement

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Is it really democracy Hong Kongers want? Or is it a level playing field? This banner screams, “Down with Capitalism – Occupy Central”. (image by www.leela.net)

I have been watching the Occupy Central Movement with some detachment (some are also calling it the Umbrella Movement, since protestors sport umbrellas against the tropical sun and afternoon showers). The rubber stamp, Ministry of Truth-Western mainstream media is kowtowing to the Washington-London-Paris consensus, declaring that Occupy Central is hungering for Western style “democracy”, that it is bigger than Hong Kong. It all sounds so predictably déjà vu. Knowing that free-wheeling Hong Kong is gladly letting CIA front NGO National Endowment for Democracyoperate on its soil, is all we need to know. The main “non” governmental organizations (NGOs) that do the CIA’s bidding around the world are:

• American Center for International Labor Solidarity
• Center for International Private Enterprise
• Ford Foundation
• Freedom House
• International Republican Institute (IRI)
• National Democratic Institute (NDI)
• National Democratic Institute for International Affairs
• National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
• U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

While some do decent work, like the American Center for International Labor Solidarity fighting human trafficking, the Ford Foundation and many of its excellent programs, or USAID doing helpful infrastructure projects, they have many other darker, deep state activities that answer to a higher, nefarious power. Often, what they will do is create a local NGO, with a lofty sounding, idealistic name, and then this NGO will work to destabilize the local political structure, with the goal of overturning the government in a coup d’état or “color” revolution. This revolution will try to install a pliant Western stooge leader to do Eurangloland’s bidding. All the color/named revolutions since 1990 – China, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, the Arab Spring and currently in Ukraine, where it has not gone as planned, and Russia and Venezuela, where the same modus operandi is simply not working, are financed directly by the CIA or through their panoply of NGOs and local NGOs.

To understand just how pervasive and cancerous the CIA’s bogus NGOs can become in a country, here is a long list of CIA financed NGOs that were in Russia in 2009. Its length is shocking, but destroying Russia is a long sought after American goal. Since then, the Russian parliament has cracked down on them. Other countries are also starting to catch on and being more vigilant. But given the chance, the United States will flood a country with millions, and in at least the case of Ukraine, billions of dollars, to overthrow national governments, in order to put in puppet leaders who, now bought and sold, will greedily turn their country into a IMF/World Bank resource and asset prostitute.

One of the classic NGO case studies is Otpor in Yugoslavia. Its template has laid the foundation for many of the CIA ginned revolutions and rebellions for the last 25 years. Otpor is heavily CIA financed and infiltrated with local CIA agents, as are all the other CIA NGO assets around the world.

And in other cases, the United States, through its CIA front NGOs, just tries to buy overseas elections. As is the case right now in Brazil, where Uncle Sam is financing a yes-woman named Marina Silva, ironically, of the “Socialist Party”. If elected, she’ll bark and do tricks for the CIA and the White House and let Wall Street, the IMF and the World Bank come in and plunder one of the world’s richest countries, as well as divorce Brazil from BRICS.

In 1949, when Mao Zedong and the Communists kicked out of China the fascist mafia KMT, the Japanese military machine as well as all the Western colonialists, including the USA, the US government, from the White House, the State Department, Congress to the CIA, all officially bemoaned the fact that the United States had “lost” China. You can’t lose something if you do not “own” it in the first place. Thus, the US and Europe believed, in all their colonial delusions, that they owned China and lost it. Even before 1949, the CIA was trying to destabilize and balkanize the People’s Republic in China via Tibet, sending spy planes, arms, rebels, and hundreds of agents from Taiwan.

Most recently, the CIA’s latest gambit is to finance the transportation and training of hundreds of Muslim Ouighers from Xinjiang to travel to the Middle East, ostensibly for religious studies. There, they are trained in the arts of terrorism, by America’s bought and paid for jihadist groups, Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra, ISIL/Islamic State and on and on, only to be sent back home to blow up bombs and go on public stabbing massacres, in hopes of destabilizing Baba Beijing’s rule in Northwest China. Again the goal is for the West to install a puppet leader and government to exploit Xinjiang’s trillion dollar natural resources and turn it into an IMF/World Bank debt slave. Ditto Tibet. All of this has been written about and referenced in previous articles.

And so the CIA sees a chink in China’s armor in Hong Kong. Like in the Ukraine’s conflated Maidan, Hong Kong’s citizens have legitimate grievances about their corrupt elected government. It is only natural to want a greater voice in one’s affairs, especially when one’s economic, educational and professional lives have degraded so much in the last generation. In Kiev, the CIA made sure the protesters stayed on Maidan Square for weeks on end, 24/7, while bringing in hard core local operatives, which in Ukraine’s case were and are Nazis and fascists, paying them a daily per diem of €20-30 to raise hell, commit destruction and eventually death and assassinations. This was part of America’s $5 billion dollar investment to install a stooge Ukrainian government, that the US Department of State’s Victoria Nudelman/Nuland bragged about publicly, and which I’ve also written about and referenced.

Hong Kong is no different. The middle class and poor are being decimated by the Princes of Power’s draconian, libertarian capitalist policies of pushing the Territory’s profits to the 1%, at the expense of the 99%. Students are graduating from college and finding it difficult to get good paying jobs or affordable places to live. This, in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. Hong Kong only just passed a minimum wage law in 2010 and it is a paltry US$3.20/hour, less than half of America’s slave minimum wage. Standards of living for the 99% are cratering. Like in the US, Hong Kongers are having to work 2-3 jobs and much more than 40 hours a week, just to pay the bills, never mind prosper. As fully explained by Hong Konger Ming Chun Tang, his co-citizens have no collective bargaining rights, no unemployment benefits and no pensions, which even their fellow Chinese workers all have north of the border.

So, while the CIA is fully exploiting Hong Kongers’ discontent at their status quo, it has much less to do with pangs of democracy, as it does that they, like you, me and everybody else around the planet, are being economically sodomized by the one percent’s jungle, libertarian capitalism – now the world’s permanent reality, except maybe in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and among a few other Quixotic peoples, who battle for dignity and a more level playing field.

In truth, the ball is in Baba Beijing’s court. They have the power and the ability to read the riot act to Hong Kong’s elite billionaires and their corrupt, toady politicians. All Baba Beijing needs to do is say,

OK boys, it’s time for a haircut. Your current inverted pyramid of wealth accumulation doesn’t need to be re-inverted, but it sure needs to be flattened out enough to keep the peace. Make that apex angle more obtuse, much more obtuse.

I have always said that as soon as China’s 99% begin to agitate against their billionaire class, and it is inevitable that they will one day, Baba Beijing will not hesitate to very publicly, not only give their fat cats a full-fledged sheep shearing, but take a chunk out of their backsides too, in order to maintain the Heavenly Mandate and social stability.

It’s a little dicier though, in Hong Kong. China signed a UN witnessed treaty that after Hong Kong reverted to the Mainland in 1997, it would not change the Territory’s way of life for the next 50 years – until 2047. Thus, Baba Beijing has committed themselves to not overtly interfering in Hong Kong’s local affairs. Of course they do behind the scenes, vetting and selecting who will run the government, but always with a veneer of plausible deniability. While Baba would find it next to impossible to influence Hong Kong’s billionaire class’ investments in the Territory, all of them have billions in investments on the Mainland. If Occupy Central drags on, and it undoubtedly will, with the CIA’s NGOs putting money in the protesters’ pockets to maintain the vigil, a haircut north of border might be in order to get Hong Kong’s Princes of Power to share more of the Territory’s wealth, passing laws to funnel money to the working and poor classes.

Otherwise, the United States and its CIA, which would give anything to shatter the People’s Republic into a bunch of balkanized, subservient smaller countries, just might take this chink in Baba Beijing’s armor, and rend it into a full-fledged, hemorrhaging gash. At the very least, if the CIA can get Baba Beijing to overplay its hand, by say, sending in PLA troops or declaring martial law, it would be a massive propaganda coup for the West, just as the CIA’s support and financing of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and bogus “massacre” charges are continuing to wound China on an annual basis. This is of course what the US is hoping they can get Vladimir Putin to do in Novorossiya: overreact and give the West the propaganda coup of the century, in order to destroy Europe’s and Russia’s economic and political relationship, thus guaranteeing Europe continuation as one big collective of vassal states, totally dependent on Uncle Sam’s dictates.

Just as Russia has a huge, intricate and delicate juggling act to pull off, in order to try to prevent World War III in Ukraine, the US is using its dollar printing presses to pay for the same misery in China, now starting in Hong Kong.

OK, Baba Beijing, game on? It’s the Heavenly Mandate or CIA chaos.

- See more at: http://44days.net/the-skinny-on-hong-kongs-occupy-central-movement/#sthash.RrX72JAO.dpuf

WHY A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT TO END CITIZENS UNITED IS INEVITABLE

It is amazing how hard some people will work to convince others that doing what is absolutely necessary is impossible. Imagine if most people chose to believe that it is too late to do anything about climate change. Even if they were right, doing nothing due to widespread acceptance of the idea would amount to humanity turning its back on its children, dooming them to live through the collapse of human civilization.  As another example, the biggest obstacle to global peace is arguably the widespread acceptance of the self-fulfilling prophecy that war is inevitable. What if it became commonly understood that war is always a choice and they only benefit the corporations of the military-industrial complex that essentially dictates foreign policy to decision-makers in Washington? It is possible that war would become unthinkable, if we are willing to make that happen.

Global climate change and global peace, like nearly every issue that Congress and the White House have failed to address, are problems for all but the few who pay for the elections of our representatives in Washington. Congress and the White House routinely put the immediate interests of corporations over those of the rest of us. The short-sighted approach of the Wall Street criminals who dominate the government is setting the US and global economies up for a fall that will make 2008 look like a mild downturn. The economic devastation would leave us woefully unprepared to deal with the human crisis that would result. Well-respected experts like Helen Brown are warning us to prepare for a state of permanent martial law in the wake of the coming economic collapse.

The problem then is that until we change the US system of campaign finance, there is little hope for human civilization. There is a large and growing movement to do so through the only means that a corrupt Supreme Court has left us, a constitutional amendment. You would think that the recent 54-42 vote in the Senate would have caused naysayers some pause, but that does not seem to be the case. A recent article in Alternet made the claim that this meant the movement “collapsed with a predictable thud,” overlooking the fact that the vote itself was a historic milestone on the path to the inevitable enactment of an amendment that will be the first giant step toward establishing democracy in the US since the constitution itself.

What casual observers of the amendment movement consistently fail to recognize is that there is a specific path to passage that should be obvious to anyone who thinks through the problem of getting a corrupt Congress to pass an amendment that will undercut the very system that got most of its members into office.  Any solution will clearly need to involve making support for an amendment a crucial campaign issue in Congressional elections. If voters can be made to use this issue as a litmus test for their support, we can and will elect a Congress that will pass an amendment. Such a Congress will have proven that it is willing to put the interests of its constituents over those of the corporate patrons of the current occupants of Congress. Then, they can get on to dealing with other aspects of corruption that critics of the amendment complain it would not address.

Movement leaders can take much of the blame for the failure of recognition of this clear path to victory. The idea has been floating around since before Citizens United was decided, as the Roberts Court’s call for briefs that would expand the original question to gut campaign finance reform made it obvious which way it was going to come down. After the decision, some of us immediately got to work promoting not just wider awareness of the problem, but recognition of the solution. Unfortunately, early supporters gave up on the strategy after the 2010 election failed to yield results. This was surprising, given that the lack of success in electing candidates pledged to support an amendment was predictable. Not only was the idea new, but organizers failed to achieve buy-in from many groups working on the issue. Move to Amend, which had the most boots on the ground early in the battle, rejected the idea outright and refused to work with any group that did not support the amendment they wrote or their strategy to see it passed.

In 2010, Public Citizen issued a call for pledges to support an amendment that would overrule Citizens United. I was one of dozens of candidates for the House and Senate who answered the call. We will never know how many more candidates might have been willing to take the pledge had it received wider publicity through other groups working on the issue and the “alternative” media that treated it as just one issue among many rather than the central problem halting progress on addressing the rest. People for the American Way was Public Citizens’ only partner. Its role was confined to mentioning the campaign on its website and listing candidates who had made a pledge. Despite an effort to revive interest in the idea in 2012 and the ease with which pledges were obtained, another four years passed before the idea finally began to catch on.

In 2012, both Public Citizen and People for the American Way declined to continue what came to be most widely known as the Pledge to Amend campaign, despite the obvious fact that it was a strategy that could only succeed over several election cycles. The same was true for other groups that were approached. Most of them did not seem to appreciate the significance of the idea. Although Pledge to Amend is the name of the same strategy recently adopted by Move to Amend, its steering committee explicitly rejected the idea in 2012 as premature whenever the question came up. Move to Amend is now calling for people to solicit pledges of support for an amendment that would reform campaign finance and abolish corporate constitutional rights (corporate personhood), but there is little evidence that their local affiliates around the country have responded. As a result, it appears that another election cycle is likely to be wasted.

The earliest serious effort to organize a movement around the idea of making support for an amendment a campaign issue seems to have started in Oregon in 2014. In 2013, various groups around the state came together in a successful effort to get an amendment resolution passed in the state legislature. By 2014, they were looking for another project. At that time, the national steering committee of Move to Amend had failed to provide strong leadership in giving local affiliates around the country a new objective once those who had worked passed amendments in their communities had succeeded. They suggested working on getting pledges from state legislators, seemingly ignoring the fact that the amendment had to pass Congress first. The Oregon Democracy Coalition decided to pursue what they call the Ask the Candidate strategy, first suggested by Public Citizen in 2010.

The effort is off to a slow start, but is likely to serve as a model for groups around the US by the time of the 2016 election. It is based on the idea of forming local groups in every community and empowering them to raise awareness of the issue of corruption and the way to address it in ways of their own choosing. The coalition has quickly grown from its original six members (considering all of the Move to Amend locals in the state as one group) to 29.  It is reaching out to public interest organizations in the environmental, peace, economic justice, labor and other movements that have largely been working in isolation. All of these groups are realizing that their efforts will be fruitless until we have a government that puts our interests over the corporate patrons of our so-called representatives. While there have been dozens of other strategies proposed that merit support, none have the momentum of the movement to amend the constitution.

As the alternative media and activists nationwide increasingly become aware of the central role of reforming campaign finance in moving America forward, the model used by the Oregon Democracy Coalition is likely to become the nucleus of a truly grassroots movement for an amendment in communities around the country. It might even just become the way that we finally build the fabled “progressive movement” that cynics have written off as impossible to achieve.

USING CONSPIRACY THEORIES TO CONTROL THE MASSES

                                                                         


The CIA has been using propaganda to control public perception of covert operations overseas since at least the early 50s, when it was officially given this role under Operation Mockingbird.  Although this authority was given only with regard to manipulating foreign media, it quickly morphed into a means of controlling US public opinion about the imperialist actions of its government. Failure to understand this is one of the main reasons that the American public has no idea what the government is actually doing in its name in other countries. Understanding how those who determine US foreign policies use conspiracy theories to control conversation about US policies abroad is crucial to understanding how to challenge their propaganda.

The most important deception of the US government is masking its imperialist policies, from Guatemala and Iran in the early 50s to the Ukrainian coup earlier this year. It took nearly 60 years before Americans were officially informed about the CIA-engineered overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian government of Mossadeghin 1953. To many Americans, that is ancient history even though it has changed the course of US-Iranian relations from then until today.  They still ask “why do they hate us?” when the answer is a matter of public record. Corporate pundits play their part by never making this point when commenting on the long-standing enmity between Iran and the US. Instead, they repeat without question the CIA-vetted conspiracy theory that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons, in the complete absence of credible evidence. Today, this lie is repeated in public statements by both proponents and opponents of engagement with Iran

American imperialism beyond its present borders had its modest beginnings in the Spanish-American War. This was a war heavily promoted by much of the corporate media of the time, following the lead of William Randolph Hearst. The conspiracy theory of the time was that the USS Maine was sunk in Havana harbor by a Spanish mine, a lie that was repeated enough that it came to be regarded as a matter of common knowledge. This led to an initially reluctant McKinley to embrace imperialism. The story of the rise of American influence from then is one of imperialist expansion to serve the interests of international corporations. As the US grew into the most powerful military, economic and diplomatic power in world history, it eventually gave up trying to justify its aggression on the basis of false claims that it was defending itself from direct attacks.

At the end of WWII, the US adopted a new policy of making war against anyone it perceived as a possible enemy. Based on the assertion that the national interest included waging war anywhere where communism tried to take hold, Truman chose to go to war with Korea. As importantly, he did not seek Congressional approval to launch the assault. The US-controlled UN endorsed the Korean War despite the fact that it was not defensive nor intended to stop genocide, the only two exceptions to laws stating that national sovereignty is inviolable, This is a doctrine going back centuries to the Treaty of Westphalia after the 30 Years War. It served as a founding principle of the UN charter.  Since then, any offensive war against a sovereign nation is against the law. However, under policies based on the notion of American exceptionalism, violation of national sovereignty is no longer considered by the US government as an impediment to involving itself in civil wars or starting wars of choice. The UN has become irrelevant except for the cover it provides NATO and its allies, especially Israel.

The Korean War was immensely unpopular, especially after it resulted in what millions of Americans considered the country’s first defeat. Although the USSR, China and communism itself were regarded by most as real threats to US security, the nation was tired of war. During the Eisenhower administration foreign intervention was mostly covert, with the CIA providing cover under policies established by Operation Mockingbird.  In his final days in office, Eisenhower warned Americans about the threats posed by the growing power and economic influence of the military-industrial complex. According to James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable, the MIC was referred to as the military-industrial-government complex in the first draft of his speech. The original term was much more descriptive of the power that these corporations had come to wield over the American government, but perhaps he felt that Americans were not ready for the truth. At any rate, he was no longer in a position to do anything about the threat.

Douglass makes a compelling argument that it was Kennedy’s efforts to change America’s imperialist policies that led to his murder by what he calls “the national security state.” Kennedy was shot five months after declaring his intention to end the Cold War. This was after declaring a unilateral ban on atmospheric nuclear testing leading to a partial nuclear test ban treaty with the USSR, secretly opening discussions with Kruschev, beginning to establish a backdoor dialogue with Castro and signing three orders to develop a plan to withdraw from Vietnam beginning in 1963.

Many Americans have forgotten that it was Johnson who used the manufactured incident in the Gulf of Tonkin to escalate a war that Kennedy tried to end. A mere 10 years after the end of the Korean War, American empire builders used this ruse to gain public support for a war of corporate imperialist expansion.  The failure of Americans to accept the fact that they are routinely lied to by leaders of both parties has had disastrous consequences.

In the aftermath of the JFK murder, there was a widespread belief that he was the victim of a conspiracy that the government was covering up. This led to a little-known CIA program to discredit critics of the Warren Commission report as “conspiracy theorists”while simultaneously conducting a campaign to erase from the American consciousness any awareness of everything Kennedy had done to challenge the military-industrial-government complex. The program was and continues to be a success, with the public growing increasingly skeptical of any alternative theory of JFK’s murder, despite the fact that the House Select Committee on Assassinations declared in 1977 that he was murdered as the result of a "probable conspiracy" that Congress has yet to seriously investigate..

With few exceptions, the resistance to traditional power structures in the US that escalated in the wake of the assassinations of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X has dissipated. The influence of the Vietnam antiwar movement is often overstated. The war continued until it became politically expedient to end it. The growing opposition to the war after 10 years and tens of thousands of American dead was only one consideration. What the movement did show is that Americans are capable of standing together against the government when it becomes oppressive. Occupy tried to recreate this but failed because itwas so worried about “cooption” that it refused to work with establishedorganizations and rejected calls to create a focused strategy for advancing itsobjectives.

The abdication of Congress during the Korean War of its role in deciding when the nation goes to war has been a major factor in subsequent US wars of imperial expansion. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was another example of giving away congressional war powers to the President. The Authorization for the Useof Military Force formally gave Bush almost complete authority to start wars of corporate conquest and to restrict civil liberties. That power has now devolved to Obama. To his credit, he sought congressional authorization for a directattack on Syria and may seek authorization to strike at ISIS.  This does not of course excuse the fact that he continues to use the AUMF to support proxy wars in Syria as he did in Libya, commit extrajudicial executions of both foreign nationals and US citizens around the world and to extend his power to suspend civil liberties through provisions of the 2012 NDAA that gave him the power to determine Americans enemycombatants, subject to military law until the “cessation of hostilities.” The question is, if Obama truly believes that War of Terror cannot go on forever, how and when does he think it will end?

Only after Americans have a basic grasp of the imperialist nature of its government and whose interests it serves will they be prepared to understand just how ruthless the puppet masters of Congress and the White House can be. It is the nature of Empires to crush all opposition, both foreign and domestic. The means to establish a permanent police state in the US are in place to respond to any organized resistance to imperialist policies, and effective antiwar organizations are closely monitored. If Americans fail to come together as part of a grassroots united international front against fascism and war, they too will become victims of the Empire in more than just the economic sense that they already are.

This brings us to the greatest conspiracy theory ever concocted by the US government; the official explanation of 9/11. The story should not be hard to debunk, since the report has been repudiated by both co-chairs and the Chief Counsel of the 9/11 Commission. The major obstacle to the 9/11 Truth movement is the successful use of the label “conspiracy theory” to inoculate against dissent. The majority of Americans still believe that 19 Saudis with box cutters managed to fly planes into the twin towers and the Pentagon in a way that professional pilots say they cannot. They are willing to accept the story that the failure to follow up on at least three independent lines of investigation that would have revealed the plot was due to incompetence and confusion by government agencies whose job it is to protect us. The alternative is unthinkable, so they reject any more logical explanation that forces them to question the nature and intentions of their “protectors.”

The most effective way to challenge those who blindly accept the lies of their government is to tell them about a conspiracy to overthrow the government that is no theory, but established fact. Smedley Butler was a highly decorated Marine general who testified before Congress in 1933 about an plot by wealthy industrialists to stage a military coup and overthrow Roosevelt.  It was the most important event in US history that most Americans have never heard of. Congress took the testimony, videos of which are stillavailable online, but did nothing to pursue the plotters.  This left them free to subvert the government is less obvious ways, and to raise their children to do the same. If this is not enough to persuade doubters that the government is and has been in the hands of corporate puppet masters for decades, nothing will. If and when America is free from their influence, it is a cautionary tale we will teach our children forever after.

The next time someone calls you a “conspiracy theorist,” ask him if he has heard about Smedley Butler.  Once he understand the implications of the plot Butler revealed, ask him if he knows that a third building fell on 9/11. If enough of us are willing to speak about the “unspeakable,” we can change the national conversation about what is wrong with America and what needs to be done to create a true representative democracy in the United States.