Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1325
July 28, 2015
REALPOLITIK: The Secret Projects of Israël and Saudi Arabia – By Thierry Meyssan
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French investigative journalist Thierry Meyssan reports that for the last 17 months Israel has been engaged in secret negotiations with Saudi Arabia. Extremely high-level delegations have met five times – in India, Italy and the Czech Republic. It’s all part of a US plan to create a “Common Arab Defense Force,” under the auspices of the Arab League, but under Israeli command. This “Force” is already in operation in Yemen, where Israeli pilots fly Saudi bombers within the framework of an Arab Coalition whose headquarters have been installed by the Israelis in Somaliland.
Talk about strange bedfellows. No wonder Obama and Netanyahu want to keep this secret.
Originally posted on RIELPOLITIK:
Source – voltairenet.org
– The reponse by Tel-Aviv and Riyadh to the US-Iran negotiations can be found in the extension of Saudi financing of the war against Gaza in 2008 – the alliance between a colonial state and an obscurantist monarchy. While the Near East is preparing for a ten-year change in the rules of the game, Thierry Meyssan reveals here the contents of the secret negotiations between Tel-Aviv and Riyadh.
No-one in the Middle East seems to be aware that the secret agreements which should be signed on the 30th June 2015 by Washington and Teheran – on the fringe of the multilateral agreements concerning nuclear power – will probably set the rules of the game for the next ten years.
These agreements arrive at a moment when the United States have become the world’s first producers of petrol, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia. Consequently they do not…
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July 27, 2015
How to Spot an Undercover Cop
Cutting Edge: Confessions of an Undercover Cop
Channel 4 (2011)
Film Review
This documentary is about a member of Britain’s National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) who served as an undercover operative inside the British environmental and antifascist movement between 2002-2009. Mark Kennedy was recruited for the elite NPOIU while working as an undercover narcotics officer. Following three weeks of specialized training, he assumed the role of a vegan anarchist named Mark Stone. For seven years, he reported daily to an NPOIU cover officer with information he had gleaned about fellow activists and their protest campaigns.
The NPOIU justification for infiltrating the environmental movement was to ensure the police response was “proportional” to the size of environmental protests. However over time Kennedy realized their true goal was to minimize the effectiveness of the environmental movement. As a result, he became increasingly conflicted about the role he played in undermining activists who seemed to have a genuine social function.
London’s massive March 2003 demonstration against the Iraq War was one of the first protests he infiltrated. Over time Kennedy, who was living under the cover name of Mark Stone, was admitted to the inner circle of the environmental movement. By 2005, he was assuming major responsibility for managing logistics for the 2005 G8 protest at Glen Eagles and the attempted shutdown (in 2006) of the Drax Power Station.
He also began a four year relationship with a female activist, in clear violation of NPOIU policy. According to police officials interviewed in the film, his cover officer had to know about the affair and should have terminated the assignment. It appears Kennedy’s superiors allowed the affair to continue for four years owing to the high quality of the information he was providing.
In 2005, he was suspended after riot cops beat him up during a protest, leading to an investigation on a possible charge of assaulting a police officer. After three months, he was suddenly recalled to duty to infiltrate the Spanish antifascist movement. Spain had contacted NPOIU requesting their assistance.
The NPOIU was forced to remove Kennedy from his undercover role in 2009, when information he provided led to police preventively arresting 30 protestors planning a civil disobedience at Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. It became patently obvious Kennedy had narked on them when he was the only participant to have his charges dropped.
The NPOIU extracted him by floating the cover story he was moving to the US. After two weeks, he returned to Britain to be reassigned and was told the Metropolitan Police no longer had any use for his particular skills. He resigned, effectively ending a twenty year career.
When he tried to resume his relationship with his activist girlfriend, she happened to find a passport issued under his real name and outed him to the rest of the group – who outed him to the media.
The film concludes by raising important ethical questions about Kennedy’s undercover activity. Such as why the British police feel justified in preventing environmental protestors from executing their democratic rights. And how they justify spending millions of dollars spying on activists when Kennedy’s seven year mission failed to result in a single conviction.
July 26, 2015
REBEL YELL: Syriza “Rebels” Planned To Ransack Greek Mint, Seize Cash Reserves, Arrest Central Bank Governor
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Interesting that EU officials are still predicting Greece will exit the euro – most likely through insurrection.
Originally posted on RIELPOLITIK:
Source – zerohedge.com
– Earlier this week, in an FT op-ed, Eurointelligence’s Wolfgang Münchau said that in his estimation, an EMU exit remains the most likely outcome for Greece. The reason, Münchau explained, is that “[Greek PM Alexis] Tsipras ended up with another very lousy bailout deal. And this one suffers from the same fundamental flaws as its predecessors.” Münchau went on to describe, in vivid detail, how he believes a Grexit would unfold:
My own most likely Grexit scenario is a different one yet again. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, hinted at this in his interview with the Financial Times last week when he said that he felt “something revolutionary” in the air. He is on to something. The most probable scenario for me is Grexit through insurrection.
Whether he knew it when he penned those words or not, Münchau’s vision for Greece nearly unfolded…
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July 25, 2015
The War Crimes of Bill Clinton
The Weight of Chains
Boris Malagurski (2010)
Film Review
The deliberate demonization of the Serbian people by the Clinton administration has been a special interest ever since I cared for Serbian PTSD victims in the mid-nineties. At the time there were rumors the US was after oil in the Caspian basin. Until I saw this documentary, I was unaware of the bloodthirsty ruthlessness of US policy in Yugoslavia. Nor that Clinton, like his successors George W Bush and Barack Obama, was guilty of war crimes. The film also sheds important light on current US policy in Ukraine.
The Weight of Chains is about the deliberate break-up of Yugoslavia in the 80s and 90s to enable its transformation into a US colony, like Iraq and Afghanistan. The cover story blaming Serbian barbarism for the conflagration in Bosnia and Kosovo was pure fabrication by the Clinton administration and US media.
Under Marshall Tito (1943-1980), Yugoslavia enjoyed an ethnically diverse society in which Muslim Turks, Croatians, Serbians, Hungarians, Albanians and other ethnic minorities lived side by side and intermarried. It was a very prosperous nation, thanks to a mixed economy that combined central economic planning with private enterprise, worker cooperatives and a generous welfare state. Tito, who stubbornly resisted Russian pressure to join the Soviet bloc, was one of the founders of the non-aligned movement.*
Enter the NED
Shortly after Tito’s death in 1980, President Reagan signed a secret memorandum declaring his intention to transform Yugoslavia into a “market economy” (translation: US colony for Wall Street investors). The first salvo in this campaign was to send in the CIA-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to finance pro-US opposition groups, journalists, trade unionists and the G17. The latter was a group of World Bank economists who seized control of the Yugoslavian economy by inducing corrupt officials to enter into unpayable loans. By the late 1980s, the G17 had imposed deep cuts on all social services and forced 1,100 industries into bankruptcy. Those that weren’t totally wiped out were sold to foreign investors at rock bottom prices.
Thanks to these austerity cuts, by 1990 Yugoslavia’s unemployment rate had soared to 20%. When the government appealed to the US for debt relief, Bush senior cut off all aid to Yugoslavia. Under US pressure, the IMF only agreed to fund right wing ultranationalist groups in six autonomous regions (Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Bosnia) – provided they declared independence from Yugoslavia. The Bush senior administration also illegally supplied arms to Croatian fascists who would seize control of Croatia and the Muslim Bosniaks who controlled Bosnia.
Accordingly Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in 1992 and Bosnia in 1992.
US-Inspired Ethnic Cleansing
Despite constant denunciation of the Serbian people (as fascist thugs) by the Clinton administration and Senator Joe Biden, the real culprits were fascist American thugs. In 1995, the Clinton administration financed and armed the Croatian government to carry out the largest act of ethnic cleansing in history in the Serbian enclave of Krajinia. Thanks to the American-inspired Operation Storm, 2,000 Serbs were killed and 250,000 were driven from their homes over a period of 84 hours. One of my patients, whose sister was massacred during Operation Storm, only survived because his Muslim neighbors hid him and his children from the Croatian army.
The Weight of Chains also deconstructs the alleged Serb atrocities committed at Srebrenica (where equal numbers of Serbs and Muslims died), which the US would use to justify NATO intervention.
Enter Osama bin Laden
Following Serbian independence, Clinton armed and trained the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army,** with the assistance of Osama bin Laden and heroin-trafficking Mujahideen from Afghanistan. The President’s chief motivation was to further destabilize Serbia to open it up to US investment.
When Slobodan Milosevic refused to sign a peace agreement accepting US occupation of Serbia, Clinton committed further violations of international law by using NATO aircraft to bomb Serbian civilians and deliberately target civilian infrastructure that included power grids, schools, hospitals and water filtration plants.
Enter George Soros
Following Milosevic’s surrender in June 1999, the World Bank immediately sent in an army of World Bank lawyers to privatize Serbia’s most valuable state-owned assets. Soros and his cronies were particularly keen on getting the Trercha mining interest into western hands, with its rich coal, copper, zinc, cadmium, gold and silver resources.
The film concludes by examining the dire economic consequences (ie massive debt, industry closure and joblessness) for Eastern European countries whose business elites opt to join the EU and NATO. For example, the EU forced the Czech Republic to close their sugar industry because it was more profitable to import Cuban sugar. While the French destroyed the Hungarian vineyards by dumping cheap wine into their market, forcing Hungarian wine growers to sell their vineyards to English investors at bargain basement prices. After Slovenia joined the EU in 2004, they experienced massive layoffs after most of their factories were privatized and moved overseas. In 2009, Croatia (like Greece) was forced to start selling their islands to pay off their debt.
*The Non-Aligned Movement is a group of states which aren’t formally aligned with or against any specific power bloc.
**Kosovo is a disputed territory within Serbia in which ethnic Albanians make up 80-90% of the population.
July 24, 2015
George Clooney Paid by Lockheed Martin to Oppose War Profiteering by Africans Disloyal to the U.S. Agenda
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Clooney’s new organization, “The Sentry,” is part of The Enough Project, which is part of the Center for American Progress, which is a leading backer of “humanitarian” wars, and various other wars for that matter — and which is funded by the world’s top war profiteer, Lockheed Martin, and by number-two Boeing, among other war profiteers.
Originally posted on Counter Information:
By David Swanson
Global Research, July 23, 2015
World Beyond War
George Clooney is being paid by the world’s top two war profiteers, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, to oppose war profiteering by Africans disloyal to the U.S. government’s agenda.
Way back yonder before World War II, war profiteering was widely frowned on in the United States. Those of us trying to bring back that attitude, and working for barely-funded peace organizations, ought to be thrilled when a wealthy celebrity like George Clooney decides to take on war profiteering, and the corporate media laps it up.
“Real leverage for peace and human rights will come when the people who benefit from war will pay a price for the damage they cause,” said Clooney — without encountering anything like the blowback Donald Trump received when he criticized John McCain.
Really, is that all it takes to give peace a chance, a celebrity? Will…
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July 23, 2015
Are Women Better at Getting Out of Poverty?
Solar Mamas: Why Poverty? (2012)
Directed by Mona Eldaief and Nehane Nonjaim
Film Review
Solar Mamas is about the Barefoot College in Rajastan India and the struggles of a Jordanian woman to overcome the sexist attitudes of her husband and other men in her Bedouin village.
The Barefoot College is a non-governmental organization which has training rural women from the developing world to become solar engineers since 1997. The program serves the dual purpose of electrifying poor rural villages and helping these villages out of poverty. After completing a six month training program, the women return to their home countries to train other women in solar installation.
The documentary concerns the first two women selected by the Jordanian Minister of the Environment to attend the Barefoot College. The women come from a village of 300 where all the adults are “unemployed” and the women do all the work (collecting firewood, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning and looking after children). Women with young children receive welfare benefits, which is why the Jordanian government is keen to subsidize their attendance at the Barefoot College.
As the Jordanian women speak no English, their training is based on hands-on assembly experience, aided by a book of color-coded circuit diagrams. Both women are illiterate, as it’s considered shame for Bedouin girls to remain in school past age ten.
Are Women Better at Getting Out of Poverty?
The film focuses on the younger of the two women, who’s forced to discontinue her training after her husband threatens to divorce her and take her children away. Rafea’s mother is caring for her four children during her absence. The husband threatens to take them to another village to be raised by his first wife (he has two).
Rafea returns, tearfully. A month later, despite her mother’s opposition and continuing threats from her husband, she overcomes her fear of her husband and returns to India to complete her solar training.
Towards the end of the film, the Minister of the Environment explains why the Jordanian government only selects women for solar training: they can’t count on men (who often have other wives) to remain in their home village.
If Rafea’s village is anything to go by, I suspect the real reason is that the women develop a stronger worth ethic in looking after their children. The men, in contrast, are bone idle and lay around on mattresses all day.
Below is a presentation by Bunker Roy, founder of the Barefoot College, about its history:
July 22, 2015
Mutual Aid at the Bolt Occupied Hostel in Dublin
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Very inspiring experiment in direct democracy in Dublin.
Originally posted on The Free:
“Mutual aid is arguably as ancient as human culture; an intrinsic part of the small, communal societies universal to humanity’s ancient past. From the dawn of humanity, until far beyond the Invention of agriculture, humans were foragers, exchanging labor and resources for the benefit of groups and individuals alike.” – Wikipedia
Since the establishment of the Bolt Hostel just over a week ago, there have been many people that have arrived at the door to donate furniture, cloths, bed linin, volunteering their time, labour and skills. There has been a communal kitchen area/ TV area created, all by the donations of fridges, microwave, washing machine, cooker, table and chairs, sofa, TV and DVD player by people.
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July 21, 2015
US Sex Trafficking of Underage Girls
Selling the Girl Next Door
CNN (2015)
Film Review
Selling the Girl Next Door is about sex trafficking of American underage girls, a business which has moved off the street and onto the Internet. The sex services of girls as young as eleven are being advertised in the Adult Services section of Backpage.com. They were being sold on Craig’s List until CNN journalist Amber Lyon confronted owner Craig Newmark as part of her investigation.
Obviously no online marketplace is going to accept an ad for prostitution. The girls are listed as “escorts,” with revealing photos and coded language (eg “young,” “fresh,” “innocent”) to indicate they’re underage.
When you look at the millions of dollars the federal government spent on shutting down Silk Road for selling recreational drugs (see Was Silk Road Founder Framed?), it’s ironic – and frankly sickening – that they continue to allow sites like Backpage.com to traffic in underage girls.
Lyon interviews Las Vegas girls convicted for underage prostitution in Clark County juvenile detention center, as well as men who have used their services and judges, lawyers and probation officers who work with them. She also profiles one particular thirteen-year-old, interviewing her mom and going to court with her.
Blaming the Victim
The pimps who run underage girls are always on the lookout for runaways. They use the promise of affection to lure them in and violence to keep them as virtual sex slaves. In most US cities, underage girls arrested for prostitution are locked up in juvenile prisons. City and county authorities claim they have no other way to keep them off the street.
One Las Vegas judge is fronting an initiative to build a safe house for underage victims of sex trafficking as an alternative to prison. He’s being blocked by county authorities – they refuse to cough up $700,000 for probation officers to run it. Federal funding appropriated to combat sex trafficking, only goes to help foreign victims.
In the course of the CNN investigation, the threat of unwanted publicity led Newmark to shut down the Adult Services section of Craig’s List. Backpage.com, the second most popular online marketplace, immediately saw their income spike by billions of dollars. They’re owned by Village Voice Media, who refused to be interviewed by CNN.
July 20, 2015
Low-skilled fracking jobs, divestment, climate debt and neoliberalism
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Great post by Climate Justice Taranaki, a local grassroots group fighting the takeover of our community by the oil and gas industry. In addition to the environmental destruction wreaked by the fracking industry, by luring young people into temporary low wage jobs, it’s destroying our local economy.
Originally posted on Climate Justice Taranaki:
As the oil and gas fracking industry spreads across a nation, increasingly high school teens are being lured to drop out and take up low-skilled jobs, as demonstrated in a recent research in the US. The authors of the study warned, “fracking raises the risk that some workers at the bottom of the skills and education ladder may end up being stuck there, because they made bad schooling choices in a rush to be part of the industry“.
Could this be happening in Taranaki – the heartland of the fossil fuel industry in New Zealand? Do we want to sacrifice our youth’s future to such short-term gains and in full knowledge of the social and environmental damages of this industry, volatile oil prices and widespread divestment movements?
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July 19, 2015
Was Silk Road Founder Framed?
The Deep Web
Directed by Alex Winter (2015)
Film Review
The Deep Web is about the January 2015 trial of the alleged founder of the Silk Road website Ross Ulbricht. In addition to exploring Ulbricht’s background and the history of the Silk Road, the documentary also lays out some pretty revealing evidence US District Judge Katherine Forrest disallowed at trial. Ulbricht was sentenced to life imprisonment for drug sales, money laundering, hacking and engagement in a continuing criminal enterprise (kingpin charge). The filmmaker clearly believes Ulbricht was denied a fair trial.
The film begins by explaining what the Dark Web is, ie the unindexed records on the Internet. The Dark Web, which is thousands of times larger than the visible Internet, includes millions of bank records, as well as private and government administrative records. It also includes illicit sites like Silk Road.
Silk Road was created in 2011 by combining two cryptographic technologies: TOR (an open source technology originally developed by the US military), a browser that allows a user to access the Internet anonymously, and bitcoins, a cryptographically generated currency which, unlike bank-generated currency, is virtually untraceable.
Silk Road Founded as Political Statement
Silk Road didn’t actually buy or sell drugs. It simply provided a secure eBay-type marketplace where buyers and sellers could link up anonymously. Over time Silk Road developed an extremely tight knit user community that participated in the site’s political forums. One of the lead administrators, who took the screen name Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR)*, always maintained that Silk Road was less about selling drugs than making a political statement. DPR presented himself as a free market libertarian and talked a lot about resisting state efforts to control every aspect of our lives. All the Silk Road administrators were unified in their desire to end the war on drugs** and the extreme violence associated with it.
This fundamental nonviolent stance was reflected in their refusal to accept sellers offering products or services that caused people harm, such as prostitution or child pornography.
The Cryptoanarchist Movement
The Deep Web also provides interesting background on the radical cryptoanarchist movement that would eventually lead to the emergence of Wikileaks, Anonymous and Silk Road. A primary goal of this movement has been to create a world where the government can’t spy on everything we do. Members feel they have an implicit duty to develop encryption tools that non-tech savvy Internet users can employ to protect their privacy and anonymity.
Before the FBI shut it down in 2013, Silk Road had over one million registered users. According to cops, judges and FBI and DEA agents filmmakers interviewed, the site accomplished its goal in reducing violence associated with the drug trade.
Judge Disallows Evidence of FBI Crimes
The defense Ulbricht attempted to present was that he founded Silk Road but wasn’t Dread Pirate Roberts, as the prosecution claimed – that the individual using this screen name had taken over the website and framed him.
In March 2015, two federal agents were indicted (after a nine month investigation) for infiltrating Silk Road and stealing and extorting millions in bitcoins from Silk Road clients. These agents had high-level access to administrative functions of Silk Road, thanks to an administrator they arrested who turned informant. These federal agents had the power to change access to administrator platforms and passwords and to change PIN numbers and commandeer accounts, including that of DPR. They also had the means to manipulate logs, chats, private messages, keys, posts, account information and bank accounts. And they had the motive to alter data in order to cover up their own actions and point guilt elsewhere.
Judge Forrest barred Ulbricht’s attorney from presenting any of this evidence at trial.
She also disallowed evidence the FBI had illegally hacked into Silk Road’s servers in Iceland without a warrant – a violation of Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure. If her ruling is allowed to stand on appeal, it sets a dangerous precedent for allowing evidence resulting from illegal government hacking to be used at trial.
*Dread Pirate Roberts was a fictional character in the novel and movie The Princess Bride. In both, when the original Dread Pirate Roberts dies, his successor takes up the alias.
**The libertarian think tank Cato Institute has taken the position that the US should legalize all addictive drugs as Portugal has done. See The Cato Institute and the Drug War
For an update on Ulbricht’s appeal and to donate to his legal defense fund (like I did) go to
http://freeross.org/
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