Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1347

Blackwater: the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

 

Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

by Jeremy Scahill

2008 (with 2013 epilogue)

Book Review

Blackwater is an in-depth examination of the systematic privatization of the US military. The process of outsourcing military training, security and intelligence and eventually combat roles to private companies, began in 1988 when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense in the Bush senior administration. Thanks to the Rumsfeld Doctrine, the outsourcing of training, security, intelligence duties – and eventually combat roles – would peak during the occupation of Iraq between 2002 and 2008.

Scahill’s book places special emphasis on the US failure to hold mercenary soldiers accountable for human rights violations. It also highlights the total absence of financial oversight, allowing Blackwater, Halliburton and other private military contractors to bilk taxpayers out of hundreds of billions of dollars. Finally it raises the troubling specter of corporations or even wealthy individuals hiring a standing mercenary army, such as Blackwater, to declare war against sovereign states.

Cheney Downsizes the US Military

Scahill begins by discussing the major downsizing of the US military that began in 1988, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and break-up of the former Soviet Union. In his first year as Secretary of Defense, Cheney reduced military spending by $10 billion, by canceling expensive weapons systems and decreasing US troop strength from 2.2 to 1.6 million. As the cuts continued, there was a growing tendency to outsource various non-combat functions to private contractors. Clinton continued the trend, when he hired Military Professionals Resources Inc (staffed by retired military officers) to “train” the Croatian military* in their secessionist war against Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine

Following George W Bush’s election in 2000, Rumsfeld pursued even more aggressive privatization of the Pentagon bureaucracy. The primary neoconservative rationale for shifting both combat and non-combat duties to private mercenaries is to allow the President to engage in military interventions overseas that are potentially unpopular with Congress or the American people. Other advantages include the ability of private mercenaries to engage in unlawful activities (such as extraordinary rendition**) that would make regular forces subject to court martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice – and a massive gravy train of unmonitored no-bid contracts for wealthy Republican donors. In June 2004, after only fifteen months of US occupation, $9 billion of Iraqi reconstruction funds were unaccounted for.

The Blackwater Lodge and Training Center

Blackwater itself was first formed in 1996, to fill a big hole in training capacity, particularly in the Navy, resulting from Cheney’s extensive DOD cuts. Former Navy SEALS Erik Prince and Al Clark initially established the Blackwater Lodge and Training Center in North Carolina to offer private tactical training to Special Forces and local law enforcement personnel. A long time SEAL trainer, Clark supplied the concept. Prince, who came from a wealthy conservative Christian family, bankrolled it.

In 2002, Blackwater branched out into providing personnel as well as training. Their first contract would be to provide twenty security guards for Kabul’s CIA station in Afghanistan. In 2003, the State Department would award their largest documented (non-classified) contract providing security for US officials in Iraq. This included a $27.7 million no-bid contract to protect Paul Bremer. Bremer, who Bush appointed to run Iraq during the US occupation. Bremer, viewed by many Iraqis as worse than Sadam Hussein, quickly became the most hated man in Iraq.

Iraqi Resistance to Occupation

The book provides an interesting historical perspective on the rise of the Iraqi resistance movement in reaction to the virtual takeover of Iraq by US corporate interests. Contrary to the US media portrayal of the Iraqi opposition as al Qaeda terrorists, it was a genuine home grown movement that formed in direct reaction to Bremer’s refusal to allow free elections and his de-Baathification program. The latter instantly plunged the vast majority of Iraqis into abject misery. In addition to decommissioning 350,000 former Iraqi troops, it also threw hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, teachers, government workers out of work (who were required to join the Baath party as a condition of employment). The loss of these front line personnel would result in the total collapse of Iraqi society.

As Scahill carefully documents, the original Iraqi resistance was peaceful and nonviolent until the US military and Blackwater contractors deliberately fired on peaceful civilian protestors.

Blackwater and other mercenaries are typically paid $600-800 a day for mercenaries. This contrasts with an average of $270 a day for active duty GIs.

The Ambush in Fallujah

Blackwater devotes five chapters to the horrific ambush in Fallujah on March 30, 2004, in which a local mob killed, burned and dismembered four Blackwater contractors before hanging them from a bridge. It was this event that would bring Blackwater to world attention, while setting off a chain of events that would compel (due to an overstretched enlisted force) the Pentagon to hire Blackwater and other private security contractors* as mercenary soldiers in Iraq. At a pay rate of $600-800 a day (in contrast to an average of $270 for active duty GIs), private security companies had no difficulty recruiting mercenaries. In fact, the worse the violence got, the more profits rolled in for Blackwater.

By June 2004, there were 20,000 private mercenaries in Iraq. By the time Rumsfeld resigned in 2006, there was a one to one ratio between troops and mercenary soldiers maintaining the US occupation in Iraq (100,000 mercenaries vs 100,000 troops.

In 2004-2005, the Blackwater role expanded to guarding the US oil industries pipeline in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, to “protecting” FEMA reconstruction contracts in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and to providing immigration security at the Mexican border. By 2007, Blackwater had 2300 private soldiers fighting in nine countries, as well as a database of 22,000 former troops, special forces operatives and retired law enforcement officers who could be deployed at short notice.

Immunity from Prosecution

As of 2013, when Scahill published the revised edition, no Blackwater contractors had ever been prosecuted for unlawful activities. Under an edict Bremer enacted in 2004, US mercenaries were immune from prosecution under Iraqi law. Prosecuting them in American courts is extremely difficult owing to the difficulty of transporting foreign witnesses to the US. However in October 2014, a Washington DC federal district court found four of them guilty of murder and manslaughter for the 2007 shooting of seventeen civilians in Baghdad.

Erick Prince sold Blackwater in 2010 and it has since merged with its main rival Triple Canopy to form Academi. Although Blackwater was banned from Iraq in 2009,  Academi still provides security for State Department personnel across many countries.They also continue to receive contracts from the Defense Department and US intelligence agencies.

Links to free epub and kindle versions of Blackwater are available at Blackwater the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

*In the mid-1990s, the Croatian military was dominated by right-wing Nazi sympathizers similar to those in the present Ukrainian government.

** Extraordinary or irregular rendition is the US sponsored abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person to countries known to practice torture. It’s also known as torture by proxy.

***Other companies that entered the lucrative mercenary market in 2004 include Control Risks Group, DynCorp, Erinys, Algis, Armor Group, Hart, Kroll and Steele Foundation. British security contractors were also extremely pro-active in Iraq. By October 2006, there were 21,000 British mercenaries in Iraq, in contrast with 7.200 conventional duty troops.

UN confirms Israeli links with Syrian terrorists

stuartbramhall:

 

 

This overt Israeli support for Islamic terrorists is yet more evidence that ISIS is merely a ruse (by the US and Israel) to justify US military intervention to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria.

Originally posted on Tony Seed's Weblog:

Reports by UN observers in the Golan submitted to 15 members of Security Council detail regular contact between IDF officers and armed Syrian terrorists at the border.

Israeli soldiers stand near the border with Syria in the occupied Golan Heights as they prepare to evacuate a wounded Syrian terrorist let in for medical treatment, September 23, 2014 | Photo by Reuters

By Barak Ravid, Haaretz

(Dec. 7) – Reports by UN observers in the Golan Heights over the past 18 months reveal the type and extent of cooperation between Israel and Syrian opposition figures.

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Rethinking Cancer Treatment

 

Restoring Immunity Rather than Destroying It

As western medicine comes under ever greater domination by insurance and pharmaceutical companies, a growing health freedom movement advocates for patients’ right to choose non-corporate health care options. Nowhere is the importance of choice more urgent than in cancer treatment. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy, the primary treatments recommended by the health industry, rarely “cure” or eliminate cancer. These treatments are associated with low survival rates, especially in aggressive and advanced cancer;  a high recurrence rate; and brutal, often fatal, side effects. There’s also something innately illogical about a treatment approach that destroys immune function in order to eradicate cancer.

Anyone watching a family member or close friend go through the cruel agony of chemotherapy can’t help but question this treatment approach. An oncologist recently gave a friend of mine with severe metastatic bowel a 33% chance of extended her life for a two to three months with chemotherapy. The continuous vomiting, soul destroying lethargy and pneumonia (her immune system shut down) made these last few months a living hell. It baffled me the oncologist would even recommend this approach. Especially given the growing research into cancer treatments that enhance immunity rather than destroying it.

The first video is an interview with Ty Ballinger, author of Cancer: Step Outside the Box. In it, Ballinger focuses mainly on the origin of the current cancer epidemic and cancer prevention. In 1900, one person out of fifty people developed cancer. In 2014, one out of two residents of the industrialized world suffers from it.

Epidemiological research reveals this massive increase clearly stems from environmental causes. According to Ballinger, the main environmental causes of cancer include ionizing (nuclear) and electromagnetic (from cellphone and wifi technology) radiation, heavy metals, industrial toxins, fluoride, chlorine, genetically modified (GMO) foods and the endocrine disruptors found in herbicides, pesticides, cosmetics and cleaning products.

Avoiding processed foods and eating organic fruits, vegetables and meat is an important first step in avoiding GMOs, herbicides, pesticides and other industrial toxins.

Though he only briefly discusses treatment, Ballinger is clearly part of the growing movement that views cancer as symptomatic of impaired immunity, rather than a foreign body to be cut out and burned away with radiation and toxic poisons.

Although he has detailed knowledge of multiple natural and alternative cancer treatments, he only has time to discuss one:  high cannabidiol (CBD) cannabis oil, presently legal in all fifty states.  Current scientific research shows CBD to be highly effective in treating twelve types of cancer.

Ballinger writes in depth about other holistic cancer treatments at his website: http://www.cancertruth.net/

Dying to Have Known

The second video Dying to Have Known (2006) concerns Gerson therapy, the most extensively researched immunity-focused cancer treatment. Most of the research is Japanese (500 case studies) although Gerson published more than thirty studies (mainly in German) during his lifetime. There are also Gerson clinics in Mexico, Netherlands and Spain.

Gerson therapy consists of a diet based mainly on raw organic fruits and vegetables and juices, accompanied by coffee enemas. Max Gerson originally came up with the treatment as a cure for tuberculosis. He also found it to be effective for a wide range of “degenerative” illnesses, include migraines and multiple sclerosis. Detailed dietary instructions can be found at Get Started

The film features numerous interviews with patients with documented cures, via the Gerson method, of so-called “untreatable” cancers. Filmmaker Steve Kroschel also interviews some of Gerson’s staunchest critics. The latter repeatedly emphasize the need for cancer treatment to be “evidence based” – yet refuse to examine any of the European or Japanese research into Gerson therapy.

What comes across most clearly is the greater freedom European and Japanese doctors enjoy in prescribing non-pharmaceutical treatments for cancer and other degenerative conditions. Filmmaker Steve Kroschel drives this point home when he reveals that numerous traditionally trained US doctors refused to speak on camera, owing to fears of being blackballed (or worse) by the American medical establishment.

photo credit: faith goble via photopin cc

Also posted at Veterans Today

Debt

Debt: the First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

Book Review

The primary purpose of Debt: the First 5,000 Years is to correct the historical record concerning the origin of barter, coinage and credit. Incredibly well researched, Anthropologist David Graeber’s book is a fascinating read. I found it extremely helpful in gaining some understanding of modern problems with debt and perpetual war. I was particularly intrigued to learn about the 2,600 year old link between war, debt and money creation, as well as the role of violent insurrection in shaping history. Ruling elites are terrified of insurrection. Throughout history, this fear has driven most major reforms.

Debunking Adam Smith

The conventional wisdom, which originates from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, is that money (i.e. coins) originated out of barter relationships, and that paper money and credit replaced coins when trade became too large and complex to be conducted with coins. As Graeber ably demonstrates, Smith had it backwards. Not only was barter virtually non-existent in prehistoric societies, but coinage itself was an extremely late development. Virtual credit preceded coinage (and barter) by thousands of years in all early civilizations. What’s more, these complex credit-debt arrangements played a vital role in the development of traditional institutions, such as slavery, patriarchy, urbanization and organized religion.

The Myth of Barter

People didn’t barter in early hunter gatherer and agrarian societies because they didn’t need to. Well into the Middle Ages, basic needs were met by family and community mutual obligation networks. There was an expectation extended family, neighbors would provide what you couldn’t provide for yourself.

There was a vital need for credit, however, with the development of farms large enough to feed the entire community. According to archeological evidence, credit first developed around 5,000 years ago when farmers borrowed seed and farm implements from wealthy merchants and repaid the debt with a share of the harvest. When the harvest failed, they repaid it in sheep, goats and furniture. When that was gone, they sold their children and eventually themselves into slavery.

This scheme was difficult to enforce, as many indebted farmers either walked away from their land or launched violent insurgencies. In was for this reason that both Sumeria and early Chinese civilizations launched formal debt forgiveness schemes, in which people regained their lands and debt slaves were free to return to their lands.*

The first money (in the form of precious metals, shells or other tokens) was used to pay the bride price the groom paid the bride’s family, the blood debt incurred when someone was murdered and to buy someone out of slavery.

The Origin of Patriarchy

In the earliest Sumerian texts (3000-2500 BC), women appear as doctors, merchants, scribes and public officials and are free to participate in all aspects of public life. This changes over the next 1000 years, with women becoming closeted to protect the honor of their fathers and husbands. According to Graeber, this pressing need to protect a woman’s reputation arose from a reaction by agrarian peoples (such as the early Israelites) to urbanization and the prostitution that resulted from it. The rise of cities in Sumeria and Babylon was accompanied by the rise of numerous informal occupations – including prostitution – practiced by men and women who had fled slavery. Patriarchy arose simultaneously in ancient China for similar reasons.

War, Debt and Money

Coinage (gold, silver and bronze coins) arose simultaneously between 600 BC and 800 AD (aka the Axial Period) in Greece, Rome, the great plains of northern China and the Ganges Valley for precisely the same reason: it was impossible to finance war with local systems of credit.

In all three civilizations, the first coins were used to pay professional soldiers (aka mercenaries). This would lead to the first market economies, as soldiers spent their coins in local communities, as well as concepts of profit and debt interest. In fact, a vicious cycle was established whereby rulers tried to solve their debt problems through expansionist wars to acquire more land, resources and slaves. In every case, this strategy backfired and the wars only increased their indebtedness.

The appearance of coins and market economies also led to a backlash against materialism and preoccupation with money. All the world’s major philosophic tendencies (Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, prophetic Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Jainism, Taoism, Christianity and Islam) arose during the Axial Period

This period also saw the rise of the first peace movements when early philosophers (eg Socrates and Plato) made common cause with rebels who opposed the violence of war and existing power relationships. According to Graeber these movements were remarkably successful in reducing the brutality and frequency of war. By 600 AD, slavery itself was virtually non-existent.

The Rise and Fall of Credit Economies

Following the fall of Rome, populations fled the cities and lived in smaller communities that reverted to credit economies. Gold and silver were used for temples and cathedrals, and only rich people had access to coins. All the major religions prohibited usury.

Money lending and banking arose to fund the Crusades, with the Knights Templar replacing Jewish moneylenders. After their persecution, torture and extermination by Phillip IV (due to the enormous debt he owed them), the latter were replaced by Venetian and Genoan bankers. The Italian bankers used municipal and government debt bonds as the chief instrument of exchange.

Around 1450, gold and silver bullion and coin (much of it from the New World) were re-introduced to finance vast empires and predatory warfare. This development was accompanied by the return of usury and debt slavery.

The Birth of Capitalism

Graeber defines capitalism as a gigantic credit/debt apparatus pumping maximum labor out of human beings to produce an ever expanding quantity of material goods. He dates its origin to around 1700 (six years after the Bank of England issued the first paper banknotes). Police, prisons and state sanctioned slavery were essential tools in achieving the phenomenal productivity needed to finance political systems based on continual war.

*”Every seventh year you shall make a cancellation. The cancellation shall be as follows: every creditor is to release the debt he has owing to him by his neighbor” (Deuteronomy 15:1-3). Every 49 years came the Jubilee, when all family land was to be returned to its original owners, and even family members who had been sold as slaves set free (Leviticus 25:9).

Dirt: the Movie

Dirt: The Movie

Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow (2009)

Film Review

This documentary focuses on the rapid destruction of the planet’s topsoil, with its dire implications for food production and human survival. Through a combination of industrial farming, deforestation, urbanization and extractive mining, humankind has destroyed one-third of the world’s topsoil in a hundred years.

The film begins with a basic introduction to on the abundant microbial life that characterizes healthy topsoil. Plowing, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and heavy pesticide and herbicide use render soil infertile by destroying these microorganisms. Deforestation hastens the process by destroying deep root systems that protect against nutrient runoff. The productive farmland that isn’t wrecked by industrial farming and deforestation is paved over as cities expand or destroyed by fracking, mountaintop removal and strip mining. This voracious greed for new fossil fuels benefits a few hundred people and carries immense costs for the rest of us.

The film depicts quite eloquently the western slash and burn mentality that approaches food production like running a factory. Extracting a quick profit is all that matters. There is no planning whatsoever for food security, much less the needs of future generations. You clear cut a forest, plant acres of a single crop (an open invitation to pests) and pour on industrial fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. In three to four years you have depleted the soil, and you cut down another forest.

Dirt: the Movie also poignantly portrays the link between environmental destruction and human degradation. It’s always the poorest and most disempowered who have their land destroyed by multinational corporations. Rapid desertification in Africa and India is forcing thousands of subsistence farmers to migrate to city slums – and Haitian mothers to make dirt cookies to ward of their children’s hunger pains.

Meanwhile increasing desertification (from a combination of deforestation and industrial farming) in Africa and India and the thousands of farmers forced to migrate to city slums when their land becomes useless. The film also emphasizes the link between environmental destruction and human degradation. It’s always the poorest and most disempowered who have their land destroyed by multinational corporations. The most heart breaking scene depicts Haitian mothers making dirt cookies to ward off their children’s hunger pains.

Water mismanagement also plays a major role in desertification. Because they have paved over their rivers, Los Angeles spends billions of dollars from as far away as Wyoming – and millions more managing rainwater runoff. Liberating their rivers would solve both problems at a fraction of the cost.

Significantly the main voices featured in the film are those of women of color: the late Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Mathai, who won a Nobel Prize for founding the Green Belt tree-planting movement, Indian environmentalist and organic farming advocate Vandana Shiva and Greening the South Bronx founder Majora Carter (see Greening the South Bronx). In addition to championing urban agriculture and green roof projects in the South Bronx, Carter has helped establish a prison greenhouse and organic farm at Rikers Island prison and the Green Team. The latter is a project that allows ex-cons to use the skills they have learned in tree planting, urban agriculture plots and New York’s first green roof* business.

*A green roof is a living roof partly or completely covered with vegetation, to optimize energy conservation and minimize water runoff.

The Water Emergency

Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water

by Maude Barlow

The New Press (2007)

Book Review

Although it receives less public attention, fresh water scarcity is far more urgent and deadly than climate change. With no choice but to drink contaminated water, millions of children under five are dying from infectious diarrhea. Growing water scarcity is also the major driver of illegal immigration. In Mexico alone, nearly 600 farmers a day abandon their land when their wells dry up.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 80% of global sickness and disease is caused by contaminated water. In the global south, where only the rich can afford clean water, the poor die of hepatitis, cholera, polio, botulism, salmonella, e coli, campylobacter, viral gastroenteritis and other infectious illnesses transmitted by human feces. In the global north we die at unprecedented rates of cancer and autoimmune disease from drinking water contaminated with endocrine disrupting herbicides and pesticides, industrial toxins, heavy metals, drugs and nanoparticles.

The Cause of Freshwater Scarcity

Barlow identifies seven major factors contributing to the rapid depletion of clean drinking water:

1. Total failure to regulate the massive increase in toxic runoff (animal waste, herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics) from factory farms and industrial sites.

2. Unregulated corporate mining of fossil water from aquifers that are too deep to be replenished by rainwater. Corporations siphon off millions of gallons a day at zero or minimal charge to mass irrigate deserts, manufacture cars and computers, mass produce bottled water* and extract oil from tar sands and oil and gas from shale (aka fracking).

3. Reduced rainfall due to destruction of water retaining landscapes from rapid and haphazard urbanization. Rain that falls on pavement runs off (and ends up in the sea), rather than being absorbed and evaporated.

4. Rapid glacial melting (due to climate change) of glaciers in the Himalayas, Alps and Andes. The Himalayan glaciers are the primary source of water for nearly half of humanity (India, Pakistan, China, Vietnam, Laos, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh and Cambodia).

5. Loss of water from the “virtual water” trade, thanks to International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank policies that force poor countries to sacrifice their scarce freshwater by growing and exporting water intensive crops (eg avocados, citrus, wheat, coffee, cut flowers and biofuel).

6. Ill-conceived technological fixes, such as mega-dams, water diversion and desalinization that reduce, rather than increase, access to clean water. Desalinization is the most destructive, owing to the massive of toxic waste (from chemicals used to clean reverse osmosis filters) discharged to the ocean.

7. Water privatization by powerful multinational corporations. Most of the world’s freshwater is controlled by the French Companies Suez and Veola and the British/German company RWE/Thames.

The Global Water Cartel

During the late 19th and early 20th century, Europe (with the exception of France, where municipal water service has been privately run since the late 1800s), North America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan adopted universal public water and sanitation services in all major metropolitan areas. This never happened in the global south, where cities only provided water service to the wealthy elite. This made it easy for neoliberal institutions like the IMF to force water privatization schemes on countries in the global south with debt problems.

Barlow slams the IMF and World Banking for forcing water privatization schmes on South America, Africa and Asia as a condition of development loans. She’s especially critical of former UN Secretary General Kofi Anan for supporting these policies, in return for major donations Suez and Veola made to UNESCO.

Over the last few decades, Suez, Veola, RWE/Thames and a few smaller corporate players have been targeting cash-strapped US cities with their water privatization schemes. Bankrupt cities like Detroit are being forced to sell their public water systems as a source of revenue.

Water Warriors

Barlow devotes the last third of her book to the “water warriors” around the world who are fighting for clean drinking water to be recognized as a basic human right. Among other reforms, there must be pressure on government to end the virtual water trade by promoting local sustainable farming, to ban private water companies from developing countries, to strictly enforce laws against surface and ground water contamination, to charge corporations full value for the water they take for bottling plants, fracking, manufacturing and flood irrigation and to promote urban planning that accommodates the need for rainwater to be captured and returned to the earth.

* The big three global bottling companies are Nestle, Pepsico and Coca Cola, though Starbucks’s water bottling company Ethos Water is sneaking up on them with their phony campaign to “help children get clean water.”

UN report documents torture, police violence in US

stuartbramhall:

 

 

If there were a rogue state award, the US would win it hands down.

Originally posted on Counter Information:

29 November 2014

The United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a lengthy report today assessing the performance of the 156 countries whose governments have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which took effect two decades ago.

The report subjected a major country to a wide-ranging critique, indicting it for a long list of human rights violations including:

Refusal to prosecute officials who engage in or sanction torture of prisoners
Detaining prisoners indefinitely without trial or other judicial proceeding, or any hope of release
Kidnapping individuals overseas and torturing them in secret prisons
Approving a manual for interrogation of prisoners that includes methods classified as torture under the Geneva Conventions
Imprisoning immigrants under degrading conditions and refusing to acknowledge their claims as refugees fleeing persecution
Imposing the death penalty on hundreds of prisoners, many of them from oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, many…

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Healing Cancer and Chronic Illness in the Amazon

The Sacred Science

Nicki Polizzi (2011)

Film Review

The Sacred Science follows eight patients with cancer and severe chronic illness who seek treatment with traditional medicine men in the Amazon basin. The purpose of the film is to raise awareness of indigenous healing practices and the importance of halting the rampant destruction of the Amazon rainforest and indigenous cultures that foster shamanic healing practices. Twenty-five percent of the ingredients used in western pharmaceuticals originate from Amazonian plants. Moreover a range of cancers and chronic illnesses resistant to western medicine respond to traditional healing methods. Polizzi, Plotkin and others are very alarmed about the rapid destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the indigenous cultures that foster shamanic healing.

John Perkins, best selling author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, writes about his own experience with Amazon healers in Shapeshifting: Shamanic Techniques for Global and Personal Transformation, The World Is As You Dream It: Teachings from the Amazon and Andes, and Spirit of the Shuar: Wisdom from the Last Unconquered People of the Amazon.

Filmmaker Nick Polizzi first became interested in the healing potential of Amazonian plants when a friend developed untreatable Parkinsonism in 2009. Polizzi reached out to ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin* and through Mark, met Roman Hunt. Hunt moved to the Amazon in the late nineties to work with traditional shaman after they healed his Crohn’s Disease. Together, the three men conceived of a project in which eight patients would spend a month in the Amazon rain forest undergoing treatment with traditional medicine men.

Polizzi and his team received 400 applications when they advertised for patients to participate in the project. The eight they selected suffered from Parkinson’s Disease, neuroendocrine cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, type II diabetes, Crohn’s Disease, irritable bowel syndrome and depression/alcoholism.

The treatment combined spiritual healing, diet and herbal remedies specific for each illness. All eight patients took Ayahuasca, a mild mind expanding psychedelic and participated in various spiritual ceremonies aimed at self-healing. All gained insight into ways in which their mental state impeded their healing. They also received regular monitoring by a western qualified doctor.

As the eight subjects talk about themselves, their lives and their illnesses, the stark contrast between their self-centered world view and the holistic beliefs of the shamans leaps out at you. Although Polizzi doesn’t dwell on this in the film, his blog explores the topic at length. He particularly laments the loss (in the global north) of unwavering respect for all living things, including human beings, that characterized early cultures. “We have forgotten how to look after one another.”

He’s also highly critical of the Newtonian model of western medicine that approaches human beings as if they were machines in need of repair.

Of the eight patients, one died of advanced metastatic neuroendocrine cancer, and five became symptom-free after 1-2 months. The patients with breast cancer and Crohn’s Disease experienced no improvement. Given that Roman Hunt required five months of treatment to recover from Crohn’s, I wonder if Jessica (who spent two months in the Amazon) might have benefited from a longer course of treatment.

More information and a free ebook available from http://www.thesacredscience.com/

*Ethnobotanist specializing in the healing properties of tropical plants and author of Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice, Medicine Quest and The Killers Within: the Deadly Rise of Drug-resistant Bacteria and The Shaman’s Apprentice (a children’s book) with Lynne Cherry.

 

 

Capitalism Works for Me – True or False?

Capitalism Works for Me is a public art exhibit Steve Lambert created in 2011. It’s been touring internationally for the last three years. The first video is a brief cameo of the Capitalism Works for Me exhibit in Times Square.

In the second video, Lambert discusses his inspiration for the project, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s observation that people find it easier to contemplate the end of human existence than the end of capitalism.

Lambert also talks about the erroneous tendency to equate capitalism and civilization and the false assumption that ending capitalism is comparable to ending civilization.

He hopes Capitalism Works for Me will help to challenge this assumption.

 

 

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Protests Break out Across Ninety Cities as Thousands March in Anger

stuartbramhall:

 

 

Americans wake up – finally.

Originally posted on SilentSoldier:

November 25, 2014

ChristianPatriots.org

Demonstrators angered by at the grand jury decision in the Darren Wilson case took to the streets in 90 cities from coast to coast Monday night, snarling traffic, chanting slogans condemning police and waving signs in support of slain black teen Michael Brown.

In New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Boston and Chicago, thousands of people led marches screaming, ‘Hands up! Don’t shoot!’ that has become a rallying cry in protests over police killings across the country.

The protests around the country were largely peaceful, but several demonstrations were marred by foul-mouthed verbal attacks on police and arrests.

Shut down: A mass of demonstrators crossed from Manhattan to Brooklyn in the traffic lane, closing it to cars

New York: Protesters fill Times Square during Monday night’s march after the announcement of the grand jury decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal…

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