Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1385

An NSA-Approved Guide to Revolution

Tahrir Square

Activists who advocate for violent revolution don’t advertise their views on the Internet for obvious reasons. That being said, Storm Clouds Gathering treads a really fine line with their recent. Revolution: An Instruction Manual. They don’t exactly advocate using violence to dismantle corporate fascism. But they don’t really condemn it, either. Instead they argue from perspective that revolutions are mainly won by psychological means and it makes most sense to attack the state where they are weakest.

It’s a really well-made film with some excellent tried and true techniques for bring about major political change. In view of the title, I’m a little surprised the NSA hasn’t taken their website down and put them in jail.

The filmmakers are totally non-ideological in their approach to dismantling capitalism. In fact, they begin with the assertion that any revolution with a an inflexible pre-ordained view of the desired outcome is doomed to failure. .

They then share a general overview of their own vision – a loose confederation of self-governing communities similar to the Iroquois Federation. This was the model for the Articles of Confederation, which was the founding document of the United States of America before the bankers and mercantalists used the Constitution to strip the 13 original states of their power.

Audience Participation Required

The film is interactive and requires audience participation. In fact, it stops at 1:47 minutes until the viewer answers “yes” or “no” whether they believe the system can be reformed. If they click “yes” the video ends. I clicked “no.”

The strategy the filmmakers lay out for dismantling the corporate state involves removing, one by one, what they identify as the three “pillars of power”:

Control of the “public mind,” as it concerns patriotism and nationalistic beliefs, such as freedom, democracy and terrorism.
Control of money and finance through money creation, taxation and inflation.
A state monopoly on violence to compel obedience through fear.

The Three Stages of Revolution

Stage 1 is the Ideological Revolution. Here the legitimacy of the current government is destroyed by exposing politicians and corporate leaders for the scoundrels they are. The filmmakers assert we are already winning the Ideological Revolution and have successfully seized control of the public dialogue. Former national security adviser and Obama’s Machiavellian mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski acknowledges this in a recent clip about the rise of a global activist community, via the Internet and social media, that he asserts cannot be suppressed (this was my favorite part of the film).

In Stage 2, I expected them to talk about strategies for withdrawing from the corporate economy, such as growing our own food, forming cooperatives, bartering, Freecycling and creating community currencies. Instead their Stage 2 involves is what they refer to as “strategic nonviolence.”

In Stage 3, the people end the state’s monopoly on violence. This would be the logical place to mention guns and bombs. Instead the filmmakers talk about reaching out to the police and military and encouraging them to break the chain of command. This, too, is already occurring. The two examples in the film are two anti-indefinite detention groups” PANDA (People Against the NDAA), and Oathkeepers, an anti-NDAA group organized and run by current and ex-military and police officers. The purpose of Oathkeepers is to remind other troops and cops that enforcing the NDAA violates their oath to uphold the Constitution. Other similar entities the film doesn’t mention include the GI coffeehouse movement and the online zine Veterans Today.

How They Got Past the NSA Censors

The film finishes quite abruptly by recommending people read three books on revolution, including Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy. This was an extremely wise choice, as this is the training manual the State Department and CIA-linked democracy manipulating foundations (such as the National Endowment for Democracy) widely distributed to the activists engaged in the “color” revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring.

I have written several articles about the CIA’s role in financing the nonviolent movement, as well as nonviolent guru Gene Sharp’s historic links with the Pentagon, State Department, and US intelligence. Thierry Meysson, editor of Voltaire Net, was the first to go public (in 2005) with Sharp’s longstanding links to the military-intelligence complex. (Meysson was also the first to expose US intelligence involvement in 911 with The Big Lie in 2002). The only weakness of Meysson’s original article about Sharp is his failure to cite his references. I researched the sources and confirmed each of his original assertions for a 2012 Daily Censored article entitled The CIA and Nonviolent Resistance.

Also see The Cointelpro Role of Left Gatekeeping Foundations, Smoking Gun: the US Government Role in the Arab Spring, and How Nonviolence Protects the State

photo credit: RamyRaoof via photopin cc

The Case That Michael Hastings Was Assassinated

Below is a brilliant Corbett Report video laying out existing evidence supporting recent speculation that Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings’ June 18 car accident was most likely foul play on behalf  of the US government.

Hastings thus joins the ranks of Danny Casolaro and Gary Webb, two other courageous journalists who gave their lives for daring to expose the intelligence community’s dirty laundry in the mainstream press.

Hastings is best known for his Rolling Stone expose that led to the firing of General McChrystal, the ISAF Commander in Afghanistan. However he also penned an equally explosive expose regarding General Petraeus, former CIA director, Afghanistan ISAF Commander and Commanding General of Iraq’s multinational force in Iraq. The article, written immediately after his resignation for an extramarital affair, was scathing in its criticism of Petraeus’s dishonest and morally bankrupt conduct of both wars – an approach resulting in thousands of unnecessary deaths on both sides. For example, Hastings holds Petraeus personally responsible for instigating the sectarian violence between Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites, which persists to this day.

James Corbett’s video is a moving tribute to Hastings’ courage in confronting the military-intelligence establishment, with recent TV clips in which the reporter angrily challenges Obama’s war on journalists and his suspension of civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.

The film also summarizes important anomalies connected to the so-called car accident:

Hasting emailed Wikileaks and close friends just hours before his death that he was being investigated by the FBI for a new ground-breaking story regarding the CIA and NSA he was about to publish.
Witnesses heard a loud explosion and the car’s engine shot 100 yards down the road.
Witnesses report the car was already on fire before it hit the tree.

It goes on to presents a recent scientific study demonstrating how car computers can be hacked to override driver control of braking and acceleration.

Corbett concludes with an excerpt of an interview Bush’s anti-terrorism czar and cyber terrorism specialist Richard Clarke gave the Huffington Post. During the clip, Clarke asserts that the circumstances of Hastings’ accident are consistent with a cyber attack on his car.

 

 

 

photo credit: tonx via photopin cc

Fracking, Drought, and the Price of Food

The Fracking President

Natural gas, according to Obama’s climate speech, is a “bridge” fuel. Shifting from coal to natural gas in US power plants is supposed to slow the increase in US carbon emissions while the US infrastructure transitions to renewable energy. The current availability of cheap natural gas has been made possible by a six-year nationwide boom in hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking). This is a process in which water is injected under pressure into rock formations to dislodge the methane (gas) that is trapped there.

Many environmentalists are very critical of Obama’s decision to side with the big energy corporations on the fracking issue. They cite fracking’s destructive environmental consequences, as well as health risks associated with ground water contamination. They, and the rest of us, should be a lot more worried about the massive amount of water used in fracking – especially in states that are already suffering from drought.

Competition in the West and Southwest between oil and gas companies and farmers and ranchers is driving up water prices to the point that growers are taking land out of production. We all know what this means in terms of food prices. If you thought they were high last summer, just wait.

Fracking’s Massive Water Take

At present, many parts of the Midwest, West and Southwest are still officially in drought. 2012’s record-breaking drought was the worst since the 1930’s Dust Bowl. According to Reuters, between 2000 and 2008 water levels in U.S. aquifers, our vast underground water storage reservoirs, dropped at a rate that was almost three times as great as any time during the 20th century.

A comprehensive May 21, 2013 report by Ceres, a Boston-based nonprofit, reveals that 47% of oil and gas fracking sites are in high or extremely high water-stressed water basins. The study was based on water consumption by 25,450 fracking wells that drillers voluntarily reported to the FracFocus database between January 2011 and September 2012. The data was then laid on top of water risk maps developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI). During the study period, US fracking operations consumed 68.5 billion gallons of water— equivalent to the amount 2.5 million people would use in a year. Ceres researchers believe this figure is most likely an underestimate – oil and gas companies aren’t required to report how much water they are using.

The amount of water needed to hydraulically fracture a well varies greatly depending on the type of geological formation. Texas uses the most water for fracking, more than three times as much as Pennsylvania, the second largest user. According to estimates, the average Texas well requires up to 6 million gallons of water. In California, in contrast, each well requires 80,000 to 300,000 gallons.

The fracking boom is already affecting several drought-stricken counties in Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wyoming. The Ceres report calls into question whether the industry’s growth in these arid states is sustainable – especially in Texas, where thousands of new fracking wells are being drilled every year. In Texas, where fracking-related water use has doubled in three years, 51% of wells are in high or extremely high water-stressed locations

The situation in Colorado is equally concerning. According to the Ceres report, 92% of Colorado’s 3,862 fracking wells are in areas designated as “extremely high water stressed.” This means that 80% of the available water is already being called on for residential consumption or for industrial and agriculture use.

Inadequate State and Local Regulation

Different state and municipalities have different ways of dealing with the growing competition between farmers and ranchers and oil and gas companies over dwindling water supplies. In some states, regulators have stepped in to limit the water that energy companies can use during drought conditions. Northwest Louisiana, for example, has ordered oil and gas companies drilling the Haynesville Shale to stop pulling groundwater from the local aquifer that also supplies local farmers and residents. Instead they are required to use surface water.

In contrast, some communities still allow drillers to draw their water for free from underground aquifers or rivers. In others they must buy or lease supplies belonging to water districts, cities and farmers. Some communities charge drillers more for water than other users. In Colorado and North Dakota, for example, energy companies (with more than 19,000 active oil and gas wells in Weld County), are paying up to 10 times more than farmers for municipal water.

Farmers and Residents Left High and Dry

Despite the price differential, increasing competition over water has still caused a prohibitive increase in irrigation costs for many farmers. According to Kent Peppler, President of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, county officials traditionally sell excess portions of their Colorado River water allotment at auction. In a normal year Peppler would pay been $9 to $100 for an acre-foot of water at these auctions. At present, however, there is no way he can compete with energy companies paying $1,200 to $2,900 per acre-foot. Thus he has made the tough decision to fallow some of his corn fields because he can’t afford to irrigate the land for the full growing season.

In South Texas, which has also been declared a drought disaster area by the USDA, fracking is draining nearly 100% of the new inflow to the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer – according to Ron Green of the Southwest Research Institute. In June the West Texas town of Barnhart, with a population of 200, ran out of water. The city’s well simply stopped pumping enough water to keep up with demand. The town had to turn to another well, drilled in the 1900s, which yields water deemed unfit for consumption unless boiled.

Reposted from Veterans Today

Photo credit: Justin Woolford

British Columbia Says No to Tar Sands

 

Proposed Northern Gateway pipeline

According to Environmental News Service, on June 3 British Columbia officially rejected the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline. The latter would have transported tar sands* from Alberta to the west coast, to be carried via super tankers to Asia . The primary reason the British Columbia Joint Review Panel gave for rejecting the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal was Enbridge’s failure to provide adequate spill response documentation. Apparently they were particularly put off by the statement: “Doing nothing is a possible response to a spill.”

Enbridge’s Disastrous Safety Rercord

There have already been seven major tar sands pipeline spills, all with devastating effects on communities where they have occurred. As the article notes, Michigan is still cleaning up after an Enbridge tar sands pipeline burst in July 2010 and spilled 877,000 barrels of bitumen into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. It was the largest on-land oil spill in US history, and definitely one of the most costly. It resulted in a $3.7 million fine

$3.7 million fine against Enbridge, which first learned there were corrosion and cracks in the pipeline in 2004 and failed to repair them.

In June 2012 an Enbridge pipeline spilled 60,760 gallons of bitumen in Elk Point, Alberta and in July 2012 one of their pipelines released 1,200 barrels near Grand Marsh in Central Wisconsin.

In April 2013 an ExxonMobil tar sands pipeline burst in Arkansas spilling hundreds of thousands of barrels into residential streets outside Little Rock and forcing the evacuation of 22 homes. Many have become uninhabitable. The Arkansas spill is the second biggest in US history and has contaminated LakeConway, the largest man-made lake in the US, which serves as a tributary of the ArkansaRiver.

Coming to a Community Near You

Proposed Keystone XL Pipeline (southern extension already 75% complete)

In his historic climate speech Obama stated he hasn’t decided whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline extension (connecting Alberta tar sands fields with Gulf Coast refineries). However unbeknownst to many Americans, the southern half of the Keystone XL extension is already 75 % complete thanks to an  executive order he signed in March 2013  Yet already it is notorious for faulty workmanship, as well as dents and faulty welds. Even more scandalous is the exact route of the northern extension is a state secret. Americans aren’t allowed to know which cities it will travel through or which bodies of water it will cross.

Will Keystone XL Increase Carbon Emissions?

According to the  Environmental News Service, the Northern Gateway Pipeline would have enabled Alberta to expand their tar sands production by about 30%. This tends to negate the State Department claim that the Keystone XL Pipeline in itself won’t increase carbon emissions. According to the president of Canada’s largest oil company, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd, completion of the Keystone XL extension will enable them to increase tar sand productions by 830,000 barrels a day According to Climate Progress, this will produce a carbon footprint equivalent to 51 coal fired plants.

*Tar sands is a term describing loose sand saturated with an extremely viscous form of petroleum technically referred to as bitumen. Tar sands have only been recently included as part of global oil reserves, as the usable oil is extremely difficult and expensive to extract. This has only been profitable with the spike in oil prices which has occurred since 2000. Oil extraction from tar sands is  extremely energy intensive and generates 12 percent more greenhouse gases per barrel of final product than conventional oil extraction.

Tar sands extraction is also extremely environmentally destructive. Most operations are similar to strip mining and require massive clearing of trees, brush, topsoil, sand and clay that cover the oil sands deposit. The use of steam injection in the extraction process requires between 2 to 4.5 gallons of water for each gallon of oil produced. Despite recycling, almost all of it ends up in tailings ponds. There is evidence of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydocarbons (PAH’s) leaking into ground water and cancer clusters near productions sites.

 

 

 

 

 

US Drastically Cuts Carbon Emissions

Good job, guys. Well done. Keep it up.

I think Americans deserve about 1,000 gold stars each for cutting their carbon emissions to 1994 levels. Too bad Obama didn’t mention this in his speech last week. A substantial number of Americans have made small and large lifestyle changes in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint. Surely this deserves some acknowledgement. That’s how you get people to continue appropriate behavior, by acknowledging and rewarding it.

Curious the corporate media didn’t mention it either in their coverage of the President’s “groundbreaking” climate initiative. However both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Bloomberg’s Sustainable Energy in America 2013 Factback confirm it: US CO2 emissions for 2012 were the lowest they have been since 1994. This is quite a remarkable accomplishment, especially since the US is one of the few developed countries without a national climate policy (until last week).

Typically the business press attributes the drop in CO2 emissions to economic factors. They seem reluctant to acknowledge that (despite federal inaction) more than 1,000 US cities and many states signed up to the Kyoto Protocol (to reduce CO2 emissions to 7% below 1990 levels by 2012). The Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Treaty Clinton signed in 1997. However thanks to a 2005 initiative by US Conference of Mayors, cities in every state committed to reduce their CO2 emissions.

Clearly economics also played a major role. Economic explanations for the drop in the US carbon footprint include

A reduction in overall economic activity due to the recession.
A reduction in automobile use due to higher gas prices.
The replacement of older coal-fired power plants with new ones run on cheaper and cleaner natural gas. Gas-fired power plants supplied 31 percent of US electricity in 2012, an increase of 9 percent from 2008.
A reduction in energy use in homes and commercial buildings, thanks to federal, state and local subsidies for energy efficiency measures.
A big jump in renewable energy generation due to cheaper component costs (e.g. Chinese solar photo voltaic cells).

Can the US Continue to Reduce Emissions?

The bad news is that the US is still the world’s second largest carbon emitter, behind China. Moreover the Department of Energy forecasts that CO2 emissions will increase again as the economy recovers. They predict a 2% increase for 2013 and a 0.7 percent increase in 2014.

Eduardo Porter. writing in the New York Times, cites a November PricewaterhouseCoopers report recommending that the US can only avert catastrophic climate change through a six-fold improvement in the US rate of “decarbonisation.” He points out that US fuel economy performance for cars and trucks is still among the worst in the developed world. Plus only 7 percent of the nation’s energy comes from renewable sources, which is much lower than in other advanced nations.

Also as Russell McClendon reminds us in Forbes,  the replacement of coal with natural gas in power plants is extremely controversial. Although burning natural gas produces half the carbon emissions of coal, there are major environmental and health hazards linked to fracking, the technology used to extract natural gas from shale formations. Fracking is associated with emissions of methane, an even more dangerous greenhouse gas, and hazardous groundwater contamination. Aging corroded gas pipelines present additional hazards of their own.

Will Obama’s Climate Initiative Reduce Emissions?

A lot depends on whether the President gives the go ahead to the Keystone XL pipeline. This would transport tar sands oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries. Tar sands oil is the dirtiest fossil fuel there is. Owing to the immense amount of energy used to extract it, Climate Progress estimates the Keystone pipeline will increase carbon emissions by as much as 51 coal-powered plants.

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Keystone XL southern extension is already 75 % complete, thanks to an executive order Obama signed in March 2013.

Republicans Veer Toward Socialism

Obama Tries to Privatize TVA

 According to a recent article article by Gar Alperowitz, Obama has inserted a proposal to sell the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in his 2014 budget. The TVA was established by the Roosevelt administration during the Depression. The largest public power provider in the US, it employs more than 12,500 people and provides educational, training and other services (such as navigation and land management, flood control, and economic development) in the Tennessee River basin. This region encompasses seven states: Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, South Caroline, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

 Alperowitz finds it ironic that the most vehement opposition comes from free market Republicans:

Sen Lamar Alexander (R Tennessee) – fears higher energy costs for his constituents, “one more bad idea in a budget full of bad ideas.”
Rep John L. Duncan, Jr. (R-Tennessee) – “something that has been proposed in the past and been determined to be a very bad idea.”
Sen Richard Shelby (R-Alabama – will “carefully study any proposals to restructure TVA” in order to make sure that it won’t result in a price hike.
Sen  Bob Corker (R-Tenn) – “I doubt this idea gains much traction.”

Weird isn’t? Republicans are supposed to take the line that Big Government is Socialism and Bad. When they advocate privatization of schools, prisons, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, they tell us that the free market reduces costs by introducing competition. There appears to be a big discrepancy between theory and reality. The experience with utilities, at least, is that privatization increases the costs to the consumer – in addition to operating costs, privately run utilities are obliged to cover profits, advertising and CEO salaries.

Republican lawmakers in states served by the TVA are well aware that it’s an extremely popular federal agency, mainly because it sells power at much lower prices than private power companies. An analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration found that consumers in Alabama and Tennessee pay considerably less for electricity than the national average.

Alperovitz concludes his article by pointing out that “socialist” municipally and regionally owned power companies – more than 2,000 in all – can be found in every single state in the US.  Like the TVA, they are all immensely popular, even in conservative rural areas.  Public ownership of vital transportation facilities (such as roads, ports and airports) is also extremely common. Moreover approximately a third of the nation’s total land surface (and the minerals beneath and forests above) is owned and managed by the government.

So why, Alperowitz asks, is a Democratic president proposing to increase power rates for millions of customers by privatizing the TVA? All I can say is that his answer is much kinder than mine would be. Read more here.

photo credit: Pete Zarria via photopin cc

Reposted from Veterans Today

When They Put White Collar Criminals in Charge

Guest post by Steven Miller

(This is the last of four posts by Steven Miller regarding the rise of the surveillance state.)

Domestic Spying

Since the state is the organization of the ruling class, there has always been the closest collaboration between corporate leaders and the police. In the Palmer Raids in 1919 and 1920, the Department of Justice organized coordinated raids across the country, to arrest and physically beat labor activists, including communists and anarchists. These boys threatened the roaring profits of the post World War I era.

On November 7, 1919, for example – the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution – federal and local police attacked Russian workers in 12 cities. The fledgling media-state publicized these events in dramatic fashion, much like they did with the LAPD in “Dragnet” in the TV era. This is where J Edgar Hoover became a media star! People were dragged in, questioned, beaten. Arrests far exceeded the number of warrants. Then, like now, we hear, “Oooops, my bad!”

It’s far more tightly organized now. In May, the Center for Media and Democracy, released their investigation of police cooperation with banks and corporations during the national wave of Occupy movements in 2011: Dissent or Terror – How The Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.

The report states:

“Put simply, the pattern that emerges from these pages shows that heavily-funded municipal, county, state and federal “counter-terrorism” agencies (often acting in concert through state/regional “fusion centers”) view citizens engaged in movements of political and social dissent, such as Occupy Wall Street (and its regional incarnations), as nothing less than nascent, if not bona­ fide, “terrorist” threats….

Furthermore, records obtained by DBA/CMD from agencies active in state counter -terrorism “fusion centers– including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) – demonstrate the institutionalized blending of corporate security with “national security” through a number of public-private “counter-terrorism” intelli­gence sharing programs.

What has resulted is the wholesale criminalization of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of American citizens who have dared to voice opposition to what is increasingly viewed as the undue influence of private corporate/financial interests in the functions of public government.” (8)

The report notes that there are more than 70 “fusion centers” operating throughout the country. The

US Patriot Act facilitated the creation of information sharing between intelligence agencies, law enforcement and “private sector actors”.

The Patriot Act also created the Domestic Security Alliance Council. This is a public-private partnership between the FBI, DHS and major corporations. The leadership board is made up of 29 corporations and banks, including “Bank of America, MasterCard, Citigroup, American Express, Barclays, RBS Citizens, 3M, Archer Daniels Midland, ConocoPhillips, Time Warner and Wal-Mart.” Aren’t these the same corporations that brought down the economy in 2008? The same ones we bailed out? The same ones who offshore most of their profits to avoid paying taxes?

It is fair to say, given the information in this report, that the American public simply has no comprehension of the new corporate state. And for good reason, most of it is hidden from us.

Glenn Greenwald reports:

“Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez said after Congress on Wednesday was given a classified briefing by NSA officials on the agency’s previously secret surveillance activities:

‘What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today… I can’t speak to what we learned in there, and I don’t know if there are other leaks, if there’s more information somewhere, if somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it’s the tip of the iceberg . . . . I think it’s just broader than most people even realize, and I think that’s, in one way, what astounded most of us, too.’” (9)

Maybe Sanchez is referring to the story that just broke today, as I finish this article, that government computers have stored the actual photos of 120 million Americans, “in case they need them in criminal investigations.” My guess that we will see that this unwarranted invasion of personal privacy is just chicken feed in comparison with what’s really going on.

Where Is This All Going?

The Gulf Oil Spill in 2010 is a cautionary tale of where things are heading. As the oil reached the shore, reporters went to public beaches to film and observe. They were met by British Petroleum officials, who told them they could not be on the beach. The reporters just laughed – after all, what’s public is public. The BP officials simply pulled out their cell phones and called the police, who detained the reporters and whisked them away.

Today, an increasing number of economists recognize that the next economic collapse is being prepared by the very same banks, with the collusion of the federal government, using the very same economic weapons of mass destruction that caused the 2008 collapse. Slowly but steadily, the economic crisis is passing over to becoming a political crisis. Obama’s actions towards guaranteeing the XL pipeline are just one example of this.

Most cities and states are deeply in debt to the banks we have already bailed out. Private-sector debt dwarfs all other forms of debt combined; yet the financial speculators and hedge funds are aggressively rigging the system. Students, homeowners and medical patients are becoming debt slaves. And while you were sleeping, the IMF and the European Central bank announced that Cyprus sets the model “for how future stresses will be handled”. In other words, your bank deposits have been declared “equity investments”, meaning that they can legally take up to a 100% loss. (10)

So the next time the banks bring down the economy, will Americans once again accept that they are “too big to fail”?

Does anyone really think corporations are neutral here? So what will the corporate state do, when Americans begin to act on the obvious – that either the people will take over the corporations or the corporations will destroy society and the planet into the bargain?

Corpstate will do what a state is supposed to do – protect the economic interests of the rulers. It will expand the surveillance, the Black Ops, employ rendition, expand secret prisons and drones, and use the already-militarized police to guarantee its rule.

Most people already agree with Edward Snowden that this is not the America that they want to see. But it’s the economic system that creates the state, not the other way around. In 1857, slave property controlled the Supreme Court, the Presidency and the Congress. Their power was abolished with the abolition of slavery. Today corporations likewise control the three branches of government. Abolish corporations and abolish their rule!

Notes and Background

(8) Dissent or Terror – How The Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street. p 1

(9) “Just the Tip of the Iceberg”. Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK.15 June 13, 2013

(10) “It Can Happen Here: The Bank Confiscation Scheme for US and UK Depositors”. Ellen Brown. Global Research, 3-29-2013

***

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nanodog2@hotmail.com

Crossposted at Daily Censored

photo credit: Michael Fleshman via photopin cc

Spies and Thugs for Hire

Blackwater Assisting with DEA Raid

(This is the 3rd of four guest posts by Steven Miller about the rise of the surveillance state.)

The state has metastasized greatly since 1984. The NSA existed then, perhaps more hidden than now, but there were no personal computers, no internet, no digital communications then. The largest transformation of the American state since World War II occurred right after 911 with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The state has spent about $30 billion a year since then to intrude the DHS into every facet of domestic life. The main way this has been done is to privatize various police functions, to literally create a corporate state with police powers.

Naomi Klein blew the whistle on this in her important and essential book, The Shock Doctrine (2007). Klein describes the rise of the DHS Shadow State that includes financing private policing corporations like Blackwater to private prisons:

“The emergence of this parallel privatized infrastructure reaches far beyond policing. When the contractor infrastructure built up during the Bush years is looked at as a  whole, what is seen is a fully articulated state-within-a-state that is as muscular and capable as the actual state is frail and feeble. This corporate shadow state has been built almost exclusively with public resources (90 percent of Blackwater’s revenues come from state contracts), including the training of its staff (overwhelmingly former  civil servants, politicians and soldiers). Yet the vast infrastructure is all privately owned  and controlled. The citizens who have funded it have absolutely no claim to this parallel economy or its resources. The actual state, meanwhile, has lost the ability to perform its core functions without the help of contractors.” (6)

Further describing the military power of disaster capitalism, Klein writes:

“It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one   administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist dialogue that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged….

A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist, but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.” (7)

It’s worth remembering here the old saying that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. When Mussolini, the theoretician of Fascism, was asked what it meant, he is credited with replying:

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

Understanding that the state, properly defined, is an armed, repressive apparatus, it is now clear why the state uses force to protect and extend the interests of the 1%.

Capitalists have always had state power in the United States. But now their corporations have seized the power to exercise police authority directly. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is supposed to protect people from unreasonable search and seizure. But it only applies to government, not to corporations!

Notes and Background

(6) Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine. 2007. p 417

(7) Op sit, p 14-15

 ***

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nanodog2@hotmail.com

 

Crossposted at Daily Censored

photo credit: NoHoDamon via photopin cc

Criminalizing Dissent

Guest post by Steven Miller

(This is the 2nd of four guest posts by Steven Miller about the rise of the surveillance state)

So exactly what is the legal definition of a “terrorist” anyway?

The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee (the committee supposedly charged with “oversight”, Diane Feinstein, redefined the term to include many traditional homegrown forms of social protest in the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006. Here “terrorism” is officially determined to mean an act of protest that reduces the profits of a corporation, its suppliers, or partners.

Matt Smith wrote in the SF Weekly in 2006:

“The thing is, however, that violence, threats, vandalism, and harassing assaults of  the sort described by Feinstein are already illegal. Her bill criminalizes ordinary protest activities that weren’t illegal before.

The new Act calls for more lengthy sentences for such activity, and punishes  activists whose protests harm “tertiary targets,” or suppliers and other business  partners of target companies. It includes language saying that the new bill will not infringe on ordinary social protest activities such as boycotts or picketing.

Opponents of the bill say, however, that just by stating that it will be enforced in a way that respects constitutional protections of free speech and protest doesn’t make it so. The law’s very premise, they say, that protest that harms a company’s bottom line should be construed as a type of terrorism, is a frightening prospect for free speech.

The function of civil disobedience and a boycott are to cause loss of profits in order to get a message out. So we don’t think their distinctions make a difference,’ says Boghosian, the Lawyers Guild director.

Most menacing, in my view, was Feinstein’s statement on Nov. 13 crowing about House passage of legislation whose Senate version she sponsored. ‘We can  no longer tolerate criminally based activism regardless of the cause it allegedly advances,’ Feinstein said. ‘This is terrorism and it must be stopped.’ “(5)

Feinstein’s response to Snowden’s whistleblowing was that it’s not treason to illegally spy on the public, but only to expose it! Feinstein, of course, receives huge campaign donations from the very corporations that control and profit from domestic spying, those that she is supposed to “oversee”.

The Rise of the Surveillance State

This then is the context for the developing NSA snooping scandal. Though much is secret, it is certain that the agency can analyze virtually every communication that Americans routinely use during the day, from landline calls to cell phones to emails. Through the program codenamed PRISM, the NSA, the world’s largest surveillance agency, collects the content of communications provided through Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and five other large Internet companies, including Verizon.

PRISM allows the NSA to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders. The NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain stored communications, develop “metadata” – patterns of communication – and read the actual content of targeted individuals. This is unprecedented militarization of domestic communications infrastructure.

But – we are reassured – all the proper controls are in place, even though they can’t be discussed publicly because they are secret.

Despite the fact that every one in Congress and the Administration, with authority over intelligence, has violated their oath of office – prima facie evidence for impeachment – we are supposed to rest assured that nothing secret is aimed at Americans. This goes so far that when James Clapper, national director of intelligence, openly lies to Congress, Diane Feinstein sees no real need to replace him.

Sixty years of propaganda from the 1% has completely confused the basic definitions we use to describe power in America. “Government” refers to the apparatuses for making laws – local, state and federal – and providing money and services for society. This is different than the “state”, which explicitly exists to enforce those laws. Yet these terms are deliberately conflated.

The “state” means organized bodies of armed men, who are empowered to use forms of violence to guarantee what is so euphemistically referred to as “the rule of law”. The state, then, is the army, the police, the Migra, the courts, the prisons, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the secret agencies, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco, etc, etc.

Americans have been propagandized to be against “Big Government”, but you don’t really hear people railing against sewer systems, highways or the national parks. What Americans really don’t like is the “BigState” – the use of armed force to curtail individual liberties. We are supposed to “drown the government in the bathtub”; meanwhile nobody says anything about the incredible growth and transformation of the state since 911.

A “drowned government” means ending government authority to regulate corporations. One interesting aspect of this line deals with the fact that every group of people in society needs to raise money to protect their interests. If you can’t get this money from the government, the only other place you can get it is from corporations and banks. So “drowning the government” is just good business for corporations.

Corporations are the legal attack dogs of the 1%. By law, they specifically protect their directors and decision-makers, better known as capitalists, against liability for breaking the law. Consequently, corporate crime and depredations occur on a daily basis, from Wal-Mart to the XL Pipeline to the unregulated corporate CO2 emissions that, if not controlled, will destroy human society.

Corporate crime and white-collar crime dwarf every form of violent crime caused by individuals. Even more, the system revels in criminality, from the international drug trade that may have saved Wall Street in 2008, due to daily deposits, to the fact that the banks that engaged in illegal foreclosures refuse to payoff their obligations.

Yet the police are assigned to show up at every demonstration to protect corporate headquarters, and generally violate the civil rights of people when it does.

That’s the state in action. It’s hardly neutral, but it real goal is carefully hidden behind the popular idea that the state “administers laws impartially and guarantees social order”. It is obvious today that the state guarantees the rule of the 1%, who just happen to exert their will over government to make the laws the state enforces, through an open system of bribery known as lobbying. It’s all perfectly legal!

Notes and Background

 (5) “Boycott Feinstein”. Matt Smith Wednesday, 11-29-2006. SF Weekly

To be continued.

***

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

 Crossposted at Daily Censored

photo credit: Chris Wieland via photopin cc

Surveillance and the Corporate State

Guest Post by Steven Miller

(This is the first of four guest posts by Steven Miller about the rise of the surveillance state.)

NSA’s PRISM

Edward Snowden’s courageous exposure of how NSA routinely intercepts the communications of private American citizens threatens to expose how corporations rule America. More political exposures are promised. The situation is not yet under control.

This can of worms includes a wide number of issues about the relations of police and the citizens in this country. The central and most outrageous issue is that 70% of $72 billion dollar intelligence budget goes to private contractors. These are private corporations. They are being put in charge of far more than the militarized government intelligence. Coordinated through the Department of Homeland Security contracts, police and military services at all levels have been privatized, from private prisons to intelligence to corporate police squads.

Corporations have now accrued to themselves actual police power to use force over the people in society. These bodies meet in secret (“proprietary secrets”, “trade secrets”) and make policy about how to exercise their police authority. These discussions are now hidden from the public. Furthermore US law is clear: each and every corporation with police powers must guarantee maximum profits. This includes those with newly usurped police powers.

By exercising the will of corporations, these bodies are implementing a new, direct form of corporate rule. Laws, after all, are just words. When you come up against it, people are legally bound to obey the authority of whatever organization is empowered to exercise that authority, even if it’s violent. This is political power. On the street, with “the Rule of Law”, it’s the ruling that matters, not the “law”.

Ruling America 2.0 – Recent Developments

Let’s examine this transfer of power in the context of recent events. Since the Boston Marathon bombing, the American people has been getting lesson after lesson about the nature of the state apparatus. Here’s the sequence of events:

The Media Industrial Complex’s on-the-fly, multi-network crafting of narrative during the manhunt was a tremendous display of power. It was designed to do so, crafting the story of Muslim terrorists, while repeatedly showing the same film clips of police in body armor and tanks patrolling the streets, to demonstrate America’s strength to the world, and not insignificantly, to the American people.

No matter than most of the narrative was later shown to be untrue. No matter the creepy implications of the fact that you are always on film now. No matter that ex-CIA counter-terrorism director, Philip Mudd, publicly stated that the bombers seemed more like Columbine wackos than terrorists. (1)

It doesn’t matter either that the 1997 satire, “Wag the Dog”, revealed in detail how the state can fabricate what you see and therefore believe. As Robert De Niro, playing a “special op” in the film, said, “Of course it’s true! I saw it on TV”.

It’s not 1984 anymore. Thirty years later, Big Brother has far more in his tool kit than the clumsy techniques of the Industrial Era.

The Boston area was “shutdown” by police forces, with no declaration of martial law. This production was another message to anyone who seeks to challenge the power of the state. In post-911 America, this is all OK ‘cuz we’re getting the terrorists. The implications are clear for any city, perhaps like Los Angeles in the 1992 Rodney King Rebellion, that rises up against police control.

On May 13, Michael Sheehan, revealed that “War for Your Lifetime” will continue at least 10 to 20 more years. Writing in Wired, Spencer Ackerman, provided these insights:

“It was just two months ago that the top U.S. intelligence official testified that al-Qaida had been battered by the U.S. into a state of disarray . A year ago, the current CIA director, John Brennan, said that “For the first time since this fight began, we can look ahead and envision a world in which the al Qaeda core is simply no longer relevant .” Just this week, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Votel, told a Florida conference that he was looking at missions beyond  the counterterrorism manhunt .

Yet a spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today — atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America ’s Thirty Years War.  

There is no geographic limit to that war, Sheehan and others testified, thanks to the seminal law authorizing it in the days after 9/11, known as the Authorization to Use Military Force. Thanks to that relatively terse authorization, US counterterrorism stretches ‘from Boston to the FATA,’ Sheehan said, using the acronym for Pakistan ’s tribal areas.”  (2)

The same day, for the first time in US history, the military instituted its “right” to police America domestically, thereby undoing the Posse Comitatus Act that has been in effect since the Civil War. Jeff Morley wrote in the Long Island Press:

“By making a few subtle changes to a regulation in the U.S. Code titled “Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies” the military has quietly granted itself  the ability to police the streets without obtaining prior local or state consent, upending a precedent that has been in place for more than two centuries.

The most objectionable aspect of the regulatory change is the inclusion of vague language that permits military intervention in the event of “civil disturbances.” According to the rule:

Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily  in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected ‘civil disturbances’.

Bruce Afran, a civil liberties attorney and constitutional law professor at Rutgers University, calls the rule, ‘a wanton power grab by the military,’ and says, ‘It’s quite shocking actually because it violates the long-standing presumption that the military is under civilian control.”  (3)

The state has been asserting its power to rule in other ways. Last year, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act. From Forbes Magazine:

“So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial , the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end.”  (4)

The NDAA eliminates many protections of the Bill of Rights and contains the option of extraordinary rendition, by black ops into secret prisons, of virtually anyone, up to and including citizens, who are identified as “terrorists”.

Right here, just on this basis alone, every politician who agreed to this, up to and including the President and the Attorney General, not to mention a gaggle of Congressional leaders, are open to impeachment.This is after all Prima Facie evidence.

Notes and Background

(1) Ex-CIA deputy director: Boston bombing ‘more like Columbine than al Qaeda”. David Edwards Fox News, 4-21-2013

(2) “Pentagon Spec Ops Chief Sees ’10 to 20′ More Years of War Against al-Qaida”. Spencer Ackerman, 5-15-2013

(3) “US Military ‘power grab’ goes into effect”. Jed Morey, May 14, 2013.  Long Island Press

(4) “The National Defense Authorization Act is the Greatest Threat to Civil Liberties Americans Face”. Forbes, 12-5-2011

To be continued

 ***

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

 

Crossposted at Daily Censored

photo credit: silverfuture via photopin cc