The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA): The Corporate Usurpation of the Internet

We are the world, we have the power, our numbers are vastly superior to those who wish to control us. Without us nothing gets done, the machine goes idle, the lights go out and their paychecks stop. Our weakness is our ability to organize, communicate and coordinate our consensus. The internet has provided a solution to that problem as we have witnessed in the Middle East and other  parts of the world. This realization has so infuriated the oligarchy that they have declared “War on the Internet” and have pulled out all the stops to  remove this tool of the masses. The One Percenters are so determined in this effort that the President of the United States of America has blatantly violated the Constitution he swore to uphold and protect in his Oath of Office. It’s our Internet, if we allow their success we return to the Dark Age… JemniPress

by Nile Bowie
Global Research

In the wake of a public outcry against internet regulation bills such as SOPA and PIPA, representatives of the EU have signed a new and far more threatening legislation yesterday in Tokyo. Spearheaded by the governments of the United States and Japan and constructed largely in the absence of public awareness, the measures of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) dramatically alter current international legal framework, while introducing the first substantial processes of global internet governance. With complete contempt towards the democratic process, the negotiations of the treaty were exclusively held between industry representatives and government officials, while excluding elected representatives and members of the press from their hearings. 

Under the guise of protecting intellectual property rights, the treaty introduces measures that would allow the private sector to enforce sweeping central authority over internet content. The ACTA abolishes all legal oversight involving the removal of content and allows copyright holders to force ISPs to remove material from the internet, something that presently requires a court order. ISPs would then be faced with legal liabilities if they chose not to remove content. Theoretically, personal blogs can be removed for using company logos without permission or simply linking to copy written material; users could be criminalized, barred from accessing the internet and even imprisoned for sharing copyrighted material. Ultimately, these implications would be starkly detrimental toward the internet as a medium for free speech. 

The Obama Administration subverted the legal necessity of allowing to US Senate to ratify the treaty by unconstitutionally declaring it an “executive agreement” before the President promptly signed it on October 1, 2011. As a touted constitutional lawyer, Barack Obama is fully aware that Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution, mandates Congress in dealing with issues of intellectual property, thus voiding the capacity for the President to issue an executive agreement. The White House refused to even disclose details about the legislation to elected officials and civil libertarians over concern that doing so may incur “damage to the national security.” While some may hang off every word of his sorely insincere speeches and still be fixated by the promises of hope offered by brand-Obama, his administration has trampled the constitution and introduced the most comprehensive authoritarian legislation in America’s history. 

In addition to imposing loosely defined criminal sanctions to average web users, the ACTA treaty will also obligate ISPs to disclose personal user information to copyright holders. The measures introduce legislative processes that contradict the legal framework of participant countries and allows immigration authorities to search laptops, external hard drives and Internet-capable devices at airports and border checkpoints. The treaty is not limited solely to internet-related matters,

ACTA would prohibit the production of generic pharmaceuticals and outlaw the use of certain seeds for crops through patents, furthering the corporate cartelization of the food and drug supply.

ACTA would allow companies from any participating country (which include EU member states, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Morocco) to shut down websites without any explanation. Hypothetically, nothing could prevent private Singaporean companies from promptly taking down American websites that oppose the Singapore Air Force conducting war games on US soil, such as those conducted in December 2011. By operating outside normal judicial framework, exporting US copyright law to the rest of the world and mandating private corporations to conduct surveillance on their users, all prerequisites of democracy, transparency and self-expression are an afterthought. 

The further monopolization of the existing resources of communication, exchange and expression is ever present in the form of deceptive new articles of legislation that unanimously call for the implementation of the same austere censorship measures. Even if the ACTA treaty is not implemented, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TTP) between Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Vietnam and the United States offers more extensive intellectual property regulations. Leaked documents prepared by the U.S. Business Coalition (which have been reportedly drafted by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufactures of America, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Motion Picture Association of America) report that in addition to ACTA-style legislation, the TTP will impose fines on non-compliant entities and work to extend the general period of copy write terms on individual products.

Under the sweeping regulations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, individual infringers will be criminalized and sentenced with the same severity as large-scale offenders. Within the United States, the recently announced Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) H.R. 3782 regulation seeks to install policies largely identical to SOPA and PIPA. The Obama administration is also working towards an Internet ID program, which may be mandatory for American citizens and required when renewing passports, obtaining federal licenses, or applying for social security. Spreading these dangerous measures to other countries participating in these treaties would necessitate a binding obligation on the US to retain these policies, averting any chance of reform. 

The ACTA will become law once it is formally ratified and cleared by the European Parliament in June. By petitioning members of the European parliament and educating others about the potential dangers imposed by this legislation, there is a chance of the treaty being rejected. Upon closer examination of the human condition with all of its inequalities, food insecurity and dire social issues, our governments have lost their legitimacy for giving such unwarranted priority to fighting copyright infringement on behalf of lobbyists from the pharmaceutical and entertainment industries. The existence of ACTA is a clear statement that surveillance, regulations and securing further corporate centralization dwarfs any constructive shift towards stimulating human innovation and self-sufficient technologies. 

When former US National Security Advisor and Trilateral Commission co-founder, Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke before the Council on Foreign Relations in 2010, he warned of a global political awakening beginning to take place.Technology such as file sharing, blogging, and open source software has the potential to undermine the oligarchical governing interests seeking to centrally control our society and enforce the population into being entirely dependent on their commodities. The following excerpt from Brzezinski’s book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, provides invaluable insight into the world being brought in; “The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”

The Crisis of Education in America: “How to Become a Serf”

By John Kozy
Global Research

Educational systems now train workers to fulfill the needs of companies. A society in which people exist for the sake of companies is a society enslaved. But there’s a deep problem with the notion that education should equal vocational training. To paraphrase a very famous and renowned person, man does not live by work alone. Indeed, the knowledge and skills needed to earn a living in a capitalist industrial economy are of little use in human relationships, and human relationships are the core of everyone’s life. Schools devoted to vocational training provide no venue for teaching cultural differences, for trying to understand the person who lives next door or in another country. Value systems are never evaluated; alternatives are never considered. As a result, although we all live on the same planet, we do not live together. At best, we only live side by side. At worst, we live to kill each other. Education as vocational training reduces everything to ideology, our devotion to which causes us to reject the stark reality that stares us in the face, because our ideologies color the realities we see and people never get wiser than those of previous generations. People have become nothing but the monkeys of hurdy gurdy grinders, tethered to grinders’ organs with tin cups in hands to be filled for the benefit of the grinders. And this is the species we refer to as sapient. What a delusion!

For many years, I have been troubled by what I saw as the results of what passes for education in America and perhaps elsewhere too. Why is it, do you suppose, that one generation does not seem to get any smarter than the previous one? Oh, it may know more of this or that, but what it “knows” does not translate into smarts. In other words, why don’t people ever seem to get wiser? Why do they repeat the same mistakes over and over?

For centuries, an education was thought to be comprised of considerably more than one providing the skills and requirements needed to carry on a trade or profession. For instance, consider this passage:

 ”Education is not the same as training. Plato made the distinction between techne (skill) and episteme (knowledge). Becoming an educated person goes beyond the acquisition of a technical skill. It requires an understanding of one’s place in the world—cultural as well as natural—in pursuit of a productive and meaningful life. And it requires historical perspective so that one does not just live, as Edmund Burke said, like ‘the flies of a summer,’ born one day and gone the next, but as part of that ‘social contract’ that binds our generation to those who have come before and to those who are yet to be born.

An education that achieves those goals must include the study of what Matthew Arnold called ‘the best that has been known and said.’ It must comprehend the whole—the human world and its history, our own culture and those very different from ours. . . .”

This idea of an educated person was often summarized in the phrases, a Renaissance man, and un homme du monde. But these expressions are hardly heard any more. Educated people no longer exist. We are nothing but the monkeys of hurdy gurdy grinders, tethered to grinders’ organs with tin cups in hands to be filled for the benefit of the grinders.

“Governor Rick Snyder wants to tie retraining programs to companies’ needs . . . and encourage more Michigan residents to earn math and science degrees under an initiative aimed at making workers more competitive in the global marketplace.”

The hurdy gurdy grinder’s monkey exists for the sake of the organ grinder; Governor Snyder wants Michigan’s residents to educate themselves for the sake of companies. Workers are to fulfill companies’ needs rather thanvice versa. President Obama has said similar things.

But there’s something wrong, something terribly wrong, with this picture. A society in which people exist for the sake of some non-human entity is a society enslaved. And this picture gets even more horrid with the realization that workers are expected to pay to acquire the required skills. Students are being asked to pay for the privilege of becoming serfs.

Living things in the natural world exist as ends in themselves. Everything they do is done for their own benefit or the benefit of their offspring. Horses in the wild do not acquire skills in order to perform tasks that benefit other horses. When a human being acquires a horse and trains it to perform a skill for the person’s benefit, the person provides for all the natural needs of his horse. Horses don’t come begging to be trained to be ridden. What kind of perversion is the requirement that people should beg to be trained to be serfs?

But neither a hurdy gurdy grinder’s monkey or a riding horse are educated; they are trained. There is no such thing as a Renaissance monkey!

Education in America, and perhaps other places too, is as fractured as shattered glass. The federal agency called the Department of Education’s only power is the ability to cajole schools mainly by offering them money. There are public and private schools, and the public ones are governed by local school boards, the members of which are not even required to be able to read or write. State school boards exist to have some influence over local boards, but again, the power of the states is limited. Education in America is a local affair. The people on these school boards are the ones that control what is and how it is taught. For instance, creationism is often given equal standing with evolution. Students are often required to engage in practices that are clearly unconstitutional. All of this is done to suit the views of school board members, not society or even students.

Teachers are certified by subject matter. Perfectly good mathematics teachers may not be able to write literate essays. English teachers are not required to understand even elementary algebra. The schools do not employhommes de monde. And what is true in the primary and secondary schools is also true in colleges and universities. Les spécialistes rule the classroom. Trained monkeys all!

Now vocational training works, of course, if people know what industries need workers and if workers want those jobs. But often, especially in times of crisis, this knowledge doesn’t exist. Yet there’s a deeper problem with the notion that education should equal vocational training. To paraphrase a very famous and renowned person, man does not live by work alone. Indeed, the knowledge and skills needed to earn a living in a capitalist industrial economy are of little use in human relationships, and human relationships are the core of everyone’s life.

Although the United States is often referred to as a multicultural melting pot, most highly developed nations today have multicultural populations. Different cultures embody different values. Those values often clash and erupt in violent behavior. If people understood these cultural differences, these clashes could be ameliorated. But schools devoted to vocational training provide no venue for teaching cultural differences, for trying to understand the person who lives next door or in another country. Various value systems are never evaluated, and alternatives are never considered. As a result, although we all live on the same planet, we do not live together. At best, we only live side by side. At worst, we live to kill each other.

Education as vocational training reduces everything to ideology. Religion is an ideology and no one ever questions a person’s right to her/his own. Economics, although often touted as a science, is an ideology. Part of free marked economic theory is the belief that when an established industry falters and declines, some new industry will come forth and employ the newly unemployed. But nothing in economics can compel that to happen. This belief is akin to the belief in a Second Coming. It is purely ideological. Even science has become an ideology. People believe, for instance, that science will discover solutions to all of our problems. But again, there is nothing in science that compels that. It is perfectly possible that, as human beings destroy their environment, science will be unable to correct the damage and that life on this planet will perish. Worse, ideologies contribute to human stupidity; our devotion to them causes us to reject the stark realities that stare us in the face. (See here and here.)

So what is required if we are to make one generation smarter than the previous one? We need to educate Renaissance men who comprehend the whole human world, its history, our own culture, and those very different from ours. Vocational training will never produce such people.

John F. Kennedy was glorified when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.” Shouldn’t he have been vilified? Do countries exist to benefit their peoples or do their peoples exist to benefit their countries? What good is a country that requires the sacrifice of its people?

Since the Enlightenment, it is generally agreed that legitimate governments are those that govern with the consent of their peoples. Does anyone really believe that people would consent to living in a nation that made it clear that the lives of most citizens would be fated to live for the benefit of the few who control the nation’s institutions? Isn’t that exactly what slavery is?

Analytical thinking, even when valid, can lead people down invalid roads, because analysis alone tends to overly simplify questions. When used to answer the question, What must be done to put unemployed people to work?, it leads to attempts to make education equivalent to vocational training. But when put into practice, it results in people who lack the ability to understand their value systems and evaluate them properly. They end up being hurdy gurdy monkeys or, as Arnold put it, the flies of a summer, born one day and gone the next. If a nation’s institutions do not exist to benefit its citizens, the institutions, not the people, are faulty.

In Classical Greece it was known that the unexamined human life is not worth living. Vocational training never presents people with opportunities to examine one’s life; so people end up relying entirely on ideologies which have no intellectual basis and are often absurdly false, but “falsehoods are not only evil in themselves, they infect the soul with evil.”

If human beings wish to endure, their ideologies must be subjected to serious criticism; otherwise, no generation will ever be smarter than its predecessors and continuing to refer to ourselves as sapient is a sheer delusion.

 John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site’s homepage

Winds of Change – Congressional Reform Act of 2012

1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they’re out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women. Congressmen/women made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet
by grtv

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like YouTube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year — that’s for a fix that won’t work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices, and censors the internet. This bill is bad for creativity and does not protect your rights.

Tell Congress not to censor the internet NOW!
http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa

End of Nations: Canada, the US and the “Security Perimeter”

by James Corbett
grtv.ca
December 15, 2011

When Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and US President Barack Obama announced the much-anticipated border agreement between the two countries at a press conference in Washington last week, those mainstream media outlets that bothered to cover the story at all compensated for the lack of details about what specifically is going to be accomplished by this accord by focusing on issues of no practical significance.

The Globe and Mail, for example, ran an entire article about how Harper and Obama’s personal “friendship” allegedly effected the deal, which was in reality and admittedly struck by bureaucrats in months of closed-door negotiations.

A variety of trade magazines and corporate websites released vague laudatory statements about the “streamlining” of the border.

But the story itself, which generated few headlines at all in the American media, was not about what specifically will change at the border so much as the border is increasingly being redefined as just one part of a broader security perimeter that in fact encompasses both the US and Canada.

The agreement in fact comprises two so-called “action plans,” one entitled Beyond The Border and the other the Regulatory Cooperation Council. The former plan focuses on border security with the explicit aim of creating a security perimeter that encompasses both countries. The latter is meant to harmonize regulations for business, facilitating cross-border trade.

The security agreement uses the threat of terrorism, crime and health securities to announce an increasing merger of the two countries’ border security, including an integrated entry-exit system that will involve full sharing of individuals’ biometric details between the two governments by 2014 and even the creation of integrated cross-border law enforcement teams with authority to collect intelligence and conduct criminal investigations on either side of the border.

The regulatory plan, meanwhile, aims to standardize agricultural regulations on such items as maximum pesticide residue limits as well as develop standards and regulations for potential future products and industries like nanotechnology.

Although the plans detail certain steps that can be or are being taken, the majority of the information is about agreed-upon shared values and the possibility of cooperation.

In light of the relative paucity of detail about these “action plans,” media outlets chose to illustrate the general points of the agreement with seemingly random examples, such as this one about breakfast cereals.

Keen-eyed observers of this trivial example of the effects might have noted a striking similarity to the way that Prime Minister Harper tried to deflect criticism of the Security and Prosperity Partnership agreement that sought to merge the governments, security forces and regulatory framework of the US, Mexico and Canada, back in 2007 by talking about jellybean regulations.

On one level, reducing these agreements to regulations on cereals and jelly beans marginalizes the legitimate criticism and fears about the erosion of national sovereignty implicit in these talks. It also serves to keep the public disinterested in the issues by painting them as dry and unimportant talks about bureaucratic affairs.

What this similarity in rhetoric unwittingly reveals, however, is how this latest agreement is in fact nothing new, and can only be properly understood as the latest point in a continuing process of merging the bureaucratic, regulatory and military functions of Canada and the US that has in fact been taking place for a decade.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the two countries began work on reshaping the nature of the world’s longest undefended border. This resulted in the Canada-US Smart Border Declaration, an agreement signed in December 2001 that contained much of the same rhetoric as the recent agreement, including vows to coordinate security and law enforcement efforts in the name of facilitating the flow of people and goods between Canada and the States.

This led into the Security and Prosperity Partnership, a trilateral framework between the governments of the US, Canada and Mexico that began a process of regulatory integration. Formally launched in 2005, the SPP quickly caught the attention of the public on both sides of the border, and as freedom of information requests shed more light on the process, including the almost total domination of the partnership in closed-door meetings by big business, the SPP’s annual summit quickly became a flashpoint for political activism.

In the light of public scrutiny, the SPP was shelved in 2009, but many of its initiatives and recommendations continue on behind the scenes. SPP documents, for example, show how Canada’s controversial no-fly list was in fact part of a trilateral agreement, with the 2006 report to leaders in fact mandating the program’s June 2007 launch date.

Meanwhile, the military merger of Canada and the US has proceeded in its own series of mutual agreements, beginning with the creation of NORTHCOM, the United States Northern Command, in 2002, which charged the US military with the protection of the United States, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Mexico and Canada.

In February of 2008, the Canadian and American militaries signed an agreement allowing troops of either country to cross the border and carry out operations in the other country in the event of an emergency, such as civil unrest.

In 2010, the two countries signed the shiprider agreement, allowing the operation of specially designated vessels to patrol the shared waterways of the two countries by joint crew, consisting of both Canadian and American law enforcement. This agreement is cited in the new border proposal as an example of how cross-border policing can be implemented.

Now, with increasing “cooperation” between cross-border law enforcement, Canadians will be expected to allow American officials to pursue their investigations of suspected criminals on Canadian soil. And the process of harmonization means that Canada may even be expected to allow the use of drone surveillance, an idea presently being used by the US to patrol the Canadian border and even to pursue criminal investigations of American citizens far away from the border.

Although there are many individual aspects of this latest accord that are worrying, from the militarization of the border to the harmonization of regulatory frameworks to allow for the lowest common denominator in food standards and other areas, to the increasing sharing of information about citizens between the two countries, perhaps the most worrying aspect is the project itself. As many have warned, these seemingly bland border proposals, a story so dull that it has barely been covered at all by the American press, may in fact be used to slip in a North American Union through the gradual merging of the two countries’ bureaucratic systems.

The most insidious part of this process is that it is not subject to legislative oversight of any kind, and is taking place in behind-the-scenes discussions between high-level bureaucrats outside of the glare of public scrutiny, a point that is readily conceded by the proposals’ proponents.

Last week I had the chance to talk to Paul Hellyer, the former deputy Prime Minister of Canada, about this agreement, and whether the border security threat that the US is using to justify the process is in fact a ploy to obscure an underlying agenda, the drive to merge Canada and US in a de facto union.

Regardless of whether this particular agreement bears fruit for those seeking to bring the two countries into a closer union, or whether it is just another waypoint on the road of a much longer and more detailed process, the very real concerns about the erosion of national sovereignty implicit in this deal is one that those in power are eager to see avoided. So far, they are being aided in that quest by a media that chooses to avoid the hard questions about this series of agreements to the extent that they cover them at all.

As always, the power belongs in the hands of the people. Without significant pushback from the public, however, the momentum of these border agreements might be enough to make the North American Union an inevitability. Alternatively, the public can fight back by making this into a key political issue and informing others of the potential threat to the survival of both the US and Canada as sovereign nations.

Federal Grants Pay to Militarize Local Cops

Keith Johnson
Infowars.com
January 6, 2012

Since Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of communities across the nation have taken advantage of more than $34 billion in central government grants to equip police and sheriffs’ departments with assault rifles and exotic weaponry.

In 2011 alone, approximately $2 billion in grants were awarded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), along with $500 million more allocated to existing programs.

The accounting for this expense was recently compiled by the Center for Investigative Reporting and detailed in a report, “America’s War Within: Homeland security and the first 10 years of the war on terror.” After reviewing records from 41 states and interviewing over two dozen police officials and terrorism experts, researcher G.W. Schulz concludes that police departments “have transformed into small army-like forces.”

Federal grants are just one avenue police are using to get weaponry like armored vehicles, grenade launchers and M-16 assault rifles, suited to use on a battlefield. In fiscal year 2011, the Department of Defense gave away a record total of more than $500 million worth of military surplus to law enforcement through its little-known (to the public) “1033 program.”

“Passed by Congress in 1997, the 1033 program was created to provide law-enforcement agencies with tools to fight drugs and terrorism,” writes Benjamin Carlson in a recent article for The Daily. “Since then, more than 17,000 agencies have taken in $2.6 billion worth of equipment. . . paying only the cost of delivery.”

That trend is showing no signs of slowing, according to Carlson.

So why is the government supplying cops with these dangerous toys? The much-touted threat of terrorism is no justification. The National Safety Council notes: “You are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.”

A crime wave can’t be blamed either. Since the early 1990s, the incidence of violent crime has steadily been on the decline, as more and more law-abiding citizens arm themselves. Violent crime peaked in 1991 at 758.2 per 100,000 people. In 2010, there was nearly half that number—403.6 per 100,000. The same can be said for officers killed in the line of fire. The number of deaths peaked in 1980, at 104 per 100,000, compared to a low of 50 per 100,000 in 2010.

The real reason these lavish gifts are being provided is that it makes police chiefs and sheriffs more accountable to the federal government than to their own states and local communities. Those agencies may soon be called upon to integrate with federal troops—who may soon be allowed to patrol U.S. streets, pursuant to the passage of the so-called National Defense Authorization Act.

There is also a growing effort by the drone or unmanned aerial vehicle industry to market its products to local law enforcement. In their 2011 annual report, General Atomics (GA), the nation’s leading manufacturer of Predator drones, made it clear their future growth depends upon pursuing new applications that will help create opportunities “beyond the military market.” Meanwhile, GA spent in excess of $2 million last year lobbying Congress on behalf of defense appropriations bills and larger DHS budgets.

Though normal American manufacturing and production is at an all-time low, the defense industry is booming. According to the Homeland Security Research Corp., “The homeland security market for state and local agencies is projected to reach $19.2 billion by 2014, up from $15.8 billion in fiscal 2009.”

Related Articles:

• Pentagon to equip local police forces with military weapons
• Lawsuits Involving Local Police Working For DHS Highlighted By The Identity Project
• Local Cops Ready for War With Homeland Security-Funded Military Weapons
• Economy limiting services of local police
• Local Cops Get Access to Pentagon “Domestic Terror” Database
• $1 Billion in “Stimulus” Money to Hire More Cops
• California Fire Departments Federalized Under DHS “SAFER” Grants
• Federal Influence Over Local Police in Texas
• Local Cops, Feds Set-up Checkpoint to Stop “Terrorism” in VA
• Homeland Security and Justice Departments Providing More Info to Local Officers
• Feds Include Local Police in Snoop “Continuum”
• Local Police Want Right to Jam Wireless Signals

Another Tyrannical Success for Lieberman: Enemy Expatriation Act Now Law Under NDAA

Eric Blair
PrisonPlanet.com

Last January, four-term senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) announced that he would not seek reelection in the upcoming 2012 elections.  This seems to have relieved any pressure of facing his constituency for approval, allowing him to push for some of the most draconian legislation in the history of the United States.  Or, perhaps, he is just auditioning for a more powerful position like Secretary of Defense or Secretary of the DHS.

Besides his renewed pressure on Google and Twitter to openly censor the Internet, Lieberman’s desire to crush all dissent against the war machine has manifested in bills like his Enemy Belligerent Act, his Internet Kill Switch bill, and the recently introduced Enemy Expatriation Act.

Unfortunately, the most egregious parts of the above mentioned bills already found their way into law under the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which seemingly renders any further discussion of these bills as somewhat redundant, but they certainly won’t be critically discussed in the corporate media.

The Enemy Belligerent Act grants “the president the power to order the arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment of anyone — including a U.S. citizen — indefinitely, on the sole suspicion that he or she is affiliated with terrorism, and on the president’s sole authority as commander in chief.”

The Internet Kill Switch bill, officially called the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, gives the President the authority to police, censor and shut down parts of the Internet under a cyber emergency.  While promoting the bill, Lieberman openly called for the U.S. to have the same ability to censor the Internet as China.

The Enemy Expatriation Act aimed to remove the rights protected by U.S. citizenship from those who “support hostilities against the United States.”  This act was in response to Obama’s assassination of a U.S. citizen without formal charges or due process to, in effect, legalize such action by removing Constitutional protections of those suspected of supporting hostilities.

The NDAA, which has declared American soil part of the formal battlefield, permits the U.S. military to arrest and indefinitely detain U.S. citizens on the suspicion of supporting or sympathizing with broadly defined terrorists — thus effectively rendering their rights as citizens obsolete — expatriation in practice but not in name.

The NDAA also includes authorization to go after those who engage in a “belligerent act” including protests and speech, thus fulfilling the intent of the Enemy Belligerent Act.  Shahid Buttar points out on FireDogLake:

If Occupy and Tea Party groups are treated as terrorists, does that render them among the ‘associated forces’ of groups ‘engaged in hostilities against the United States’ for whom the NDAA authorizes military detention without trial? Just to be clear: no one has a good answer here, which is precisely the problem.

Even within the four corners of the NDAA itself (here’s the full text of the bill), section 1031(b)(2) includes among ‘covered persons’ subject to potential military detention ‘any person who has committed a belligerent act….’ What, exactly, is a belligerent act? ‘Hostile’ and ‘aggressive’ are synonyms, and while the term has an established (though not entirely defined) meaning in the context of international war, its precise meaning in the context of the NDAA remains unspecified.

And finally, the NDAA declares the Internet an “operation domain” in the war on terror allowing for the Pentagon, “upon direction by the President may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace.”  The authority goes even further than passive Internet censorship.  The Pentagon also claims the authority to use military force as a response to serious cyber attacks.  The Pentagon announced their efforts (PDF) to recruit and train an army of cyber soldiers as funded by the NDAA.

How bad each of these bills are separately only reflects the magnitude of what Lieberman and his hawkish ilk were able to accomplish in the NDAA.  No other elected official can claim the success of Lieberman in terms of ramming through increasingly tyrannical legislation.  But nearly all elected officials are responsible for passing the NDAA and its predecessor the USA PATRIOT Act.

So, protest of these individual bills are futile, much like the overwhelming public opposition to the bank bailouts was futile in swaying the “deciders.”  As Lieberman departs the Senate in a blaze of tyranny, Americans will most certainly continue to be burned unless the people wake up.

The Dismal Economic Outlook For The New Year

Paul Craig Robert
www.paulcraigroberts.org

Jobs offshoring, financial deregulation, and ten years of wars have severely damaged the US economy and the economic prospects of 90% of the American population. The signs are everywhere in front of our eyes. They are in the income distribution data, the BLS jobs data, the Census data, the poverty figures, and the high number of food stamp recipients.

The signs are in the foreclosed and boarded up homes and the accompanying homelessness. They are in closed strip malls, in office building, warehouse, and shopping mall vacancies, and in the huge population losses of America’s manufacturing cities.

The New Economy was a hoax, like Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” and the “war on terror.” Americans were deceived by “their” corrupt government, by greed-driven corporations, and by corporate shills among economists and the pundit class into believing that they were trading middle class “dirty fingernail” jobs in manufacturing for better middle class “clean fingernail” high-tech service jobs. Instead, reasonably paid manufacturing and professional skill jobs, such as software engineering and information technology, were traded for lowly paid jobs as waitresses and bartenders and for jobs in ambulatory health care.

Consequently, real median US income fell for the vast majority of the population. To keep consumers spending when they had no raises, the Federal Reserve used low interest rates to create a real estate and credit bubble. The low interest rates drove up housing prices, and Americans refinanced their mortgages and spent the equity in their homes. Americans maxed out credit cards. The rise in consumer indebtedness kept consumer demand growing and the economy afloat.

But there is a limit to how far debt can outpace income, and the bubble burst. And when it burst the financial fraud that had been hidden in the euphoria was revealed. That set off the financial crisis.

As the US government is controlled by financial and armaments interests and not by the people, the government responded to the financial crisis by shoveling more debt and more hardships on the American people in order that financial interests did not have to
pay for their own mistakes and crimes. Instead of blaming the responsible parties, “our” government handed the bill to the American people.

An important part of the bill is the huge number of new dollars being created in order to keep “banks too big to fail” afloat and in order to finance the federal government’s enormous budget deficit from its illegal wars. Sooner or later, the proliferation of dollars will cost the American people sharply higher prices.

We will return to the dollar crisis later in this column. First, lets look at what the loss of manufacturing and manufacturing related jobs have done to the economy and the prospects of US citizens.

In the first decade of the 21st century, Detroit, Michigan, lost 25% of its population. Gary, Indiana, lost 22%. Flint, Michigan, lost 18%. Cleveland, Ohio, lost 17%. In St. Louis, Missouri, 19% of the housing is vacant. These population losses were not the result of the Black Plague or killer viruses or a nuclear attack. They were the result of corporate CEOs, pushed by their own greed, by the greed of Wall Street and that of large retailers such as Wal-Mart, aided and abetted by “our” government, into moving millions of manufacturing, software engineering, information technology, engineering, research, development, and design jobs offshore.

The process of moving American jobs offshore left cities, counties, and states with shrunken tax base.The resulting state and local budget deficits are being used to dismantle public sector unions and to cut social services. Public assets, such as water companies, and future income streams from parking meters, toll roads and bridges, are being sold off to foreign buyers in order to insure another year of local and state government solvency.

In the first decade of the 21st century, Americans lost 5,500,000 manufacturing jobs. US employment in the manufacture of computer and electronic products fell by 40%; in the production of machinery by 30%, in motor vehicles and and parts by 44%, and in the manufacture of clothing by 66%.

In other words, in ten years the US economy was decimated by jobs offshoring for the sole purpose of higher rewards to capital in the form of multi-million dollar executive bonuses and large shareholder capital gains. A few hedge fund executives were paid a billion dollars in annual renumeration and a couple of dozen of them were paid $500 million in annual compensation. What sense does that make? Huge fortunes paid for one year’s work, not in productive activity but in destroying the financial system and the value of pensions that tens of millions of Americans had worked their lives to achieve.

While this was happening, “our” government squandered several trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan on wars based on lies and deception. The American people were lied to and deceived, and continue to be, in order that arms industries can enjoy record profits and in order that crazed neoconservative war criminals could pursue their ideology of world hegemony and empire. We were even lied to about US war casualties. As Dennis Loo points out in his book, Globalization and the Demolition of Society (2011), the 4,801 Americans killed in action in Iraq leaves out the 50,000 suicides of veterans and active duty US troops. The truth of the matter is that the casualties of the Iraq war are as high as those of the Vietnam war.

With all income gains redirected to the financial and war sectors, the distribution of income in the US has become, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the worst of all developed countries. The Central Intelligence Agency–yes, the CIA–concluded that America had achieved not only the worst income distribution of all developed countries but also a worst income distribution than Iran, Cambodia, Uganda, Nicaragua, Russia, and China. https://cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html

The economic “recovery” that Washington and the financial press hype is all talk and no reality. The “recovery” is produced by understating the inflation rate, which overstates GDP growth, and by dropping the long-term unemployed out of the measurement of unemployment. An economy, the driving engine of which has been moved offshore, cannot recover unless the economy is brought back home, and that requires the repeal of Globalism.

Overstatement is common in order to produce good news, but eventually it catches up with the spinmeisters. Last month the National Association of Realtors reported that it had overstated home sales by 3.5 million. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that the “birth/death” model, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to estimate the net affect on jobs data of unreported business closures and new start-ups, overstates the annual number of new jobs during troubled economic times by approximately one million jobs annually. Each year the accumulated monthly overstatements are quietly revised away by BLS.

Similarly, data can be understated in order to hide bad news. The understatement of inflation results from basing the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on substitution rather than on a fixed basket of goods, the traditional method. During the “progressive” Clinton regime, a deceptive change was made to the CPI. If the price of a good rises, for example, sirloin steak, the higher price does not appear in the index. Instead, the CPI assumes that consumers switch from sirloin to a cheaper cut, such as round steak. Thus, the rise in prices is negated by substituting goods that represent a lower standard of living.

By understating inflation, the government has been able to produce a “recovery,” when in fact the positive economic growth number is created by counting inflation or nominal GDP growth as real GDP growth. John Williams says that when inflation is measured in the old way, prior to Clinton, the US has experienced essentially no real GDP growth in the 21st century. In other words, we have had a decade of essentially no growth in the GDP while the presstitutes in the media proclaim “recovery.”

The government’s forecasts of its budget deficits are based on the assumption that an economic recovery is underway. If in fact there is no recovery and the economy is about to worsen, the trillion dollar plus deficits that the government forecasts for as far as the eye can see will be even larger. As more debt creation likely means more money creation by the Federal Reserve, the future purchasing power of the US dollar appears to be dismal.

The federal government’s reckless issuance of debt in order to finance its hegemonic wars and the Federal Reserve’s misuse of its authority to create $16.1 trillion in secret loans to US and European banks (as revealed by the GAO audit of the Fed) have created an enormous number of new dollars. In addition, financial deregulation has resulted in banks creating paper claims on real assets that far exceed the value of the underlying real assets. This is an untenable situation. How is it likely to be resolved?

This is a two-part question: there is the banks’ debt and there is the federal government’s debt. Both are serious problems.

Mortgage-backed derivatives exceed the value of the homes, and Credit Default Swaps and other financial innovations have resulted in the paper claims on assets exceeding the value of the underlying real assets. Consider Credit Default Swaps, a form of unreserved “insurance.” Investors, really speculators, do not have to own a Greek government bond or a mortgage-backed derivative in order to purchase a “swap” that insures its value. Thus, the total value of swaps issued on Greek bonds, for example, can far exceed the total value of Greek bonds. The value of swaps issued on mortgage-backed securities can exceed the total value of mortgaged real estate.

Financial institutions, such as US banks, that sold “swaps” on Greek bonds were gambling that Greece would be bailed out and would not default. The financial institutions regarded as gravy the fees paid to them for “guarantees” on which they cannot make good. I don’t know the extent of swaps on sovereign debt, but I recently saw a report that the Bank of America alone has sold $2.1 trillion in swaps on sovereign debt. Imagine the crisis if the Bank of America had to pay off these swaps.

Obviously, if European sovereign debt blows up, the US financial crisis will become deeper.

The GAO audit of the Federal Reserve showed that the Fed made secret loans to banks of $16.1 trillion between December 2007 and June 2010. To put that figure in perspective, it is larger than the US GDP and larger than the US public debt. In other words, it took a tremendous amount of new money to keep the financial system from collapsing. Despite this huge sum pumped into the banking system, the banks are still regarded as weak and troubled. The insecurity of bank depositors is reflected in the one basis point interest rate on Treasury bill money funds. Many Americans are willing to receive a negative interest rate in order to have their money in instruments that can be paid off with newly created money.

When the paper claims on assets exceed the value of the underlying assets, one solution could be slow write downs of bad paper over time as the banks’ profits permit. This would require suspending the mark-to-market rule and permitting the banks to remain “solvent” by counting bad assets as good until profits permitted write-downs.

This would be a sensible solution if the banks have profitable prospects. But with consumers too indebted and broke to borrow and the consumer market too impaired for good sales prospects for businesses, what profitable prospects do banks have? Only those created by the Federal Reserve’s support of the “carry trade,” the ability of financial institutions to borrow from the Federal Reserve at essentially zero interest rates and to put the money in Greek and Italian sovereign debt. This is gambling, otherwise known as “casino banking.”

If reality rules out the solution of gradual write-downs, all that remains is bankruptcy or inflation. The Federal Reserve and the US government have ruled out permitting the banks to fail. That leaves inflation.

Except for a relatively few indexed Treasury bonds, financial instruments are in nominal values. Thus bad debts can be inflated away by driving up the nominal values of the underlying real assets and the nominal values of wages and salaries. It seems that the path that policymakers are taking is to reduce the purchasing power of money in order to drive up nominal asset values so that they exceed the claims against them.

For example, consider a person with a $200,000 mortgage whose home, if he could sell it, is only worth $175,000. This person’s asset is under water. However, if inflation drives up the price of his home to $250,000, the person has gone from a balance sheet $25,000 in the red to one $50,000 in the black. It seems clear that in order to save the financial institutions and itself, the government will sacrifice the purchasing power of the dollar.

Thus, the same solution appears to be in effect for the government’s growing debt. For the moment the US dollar is benefitting from flight from the euro due to the hyped sovereign debt crisis in Europe. As in the past, a scared financial world takes refuge in the dollar and in US Treasury debt instruments. The main difference between Greece’s indebtedness and America’s is that Greece cannot print euros, but the US can print dollars. Thus holders of US debt can always get back the nominal dollar value of Treasury debt issues. Of course, the real purchasing power of these printed dollars can be very low.

The dollar as a refuge is a short-run phenomenon. Once the transfer out of euros into dollars has occurred, how does the Treasury sell the next round of bonds to finance trillion dollar deficits? Sooner or later the Federal Reserve will be back to monetizing the new Treasury bond issues, that is, the Federal Reserve will create new money with which to purchase the new Treasury bond issues.

Sooner or later the new money will find its way into the economy and drive up prices, or the continual monetization of new US Treasury debt will cause the world to lose confidence in the dollar. Heavy sales of US dollars in currency markets would drive down the exchange value of the dollar and raise the prices of imports such as energy, manufactured goods, and food. Either way inflation is the result. Indeed, both can occur together, which is the likely result.

Normally, inflation is associated with a booming economy, but as too much of the US economy has been moved offshore, there is little left to boom other than prices. Therefore, the combination of high inflation with high unemployment is a likely fate that awaits Americans.

I cannot predict how long policymakers can hold economic armageddon at bay with spin, money creation, currency swaps, intervention in gold and silver markets, and outright lies. The onset could be sudden and take place this year, but we shouldn’t underestimate the power of spin over a gullible public that trusts “their” government and fervently believes that Muslim terrorists are out to get them and that the demise of the Constitution, the product of a eight hundred year struggle that produced Anglo-American civil liberty, is worth the price of “safety.”

There is no safety in a police state and a debauched currency. The comfortable world that Americans have known is falling apart at the seams.

Faking It: How the Media Manipulates the World into War

by James Corbett
www.corbettreport.com

As the drums of war begin to beat once again in Iran, Syria, the South China Sea, and other potential hotspots and flashpoints around the globe, concerned citizens are asking how a world so sick of bloodshed and a population so tired of conflict could be led to this spot once again.

To understand this seeming paradox, we must first understand the centuries-long history of how media has been used to whip the nation into wartime frenzy, dehumanize the supposed enemies, and even to manipulate the public into believing in causes for war that, decades later, were admitted to be completely fictitious.

The term “yellow journalism” was coined to describe the type of sensationalistic, scandal-driven, and often erroneous style of reporting popularized by newspapers like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. In one of the most egregious examples of this phenomenon, Hearst’s paperswidely trumpeted the sinking of the Maine as the work of the Spanish. Whipped into an anti-Spanish frenzy by a daily torrent of stories depicting Spanish forces’ alleged torture and rape of Cubans, and pushed over the edge by the Maine incident, the public welcomed the beginning of the US-Spanish war. Although it is now widely believed that the explosion on the Maine was due to a fire in one of its coal bunkers, the initial lurid reports of Spanish involvement stuck and the nation was led into war.

In many ways, the phrase infamously attributed to Hearst in reply to his illustrator “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” apocryphal as the story may be, nevertheless perfectly encodes the method by which the public would be led to war time and again through the decades.

The US was drawn into World War I by the sinking of the Lusitania, a British ocean liner carrying American passengers that was torpedoed by German U-boats off the coast of Ireland, killing over 1,000 of its passengers. What the public was not informed about at the time, of course, was that just one week before the incident, then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had written to the President of the Board of Trade that it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.” Nor did reports of the attack announce that the ship was carrying rifle ammunition and other military supplies. Instead, reports once again emphasized that the attack was an out-of-the-blue strike by a maniacal enemy, and the public was led into the war.

The US involvement in World War II was likewise the result of deliberate disinformation. Although the Honolulu Advertiser had even predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor days in advance, the Japanese Naval codes had already been deciphered by that time, and that even Henry Stimson, the US Secretary of War, had noted in his diary the week before that he had discussed in a meeting with Roosevelt “how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves,” the public were still led to believe that the Pearl Harbor attack had been completely unforeseen. Just last month, a newly-declassified memo emerged showing that FDR had been warned of an impending Japanese attack on Hawaii just three days before the events at Pearl Harbor, yet the history books still portray Pearl Harbor as an example of a surprise attack.

In August 1964, the public was told that the North Vietnamese had attacked a US Destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin on two separate occasions. The attacks were portrayed as a clear example of “communist aggression” and a resolution was soon passed in Congress authorizing President Johnson to begin deploying US forces in Vietnam. In 2005, an internal NSA study was released concluding that the second attack in fact never took place. In effect, 60000 American servicemen and as many as three million Vietnamese, let alone as many as 500,000 Cambodians and Laotians, lost their lives because of an incident that did not occur anywhere but in the imagination of the Johnson administration and the pages of theAmerican media.

In 1991, the world was introduced to the emotional story of Nayirah, a Kuwaiti girl who testified about the atrocities committed by Iraqi forces in Kuwait.

What the world was never told was that the incident had in fact been the work of a public relations firm, Hill and Knowltown, and the girl had actually been the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador. Once again, the public was whipped into a frenzy of hatred for the Hussein regime, not for the documented atrocities that it had actually committed on segments of its own population with weapons supplied to them by the United States itself, but on the basis of an imaginary story told to the public via their televisions, orchestrated by a pr firm.

In the lead-up to the war on Iraq, the American media infamously took the lead in framing the debate about the Iraqi government’s weapons of mass destruction NOT as a question of whether or not they even existed, but as a question of where they had been hidden and what should be done to disarm them. The New York Times led the way with Judith Miller‘s now infamous reporting on the Iraqi WMD story, now known to have been based on false information from untrustworthy sources, but the rest of the media fell into line with the NBC Nightly News asking “what precise threat Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction pose to America”, and Time debating whether Hussein was “making a good-faith effort to disarm Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” Reports about chemical weapons stashes were reported on before they were confirmed, although headlines boldly asserted their existence as indisputable fact. We now know that in fact the stockpiles did not exist, and the administration premeditatedly lied the country into yet another war, but the most intense opposition the Bush administration ever received over this documented war crime was somepolite correction on the Sunday political talk show circuit.

Remarkably, the public at large has seemingly learned nothing from all of these documented historical manipulations. If anything, the media has become even bolder in its attempts to manipulate the public’s perceptions, perhaps emboldened by the fact that so few in the audience seem willing to question the picture that is being painted for them on the evening news.

Later that year, CNN aired footage of a bombed out Tskhinvali in South Ossetia, falsely labeling it as footage of Gori, which they said had been attacked by the Russians.

In 2009, the BBC showed a cropped image of a rally in Iran which they claimed was a crowd of protesters who assembled to show their opposition to the Iranian government. An uncropped version of the same photograph displayed on the LA Times’ website, however, revealed that the photo in fact came from a rally in support of Ahmedinejad.

In August of 2011, the BBC ran footage of what they claimed was a celebration in Tripoli’s Green Square. When sharp-eyed viewers noticed that the flags in the footage were in fact Indian flags, the BBC was forced to admit that they had “accidentally” broadcast footage from India instead of Tripoli.

Also that month, CNN reported on a story from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claiming that eight infants in incubators had died in a hospital in Hama when Syrian authorities cut off power in the area. Some news sites even carried pictures of the infants. The images were later admitted to have been taken in Egypt and no evidence has ever emerged to back up the accusations.

As breathtaking as all of these lies, manipulations and so-called “mistakes” are, they in and of themselves don’t represent the only functions of the media for the war machine. Now, the US government is taking the lead in becoming more and more directly involved with the shaping of the media message on war propaganda, and the general public is becoming even more ensnared in a false picture of the world through the Pentagon’s own lens.

In 2005, the Bush White House admitted to producing videos that were designed to look like news reports from legitimate independent journalists, and then feeding those reports to media outlets as prepackaged material ready to air on the evening news. When the Government Accountability Office ruled that these fake news reports in fact constituted illegal covert propaganda, the White House simply issued a memo declaring the practice to be legal.

In April 2008, the New York Times revealed a secret US Department of Defense program that was launched in 2002 and involved using retired military officers to implant Pentagon talking points in the media. The officers were presented as “independent analysts” on talk shows and news programs, although they had been specially briefed beforehand by the Pentagon. In December of 2011, the DoD’s own Inspector General releaseda report concluding that the program was in perfect compliance with government policies and regulations.

Earlier this year, it was revealed the the US government had contracted with HBGary Federal to develop software that create fake social media accounts in order to steer public opinion and promote propaganda on popular websites. The federal contract for the software sourced back to the MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.

As the vehicle through which information from the outside world is captured, sorted, edited and transmitted into our homes, the mass media has the huge responsibility of shaping and informing our understanding of events to which we don’t have first-hand access. This is an awesome responsibility in even the most ideal conditions, with diligent reporters guided by trustworthy editors doing their level best to report the most important news in the most straightforward way.

But in a media landscape where a handful of companies own virtually all of the print, radio and television media in each nation, the only recourse the public has is to turn away from the mainstream media altogether. And that is precisely what is happening.

As study after study and report after report has shown, the death of the old media has accelerated in recent years, with more and more people abandoning newspapers and now even television as their main source of news. Instead, the public is increasingly turning toward online sources for their news and information, something that is necessarily worrying for the war machine itself, a system that can only truly flourish when the propaganda arm is held under monopolistic control.

But as citizens turn away from the New York Times and toward independent websites, many run and maintained by citizen journalists and amateur editors, the system that has consolidated its control over the minds of the public for generations seems to finally be showing signs that it may not be invincible.

Surely this is not to say that online media is impervious to the defects that have made the traditional media so unreliable. Quite the contrary. But the difference is that online, there is still for the time being relative freedom of choice at the individual level. While internet freedom exists, individual readers and viewers don’t have to take the word of any website or pundit or commentator on any issue. They can check the source documentation themselves, except, perhaps not coincidentally, on the websites of the traditional media bastions, which tend not to link source material and documentation in their articles.

Hence the SOPA Act, Protect IP, the US government’s attempts to seize websites at the domain name level, and all of the other concerted attacks we have seen on internet freedoms in recent years.

Because ultimately, an informed and engaged public is far less likely to go along with wars waged for power and profit. And as the public becomes better informed about the very issues that the media has tried to lie to them about for so long, they realize that the answer to all of the mainstream media’s war cheerleading and blatant manipulation is perhaps simpler than we ever suspected: All we have to do is turn them off.

The Outlook for the New Year

Dr. Paul Craig Robert’s
www.paulcraigroberts.org/

In March 2010 when I resigned from my column with Creator’s Syndicate and put down my pen, I received so many protests from readers that two months later I began writing again. This renewed activity has resulted in this new year in a website of my own.

My columns will first appear on my site. Sites on which readers are accustomed to find my columns are permitted to continue to post my columns as long as they link to my site and indicate my copyright. The site will stay up if reader support justifies it. Otherwise, I will conclude that the cost of the site exceeds the value of what I have to say.

This past year has not been a good one for the 99%, and the new year is likely to be even worse. This column deals with the outlook for liberty. The next will deal with the economic outlook.

The outlook for liberty is dismal. Those writers who are critical of Washington’s illegal wars and overthrow of the US Constitution could find themselves in indefinite detainment, because criticism of Washington’s policies can be alleged to be aiding Washington’s enemies, which might include charities that provide aid to bombed Palestinian children and flotillas that attempt to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/24/us-israel-usa-flotilla-idUSTRE75N4A620110624

The Bush/Obama regimes have put the foundation in place for imprisoning critics of the government without due process of law. The First Amendment is being all but restricted to rah-rah Americans who chant USA! USA! USA! Washington has set itself up as world prosecutor, forever berating other countries for human rights violations, while Washington alone bombs half a dozen countries into the stone age and threatens several more with the same treatment, all the while violating US statutory law and the Geneva Conventions by torturing detainees.  http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/06/18/41514/general-who-probed-abu-ghraib.html

Washington rounds up assorted foreign politicians, whose countries were afflicted with civil wars, and sends them off to be tried as war criminals, while its own war crimes continue to mount. However, if a person exposes Washington’s war crimes, that person is held without charges in conditions that approximate torture.

Bradley Manning is the case in point. Manning, a US soldier, is alleged to be the person who released to WikiLeaks the “Collateral Murder” video, which, in the words of Marjorie Cohn, “depicts U.S. forces in an Apache helicopter killing 12 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists. People trying to rescue the wounded were also fired upon and killed.”

One of the Good Samaritans was a father with two small children. The video reveals the delight that US military personnel experienced in blowing them away from the distant skies. When it became clear that the Warriors Bringing The People Democracy had blown away two small children, instead of remorse we hear an executioner’s voice saying: “that’s what he gets for bringing children into a war zone.”

The quote is from memory, but it is accurate enough. When I first saw this video, I was astonished at the brazen war crime. It is completely obvious that the dozen or so murdered people were simply people walking along a street, threatening no one, unarmed, doing nothing out of the ordinary. It was not a war zone. The horror is that the US soldiers were playing video games with live people. You can tell from their commentary that they were having fun by killing these unsuspecting people walking along the street. They enjoyed killing the father who stopped to help and shooting up his vehicle with the two small children inside.

This was not an accident of a drone, fed with bad information, blowing up a school full of children, or a hospital, or a farmer’s family. This was American soldiers having fun with high tech toys killing anyone that they could pretend might be an enemy.

When I saw this, I realized that America was lost. Evil had prevailed.

I was about to write that nothing has been done about the crime. But something was done about it. An American soldier who recognized the horrific war crime knew that the US military knew about it and had done nothing about it. He also knew that as a US soldier he was required to report war crimes. But to whom? War crimes dismissed as “collateral damage” are the greatest part of Washington’s 21st century wars.

A soldier with a moral conscience gave the video to WikiLeaks. We don’t know who the soldier is. Washington alleges that the soldier is Bradley Manning, but Washington lies every time it opens its mouth. So we will never know.

All we know is that retribution did not fall on the perpetrators of the war crime. It fell upon the two accused of revealing it–Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.

Manning was held almost two years without charges being presented to a court.
In December’s pre-trial hearings all Washington could come up with was concocted accusations. No evidence whatsoever. The prosecutor, a Captain Fein, told the court, if that is what it is, that Manning had been “trained and trusted to use multiple intelligence systems, and he used that training to defy that trust. He abused our trust.”

In other words, Manning gave the world the truth of a war crime that was being covered up, and Washington and the Pentagon regard a truth teller doing his duty under the US military code as an “abuser of trust.”

In the 1970 My Lai Courts-Martial of Captain Ernest L. Medina, the Prosecution Brief states:

“ A combat commander has a duty, both as an individual and as a commander, to insure that humane treatment is accorded to noncombatants and surrendering combatants. Article 3 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War specifically prohibits violence to life and person, particularly murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture. Also prohibited are the taking of hostages, outrages against personal dignity and summary judgment and sentence. It demands that the wounded and sick be cared for. These same provisions are found in the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. While these requirements for humanitarian treatment are placed upon each individual involved with the protected persons, it is especially incumbent upon the commanding officer to insure that proper treatment is given.

“ Additionally, all military personnel, regardless of rank or position, have the responsibility of reporting any incident or act thought to be a war crime to his commanding officer as soon as practicable after gaining such knowledge. Commanders receiving such reports must also make such facts known to the Staff Judge Advocate. It is quite clear that war crimes are not condoned and that every individual has the responsibility to refrain from, prevent and report such unwarranted conduct. While this individual responsibility is likewise placed upon the commander, he has the additional duty to insure that war crimes committed by his troops are promptly and adequately punished.” http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/Myl_law3.htm

At the National Press Club on February 17, 2006, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that “It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral.” General Pace said that the military is prohibited from committing crimes against humanity and that such orders and events must be made known.

However, when Manning followed the military code, his compliance with law was turned into a crime. Captain Fein goes on to tell the “court” [a real court would throw out the bogus charges, but Amerika no longer has real courts] that “ultimately, he aided the enemies of the United States by indirectly giving them intelligence through WikiLeaks.”

In other words, the “crime” is an unintended consequence of doing one’s duty–like the “collateral damage” of civilian casualties when drones, bombs, helicopter gunships, and trigger-happy troops kill women, children, aid workers, and village elders. Why is Washington only punishing Manning for the collateral damage attributed to him?

Captain Fein could not have put it any clearer. If you tell the truth and reveal Washington’s war crimes, you have aided the enemy. Captain Fein’s simple sentence has at one stroke abolished all whistleblower protections written into US statutory law and the First Amendment, and confined anyone with a moral conscience and sense of decency to indefinite detention and torture.

The illegal detention and treatment of Manning had a purpose, according to a number of informed people. Naomi Spencer, for example, writes that Manning’s long detention and delayed prosecution is designed to coerce Manning into implicating WikiLeaks in order that the US can extradite Julian Assange and either prosecute him as a terrorist or lock him away indefinitely in a military prison without any recourse to the courts, due process or the law. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30075.htm

Assange’s case is mysterious. Assange sought refuge in Sweden, where he was seduced by two women. Both admit that they had sexual intercourse with him voluntarily, but afterwards they have come forth with claims that as they were sleeping with him in the bed, he again had sexual intercourse with them, and that they had not
approved this second helping and that he was asked to use a condom but did not.

The Swedish prosecutorial office, after investigating the charges, dismissed them. But, strangely, another Swedish prosecutor, a woman suspected of connections to Washington, resurrected the charges and is seeking to extradite Assange to Sweden from the UK for questioning.

The legal question is whether a prosecutor can seek extradition for investigative purposes. The UK Supreme Court thinks that this is a valid question, and has agreed to hear the case. Normally, extradition requests come from courts and are issued for persons formally charged with a crime. Sweden has not charged Assange with a crime.

The real question is whether the Swedish prosecutor is acting on behalf of Washington.
Many who follow the case believe that Washington is behind the prosecutor’s re-opening of the case, and if Sweden gets hold of Assange Sweden will send him to Washington to be put in indefinite detention and tortured until he says what Washington wants him to say–that he is an Al Qaeda operative.

This is the way that Washington intends to absolve itself of its war crimes revealed, allegedly, by Manning and Assange.

Meanwhile, Washington in a brazen display of hypocrisy accuses other countries of human rights abuses, while Congress has passed and President Obama has signed an indefinite detention and torture bill that US Representative Ron Paul says will accelerate America’s “slip into tyranny” and “descent into totalitarianism.”

In signing the Bill of Tyranny, President Obama indicated that he thought that the tyranny established by the bill did not go far enough. He announced that he was signing the bill with signing statements that reserved his right, regardless of any law, to send American citizens, deprived of due process and constitutional protection, abroad to be tortured.

This is the US government that claims to be a government of “freedom and democracy” and to be bringing “freedom and democracy” to others with bombs and invasions.

The past year gave us other ominous tyrannical developments. President Obama announced that he had a list of Americans whom he intended to assassinate without due process of law, and Homeland Security, itself an Orwellian name, announced that it had shifted its attention from terrorists to “domestic extremists.” The latter are undefined and consist of whomever Homeland Security so designates.

None of this was done behind closed doors. The murder of the US Constitution was a public crime witnessed by all. But like Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death in New York in 1964 in front of onlookers who failed to come to her aid, the media, Congress, bar associations, law schools, and the American public failed to come to the defense of the Constitution.

In my lifetime the collapse in respect for, and authority of, the Constitution has been an horrific event. Compare the ho-hum response to the Obama regime’s police state announcements with the public anger at President Richard Nixon over his enemies list.  Try to imagine President Ronald Reagan announcing that he had a list of Americans marked for assassination without impeachment proceedings beginning forthwith.

Local and state police forces have been militarized not only in their equipment and armament but also in their attitude toward the public. Despite the absence of domestic terror attacks, Homeland Security conducts warrantless searches of cars and trucks on highways and of passengers using public transportation. A uniformed federal service is being trained to systematically violate the constitutional rights of citizens, and citizens are being trained to accept these violations as normal. The young have no memory of being able to board public transportation or use public roadways without intrusive searches or to gather in protest without being brutalized by the police. Liberty is being moved into the realm of myth and legend.

In such a system as is being constructed in public in front of our eyes, there is no freedom, no democracy, and no liberty. What stands before us is naked tyranny.

While America degenerates into a total police state, politicians constantly invoke “our values.” What are these values? Indefinite imprisonment without conviction in a court. Torture. Warrantless searches and home invasions. An epidemic of police brutality. Curtailment of free speech and peaceful assembly rights. Unprovoked aggression called “preemptive war.” Interference in the elections and internal affairs of other countries. Economic sanctions imposed on foreign populations whose leaders are not in Washington’s pocket.

If the American police state were merely an unintended consequence of a real war against terror, it could be dismantled when the war was over. However, the evidence is that the police state is an intended consequence. The PATRIOT Act is a voluminous and clever attack on the Constitution. It is not possible that it could have been written in the short time between 9/11 and its introduction in Congress. It was waiting on the shelf.

The dismantling of constitutionally protected civil liberties is purposeful, as is the accumulation of arbitrary and unaccountable powers in the executive branch of government. As there have been no terrorist events within the US in over a decade except for those known to have been organized by the FBI, there is no terrorist threat that justifies the establishment of a political regime of unaccountable power. It is being done on purpose under false pretenses, which means that there is an undeclared agenda. The threat that Americans face resides in Washington, D.C.

Of the presidential candidates, only Ron Paul addresses the Constitution’s demise.Yet, the electorate is concerned with matters unimportant by comparison. Propagandized 24/7 by the Ministry of Truth, Americans are not sufficiently aware of their plight to elect Ron Paul president.

It might be too late for even a President Ron Paul to turn things around. A president has no power unless his government supports him. What prospect would President Ron Paul have of getting his appointees confirmed by the Senate? The military/security complex is not going to vacate power. Powerful monied interests would block his appointments. If he persisted in being a problem for the Establishment, he would be victimized by a scandal and fail to be reelected if not forced to resign.

Remember what the Washington Establishment did to President Carter. His budget director and chief of staff were framed, thus depriving Carter of the powers of his office.  Even Ronald Reagan had to give away more than half of his government, including the White House chief-of-staff and vice presidency, to the Establishment. President Reagan told me that he wanted to end stagflation in order that he could end the cold war, but that he could not sign a tax bill if I could not get one out of his administration that he could send to Congress.

I do not know, but I suspect that turning things around internally through the political system is not in the cards. Our chance to resurrect liberty might come from Washington’s hubris. Imperial ambitions and drive for power can produce unmanageable upheavals and a loss of allies. Overreach abroad with a demoralized, unemployed and downtrodden population at home are not the ingredients of success.

How much longer will the Russian government permit NGOs funded by the US Endowment for Democracy to interfere in its elections and to organize political protests?  How much longer will China confuse its strategic interests with the American consumer market? How much longer will Japan, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and the Middle East oil states remain US puppets? How much longer can the dollar retain the reserve currency role when the Federal Reserve is monetizing vast quantities of debt?

How much longer can a “superpower” survive when it is incapable of producing political leadership?

America’s salvation will come when Washington suffers defeat of its hegemonic ambitions.

Many readers, especially those who watch Fox “News” and CNN and read the New York Times, might see hyperbole in my outlook for 2012. Surely, many believe, the draconian measures put in place will only be applied to terrorists. But how would we know? Indefinite detention and torture require no evidence to be presented. The American public has no way of knowing whether tortured detainees are terrorists or political opponents. The decision to detain and torture is an unaccountable decision. It relies on nothing but the subjective arbitrary decision of someone in the executive branch. Why are Americans prepared to take the word of a government that told them intentionally the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to America?

Like cancer, tyranny metastasizes. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union’s most famous writer, was a twice-decorated World War II Red Army commander. He made mild critical comments about Stalin’s conduct of the war in a private letter to a friend, and for this he was sentenced, not by a court, but in absentia by the NKVD, the secret police, to eight years in the Gulag Archipelago for “anti-Soviet propaganda.” Not even Stalin had indefinite detention. The closest the Soviets came to this medieval practice resurrected by the Bush and Obama regimes was internal exile in distant parts of the Soviet Union.

During much of the Soviet era, even art, literature and music were scrutinized for signs of “anit-Soviet propaganda.” America’s Dixie Chicks suffered a similar, but more frightening, fate. Bush did not need the NKVD. The American public did the job for the secret police. Wikipedia reports:

“During a London concert ten days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, lead vocalist Maines said ‘we don’t want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States (George W. Bush) is from Texas.’ The statement offended many Americans, who thought it rude and unpatriotic, and the ensuing controversy cost the band half of their concert audience attendance in the United States. The incident negatively affected their career and led to accusations of the three women being “un-American”, as well as hate mail, death threats, and the public destruction of their albums in protest.”

In Nazi Germany, the mildest criticism could bring a midnight knock at the door.

People with power use it. And power attracts the worst kind of persons. As Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prove, democracies are not immune to the evil use of power. Indeed, identical inhumane treatment of prisoners goes on inside the US prison system for ordinary criminals.http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm A December 30, 2011, search on Yahoo for police brutality produced 20 million results.
Over-fed goon cop thugs taser little children and people in wheel chairs. They body slam elderly grandmothers. The police are a horror. They represent a greater threat to citizens than do criminals.

Preventative war, indefinite imprisonment, rendition, torture of people alleged to be “suspects” (an undefined category), and assassination are all draconian punishments that require no evidence. Preventative war is an Orwellian concept. How do you prevent a war by initiating a war? How do we know that a country that did not attack us was going to attack us in the future? Preventative war is like Jeremy Bentham’s concept of preventing crime by locking up those thought by the upper crust to be predisposed to criminal activity before they commit a crime. Punishment without crime is now the American Way.

The concepts that the Bush/Obama regimes have institutionalized are totally foreign to the Anglo-American concepts of law and liberty. In one decade the US has been transformed from a free society into a police state. The American population, to the extent it is aware of what has occurred, has simply accepted the revolution from the top.

Ron Paul is the only American seeking the presidency who opposes the tyranny that has been institutionalized, and he is not leading in the polls.

This tells us all we need to know about the value Americans place on liberty. Americans seem to welcome the era of tyranny into which they are now entering.