Freda Art

Eric Blair
Activist Post

In a free society the government is supposed to be open and transparent while the citizens enjoy privacy. What, then, do you call a society where the government is ultra secretive and all citizens are spied on by the state?

Establishment pundits are frantically attempting to make the NSA spy scandal story about whether the whistleblower is a hero or a traitor instead of debating the real issue — whether broad government spying on U.S. citizens violates their Constitutional rights.

This divide-and-distract strategy has long been used to protect the real criminals to a free society. Some officials are taking the extreme position that the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, committed treason by releasing proof of what most Americans already suspected, that their every move is being spied on by their government.

These officials, like Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), also happen to be the staunchest advocates for destroying the Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment in particular. Snowden broke a corporate disclosure contract; these officials broke their oath to the Constitution. Who are the real traitors here?

Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, claims that a leaked court document proving the government is colluding with communications companies to spy on Americans causes ‘irreversible harm’ to national security, and that the leaker should be prosecuted under theEspionage Act.

This is the same James Clapper that lied under oath to Congress when Senator Ron Wyden asked him in a Senate hearing this March, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

Bradley Manning is facing espionage charges for allegedly revealing war crimes to the public, while the actual war criminals walk around scot-free. There’s another case where a hacker who exposed a rapist may face more jail time than the rapist. How did our society become so inverted?

Despite the best efforts by the establishment to make whistleblowers out to dangerous criminals, the real criminals are those who are violating the rights of innocent people in a free society.

What we need now are not more whistleblowers, but more oath keepers to arrest these enemies of America.

Eric Blair
Activist Post

Give them an inch and they will take a mile. That is how power-hungry tyrants interpret any law.

The PATRIOT Act and the FISA court led to the blanket wiretapping of every American citizen and a PRISM lens into all Internet activity for the NSA.

Now we are supposed to trust this Peeping Tom government by giving them more authority for “cybersecurity” with the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA)?

As George W. Bush once eloquently said with his patented deer-in-the-headlights conviction “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, you can’t get fooled again, see.”

Oh, I bet the American people will get fooled again. But it’s not their fault. When authority figures tell bald-faced lies to the public, most people instinctively want to believe them because the majority of people are honest and perceive others to be honest.

Obama won the presidency promising to overturn Bush’s draconian destruction of civil liberties in the name of fighting terror. The majority of Americans took Obama at his word and gave him the benefit of the doubt. Until now.

Reuters reports today that the NSA spying scandal may “complicate” Obama’s agenda for cybersecurity:

Renewed concerns about the spy agency’s domestic surveillance programs could also hamper efforts to give it a broader role in defending the country’s infrastructure, and put pressure on lawmakers to update laws protecting online privacy, say congressional aides and defense and security experts.

“They’re going to make it harder to do the work that is now going on,” said former chief Pentagon weapons buyer Mike Wynne, who also served as Air Force secretary from 2005 to 2008.

Wynne said growing unease about domestic surveillance could have a chilling effect on proposed cyber legislation that calls for greater information-sharing between government and industry.

But this is laughable. The U.S. government already has been illegally using the authority in CISPAprior to it being codified into law. At least everything Hitler did was “legal” before he did it.

PRISM reportedly forces Internet companies to hand over information to the NSA and FBI. Some even allow a backdoor to their servers. This program has been in place for several years according to reports.

The only difference between the secretive PRISM project and CISPA is that under CISPA personal data will be given to the civilian Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon by communications companies instead of the NSA. Like that matters.

But even this is just window dressing for public consumption because Obama already has authorized these moves with the secret Presidential Policy Directive 20 and an Executive Order.

Presidential Directive 20 shows that the government is drawing up a target list for offensive cyber strikes overseas, and the Executive Order outlines the flow of illegally obtained data of online activity to the DHS, NSA, and other agencies.

Yes, the Pentagon already assumed the role of engaging in cyber war as part of their “operational domain” for “offensive operations”, again prior to any legal authority. In July 2011, the Pentagon announced ”The United States reserves the right, under the laws of armed conflict, to respond to serious cyber attacks with a proportional and justified military response at the time and place of our choosing.”

Their “authority” was later affirmed in the infamous 2012 NDAA which gave the U.S. military the right to launch a global offensive cyber war against perceived threats.

Section 954 of the NDAA titled Military Activities in Cyberspacereceived no debate in Congress as well as in the media. The section states clearly:

Congress affirms that the Department of Defense has the capability, and upon direction by the President may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace to defend our Nation, Allies and interests.

And thanks to whistleblowers we know that telecom companies have been cooperating with government spooks for years.

Significantly, all of this occurred without any public debate, probably because lawmakers understand that it’s a gross violation of the 4th Amendment which guarantees privacy to American citizens.

Indeed, the NSA issued a secret memo urging lawmakers to “rethink” the 4th Amendment. This recently declassified memo from 2001 reads:

The Fourth Amendment is as applicable to eSIGINT as it is to the SIGINT of yesterday and today. The Information Age will however cause us to rethink and reapply the procedures, policies and authorities born in an earlier electronic surveillance environment.

Is it any wonder why Americans no longer trust their government?

As President Obama said in his press conference defending the secret spying program: “If Americans don’t trust government, we’re going to have some problems.”

Yes, as Reuters reports, the Administration may have problems legalizing their illegal activity. And if the people are paying attention, this Administration may have even bigger problems than that.

On June 5, London’s Guardian reported part of it. “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily,” it headlined.

On June 6, a follow-up article headlined “NSA taps in to systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and others, secret files reveal.”

The Washington Post followed with its own report. It said the NSA and FBI “are tapping directly into the central servers of nine US Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to trace a person’s movements and contacts over time.”

Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple, and other online companies willingly cooperate with lawless government spying.

Doing so, in part, reflects old news. Institutional spying on Americans is longstanding. Previous articles discussed it. More on the Guardian articles below.

According to retired NSA/US Air Force/Naval Intelligence/Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence analyst-turned whistleblower Russell Tice:

What’s ongoing “is much larger and more systemic than anything anyone has ever suspected or imagined.”

It’s been widely known for years. Little was revealed publicly. Pervasive spying is much worse than suspected. Other media reports followed London’s Guardian revelations.

Few people knew before. Many more do now. A firestorm of public anger is needed to have any chance to stop it. Nothing less stands a chance. What follows remains to be seen. Based on post-9/11 extremism, expect worse ahead, not better.

All three branches of government are involved. They’re complicit in sweeping lawlessness. Congress is regularly briefly. Bipartisan leaders are fully on board. So are US courts.

Federal ones are most egregious. Right-wing extremists control them. America’s High Court is supremely pro-business. It’s profoundly unjust. It mocks judicial fairness.

It rubber stamps what demands rejection. It rejects what demands affirmation. It consistently serves wealth and power interests. So do Congress, Obama, and administration officials.

Populist ones don’t matter. Nor does constitutional law. Its inviolability is disregarded. It’s rendered null and void.

On June 5, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) headlined “Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans,” saying:

London’s Guardian “confirmed what EFF (and many others) have long claimed: the NSA is conducting widespread, untargeted, domestic surveillance on millions of Americans.”

This revelation should end, once and for all, the government’s long-discredited secrecy claims about its dragnet domestic surveillance programs.

It should spur Congress and the American people to make the President finally tell the truth about the government’s spying on innocent Americans.

Domestic spying is longstanding. Post-9/11, it’s been institutionalized. In 2002, Bush authorized it by presidential order. He did so secretly.

In December 2005, New York Times writers James Risen and Eric Lichtblau headlined “Bush Lets US Spy on Callers Without Courts,” saying:

He “secretly authorized (NSA) to eavesdrop on Americans and others to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.”

Mark Klein worked for AT&T for 22 years. In 2004, he retired. After doing so, he turned whistleblower. He revealed blueprints and photographs of NSA’s secret room inside the company’s San Francisco facility.

Three other whistleblowers submitted affidavits. They explained post-9/11 lawless NSA spying on millions of Americans. The FBI, CIA, Pentagon, state and local agencies operate the same way.

Spies “R” us defines US policy. America’s a total surveillance society. It’s unsafe to live in. Everyone is suspect unless proved otherwise.

The 2012 FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act renewed warrantless spying. It passed with little debate. On Sunday, December 30, 2012 Obama signed it into law. Doing so largely went unnoticed.

Warrantless spying remains law for another five years. Phone calls, emails, and other communications may be monitored secretly without court authorization.

Probable cause isn’t needed. So-called “foreign intelligence information” is sought. Virtually anything qualifies. Vague language is all-embracing.

Constitutional protections don’t matter. All major US telecommunications companies are involved. So are online ones. They have been since 9/11. Things now are worse than then.

One expert said what’s ongoing “isn’t a wiretap. It’s a country-tap.” It’s lawless. Congress has no authority to subvert constitutional provisions. Legislation passed has no legitimacy. Constitutional changes require amendments. More on that below.

The Patriot Act trampled on Bill of Rights protections. Doing so for alleged security doesn’t wash. Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment due process rights were compromised.

So were First Amendment freedom of association ones. Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable searches and seizures were violated. Unchecked sweeping surveillance followed.

So-called “sneak and peak” searches are conducted through “delayed notice” warrants, roving wiretaps, email tracking, as well as Internet and phone use.

Section 215 pertains to alleged suspects, real or contrived. It authorizes government access to “any tangible item.”

Included are financial records and transactions, education and medical records, phone conversations, emails, other Internet use, and whatever else Washington wants to monitor.

Individuals and organizations may be surveilled whether or not evidence links them to terrorism or complicity to commit it. In other words, everyone is fair game for any reason or none at all.

On May 15, 2012, Wired.com headlined “CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher.”

Virtually everything electronic is vulnerable. Devices with Internet connections for sure are. So are TVs, radios, electric clocks, car navigation systems, light switches, refrigerators, electric stoves, toasters, vacuum cleaners, and other wired items.

Before Petraeusgate, the former CIA chief said:

Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters – all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing.”

He added that household spy devices “change our notions of secrecy.” Former rules don’t apply. Modern technology permits anything goes.

London’s Guardian revealed telecom giant Verizon spying. A top secret April 25, 2013 orderauthorized it. It runs through July 19. It includes domestic and foreign calls.

NSA has access to every Verizon customer’s call history for nearly three months. If so ordered, spying may be extended indefinitely. Verizon is prohibited from disclosing what it’s doing publicly.

Information obtained includes all domestic and foreign calls, phone locations, time calls made, their duration, and other “identifying information.” Patriot Act Section 215 permits it.

What’s collected is called “metadata” or transactional information. It’s not limited to what’s included above. It’s not called communications. Individual warrants aren’t sought.

As discussed above, doing so is lawless. Congress has no authority to violate constitutional provisions. Compromising Fourth Amendment protections do so brazenly.

Verizon and AT&T cooperation with NSA and other US agencies isn’t unique. It’s virtually certain that all other major US telecom companies operate the same way. So do major online ones. They do so willingly, irresponsibly and lawlessly.

Post-9/11, sweeping surveillance became policy. What Bush began, Obama escalated. Privacy rights are systematically violated. EFF and other organizations filed suits to stop it.

In 2006, EFF’s Hepting v. AT&T was filed. It charged lawless company monitoring of private customer communications. Without their knowledge or approval, it supplies NSA with information they contain.

Whistleblower help provided documented proof. Nonetheless, right-wing courts are incorrigible. In June 2009, a federal judge dismissed Hepting and dozens other suits against telecoms.

In September 2008, EFF’s Jewel v. NSA was filed. It remains ongoing. It challenges lawless NSA spying. It uses documents former AT&T employee Mark Klein supplied.

In 2011, EFF filed an FOIA suit against the Justice Department. It did so for “records about the government’s use of Section 215.”

Obama’s the most lawless, secretive president in US history. So is his Justice Department. In Hepting, it claimed telecom immunity. In Jewel, it claims privileged state secrets.

In EFF’s FOIA suit, it maintains information sought is top secret. It operates extrajudicially. It turns constitutional provisions on their head. It does so secretly. It lies when confronted with facts.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

The New York Times reports that the Internet giants involved in the secret PRISM surveillance program agreed to cooperate with the government. The same companies have issued denials which some argue are actually cleverly worded attempts to obscure their involvement.

All of this comes in response to the reports exposing the NSA’s massive surveillance program known as PRISM which gives them access to the servers of some of the largest Internet companies which was quickly defended by Obama. The information about PRISM was released shortly after it was revealed that Verizon was secretly ordered to hand over all the records of U.S. phone calls in their system.

This slide shows when each company joined the PRISM program image credit: documents obtained by The Guardian

Now the New York Times reports that in some cases the companies actually changed their computer systems to make it more efficient and secure for the government to conduct surveillance.

These changes were made after a series of secret negotiations that “illustrate how intricately the government and tech companies work together, and the depth of their behind-the-scenes transactions.”

These were far from low-level discussions, according to people briefed on the discussions and one person who actually attended who was cited by the Times.

In recent months Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, traveled to Silicon Valley to meet with executives at Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Intel with the official aim of discussing the future of the Internet but the conversation went further.

A person who attended the meetings told the Times that they also discussed how the companies would work with the government on their intelligence-gathering.

The details revealed by the Times show how the companies that thoroughly denied any knowledge of a program where they provided “direct access” to their servers could say such a thing without outright lying.

The companies “drew a bright line between giving the government wholesale access to its servers to collect user data and giving them specific data in response to individual court orders. Each said it did not provide the government with full, indiscriminate access to its servers,” the New York Times reports.

The companies acknowledged that they do comply with Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests and other court orders, which is what the negotiations would fall under.

As Josh Constantine noted for TechCrunch, the language they used was quite clever indeed.

“Direct Access” didn’t mean no access. “Back door” didn’t mean no door. “Only in accordance with the law” didn’t mean PRISM is illegal. And you didn’t need to have heard of a codename to have participated. Larry, Zuck, you didn’t spell out your denials of the NSA’s data spying program in plain English, and now we know why. You were obligated to help the government in its spying, but were muzzled.”

“Larry” refers to Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page and “Zuck” refers to co-founder, chairman and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg. Both released statements in response to the PRISM news along with every other company named in the NSA presentation according to the Guardian.

Chris Soghoian, a tech expert and privacy researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union similarly explained to Foreign Policy that “the phrase ‘direct access’ connotes a very specific form of access in the IT-world: unrestricted, unfettered access to information stored on Google servers. In order to run a system such as PRISM, Soghoian explains, such access would not be required, and Google’s denial that it provided ‘direct access’ does not necessarily imply that the company is denying having participated in the program.”

Normally, the only people who have that kind of “direct access” to the servers of an Internet giant like Google would be Google engineers.

Soghoian similarly said that Google’s denial of setting up a “back door” could very well be accurate since a back door means a method of accessing a system that is neither documented nor known by the system’s owner.

“By denying that it set up a back door, Google is not denying that it worked with the NSA to set up a system through which the agency could access the company’s data,” Foreign Policy notes.

Similar to the point raised by Constantine, Foreign Policy notes that there is no reason to believe that the intelligence officials who reportedly worked with Google would use the actual codename of the program with them.

Even when Google says they provide “user data to governments only in accordance with the law,” there is reason to believe they aren’t lying.

PRISM as we know it currently is most likely within the bounds of the law, according to George Washington University Law School professor Orin Kerr.

It seems the cleverly worded responses have fooled many people into thinking they were denying any and all involvement in any program remotely resembling what we know about PRISM. Apparently that is not the case. A few deftly placed words can make a lot of difference.

I’d love to hear your opinion, take a look at your story tips and even your original writing if you would like to get it published. I am also available for interviews on radio, television or any other format. Please email me at Admin@EndtheLie.com

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This article first appeared at End the Lie.

Madison Ruppert is the Editor and Owner-Operator of the alternative news and analysis database End The Lie and has no affiliation with any NGO, political party, economic school, or other organization/cause. He is available for podcast and radio interviews. Madison also now has his own radio show on UCYTV Monday nights 7 PM – 9 PM PT/10 PM – 12 AM ET. Show page link here: http://UCY.TV/EndtheLie. If you have questions, comments, or corrections feel free to contact him at admin@EndtheLie.com

credit: documents obtained by The Washington Post

Madison Ruppert
Activist Post

Thought yesterday’s revelation of Verizon being ordered to hand over records for all U.S. calls to the National Security Agency (NSA) was bad? Think again.

Today documents were unveiled showing that the NSA and FBI are directly tapping into the servers of nine of the largest U.S. Internet companies since 2007 under a secret program called PRISM in order to mine data including e-mails, documents, connection logs, audio, video and photographs.

Given this newest information, it is important to note that the connection between the intelligence community and Google in particular has been thoroughly documented. Just last year a U.S. appeals court prevented the public from ever knowing the details of that relationship.

It also allows the NSA to collect search history, file transfers and even live chats, according to the document which the Guardian verified as authentic. Unsurprisingly, the FBI is involved as well, acting as an intermediary between other agencies and the tech giants.

The data allows analysts in the U.S. intelligence community to keep tabs on a target’s movements and contacts over times, according to The Washington Post.

The document is a 42-slide PowerPoint presentation classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies, apparently used to get intelligence operatives up to speed with what PRISM can do.

The document most notably says that the program is capable of “collection directly from the servers” which means that the intelligence community doesn’t have to jump through the pesky Constitutional loops.

The companies participating, in order of entry into the program are, “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, [and] Apple,” according to the document. Dropbox is listed as “coming soon” and the presentation states that the NSA seeks to “expand collection services from existing providers.”

The presentation itself states that the program is operated with the assistance of all the companies involved but, unsurprisingly, all of the companies that responded to the Guardian denied knowledge of PRISM or any program like it.

“Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully,” Google said in a statement. “From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data.”

Unsurprisingly, government officials would not comment for the story, according to The Washington Post.

The technology is clearly being heavily used. The presentation stated that PRISM data was cited in a whopping 1,477 articles last year alone.

“NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as the leading source of raw data, according to the presentation, making up almost 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

This latest revelation is quite troubling because it shows that the NSA, which is supposed to be engaged in foreign intelligence, is “reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil,” as The Washington Post put it.

However, the PRISM program isn’t as much a dragnet as the type of surveillance revealed yesterday.

The Post reports that under current rules, the agency doesn’t collect all of the data, though they are able to pull out anything they like.

Analysts access the Internet giants’ data stream from a web portal at Fort Meade where they key in search terms or “selectors” which are “designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s ‘foreignness.’”

When the Post calls it “not a very stringent test,” they are wildly understating the matter. The presentation states that analysts should consider U.S. content collected accidentally “nothing to worry about” and simply submit it for a quarterly report.

Indeed, even when no American is targeted directly, the NSA still collects massive amounts of information on Americans, something which they describe as “incidental.”

When the NSA is conducting surveillance on a suspected foreign spy or terrorist, they snap up everyone who happens to have crossed paths with the target online.

“Intelligence analysts are typically taught to chain through contacts two ‘hops’ out from their target, which increases ‘incidental collection’ exponentially,” the Post notes.

This means that the number of Americans caught in this sweeping surveillance method is likely much larger than one would initially suspect.

Perhaps even more troubling is that PRISM is growing rapidly and is hailed by the NSA as “one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses for NSA.”

The document reveals that in 2012 the number of communications obtained under PRISM increased by 248% along with a 131% increase in requests for Facebook data and 63% for Google.

The presentation claims that the NSA has overcome what they claim are shortcomings in theForeign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant system.

Since FISA requires individual warrants and supposedly requires confirmations that the parties targeted are outside of the U.S., the NSA claims the constraints “restricted our ‘home-field advantage.’”

“FISA was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them,” the presentation states. “It took a FISA court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States. There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek FISAs for all.”

Now the NSA “only reasonable suspicion that one of the parties was outside the country at the time of the records were collected by the NSA,” according to the Guardian.

Yet the secrecy surrounding the government’s surveillance programs is so pervasive that we don’t really know if the privacy safeguards are actually working.

“The problem is we here in the United States Senate and so the citizens we represent don’t know how well any of these safeguards actually work,” Sen. Christopher Coons (D-Del.) warned in the past.

“The law doesn’t forbid purely domestic information from being collected. We know that at least one FISA court has ruled that the surveillance program violated the law. Why? Those who know can’t say and average Americans can’t know,” Coons added.

“It’s shocking enough just that the NSA is asking companies to do this,” Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy said to the Guardian. “The NSA is part of the military. The military has been granted unprecedented access to civilian communications”

“This is unprecedented militarization of domestic communications infrastructure,” Jaffer said. “That’s profoundly troubling to anyone who is concerned about that separation.”

Yesterday, when I wrote, “One can only imagine what remains to be uncovered,” I really didn’t suspect we’d see something of this magnitude so soon.

I’d love to hear your opinion, take a look at your story tips and even your original writing if you would like to get it published. I am also available for interviews on radio, television or any other format. Please email me at Admin@EndtheLie.com

Please support our work and help us start to pay contributors by doing your shopping through our Amazon link or check out some must-have products at our store.

This article first appeared at End the Lie

NSA taps in to user data of Facebook, Google and others, secret files reveal

Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill
guardian.co.uk
June 7, 2013

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.

Read more

___________

David Petraeus At Bilderberg to Craft “Big Data” Spy Grid

Former CIA director helping to bolster same surveillance system that brought him down

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
June 7, 2013

Former CIA Director David Petraeus is in attendance at the 2013 Bilderberg Group conference to help construct the “big data” spy grid, which is set to become the new frontier of clandestine statecraft as Internet connectivity becomes ubiquitous.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Bilderberg’s official agenda for 2013lists one of the areas of discussion as, “How big data is changing almost everything,” a reference to how the “Internet of things” along with the ubiquitous growth of social media is transforming the world of surveillance and the ability to foresee and manipulate future events.

At almost the exact same time, aHomeland Security subcommittee in the United States will also be discussing “big data” and its implications in the context of social media.

Bilderberg’s effort to push the “big data” agenda ties in with the secretive organization’s close relationship with Google, which as we documentedis now merging with and taking over from Bilderberg in many aspects.

The discussion about “big data” is also likely to cover how social media can be used to launch more faux revolutions and social movements as it was in Egypt, which was aided in no small part by Google.

As we have documented, the Internet of things is the process of manufacturing every new product with a system that broadcasts wirelessly via the world wide web, allowing industry and the government to spy ubiquitously on every aspect of your existence.

Petraeus has previously hailed the “Internet of things” as a transformational boon for “clandestine tradecraft”. In other words, it will soon be easier than ever before to keep tabs on the population since everything they use will be connected to the web, with total disregard for privacy considerations. The spooks won’t have to plant a bug in your home or your vehicle, you will be doing it for them.

It’s ironic that Petraeus is helping bolster the very same surveillance system that brought him down last year when details emerged of his extra-marital affair.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer forInfowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.

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There’s a sense of urgency in the prepping community lately that is at an all-time high. Between the global elite warmongers, the impending financial collapse as the government makes plans to attach pension funds, the new viruses, Monsanto’s GMO seeds running amok and threatening the world’s food supply, and Big Food’s toxic food-like substances in the grocery stores with no regard for actual nutrition, it is clear that we are going downhill fast. The soothing ”everything-is-just-fine” propaganda is so blatant that even the most die-hard zombie is beginning to see that something is amiss and that a massive change is soon to take place.

Many of us have stocked our homes to the rafters with beans, rice, bullets, and band-aids. Each trip to the store adds more to our stockpiles as we try to get what we need before time runs out. Newbie preppers are feeling even more frantic, wondering how to prepare when each week it takes more money to put less in the grocery cart. (If you’re new to preparedness, here’s a little primer with some great links.)

With the situation looking more grim by the day, it is very clear that stockpiling is not enough. No matter how many cans of green beans you have stored away, one day they will run out. We have become so dependent on the “buy it as you need it” lifestyle that despite our food storage, there are still gaps that must be filled.

And the only way to fill these gaps is through that which is a step beyond prepping…self sufficiency.

Self sufficiency is defined as the ability to provide for oneself without the help of others. No amount of stockpiling gives you true self sufficiency. It is a combination of skills, supplies, attitudes and habits that mean the difference between a person with a great pantry and a true survivor.

Self-sufficiency is for…

• The day the grocery stores close their doors or become so expensive that people cannot afford to shop
• The day that the FEMA Camp gates open in only one direction
• The day that the banks go on an indefinite holiday, after draining depositor savings accounts and pension funds
• The day that electricity and heat on demand become so expensive that only the wealthy can afford them
• The day that medical care no longer exists for the average person, or is directed by government death panels
• The day that a natural disaster or false flag locks down the country and completely, irrevocably changes our way of life

The list could go on and on. These things are hurtling towards us and we must be ready. Self sufficiency, unlike prepping, doesn’t cost a lot of money – it’s about planning and acquiring basic skills and tools. It is about putting your plan into practice before you have no other option but to do so.

What would you do if you could never go to a store again? If you could never have utilities provided by a supplier again? What if you were truly on your own, forever?

For some situations, prepping just isn’t enough. If you don’t have plans for the following, you cannot consider yourself to be truly prepared.

Daisy Luther is a freelance writer and editor. Her website, The Organic Prepper, where this article first appeared, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca

If you had free reign over classified networks… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do?

God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms… I want people to see the truth … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public. – Quotes from an online chat attributed to Bradley Manning

On 3 June the trial of PFC Bradley Manning finally began. He will have spent over three years in prison. During his first year of incarceration the conditions Bradley was kept in amounted to torture and were condemned by the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez.

The American government has devoted great energy and resources to the persecution of Bradley Manning since his arrest in 2010 for releasing documents to WikiLeaks that exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is all part of President Obama’s war on whistleblowers that has led to his administration arresting more people under the 1917 Espionage Act than all of the previous governments put together. Up until Obama took office, the US government had only prosecuted three whistleblowers in 40 years. Now under Obama six people have/are being prosecuted for their whistleblowing activities.

The persecution of John Kiriakou, a former CIA intelligence analyst, who was sentenced to two-and-half years in prison for exposing torture as official US policy sums up the attitude of Obama’s government.

Obama’s government is trying to send a very clear message to both servicemen and women and those in the intelligence services. To those Americans he is saying don’t you dare release any document that might be critical of US foreign policy or we will come after you and put you in prison for a very long time.

Of course, this is not the only target in Obama’s sights. It is very clear from the pre-trial hearings that the military prosecutors want to send a message to journalists which is: if you have any contact with the enemies of America then you may be guilty of aiding the enemy and we will come after you also.

Journalist Alexa O’Brien has covered the Bradley Manning case from the start. As she points out, the persecution of Manning is one of the most important civil rights cases since 9/11. In her blogshe commented,’

At issue in the Manning trial is the danger posed to democracy and the rule of law by the government’s expanding control over information in the digital age; and the use of prejudicial prosecutions that turn whistle-blowing into treason and journalism into espionage or an act of war.’

It is not surprising that they have gone after Bradley Manning considering the revelations he allegedly made to WikiLeaks when he was serving in Iraq as an intelligence specialist. The documents released by WikiLeaks have opened a Pandora’s box of highly embarrassing and illegal activities committed by American forces. The ‘‘Iraq War” logs revealed that American armed forces routinely ignored the torture of suspects by the Iraqi security forces. Indeed, they often used torture themselves. They also revealed war crimes committed by American troops. The infamous video of an Apache attack helicopter shooting and killing 11 people in Baghdad in 2007 is probably the most famous revelation.

The Afghan war logs reveal a relentless catalogue of civilian killings by NATO forces, many of which are war crimes. Not surprisingly, most of these unlawful killings have not been investigated. The most infamous of which is the major scandal surrounding the NATO bombing of a village at Kunduz. This massacre of 140 civilians gained worldwide media coverage at the time.

The military trial that Bradley Manning will receive will not be open and transparent. Military judge Denise Lind had ruled that some sections of the trial will be closed to the public to protect classified material. She has also ruled that the testimony of 24 of the 150 witnesses for the prosecution will be heard in closed sessions of the court.

On 22 May a group of prominent journalists, that includes Julian Assange, filed a lawsuit that tries to force military judge Denise Lind to grant the public and press access to transcripts of the trial proceedings, the government’s filings and court orders.

Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Attorney Shayana Kadidal has commented,

If this lawsuit fails, Manning’s trial will take place under conditions where journalists and the public will be unable as a practical matter to follow what is going on in the courtroom. That ensures that any verdict will be fundamentally unfair …’

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! is one of the journalists bringing the lawsuit against military judge Denise Lind. She has warned:

Secret trials are commonplace in dictatorships, but have no place in this country. The Obama administration conducts unconstitutional dragnet surveillance of journalists to uncover protected sources, and targets whistle blowers with unprecedented use of the espionage act. Access to court documents and proceedings in the court martial of Bradley Manning is vital to the public’s right to know to what lengths their government will go to keep secret their conduct of wars and occupations abroad.

This is one of the the most important trials of the last decade, yet it is largely ignored by the mainstream media in the United States. Internationally, support is growing for Bradley Manning. In the UK he was recently voted The Guardian’s Person of the Year by readers.

In early December three Nobel Peace Prize winners, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire and Adolfo Perez Esquivel called upon the American people to stand up for the whistleblower who has done so much to defend their democratic rights. Their letter of support for Bradley Manning concludes:

‘We Nobel Peace Prize laureates condemn the persecution Bradley Manning has suffered, including imprisonment in conditions declared “cruel, inhuman and degrading” by the United Nations…. In the conflict in Iraq alone, more than 110,000 people have died since 2003, millions have been displaced and nearly 4,500 American soldiers have been killed. If Bradley Manning released the documents, as the prosecution contends, we should express to him our gratitude for his efforts toward accountability in government, informed democracy and peace’.

Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the top secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, that exposed the destructive and immoral nature of America’s war in Vietnam, has made an appeal for people all over the world to support Bradley Manning:

We need money to support ongoing grassroots efforts—including rallies, petitions, and ads. Most importantly, however, we need to continue fully funding Bradley’s legal defense efforts—including possible appeals, all the way up to the US Supreme Court, if need be. The future of truth-telling is at stake, and a young man’s selfless, heroic act of patriotism deserves our support.

To learn more about Bradley Manning’s case or to get involved, visit the Bradley Manning Support Network website.

See also 11 Articles on Bradley Manning Here

Brandon Bryant stands with a Predator drone in Nevada. He says that as an operator he was troubled by the physical disconnect between his daily routine and the violence and power of the faraway drones.

Dees Illustration

Jon Rappoport
Activist Post

In the 1950s, before television had numbed minds and turned them into jelly, there was a growing sense of: the Individual versus the Corporate State.

Something needed to be done. People were fitting into slots. They were surrendering their lives in increasing numbers. They were carving away their own idiosyncrasies and their independent ideas.

Collectivism wasn’t merely a Soviet paradigm. It was spreading like a fungus at every level of American life. It might fly a political banner here and there, but on the whole it was a social phenomenon and nightmare.

Television then added fuel to the fire. Under the control of psyops experts, it became, as the 1950s droned on, the facile barrel of a weapon:

“What’s important is the group, the family, peers. Conform. Give in. Bathe in the great belonging…”

When this medium also broadcasts words and images of belonging and the need to belong, it’s engaged in revolutionary social engineering.

The very opposite of living as a strong, independent, and powerful individual is the cloying need to belong. And the latter is what television ceaselessly promotes.

This is no accident. After World War 2, psychological-warfare operatives turned their attention to two long-term strategies: inculcating negative stereotypes of distant populations, to rationalize covert military plans to conquer and build an empire for America; and disseminating the unparalleled joys of disappearing into a group existence.

When, for example, television promotes “family,” it’s all on the level of fictitiously happy, desperate, yearning, last-chance, problem-resolving, melted-down, trance-inducing, gooey family.

This isn’t, by any stretch, an actual human value. Whether it’s the suburban-lawn family in an ad for the wonders of a toxic medical drug, or the mob family going to the mattresses to fend off a rival, it’s fantasy time in the land of mind control.

Television has carried its mission forward. The consciousness of the Individual versus the State has turned into: love the State. Love the State as family.

The political Left of the 1960s, who rioted against Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, at the Century Plaza Hotel, and ended his hopes to run again in 1968…that Left is now all about the State and its glories and gifts. The collective.

A great deal of the television coverage of mass shootings is now dedicated to bringing home the spurious message: we all grieve together and heal together.

In the only study I have been able to find, Wictionary partially surveys the scripts of all television shows from the year 2006, to analyze the words most frequently broadcast to viewers in America.

Out of 29,713,800 words, including the massively used “a,” “an,” “the,” “you,” “me,” and the like, the word “home” ranks 179 from the top. “Mom” is 218. “Together” is 222. “Family” is 250.

This usage reflects an unending psyop.

Are you with the family or not? Are you with the group, the collective, or not? Those are the blunt parameters.

“When you get right down to it, all you have is family.” “Our team is really a family.” “You’re deserting the family.” “You fight for the guy next to you.” “Our department is like a family.” “Here at Corporation X, we’re a family.” “Above all, this is a community.”

The committee, the group, the company, the sector, the planet, the family.

The goal? Submerge the individual and tie him inexorably to a group.

Individual achievement, imagination, creative power? Not on the agenda. Something for the dustbin of history.

All you need to do is fall into the arms of a group. After that, everything is settled. You can care exclusively about the collective.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World: “‘Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines’! The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. ‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history.’”

George Orwell, 1984: “The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”

Television seeks to emphasize one decision: inclusion or exclusion. Exclusion is portrayed as the only condition that is possible if you aren’t part of the group. And exclusion carries the connotation of exile, excommunication, and criminality.

The soap opera is the apotheosis of television. The long-running characters in Anytown are irreversibly enmeshed in one another’s lives. There’s no escape. And with that comes mind-numbing meddling.

“I’m just trying to help you realize we all love you (in chains).”

“Your father, rest his soul, would never have wanted you to do this to yourself…”

“How dare you set yourself apart from us. Who do you think you are?”

Of the three elite network anchors, the one who fictionally conveys the sense that “we’re all in this together” is Brian Williams (NBC). He’s also the number-one-rated anchor on the evening news.

Am I saying that no groups anywhere can achieve important objectives? Of course not. I’m talking about a state of mind wherein the individual surrenders his own life-force.

There is an indissoluble link between the artifact called “we” and “limited context.” This is precisely what television news gives to the public. With each story that fails to explore the deeper players and their motives, the news speaks to a collective consciousness, which is to say, the sharing of a fabrication.

What “we” shares is foreshortened perspective, lies, misdirection, and superficial gloss. Those qualities are built for the group, and the group digests them automatically.

The group needs something to focus on, to claim is of the greatest significance. So it settles on those deceptions fed to it. It works with those deceptions, rearranges them, voices them, troubles itself over them, massages them, sculpts them, complains about them, praises them.

Retired psyops specialist Ellis Medavoy once said to me, “I think we’ve reached the point where the collective doesn’t even need a leader anymore. It can take all its cues from television.”

For some people, “we” has a fragrant scent, until they get down in the trenches with it. There they discover odd odors and postures and mutations. They find self-distorted creatures running around doing bizarre things with an exhibitionist flair.

The night becomes long. The ideals melt. The level of intelligence required to inhabit this cave-like realm is lower than expected, much lower.

Perceptions formerly believed to be the glue that holds this territory together begin to crack and fall apart, and all that is left is a grim determination to see things through.

As the night moves into its latter stages, some participants come to know that all their activity is taking place in a chimerical universe.

It is as if reality has been constructed to yield up gibberish.

Whose idea was it to become deaf, dumb, and blind in the first place?

And then perhaps one person in the cave suddenly says: I EXIST.

That’s starts a cacophony of howling.

The spell is being broken.

People dimly wonder whether, beyond this night, there is another whole world where individuals live, where some of them do, in fact, join together, but not in a desolate way.

Where individuals finally separate from the sticky substance of coordinated defeat.

The “we” that television gives us is a fiction designed to make the independent individual extinct. That is its job.

In the aftermath of the 1963 assassination of JFK and the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the covert theme was the same: a lone individual did this.

A lone individual, detached from the group, did this. See what happens when the group is rejected? Lone individuals are really no different than individuals. They are people who left the fold. They wandered from the communal hearth. They thought for themselves. This is what happens when individuals assert their independent existence. They become killers. They lose their way. They break the sacred bond. They are heretics who fall away from the collective.

In 1995, after the Oklahoma City Bombing, President Bill Clinton made a speech to the nation. He rescued his presidency by essentially saying, “Come home to the government. We will protect you and save you.”

He framed the crime in those terms. The individual versus the collective.

Of course, he was an individual who had chosen to be a mouthpiece and a middleman for the elite players who run the collective from above. But that went unnoticed.

The strongest argument against the free and independent and powerful individual, and in favor of the collective is, simply: the collective has advanced to such a degree that there is no going back; the individual can’t win; the battle is over.

All I can say is, I’ve never accepted an argument on that basis, and never will. The liberation of the individual has existed as an aim since the dawn of time on this planet. That aim will not vanish.

Why? Because underneath all the programs for mind control, there is, obviously, something to control. Otherwise, why bother? The deeper you go in discovering what “must be controlled,” the more freedom and power and imagination you encounter in the individual.

There is no limit. These three qualities are endless.

It may not seem so. It may seem that all the propaganda about the inherent weakness and smallness of the human being is accurate. But that is a false dream.

The reality is far different.

A million psyops won’t change that reality.

Finally, here is a 1980 quote from author Philip K Dick. He is writing poignantly about another titan of science fiction, Robert Heinlein. The relevance of his words to the subject of this article? There are probably a number of interpretations. I won’t try to flesh it out. I’ll leave it to you to decide:

Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him—one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don’t agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn’t raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to the haircut. He knows I’m a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love.

Okay, I can’t resist giving you one more from Philip Dick. I don’t agree with the “motive” part of the quote, but everything else? Perfect.

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

The question is, in gaining freedom from these pseudo-realities, does the process happen for everyone at once, or is it one individual at a time? The answer is clear, and it tells us a great deal about the illusion of the collective.

RELATED ACTIVIST POST ARTICLE:
10 Modern Methods of Mind Control

Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed and Exit From the Matrix, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

___________

The attempt to destroy the individual

Jon Rappoport
Prison Planet.com
May 28, 2013

“What is finished is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being that’s finished. It’s every single one of you out there that’s finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It’s a nation of some two hundred odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods.” — Howard Beale, in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film,Network

But that was only a movie. Who cares about that? You go into a theater, sit there in the dark for a couple of hours, walk out, and think about something else.

For several years now, I’ve been writing about the decline of the individual. The wipeout.

Every time I write an article on this subject, I receive suggestions. I should go back and re-read Marx. I need to understand the difference between “communal, communitarian, community, communist.” I should research worker-owned businesses. What about trans-substantial transpersonal sub-brain algorithmic psychology? How about the pygmies? Ego? Superego? Id?

I appreciate these and other remarks, but I’m talking about the individual, about Self, beyond any construct, beyond citizenship, beyond membership, beyond sociology or anthropology or archeology.

The individual is enshrined in various political documents, but his rights don’t originate there. Neither does courage nor imagination.

I’ve laid out the enormous psyop designed to submerge the individual in unconscious goo. This psyop depends on the repetition of words like: unity, love, caring, community, family. And phrases like “we’re all in this together.”

The individual is characterized as: lone, outsider, selfish,greedy, inhumane, petty. Turn him into an exile, excommunicated from the great body of humanity.

Here, in the usual prose, is a familiar formulation of the grand psyop: “We can no longer afford the luxury of thinking of ourselves as individuals. The stakes are too high. Finally, we must all come together and realize our presence on this planet is a shared experience. The decimation of our resources, through hatred and divisive behavior, the denial of love and community, the cold greed and excessive profit-making, the whole range of social and political injustices—all this can ultimately be laid at the door of the individual who refuses to join the rest of humanity…”

Is this manifesto valid? It’s a deception, BECAUSE it’s aimed at making the individual extinct.

And once that happens, the collective, managed by Globalist princes, will have a clear path to the control of Earth, at the expense of the rest of us. And the cruelties we now witness will pale in comparison to what is in store for us.

“When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse…The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause…Collective unity is not the result of the brotherly love of the faithful for each other. The loyalty of the true believer [who surrenders Self] is to the whole — the church, party, nation — and not to his fellow true believer. True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.” — Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951

Wait. Isn’t that a bit harsh? Isn’t that too “critical and negative?” Where is the cosmic share-and-care we need to spread like butter over the whole universe? I mean, Eric Hoffer was a wonderful writer, and he was a working man, a longshoreman for his whole life, so we should admire him, but today’s prophets are wired directly into the Unity that will save us all automatically—like a toaster popping up with toast every time…right?

On some mid-west college campus, a wide-eyed kid of 19, full of hope and optimism, is studying political science. His professor is running down the catalog of stunning injustices that populate far-off regions of the planet.

The boy wants to help. His professor gives him the name of a humanitarian group that runs operations in Africa. The boy, in some sort of “personal crisis,” drops out of school and signs on with the group.

Little does he know that the charity he is now working with in Africa has ties to USAID, which in turn is a solid CIA front. The real mission of the charity, unknown to most or all of its members, is gathering information that can be used as intelligence.

Under the banner of justice, help, hope, and unity of all peoples, the charity is providing actionable intell to CIA-backed “rebel forces” who are carrying out assassinations and bombings in advance of a political coup.

The coup will pave the way for new deals with multinational scum, organized as corporations, to enter the scene and plunder natural resources and labor at more formidable levels.

Five years later, the boy leaves the charity and returns to the US. He is confused, looking for another group in which he can submerge himself. He’s hooked on groups…

The naïve have given up the ghost on their own independent existence. That is the key.

Think of some of the messages of recent pathetic presidents. Bush the Elder: “Kinder, gentler.” Clinton: “I feel your pain.” Bush 2: “No child left behind.” Obama: “We’re all in this together.”

Judging by these presidents’ murderous actions, it’s clear they were selling unity and caring and togetherness as cover stories for oppressive business as usual.

The op? Make the individual extinct, present him as a useless and dangerous and outmoded construct. Then, whatever real unity that might exist between individuals will vanish, because the population will take on the shape of a coagulated mass melted down into a cosmic glob of androidal harmony.

Artists have warned about all this. Their so-called supporters say, “Oh yes, he was a wonderful writer. Misunderstood, of course, but brave in the face of utter rejection.” The usual claptrap. Point is, these gushing advocates conveniently and easily forget what the artists actually wrote.

Here is another reminder from an Outsider who was glad to be outside. He was a hero to some. He was reviled by many.

“A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence. Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus…Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.”

“After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”

“There is simply no room left for ‘freedom from the tyranny of government’ since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.”

The author? William S. Burroughs. But not to worry, he was crazy. Of course he was. He didn’t profess utter loyalty to the mass of humanity. He didn’t prostrate himself before “the greater good.” He didn’t preach unity and togetherness.

He was an individual. Therefore, he is obsolete. A cherished memory of a time now wiped from the mind. Now we are all dancing and marching in the psyop.

Here’s another psyop and cultural theme: the distortion of money and the free market.

The psyop goes this way: The making of $$ is a religious event comparable to the arrival of Jesus or the appearance of the Great Buddha. Indeed, isn’t Christmas the season measured by consumer sales?

A life justified is a life of the bottom-line cash register, a poem to make Shakespeare turn pale with envy.

It doesn’t matter what a product is. If it sells, it must be good. It must mean something profound.

Nail polish, a new plastic toy, a little robot that sings songs—they’re Walt Whitman and Michangelo and Bach because they jumped off store shelves.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are geniuses because they and their companies amassed billions. It has to be so.

The team that put together Goofy Bird III, the summer blockbuster hit, are the Chaucers of our time. The box office proved it.

What product makes more money than any other? War. Therefore, Jesus wore a white leisure suit and played golf with generals and made deals for weapons systems.

“If a young man or woman today wants to express his true individuality and succeed with other like-minded individuals who have no fear of failure, the two businesses to go into are war and banking. My father told me that, and it’s stood me in good stead all these years. It’s the apotheosis of America…”

An artist named Paddy Chayefsky, in his film, Network, covered this waterfront pretty well:

“You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and You Will Atone!”

Hail to the collective, managed from the top. Ah, but as I said, Network was just a movie.

Who cares about American artists? They need monuments and grants here and there, if they’re still alive, but…taking them seriously? Who would want to do that? They’re just…INDIVIDUALS.

Who would want to keep the individual alive, especially the free, independent, and creative individual? We can learn all we need about that by listening to TED lectures!

Here is another quote from an American artist. This one is REALLY not in the politically correct mode. I mean, how dare he!:

“Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with you—MYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am.” — Henry Miller, Black Spring, 1936

And this! From the most celebrated American poet of all! Is this what he really wrote?

“I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself/And what I assume you shall assume/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you/I loafe and invite my soul/I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass/…Creeds and schools in abeyance…I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked…The smoke of my own breath/Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine…The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides/The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.” — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, I, II, VI & LII

A celebration of self, and self expanded out into limitless dimensions?

And this is is our real poet laureate?

Something must be wrong.

Yes, the individual, the self—these individual artists—far too messy, too uneven, too unpredictable, too complex to fit into a scheme of the future in which we’ll all be subsumed in a cosmic order.

No, the individual, the self, must be shaved and carved so we can all meld together in a simplified enlightenment.

Here, from the universally acclaimed author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville, another quote that sticks out from the great uniform mass of group-think:

“There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag, — that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.”

There is no doubt; these Individuals are too thorny, too different—and even different from each other. How can we build a world of unity and unified enlightenment if we let them in the door?

We must erase the memory that these people ever existed. We need to cut down space and time, leave them out, and outfit a new continuum so it will accept only the brainwashed and reduced and harmonized desires of the collective.

Yes. That’s it.

Let’s cause everyone to accept one of two things. We are either “all in this together forever,” or money is the supreme and final god of all time and space. Those are the two choices. They both flatten out the soul and prepare it for the endless gray day.

The Individual must be put into permanent exile. We can’t even say what he is. We can’t define him. We can’t hold him within borders. We can’t know what he’ll do.

Sometimes he’s up, sometimes he’s down, sometimes he’s sideways. Sometimes he embraces the whole cosmos, sometimes he’s alone in a room.

The new world can’t have him. For sake of the coming glory, he has to exit.

The Great Psyop hath spoken.

So, you see, when it comes to freedom, I’m not talking about columns and columns of people marching in one direction, most of them moving ahead together, and a few dropping out and scattering. I’m not talking about a billion androids, among whom a few thousand defect.

I’m not talking about androids or columns of marchers at all. I’m talking about Self. The individual apart from any coordinated picture, apart from any tedious idea about what a human being is.

I don’t care whether he chooses to live in a one-room apartment in New York or a commune in Georgia. I don’t care whether he votes Republican or Democrat or the Party of Golden Lucifer. I don’t care about any of those distinctions, because they all proceed from some horrendous and mutilated idea, some shrunken desiccated idea of what the Self IS in the first place.

“Well, we’re really all the same, so the choices a person has aren’t that important…”

We’re really all the same AFTER the great curtain has lowered on the individual and his psyche and his imagination and his daring. Yes, THEN we’re all the same. And then it doesn’t matter what the individual thinks or does, or whether he goes left or right or stays down the middle. THEN he begins to concoct systems and counter-systems and parochial visions he wants to impose on everyone else.

The truth is, we’re all different, astonishingly different. So different, in fact, that left to our own devices, over a long enough span of time, how each one of us would express his deepest thoughts and inventions would make the world into a completely different place.

The individual, the Self, isn’t just a little different or moderately different or quite different. The individual is a revolution all his own, a living breathing revolution.

He can become and identify with any other thing or creature in the universe—or not. He can think with seventeen brains and walk on eight legs if he wants to. He can be Self inventing more Self. He can destroy all forms and shapes of slavery—most importantly his own.

He can love and he can hate. He can experience and create emotions that have never been dreamed of. He can dance with the angels on the head of a pin or drift off past the stars.

He knows freedom is real, and he doesn’t have the slightest interest in interfering with another’s freedom.

This is what political and social movements are FOR: to establish enough freedom for the individual, any individual, so that he can then, if he wants to, become what he is, which is to say, invent his existence entirely according to his own fecund imagination. It will not be a copy of anyone else’s existence. It will not even be close.

After enough time has elapsed, it will be astonishing.

I know many people who believe they are already free and are already living life exactly the way they want to. This is preposterous. At a superficial level, yes. But beyond that, there are oceans of potential expression and invention they haven’t begun to fathom. If by “free” they mean relatively unencumbered by outside forces, but locked down tight as a drum from the inside, then yes, they are free, and good luck to them.

I’ve quoted artists in this essay because I want to impart at least some sense of how different we are from each other. This doesn’t mean we can’t bridge the gulf; of course we can. In fact, it becomes far easier when each of us is speaking with a Voice uncoupled from the “wisdom” of this joke of a society in which we currently live.

The ultimate and permanent fusion of all things is a myth and fairy tale. It’s a fairy tale bought by people who have never ventured off the reservation to discover and invent their own Voice.

If all this is true, then why do I write about the crimes of the medical cartel, the crimes of Monsanto, the corrosive destruction wrought by television? Why bother with any of this? Because I’m for authentic movements to end these crimes. The mafias of this world are out to gain as much control as possible…and finally and ultimately, this means a war against the freedom of every individual. It means writing the individual and his enormous untapped potential out of existence.

When the android-uniformity of all individuals is being sold as marvelous unity, that needs to be pointed out. When millions of people believe uniqueness=uniformity=unity, that’s more Orwellian than Orwell, and it needs to be pointed out.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails atwww.nomorefakenews.com

Related posts:

1. 48% See Government Today As A Threat to Individual Rights
2. Who is this person? Individual seen walking on roof directly overhead as bomb goes off
3. Down in the psyche of the individual, there still burns a flame
4. Hayek: “Emergencies Have Always Been the Pretext on Which the Safeguards of Individual Liberty Have Eroded”
5. Congressional Report Casts Doubt on Constitutionality of Obamacare’s Individual Mandate

This article was posted: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 at 4:23 am

Dylan Charles
Activist Post

This past Saturday, May 25th, 2013, millions of people worldwide publicly protested against Monsanto, the corporation that has become the driving force and the figurehead behind the effort to monopolize control of food and to genetically modify staple crops to become dependent on toxic chemicals. This may have been the largest ever unified protest against a single company, which is a monumental achievement for the movement against GMO’s, against seed patents and for the labeling of foods and products made with genetically modified ingredients.

Protesting against Monsanto is an important and symbolic act, and does wonders to energize the movement for food and farm freedom. However, Monsanto is only part of a larger problem plaguing the world today. In these times we are witnessing a worldwide assault against food sovereigntyfrom many angles that goes far beyond the effects of a single corporation. Additionally, public awareness of this cause is still remarkably under realized, as the most people seem content to consume anything packaged and placed on a store shelf.

To wrap our heads around the magnitude of the problem we are facing when confronting the seed giants, here’s a list of things working against those of us who wish to see an end to the domination of our food and seed supply by companies that are willing to pollute, poison, lie and manipulate to gain control over something we ALL need every single day. Food.

• Monsanto is one of many – There are many other seed and chemical corporations working to bastardize our food supply and create dependence on chemicals for growing food. Dow, Pioneer, BASF, and Syngenta are just a few. Additionally, there are the grocers and supply chains who choose to bring genetically modified to consumers.
• Government complicity and collusion – Our present form of government encourages the union of business and law-making. From a revolving-door policy of government appointments that puts major players from these corporations into the highest offices of governmental regulatory agencies, to the treasonous act of allowing corporations to write policy and legislation, government itself stands as the biggest culprit in the war against our right to natural, unadulterated, and un-patented foods. This has recently become overwhelmingly evident with the passage of the Monsanto protection act.
• Media complicity – Once again, the mainline media, sponsored in part by the companies listed above, remains almost completely absent on this issue. Save for the coverage byRussia Today, a handful of local journalists and the growing independent media, there was nary a mention of this worldwide protest, and it certainly did not get the coverage that this issue warrants. It is clear that true journalism has died and the public has no voice amongst the big players in national media.
• A social climate of avarice – Monsanto stock value has risen 40% in the last yearalone, proving that Monsanto’s plan to reap enormous profit by sacrificing public health is working rather well. Assuming that their main motive for developing GMO’s while attempting to restrict the public’s access to information about GMO’s is purely money related, Monsanto seems to have discovered the right formula for success, even in the face of widespread public opposition to genetically modified foods and their inherent dangers to human health and the environment. Most people, not just the corporate board of Monsanto, still consider the bottom line to be of greater importance even their own health and are willing to ignore overwhelming evidence that GM foods wreak havoc on human health. Most people willingly discard the long term potential dangers of this in order to reap short term financial gain. This speaks doubly of our willingness to remain blind to the truth, and our capacity to be duped by the lie of money and profit.
• An atmosphere of apathy, denial, and ignorance – Let’s face it, many people still, even when informed, continue to ignore the dangers of consuming genetically modified foods and foods heavily doused with pesticides and herbicides. This is very important to the battle against Monsanto because without a concerned and informed citizenry, the majority will find it more convenient to eat whatever is on front of them and take no action to stop this. It takes awareness, care and a sense of self-preservation to attempt to avoid harmful foods, and the general public is simply not yet conscious enough about their personal health and well-being to give a hoot about participating in a David vs. Goliath struggle against very powerful companies and colluding governments.
• An atmosphere of resentment toward protest – The American propaganda machine has succeeded in demonizing dissent and ridiculing protest, so much so, that protest as a form of realizing political change has all but been neutered. For example, the largest worldwide protest that ever occurred was in 2003 against the building invasion of Iraq. The media largely ignored it and the end result has been 10+ years of conflict and destruction in Iraq and the complete decimation of the global anti-war movement. The powers that be now know all too well that street protest as a form of political action is useless, and therefore, any attempt to persuade or derail an entity like Monsanto by taking to the streets and waving signs is considered a joke the power brokers in our society.

A hard look at reality tells us that this behemoth is not going to fall without a major, fundamental shift in how people look at the world around them, and how they view their own personal health. That time may very well come before too long, but it is likely to be a result of some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a staged world food shortage, and not the result of a public demonstration of anger toward the people who are most involved in bastardizing our health and controlling our food. This is quickly becoming a very real battle of survival for ordinary people.

Until such a shift does occur, it is paramount that activists and informed citizens move this struggle into their daily lives and make regular commitments to avoid GMO’s, inform others, and develop personal food sovereignty by becoming more attached to local and personalized food systems.

Activist Post contributing author Daisy Luther shares some simple insight into how the individual can personalize this struggle:

Print off some labels and put them in the grocery store. Organize your own pickets and hand out flyers in front of the grocery store, letting people know what they’re buying. Go to farmers markets and support your local growers. Sow the seeds of revolution by growing as much of your own food as possible. Most of all, vote with your wallet and don’t buy ANYTHING that puts money into the pockets of companies that support GMOs or that fought against California’s Proposition 37, which would have called for the labeling of GMOs.

So, Monsanto, did you hear that?

People en masse are waking up and taking action and the movement against seed patents and GM food is growing. In addition to seeing more protests over your unethical actions you can expect a growing number of people to subvert your model of food production by taking on the responsibility of growing their own food and supporting local organic growers. You can expect more farmers to wake up and abandon your products as the true effects of using your modified seed become apparent. You can expect a growing movement of boycott against your products, and the food manufacturers and retailers who support you and sell your unnatural GM foods. You can expect a more resilient effort to stop you dead in your tracks.

We know the score. We know the endgame. We know the danger you represent to our children and future. We know it won’t be easy, but we also know that acquiescence to your plan is not an option that we are willing to entertain.

Dylan Charles is a student and teacher of Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi and Qi Gong, a practitioner of Yoga and Taoist esoteric arts, and an activist and idealist passionately engaged in the struggle for a more sustainable and just world for future generations. He is the editor of WakingTimes.com, the proprietor of OffgridOutpost.com, a grateful father and a man who seeks to enlighten others with the power of inspiring information and action. His remarkable journey of self-transformation is a testament to the power of the will and the persistence of the human spirit. He may be contacted atwakingtimes@gmail.com.

Anthony Freda Art

Stephen Lendman
Activist Post

His doublespeak duplicity reflects the last refuge of a scoundrel. He’s the worst in recent memory. Perhaps the worst ever. Forked tongue rhetoric can’t disguise it.

Throughout his tenure, he governed lawlessly. He’s done so at home and abroad. He spurns rule of law principles and other democratic values.

Nothing suggests change. Business as usual continues. War on humanity is policy. Rogue leaders govern that way. Obama threatens everyone.

On May 23, he spoke at Washington’s National Defense University. He defended what he urged changing four years earlier. More on his Thursday address below.

The documents that we hold in this very hall – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights – these are not simply words written into aging parchment.

They are the foundation of liberty and justice in this country, and a light that shines for all who seek freedom, fairness, equality, and dignity around the world.

(O)ur government made a series of hasty decisions.

(O)ur government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.

(W)e set (aside fundamental) principles as luxuries that we could no longer afford.

In other words, we went off course. (Americans) called for a new approach – one that rejected torture and one that recognized the imperative of closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

We must act, he said, “with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process; in checks and balances and accountability.”

(D)ecisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach.

He called doing so “neither effective nor sustainable.”

He pledged change. He said he took steps to prohibit torture. He ordered Guantanamo closed, he claimed.

He made other high-minded promises. He “swore an oath to uphold the Constitution,” he said. He systematically spurned it. He did so across the board. He represents the worst of rogue leadership.

His Thursday address reflected same old, same old. It was beginning-to-end demagogic boilerplate. We’ve heard it throughout his tenure. He repeats it ad nauseam.

Promises made are broken. Defending the indefensible doesn’t wash. CODEPINK Women for Peace co-founder Medea Benjamin challenged him.

She interrupted his speech. She did so several times. She called on him to close Guantanamo, release cleared detainees, and stop killer drone attacks.

“Will you apologize for the thousands of Muslims that you killed,” she asked? “Will you compensate the families of innocent victims?”

Can you tell the Muslims that their lives are as precious as our lives?

Can you take the drones out of the hands of the CIA?

Can you stop (drone) strikes that are killing people on the basis of suspicious activity?

You are commander in chief! You can close Guantanamo today! You can release all cleared detainees.

It’s been 11 years. Abide by the rule of law. You’re a constitutional lawyer.

Speaking truth to power has a price. Benjamin was forcibly removed. She was detained. She was interrogated by Secret Service, military and FBI personnel. She was then released.

Asked why she challenged Obama, she said:

We have been so disappointed with Obama. We expected him to to make serious changes like taking drones out of the hands of the CIA, stopping the signature strikes, apologizing to innocents who have been killed, families of the innocent, and announcing that he, as Commander-in-Chief, would close Guantanamo, so when he did not I felt compelled to speak out.

Obama defended drone strikes. He did so disingenuously. Extrajudicial killing is lawless. Weasel words fell short of explaining his failure to close Guantanamo. What he said didn’t wash.

He lied. He blamed Congress for his own transgression. He bears full responsibility. He can close Guantanamo today. He can do so with a stroke of his pen.

As president and commander in chief, he’s fully authorized to do so. Congress has no say. He can order all uncharged prisoners released. Indefinite detention is lawless.

He claimed a nonexistent terror threat. The only ones are those he and complicit allies invent. They’ve done so throughout his tenure. They continued what Bush officials began.

In 2009, Obama promised change. He spurned what he pledged to uphold. He did what core supporters thought impossible. He exceeded the worst of his predecessor.

He turned truth on its head. He claimed extrajudicial murder is legal. On 9/11, America was attacked, he said. Doing so was state-sponsored terrorism. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were wrongfully blamed.

Days later Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) was introduced. Congress passed it near unanimously. Bush signed it into law. America’s “war on terror” began.

Police state laws were enacted. Multiple direct and proxy wars were launched. They’re lawless. They target humanity. They remain ongoing. Obama continues what he promised to stop.

Rule of law principles don’t matter. Diktat authority is policy. Obama’s weasel words belie his actions. His promises aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. He broke every major one made.

Nothing ahead suggests change. Straightaway in office he promised Guantanamo closure. Nothing whatever’s been done to do so.

Innocent victims remain imprisoned. Indefinite detention is policy. So are lawless military commissions. America maintains a global gulag. Extraordinary renditions fill it. Torture continues.

Drone killing is prioritized. More of the same is planned. No one’s secure anywhere. US citizens are vulnerable. Summary judgment is policy. Attacks can occur anywhere. US soil is unsafe. There’s no place to hide.

Secrecy prevents public disclosure. Promised transparency’s nonexistent. What’s most important continues out of sight and mind. Media scoundrels suppress what demands highlighting.

Obama reflects the worst of rogue leadership. War on terror policy continues. It does so when no threat exists. It’s lawless and unconscionable.

Obama’s heading America for full-blown tyranny and ruin. He threatens humanity. Doublespeak duplicity reflects it. His speech didn’t surprise. Same old, same old remains policy. Nothing he said suggests otherwise.

Following his address, the Center for Constitutional Rights responded as follows:

(U)nless (Obama) takes immediate steps to resume transfers and ultimately close (Guantanamo), his administration will not escape the ‘harsh judgment’ of history.

Lifting the ban on Yemeni transfers fell short. So far it’s rhetoric, not policy. “(W)e are disappointed by (Obama’s) comment that cleared men will only be released ‘to the greatest extent possible.’ “

Obama’s “equivocation is troubling. After eleven years of detention without charge or trial, all of the men President Obama does not intend to give fair trials should be released and reunited with their families.”

Anything short of that threatens to worsen a potentially deadly crisis unfolding at Guantanamo.

Targeted drone strikes remain policy. Reasserting the right is “legally flawed and dangerous.”

Whether or not the United States can use lethal force under the laws of war is not a matter of policy preference – it is a matter of law and facts.

Continuing current policy in any forms “sets a dangerous precedent for future administrations and other countries.”

Hundreds of activists endorsed a New York Times ad. It called on Obama to “Close Guantanamo Now” and “stop the torture.”

Presidents cannot be allowed to arrogate to themselves the power of judge, jury and executioner.

Fundamental civil liberties have been eviscerated.

It is up to the people to stand up for principle and morality when their institutions and public officials refuse to do so.

End the War Crimes and Violations of Fundamental Rights!

Nothing Obama said suggests change. Business as usual remains policy. War on humanity continues. No end in sight appears likely.

New world order harshness threatens everyone. It’s a clear and present danger. It’s much too great to ignore.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

By RT

The US war on terror is in fact the most massive terror campaign ever, and the invasion of Iraq was the worst crime in recent history, prominent liberal thinker Noam Chomsky told RT, adding that he wants to see Bush, Blair and Obama tried at the ICC.

The ‘father of modern linguistics,’ Chomsky reflects on the language of the war on terror, coming to the conclusion that the freer the society, the more sophisticated its propaganda.

RT: As someone who was living in the aftermath of the Boston bombings, the chaos, what did you think of the police and media response to them?

Noam Chomsky: I hate to second guess police tactics, but my impression was that it was kind of overdone. There didn’t have to be that degree of militarization of the area. Maybe there did, maybe not. It is kind of striking that the suspect they were looking for was found by a civilian after they lifted the curfew. They just noticed some blood on the street. But I have nothing to say about police tactics. As far as media was concerned, there was 24 hour coverage on television on all the channels.

RT: Also zeroing in on one tragedy while ignoring others, across the Muslim world, for example…

NC: Two days after the Boston bombing there was a drone strike in Yemen, one of many, but this one we happen to know about because the young man from the village that was hit testified before the Senate a couple of days later and described it. It was right at the same time. And what he said is interesting and relevant. He said that they were trying to kill someone in his village, he said that the man was perfectly well known and they could have apprehended him if they wanted.

A tribesman walks near a building damaged last year by a U.S. drone air strike targeting suspected al Qaeda militants in Azan of the southeastern Yemeni province of Shabwa (Reuters / Khaled Abdullah)

A drone strike was a terror weapon, we don’t talk about it that way. It is, just imagine you are walking down the street and you don’t know whether in 5 minutes there is going to be an explosion across the street from some place up in the sky that you can’t see. Somebody will be killed, and whoever is around will be killed, maybe you’ll be injured if you’re there. That is a terror weapon. It terrorizes villages, regions, huge areas. In fact it’s the most massive terror campaign going on by a longshot.

What happened in the village according to the Senate testimony, he said that the jihadists had been trying to turn over the villagers against the Americans and had not succeeded. He said in one drone strike they’ve turned the entire village against the Americans. That is a couple of hundred new people who will be called terrorists if they take revenge. It’s a terrorist operation and a terrorist generating machine. It goes on and on, it’s not just the drone strikes, also the Special Forces and so on. It was right at the time of the Boston marathon and it was one of innumerable cases.

It is more than that. The man who was targeted, for whatever reason they had to target him, that’s just murder. There are principles going back 800 years to Magna Carta holding that people cannot be punished by the state without being sentenced by a trial of peers. That’s only 800 years old. There are various excuses, but I don’t think they apply.

But beyond that there are other cases which come to mind right away, where a person is murdered, who could easily be apprehended, with severe consequences. And the most famous one is Bin Laden. There were eight years of special forces highly trained, navy seals, they invaded Pakistan , broke into his compound, killed a couple people. When they captured him he was defenseless, I think his wife was with him. Under instructions they murdered him and threw his body into the ocean without autopsy. That’s only the beginning.

RT: The apprehension of bin Laden and the assassination and dumping his body into the ocean, of course the narrative completely fell apart. You’ve said that in the aftermath of 9-11 the Taliban said that we will give you Bin Laden if you present us with evidence, which we didn’t do…

NC: Their proposal was a little vague.

RT: But why are people so easy to accept conventional wisdom of government narratives, there is virtually no questioning…

NC: That’s all they hear. They hear a drumbeat of conventional propaganda, in my view. And it takes a research project to find other things.

‘Invasion of Iraq was textbook example of aggression’

RT: And of course at the same time of the Boston bombings, Iraq saw almost the deadliest week in 5 years, it was the deadliest month in a long time. Atrocities going on every day, suicide bombings. At the same time our foreign policy is causing these effects in Iraq…

NC: I did mention the Magna Carta, which is 800 years old, but there is also something else which is about 70 years. It’s called the Nurnberg tribunal, which is part of foundation of modern international law. It defines aggression as the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes, and it encompasses all of the evil it follows. The US and British invasion of Iraq was a textbook example of aggression, no questions about it. Which means that we were responsible for all the evil that follows like the bombings. Serious conflict arose, it spread all over the region. In fact the region is being torn to shreds by this conflict. That’s part of the evil that follows.

Iraqi security personnel are seen at the site of a bomb attack in Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, April 15, 2013 (Reuters / Ako Rasheed)

RT: The media’s lack of coverage of everything that you are speaking about, I know that America runs on nationalism, but is America’s lack of empathy unique? Or do we see that in every country? Or as we grew up in America we are isolated with this viewpoint? NC:

Every great power that I can think of… Britain was the same, France was the same, unless the country is defeated. Like when Germany was defeated after the WWII, it was compelled to pay attention to the atrocities that it carried out. But others don’t. In fact there was an interesting case this morning, which I was glad to see. There are trials going on in Guatemala for Efrain Rios Montt who is basically responsible for the virtual genocide of the Mayans. The US was involved in it every step of the way. Finally this morning there was an article about it saying that there was something missing from the trials, the US’s role. I was glad to see the article.

‘Bush, Blair and Obama got to be tried by ICC but that’s inconceivable’

RT: Do you think that we will ever see white war criminals from imperial nations stand trial the way that  Rios Montt did?

NC: It’s almost impossible. Take a look at the International criminal court (ICC) – black Africans or other people the West doesn’t like. Bush and Blair ought to be up there. There is no recent crime worse than the invasion of Iraq. Obama’s got to be there for the terror war. But that is just inconceivable. In fact there is a legislation in the US which in Europe is called the ‘Netherlands invasion act’, Congressional legislation signed by the president, which authorizes the president to use force to rescue an American brought to the Hague for trial.

RT: Speaking of the drone wars I can’t help but think of John Bellinger, the chief architect of the drone policy, speaking to a think-tank recently saying that Obama has ramped up the drone killings as something to avoid bad press of Gitmo, capturing the suspects alive and trying them at Gitmo. When you hear things like this what is your response to people saying that ‘his hands are tied, he wants to do well’?

NC: That was pointed out some time ago by a Wall Street journal military correspondent. What he pointed out is that Bush’s technique was to capture people and torture them, Obama has improved – you just kill them and anybody else who is around. It’s not that his hands are tied. It’s bad enough to capture them and torture them. But it’s just murder on executive whim, and as I say it’s not just murdering the suspects, it’s a terror weapon, it terrorizes everyone else. It’s not that his hands are tied, it’s what he wants to do.

Members of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands (AFP Photo / HO)

RT: I would rather be detained then blown up and my family with me… NC: And that terrorizes everyone else. There are recent polls which show the Arab public opinion. The results are kind of interesting. Arabs don’t particularly like Iran, but they don’t regard it as a threat. Its rank is rather low. They do see threats in Egypt and Iraq and Yemen, the US is a major threat, Yemen is slightly above the US, but basically they regard the US as a major threat. Why is that? Why would Egyptians, Iraqi and Yemeni regard the US as the greatest threat they face? It’s worth knowing.

RT: The controversial Obama policy, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which you are plaintiff on the case, you’ve also said that the humanitarian laws are actually worse, providing material support for terrorism. Do you think that all these policies are quantifying what has been in place for decades?

US executive whim: Nelson Mandela put on terrorist list, Saddam Hussein taken off

NC: The NDAA is pretty much quantifying practices that have been employed, it went a little bit beyond , and the court case is narrow, it’s about the part that went beyond -  authorization to imprison American citizens indefinitely without trial. That is a radical violation of principles that go back as I said 800 years ago. I don’t frankly see much difference between imprisoning American citizens and imprisoning anyone else. They are all persons.

But we make a distinction. And that distinction was extended by the NDAA. The humanitarian law project broke no ground. There was a concept of material support for terrorism, already sort of a dubious concept, because of how to decide what is terrorism?

Well that’s an executive whim again. There is a terrorist list created by the executive branch without review, without having any right to test it. And if you look at that terrorist list it really tells you something.

So for example Nelson Mandela was on the terrorist list until three or four years ago. The reason was that in 1988 when the Regan administration was strongly supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa, in fact ruling congressional legislation in order to aid it, they declared that the African national Congress was one the most notorious terrorist groups of the world – that’s Mandela, that’s 1988, barely before apartheid collapsed. He was on the terrorist list.

We can take another case: 1982 when Iraq invaded Iran, the US was supporting Iraq and wanted to aid the Iraqi invasion, so Saddam Hussein was taken off the terrorist list…Its executive whim to begin with, we shouldn’t take it seriously. Putting that aside, material assistance meant you give him a gun or something like that. Under the Obama administration it’s you give them advice.

Saddam Hussein (Reuters)

RT: Let’s talk about the linguistics and language of the war on terror. What did Obama’s rebranding of Bush’s policies to do consciousness?

NC: The policy of murdering people instead of capturing them and torturing them can be presented to the public in a way that makes it look clean. It is presented and I think many people see it like that as a kind of surgical strike which goes after the people who are planning to do us harm. And this is a very frightened country, terrified country, has been for a long time. So if anybody is going to do us harm it is fine for us to kill them.

How this is interpreted is quite interesting.

For example there was a case a year or two ago, when a drone attack in Yemen killed a couple little girls. There was a discussion with a well-known liberal columnist Joe Klein, he writes for the Time, he was asked what he thought about this and he said something like – it’s better that four of them are killed than four little girls here.

The logic is mind-boggling. But if we have to kill people elsewhere who might conceivably have aimed to harm us and it happens that a couple little girls get killed too, that’s fine. We are entitled to do that. Well, suppose that any country was doing it to us or to anyone we regard as human. It’s incredible! This is very common.

I remember once right after the invasion of Iraq, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times, Middle East specialist, columnist, was interviewed on the Charlie Rose show, a sort of intellectuals show. Rose asked him ‘what we ought to be doing in Iraq?’ You have to hear the actual words to grasp it, but basically what he said is something like this: ‘American troops have to smash into houses in Iraq and make those people understand that we are not going to allow terrorism. Suck on this, we are not going to allow terrorism in our society! You’d better understand that.

So those terrorized women and children in Baghdad have to be humiliated, degraded and frightened so that Osama Bin Laden won’t attack us.’  It’s mind-boggling. That is the peak of liberal intellectual culture supposedly.

RT: Famous atheists like Richard Dawkins saying that Islam is one of the greatest threats facing humanity, that is a whole another form of propaganda…

NC: Christianity right now is in much greater threat.

‘Propaganda most developed and sophisticated in the more free societies’

RT: The media is obviously instrumental in manufacturing consent for these policies. Your book ‘Media control’ was written a decade before 9-11 and it outlines exactly how sophisticated the media propaganda model is. When you wrote that book did you see how far it would come and where do you see it in 10 years?

NC: I’m afraid that it didn’t take any foresight because it has been going along a long time. Take the US invasion of South Vietnam. Did you ever see that phrase in the media? We invaded South Vietnam, when John F. Kennedy in 1962 authorized bombing of South Vietnam by the US air force, authorized napalm, authorized chemical warfare to destroy crops, started driving peasants into what we called strategic hamlets – it’s basically concentration camps where they were surrounded by barbwire to protect them from the guerrillas who the government knew very well they were supporting. What we would have called that if someone else did it.

But it’s now over 50 years. I doubt that the phrase ‘invasion of South Vietnam’ has ever appeared in the press.  I think that a totalitarian state would barely be able or in fact wouldn’t be able to achieve such conformity. And this is at the critical end. I’m not talking about the ones who said there was a noble cause and we were stabbed in the back. Which generally Obama now says.

Hanoi’s Lenin Park, Vietnamm (Reuters)

RT: It’s become so sophisticated, but I don’t know maybe beсause I am younger and I’ve seen it only in the last 10 years in the post 9-11 world. With the internet do you see the reversal of this trend when people are going to be making this form of media propaganda irrelevant? Or do you see a worsening?

NC: The internet gives options, which is good, but the print media gave plenty of options, you could read illicit journals if you wanted to. The internet gives you the opportunity to read them faster, that’s good. But if you think back over the shift from say of the invention of the printing press there was a much greater step then the invention of the internet.

That was a huge change, the internet is another change, a smaller one. It has multiple characteristics. So on the one hand it does give access to a broader range of commentary, information if you know what to look for. You have to know what to look for, however. On the other hand it provides a lot of material, well let’s put it politely, off the wall. And how a person without background, framework, understanding, isolated, alone supposed to decide?

RT: Another form of propaganda is education. You’ve said that the more educated you are the more indoctrinated you are and that propaganda is largely directed towards the educated. How dangerous is it to have an elite ruling class with the illusion of knowledge advancing their own world view on humanity?

NC: It’s old as the hills. Every form of society had some kind of privileged elite, who claimed to be the repositories of the understanding and knowledge and wanted control of what they called the rebel. To make sure that the people don’t have thoughts like ‘we want to be ruled by countrymen like ourselves, not by knights and gentlemen’.

So therefore there are major propaganda systems. It is quite striking that propaganda is most developed and sophisticated in the more free societies. The public relations industry, which is the advertising industry is mostly propaganda, a lot of it is commercial propaganda but also thought control.

That developed in Britain and the US – two of the freest societies. And for a good reason. It was understood roughly a century ago that people have won enough freedom so you just can’t control them by force.

Therefore you have to control beliefs and attitudes, it’s the next best thing. It has always been done, but it took a leap forward about a century ago with the development of these huge industries devoted to, as their leaders put it, to the engineering of content. If you read the founding documents of the PR industry, they say: ‘We have to make sure that the general public are incompetent, they are like children, if you let them run their own affairs they will get into all kind of trouble.

The world has to be run by the intelligent minority, and that’s us, therefore we have to regiment their minds, the way the army regiments its soldiers, for their own good. Because you don’t let a three-year-old run into the street, you can’t let people run their own affairs.’ And that’s a standard idea, it has taken one or another form over the centuries. And in the US it has institutionalized into major industries.

Speakers: Daniel Ellsberg, Birgitta Jonsdottir, Ethan McCord, Col. Ann Wright (Ret.), Lt. Dan Choi, Sarah Shourd

Not surprisingly, the mainstream media has been pretty quiet about the event.

After relentless phone calls and emails by protesters, some coverage has finally been achieved, preventing the event from being completely blacked out. The same article was published throughout global media, including Yahoo, CTV, Huffington Post, ABC News, and  the UK Guardian.  The article downplayed the magnitude of the March and the importance of the cause:

Protesters rallied in dozens of cities Saturday as part of a global protest against seed giant Monsanto and the genetically modified food it produces, organizers said.

Organizers said “March Against Monsanto” protests were held in 52 countries and 436 cities, including Los Angeles where demonstrators waved signs that read “Real Food 4 Real People” and “Label GMOs, It’s Our Right to Know.”

Genetically modified plants are grown from seeds that are engineered to resist insecticides and herbicides, add nutritional benefits or otherwise improve crop yields and increase the global food supply. (Huffington Post)

Discover even published a hit piece, calling the event “cartoonish”:

The only thing that’s truly being poisoned is the biotech debate by such rhetoric. I’m also willing to bet that organizers are being as truthful about the number of marchers as they are about the science on genetically modified foods…Nonetheless, there does seem to be many people who buy the notion that dangerous GMOs are being foisted on the world by Monsanto.

The truth of the matter is, over two million people marched in more than 50 countries around the globe.  (See RT’s excellent timeline of the global event)Despite the grudging media coverage in the mainstream a sleeping giant has awakened.  Many people will no longer accept that what lines grocery store shelves is safe to eat.

We know that we have been sold out, betrayed by the politicians that were duly elected to represent the wishes of their constituencies. The day before the event, the US Senate shot down a bill that would have allowed individual states to require labeling of GMOs.  We are fighting a company with billions of dollars, links to the FDA, the USDA and the Supreme Court, and a whole bunch of sketchy politicians in their back pockets. They have fought a sneaky social media war against us, and will continue to pull out all the stops to marginalize the movement against them.

So…

We have to keep the momentum going that we have achieved with the March Against Monsanto. Don’t let it end on May 25, 2013.  The only way to defeat Monsanto and the rest of the biotech industry is by spreading information far and wide. We clearly cannot rely on the mainstream media to do this, as evidenced above.  So we must use social media, alternative media, and word of mouth. Print off some labels and put them in the grocery store.  Organize your own pickets and hand out flyers in front of the grocery store, letting people know what they’re buying. Go to farmer’s markets and support your local growers. Sow the seeds of revolution by growing as much of your own food as possible.  Most of all, vote with your wallet and don’t buy ANYTHING that puts money into the pockets of companies that support GMOs or that fought against California’s Proposition 37, which would have called for the labeling of GMOs.

The Monsanto Corporation is among the largest pesticide and biotechnical corporations in the world today.

Their products are used in most sectors of agriculture, public land upkeep, landscaping/gardening and can be found in most markets across the United States. Monsanto is a multi-billion dollar company with a diverse product base and is among the largest producers of genetically engineered crops.

As a company, Monsanto promises to be the creator of new, safer, pesticides as well as stronger bio-engineered crops. Unfortunately, the reality of what Monsanto will deliver to the world is likely very different from what they promise, or what we, as a society, desire.

© Josh Sager – June 2012

(Image Credit: Rasa13)

Monsanto has produced many products, from new types of pesticide to genetically engineered crops, and has been the center of several severe controversies. In numerous cases, the Monsanto Corporation produced and marketed products which they knew to be potentially toxic, yet they still sold them in order to reap a profit. While not illegal, largely due to Monsanto’s massive lobbying efforts aimed at reducing safety standards (Monsanto Spent $6.3 million dollars in lobbying during the 2011 fiscal year alone – Follow this link for more information on Monsanto’s lobbying), the sale of toxic chemicals for a corporate profit is both highly immoral and very relevant to those in society who wish to assess the use of Monsanto products. Put plainly: Monsanto’s history of selling poison, labeled as a useful product, casts doubt on whether any product that they sell should be trusted.

During its early years, Monsanto produced PCBs (Polychlorinated biphenyl) to be used in various industrial applications. PCBs, while very stable and good at acting as a liquid insulator, are extremely toxic to virtually all forms of life – they are carcinogenic, highly toxic, and corrosive upon contact with skin or mucus membranes. Even as evidence mounted of the toxicity of PCBs, Monsanto continued to produce them until they were forced to stop when the government banned all domestic production of PCBs in 1977.

The Monsanto Corporation has a long and sometimes unfortunate history of creating new and powerful pesticides. The infamous “Agent Orange”, used in Vietnam to destroy jungles, and the powerful pesticide DDT were two of the primary pesticides produced by Monsanto during its early years. While Agent Orange and DDT are now outlawed due to the massive damage they cause human life as well as the environment, Monsanto continued producing them for as long as the law allowed. The gigantic costs to human health and to the environment caused by the sale of Monsanto pesticides, even once they were deemed too dangerous to use, resulted in many ruined lives and destroyed ecosystems for society, but huge profits for Monsanto.

Currently, Monsanto is the producer of “Roundup”, a powerful and supposedly safe agricultural pesticide that has been the most common wide-spectrum herbicide for the past several decades. The major active ingredient in Roundup is a glyphosate salt, which makes it highly toxic for most common types of weeds. For added effectiveness, Monsanto has marketed a brand of “Roundup Ready” genetically engineered plants, which are immune to glyphosate salt poisoning, and allow for the use of pesticides during the growing process.

While not as dangerous as “agent orange” or DDT, there are several serious problems associated with glyphosate pesticide use. Glyphosate pesticides have the potential to breed “super-weeds”, in the same way that antibiotics breed “super-germs”. The pesticide kills all but the strongest pests, leaving the hardiest members of the population to repopulate the area. Eventually, once the weaker pests are culled from the gene pool, “super-weeds” are all that remain; at this point, modern pesticides will become nearly useless and far stronger (and more toxic) ones will need to be employed.

In addition to their potential to create super-weeds, some studies link glyphosate pesticides to damage to human cells, particularly in fetuses. Glyphosate is considered relatively safe by the FDA (Toxic Class III), but studies have shown that it can be damaging to embryonic and placental cells even if very dilute formulations. The potential danger glyphosate poses to fetuses is particularly worrying when one considers the wide use of the pesticide and the low concentrations necessary to cause harm. In addition to harming certain types of cells in the human body, glyphosate pesticide additives (Ex. the “inactive” ingredients of Roundup) have been shown to accumulate and cause genetic damage on lab rats. While the pesticide additive must be applied in large dosages for it to cause such damage, this raises questions about whether such damage is possible in other mammals, like humans.

A large portion of Monsanto’s business is currently in the field of “genetically modified organisms” (GMOs) This simply means that they alter the genetic structures of crops in order to hopefully make them more resistant to disease, easier to grow, higher yield, or less susceptible to predation by pests. Unfortunately, GMOs are often plagued by unintended consequences and side effects of genetic modification, which make them risky for human consumption. Monsanto has been embroiled in several serious controversies surrounding the safety of their GMO products – namely GE corn and recombinant bovine growth hormone – yet they have consistently continued to sell their goods.

Just recently, a study published in the International Journal of Biological Sciences seems to indicate a link between the consumption of Monsanto genetically engineered corn and organ damage in the liver and kidneys. This damage is consistent with the genetically engineered pesticide utilized by the corn, and seems to refute Monsanto’s claim that the pesticide will degrade long before it is consumed. Despite evidence that Monsanto’s GM corn may cause organ damage in its consumers, they have refused to recall their products. The refusal to recall their potentially toxic corn, in combination with their history of damaging their consumers for a profit, sheds considerable doubt upon their care for the health of those who consume their goods.

The doubts surrounding the safety of Monsanto’s genetically engineered corn are particularly important considering the fact that high fructose corn syrup is a staple ingredient in most processed foods. Monsanto GE “roundup Ready” corn is a primary source for most American high fructose corn syrup, thus any potential harm caused by this corn would likely be enormous.

Monsanto’s corporate behavior, both historically and currently, demonstrates a prioritization of profits over the safety of their consumers. It is evident that Monsanto will sell products, regardless of whether they may be toxic, for as long as they are legally able to sell them.

Not only does Monsanto have a pattern of selling toxic goods, but they lobby to prevent these goods from becoming illegal even after determining their toxicity, thus compounding the harm that they cause society. Monsanto spends millions of dollars a year in lobbying and is a very prolific user of the Washington DC “revolving door” (industry professionals becoming regulators and vice versa).

Some Monsanto goods may be exactly what they are marketed as – clean and safe agricultural goods – but, given their history of selling dangerous goods, there is little reason for the public to trust in their products. The Monsanto Corporation has proven numerous times that it will sell poison for a personal profit, regardless of the harm which their products inflict upon society. In the absence of regulators sanctioning Monsanto for its negligence, it is up to the public to stand up to Monsanto and call them out for their bad acts.

The next time you hear the name Monsanto in relation to a good which you are thinking of buying, please reconsider your purchase. It is entirely possible that the food is safe, or even of higher quality than other food. But there is also the very real likelihood that this food will damage your body. Why gamble with your or your family’s health when there are so many other alternatives to the potentially toxic goods of Monsanto?

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‘Monsanto is the metaphor for genetic manipulation, food chain control’

May 26th, 2013

(RussiaToday) – In order to take full control of the global food chain the world’s largest owner of patents on seeds Monsanto is lobbying, bribing, suing small farmers out of business and altering scientific research, geopolitical analyst F. William Engdahl told RT.

Hundreds of thousands around the world gathered on Saturday in a global move dubbed ‘March Against Monsanto’.

Activists are calling for labeling of food containing GMOs and further scientific research of the effects of GMO crops that while banned in several countries over alleged health threats still remain legal in many others.

Protesters all across the US joined the march calling for a boycott of Monsanto products, following the Senate’s decision to turn down a bill which requires the labeling of GM food.

RT: What’s wrong with GM food? 

William Engdahl: The fundamental problem with GM food that it’s genetically and biologically unstable. There’s no genetic modification known to science and this I have from some of top scientists in the world on this question that’s stable – it’s always mutating. And No.2, all the GM products that are in the human and animal food chain over the last 20 years are modified primarily to do one thing – 80 per cent of all the GM is modified to accept chemicals, the pesticides. Monsanto Roundup being the most prominent of them, which are highly, highly toxic and they’re modified to be resistant to that deadly chemical so that it kills everything inside, except the Monsanto corn or the Monsanto soy beans or what will you. All those chemicals are equally as dangerous to the human food chain as the GMO seeds themselves.

RT: Why have so many people in different countries taken to the streets to demonstrate against this US company now?

WE: I think for one very simple reason Monsanto is the company. They are the world’s largest owner of seeds. They’ve bought up all those small seed companies to control those seed varieties of wheat, of rice, of corn and soy beans and so forth. No.2 Monsanto bought up a company that gives Monsanto a patent on what are called terminator seeds, which self-destruct, the seeds commit suicide after one harvest season. So, farmers are unable to take part of their seeds and replant them for the next harvest season – something that never in history has been possible before this Monsanto development. But Monsanto is the metaphor for genetic manipulation of the food chain and they are by far the largest – of course, you have other companies like Syngenta in Switzerland, you have BASF, which is a partner of Monsanto in Germany. You have Dow and DuPont Chemical. But Monsanto is really the giant of the four horsemen of the GMO Apocalypse.

RT: Why is the US government so keen to protect the interests of Monsanto?

WE: I think this is the strategic interest of the US agribusiness lobby, the lobby of Bush senior as president in 1992. Monsanto went to the White House and had a closed-door meeting with Bush, and got him to agree to make sure there are no government tests whatsoever on the health and safety of GMO products before they were released to the commercial public. That was called the doctrine of ‘substantial equivalence’– it’s a fraudulent doctrine if you just analyze the name, it’s by no means scientifically rigorous. So there have been up until recently no long-term tests beyond what ninety day short-term studies Monsanto gave to the government to say ‘everything is hunky-dory.’  It turns out evidence has been uncovered by whistleblowers who say we were forced to alter the scientific data for Monsanto so it showed that the results were positive. You have the fox guarding the chicken house  here with Monsanto verifying the health and safety of its own products. But it’s the idea of monopoly on seeds, a patent on monopoly on seeds worldwide that makes the whole question of Monsanto and GMO question so extremely important in so many countries. They are trying everything to bribe and influence the European commission in Brussels. A study came out in France at the Caen university September last year, it was published in the PEW review , a serious scientific journal of toxicology , by Dr Seralini and his French colleagues, showing that rats fed with GMO Monsanto rice , or corn rather, had huge incidents of cancer tumors compared with non GMO rats. They had enormous organ damage and death rates five times that of normal rats. The study was suppressed by the EU food safety administration. It turns out that most of the scientists on the panel had ties to Monsanto. So it’s just the corruption that Monsanto tries to infiltrate its way, they try to block labeling in California, because that would damage their whole product situation in America. People are beginning to wake up. I think there is change going on not only against the Monsanto but biological engineering of our food chain.

Source: RT

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Sunday, May 26, 2013

Monsanto: Profits Above Human Health

Dees Illustration

Stephen Lendman
Activist Post

On May 25, tens of thousands of people marched against Monsanto. They did so in dozens of countries worldwide. They had good reason.

They want consumer protections enacted. They want safe food to eat. They want governments assuring it. They want GMO foods and ingredients labeled.”March Against Monsanto” (MAM) headlined “Why Do We March?”

Independent research shows GMO foods and ingredients cause “serious health conditions such as the development of cancer tumors, infertility and birth defects.”

Former Monsanto executives run the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). An obvious conflict of interest exists.

Provisions of the March 2013 Monsanto Protection Act include “ban(ning) courts from halting the sale of Monsanto’s genetically-modified seeds.”

For too long, Monsanto has been the benefactor of corporate subsidies and political favoritism.

Organic and small farmers suffer losses while Monsanto continues to forge its monopoly over the world’s food supply, including exclusive patenting rights over seeds and genetic makeup.

Monsanto’s GM seeds are harmful to the environment; for example, scientists have indicated they have contributed to Colony Collapse Disorder among the world’s bee population.

MAM advocates:

• buying organic foods;
• boycotting Monsanto-owned companies;
• repealing Monsanto Protection Act harmful provisions;
• more independent research on the effects of GMOs on human health;
• holding Monsanto officials and complicit politicians accountable;
• informing the public about “Monsanto’s secrets;” and
• “taking to the streets to show the world and Monsanto that we won’t take these injustices quietly.”
• “We will not stand for cronyism. We will not stand for poison. That’s why we March Against Monsanto.”

In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel The Jungle aroused the public. It exposed monopoly capitalist excesses, worker exploitation, and unsanitary practices in slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants.Food hazardous to human health was produced. Nothing was done to stop it. Unsuspecting consumers ate it.

Jack London said Sinclair’s book “depict(ed) what our country really is, the home of oppression and injustice, a nightmare of misery, an inferno of suffering, a human hell, a jungle of wild beasts.”

Theodore Roosevelt was president. Public outcry got results. The 1906 Pure Food Food and Drug Act became law. It fell short of full protection. It helped by prohibiting some of the worst abuses.

Yesteryear’s reforms are gone. They no longer exist. Deregulation ended them. Profits alone matter. What corporate America wants it gets. It runs the country. Agribusiness and other industry sectors occupy Washington.

They decide policy. They write laws Congress passes. Ordinary people have no say. Politicians are bought like toothpaste. Public health and environmental sanity are ignored. Corporate greed alone matters.

Business officials run the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Department of Health and Human Services (DHS), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other government agencies.

America’s food supply suffers. Genetically modified ones proliferate. They’re unsafe to eat. They’re hazardous to human health. Independent studies prove it.

Monsanto’s the world’s leading GMO seed producer. It’s profiting at the expense of human health. It wants all animal and vegetable life forms patented. It wants global food control.

It wants labeling prohibited. It wants reliable science buried. It wants issues of food safety ignored. It wants consumers to have no say.

It wants critics silenced. It wants them discredited. It has enormous influence in Washington. It gets its own way. It’s long past time that ended. Ordinary people must demand it. Food safety is too vital to ignore.

The World According to Monsanto chronicles its controversial history. It’s a powerful film. It explains some of the most toxic products ever sold.

Monsanto deception, pressure, collusion and bribery are standard tactics to do so.

Secret documents are exposed. Firsthand accounts are presented. Victims, scientists, politicians and others tell their own stories.

The film explains why Monsanto’s the world’s poster child for manipulating governments to permit hazardous products vital to prohibit. It’s a wake-up call for mass action.

Monsanto’s history includes some of the most hazardous products ever produced. They include Agent Orange, DDT, recombinant bovine growth hormone, polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), aspartame, and Roundup herbicide among others.

Jeffrey Smith’s Institute for Responsible Technology calls Monsanto’s history “Deception, Deception, Deception.” It’s why the company “can’t be trusted,” he says.

Its own documents later made public reveal Monsanto knew straightaway that many of its products are hazardous to human health. A company memo justified selling them. “We can’t afford to lose one dollar of business,” it said.

In December 2011, the Natural Society called Monsanto the “Worst Company of 2011.” It did so for “threatening both human health and the environment.”

It controls 90% of the US GMO seed market. Its Roundup herbicide contaminates 120 million hectares in America, Europe, South America, Australia and South Africa. Its other biopesticides increase contamination.

Corporate Accountability International conducts an annual poll. “(W)e ask you,” it says, to (choose) the worst of worst and induct the ‘winner’ into our Corporate Hall of Shame.”

In 2012, Monsanto was chosen. It was “(f)or mass producing toxic chemicals, aggressively running small farms out of business, and recklessly promoting (hazardous GMO) seeds that (harm human health and) exacerbate food scarcity globally – again.”

Food & Water Watch says “Monsanto’s control over seeds harms farmers, the environment and the global economy.”

Its food system reach is “formidable.” Its seeds are responsible for about 86% of corn and around 93% of soybeans. Most processed foods include them.

Monsanto wants GMOs proliferated globally. Washington actively promotes it. The State Department acts as an agribusiness biotechnology ambassador.

It lobbies and pressures governments to permit GMO proliferation. It conducts public relations on behalf of industry giants. It ignores food safety issues. It opposes GMO labeling.

US embassies are aggressively involved. Darcy O’Callaghan is Food & Water Watch’s international policy director. She was interviewed on The Real News Network.

She discussed 926 diplomatic cables. WikiLeaks published them. They revealed active State Department biotech promotion. It’s done deceptively.

False GMO seed claims are made. Governments are pressured. Food & Water Watch’s executive director Wenonah Hauter said “(t)he US State Department is selling seeds instead of democracy. It campaigns on behalf of biotech giants.”

The State Department should not be flexing its diplomatic muscle to impose biotech crops on the developing world.

Today, the US government is secretly negotiating major trade deals with Europe and the countries of the Pacific Rim that would force skeptical and unwilling countries to accept biotech imports, commercialize biotech crops and prevent the labeling of GE foods.

This madness must stop. The US government should not be a shill for the largest biotech seed companies.

According to National Family Farm Coalition president Ben Burkett:

An overwhelming number of farmers in the developing world reject biotech crops as a path to sustainable agricultural development or food sovereignty.

The biotech agriculture model using costly seeds and agrichemicals forces farmers onto a debt treadmill that is neither economically nor environmentally viable.

Organic Consumers Association executive director Ronnie Cummins added:

It’s not surprising that Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow want to maintain and expand their control of the $15 billion global biotech seed market, but it’s appalling that the State Department is complicit in supporting their goals despite public and government opposition in several countries.

American taxpayer’s money should not be spent advancing the goals of a few giant biotech companies.

Food & Water Watch wants both kept safe, accessible, affordable, and sustainably produced. “Take Action,” it urges. Everyone has a right to know what they’re eating.

GMO foods and ingredients harm human health. Jeffrey Smith’s investigative research links GMOs to “toxic and allergic reactions, infertility, and damage to virtually every internal organ studied in lab animals.”

Monsanto and other biotech giants mislead governments. They put profits above human health and environmental sanity. Staying healthy begins with not ingesting harmful substances.

Independent research reveals compelling evidence. GMOs harm human health. Monsanto’s the world’s largest seed producer. It’s history reflects irresponsible behavior.

According to Smith, it includes “extensive bribery, highjacking of regulatory agencies, and suppressing negative information about its products.”

It threatens journalists and scientists who dare report them. It long ago proved it can’t be trusted.

On May 25, tens of thousands worldwide marched against Monsanto. They want governments assuring they get safe food. They want GMOs labeled.

Not in America any time soon. On May 23, the Senate voted overwhelmingly against it.

A Farm Bill amendment was defeated by a 71 – 27 vote. It lost despite the vast majority of Americans wanting labeling.

People have a right to know. Consumer advocates demand it. What Monsanto wants it gets. Washington works that way.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

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The People’s Movement Against Monsanto

Youtube

Monsanto is a company feared and reviled by the public in equal measure. But whatever cases Monsanto has lost in the court of public opinion it has made up for in the courts of justice thanks to its revolving door with the upper reaches of Washington. Now, a new movement is seeking to galvanize grassroots resistance to the corporation, and derail its agenda.