Afghans Go To Polls : Will The U.S. Now Remain Past 2014? - And WHO Will Pay For It?

"Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for resources.  We do it because it’s right." - Barack Obama,  2011


Today is a big voting day in Afghanistan, and likely will be an even bigger one for the American Military- Industrial National Security State. It means there is a good chance the vote will see pressure for the U.S. to remain long term, possibly even through 2024 - despite the fact we lack the money to do that. Hell, we have more pressing problems here at home with a collapsing infrastructure as well as middle class. We can't be the world's cop forever!

What we know is that eight candidates are competing in the race. The problem is that the five minor candidates’ separate  shares of the total  vote will make it even more difficult for any one candidate to reach the 50 percent threshold that would allow an outright victory. In this case, a runoff vote is unlikely to take place until the end of May at the earliest. The leading candidates going into the vote were Ashraf Ghani, 64, a technocrat and former official in Mr. Karzai’s government; Abdullah Abdullah, 53, a former foreign minister who was the second biggest vote-getter against Mr. Karzai in the 2009 election; and Zalmay Rassoul, 70, another former foreign minister.

All three of these guys are said to be in favor of approving a long term American troop presence. Up in the air is how long an American force will remain in Afghanistan after 2014. Hamid Karzai’s refusal to sign a long-term security deal to allow that presence through 2024 was a major point of tension between the American and Afghan governments.  Why, baffles the mind of the objective and rational observer, given the continued costs to Americans in blood and treasure.  Hell, we've already been there over 12 years and have little or nothing to show for it other than a lot of pissed off people - at home and over there. (Many of the latter pissed and outraged at drone strikes that took out family members and for which they were offered a few head of sheep and a thousand bucks as  reparation.)

I mean, in the normal world of logic and rationality and given our dwindling resources and stupendous debt - with domestic needs already stretched beyond limits - we ought to have taken Karzai's 'out'  and left, lock, stock and barrel. But oh no, we have to continue the pretense of Pax Americana and being the cop of the world. But, of course, why would a national security state that killed the President who inveighed most against Pax Americana (in 1963)  pay any attention to it now? They wouldn't because they removed the sole obstacle to its future implementation, via the document NSC-68.

As in the case of Vietnam, which ought to have had its plug pulled much earlier (thereby saving thousands more lives), we ought to be pulling the plug on this Afghan fiasco and THIS year!  We can't do the Afghans' nation building for them.  It's now their job. We invested in their security forces as much as we can and as it is that trillion dollars pissed away over there has set us back in sundry ways. Hell, to me it'd be more crucial to use the projected money we might spend there on lowering the interest on college students' debt.

But make no mistake that Amerikkan  Neocons and the military-industrial state want a presence there if for no other reason to bleed down our domestic resources even further - thereby widening the nation's economic inequality and hastening the end of the American Middle class. The longer the U.S.  presence, the more money pumped into the pockets of defense contractors for more stupid weapons, including setting up a "combat air brigade" at a cost of $1 billion here in Colorado Springs. (And ranchers here are already in an uproar that the Army wants to claim over 200,000 acres for "drone maneuvers", for cripes' sakes!)

Yes, it may take six months or even longer for the Afghan issue to be settled, following today's election, but make no mistake the end result will be an unwise extension of our presence, of at least 10,000 troops - maybe more. Obama has made it clear this is what he wants-  for reasons I cannot begin to fathom- other than that the neocons have burrowed into his head. In effect, making 10,000 (or more)  targets for the Taliban as well as laying the potential for more incidents to piss off the Afghans and surrounding nations, likely leading to more terrorist blowback.

Which, of course, the national security state welcomes as more justification to keep its expansive surveillance system going. They ought to be more concerned with the additional thousands of returned troops likely to go mentally  'haywire' and ending up with tragedies such as we beheld at Fort Hood 2 days ago.

See also: 'Afghan Elections for Another Fake Regime' - by Eric Margolis

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-margolis/55206/afghan-elections-for-another-fake-regime

Excerpt:

Afghanistan’s national election held this week is a sham. A group of candidates, handpicked by the US, will pretend to compete in an election whose outcome has already been determined – by Washington. The candidates include US -groomed politicians, and drug-dealing warlords from the Tajik and Uzbek north. Chief among them, Rashid Dostam, a major war criminal and principal CIA ally who ordered the massacre of over 2,000 Taliban prisoners.

Such is the rotten foundation on which Washington is hoping to build a compliant Afghan “democracy” that will continue to offer bases to US troops and warplanes. Afghanistan’s majority, the Pashtun tribes, have little voice in the election charade.

Citizens - Regarded As Too Dumb Or Dangerous To Read Full CIA Torture Report

Douglas Rushkoff, in Chapter Four ('Individually Wrapped').  of his  book, Life Inc. - How Corporations Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back, singles out the arena of public relations (PR)  and its perverse uses to bamboozle citizens. The essential thesis is that properly applied, PR divides each citizen from every other - each accepting his or her own version of political and economic truth.  The outcome is that the citizenry is disarmed from opposing the excesses of the state or corporations, because they are instead fighting each other.

Rushkoff singles out the immediate era after Edward Bernays - the author of 'Propaganda' - signed on with the corporate state, to promote fascism. As he observes (p. 109):

"American corporatists saw in fascism a counterbalance to FDR's strong-handed tactics and aggressive social welfare programs.....Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME magazine, put Mussolini on the cover five times and traveled the country arguing that corporations - not government - were really in charge of America.  Luce convinced many business people that fascism might be corporatism's best hope for organizing and influencing people."

Rushkoff goes on to note that by the end of World War II fascism had revealed itself as "ruthlessly dehumanizing" so  American industry had to take a different tack known as "Americanism. This approach used advertising PR to turn citizens into consumers - driven by spending on all manner of fluff and nonsense- to take their minds off serious politics and economic issues. Combined with this the media empire developed to the point it was able to frame issues, events, ideas to shape the minds of the masses.   This followed Edward Bernays' PR description in his work, 'Propaganda':

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country."

If then this power is wielded to split consumers into "brand" factions along with their political affiliations and beliefs, the effect is polarizing and also dissolves any united citizens' front, i.e. to hold the Deep State or corporations to account.  It additionally is designed to keep citizens at the infantile level of "consumers" who shy away from examining what their government is up to. If a person then refuses to venture outside this compromised matrix of PR he remains a mental invalid and automaton run by the Deep State. Believing whatever it spouts, or what its talking heads blab, or distort.

It is no accident that Bernays' use of the term 'invisible government'  equates to 'the true ruling power of the country'.  Today, this ruling power inheres in a military-corporate- security state nexus called the  Deep State, and it requires deep politics - not its superficial media counterpart-  to plumb its depths. This is irrespective of  examining the Ukraine crisis, the JFK assassination, the yen for pretext "wars" as in Iraq, the related monstrous Pentagon budget, or the growing inequality in the country.

It also pertains to the examination of the CIA torture program which went on for years, and which report - of 6,300 pages- will now likely never be seen by the American people. As a Senate committee moves to declassify a landmark report about the Central Intelligence Agency’s descent into torture, among the only certainties is that the public won’t see the vast majority of it. Instead we will be told by PR talking  media heads what they want us to think about it, and only dribbles released concerning what we can actually  be allowed to know.

True,  the Senate select committee on intelligence has waged an unprecedented and acrimonious public battle with the CIA over the secret 6,300-page investigation  known as the "Panetta Report", concluding torture  is an ineffective intelligence-gathering technique and that the CIA lied about its value. But now they ought to release it in full to citizens wanting to know - so we can at least see what the spook degenerates did in our name. Instead, we're told to expect a similar micro-managing of files as was done  previously with the  HSCA Investigation of the JFK assassination back in 1978. So the Senate  vote has allowed only  a slice of the CIA Torture report to be made public. Worse,  the CIA will have a significant degree of influence over how large and how public that slice will be. Of course, this is reminiscent of the perverse manner in which information was controlled with the files released by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, once the CIA got control of it, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/frequently-asked-questions-on-jfk_19.html

 

Thus, the committee is not going to release the 6,300-page report. Its chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein of California, said on the Senate floor three weeks ago that only the “findings, conclusions and the executive summary of the report” were the subject of the committee’s declassification efforts. The vast majority of the Senate report – effectively, an alternative post-9/11 history detailing of years’ worth of CIA torture and cover-up – will remain shielded from public view.

So what gives? Why prevent us from accessing a report we paid for with our tax dollars?  The short answer is that part of the Deep State's PR conditioning process - to dissuade any remaining citizens (who haven't mutated into totally infantilized consumers) from pressing the national security state to back off - is framing and omission.  Both techniques were first noted by Michael Parenti in his 'Dirty Truths', to do with how the media manipulates the public mind.  Omission here serves the same purpose it does with the National Archives refusing to release all the files on the JFK assassination. If we are then prevented from knowing the dark aspects of our history, and the extent of our own government's complicity in it-  i.e. in having Kennedy assassinated- then we can't break out of the realm of false tropes and American goody-goody exceptionalism. Hence, it dovetails precisely with the post-WWII corporatists embrace of "Americanism" as a practical substitute for fascism.

 

The problem with that is that it's still leading us down a path of fascism, which in its most fundamental definition means the control of a nation's destiny by the wealthiest using corporate power. It is also a feature of fascism that it extols expanded military power - because for every dollar wasted in unprovoked conflicts or insinuating American power where it doesn't belong, there is less available for the public commons or the general welfare. It's a 'win-win' for the Deep State because with military expansionism more money is pumped into pockets of defense contractors, corporations while more is taken out of struggling citizens' hides. Thus, everything from the dramatic increase in student college debt to our crumbling infrastructure and the stagnation of middle class wages can be laid at the door of creeping fascism.

 

Meanwhile, Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, considers the CIA's  role in managing the Torture Report file release a conflict of interest.  He stated in an interview with the UK Guardian:

 

" They functionally control the declassification process, and they have an interest in how they as an agency are portrayed in the final product.  They’re not an impartial party, and that’s a flaw in the process.”

 

Of course, neither were they an "impartial party" in the case of the JFK assassination files released by the HSCA.  In the latter case, none other than CIA Information and Privacy Coordinator  Jim Lawderman – on July 27, 1977- wrote out the terms of the CIA’s control of  HSCA head Robert Blakey’s investigation. (Mellen, J., ‘Farewell to Justice’, p. 345).  One of the terms cited was (ibid.):

 

“ Certain areas relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy should be entirely disregarded based upon our contention they are without merit or corroboration” (ibid.)

 

Thus, the CIA was effectively judging the evidence even before there was any. This statement in many ways is as glaring and outrageous as the terms of the document NSC-68 paving the way for perpetual war.

 

In this way  practical citizenship can be kept at bay in the Deep State, and citizens (actually mostly consumers) can be set against each other because each will have different purviews of knowledge, media exposure and extent of research into what's really going on.  The Deep State has nothing, nada to worry itself over, since those of us who DO this digging into its nefarious backgrounds will often be dismissed as "tin foil hats" or "conspiracy theorists" or some such misbegotten term. Each of which betrays the inner fear the infantilized citizen has for facing the unsavory truth. That he really inhabits a gangster corporate-militarist state which doesn't have his best interests at heart.

 

The refusal of the Senate committee to release the full CIA Torture report is in line with all of the above and Feinstein et al regard their decision as justified because  they see American citizens are either too dumb or dangerous to place the full report in their hands.   Thus, we will likely never know the extent to which we, as citizens, supported a horrific policy of torture done in our name.

 

Welcome to Americanism V. 2.0 and the Deep State!

 

See also:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/medea-benjamin/55186/the-cia-whistleblower-and-the-torture-report

 

and:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/bob-burnett/54660/the-war-on-democracy-the-deep-state

 

Another Young Woman Who Shouldn't Do 'Selfies'

Valeria Lukyanova  after her 'Barbie' transformation and before (left). She is now advised not to even attempt a selfie - because of the risk of turning it into a parody.

In a previous post, I noted that Winter Olympics star Meryl Davis probably shouldn't be doing any selfies because of the risk they'd be interpreted as parodies of a selfie, or Selfie Poes. See e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-case-for-ugly-selfie-and-why-meryl.html

Now, we behold a living "Barbie" doll, a Ukrainian by the name of   Valeria Lukyanova, who has undergone successive plastic surgeries to transform herself into a living manikin with the appearance of "Barbie". (The classic little girl's doll created by Mattel.)  According to the author of a recent piece in GQ, encountering this being (who now calls herself "Amatue")  for the first, time,

"Is the closest you will come to an alien encounter"

Why? Well, let's start out with her proportions being ridiculous, as the image above shows. The author points out other aberrational aspects:

"The head is cocked like a sunflower too heavy for its stem, there's the plasticky skin and wasp waist.....her mouth .....like a cheap cartoon is the only part of her face that moves. The eyes, the staring eyes ...are the scariest. (There is essentially an eye drawn around each eye- an optical effect brought about by the makeup).. "

Why the hell would a young woman deform herself to look like a doll?  "Beauty"? No, I don't believe so, and as the author observes:

"Her beauty, though I hesitate to use that term, is pitched at the exact precipice where the male gaze curdles in on itself"

He also makes a similar point to what I did re: Meryl Davis, that while evolution predisposes us to think of big eyes as beautiful (a "neotonous"  feature)- but "tweak that delicate scale just a little and you have a wraith"

And who wants a wraith, or wants to do a selfie of one?

Incredibly, "Amatue" makes reference to reincarnation, as if the existence of such a post-death outcome could justify altering her physical appearance to that approaching an artifact designed by Mattel.   But this belief is misplaced. As noted by my spiritual adept sister-in -law,  Krimhilde (recent Skype chat):

"Any being on the path of reincarnation doesn't advance by altering her body to imitate an artifact. The body is enfolded within spirit, so if one warps the body the spirit is warped also.   This warping means that one's path of reincarnation is disturbed or delayed from what it would have been.

The advancing being, the advancing human, accepts his or her body as it is, but treats it well:  no bad food, no smoking, no drugs, nothing that can disrupt its wholeness or the spirit related to it."

What about 'selfies"?

"These are the creations and obsessions of the immature human, which remains steeped in narcissism, in self-absorption. No truly advanced or advancing human on the path to a higher spirituality takes a selfie. Our true motivation and mission in this life is instead to embrace selflessness. That means placing one's body in proper relation to one's spirit."

So, irrespective of Amatue's distorted features and body it's probably not a good idea to do a selfie in any case. Indeed, Krimhilde emphasizes she'd be better off - if she intends to keep on the path toward advanced spirituality- to avoid them at all cost.

Perhaps we'd all do well to take that advice!

ZunZuneo - Another Bald-Faced NeoCon Attempt to Interfere in Another Country

The neocons and their predecessors (mainly embedded in the military and CIA from the era of 'Operation Mongoose' and ZR/Rifle) have had a boner to overthrow Fidel Castro since the 1960s. From trying to use exploding cigars to poisons, these miscreants have never given up and continued to try to knock out Castro - even planning a false flag operation called "Operation Northwoods" that would have instigated terror attacks on U.S. cities and citizens - then blame Castro  - in order to start a war and invade Cuba. See e.g. this FOIA -obtained document below:


























Note the plan also entailed blowing up ammunition inside Cuban air bases, sabotaging aircraft therein, lobbing mortar shells into air bases,  sabotaging ships in harbor and sinking them as well as other criminal deeds. James Bamford, in his book, Body of Secrets (pp. 82-83) also noted the plan included killing Americans using bombing attacks,  on the streets of New York, Miami and D.C.,  in order to foment the tale the Cubans were behind it. All this to trigger a justification for invasion of Cuba and overthrowing the Castro government. (It's always stuck in the craw of the U.S. that it wasn't able to overthrow the lone surviving communist nation in the hemisphere - in the same way it did to Guatemala and Chile).

The plan went dead in 1962 after JFK learned of it, and he handed assorted conspirators their heads- and dumped them into lower grade positions, or harmless ones.  One more point - given such a plan actually existed and was well documented, let no one believe for a minute it couldn't also have metastasized into killing Kennedy!

Anyway, the latest scheme just disclosed, is a Twitter-like  "social communications network" app released in Cuba back in 2010 called "Zun Zuneo" and by which the neocons ensconced at State hoped to get rid of Raul Castro and his government. The 'cons never got their wish, and the idiotic program terminated in 2012.  The topic came up on the CBS Early Show this morning, where the following were noted:

- The network was designed to spark a "political uprising" - emulating e.g. the "Arab Spring" erupting in Egypt, Libya etc.

-  Cuba has condemned it as a "subversive plan to destabilize the country" - which is exactly what it is and again, using symmetrical perception (which too many of our fellow citizens lack) one can understand what OUR gov't would do if a foreign nation had facilitated an analogous scheme here - or tried to.

- The State Dept., however, claimed it was "just a developing program to help the Cuban people". RIIIIIGHT.!...and "there were no neo-Nazi ultra-nationalists"  behind the Maidan uprising in Kiev. It all just kinda happened of its own steam.

- The social network itself could be hidden from the Cuban government (imagine, again by symmetric perception, a hidden terrorist social network  established in the U.S. to entice Americans to terror acts.)

- The program took Sen. Patrick Leahy - who oversees foreign operations funding - by surprise.  Leahy this morning commented and said:

"If I had known, I would have said, are you out of your mind?"

- The program known as ZunZuneo functioned as a "bare bones" Twitter and allowed users to exchange information by text without the government knowing anything. In this way it was hoped mostly young Cubans would use it to organize as protestors - like those involved in the Arab Spring.

- The users didn't know it was run by the U.S. Agency for International Development - a CIA front organization, known since the 1960s (as AID), when as author James Douglass ('JFK and the Unspeakable ) notes,  a David Bell of "AID",  informed JFK that the funds from the Commodity Import Aid Program had “already been cut off”,  essentially assuring a coup would ensue with the Diem government in South Vietnam. The Diems were killed on Nov. 2, 1963, and Kennedy had effectively been omitted from the loop.  Kennedy was evidently livid and directly asked Bell who had told him to do that, to which Bell replied, “No one” (ibid.). The will to power disclosed here indicates the CIA felt it more powerful than Kennedy himself or his decision-making authority. 

- USAID paid contractors to collect users' cell phone data and send them text messages. Those texts were "meant to inspire dissent that would ultimately bring down the Castro government".  (According to documents obtained by the Associated Press)


In the aftermath of the revelations, a State Dept. tool and spokesperson appeared at a brief press conference, and with a big stupid smile on her pasty face, blurted:

"We did not supply political content. We did not drive the political content. We are just soooo perfect here....to open the space so they could supply their own content".

RIIIIIIGHHT! Like the Ukrainians supplied their own fuel for a revolution, with no Nazis or Amerikkan Neocons involved at all.

What the dope doesn't get, or doesn't want us to - is that by supplying a tool whereby Cubans could conduct activities under the radar, in an objective to arouse dissent, they were indeed engaged in subversive activity and the State Dept. was helping them by providing the device- wherewithal to carry it out. Again, if you're having trouble understanding the kerfuffle examine it from a mirrored perspective.

The Associated Press also noted that funding for the program, about $1.2 million was "routed through overseas bank accounts and front companies in order  to keep it under the radar".   Again, IF the program was so innocuous, why the need to go this underhanded route? Clearly the architects of it knew damned well it wasn't legal and instead a device to incite insurrection.

The State Dept. also claimed that Congress was notified, however Sen. Leahy contested that claim, asserting he was not, and called the program "dangerously misguided" adding:

"We've had every administration since Dwight Eisenhower - who said 'If we just try one more thing, we can get rid of those Castros. It hasn't worked for 60 years and it won't work."

Sadly, that money wasted on the stupid  ZunZuneo program could have been more constructively used paying reparations to the victims of Cubana Airlines Flight 455,  blown out of the sky  off Barbados on October 6, 1976. This was at the instigation of the CIA (which deployed two Venuzuelans, Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo) to plant 2 bombs  -   with the plan masterminded by Luis Carriles Posada - a former CIA contract operative.

Will this country ever learn? Likely not until we get rid of every last neocon burrowed like parasites into the fabric of our State Department. Oh, and we cease being such god-damned hypocrites on the world stage - holding other nations to moral and legal standards we don't subscribe to ourselves! As salon.com blogger Patrick Smith has observed, at least Vladimir Putin understands and recalls history, which our clowns.....errrr ...leaders, seem to conveniently forget.

Obama, you reading this? NSA pass it to you? Maybe? Then act! Dump those neocons!

See also: http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/alfredo-lopez/55168/usaid-used-fake-twitter-to-try-and-oust-a-government-the-hummingbird-tweet-an-espionage-tale

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/03/someone_teach_john_kerry_about_history/

NO! Money Is Not "Speech" - The Five Conservo Supremes Are Off Their Rockers!

"It's not too much to announce that it's over. We - the 90-odd percent of ordinary Americans, have finally lost -- it all this time. And the rich and super-rich have won. What's over are the last vestiges of the dream of an egalitarian democracy. Though never achieved in perfection, past generations have at least tried hard to make it so.

But the final blow came today when the conservative dominated Supreme Court struck down campaign finance limits. Now the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adleman and their ilk, can buy the kind of government that most benefits them and theirs.

We have now officially become a checkbook democracy." - Steve Pizzo,  www.smirkingchimp.com

In the course of describing the egregious ruling of the majority conservative faction on the Supreme Court yesterday, Chief Justice John Roberts declared (presumably with a straight face):

"If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests and Nazi parades - despite the profound offense such spectacles cause - it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition".


In a landmark judgment in favour of the rights of political donors, the conservative-dominated bench basically ruled that unlimited amounts of money can be poured into election campaigns.

Which makes me wonder what kind of misbegotten law school Roberts attended, that he can confuse and conflate "political campaign speech" with an inert currency exchange medium like money. To be sure, I've no objection to political campaign speech. Let the politicos get up on their soap boxes and spell out their assorted agendas and programs to their hearts' content. Indeed, they can say whatever the hell they want, within limits.

But please don't go on now and also tell me that money is speech and is entitled - in terms of donations to political campaigns - to be regarded in the same First Amendment sense as "funeral protests" (like Fred Phelps and his band of idiots used to stage), or flag burning or neo-Nazi parades.

The reason is clear: The First Amendment was intended to protect the speech of humans, which bears ideological or innately political statements - often in the form of protests, artifacts or parades. Thus, neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, IL as they did back in the 70s was intended to focus attention on their dubious cause. In the same way, flag burning is intended to focus public attention on some manner of outrage for which giving ordinary voice might not have the same effect. Note here too, that the flag is a possession, an artifact....and as one Justice once pointed out - "So long as you are burning YOUR own flag and not someone else's you are exercising your form of speech as protest."

Yes, it's true that on its face the 5-4 ruling seems to be more limited than the outrageous Citizens United ruling several years ago. However, it still leaves loopholes a mile wide through which the money-laden, aka the wealthiest, will be able to drive gigantic trucks through to get the  "best democracy money can buy."  Which is really ...a corporatocracy.

Douglas Rushkoff, in his superb book, Life Inc. - How Corporations Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back, has a special chapter on money (Chapter 6, 'To Whom Credit Is Due') and ought to be required reading for every citizen. As he points out: "Money is not a neutral medium - it favors some types of behavior while discouraging others."  He goes on to give a detailed discourse (which I will treat in a separate future blog post) on how the rise of "centralized currency" money and the infrastructure that conceived it, was actually responsible for the bubonic plague which killed more than one third of humanity.

At this point, let me simply summarize his thesis by noting that such centralized, interest -bearing currency contains all the instrumental evils in itself that one can comprehend. This instrumental evil is vastly in excess of that manifested in any Nazi parade, or occasional flag burning, because it affects the bulk of humanity (excepting the wealthiest) under its control. Hence, its infernal systematic spread can increase unemployment, hoarding and destitution engendering secondary evils (such as prostitution, drug addiction, burglary, murder and even spread of disease) that Nazi parades and flag burning cannot.

This is precisely why its perverse equivalence to "speech" (hawked by numerous right wing think tanks in the 80s) is as outrageous as it is incorrect.  Because money - certainly in our country (and surely many others) is tied inextricably to a centralized currency and banking system, then any occasions wherein that currency is infused  (i.e. elections) can be made as corrupted as the centralized system itself.   One can even argue that given the already widespread circulation of outside money in politics, to the point of bribery, it was inevitable the nation would descend to a military-corporate gangster state that only appeases the will of the few - while eschewing the will of the many (expressed in the vote).

Rushkoff's point is that this central currency system not only drives political corruption, but also massive inequality, because it is designed to always be even less than a zero sum game. He cites the example of a company that borrows $1 million from a bank, but then this metastasizes to $3m because of interest accrued over time. Where does the money come from to pay the outstanding $2m back - assuming it can be paid back at all? It comes from all those who have property claimed or foreclosed or confiscated because they were at the "losing end" of the banking loan and credit system.  At no time, as Rushkoff observes, can that losing end be closed, citizens protected, because otherwise it would mean the elimination of debt - which the centralized system can't tolerate.

In the case of pouring money into political campaigns or elections, then, the money amassed and channeled into these purviews to give specious "voice" to a segment of the populace (the richest)is generally taken from the indebted hides of ordinary citizens. If this money infusion is to be compounded or expanded, it means that debt must increase as the economic inequality sustained by it.

This is totally dissimilar to any "Nazi parade" or "flag burning" which speech can only have a limited effect on the body politic and because of this can't undermine it or destroy it the way money can to the political-electoral system. 

If one needs an analogy to forms of disreputable speech to work with - here it is: A motley assortment of drinks is available at a party to feed one's drinking "vice" - maybe gin, bourbon, rum, vodka and scotch whiskey. Partaking of any or all of them will get one's head spinning but that's okay as it's just a social occasion. In whatever case, the effects will wear off.  However, if one were to add cyanide to the mix, say in a fruit juice, the social tableaux and exchange upon which it's based would be terminated. All partaking would perish if the cyanide -laced drinks spread. In this sense, the thesis of instrumental evil advanced by Rushkoff and Lars Svendson (' A Philosophy of Evil') equates the infusion of money as "speech" as akin to the infusion of cyanide  -in drinks,  at a party or social gathering.  

The very example here, of cyanide-  a  known lethal substance -  is intended to force the perceptual disconnect to all the other drinks served. In like manner, money (as akin to it)  is intended to force the perceptual disconnect that it cannot be the same as other forms of distressing speech.

Thus, Roberts and his 4 conservos have effectively given permission to dump "cyanide" into the political -electoral system which could conceivably complete its destruction - already well underway.

In this sense, the four liberal Justices were quite correct when they objected, noting that the conservative five "misconstrued the nature of the competing constitutional interests and understanding the importance of protecting the political integrity of our governmental institutions".

Perhaps, Roberts and his motley crew wouldn't have made this error if they had thought of money as cyanide, to the body politic.

Justice Stephen Brier went on to note that the ruling:

"creates a loophole that will allow a single individual to contribute millions of dollars  to a political party or a single campaign"

Justice Brier went on to point out that along with the Citizens United decision, it "eviscerates our nation's campaign finance laws leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve."

Sen. Bernie Sanders has it exactly correct when he said yesterday, in response to the ruling:

“Freedom of speech, in my view, does not mean the freedom to buy the United States government,”

Sadly, it appears whatever "democratic legitimacy" we may once have had, has now gone the way of the Dodo. 


See also:
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/stephen-pizzo/55153/okay-folks-its-game-and-match

NSA Troll Clapper Now Admits 4th Amendment Was Violated (Though He Doesn't Put It So!)

"Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for the purpose of a temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open." - Thomas Jefferson, in 'Notes on Virginia'.

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED." - Thomas Jefferson, 'Notes on Virginia'.

Less than a year ago on this blog I pointed out there were likely "thousands of 4th amendment violations"  thanks to the scurrilous NSA programs PRISM, MUSCULAR, XKeyscore.  See e,g,
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/08/thousands-of-4th-amendment-violations.html

Now, we know there were millions, thanks to NSA troglodyte James Clapper's recent admissions of warrantless wiretaps.  Before examining Clapper's admission (which was cloaked in a pseudo-legalese cover) let us note the 4th amendment is very clear on the limits of warrants and how they are issued. The specific wording is:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Note, “secure in one’s person, house, papers, effects” implies PRIVACY! These are after all MY private papers, my private effects, my house, etc. If an inherent right to privacy was a myth then by all accounts being secure in one’s person, papers, effects wouldn’t matter. Hell, let the whole freakin’ world see ‘em! This is why in a fascist dictatorship “personal effects” don’t exist. “Personal papers” has no meaning. The state has full monopoly, de facto ownership on whatever the person has, even his own body. Hence, in fascist dictatorships, such as existed in Nazi Germany, all personal effects, papers could be seized by the Nazis on a whim or remote suspicion - under the Reich Laws. (The Reich laws, as Konrad Heiden notes, altered Weimar laws to render what had been originally illegal, legal.)

Clapper has finally admitted that the National Security Agency had a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a "legal authority"  enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant. This was revealed in top-secret NSA documents provided to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans' communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provided the NSA with a "loophole"  potentially allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans".

Now, we know - thanks to Clapper's admissions in his letter, the searches were indeed warrantless - and hence in violation of the 4th amendment.  This is according to the most recent Guardian report,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/01/nsa-surveillance-loophole-americans-data

According to Clapper, quoted above, NSA "performed warrantless searches on Americans' emails and phone calls."

We must not only thank Edward Snowden for the original revelations, but also Sen. Ron Wyden for keeping after Clapper to respond to his letters and 'fess up.  (After all, Wyden already knew the little rat lied before a Senate Intelligence Committee last March when asked directly if the NSA conducted mass surveillance of Americans.)

Of course, to Clapper 'fessing up isn't the same as it is for the rest of us. NO, it means delivering a mealy-mouthed wad of euphemistic babble which - for the weaker minded- is designed to assuage any doubts that it was legal by baffling with bullshit. Clapper's exact words as reported by The Guardian:

"There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.

These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the Fisa court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.”


Pay attention to the last sentence in particular, because this is where the attempted exculpation of his misbegotten agency resides.  He claims the "queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the FISA court" but what were these anyway?  In fact, nothing more than the merest fig leaf. The merest cover to defend the searches (i.e. one "end" of a phone call is in a foreign country, say Barbados).

Most of these came under Section 702  of the misnamed "Patriot Act" - which the traitors in congress also helped approve. As Clapper pointed out:

“As you know, when Congress reauthorized Section 702, the proposal to restrict such queries was specifically raised and ultimately not adopted,”

So congress punked out, When the opportunity arose to protect citizens' rights under the 4th amendment, congress shat on it, and refused to adopt the protections. Traitors!  Let us also recall congress - instead of prosecuting the Bushites for their warrantless wiretapping - made those illegal searches LEGAL!  Thus, they perverted the existing 1978 FISA law as fully as Hitler and the Nazis perverted the original Weimar laws into "Reich laws". The point is that using such a nefarious tactic any act which was once condemned as illegal can be made "legal" - all that's needed is the political will and power to do so.   This is why Clapper insists in his letter that the procedures were "consistent with the statutes and the 4th amendment".

In fact they were not! The 4th amendment is clear in its wording - as I showed above. Individual warrants must be issued for individual acts. And no amount of perturbing the language or making laws that were once illegal, legal can alter that. In this sense, the laws that legalized the original warrantless wiretaps of the Bushites are themselves baseless and LAWLESS.  They overturned the real laws that afforded genuine protections in return for mock laws.

Senators Wyden and  (Mark) Udall,  in their response to the Clapper bafflegab, were blunt:

“This is unacceptable. It raises serious constitutional questions, and poses a real threat to the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans. If a government agency thinks that a particular American is engaged in terrorism or espionage, the fourth amendment requires that the government secure a warrant or emergency authorization before monitoring his or her communications. This fact should be beyond dispute,”

If congress really had the interests of Americans at heart, and the protection of their 4th amendment rights, they'd have prosecuted the Bushite criminals, as they ought to have for their torture and rendition exercises - and illegal wars.  But they punked out! They refused to exercise their authority to uphold the actual laws, much as the Nazis - once in power- overturned the existing Weimar legal infrastructure in the Enabling Act. 

The tragedy is that by legalizing lawlessness - as regards the Constitution and citizen rights - the country has proceeded down the path of a "gangster state"- to use the words of deep politics authors Michael Parenti, as well as Chris Hedges, see e.g. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bradley_manning_and_the_gangster_state_20130821

The Senators final comment is one which to which we all need to pay heed:

“Today’s admission by the Director of National Intelligence is further proof that meaningful surveillance reform must include closing the back-door searches loophole and requiring the intelligence community to show probable cause before deliberately searching through data collected under section 702 to find the communications of individual Americans."

Giant, Flesh-Eating, 'Alien' Bat Seen in Everglades - Devours Pythons

A giant,  flesh eating bat came to life last night in the middle of the Everglades, and promptly devoured four Burmese pythons, and one alligator.  Hunters in the glades at the time,  trying to kill some of the 100,000 pythons estimated there,  said the giant bat took them by surprise. They initially  thought it was some kind of 'statue' as it barely moved. As they brought their swamp buggy within twenty feet of it, however, it let out a banshee -like shriek that nearly split their eardrums and proceeded to hurtle over the swamp to snatch a python, then another. In each case, the predator bat severed the python heads before devouring the snakes. The hunters observed the massive creature, estimated to be at least nine feet in height, for nearly a half hour before departing. They insisted the creature subsequently consumed two more pythons (in the same way)  and also an eight foot long gator.

Dr. Averell Foolius,  senior Chiropterologist at the University of Miami, insisted the creature was hitherto unknown. Indeed, he said no bats in evolutionary history have been known to attain the size of this one. This has led him to an astounding conclusion: the giant creature is not really native to our planet but rather an interloper from another world. Perhaps dropped off in the glades as some kind of an ongoing experiment in clashing zootic paradigms.

Dr. Foolius theorizes the giant bat was jettisoned in some kind of cocoon and likely in a calcified state, and then on reaching the Earth's surface, 'hatched' itself into manifestation. The hunters may have just caught sight of it after it emerged from its alien cocoon.

Dr. Foolius has proposed an expedition to recover the creature, or at least the residual cocoon, which may still be around. As he observed:

"If it is indeed an alien entity of some kind, we could learn an awful lot by getting DNA samples of the creature, its cocoon or both. We might also be able to figure out where it came from."

Failing that, Dr. Foolius emphasized the need to at least keep track of the bat, and report any efforts to asexually reproduce. He asserts our world can ill afford too many of the creatures.

On the positive side, Dr. Foolius assured residents of South Florida that allowing the bat to roam wild may be the best solution to ridding the Everglades of a good many of the 100,000 pythons running loose. (Most released after being purchased as exotic pets, and then outgrowing their owners' abilities to care for them.)

"It is surely far better than having these python bounty roundups ever few months, which are no where as effective as allowing this monster to have its way with 'em."

Dr. Foolius added:

"Think of it! The hunters who spotted the creature saw it devour four pythons in just a half hour! Accepting that this isn't just a giant python story, that means if it eats pythons at that rate, and say gobbles or kills  at least ten a day, we could be rid of the beasts in a short time if we could replicate them- say by cloning."

When asked of the downsides, he did admit that replicating the giant bat - to kill the snakes- posed its own  problems and risks, and they may well eat humans too.

"On second thought", he admitted, "a better idea may be to just allow the survival of the fittest to takes its course.

When he asked if he could interview the hunters, he was told they went back into the glades to try to get a closer view of the bat and see what else it might be eating.

They haven't been heard from for the past week.