Steven Gaal
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TIN FOIL HAT PERSON THINKS THIS IMPORTANT
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Article posted Feb 27 2015, 3:56 PM
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Net Neutrality: Triumph of the Ruling Class Jeffrey Tucker
A triumph of "free expression and democratic principles"? How stupid do they think we are?
It's been painful to watch the gradual tightening of government control in the name of net neutrality. The Federal Communications Commission's decision to rewrite the rules and declare the Internet as a public utility seals the deal. It cartelizes the industry and turns a "Wild West" into a planned system of public management — or at least intends to.
All the rest is a veneer to cover what is actually a power grab.
This whole plot has had all the usual elements. It has a good name and its supporters say it is about stopping private and public control. It's had the backing of all the top names in content delivery, from Yahoo to Netflix to Amazon. It's had the quiet support of the leading Internet service providers. The decision to impose the rule has been declared by a tiny group of unaccountable bureaucrats operating with the support of the executive lame duck.
The opposition, in contrast, has been represented by small players in the industry, hardware providers like Cisco, free-market think tanks and disinterested professors, and a small group of writers and pundits who know something about freedom and free-market economics. The public at large should have been rising up in opposition but people are largely ignorant of what's going on.
Here's what's really going on. The incumbent rulers of the world's most exciting technology have decided to lock down the prevailing market conditions to protect themselves against rising upstarts in a fast-changing market. To impose a new rule against throttling content or using the market price system to allocate bandwidth resources protects against innovations that would disrupt the status quo.
What's being sold as economic fairness and a wonderful favor to consumers is actually a sop to industrial giants who are seeking untrammeled access to your wallet and an end to competitive threats to market power. One person I know compared the move to the creation of the Federal Reserve itself: the creation of an industrial cartel in the name of improving the macroeconomic environment. That's a good comparison.Let's back up and grasp the position of the large content providers. Here we see the obvious special interests at work. Netflix, Amazon, and the rest don't want ISPs to charge either them or their consumers for their high-bandwidth content. They would rather the ISPs themselves absorb the higher costs of such provision. It's very clear how getting the government to make price discrimination illegal is in their interest. It means no threats to their business model.
By analogy, let's imagine that a retailer furniture company were in a position to offload all their shipping costs to the trucking industry. By government decree, the truckers were not permitted to charge any more or less whether they were shipping one chair or a whole houseful of furniture. Would the furniture sellers favor such a deal? Absolutely. They could call this "furniture neutrality" and fob it off on the public as preventing control of furniture by the shipping industry.
But that leaves the question about why the opposition from the ISPs themselves (the truckers by analogy) would either be silent or quietly in favor of such a rule change. Here is where matters get complicated. After many years of experimentation in the provision of Internet services — times when we went from telephone dial-up to landlines to T1 connections to experimenting with 4G data coverage — the winner in the market (for now) has been the cable companies. Consumers prefer the speed and bandwidth over all existing options.
But what about the future? What kind of services are going to replace the cable services, which are by-and-large monopolies due to special privileges from states and localities? It's hard to know for sure but there are some impressive ideas out there. Costs are falling for all kinds of wireless and even distributed systems.
If you are a dominant player in the market — an incumbent firm like Comcast and Verizon — you really face two threats to your business model. You have to keep your existing consumer base onboard and you have to protect against upstarts seeking to poach consumers from you. A rule like net neutrality can raise the costs of doing business but there is a wonderful upside to this: your future potential competitors face the same costs. As an established player in the market, you are in a much better position to absorb higher costs than those barking at your heels. This means that you can slow down development, cool it on your investments in fiber optics, and generally rest on your laurels more.
But how can you sell such a nefarious plan? You get in good with the regulators. You support the idea in general, with some reservations, while tweaking the legislation in your favor. You know full well that this raises the costs to new competitors. When it passes, call it a vote for the "open internet" that will "preserve the right to communicate freely online."
But when you look closely at the effects, the reality is exactly the opposite. It closes down market competition by generally putting government and its corporate backers in charge of deciding who can and cannot play in the market. It erects massive new barriers to entry for upstart firms while hugely subsidizing the largest and most well-heeled content providers.
So what are the costs to the rest of us? It means absolutely no price reductions in internet service. It could mean the opposite. Watch your bills. I predict that it is not going to be pretty. It also means a slowing down in the pace of technological development due to the reduction in competition that will immediately follow the imposition of this rule. In other words, it will be like all government regulation: most of the costs will be unseen but the benefits will be concentrated in the hands of the ruling class.
There is an additional threat to how to the FCC has reclassified the internet as a public utility. It means a blank check for government control across the board. Think of the medical marketplace, which is now entirely owned by a non competitive cartel of industry insiders. This is the future of the internet under net neutrality.
If you look at how all this shakes out, this is really no different from how most every other sector in life has come to be regulated by the state, from food to money to medicine to education. It always shakes out this way, with a sleepy public believing the propaganda, an elite group of insiders manipulating the regulations for their own benefits, a left-wing intelligentsia that is naive enough to believe platitudes about fairness, and a right wing that is mostly ignorant and for sale to the highest bidder.
No, I don't believe that this ruling means the end of times for the internet. But it does mean that progress going forward in the digital age will be slowed compared with what it would otherwise be. Future generations will laugh in bemusement: it was the dawn of a new age and yet they believed it could be controlled the same as all that came before. Fools.
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Jeffrey Tucker is Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.me (http://liberty.me/join), a subscription-based, action-focused social and publishing platform for the liberty minded. He is also distinguished fellow Foundation for Economic Education (http://fee.org), executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, research fellow Acton Institute, founder CryptoCurrency Conference, and author six books. He is available for speaking and interviews via]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]
tucker@liberty.me
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Parents who let kids walk home alone found responsible for 'unsubstantiated' neglect (LINK)
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The Maryland parents under investigation over letting their children walk home by themselves have been found "responsible for unsubstantiated child neglect" by local child protective services.
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv said they received a letter last weekend notifying them of the Feb. 20 decision in a case that has garnered national debate over parenting styles and philosophy. They plan to appeal the finding but said they first consulted with an attorney before commenting publicly Monday.
Officials began investigating Meitiv and her husband after someone called police last Dec. 20 to report that their children — Rafi, 10, and Dvora, 6 — were walking home from a playground about a mile away from their house in Silver Spring, a Maryland suburb outside Washington, D.C.
Police had also received an anonymous call about the kids two months earlier, on Oct. 27, after the kids were playing at a closer park, just blocks away from their home. That case was later dropped by CPS.
}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}o0o0o0o0o}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}Webmaster's Commentary:====It is obvious that Maryland's CPS is at war with the families of that state, just as the CPS departments are at war with families nation-wide.
And can someone please tell me how the sam hill the state can charge the parents with "unsubstantiated child neglect"?!? The word "unsubstantiated means that there is no tangible proof of child neglect.
These people appear to be good parents; they just need to be at their jobs during the day, as millions of other American parents need to be. Does that make all these parents bad parents, particularly if they have done the "due diligence" to insure that when they settle into a neighborhood, if they have, or are planning to have kids, that the neighborhood is safe?!?
I think not.
And what, pray tell, is the Maryland CPS doing about police brutality against inner city kids who deal with violence perpetrated by school cops?!? As reported this January by wbaltv.com:
So what the hell is the Maryland CPS doing to protect kids like this from the real probability of physical abuse they face from school police, who very obviously have had zero training in walking and talking back confrontational behaviour?!? One big, fat, hairy NOTHING.
For Maryland's CPS's perspective the Meitiv family was a "safe" target to attempt to label as neglectful, as a means of scaring other families in the situation where no family member was available to walk or drive their kids to, and from school.
But for a kid like Diamond Neals, who desperately needed to feel safe and protected at her school, Maryland's CPS doesn't give a rat's anus. Otherwise, there would be intensive training to school police about avoiding confrontation, which sure as hell hasn't happened.
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Almost 100 families evicted daily in Spain – statistics (LINK)
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keep it secret ,don't have to talk about it...secrecy > now THATS how to control speech !!!!!!!!!!!!
{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{How Thatcher’s Government Covered Up a VIP Pedophile Ring (LINK)
A newspaper editor was handed startling evidence that Britain’s top law enforcement official knew there was a VIP pedophile network in Westminster, at the heart of the British government. What happened next in the summer of 1984 helps to explain how shocking allegations of rape and murder against some of the country’s most powerful men went unchecked for decades.Less than 24 hours after starting to inquire about the dossier presented to him by a senior Labour Party politician, the editor was confronted in his office by a furious member of parliament who threatened him and demanded the documents. “He was frothing at the mouth and really shouting and spitting in my face,” Don Hale told The Daily Beast. “He was straight at me like a raging lion; he was ready to knock me through the wall.”
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Cabinet office in child abuse cover-up: MoS beats attempt by No10 to gag VIP file that shows Thatcher knew about paedophile MP Cyril Smith- Downing Street tried to block release of files exposing scale of cover-up
- Cabinet Office only caved in after being threatened with High Court Action
- Papers expose how much Establishment knew about Cyril Smith's abuse
- Margaret Thatcher was told police had probed claims he abused teenagers
- She was warned that handing him knighthood risked damaging 'integrity of the honours system' - but went ahead anyway
By Chris Hastings and Martin Beckford for The Mail on Sunday
Published: 17:49 EST, 7 March 2015 | Updated: 08:34 EST, 8 March 2015
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Did The BLS Once Again Forget To Count The Tens Of Thousands Of Energy Job Losses? (LINK)A month ago we asked if the "BLS Forget To Count Thousands Of Energy Job Losses" when as we showed, the BLS reported that only 1,900 jobs were lost in the entire oil and gas extraction space, which was a vast underestimation of what is taking place in reality, when compared to not only corporate layoff announcements, but what Challenger had reported was going on in the shale patch, when it calculated that some 21,300 jobs were lost in January in just the energy sector.
Today we ask again: did the BLS once more forget to add the now tens of thousands of jobs lost in the US energy sector? We ask because the divergence is getting, frankly, ridiculous.
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Joseph Moshe (MOSSAD Microbiologist): “Swine flu vaccine is bioweapon”
Joseph Moshe, MOSSAD
Sponsored by the Derma roller
Today, the MSM are not talking about this case any more. Yesterday, they wanted us to believe that Joseph Moshe was a nutcase and a terrorist, arrested for threatening to bomb the White House. Interesting detail about his arrest (the “Westwood standoff”) was that he seemed to be immune to the 5 cans of tear gas and 5 gallons of law-enforcement grade pepper spray they pumped into his face. He very calmly remained in his car, as the video footage of his arrest shows.
Professor Moshe had called into a live radio show by Dr. A. True Ott, (explanation of Joseph Moshe’s call at 06:00) broadcast on Republic Broadcasting claiming to be a microbiologist who wanted to supply evidence to a States Attorney regarding tainted H1N1 Swine flu vaccines being produced by Baxter BioPharma Solutions. He said that Baxter’s Ukrainian lab was in fact producing a bioweapon disguised as a vaccine. He claimed that the vaccine contained an adjuvant (additive) designed to weaken the immune system, and replicated RNA from the virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic Spanish flu, causing global sickness and mass death.
Sources tell us that Bar-Joseph Moshe made no threat against the President or the White House. He did not mention any bomb or attack. He then proceeded to inform the White House he intended to go public with this information. When he noticed men in suits in front of his house and feared that the FBI was about to detain him, he packed some belongings into his car and, him being a dual Israeli citizen, tried to reach the Israeli consulate located in close proximity to the federal building where the standoff took place. The FBI and the bomb squad prevented him from reaching it. Who is this man? His profile on biomedexperts.com says he is a plant disease expert with many publications on his name involving the genetic manipulation of virii. Photographic evidence that Moshe is who he says he is can be found here.
Joseph Moshe was soon after his arrest sent or let go to Israel. Nothing has been heard from him since. The Secret Service was not the agency involved in the surveillance of Moshe at his home in California. This was done by the FBI, who had orders to detain or arrest him. Mounted on top of a large black vehicle used in his arrest was a microwave weapon that possibly damaged the electronics in Moshe’s car as well as any communication devices he had which might have been used to contact the media or others who could help him.
Moshe did not suffer the same effects of the gas and pepper spray that others would have because he had built up an immunity to such weapons as a by-product of his Mossad training. Moshe was not handcuffed because he was not placed under arrest.
Does this sound like an insane conspiracy theory? Sure it does. Due to the scarcity and anonimity of the sources we would dismiss it as exactly that, if it weren’t for some uncomfortable facts: Baxter Pharmaceutical has been caught, red-handed, in spreading a live, genetically engineered H5N1 Bird flu vaccine as a lethal biological weapon all over the world, destined to be used for human vaccinations. This happened just a few months ago. And only luck prevented a global catastrophe of epic proportions.
Baxter International Inc. had mixed live, genetically engineered avian flue viruses in vaccine material shipped to 18 countries. Only by sheer luck, a Czech laboratory decided to test the vaccine on a dozen ferrets, which all died in days. The World Health Organization was notified and catastrophe was averted. This was clearly a deliberate act on Baxter’s part, because they adhere to BS3, bio-safety level three. Baxter admitted a “mistake”. Such monumental screwups are totally impossible at that level. Many safety systems would have needed to be sabotaged, many key personell would have needed to be bribed. It simply can’t be done without direction from the inside. They did not send out the wrong vial – they produced dozens of gallons of biological-weapon agent (genetically engineered live H5N1 / Bird flu virus), then sent it out as a “vaccine”.
Baxter knew full well that their vaccine was lethal, because the year before they had tested it on a few hundred homeless Polish people – dozens died as a result.
Where’s the meat? Well – Baxter is now being sued for the deliberate, repeated contamination of vaccines with biological weapons designed – by them – to mass-murder people. Here is the complaint (PDF). By some kook nutcase? Not likely – Jane Burgermeister is an experienced, respected journalist. She is not the only one suing Baxter for planning and executing a plan for global genocide: Others are filing complaints as well. Read a well-researched complaint here (PDF).
Qui bono? We think it may be profit-motivated or even sheer incompetence, but for the conspiracy-minded: The latter complaint alludes to intentional “culling of the herd”. Have you heard of the Georgia Guidestones? An enormous monument loaded with Masonic symbolism costing millions of dollars, it has been erected by unknown, powerful elites (multimillionaires with the clout to erect monuments wherever they please, obviously) around 30 years ago. It gives an “alternative ten commandments”, of which the first is the extermination of six and a half billion people from the face of the Earth. Half a billion will remain. This is the number of people the planet can sustain indefinitely, so that the descendents of the Rothschilds and Rockefellers can live in peace and affluence indefinitely. Slaves are needed to produce that luxury, but 500 million will do just fine. But how does one go about killing off most of the world?
“Vaccinating” the planet with a bioweapon with near-100% mortality would do the trick. Baxter would provide both the bioweapon as well as the vaccine against it to “civilized” Western peoples. Result: We can plunder Africa, we have no more competition from SE Asia, the oil is for our taking and only Western and perhaps Chinese sheeple remain.
Rockefeller said this in 1994 at a U.N. dinner: “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order.” PNAC said something similar right before 9/11.
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see http://www.unfictional.com/joseph-moshe-mossad-bioweapon-swine-flu-vaccine-westwood
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Conspiracy Theorists think the MSM is a disinformation system.
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The Economist: The World's Sleaziest Magazine
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and on the other side of the castle moat ........
}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}Britain’s Elite Still Enjoying a Tax Break 100 Years Old. (LINK)
They are among the British moneyed elite: the head of the nation’s largest bank, a billionaire hedge fund manager and the owner of some of London’s most luxurious nightclubs.
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WEBMASTER ADDITION: This is why Judy Clarke had to talk Dzhokhar Tsarnaev into a guilty plea, so the question of the video tape is never brought up in court!=00000]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[0000000000}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{00000=Defense admits Tsarnaev took part in Marathon bombings
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s defense attorney acknowledged Wednesday that her client had participated in the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, an attack that shook the nation as it raised once again the specter of terrorism on American soil.
Judy Clarke said the bombings were “misguided acts” carried out by Tsarnaev and his late older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. “There’s little that we dispute. It was him,” she said in US District Court in Boston.
Webmaster's Commentary:It sounds like this Judy Clarke is the government's "fixer" to get patsies to plead guilty. This is the only way for the FBI to get out of proving they really did have a video showing the planting of the bomb.
Were Clarke really working for Tsarnaev, she could win the case simply by showing the jury the remains of the bomb and backpack, and the photos of both Tsarnaev brothers taken at the scene before the blast, which clearly show the brothers were not the source of the backpack with the bomb!
At top, the remains of the bomb backpack. Note the black color and white square patch. At bottom, the Tsarnaev brothers are on the left, the "Khaki" man with the backback identical to the bomb backpack is on the right.When Martin Luther King was assassinated, Patsy James Earl Ray was told by his government-appointed attorney that if he did not challenge the official story and pled guilty, Ray would get a short prison sentence. Of course, the judge sentenced James Earl Ray to life without parole then refused to allow Ray to change his plea! I suspect the same thing is happening here. Clarke has likely told Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that if he pleads guilty and says his brother made him do it, he will get a light sentence. And Dzhokhar Tsarnaev won't know how badly he is being screwed until it is too late.
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Stop Whining America! Economists “Show” You’re The Happiest In 56 Years (LINK)
Under-employed? Over-indebted? Under-paid? Forget about it… the clever economists that run the world have news for you. Based on economist Arthur Okun’s “Misery Index” – which combines inflation and unemployment rates – Americans are the least miserable since 1959…
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But the Cops Should Be Trusted! (LINK)
Why aren't all the police officers who file false reports still on the job and not facing felony charges?
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Jon G. Tidd
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Posted Yesterday, 11:02 PM
Stephen Gaal,
Many JFK researchers, perhaps most or all, believe Oswald was an intelligence agent.
I don't believe many, if any, JFK researchers know what an intelligence agent is. Know the different kinds of intelligence agents. Know what intelligence agents do. Know how they are handled in terms of what's called the "intelligence cycle". Know how intelligence is produced and what intelligence is. Know how an intelligence service is basically organized. Know anything about the training of an intelligence officer. And so on. That's why I wrote this diary, to attempt to shine some light on these subjects.
If you believe as you assert that Oswald was an intelligence agent, what clear indications are there, in your thinking, that he was an intelligence agent?
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HERE ARE JUST 5
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Oswald’s "Historic Diary"
The conventional wisdom
The Warren Report reconstructed Oswald’s defection and his thoughts & activities during his time in the Soviet Union by utilizing Oswald’s "Historic Diary," which purportedly was Oswald’s contemporaneous documentation of events
The Evidence
Upon careful evaluation, Oswald’s "diary" reflects information that could only have become known after the supposed time of the entries. Expert handwriting analysis establishes that the "diary" was not an accumulation of random entries each entry having been made on the date indicated contemporaneous with the events being recorded.
Query:
The determination that Oswald’s "diary", upon which so much reliance has been placed in the reconstructing the defection, is not a diary at all, and is in fact a phony. calls into question the entire Warren Report reconstruction of Oswald’s life in Russia.
As well it gives rise to the following disturbing questions: when was the "diary" written?
- whose purposes did this phony diary serve?
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Oswald was never known to have any solid finances. So when his service pal Nelson Delgado was asked, he replied that he had no idea how Oswald could afford to travel across Europe. Delgado said this cost anywhere from eight hundred to a thousand dollars. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 137) Which a study of his bank records reveals he did not have. But in addition to this, Davison could have told us about the hotels he stayed in while in Helsinki. British investigator Ian Griggs actually stayed in them. The first was the Hotel Torni. Griggs described this as no less than a five star hotel. The rough equivalent of the Savoy in London or the Four Seasons in San Francisco. How and why would someone as low status as Oswald choose to stay at such a place? Someone must have alerted him to this dilemma because he soon checked out. He went to the Klaus Kurki Hotel. Griggs described this as maybe a notch below the Torni. A four and a half star hotel. Since, as I said, Davison never went anywhere for a field investigation, she cannot inform us of this dichotomy. And therefore, the reader cannot ask the obvious questions: Where did Oswald get the money to stay in the kinds of hotels that Nelson Rockefeller and Jean Sibelius booked? (ibid, p. 138) And second, why would the usually frugal Oswald become a spendthrift in Finland?
But beyond that, outside the pages of Oswald's Game, with normal rationality, the question also arises: Why did Oswald even go to Helsinki? Davison says that he placed an educational facility destination adjacent to Helsinki on his passport application. Which does not really explain it, since Oswald wrote several places on the application. Some of which he never went to. It appears he went there because that particular Russian Embassy had close ties to Intourist, the Russian state-owned travel bureau. Oswald applied for a visa to Intourist on October 13th. He got it the next day. (ibid, p. 138) Again, this is notable for the saga of Oswald. Because the Helsinki embassy was the only one in Europe which granted these visas that fast. The US Embassy there had direct ties to their Soviet counterparts and sent people who needed expedited visas to them. Did Oswald know this? Is this why he went there? If so, who told him about it? Since Davison deals with the matter of Helsinki in about two sentences, those questions also do not arise in Oswald's Game. (See Davison, pgs. 81, 84)
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This brings us to the matter of how Oswald began his journey to Helsinki. Once he was fluent in Russian, as proven through his conversation with Quinn, Oswald did something unusual. He applied for a hardship discharge. Again, Delgado could not understand it. For these were notoriously hard to get and took a long time to process. (Second Edition, Destiny Betrayed, p. 136)
Now, let us make the mystery about this transparent, which Davison really does not do. Oswald's actual application was submitted on August 17th. At this point, his service contract had less than four months to run. The HSCA discovered that these proceedings took as many as six months to finalize. (ibid) Therefore, under normal circumstances, Oswald would have been better off just waiting out his service contract rather than gambling with the complex process of discharge. Why do I say that? Because, usually there were thorough investigations made at both ends to make sure the application was not a bogus attempt to get out early. And if there had been normal inquiries done, Oswald's filing would have been exposed as ersatz and he would have been busted.
But he wasn't. One reason he was not was this: instead of taking six months, or even three, his application was approved in just ten days! The way Davison deals with this is rich. She says that Oswald's application "was approved fairly quickly." (Davison, p. 82) Well, that's one way of putting it. But by not telling us about the actual time lapse, she avoids the question of what kind of inquiry could the Navy have made in just ten days. Because the main reason the application was granted was the excuse that Marguerite had a candy box at work fall on her nose. She needed to get a doctor's affidavit to collect on workmen's compensation since the company she worked for did not think the injury was that serious.
One of the doctors that Marguerite visited to collect information for her workman's compensation claim was Dr. Milton Goldberg. He called the FBI on the day of the assassination and said he could not go along with her claims for injuries and referred her to other doctors. But he also told the FBI that on one of her early visits she told him her son wanted to defect to Russia. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 136) Now, her first visit to Goldberg was on January 9, 1959. Which was a full nine months before Oswald was discharged. It was six months before he reported to the Red Cross to begin the process of the dependency discharge. Of which there was no dependency. The Navy could have discovered this just by interviewing Robert Oswald, who was living in Fort Worth at the time. There is no evidence that he was helping his mother at the time. And, of course, when Oswald did get out, he spent all of three days in Texas. Clearly, something was going on behind the scenes with this hardship discharge. But you would never get any suggestion of impropriety from Oswald's Game.
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They would have told her that Ferrie had a tremendous influence over these youths. And he also seemed to have clearance from above to do things with them that required special permission. Like camping out with them at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, and having military planes fly them back form drill competitions. He also convinced a number of them to join the Marines. (Author's interview with Delsa in New Orleans in 1994; Destiny Betrayed, p. 84) I could go on and on in this regard, but suffice it to say, many writers have deduced that David Ferrie was a powerful influence on Oswald's life. If he was not, then why was Ferrie so obsessed with hiding his relationship with Oswald in the CAP in the days following the assassination? (Destiny Betrayed, pgs 176-77)
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Social Security Number that is incorrect for time and place at age 15 half.
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Was Oswald an Intelligence Agent? ANSWER YES
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Adele Edisen: A 4-hour interview . . .
in JFK Assassination Debate
Started by Guest_James H. Fetzer_*, 16 Feb 2011Last Post by Guest_Tom Scully_* , 26 Jul 2011
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in JFK Assassination Debate
Started by John Simkin, 21 May 2005Last Post by Guest_Tom Scully_* , 20 Jul 2012
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many Russian officials and RT ex-staff have publicly gone on record that RT is little more than Putin's Propaganda arm.// KNIGHT
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State Department to Russians & ex RT STAFF ...... the check is in the mail.........well, to be factual see below
Wednesday, Apr 18, 2012 05:46 AM PDT
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Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics Those who pretend to engage in adversarial journalism will invariably hate those who actually do it VIDEO
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/18/attacks_on_rt_and_assange_reveal_much_about_the_critics/
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}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO)and the real question is !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Who's the Propagandist: US or RT? | Consortiumnews
May 1, 2014 - The U.S. State Department, which has been caught promoting a series of ... made some broad-brush criticisms of RT's content – accusing the ...
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"I am a Ukrainian" Propaganda Video Exposed As Kony-Style Scam ...
www.globalresearch.cawww.globalresearch.ca/i-am-a-ukrainian-propaganda-video.../5370067"\
" I am a Ukrainian" Propaganda Video Exposed As Kony-Style Scam ...Feb 22, 2014 ... Regime change propaganda goes viral ... the Ukrainian revolt is grass roots, but its origins can be traced back to the U.S. State Department. - See more at: http://www.globalresearch.org/search?q=RT+NEWS#sthash.spyCgls2.dpuf
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Breaking: Google gives new meaning to “Orwellian”
Becomes Ministry of Truth
by Jon Rappoport
March 1,
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“…if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.” (1984, George Orwell)
The New Scientist has the stunning story (2/28/15, “Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links,” by Hal Hodson):
“THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free ‘news’ stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness.”
Great idea, right?
Sure it is.
The author of the article lets the cat out of the bag right away with his comment about “anti-vaccination” websites.
These sites will obviously be shoved into obscurity by Google because they’re “garbage”…whereas “truthful” pro-vaccine sites will dominate top ranked pages on the search engine.
This is wonderful if you believe what the CDC tells you about vaccine safety and efficacy. The CDC: an agency that opens its doors every day with lies and closes them with more lies.
The New Scientist article continues:
“A Google research team is adapting [a] model to measure the trustworthiness of a [website] page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the [ranking] system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. ‘A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,’ says the team…The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.”
Right. Google, researchers of truth. Assessors of trustworthiness. Who in the world could have a problem with that?
Answer: anyone with three live brain cells.
Here’s the New Scientist’s capper. It’s a beaut:
“The [truth-finding] software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.”
Right. Uh-huh. So Google, along with its friends at the CIA, will engineer a new and improved, greater flood of (dis)information across the Web. And this disinfo will constitute an overwhelming majority opinion…and will become the standard for measuring truth and trustworthiness.
Think about what kinds of websites will rise like foul cream to the top of Google page rankings:
“All vaccines are marvelously safe and effective, and parents who don’t vaccinate their kids should be prosecuted for felonies.”
“GMOs are perfectly safe. ‘The science’ says so.”
“The FBI has never organized a synthetic terror event and then stung the morons it encouraged.”
“Common Core is the greatest system of education yet devised by humans.”
“People who believe conspiracies exist have mental disorders.”
In other words: (fake) consensus reality becomes reality. Which is the situation we have now, but the titanic pile of fakery will rise much, much higher.
Also, think about this: the whole purpose of authentic investigative reporting is puncturing the consensus…but you’ll have to search Google for a long time to find it.
In the field of medical fraud, an area I’ve been researching for 25 years, the conclusions of standard published studies (which are brimming with lies) will occupy page after page of top Google rankings.
Let me offer a counter-example to the Google “knowledge team.” Here is a woman who has examined, up close and personal, more medical studies in her career than the entire workforce of Google. She is Dr. Marcia Angell. For 20 years, she was an editor at The New England Journal of Medicine.
On January 15, 2009, the New York Review of Books published her stunning statement: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
In two sentences, Angell carries more weight than 20,000 blowhard “science bloggers,” to say nothing of lying drug companies and that criminal agency called the FDA.
Angell torpedoes an entire range of medical literature, based on her hard-won experience.
But you can be sure that when it comes to “medical facts,” the Google “truth team” will ascribe absolutely no merit (ranking) to her conclusion or its implications.
You may say, “But these search engines are already slanting the truth.”
The new Google program is going to double down. It’s going to set up its own Ministry of Truth. It’s going to standardize algorithms that unerringly bring about officially favored lies.
Stories on vote fraud?
Stories contradicting the official line on mass shootings?
Stories on the US government funding terrorist groups?
Stories on the hostile planetary intentions of Globalists?
Stories on corporate criminals? Secrets of the Federal Reserve?
Stories on major media censoring scandals?
Counter-consensus stories on 9/11, the JFK assassination, the US bankers and corporations who funded both sides in WW2? All anti-establishment versions of history?
After Google launches this Ministry of Truth program, you’ll have to put on diving gear and go deep underwater to find any trace of them.
Welcome to a new day.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” (Opening line, 1984, Orwell)
Let’s take all this one step further. Google’s director of research is Ray Kurzweil, who many people know as the promoter of a “utopian” plan to hook the population up (through direct brain-machine interface) to a vast super-computer.
The super-computer will pass along virtually all human knowledge. Kurzweil believes such a momentous breakthrough will endow humans with a mystical level of consciousness.
Even if this technological wet dream could be realized, we can now see what “connecting to all human knowledge” means:
It means accepting all official knowledge. Being blind to counter-knowledge.
It’s time to reverse AI (Artificial Intelligence) and call it IA (Intelligent Androids).
IAs would be humans who are programmed to be androids. IAs accept truth as it delivered to them by official sources.
Google makes its contribution by promoting official sources.
And hiding other sources.
Yes, this surely seems like Nirvana.
You will be fed the Good and protected from the Evil.
Sound familiar?
Thank you, Google. When are you going to apply for non-profit status and open your Holy Church of Information?
“Today’s sermon will be delivered by the director of the CIA. It is titled, ‘Data: everything you need to know, everything you must not believe.’ Breathe deeply. Your neuronal circuits are now being tuned to our channel…”
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GMO Corn Really Kill All Those Bees in Canada? Scientists Say Corn Seed Coating Possible Bee-Killing CulpritFebruary 27th, 2015==
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9/11 Cover-Up? Three US-Journalists Dead Within 24 Hours (LINK)
Ned Colt of (NBC) died of a stroke.
Bob Simon of (CBS) died in a car crash.
David Carr (NY Times), 58, a columnist for the New York Times, fell out dead in his office Thursday just after interviewing NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden about the release of secret documents in a “Times Talks” episode which was captured on video via Google Hangouts.
He also had just come out against Brian Williams from NBC while on CBS… calling Williams out for lying about being shot down in the Iraq war.
The three deaths cause a certain controversy, given reports and investigations of the russian TV-channel RT that mentions that all three journalists were planning a joint documentary about the 9/11 attacks and possible involvement of the US government. According to unconfirmed reports, they also made requests for access to russian archives in the course of research for the 9/11 documentary.
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It’s Called Recovery, but Where’s the Beef?
By Robert Higgs
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Many economists and other analysts have recognized that the recovery from the U.S. economy’s most recent contraction has been unusually weak—weaker, for example, than any other since World War II. But analysts have disagreed in characterizing the current recovery, which according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the semi-official arbiter of business-cycle chronology, began in mid-2009 after a contraction that had continued for ten quarters. Some aspects of the economy, such as real GDP and consumer spending, have recovered their pre-recession highs and continued to increase. The rate of unemployment has fallen by several percentage points from its high of more than 10 percent. Net private business investment, which took an especially steep tumble during the contraction, has regained much of its loss.
Some of the most-cited indexes of recovery, however, are ambiguous, at best. The rate of unemployment, for example, has fallen in large part because millions of potential workers have left the labor force. The employment/population ratio, which fell by about 5 percentage points during the contraction, has barely budged from its new, much lower plateau. A growing GDP, despite its near-universal acceptance as the best measure of economic growth, actually tells us little about changes in the public’s well-being. Some components of GDP, especially some of the elements that pertain to government spending, actually should be deducted from, rather than added to, the domestic product, inasmuch as the related government activities—military aggression abroad, domestic spying on the entire population, enforcement of counter-productive and even destructive regulations, prosecution and incarceration of people whose “crimes” have no victims—harm the public, rather than improving their welfare.
Arguably the best single, currently available measure of the entire public’s payoff from economic activity is real disposable income per capita. This is the average amount per annum that Americans receive in exchange for the use of their labor and other input services, after taxes, corrected for changes in the purchasing power of the dollar. As the chart below shows, this measure of economic well-being has scarcely increased at all since 2007.
Real Disposable Personal Income per Capita (chained 2009 dollars)
To give greater precision to one’s visual impressions, I have computed the average compound rate of growth of the variable in the succeeding stages of faster or slower growth visible in the chart. The results are as follows:
Period Average annual percentage rate of growth 1949–1961 2.2% 1961–1973 3.7% 1973–1983 1.3% 1983–1996 2.1% 1996–2007 2.4% 2007–2014 0.6%These figures demonstrate that even though the rate of increase has varied substantially in the past, it has never remained so low as it has been in recent years. Even during the decade of so-called stagflation from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, real disposable income per capita grew more than twice as fast as it has grown in the past seven years. In the past, recessions were always followed by relatively brisk growth during the first several years of the ensuing recovery. Such has not been the case this time. Nor do forecasters anticipate any such surge of growth in the future. Might it be that the state’s burdens loaded onto the private producers of wealth—taxes, regulations, uncertainties, intrusions of all sorts, including demands for elaborate reports, asset seizures, and threats of felony prosecution for completely innocent and harmless actions—have finally become the “last straw” for these long-suffering camels?
However that may be, the current situation is clear enough. The U.S. economy, though not yet completely stagnant, has made little headway for more than seven years, and there is little reason to foresee any great change in this regard. Although some indexes of economic performance have recovered substantially since mid-2009, others have done so much less or not at all. And, without a doubt, the alleged recovery process has failed to deliver the “beef” that means the most to the people: substantial growth of real disposable personal income per capita.
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(WOULD STALIN LOVE THIS OR WHAT ??? GAAL)
Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?
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(updated below)
The FBI and major media outlets yesterday trumpeted the agency’s latest counterterrorism triumph: the arrest of three Brooklyn men, ages 19 to 30, on charges of conspiring to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS (photo of joint FBI/NYPD press conference, above). As my colleague Murtaza Hussain ably documents, “it appears that none of the three men was in any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help from the FBI informant.” One of the frightening terrorist villains told the FBI informant that, beyond having no money, he had encountered a significant problem in following through on the FBI’s plot: his mom had taken away his passport. Noting the bizarre and unhinged ranting of one of the suspects, Hussain noted on Twitter that this case “sounds like another victory for the FBI over the mentally ill.”
In this regard, this latest arrest appears to be quite similar to the overwhelming majority of terrorism arrests the FBI has proudly touted over the last decade. As my colleague Andrew Fishman and I wrote last month — after the FBI manipulated a 20-year-old loner who lived with his parents into allegedly agreeing to join an FBI-created plot to attack the Capitol — these cases follow a very clear pattern:
The known facts from this latest case seem to fit well within a now-familiar FBI pattern whereby the agency does not disrupt planned domestic terror attacks but rather creates them, then publicly praises itself for stopping its own plots.
Once again, we should all pause for a moment to thank the brave men and women of the FBI for saving us from their own terror plots.
First, they target a Muslim: not due to any evidence of intent or capability to engage in terrorism, but rather for the “radical” political views he expresses. In most cases, the Muslim targeted by the FBI is a very young (late teens, early 20s), adrift, unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering basic life functions, let alone carrying out a serious terror attack, and has no known involvement with actual terrorist groups.
They then find another Muslim who is highly motivated to help disrupt a “terror plot”: either because they’re being paid substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the case here) they are charged with some unrelated crime and are desperate to please the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives the informant a detailed attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry it out, and the informant then shares all of that with the target. Typically, the informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and persuades the target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In some instances where the target refuses to go along, they have their informant offer huge cash inducements to the impoverished target.
Once they finally get the target to agree, the FBI swoops in at the last minute, arrests the target, issues a press release praising themselves for disrupting a dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the DOJ and federal judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S. courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and permissive interpretation of “entrapment” that it could almost never be successfully invoked.
One can, if one really wishes, debate whether the FBI should be engaging in such behavior. For reasons I and many others have repeatedly argued, these cases are unjust in the extreme: a form of pre-emptory prosecution where vulnerable individuals are targeted and manipulated not for any criminal acts they have committed but rather for the bad political views they have expressed. They end up sending young people to prison for decades for “crimes” which even their sentencing judges acknowledge they never would have seriously considered, let alone committed, in the absence of FBI trickery. It’s hard to imagine anyone thinking this is a justifiable tactic, but I’m certain there are people who believe that. Let’s leave that question to the side for the moment in favor of a different issue.
We’re constantly bombarded with dire warnings about the grave threat of home-grown terrorists, “lone wolf” extremists and ISIS. So intensified are these official warnings that The New York Times earlier this month cited anonymous U.S. intelligence officials to warn of the growing ISIS threat and announce “the prospect of a new global war on terror.”
But how serious of a threat can all of this be, at least domestically, if the FBI continually has to resort to manufacturing its own plots by trolling the Internet in search of young drifters and/or the mentally ill whom they target, recruit and then manipulate into joining? Does that not, by itself, demonstrate how over-hyped and insubstantial this “threat” actually is? Shouldn’t there be actual plots, ones that are created and fueled without the help of the FBI, that the agency should devote its massive resources to stopping?
This FBI tactic would be akin to having the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) constantly warn of the severe threat posed by drug addiction while it simultaneously uses pushers on its payroll to deliberately get people hooked on drugs so that they can arrest the addicts they’ve created and thus justify their own warnings and budgets (and that kind of threat-creation, just by the way, is not all that far off from what the other federal law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, are actually doing). As we noted the last time we wrote about this, the Justice Department is aggressively pressuring U.S. allies to employ these same entrapment tactics in order to create their own terrorists, who can then be paraded around as proof of the grave threat.
Threats that are real, and substantial, do not need to be manufactured and concocted. Indeed, as the blogger Digby, citing Juan Cole, recently showed, run-of-the-mill “lone wolf” gun violence is so much of a greater threat to Americans than “domestic terror” by every statistical metric that it’s almost impossible to overstate the disparity:
In that regard, it is not difficult to understand why “domestic terror” and “homegrown extremism” are things the FBI is desperately determined to create. But this FBI terror-plot concoction should, by itself, suffice to demonstrate how wildly exaggerated this threat actually is.
Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP
UPDATE: The ACLU of Massachusetts’s Kade Crockford notes this extraordinarily revealing quote from former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes, as he defends one of the worst FBI terror “sting” operations of all (the Cromitie prosecution we describe at length here):
If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that “We won the war on terror and everything’s great,” cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.That is the FBI’s terrorism strategy — keep fear alive — and it drives everything they do.
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Email the author: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.comt
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Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Spikes 7,000% as Contaminated Water Pours into the Ocean (LINK}
Cleanup crews trying to mitigate Japan’s never-ending radiation crisis at Fukushima ran into more problems recently after sensors monitoring a drainage gutter detected a huge spike in radiation levels from wastewater pouring into the Pacific Ocean.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company says radiation levels were up to 70 times, or 7,000 percent, higher than normal, prompting an immediate shutdown of the drainage instrument. The first readings came around 10 a.m. local time on February 22, setting off alarms not once but twice as radiation levels spiked to extremely high levels.
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CONTRARY TO COLBY'S IDEAS, RE-COLONIALISM IS ON THE MARCH.
NGO/CIA/STATE DEPT = ARAB SPRING = COLONIALISM = WHAT GAAL'S TALKING ABOUT
NATO Interventionism: The Disaster in Libya
The title of Horace Campbell’s book on NATO’s 2011 Libyan intervention, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, is an allusion to a Guardian article by Seumas Milne entitled, “If the Libyan war was about saving lives, it was a catastrophic failure.” Echoing Milne’s use of “catastrophic” is apt. Claudia Gazzini of the liberal NGO International Crisis Group points out that, if the casualty figures provided by Libya’s National Transitional Council are accurate, “the death toll subsequent to the seven-month NATO intervention was at least ten times greater than the tally of those killed in the first few weeks of the conflict” before NATO intervened. As Campbell shows, while NATO claimed to be protecting human rights, it bombed Libyan civilians and enabled the Libyan opposition to persecute black African migrant workers and ethnically cleanse the black Libyan town of Tawergha. Less than four years after NATO attacked Libya, Bernadino Leon, the United Nation’s special envoy to Libya, saysthe country is “close to the point of no return.”
Perhaps as many as two million Libyan refugees have fled to Tunisia, though the exact figure is in dispute. In November, militants claiming affiliation with ISIS secured control of the Libyan city of Derna, where they have carried out public executions and assassinated activists.
Nicholas Pelham reports that almost all of the exiles who returned to Libya after the overthrow of the government have left; that more would have left had European consulates remained open; that warlords have taken power in several parts of the country; that “a once relatively homogenous society has splintered into multiple bickering armed groups”; that separatism has gained traction in Cyrenaica, which has just a third of Libya’s population but two thirds of its oil fields, most of its aquifers, and the country’s gold mines; that cafes and power stations have been burned; that embassies and assorted other targets have been car-bombed; and that airports have been attacked. Tripoli’s population, Pelham writes, is “distraught,” and Libyans “feel even more isolated than when the UN imposed sanctions on [Muammar] Gaddafi.”
At the time of writing, negotiations are underway to end an ongoing civil war. There are two rival seats of government, each with its own institutions. One is the Tripoli-based General National Congress (GNC), which was set up when the capital was seized by Libya Dawn after it did badly in parliamentary elections.
Libya Dawn is an umbrella organization made up of assorted Islamist groups, including the Salafist group Ansar al-Sharia, which is backed by U.S. ally Qatar, as well as various militia from Berber towns. Many of Libya Dawn’s leaders are former fighters from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a jihadist organization that, before trying to kill Gaddafi in the 1990s, fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan alongside Osama bin Laden. That group was backed by another U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia.
The other seat of government is the Tobruk-based House of Representatives. They have allied themselves with what remains of the Libyan state’s armed forces and with troops loyal to former army commander Khalifa Haftar. The latter helped Gaddafi overthrow the previous regime in 1969 but fled Libya upon falling out with the colonel after Haftar led a failed war with Chad.
Haftar, who is believed to have been a CIA asset, returned to Libya during the war against Gaddafi. Haftar’s forces are backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, who have bombed parts of Libya. Haftar has shelled apartment blocks, Pelham reports, and bombed Tripoli’s airports as passengers were about to board planes.
According to Libya Body Count, nearly 3,000 Libyans have died violent deaths since the beginning of January 2014. As Pelham writes, the “scale of the terror and destruction” carried out by both Libya Dawn and Haftar’s forces “far surpasses that of Gaddafi’s last years. One wonders how many of the Westerners who cheered on the war against him recognize this.”
That Egypt and Qatar – both staunch U.S. allies – are on opposing sides of the conflict suggests that the United States is effectively backing both sides of the Libyan civil war.
Campbell’s book is a helpful guide to how Libya got to this point. At the outset he explains that, before the tumult in Libya began, “he had taken the position that though Gaddafi should be opposed, it was equally necessary to oppose the NATO intervention.” While Campbell worried about how Gaddafi would respond to protesters, he regarded the social forces in Libya as politically underdeveloped and knew that the British and French “were up to mischief” once French President Nicolas Sarkozy began to champion the Libyan opposition, given that Sarkozy was “no friend of progressive African movements.”
Campbell’s view of the Libyan crisis is consonant with the one put forth in an open letter signed by two hundred African intellectuals, a document to which Campbell repeatedly returns. It expressed “our desire, not to take sides, but to protect the sovereignty of Libya and the right of the Libyan people to choose their own destiny.” Toward the end, the letter stated:
“Those who have brought a deadly rain of bombs on Libya today should not delude themselves to believe that the apparent silence of the millions of Africans [sic] means that Africa approved of the campaign of death, destruction and domination which that rain represents. … The answer we must provide practically, and as Africans, is – when, and in what ways, will we act resolutely and meaningfully to defend the right of the Africans of Libya to decide their future, and therefore the right and duty of all Africans to determine their destiny!”As Campbell’s book makes clear, he and the signatories of that letter were justified in their suspicion that imperialist states and their allies were motivated to intervene in Libya by concerns other than the welfare of Libyans. In that sense, Campbell’s book is an ideal companion piece to Maximilian Forte’s important Slouching Toward Sirte. While Forte’s book is notable for its meticulous detailing of how events played out in the Libyan affair, Campbell situates these in the larger context of the international capitalist dynamics driving them. While it is not perfect, anyone with an interest in NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya should read Campbell’s book. At times it meanders, and several claims that should be supported by citations are not. What he offers, however, is both an illuminating account of how Libya was torn asunder and an extremely useful contribution to efforts to understand precisely how militarized imperialist capitalism operates.
Campbell’s central premise is that NATO, and its allies such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, took advantage of and exacerbated the crisis that emerged in Libya following the protests that began in February 2011. The ruling classes in NATO states exploited the Libyan protests to assert Western military and economic control in Africa and to curtail efforts to create African unity and autonomy from the West. Wikileaks cables show Gaddafi’s government was seen as a barrier to these aims, and NATO’s Libyan expedition was also propelled by frustration in the elite sectors of Western states over their inability to control Libyan assets in the financial sector.
Ulterior Motives
One of Campbell’s most important insights is that the decision of Western powers and their allies to seek regime change in Libya has to be understood in the context of the 2008 financial meltdown. Whereas in the crisis of the 1930s colonial powers forced Africans to increase agricultural production so they could continue extracting the same value from the continent that they had before the Depression, Campbell suggests that in response to the 2008 crisis imperial powers had to find new ways of prying wealth from African states because they are now formally independent. Taking advantage of the turmoil in Libya in early 2011 was one way to do that, particularly because European powers did not have as much access as they would have liked to resource-rich Africa, and the NATO states were alarmed by China’s increasing role on the continent. Even during the Gaddafi government’s détente with the West, the Libyan state remained an obstacle to Western imperialist endeavors such as the building of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) military bases.
These tensions came to a head in early 2011, when, Campbell contends, elites in the U.S. wanted to “preempt other revolutionary uprisings of the type and scale that removed the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt,” a goal that he says was “outlined by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., at a major seminar on the implications of the uprising in Egypt.”
Moreover, Campbell writes that shortly after Tripoli fell, and the Libyan government was all but defeated, the Italian energy giant ENI was in the city to discuss resumption of Libyan gas exports. He characterizes Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to Tripoli a few days later as an instance of “fierce competition between French and other Western forces for control over the future of Libyan oil” and quotes the Guardian‘s description of the trip as “first and foremost, the Dave and Sarko spoils of war tour.”
In addition to oil, Campbell suggests that the coalition that overthrew Gaddafi is also likely interested in the enormous water wealth of Libya’s Nubian Sandstone Aquifer and the 4,000-kilometer Great Manmade River Project, as well as in exploiting the physical and mental labour of the Libyan people. This is the framework in which one should consider the British defense secretary’s remark near the end of the NATO intervention that business people should “pack their bags” for Libya and the U.S. ambassador in Tripoli’s claim that Libya had a “need” for American companies on a “big scale.”
Goldman Sachs in Tripoli
Campbell describes how the financialization of the energy sector deepened alliances between banks and oil companies, particularly after the banks lost billions in the subprime mortgage crisis and placed greater emphasis on energy trading.
During Gaddafi’s rapprochement with the west, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and neoliberal “reformers” in Gaddafi’s government entered the financial sector by establishing the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), a holding company responsible for managing the Libyan government’s investments in the oil and gas industry in the international finance market. The LIA paid Goldman Sachs $1.3-billion for options on currencies and stocks. However, the credit crisis caused the value of Libya’s investments in Goldman to drop 98 per cent. Those losses created tension between Goldman and the Libyan leadership – Libya ultimately rejected Goldman’s efforts to get them to further invest in the company, and the parties did not agree on a deal to compensate Libya for the lost money. Since the overthrow of Gaddafi, Campbell reports, there has been very little discussion of how Libya might recoup these losses.
A closely related issue was Libya’s bumpy relationship with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), an organization established in 1981 by the pro-U.S. governments of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to, in Campbell’s words, “recycle the resources of Arabia for the Western financial system.” At the time of NATO’s intervention, Campbell claims, Wall Street speculators allied with the GCC in a struggle with the Libyan leadership for control of the Bahrain-based Arab Banking Corporation, a major player in regional offshore, investment banking, and project finance services. The reason for the dispute was that the Libyans, Campbell says, wanted “to move the Arab Banking Group out of its servile position to Western banking interests,” a shift opposed by the Kuwait Investment Authority, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and other shareholders.
When NATO wanted the appearance of broad Arab support for the no-fly zone over Libya, an endorsement came from the Arab League in a vote that was held when only eleven of the twenty-two member states were present. Six of the nine who voted in favor were members of the GCC.
Moreover, the LIA, like many Western firms, invested billions in energy money in the “dark markets” of the UAE. Campbell suggests throughout the book that the neoliberals in Gaddafi’s government who were aligned with Western intellectuals of a similar persuasion ultimately helped bring about the government’s demise.
Despite opposition from their nationalist counterparts, the neoliberals entangled the country’s assets with Western companies, who were then able to restrict the Libyan state’s financial options at a crucial moment. After the beginning of the February 2011 uprisings, “when the Libyans started to move to divest their funds from their overexposure to British and U.S. financial institutions, Libya’s assets were frozen. This was prior to the ruse of protecting Libyans.”
Because of the opaque nature of international markets, one can hardly demand of Campbell unambiguous proof of causation between the banks and energy firms’ relations with the Libyan government and NATO’s decision to overthrow Gaddafi. For the same reason, details about the activities of – and relationships between – these actors are necessarily scarce.
Still, Campbell manages to paint a picture of the Libyan state’s often-tumultuous relationship with the financial sector that dominates NATO states. Consequently, his theory that the Gaddafi government’s relationship with other players in the financial sector was a driving force behind the NATO intervention will seem perfectly plausible to readers familiar with the leading role that Wall Street has played throughout the history of American imperialism. In contrast, readers who embrace the “bumbling empire” theory of U.S. foreign policy in North Africa will be less willing to accept that the U.S. government knows what it’s doing.
Internationalism, Not Intervention
As Campbell writes, chronicling the cataclysmic results of recent imperialist ventures in the Middle East and Africa is not about “gloating but part of an effort to strengthen the resolve of the peace and justice movement to challenge militarism and exploitation.”
One aspect of this worthy goal must be opposing those ostensible leftists who call for Western-led military interventions in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, or Ukraine. Western military interventions like the one in Libya are expressions of capitalist hegemony and only wind up strengthening that hegemony.
If leftists want to build alternatives to global capitalism, we must recognize that claims to internationalism are worse than meaningless when they enable imperialist bloodbaths. •
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Greg Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph in Canada. This article first published by Jacobin magazine.
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Dissent among EU leaders over calls to renew relations with Syria's AssadJohn Irish
Published 27/02/2015 | 15:03
Open Gallery 1Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has been isolated internationally for much of the Syrian Civil WarFrance and Britain have dismissed suggestions of restoring relations with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying such a move would push moderates into the arms of radical Islamist groups.
Why America is Not NormalAds by GoogleThese 8 facts prove the situation in America is not normal right now.
With the rise of Islamic State insurgents, some European |Union member states are critical of the position in Paris and London and say it might be time to re-establish communication with Damascus given that a four-year-old revolt has failed to overthrow Assad.
In a column published in Arabic daily Al-Hayat and France's Le Monde, the French and British foreign ministers hit back at those who sought a rapprochement with Assad by saying he was using the fear of Islamic State, which has seized wide areas of northern and eastern Syria, to win back international support.
"Some seem sensitive to this argument," Laurent Fabius and Philip Hammond wrote. "In reality, Bashar represents injustice, chaos and terror. We, France and Britain, say no to all three."
There have also been calls from some politicians and former officials in both countries for a new strategy. This week a four-man cross-party delegation of French parliamentarians travelled to Syria and some met with Assad, and triggering a national debate on the issue.
Former British Army chief Lord Dannant has previously said countries would have to work with Assad to defeat Islamic State, while the UN envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said earlier this month that Assad must be part of the solution for defusing the conflict in Syria.
"After 220,000 deaths and millions displaced, it is illusory to imagine that a majority of Syrians would accept to be ruled by the one who torments them," Fabius and Hammond wrote.
"To end their hopes of a better future in a Syria without Assad would be to radicalise even more Syrians, push moderates towards extremism and consolidate a jihadist bastion in Syria."
An initially peaceful street uprising against Assad spiralled into a civil war that has seen a level of suffering some diplomats say justify reestablishing contacts with Damascus in pursuit of a political solution.
Britain and France see Assad's departure as a precondition of peace negotiations but the collapse of his government has become less likely as the war grinds on inconclusively.
"For our own security, we must defeat Islamic State in Syria. We need a partner that can act against extremists. We need a negotiated political settlement," Hammond and Fabius said, and a compromise would be needed between elements of the existing government and relatively moderate opponents of Assad.
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Reuters
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Steven Gaal posts interesting stuff, but his presentation is confusing at times, and he occasionally leans towards the anti-semitic, for lack of a better descriptor. But give him credit - he does source his material. // BRANCATO
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GEE Whats anti-Semitic in this thread. ?? I see nothing anti-Semitic ??
Was Oswald an Intelligence Agent?
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted · Edited by Steven Gaal
Mr. Tid,
Every impersonation is, by definition, "false" isn't it.
I guess you're saying that the two impersonations of Oswald over the phone in Mexico City (on Saturday, September 28 and on Monday, October 1), never happened but were only manufactured on paper after the assassination?
If you're right, I wonder why Mexico City's Anne Goodpasture, known for her meticulous work, would go to the trouble of making the untruthful statement that a photograph taken of an American-looking man outside either the Cuban Consulate or the Soviet Embassy -- can't remember which right now -- was taken on October 1 instead of when it was really taken, October 2 ? And equally puzzling is why she would mention that particular photograph in a cable about Lee Henry (or was it Harvey?) Oswald in the same cable and juxtaposed in such a way as to suggest (without actually saying it) that this dude, our famous "Mexico City Mystery Man," was the same guy who had called the Soviet Embassy and identified himself as "Oswald, O-S-W-A-L-D" who had spoken with a "dark" Russian Embassy official. By the name of Kostin, or something like that?
https://www.maryferr..._Comrade_Kostin
--Tommy
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Mr. Graves, obviously Ann Goodpasture was under Walker's control. Really cant u SEE !! the obvious. sg