Victims of FBI Subversion Now Embrace America’s Secret Police

 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise the FBI and the DOJ obstructed justice last year when then acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee to pound sand after Republicans demanded he hand over work-related texts.
The obstruction of justice, however, is a trivial matter for the FBI. It has engaged in criminal activity for decades. 
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It seemed like I’d entered a new dimension deep within Bizarro world labyrinth when Democrats suddenly became defenders of the agency. Liberals and leftists, especially those in the civil rights movement and actively opposed to the Vietnam War, were targeted by the FBI and its Operation COINTELPRO in the 1960s and 70s. Many of those targeted activists ended up in government and the ivory towers of academia. 
Likewise the Grand Inquisitor, Robert Mueller. He was FBI boss during the Bush and Obama administrations. He is a consummate insider. His mission as special prosecutor is to protect the establishment, the so-called Deep State. 
I can only conclude Democrats are either 1) suffering from a special kind of amnesia, or 2) they’re so ethically and morally bankrupt they will buddy up with an agency that seriously violated their rights in order accomplish the current objective: the impeachment and total destruction of Donald Trump. 
After J. Edgar Hoover died, the FBI remained the state’s secret police and kept busy sabotaging political opposition to the financial elite and its octopi tentacles, what we now call the Deep State, consisting of multitudinous “intelligence” (subversion and assassination) agencies, the national security state (NSC, Pentagon, and CIA), the ever-growing surveillance apparatus (NSA and appendages), and a hungry herd of “public-private” (in other words, fascist) business interests and contractors bidding to get a permanent spot at the federal feeding trough. 

Russiagate Has Blown Up in the Face of Its Originators—the FBI, DOJ, and Hillary

From the Palmer raids prior to the establishment of the FBI (at the time the Bureau of Investigation in the Justice Department) to the Occupy Wall Street movement and beyond, the FBI has worked diligently to undermine antiwar, civil rights (the assassination of Martin Luther King), ethnic nationalist movements (Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Puerto Rican separatists, and others), and individuals associated with those political groups. 
In the case of the Black Panthers, the preferred method of disruption was assassination (Fred Hampton and Mark Clark), while the antiwar movement and other leftist movements were discredited, members of those groups arrested (usually for drug possession), audited by the IRS, fired and denied employment, and harassed in multiple ways. Many of the victims are organizers of the current leftist agenda, while others have taken over the curriculum of major universities. 
Many of these individuals are not opposed to such tactics, so long as the victims are their ideological enemies. Most don’t realize they are being played. 

“Just as too many on the left sleep-walked through the past two years waiting for Mueller—a former head of the FBI, the US secret police, for chrissakes!—to save them from Trump, they have been manipulated by liberal elites into the political cul-de-sac of identity politics,” writes author and blogger Jonathan Cook. 

Just as Mueller put the left on standby, into waiting-for-the-Messiah mode, so simple-minded, pussy-hat-wearing identity politics has been cultivated in the supposedly liberal bastions of the corporate media and Ivy League universities—the same universities that have turned out generations of Muellers and Clintons—to deplete the left’s political energies. While we argue over who is most entitled and most victimised, the establishment has carried on raping and pillaging Third World countries, destroying the planet and siphoning off the wealth produced by the rest of us.
These liberal elites long ago worked out that if we could be made to squabble among ourselves about who was most entitled to scraps from the table, they could keep gorging on the main course.
From the very start of this fiasco, I realized it was a turf war within the establishment. The political elite are not about sharing and certainly have nothing to do with democracy (except as a deceptive advertising slogan). Trump is an outlier. He didn’t come up through the ranks. He is not acceptable to the establishment, including the Republicans who reluctantly accept him as the leader of their faction of the corporatist political party. For establishment Democrats, he is a spoiler, a man who stole the election from Hillary Clinton, the chosen successor to Barrack Obama. 
Like chickens sans heads, average Democrats by and large are running around wild-eyed, frantically warning Trump is the new Hitler, a racist, a white nationalist, and he must be deposed at all cost. As usual, these Democrats are clueless to the real state of affairs—diversionary politics designed to keep folks immersed in largely meaningless political issues while behind the scenes the bankers and corporatists continue to call the shots and fleece the people, whom they have nothing but contempt for, and in the process save a corrupt system already sagging and teetering. 
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Another Day in the Empire.

The Deplorable State of Human Rights in America

The Deplorable State of Human Rights in America

China's Annual Report, UN Special Rapporteurs on Human Rights

In response to annual US reports on human rights in China, Beijing issues its own on the deplorable state of human rights in America.
It’s latest report made the following introductory remarks, saying:
As in previous years, the latest US reports on human rights in world community nations “continued pointing fingers at and slandering human rights situations in over 190 countries, while blindly ignoring its own serious human rights problems.”
“If one takes a glimpse into the human rights situation of the United States in 2018, it will not be difficult to find that the United States government, a self-styled ‘human rights defender,’ has a human rights record which is (deeply) flawed…(T)he double standards of human rights it pursues are obvious.”

Screenshot from China Military website

Examples are numerous, including far greater gun violence per capita in America than other developed nation, tens of thousands instances annually, affecting men, women, and children.
“Religious intolerance remarks were on the rise,” notably affecting Muslims, falsely claiming they’re “inherently violent or pose an imminent threat” – Trump and other right-wing extremists proliferators of the Big Lie.
They’ve “called for Muslims to be denied basic rights or declared that Islam is not a religion.”
Big Brother Internet surveillance in the US is a major issue, along with “warrantless wiretapping…vacuuming up emails, Facebook messages, Google chats, Skype calls, and the like.”
Big money controls US elections. “The total cost of the 2018 mid-term elections was $5.2 billion,” 35% more than in 2014 in nominal dollars, “making them by far the most expensive mid-term elections on record. The US government is representing the super rich” exclusively at the expense of most others.
Among Western countries, the US has the greatest income inequality. Its super-rich never had things better. The vast majority in the nation struggle to get by, most earning poverty or near-poverty wages with few or no benefits.
The “land of the free and home of the brave” is pure fantasy. So is “America the beautiful” – except for its privilege few.

American Exceptionalism’s Dark Side: Poverty and Despair in America

America’s top 1% owns nearly 40% of the nation’s wealth, the disparity becoming greater annually. “Nearly half of the American households live in financial difficulties, and 18.5 million Americans live in extreme poverty.”
Hate crimes are at a record high – 7,175 reported by the FBI, 17% more than in 2017, Black Americans harmed most of all, their overall status deplorable.

“The median white family has about 10 times as much wealth as the median black family. African Americans are 2.5 times as likely to be in poverty as whites, about twice as likely to be in unemployment as whites, and more than 6 times as likely as whites to be incarcerated.”
“The infant mortality rate is 1.3 times higher for African Americans, whose average life expectancy is about 3.5 years shorter than whites.”

Countless numbers of school shootings occur annually – 94 last year, killing or wounding 163 people, the worst year on record for these incidents.

“Women are living in fear of sexual harassment and sexual assaults. A survey found that 81 percent of women interviewed had experienced some form of sexual harassment, and 27 percent said they had been sexually assaulted.”

Trump racist immigration policy separated at least 2,000 unwanted alien children from parents, traumatizing many, instances of sexually abused alien juveniles reported.
The Trump regime withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran, the INF Treaty with Russia, UN Human Rights Council, the Paris Climate Agreement and UNESCO. It illegally moved its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, a UN recognized international city.
It cut or eliminated aid to Palestinians, especially its millions of refugees. It maintains a global gulag of torture prisons, Guantanamo the tip of the iceberg, most in them held indefinitely for political reasons.
Numerous cases of violent crime, gun crimes, abuse of power by police, and press freedom abuses were reported.
According to the FBI, there were an “estimated 1,247,321 violent crimes, including 17,284 incidents of murder, 135,755 rapes, 810,825 aggravated assaults, as well as 319,356 robberies.”

“Among the cases, 72.6 percent of murders, 40.6 percent of robberies, and 26.3 percent of aggravated assaults were committed with firearms.”

Press freedom in America deteriorated further, including “journalists attacked, searched, arrested, intercepted at borders, and restricted from publishing public information.”
Special UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston published a report, explaining that wealthy Americans get preferential judicial treatment, ordinary Americans charged with offenses treated much differently.
Washington is corporate occupied territory, money power running the country, House and Senate members serving their interests exclusively, ordinary people exploited and otherwise abused.
Poverty is America’s leading growth industry. Around half the nation’s households are financially stressed. Low-income ones lack proper health insurance. They’re either uninsured or way underinsured, unprotected in case of serious illnesses or injuries.
Homelessness and hunger get scant attention. The world’s richest country increasingly ignores the needs of its most disadvantaged citizens and residents.

“Systematic racial discrimination has long existed in the United States. Ethnic minorities faced restrictions in exercising their voting rights. The law enforcement and judicial departments made no progress in reducing racial discrimination.”
“Racial discrimination causes health disparities. When looking at the 10 leading causes of death in the United States, including cancer, stroke and heart disease, mortality rates among black Americans were higher than among white Americans. Compelling evidence suggests both individual- and institutional-level discrimination causes this disparity.”

Women face discrimination, on average earning 80% as much as men with similar skills for similar work. Polls show nearly half of women dissatisfied with their position in US society, treated unequally compared to men.
UN special rapporteurs on human rights, international solidarity, the right of everyone to be treated equitably, the right to non-discrimination, against racism, torture, and other inhuman treatment criticized the way America treats refugees and asylum seekers.

“The United States shirked international responsibilities, carried out the unilateralist America First policies unscrupulously, repeatedly withdrew from international organizations, bullied the weak, and caused human rights disasters in its overseas military operations, and became a ‘trouble maker’ that the international community widely condemned.”

Endless US wars rage, nations attacked for refusing to subordinate their sovereignty to US interests, no end of them in prospect, new ones in the wings to be waged.
The US is the world’s leading human rights abuser on a global scale, including at home against its poor, people of color, unwanted aliens, Muslims from the wrong countries, and anyone against its rage to rule the world unchallenged.
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

 

 

 

 

We’ll Be So Much Better Without Them

We’ll Be So Much Better Without Them

There are millions of people – a majority in many places – who believe in a liberty philosophy: That the golden rule is the right way for humans to interact, that centralization is a problem, that leaving markets alone is better than rigging them, and so on. But there is a problem: Rather than pushing forward into action, most of these well-intentioned people limp along in uncertainty.

There are many explanations for this, of course, but the root is probably a fear that rulers have some kind of magic. We fear that without them we’d crash and burn. After all, we’ve been trained in precisely that for a hundred generations. Rationally we know it isn’t true, but emotionally we’re not entirely convinced.

So today I’d like to make an important point: That we’ll be better off – massively better off – without them. The nagging fear that we’re missing something is simply false. The better we get away from rulership, the better off we’ll be.

The Numbers
I like crunching the numbers on these things because the failure of rulership is hidden in plain sight, little recognized. Digging into numbers the rulers themselves publish can help break through the blockage.

And so…

In the US, the social safety net costs at least 2.5 trillion dollars per year. If you add up the federal programs ($717 billion back in 2010 and more now), the state programs ($210 billion in 2010), Medicare and Social Security ($1.3 trillion) and perhaps a few smaller items, it comes to that.

Now, here’s what you should know: That annual spending equates to 7 million new houses, plus feeding 100 million families, plus providing health care for 100 million families. The second year we could build another 7 million houses as well as feeding and doctoring almost everyone in the country… again.

If you have a nagging feeling that these numbers can’t be right, please find them and run them for yourself, it’s not that hard to do and it’s likely to help you a great deal.

Now, let’s look at the “keep us safe” expenses.

The US military budget is $686 billion per year. The US intelligence budget is close to $80 billion (but probably more). So, we’ll call it $766 billion.

Given 247 million adults and 127 million households in the US, with $766 billion we could give each adult a .30-06 rifle with scope and gear, 1000 rounds of ammunition, training and a bulletproof vest. On top of that we can add a mortar launcher, a case of 12 shells, training, and a sighting scope for each family… the first year.

The second year we could provide a Stinger missile system to every 12th family. The third year we could give a tank and training to each grouping of 100,000 people. The fourth year, I don’t know… what else do we need?

Again, please run the numbers yourself. Maybe your numbers won’t agree with mine. I used more of a national average on house prices for example, which may be lower than you’re used to. Do it your way and see how it comes out. Maybe you’ll only come up with money enough for 4 million free houses per year. But if so, please remember, that’s four million free houses per year! (Plus food and doctors!)

And bear in mind that none of the numbers above include police departments.

What This Means
What this means is that our superstitions are very expensive, and that they’re holding us down financially. Badly.

It is clear… glaringly obvious… that what the rulers “do for us” (with our own money) is being done horribly. I once wrote a line about governments sending our wealth down the twin sewers of welfare and warfare, and I still think it was well said. None of us who has run a business or a household could survive operating so incredibly stupidly.

Once we see this, and accept that it’s really true, we see that liberation from rulership is not just a liberty issue, it’s a legitimate financial issue, and a big one[1].

So, for an increasing list of reasons, it behooves us to start building our better world, laying aside the fear that we’re somehow missing some crucial ability. We aren’t, and that feeling is merely an old superstition.

To act positively is to expand life. To remain frozen in place is to paralyze life. Pick a spot and start acting.


 FREEMANSPERSPECTIVE

The Making of a Monster:

The Making of a Monster: 

We’re All Lab Rats in the 

Government’s Secret Experiments

“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late.” — Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

The U.S. government, in its pursuit of so-called monsters, has itself become a monster.

This is not a new development, nor is it a revelation.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

Mind you, there is no greater good when the government is involved. There is only greater greed for money and power.

Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle coming out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government.

These horrors are being meted out against humans and animals alike.

It’s heartbreaking enough when you hear about police shooting family dogs that pose no threat—beloved pets that are “guilty” of little more than barking, or wagging a tag, or racing towards them in greeting—at an alarming rate somewhere in the vicinity of 500 dogs a day.

What I’m about to share goes beyond heartbreaking to horrifying.

For instance, did you know that the U.S. government has been buying hundreds of dogs and cats from “Asian meat markets” as part of a gruesome experiment into food-borne illnesses? The cannibalistic experiments involve killing cats and dogs purchased from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, China and Ethiopia, and then feeding the dead remains to laboratory kittens, bred in government laboratories for the express purpose of being infected with a disease and then killed.

It gets more gruesome.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been removing parts of dogs’ brains to see how it affects their breathing; applying electrodes to dogs’ spinal cords (before and after severing them) to see how it impacts their cough reflexes; and implanting pacemakers in dogs’ hearts and then inducing them to have heart attacks (before draining their blood). All of the laboratory dogs are killedduring the course of these experiments.

It’s not just animals that are being treated like lab rats by government agencies.

“We the people” have also become the police state’s guinea pigs: to be caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.

Back in 2017, FEMA “inadvertently” exposed nearly 10,000 firefighters, paramedics and other responders to a deadly form of ricin during simulated bioterrorism response sessions. In 2015, it was discovered that an Army lab had been “mistakenly” shipping deadly anthrax to labs and defense contractors for a decade.

While these particular incidents have been dismissed as “accidents,” you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.

At the time, the government reasoned that it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks.

In Alabama, for example, 600 black men with syphilis were allowed to suffer without proper medical treatment in order to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis. In California, older prisoners had testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts implanted in them to test their virility. In Connecticut, mental patients were injected with hepatitis.

In Maryland, sleeping prisoners had a pandemic flu virus sprayed up their noses. In Georgia, two dozen “volunteering” prison inmates had gonorrhea bacteria pumped directly into their urinary tracts through the penis. In Michigan, male patients at an insane asylum were exposed to the flu after first being injected with an experimental flu vaccine. In Minnesota, 11 public service employee “volunteers” were injected with malaria, then starved for five days.

In New York, dying patients had cancer cells introduced into their systems. In Ohio, over 100 inmates were injected with live cancer cells. Also in New York, prisoners at a reformatory prison were also split into two groups to determine how a deadly stomach virus was spread: the first group was made to swallow an unfiltered stool suspension, while the second group merely breathed in germs sprayed into the air. And in Staten Island, children with mental retardation were given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured.

As the Associated Press reports, “The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs … because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.”

Moreover, “Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the '60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.”

Media blackouts, propaganda, spin. Sound familiar?

How many government incursions into our freedoms have been blacked out, buried under “entertainment” news headlines, or spun in such a way as to suggest that anyone voicing a word of caution is paranoid or conspiratorial?

Unfortunately, these incidents are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities the government has inflicted on an unsuspecting populace in the name of secret experimentation.

For instance, there was the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. As NPR reports, “All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren't recorded on the subjects' official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn't tell doctors what happened to them.”

And then there was the CIA’s MKULTRA program in which hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel were dosed with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. As Time reports, “before the documentation and other facts of the program were made public, those who talked of it were frequently dismissed as being psychotic.”

Now one might argue that this is all ancient history and that the government today is different from the government of yesteryear, but has the U.S. government really changed?

Has the government become any more humane, any more respectful of the rights of the citizenry?

Has it become any more transparent or willing to abide by the rule of law? Has it become any more truthful about its activities? Has it become any more cognizant of its appointed role as a guardian of our rights?

Or has the government simply hunkered down and hidden its nefarious acts and dastardly experiments under layers of secrecy, legalism and obfuscations? Has it not become wilier, more slippery, more difficult to pin down?

Having mastered the Orwellian art of Doublespeak and followed the Huxleyan blueprint for distraction and diversion, are we not dealing with a government that is simply craftier and more conniving that it used to be?

Consider this: after revelations about the government’s experiments spanning the 20^th century spawned outrage, the government began looking for human guinea pigs in other countries, where “clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules.”

In Guatemala, prisoners and patients at a mental hospital were infected with syphilis, “apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease.” In Uganda, U.S.-funded doctors “failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study… even though it would have protected their newborns.” Meanwhile, in Nigeria, children with meningitis were used to test an antibiotic named Trovan. Eleven children diedand many others were left disabled.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Case in point: back in 2016, it was announced that scientists working for the Department of Homeland Security would begin releasing various gases and particles on crowded subway platforms as part of an experiment aimed at testing bioterror airflow in New York subways.

The government insisted that the gases released into the subways by the DHS were nontoxic and did not pose a health risk. It’s in our best interests, they said, to understand how quickly a chemical or biological terrorist attack might spread. And look how cool the technology is—said the government cheerleaders—that scientists can use something called DNATrax to track the movement of microscopic substances in air and food. (Imagine the kinds of surveillance that could be carried out by the government using trackable airborne microscopic substances you breathe in or ingest.)

Mind you, this is the same government that in 1949 sprayed bacteria into the Pentagon’s air handling system, then the world’s largest office building. In 1950, special ops forces sprayed bacteria from Navy ships off the coast of Norfolk and San Francisco, in the latter case exposing all of the city’s 800,000 residents.

In 1953, government operatives staged “mock” anthrax attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg using generators placed on top of cars. Local governments were reportedly told that “‘invisible smokescreen[s]’ were being deployed to mask the city on enemy radar.” Later experiments covered territory as wide-ranging as Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas.

In 1965, the government’s experiments in bioterror took aim at Washington’s National Airport, followed by a 1966 experiment in which army scientists exposed a million subway NYC passengers to airborne bacteria that causes food poisoning.

And this is the same government that has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

So, no, I don’t think the government’s ethics have changed much over the years. It’s just taken its nefarious programs undercover.

The question remains: why is the government doing this? The answer is always the same: money, power and total domination.

It’s the same answer no matter which totalitarian regime is in power.

The mindset driving these programs has, appropriately, been likened to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews. As the Holocaust Museum recounts, Nazi physicians “conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent.”

The Nazi’s unethical experiments ran the gamut from freezing experiments using prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia, tests to determine the maximum altitude for parachuting out of a plane, injecting prisoners with malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis, exposing prisoners to phosgene and mustard gas, and mass sterilization experiments.

The horrors being meted out against the American people can be traced back, in a direct line, to the horrors meted out in Nazi laboratories. In fact, following the second World War, the U.S. government recruited many of Hitler’s employees, adopted his protocols, embraced his mindset about law and order and experimentation, and implemented his tactics in incremental steps.

Sounds far-fetched, you say? Read on. It’s all documented.

As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was initially so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that Herbert Hoover, then-head of the FBI, actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret police, the Gestapo.

The FBI was so impressed with the Nazi regime that, according to the New York Times, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.

All told, thousands of Nazi collaborators—including the head of a Nazi concentration camp, among others—were given secret visas and brought to America by way of Project Paperclip. Subsequently, they were hired on as spies, informants and scientific advisers, and then camouflaged to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. All the while, thousands of Jewish refugees were refused entry visas to the U.S. on the grounds that it could threaten national security.

Adding further insult to injury, American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever since. And in true Gestapo fashion, anyone who has dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties has found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.

As if the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II wasn’t bad enough, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have since fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them repeatedly against American citizens.

It’s certainly easy to denounce the full-frontal horrors carried out by the scientific and medical community within a despotic regime such as Nazi Germany, but what do you do when it’s your own government that claims to be a champion of human rights all the while allowing its agents to engage in the foulest, bases and most despicable acts of torture, abuse and experimentation?

When all is said and done, this is not a government that has our best interests at heart.

This is not a government that values us.

Perhaps the answer lies in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s influential 1949 film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. In the film, set in a post-WW II Vienna, rogue war profiteer Harry Lime has come to view human carnage with a callous indifference, unconcerned that the diluted penicillin he’s been trafficking underground has resulted in the tortured deaths of young children.

Challenged by his old friend Holly Martins to consider the consequences of his actions, Lime responds, “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we?”

“Have you ever seen any of your victims?” asks Martins.

“Victims?” responds Limes, as he looks down from the top of a Ferris wheel onto a populace reduced to mere dots on the ground. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax — the only way you can save money nowadays.”

As It makes clear in the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is how the U.S. government sees us, too, when it looks down upon us from its lofty perch.

To the powers-that-be, the rest of us are insignificant specks, faceless dots on the ground.

To the architects of the American police state, we are not worthy or vested with inherent rights. This is how the government can justify treating us like economic units to be bought and sold and traded, or caged rats to be experimented upon and discarded when we’ve outgrown our usefulness.

To those who call the shots in the halls of government, “we the people” are merely the means to an end.

“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become obsolete, undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that, in the words of Rod Serling, “has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.”

In this sense, we are all Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”

“The Obsolete Man” speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet—and here’s the kicker—this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete. As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man...that state is obsolete.”

How do you defeat a monster? You start by recognizing the monster for what it is.

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX LIVE OUTSIDE THE CAGE 

Pro Deo et Constitutione – 

Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis 

Paratus et Fidelis 

Joseph F Barber

Requiem For The American Dream

 Requiem For The American Dream

By Noam Chomsky
Watch 

Noam Chomsky describes the systems that have led to financial inequality, and the current concentration of wealth and power.

Chomsky argues there are 10 principles which lead to the concentration of wealth and power:

Reduce Democracy
Shape Ideology
Redesign the Economy
Shift the Burden
Attack Solidarity
Run the Regulators
Engineer Elections
Keep the Rabble in Line
Manufacture Consent
Marginalize the Population

Posted March 26, 2019

How Much Israel Is Spending to Buy Washington Politicians

How Much Israel Is Spending to Buy Washington Politicians

Israel's Influence in Washington - 2019 Edition

- Thanks to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics and its Open Secrets website, those of us on the outside, get a glimpse of how the "wheels" of Washington are "greased".  Open Secrets provides an up-to-date database of the role that money plays in politics through lobbying and campaign donations.  In this posting, I want to take a look at one of Washington's more influential parties, the nation of Israel. 
We will open this posting with an examination of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington.  Here is a summary of the pro-Israel lobby from Open Secrets:
"One of, if not the most, powerful international issue lobby is that of the pro-Israel crowd. Well-financed and politically powerful, the pro-Israel lobby is a major force on American foreign affairs that looks to continue America's military and fiscal support of the Jewish nation-state."
Here is a graphic showing how much the pro-Israel lobby has spent on convincing Washington to see things its way going back to 1998:

The pro-Israel lobby spent a record $5.02 million in 2018, up slightly from $4.96 million in 2017 but up substantially from $1.71 million a decade earlier in 2007.

Here are the biggest pro-Israel lobbying organizations in order of the amount spent on lobbying:
 

American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC is, by a wide margin, the biggest spender on lobbying, accounting for 70.1 percent of the total spent by all pro-Israel lobbyists.Of the 26 reported lobbyists working for 9 clients, there are 6 "revolvers" as shown here:
 

Open Secrets defines "revolvers" as former federal government workers who now work as lobbyists, consultants and strategists.  These people have access to the key players and key decision makers in Washington that Main Street America can only dream of.Now, let's look at the pro-Israel campaign contributions.  Here is a summary of the top contributors during the 2018 midterm elections:

 

Here is a table showing the pro-Israel campaign contributions going back to the 1990 election cycle:
 

Here is the same data in graphic form:
 

 

 

You will note that among all groups donating to politicians running for office in Washington that the pro-Israel lobby is ranked between 24th place overall (in 1990) to 60th place in 2000 and, in 2018 was ranked in 50th place.  The 2018 midterm election saw the pro-Israel lobby donate a record amount of money to a midterm cycle with donations totalling $14.9 million compared to $12.1 million during the 2014 midterm election.  In addition, the pro-Israel lobby seems to prefer candidates running for the Democrats; over the nearly three decades, the pro-Israel lobby has donated 60 percent or $85.365 million to the Democrats compared to 40 percent or $54.308 million to the Republicans.Here is a graphic summarizing the political donations from the pro-Israel lobby during the 2018 midterm cycle for both political parties in the House and the Senate:
 

Here are the top 20 recipients of pro-Israel lobby during the 2018 midterm cycle:
 

 

Here are the top 20 recipients who are Members of the House:
 

Here are the top 20 recipients who are Senators:
 

 

I believe that is enough to absorb for this posting.  According to the Pew Research Centre, here is a breakdown of religious affiliation in the United States from its Religious Landscape Study:
 

Given that not all Jews and Evangelical Christians support Israel's agenda, it is interesting to see how less than one-quarter of Americans are driving Washington's pro-Israel agenda and its accompanying narrative.  This suggests the extreme power that the pro-Israel lobby exerts in the nation's capital.  Given all of this data, it is most important to keep in mind that taking an anti-Israel/anti-Netanyahu stance does not mean that one is anti-Semitic or that one doesn't believe that Israel has a right to exist, it simply means that there is not universal approval of Israel's actions in the Middle East and its ability to sway governments to see things its way by spending millions on lobbying and influence American elections through donations to its preferred candidates.This article was originally published by "Viable Opposition" -