Big Government No! Big Election Campaign Yes!

The past two weeks have been alarming if not enlightening ones for those of us whose only option is to remain firmly rooted in the 'reality based community', now also increasingly described as the 'Precariat'.

From a safe distance, the rest of the world watches the televised Republican presidential candidate debates playing out across the US with a sense of mounting dread.

The candidates themselves are typical presidential material; one is an alleged sexual predator in the Clinton tradition, some are ignorant of basic history and geography, a few even appear to possess the intellectual prowess of George W Bush.

One candidate is a good Christian mother who claims that the Soviet Union presently represents a major threat to the US, and that Hezbollah is building missile sites and training camps in Cuba. The Governor of Texas says that if he becomes president he will close down three major departments of federal government altogether, but when asked can only remember what two of them actually are.

Yet another candidate, the maverick 'popular outsider' Ron Paul's brutal solutions to the deficit crises includes abolishing social welfare programmes such as Social Security and Medicare. That such actions would be highly damaging to the majority of the country's poor and working people has so far merited little comment.

Ron Paul's popularity can be largely explained by the fact that he is the only candidate advocating for an end to the US empire, and a return to those halcyon days when the US was a republic. In the US political lexicon, this makes him the anti war, 'peace' candidate, and thus the most attuned to the position of the people themselves, a majority of whom continue to be opposed to the wars that the US is waging across the globe.

His is a world view however which can only be sustained so long as many fundamental realities about the country are ignored, and while myths remain elevated to truisms. Without exception the candidates all maintain the Reaganite dogma of 'big government bad, small government good.'

'Big election campaign good, small election campaign bad.'

The Citizens United bill ratified by the US Supreme Court in January 2010 gave corporations the right to buy elections. A two billion dollar 2012 Presidential election campaign obviously excludes the interests of all but the very wealthy, hence the peoples assemblies currently springing up across the US.

Over the past thirty years the political landscape has been refashioned everywhere to conform to the interests of the new centres of power: the private constituencies of the Trans-National Corporations, mainly US owned, and the private financial institutions.

Both elements remain entirely unaccountable and notably undemocratic.

The shift of power from the public to the private was established with the historic handing over of responsibility of national interest rates to the central banks. With this single action, the governments of the OECD countries, Canada, Japan and the US abrogated control of national interest rates and destroyed traditional lines of protection between international and domestic markets. Ulrich Beck's description of politicians jumping on this bandwagon as an act of 'jubilant mass suicide' has also proven to have been an accurate prediction.

As the present crises of the democratic and public finance deficit deepens, the fate of the next president of the United States may well be that of the most recently elected Greek and Italian heads of state, namely to be removed from office and replaced by a banker.

In Greece and Italy this has just happened without any consultation involving the voters themselves.

In Italy, the newly unelected Premier and Economic Minister 'Two Jobs' Mario Monti has put together a cabinet comprising bankers, Vatican historians and business executives, all without a single politician being included.

In Greece the new Prime Minister Lucas Papademos is a former European central banker, who replaces the disgraced Papandreous.

Papandreous's fall from grace occurred after he declared a people's referendum on whether to accept conditions included in a new austerity package about to imposed on the country. The referendum was banned and the Prime Minister dismissed.

Doubtless the personal financial remuneration offered to the two deposed heads of state will be sufficient to keep them jubilantly happy in their retirement, but there is to be no remuneration for the people themselves. They remain saddled with the huge debts derived from the collapse of the casino economy.

Elected sock puppets then are evidently of little importance, other than at election times when citizens are asked to suspend rational thought and invest all their 'hope' in fictional 'change' that will be delivered with the outcome decided at the polling booth.

The inconvenient realities of an economy that increasingly functions only to serve very narrow and private interests can no longer be brushed aside however. This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement has gone rapidly global. It is the dangerous idea whose time has finally arrived.
Michael Perry November 27

Occupy Wall Street: Co-option, Eviction and Misrepresentation.

Eduardo Galeano has pointed out that the only thing you can build from the top down is a hole, and it is with this in mind that the work of the OWS movement has been so inspirational, and has resonated across the globe.

As with every other component of the emerging global peace and social justice movement, the existing power bases of the status quo will be struggling to control the momentum of any dissent which threatens to bring about genuine and meaningful change.

In the United States itself it is the bureaucracy of a powerful union with strong ties to the Obama administration which is attempting to co-opt OWS. http://www.salon.com/2011/11/19/heres_what_attempted_co_option_of_ows_looks_like/ 

That more individuals from within the unions will inevitably be getting involved as it continues to pick up momentum is inevitable, but this 'leadership from the top' is an unwelcome and counter productive development.

At the moment, while the OWS movement is still small; it has a far larger base of admirers and people who support the idea but who haven't yet committed themselves to providing a physical presence, and thus the large, active popular base necessary for success. Given the stranglehold of corporations on main stream media today, it is safe to assume that there are even enormous swathes of the general public who are yet to become aware of the movement's existence

With increasing numbers of citizens now clearly rejecting the circus of electoral/ 'representational' politics and demanding genuine participatory democracy, the fight for control of the minds of the people becomes ever more urgent. The business party and its two wings the Republicans and the Democrats will bring every force to bear to crush this nascent movement, hence the brutal treatment handed out during the evictions that took place this week. Hence also the misrepresentation of the protesters as criminal deviants and such like. http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/karl-rove-calls-occupybaltimore-protesters

Coincidentally, ten UK Uncut activists were found guilty this week of an 'aggravated trespass' which saw the Royal Grocer Fortnum and Mason's occupied during the March 2011 London anti austerity protests.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/17/fortnum-mason-protesters-convicted-trespass

In the face of the vicious class war being waged against us, we have to learn which actions are effective and which are not, and it seems to me that occupation has huge potential. It can be extended to occupying foreclosed homes and empty factories, or even your place of work.

Remembrance Sunday. 'Best We Remember......'

Today is Sunday November 13, when the victims of war will be honoured in the annual commemorative service at Westminster Abbey attended by political leaders, chiefs of the armed services and nobility. It is followed with a ceremony of laying wreaths at the base of the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

This week the world learned that of all the NATO/CIA drone attacks carried out in Afghanistan and Pakistan to date, 85% have taken place since Barack Obama was inaugurated as President of the United States. We can safely assume that the majority of these have also occurred since Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Drones are otherwise known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, developed initially as 'spies in the sky', they are now armed with missiles. Drone 'strikes' deliver death to targetted individuals, and have become the preffered option for liquidating people instead of 'wrapping them up' and imprisoning them indefinately, often secretively (extraordinary rendition).

In the region of Mir Ali, Miranshah in Warziristan, drones are now flying on a near constant basis.

On Friday October 28 of this year, representatives from the British charity Reprieve and a Pakistani charity, the Foundation for Fundamental Rights met with elders from Warzistan and families of people killed by drone strikes to discuss what might be done. Present at the meeting held in the Margala Hotel in Islamabad was the 16 year old cousin of a young man killed by a drone attack while out riding his motorcycle eighteen months earlier. Tariq Aziz volunteered to help document the aftermath of future drone attacks, and it was agreed at the meeting that Tariq be taught photography for the purpose. Three days later, Tariq's name and that of his 12 year old cousin were added to the list of children killed by drones, murdered while they were on their way to visit their grandmother.

We have also learned this week that a newly published (and promptly leaked) IAEA report has tapped questionable sources of evidence to bolster the case for attacking Iran; an exercise which our own Ministry of Defence is apparantly eager to sign up for.

Yesterday another blast rocked the Iranian capital Tehran, and once more the Revolutionary Guards were the target. In all probability this death and destruction was the work of 'our' Special Forces; 'our' being a permutation of US, Israeli and UK military intelligence and killers.

The extent of our propensity for barbarism and our utter moral depravity thus becomes ever more apparent, and whether the farcical and fictitious remains sufficient reason for us to set the Middle East on fire once more remains to be seen. All indications are that this is the likelihood.

In re-visiting earlier crime scenes, it is instructive to recall that the Anglo American 2003 military operation 'Shock and Awe' launched upon Iraq was originally billed as a surgical strike carried out to remove Saddam Hussein's regime.

In early 2003 we who were protesting the impending assault were labouring under the delusion that war with Iraq was still preventable, if enough of us made our voices heard. We were engaged in trying to point out to anyone who would listen that our politicians who had the power to prevent this war had not had access to demonstrable realities that were being highlighted by people like Scott Ritter. As an ex UNSCOM inspector, Ritter was supremely qualified to inform us regarding the state of Iraq's weapons programmes, and yet it seemed that he was not being heard, either by the political classes, or more widely by the people of the US and Britain. Even Ritter's attempt to address a US pre invasion committee of inquiry was rebuffed by its own chairman Joe Biden.

Ritter's assertion that Iraq was basically defenceless is now accepted to have been the reality, but it is now virtually impossible for us to recall the prevailing atmosphere of fear that was stoked up in late 2002 and early 2003, both in the US and the UK.

People shredders. Mushroom clouds. Al Qaeda. Forty five minutes to doom..... all conveniently forgotten today.

Gradually though, living through those times we watched the pre-attack narrative evolve from speculation about what horrific fate awaited us at the hands of the evil Saddam, to the actual weapons which 'we' possessed, in order that we might 'defend' ourselves.

In an age of global media, the citizens of Iraq must have undergone a gnawing and steadily mounting anxiety as they were shown glimpses of the awesome weaponry about to be unleashed upon their towns and cities.

With the benefit of hindsight it is now clear that what we were actually witnessing in this build up was 'stage one' of 'Shock and Awe': a psychological 'softening up' operation akin to the torturer showing his victim the devices which are about to be used to break his mind, body and spirit.

The next phase of the attack was an intense bombing campaign followed by a rapid land invasion, carrying strong resonances of the Nazi concept of Blitzkrieg: overwhelming destruction on a massive scale, carried out at lightning speed, familiar civic landmarks consumed by fireballs in the blink of an eye. The psychological impact of an assault of this nature is long understood to be to instil a feeling of helplessness and subjugation in the survivors.

The architect of the Shock and Awe doctrine, Harlan Ullman, described the process as 'rather like Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks, but in minutes..'

The attack primarily focussed on destroying Iraq's communications systems, beginning with the telephone exchanges, TV and radio networks.

After the civilian infrastructure had been dealt with (water, electricity, sewage), the country's cultural memory was next for destruction. Widespread looting of museums, libraries, and universities occurred, with never an attempt to deploy occupation forces to check the pillage and destruction.

There was neither any attempt to count the number of citizens who had perished in Shock and Awe. In the West, TV viewers were led to believe that the attacks were carried out with precision guided 'smart' bombing aimed only at the 'bad guys'. Later it became evident that tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians had been slaughtered.

Today, while we await our masters decision of whether to openly bomb Iran, the man who slammed the door in Scott Ritter's face back in 2003, Vice President Joe Biden has been busy denigrating another truth teller. History will have to decide though whether it is Julian Assange, who in Joe Biden's words is a 'high tech terrorist', or whether this accolade is more appropriately bestowed upon Mr Biden himself.

When Truth Becomes Treason

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”

Abraham Lincoln

"There is no freedom of information in this country; there's no public right to know. There's a commonsense idea of how to run a country and Britain is full of commonsense people. Bugger the public's right to know. The game is the security of the state – not the public's right to know.''

Bernard Ingham. Press Secretary to Premier Margaret Thatcher.

Two distinctly different views about democracy, separated by a span of some two hundred years serve to suggest a trend towards authoritarianism and tyranny.

As Ingham so confidently asserts, the typical neoliberal democratic government of today, of whatever political stripe, views the intelligent, enquiring, questioning individual within it's own domestic population as it's enemy. While seeking total transparency of it's own masses, it therefore demands total secrecy of it's own machinations.

This is why the issue of WikiLeaks is so important, because it has revealed a fundamental truism in this revolutionary age of the internet, best summed up by the journalist John Pilger, who has asked "If they can read our emails, why cant we read theirs?"

This is why the PTB have not rested until WikiLeaks has been shut down and its workers are languishing as solitarily confined guests of the prison system.

Whether there might now be a possibility that the PTB will follow through and go after online readers of WikiLeaks material is a reasonable question, and on consideration might explain the craven behaviour of mainstream media organs such as the New York Times and the London Guardian during the period covering three major WikiLeaks releases and the subsequent arrest of Julian Assange in London at the request of the Swedish Government.

There is also likely to be a push within the US to use the Espionage Act against Assange once he is in US custody, which will in all likelihood set a precedent for processing future 'traitors.'

Military personnel and US state and federal employees are meanwhile forbidden from visiting the WikiLeaks website or any of its mirror sites.

The 'game' that Ingham (and Lord Curzon before him) talks of remains the security of the state, and this coming week heralds the first IAEA report on Iran's nuclear ambitions since the scrupulously honest Mohamed Mustafa ElBaradei retired as it's chief back in 2009.The report is being widely predicted to contradict all previous ones, and to claim that Iran is in fact developing a nuclear weapons programme.

If these assertions turn out to be present in the IAEA report, then they will also flatly contradict all National Intelligence Estimates to have emanated from all US intelligence agencies  over the past eight years.

Whether a new National Intelligence Estimate has also been prepared for the President to digest in these critical times is therefore a good question to ask, and for those unfamiliar with the nature and purpose of an NIE, there is nobody better qualified to explain than Ray McGovern. A career CIA analyst of 27 years experience, he also delivered Daily Presidential Briefings compiled by his employers to US Presidents throughout the 1980's and '90's.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/112210c.html

The history of Iraq's destruction by Anglo American forces reminds us that it matters little when facts appear to get in the way of the official narrative. The 2003 February 15 world wide protests against attacking Iraq involved millions of people, and showed that in our democratic system we enjoy the right to protest while our governments enjoy the right to ignore us.

Any future bombing campaign against Iran in retaliation for it's perceived nuclear sins will be led by the United States, just as the 2008/9 attack on Gaza was a US attack.

The war against Iran has been waged in earnest for the past six or seven years now as a low intensity conflict, aiming at regime change in order to restore and maintain private, mainly Western economic interests. The fact that it has been low level has ensured that it remains largely a secret kept from Western society. In addition to continuous threats of aggression, this war has included violent cross-border incursions, setting bombs in public places, assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, and the imposition of harsh economic sanctions. With the exception of the sanctions, everything else on this list, including threats of aggression, is recognised as criminal behaviour in national and international law, but this is of little concern or consequence to a criminal state.

Britain's own 2000 Terrorism Act in fact makes it a criminal offence to plot the downfall of a foreign sovereign government from British shores. Given this reality we should now expect the imminent arrest of Cameron and Hague for their complicity in the recent blood bath in Libya, but in the fictional and criminal times that we are now living through, we would perhaps be naive to hold out any hope of this occurring in the near future. 
Michael Perry. Monday  November 7 2011