Public Intelligence Blog

John Pilger

Recommended by Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for Political Economy

John Pilger describes the reality hidden behind the cloak of anglo-american “democracy.”

Phi Beta Iota:  This describes the crime against humanity, the atrocity, of cleansing the population of the islands now known as Diego Garcia.  If We the People do not hold our government accountable, then We the People are complicit in all that is done “in our name.”

The World War on Democracy

January 20, 2012 — Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling girls!”

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, “I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumors we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”

In the early 1960s, the Labor government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitized” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lisette, “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying.”

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Jon Lebkowsky

Bruce Springsteen is angry

Guardian UK has a review of Bruce Springsteen’s new album, “Wrecking Ball,” described as “as angry a cry from the belly of a wounded America as has been heard since the dustbowl and Woody Guthrie, a thundering blow of New Jersey pig iron down on the heads of Wall Street and all who have sold his country down the swanny.” Springsteen is quoted about the causes for his anger: What was done to our country was wrong and unpatriotic and un-American and nobody has been held to account. There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.” Looking forward to Springsteen’s keynote at the SXSW music conference.

Phi Beta Iota:  Washington appears to be oblivious.  Speaking to Congressional staff, one is astonished at the depth of their ignorance about reality outside the Capitol.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Marcus Aurelius

COMMENT:  Only a couple of things wrong with the scenario described below:  (1) Vickers works for a POTUS, Administration and Congress committed to emasculating the National security operation IOT underwrite the incompetent/unindustrious/etc.; and (2) not always possible to be optimally surgical.

John Robb

Simple equation:

A national security system that is mostly bloat and mission creep instead of real, honest to goodness, security

+

Badly design social media monitoring tools that are sifting through billions of messages a day?

=

FAILURE

Here’s a simple example.  A young British guy makes a tweet to his friends:

Easy to discern the tweet is about hard drinking/partying.

He flies to Los Angeles with a friend.  He is promptly arrested.  Held in cuffs/cell for 12 hours and deported.

Why?  The Department of Homeland Security flagged his tweet  as a possible threat to the US.

Huh?

Automated security at its finest.

Add lethal drones that kill people due to “terrorist” signature behaviors and we have a problem Houston.

Phi Beta Iota:  Oddly enough, this is the exact unclassified parallel of the National Security Agency (NSA) that processes less than 1% of all traffic, and less than 5% of “high priority” traffic, according to various open source reports.  At what point–in the midst of economic collapse–do serious people get to say “enough – let’s get real about needs, capabilities, costs, outputs, and trade-offs?”  Has anyone been able to find the “M” in OMB?  This is what you get when “management” is non-existent, money is printed without pause, and very expensive executive merely channel dollars rather than actually thinking about what they buy, what the produce, and how we might better spend (or not spend at all) those dollars.

Gary North

The Crucial Pillar of the New World Order

by Gary North

LouRockwell.com, February 4, 2012

One of the most alluring temptations that face men is the desire to enter the inner ring. C. S. Lewis wrote a wonderful essay with this title. It should be part of every person’s rite of passage into adulthood.

The desire to enter the inner ring is closely related to the desire to maintain a New World Order. There is always an institutional claimant to New World Order status. It is always structured in terms of a series of concentric rings. These rings are always vertical. They are part of a pyramid of power. They are best represented by a stepped pyramid. (See Genesis 11.)

Every empire has been founded in the name of – on behalf of – some version of a New World Order. Empires all have this in common: they are eventually replaced. There is nothing more defunct than a New World Order that has failed. Think “Ottoman Empire.” Think “Thousand-Year Reich.” Think “British Empire.” Think “Soviet Union.”

When they are riding high, they seem unbeatable. What could possibly replace them? Most people cannot imagine anything. But there are always a few who can. They get together informally to help arrange the transition. Then they get together formally. They screen access to meetings. They set up a new inner ring.

In our day, the cry is “Next year, in Davos!” The best book on this is an insider’s book, David Rothkopf’s Superclass. It is not a conspiracy theory-type book. It is a “look how we’ve made it” book. It’s a “top of the world, Ma!” book. He also sees that this superclass is vulnerable to changes outside of its control: in Asia, in the Third World. “We’ve made it” can become “we’ve lost it.”

Count on it.

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Josh Kilbourn

Record 1.2 Million People Fall Out Of Labor Force In One Month, Labor Force Participation Rate Tumbles To Fresh 30 Year Low

Tyler Burden

ZeroHedge, 3 February 2011

A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month! So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation. As for the quality of jobs, as withholding taxes roll over Year over year, it can only mean that the US is replacing high paying FIRE jobs with low paying construction and manufacturing. So much for the improvement.

Chart below shows it all – that jump is not a fat finger!

And Labor Force

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John Steiner

Learn how the rights protecting commerce and property, combined with the constitutional bestowal of the rights of personhood, have > given corporations a controlling interest over our nation, our democracy, our people and the very land we walk on. We are occupied!

A new civil rights movement is on the rise and like movements in the past, extending constitutional rights to former slaves, women and labor, people across the nation are learning how to take the power to govern out of corporate boardrooms and put it back into the hands of their communities where it belongs.

This stimulating and illuminating course teaches citizens and activists how to reframe exhausting and often discouraging single issue work (such as opposing fracking, toxic dumps, quarries, factory farms, uranium, etc.) in a way that we can confront corporate control on a powerful single front: people’s constitutional rights. Democracy School Online also traces the development of peoples’ rights and corporate rights through U.S. history (corporations were given the rights of personhood before women were!), so we understand how things came to be the way they are. Working together, we can restore our rights as persons and our democracy.

Democracy School Online is presented by the Community Environmental Legal Defence Fund (CELDF).

300 Million Talons...

Columnist Calls for Internet “Quality Control” to Quash Dissent

Michael Tennant

New American, 25 January 2012

Do you think anthropogenic global warming is a hoax? Are you unconvinced that your ancestors had more in common with Cheetah than with Tarzan? Have you any doubts about the official version of how 9/11 went down? Then you, according to Evgeny Morozov, are part of a “kooky” “fringe movement” whose growth must be checked by forcing you to read “authoritative” content whenever you go looking for information on such topics on the Internet.

Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University, a contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine, and a former fellow at George Soros’ Open Society Institute — in other words, a reliable bellwether of globalist establishment thinking. His musings in Slate — in which he argues that while outright censorship of the web may not be possible, getting browsers and search engines to direct people to establishment-approved opinions would be an excellent idea — offer “proof of how worried the bad guys are about popular disbelief in State pieties, and about sites … that stoke it,” Lew Rockwell averred, citing his own website as an example. The New American undoubtedly would fall under that rubric as well.

The problem, as Morozov sees it, is that people who “deny” global warming or think vaccines may cause autism — opinions that conflict with those proffered by governments, the United Nations, and other globalist organizations — can post anything they want on the Internet with “little or no quality control” over it. As a result, he says, there are “thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories.”

In addition, Morozov worries that those searching for information on a disputed topic will, because of the way search engines are structured, tend to find sites giving the politically incorrect version of events first and may never get around to reading the “authoritative” sources on the subject. “Meanwhile,” he argues, “the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them.”

Then comes the big question with the foreordained answer: “Is it time for some kind of a quality control system?” Morozov, not surprisingly, replies strongly in the affirmative. Since dissuading those already committed to these outré views may be impossible, he thinks “resources should go into thwarting their growth by targeting their potential — rather than existent — members.” “Given that censorship of search engines is not an appealing or even particularly viable option” — note that he doesn’t say he opposes censorship per se — Morozov argues for changes to browsers and search engines that would notify users that they are about to see something that the self-appointed arbiters of acceptable opinion have deemed unfit for human consumption and, if possible, direct them elsewhere.

. . . . . .

Morozov’s concerns about the Internet’s openness to anti-establishment views are not new among the power elite. As far back as 1998, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton bemoaned the lack of a “gate-keeping function” that allows anyone to post anything on the web. Morozov’s proposed solutions to this perceived problem are not exactly original, either, as Paul Joseph Watsonobserved at Infowars.com:

[Morozov’s contention] represents a similar argument to Cass Sunstein’s “cognitive infiltration,” an effort by Obama’s information czar to slap government warnings on controversial websites (including those claiming that exposure to sunlight is healthy). In a widely derided white paper, Sunstein called for political blogs to be forced to include pop ups that show “a quick argument for a competing view.” He also demanded that taxes be levied on dissenting opinions and even suggested that outright bans on certain thoughts should be enforced.

Indeed, notes Watson, “Morozov’s rhetoric is merely one aspect of the wider move to turn the Internet into an echo chamber of establishment propaganda.” We can, therefore, expect calls for Internet censorship to continue and even become more pronounced. Many people thus have good reason to fear that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a back door to government censorship of the web.

Clearly the globalist establishment is running scared. As the anti-SOPA blackout and the popularity of Ron Paul attest, the Internet is enabling individuals to see through the smokescreen of propaganda emanating from Washington and to mobilize effectively against threats to their liberties. In fact, that very free flow of information on the web may be the one thing standing between the elites and their dreams of — as Watson put it — “Chinese-style thought control.”

Read full article.

One of several comments at the site:

Alexa: When AIDS was discovered, it was determined by the government and other authoritive agencies, that it was impossible for HIV to be transmitted through blood. As a result many people were infected through transfusions provided by the Red Cross.   If we had listened to a Morozov perspective, thousands or millions more people would have been infected because of donated blood.   The people who discovered the real source of the problem would be considered kooks in Morozov’s eye.   Also, the world would still be flat and the sun would be revolving around the earth.   Questioning conventional wisdom reveals truth.

Phi Beta Iota:  In the Real World Order (RWO), control is a delusion and also a fraud – it introduces friction that accelerates entropy.  You have to give up direct control in order to re-establish inherent controls that can only be actualized by freedom and liberty of all.  The magic of the cosmos is that it is self-actualizing.

See Also:

Robert Steele: Slate and New America Foundation a Propaganda Front – Taking Money Under the Table?

Josh Kilbourn

Twitter Users Beware: Homeland Security Isn’t Laughing

Two British tourists were detained after tweeting a joke about Marilyn Monroe. Is Homeland Security monitoring social media too closely?

Mathew Ingram

Bloomberg/Businessweek, 30 January 2012

Planning to make a joke on Twitter about bombing something? You might want to reconsider: According to a report from Britain, two tourists were detained and denied entry into the U.S. recently after they joked about destroying America and digging up Marilyn Monroe. That the Homeland Security Dept. and other authorities—including the FBI—are monitoring such social media as Twitter and Facebook isn’t surprising. That these authorities are willing to detain people based on what is clearly a harmless joke, however, raises questions about what the impact of all that monitoring will be.

Leigh Van Bryan, a 26-year-old bar manager from Coventry, told The Sun that he and friend Emily Bunting were stopped by border guards when they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and were questioned for five hours about messages Van Bryan had tweeted saying he planned to “destroy America.” After the questioning, during which Homeland Security agents threatened the two, said Van Bryan, they were put into a van and taken—along with a few illegal immigrants—to a holding cell and held overnight. The next morning, they said, Van Bryan and Bunting were forced to take a plane back to England.

According to a report in the Daily Mail, the officers gave Van Bryan a document that detailed why he was refused admission into the U.S. The document reads like a bad joke itself, saying:

“He had posted on his Tweeter [sic] website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. … Also on his tweeter [sic] account Mr. Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.”

Van Bryan told the newspaper he tried to explain to Homeland Security officials that the term “destroy” was British slang referring to a party and that his comments about “digging up Marilyn Monroe” were an attempt at humor, but the officers didn’t listen. The authorities even searched the two tourists’ luggage for shovels and other tools, he said.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Good news is that our experiences with TSA do not bear out the many horror stories in the media.  Bad news is that DHS may be retarded beyond all expectations.

Gordon Duff

Roadmap to Redressing Economic Terrorism in America

Gordon Duff

Veterans Today, 28 January 2012

We Weren’t Going to Stay Stupid Forever

When the Cold War ended, a secret fund planned for by President Ronald Reagan had been set aside to rebuild America, pay off the national debt and reward Americans for decades of sacrifice. 

This was the real accomplishment of his presidency, one few knew of. 

As the funds finally came together, during the first years of the Clinton administration, instead of going to America, the man chosen to secure this legacy for America was put in a Swiss dungeon, then a mental hospital and eventually railroaded into prison on charges now admitted to have been “manufactured.”

Of the funds, only $4.5 trillion remain (plus interest, less taxes), belonging to Ameritrust Corporation, held for the American people.  This is some of the story of those funds and continuing attempts by politicians and bankers to continue destroying the United States through economic terrorism.

. . . . . . .

What we want to know and “we” is not a harmless bunch of cranks.  “We” means many of the people who formerly and currently represent key “capabilities” that protect and defend the United States.

We want to know why, for years, the Federal Reserve illegally “loaned” trillions of dollars to banks that claimed they were insolvent, money in escrow and not under their authority for distribution.

We want to know why, for years, the Secretaries of Treasury authorized these illegal acts which have been reported in the news but never investigated.

We want to know where the trillions of dollars are in profits that were generated by using this currency to collateralize offshore transactions never listed by the banks who received the illegal loans.

Read full article with photos.

Phi Beta Iota:  We sought out Mr. Duff and interviewed him for two hours.  Among the speculative but at face value compelling opinions he offered are that there are a great many earnest professionals at the top levels of the US secret intelligence community and within the US military that are fed up with the continuing criminal enterprise that has captured the portions of the US Government.  Denver as the money-laundering capital of the USA; the failed war on drugs and the open border for the convenience of the Bush family cartel; Romney as a prime suspect (accusation, neither indictable nor proven) of massive money laundering for the other cartels — Bain as a form of BCCI replacement; attack on Libya as a joint US-French spanking of Israel and its biological weapons factories there to include a Level 5 (robotic only) vault; Iran war as a means of covering bad oil futures bets made by specific investors including Goldman Sachs; Obama to stay in place for four more years; Bert Laden CIA patsy play partly to sideline General Patraeus; many non-combat casualties from Bert Laden play drop-kicked in the staged CH-46 crash later.  Bottom line: heavy smoke, some cinders, certainly a sufficiency of information to warrant at least 100 supoenas and extended interrogations, but absent a deep honest investigation, the show goes on.  At this point, all sources–including Ron Paul and Veterans Today–must be  considered suspect as elements of the controlled opposition.  Absent the development of a public intelligence network able to develop public intelligence with total integrity, we simply cannot arrive at meaningful conclusions.