“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.”
Bruce Lee
Source: How the CIA Infiltrated the World’s Literature – VICE
When the CIA’s connections to the Paris Review and two dozen other magazines were revealed in 1966, the backlash was swift but uneven. Some publications crumbled, taking their editors down with them, while other publishers and writers emerged relatively unscathed, chalking it up to youthful indiscretion or else defending the CIA as a “nonviolent and honorable” force for good. But in an illuminating new book Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, writer Joel Whitney debunks the myth of a once-moral intelligence agency, revealing an extensive list of writers involved in transforming America’s image in countries we destabilized with coups, assassinations, and other all-American interventions.
The CIA developed several guises to throw money at young, burgeoning writers, creating a cultural propaganda strategy with literary outposts around the world, from Lebanon to Uganda, India to Latin America. The same agency that occasionally undermined democracies for the sake of fighting Communism also launched the Congress for Cultural Freedoms (CCF). The CCF built editorial strategies for each of these literary outposts, allowing them to control the conversation in countries where readers might otherwise resist the American perspective. The Paris Review, whose co-founder Peter Matthiessen was a CIA agent, would sell its commissioned interviews to the magazine’s counterparts in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. Mundo Nuevo was created to offer a moderate-left perspective to earn trust among Latin American readers, effectively muting more radical perspectives during the Cuban Revolution. Sometimes the agency would provide editors with funding and content; other times it would work directly with writers to shape the discourse. Through these acts, the CCF weaponized the era’s most progressive intellectuals as the American answer to the Soviet spin machine.
While the CIA’s involvement in anti-Communist propaganda has been long known, the extent of its influence—particularly in the early careers of the left’s most beloved writers—is shocking. Whitney, the co-founder and editor at large of the literary magazine Guernica, spent four years digging through archives, yielding an exhaustive list—James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway all served varying levels of utility to Uncle Sam. (Not that the CIA’s interest were only in letters: Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were also championed by arms of the agency.)
But don’t let that ruin Love in the Time of Cholera. Whitney explains with methodical clarity how each writer became a tool for the CIA. This nuance not only salvages many of the classics from being junked as solely propaganda, but it serves as a cautionary tale for those trying to navigate today’s “post-truth” media landscape. In an era where Facebook algorithms dictate the national discourse, even the most well-meaning journalist is prone to stories that distract on behalf of the US government.
“It was often a way to change the subject from the civil rights fight at home,” Whitney said of the CIA’s content strategy during the Cold War. We can easily draw parallels to today, where the nation’s most dire issues are rarely our viral subjects. With Donald Trump’s presidency just weeks away, Finks arrives at a crucial time, exposing the political machinery that can affect which stories are shared and which are silenced.
VICE: So why did you have to ruin all my favorite authors?
Joel Whitney: You want to know the truth about the writers and publications you love and what their aims might have been, but that shouldn’t mean they’re ruined. For somebody like Richard Wright or James Baldwin or even Peter Matthiessen, I feel like there were a lot of people who joined or participated through professors. They were in their early 20s, and when you’re young and your professors have national reputations, you take their attention seriously. I was a little bit more interested in where people ended up once the truth was known.
And the excuses varied. You mentioned Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s advice that “when you write, it’s you who informs the publication.” If that’s true, why did the CIA work with so many left-leaning Latin American authors, whose writing would give voice and credibility to the idea of autonomy in the region? Can we measure how successful the CIA really was in working with these artists?
That’s the thing about secrecy: Without any public discussion about what the actual goals were, there was no accountability, and you could keep moving the target. They found that with the early magazines of Latin America—the first one was Cuadernos [del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura]—they had their politics too much on their sleeve, and they weren’t getting the readers they wanted. Cuadernos could speak to the hardliners who were already convinced that the US did some good stuff in Latin America. It helped prop up the rich, and it helped knock down purportedly Communist-influenced leftists who often turned out not to have much communism in their leftism. But during the Cuban Revolution, we see a shifting target. Rather than enabling hardliners, “soft-liners” could reach more people.
Basically, they enacted something that I had stumbled into as an idea behind Guernica‘s political coverage, which is somebody needs to referee, at all times it seems, a debate between the anti-war progressive left and the interventionist left. I was always curious why the interventionist left always was heard and the anti-war progressive left always seemed like it was marginalized.
“The CIA’s influence in publishing was on the covert ops side, and it was done as propaganda. It was a control of how intellectuals thought about the US.”
So the CCF published writers who were just left enough to win an audience’s trust?
The way that they went about it was to use a cultural leftist like Garcia Márquez with their creative work and put their names on the cover in a sort of Trojan Horse style, so that they had a hand in the conversation during the Cuban Revolution. There was something democratic behind that, but there was also something unaccountable and not so democratic about it.
For example, the scholar Patrick Iber pointed out a moment where Emir Rodríguez Monegal admitted that he published an anti-Vietnam war op-ed just to reestablish the idea that it wasn’t a CIA instrument. It gets super complicated, but that’s where I got interested. Because once I got to that level of complexity I kind of had to throw out my maybe sweet naïve tendency to sort of morally judge all that stuff. After a while, I was just sort of more interested when people changed their mind or when people had a breakdown or when somebody was so instrumentalized and weaponized that they realized it and it crushed them for a moment.
When the CIA’s connections to the Paris Review and other publications were revealed, the backlash was starkly uneven. The Beirut-based Hiwar—as well as the life and career of its editor Tawfiq Sayigh— were destroyed. Why was the Paris Review left unscathed?
Your question just points to a central aim of the book. I think a lot of the writing that deals with this issue never looks at it next to all the coups and assassinations and interventions that made Americans so unpopular. Once Hiwar and other magazines were exposed, they were folded into all the interventions that people hate in the postcolonial world.
The CIA’s influence in publishing was on the covert ops side and it was done as propaganda. It might have been conceived by some of the participants as an altruistic funding of culture, but it was actually a control of journalism, a control of the fourth estate. It was a control of how intellectuals thought about the US. But once it was exposed, it was completely useless.
But not only did the Paris Review solicit this kind of propaganda literature, a lot of their editors were also monitoring writers and expats and the going-ons in France. How did they casually just replace their editors and move on?
This “joint employ” is important because it shows a sort of soft collusion. Peter Matthiessen admitted that we were spying but he resigned when he saw how ugly it was. I think there are some conspiracies out there that he didn’t but I’ve tried to stick with what I could find. Were Nelson Aldrich and Frances Fitzgerald spying on their friends while they were working for the Congress for Cultural Freedom? I don’t think so. They were basically doing magazine work and PR work, disguising it as innocent cultural work while doing sort of PR for the American Way. It’s not totally inconceivable that you could imagine yourself in the way that García Márquez did, taking that money and sort of affecting its outcome more than the paymasters would. That’s the conundrum, I think, and the problem with patronage in secret: It lets you tell yourself, “I don’t think I was tainted” and justifying your own behavior. But as soon as you say that, you’re talking against the basic journalistic principle of transparency.
The CIA turned writers into cultural weapons even when they weren’t saying anything explicitly pro-America, by simply advertising for the “American alternative.” How is that different today? American writers still have a monopoly in the literature scene—are they not conveying the same narrative?
That’s a huge question, and a good question. It reminds me of the mission for Guernica during the Bush Administration. The US was committing an ugly war, and I was horrified, ashamed, but I was a lit guy who did an MFA, so what could I do to help? I feel like a lot of writers feel that way now—what can we do? I needed to be instrumentalized. There is a shame in being represented by Bush or Donald Trump and the assholes only who often cheat their way into government. I will say, I don’t think positive propaganda is quite as nasty as disinformation and negative propaganda, which are almost always the same thing.
Once you start doing negative propaganda, I think it quickly turns into disinformation. You’re willing to entertain any argument that makes your enemy look bad. In the moment The Paris Review started to chase the Boris Pasternak interview, its implicit propaganda mission changed from something like: “We need the American and Western writers to be known overseas” to a more negative one that tells Americans how unfree “they” are, without explaining much in terms of context. I can almost agree with the first gesture of wanting Americans to be known by our writers rather than our Republicans. But this is more equitable when we’re willing to say, “We need Americans to know about work in translation.”
Pasternak is in many ways a native informant, in that he was a foreign writer who gave testimony to a narrative that the US wanted, and so became a CIA darling.
That’s what the Pasternak story is. He wrote Doctor Zhivago as an independent dissident, but the CIA wanted to control that, and so Pasternak became a symbol of why Western democracies “were better than that” culturally.
You have to hear his criticism not as a one-way thing that only criticizes his system. You have to listen to these dissidents and think about your own dissidence. Who is your Pasternak, and how are you treating him while you’re propping up Pasternak? That was one impetus behind the book: the question of whether we have a Pasternak now. What is Snowden compared to Pasternak? I don’t know that you can make huge comparisons to one creative writer making critique versus a leaker and whistleblower. But I wanted people to see in Pasternak not just the symbol that we try to make him into as Cold Warriors. These people are now symbols, but before that, they were independent thinkers. In some cases, they were just trying to tell their stories.
Where can we draw the line today? If writers want to avoid the blurred lines between honest expression and propaganda, should we simply swear off any sort of government funding or is it possible to be more nuanced?
No. It’s way more nuanced. We should have a wall of separation, and we have the principle in government in the separation of powers. It’s not that we don’t want government funding, it just can’t be secret. Some principles that point back to some of our finest big principles need to be re-articulated and restated. We’re in a messy, impure world, and as journalists, we’ll take whatever funding we can get. [But] we have be smart about it, like what García Márquez was trying to do.
Social media has dethroned editors as the gatekeepers of information. Do you think that makes it easier for the CIA to control the conversation?
I feel like some of these platforms withstood the government pressure better than others. I know that Facebook constantly is changing its algorithm for ad-related purposes, but they withstood some of the pressure a little differently than Twitter, who faced pressure to reveal identities in the wake of Arab Spring and other movements.
But there are other ways to leverage these cultural markets. If you look at the film industry— Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, etc.—we’re paying billions of dollars to lie to ourselves. I feel like at some point in the early war on terror, the Bush administration met with filmmakers, and they said, “We need to enlist you in this mission.” That’s not a new thing, but it felt new at the time, if you didn’t know how often that kind of thing happened during the cultural Cold War.
Follow Mary von Aue on Twitter.
Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers by Joel Whitney is available in bookstores and online from OR Books.
Rabbi Yaacov Perrin: “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”[6]
MK Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan himself declared that Palestinians “are beasts, they are not human.” MK Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan added: “A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual.”
Source: Kill Them All | Veterans Today
With permission from
Jan 4, 2017
Long before Netanyahu came on the political scene, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir compared the Palestinians to “grasshoppers.”
Human Rights Watch has just condemned Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy. The policy is pretty simple. If the Israeli Defense Force and police officers perceive or think that a Palestinian is about to commit a crime, then Israeli officials encourage the IDF to take that Palestinian down immediately and without hesitation.
Any Israeli officer should be able to “shoot to kill” the Palestinian “without thinking twice…no attacker male or female should make it out of any attack alive.”[1]
The evidence doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that if the IDF and the police want to kill a Palestinian, they can do so. The IDF and the police themselves are the evidence. All they have to do to defense their case is just say that the Palestinian was about to do something bad. Sari Bashi, Israel advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, declared that this clearly violates international law.[2]
The question is simply this: Has the Israeli regime gunned down Palestinians in the past based on this ridiculous policy? The answer is yes.
This should not be a surprise at all. We know for a fact that Israeli politician and Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked has unequivocally and ontologically declared that the Palestinians are Israel’s enemies.
“Who is the enemy?,” she asked. “The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started…” Shaked’s political ideology with respect to the Palestinians is worth quoting in full:
“The Palestinian people has declared war on us, and we must respond with war. Not an operation, not a slow-moving one, not low-intensity, not controlled escalation, no destruction of terror infrastructure, no targeted killings. Enough with the oblique references. This is a war. Words have meanings. This is a war.
“It is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. These too are forms of avoiding reality. This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started…
“Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor and give them their moral support.
“They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”[3]
Shaked declares that she intends to “promote advanced processes of democratization in Israel,” but how does that line up with the idea that all Palestinians are the enemy? Does Shaked really think that democracy can even exist without what Kant would call the categorical imperative or practical reason? Can Israel’s laws with respect to the Palestinians be really universalized?
Shaked’s ideology is not democracy at all. It is actually a perversion of democracy. And if you think this is far-fetched, perhaps we need to bring in Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, who said unequivocally:
“Any trial based on the assumption that Jews and goyim are equal is a total travesty of justice.”[4]
The million-dollar question is this: Was Shaked ever challenged by the Zionist Mafia and Neocon puppets for saying disgusting things about the Palestinians? Did any US politician reprimand her for her essentially diabolical plan?
Of course not.
The fact is that Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials (both past and present) have said similar things about the Palestinians. “In our neighborhood,” said King Bibi, “we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts.” If an Israeli soldier is convicted of manslaughter, says Netanyahu, he should be released immediately.
Long before Netanyahu came on the political scene, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir compared the Palestinians to “grasshoppers.”[5] Former IDF Chief of Staff Raphael Eitan declared way back in the 1980s:
“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel….Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”
Rabbi Yaacov Perrin: “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”[6]
MK Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan himself declared that Palestinians “are beasts, they are not human.” MK Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan added: “A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual.”
Shouldn’t homosexuals in America and much of the West be upset about Ben-Dahan degrading them here? Doesn’t organized Jewry in America tell us ad nauseam that homosexuality is a great thing? Why doesn’t the same organization reprimand Ben-Dahan for his racist views?
[1] “‘Israeli shoot-to-kill policy belongs to western movie laws’ – HRW official to RT,” Russia Today, January 4, 2017.
[2] Harriet Agerholm, “Israeli officials back shoot-to-kill policy of Palestinian suspects, says Human Rights Watch,” Independent, January 3, 2017.
[3] Ishaan Tharoor, “Israel’s new justice minister considers all Palestinians to be ‘the enemy,’” Washington Post, May 7, 2015.
[4] Quoted in Alan Cowell, “An Israeli Mayor Is Under Scrutiny,” NY Times, June 6, 1989.
[5] Ron Kampeas, “Andrew Sullivan owes Yitzhak Shamir an apology,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 6, 2015.
[6] Quoted in Clyde Haberman, “West Bank Massacre; Israel Orders Tough Measures Against Militant Settlers,” NY Times, February 28, 1994.
Source: Nonexistent Merits of the “US-led Coalitions” | New Eastern Outlook
The perpetual war that the so-called US-led coalition is waging is now almost universally synonymous mass murder, and this is just another not propaganda claim, and that’s rather unfortunate. By the end of the twentieth century the United States employed military force abroad more than two hundred times. In Barack Obama’s two terms in office alone the US Army was conducting military operations in five countries in the Middle East and Africa, where the weapons of the US-led coalition claimed thousands of civilian lives.
Since 2004, the Pentagon has been targeting Islamists in Somalia, while the White House provides support to the government forces in the unraveling civil war in that country. However, American bombs are killing civilians just as effectively as they kill radicals, therefore the former became hostages of the military ambitions of Washington.
In 2011, Barack Obama approved air and rocket strikes against Libya, marking the start of the criminal US intervention in the country. This intervention resulted in the overthrow and consequent murder of the head of the Libyan state – Muammar al-Gaddafi. This resulted in the devastation of the most prosperous and stable African country.
On 23 September 2014, the US-led coalition began bombing the positions of the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. While those strikes have yielded no results, they’ve resulted in thousands of civilian deaths.
In 2015 Washington launched first US missile strikes on the positions of Yemeni rebels – the Houthis, while providing active support for the Saudi military intervention in Yemen. As a result, Saudi Arabia got embroiled in a US supported war in Yemen.
The Islamic State terrorist group remains a threat in Iraq, Syria and around the world. In once-peaceful Libya things have also gone to hell, we got more problems with terrorist networks and yet another wave of refugees flooding Europe.
As it’s been noted by the French edition of the Huffington Post, the fight against ISIS is no longer a top priority for the US, the ultimate is and to contain China, while preventing Russia’s rise to international prominence. According to this approach, under the guise of carrying on the war on terror, the United States, despite the decline of its influence, is trying to get back into the regional game.
While being a big patchwork of various states, the US-led has completely discredited itself and lost any legitimacy that it could have. The unnatural alliance of the Europeans, Anglo-Saxons, the Persian Gulf monarchies, as well as other states, ranging from Pakistan to Turkey can hardly be labeled as “the Western coalition”, it is rather “a coalition against Assad” or “anti-Russian coalition.”
Moreover, there are doubts that ISIS has been an enemy of this coalition at all, which becomes obvious if you take a look at the recent statements of the US Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Philip M. Breedlove who has been telling the world time and time again that Russia is a long-term threat to the existence of the US and its European allies.
According to the USA Today, things are also awful for Washington in Asia. The Philippines have long been the cornerstone of American dominance in the Pacific. Now Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, having pronounced the United States a “loser,” has decided to side with China. He is clearly not satisfied with the attempts of the Obama administration by force to dictate its will to the world, while hiding from any sort of retribution under the facade of the US-led coalition, while bringing nothing but death, hunger and poverty to the people of the world.
Therefore, the US president to be – Donald Trump inherits a pretty ugly situation that can get dangerous situation fast. And this situation is bound to be changed once the Obama administration leaves office.
Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
Oh great, now you know some of the sites I quote from. That’s OK, I am not here for click bait posts but I am here to release what I perceive to be information close to the truth.
by: Mike Adams
January 04, 2017
(NaturalNews) SHARE EVERYWHERE: The Censored.news beta is now live, delivering a super clean, ad-free interface that brings you (near) real-time news headlines from the top independent news websites currently being targeted for censorship by the globalist regime of fascist info-monopolists and corporate journo-terrorists.
Go to Censored.news right now to see it. It’s also mobile friendly and refreshed many times throughout the day. Because it’s in beta, you may experience glitches from time to time.
The purpose of Censored.news is to connect freedom-loving citizens of the world to the most important independent sources of news on the internet today. More sources are being added soon.
As one of the tech pioneers in independent media publishing, I launched this site as a public service to help make sure that informed citizens of the world have a portal to find all the censored news that’s being blacklisted at Fakebook, Google News, Twitter and other internet gatekeepers (all of which are beholden to the NSA and the deep state).
More publishing sites will be added to Censored.news throughout 2017, including SHTFplan.com, SGTreport.com, The Anti Media, Alt Market and many others. To be considered for inclusion on Censored.news, publishers must meet three criteria:
1) They must be engaged in independent journalism and not beholden to government or corporate interests.
2) They must be targeted for censorship.
3) They must publish content that seeks to set people free rather than enslave them.
My aim is to help independent journalism continue to rapidly expand while the old media collapses from its own self-induced “fake news” epidemic. CNN, WashPost, NYT, MSNBC and USA Today are all extinct. They have zero credibility remaining. No informed person believes anything that appears in the fakestream media anymore.
Instead, people are turning to independent media in record numbers. To try to destroy the independent media, Google, Facebook and other internet gatekeepers are engaging in communist-style (red China) censorship of those sites, in exactly the same way the Chinese government censors websites about Falun Gong.
We will not let the communist-style censorship succeed in silencing the real voices of reason and truth in the western world. Censored.news connects you with the real patriots, visionaries and revolutionaries of our time.
It’s easy to remember, too: If you want to read the censored news, just go to Censored.news.
Last year, I launched GoodGopher.com, the anonymous search engine for independent media. Updated daily, GoodGopher.com allows you to search for censored news stories across thousands of censored websites and blogs. It also doesn’t track your searches or record your search history.
Use both Censored.news and GoodGopher.com to stay informed as globalist-funded journo-terrorists try and fail to maintain a stranglehold on information. Remember: Everything you read in the Washington Post is bulls##t. Get the real story on unfolding events at Censored.news or GoodGopher.com.
Information wants to be free. And people like us are willing to help promote and defend that freedom at all costs.
Prayers and blessings to Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, G. Edward Griffin, Aaron Swartz (murdered by the deep state in 2013), Andrew Breitbart (murdered by the Obama regime in 2012) and all the other champions of truth and transparency. In an age of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Welcome to the revolution.
Source: Alien life? Scientists pinpoint galaxy where fast radio bursts originate
With permission from Shepard
(INTELLIHUB) — For the first time ever, astronomers have pinpointed the home galaxy where numerous “fast radio bursts” have originated from. The bursts have puzzled scientists since their discovery a decade ago, with at least 18 of the bursts being recorded since 2007.
Interestingly, only one such fast radio burst, discovered in Puerto Rico, has actually repeated itself and now astronomers have confirmed that it comes from a galaxy billions of light-years away.
“By using telescopes from around the world, “we now know that this particular burst comes from a dwarf galaxy more than 3 billion light-years from Earth,” astronomer Shami Chatterjee of Cornell University told USA Today.
The radio bursts are “highly energetic” while lasting just a few thousandths of a second. Many within the UFO research community as well as some mainstream observers believe that the bursts could easily be from alien life.
The USA Today report continued, “Prior to this discovery, astronomers had lacked the definitive proof that the bursts come from far outside our Milky Way galaxy.”
“The dwarf galaxy itself, which is less than 1% of the mass of our Milky Way galaxy, is rather unremarkable. “It is surprising that such an exotic source is hosted by such an unimpressive galaxy,” said Joan Schmelz of the Arecibo Observatory.”
The findings were presented at an American Astronomical Society meeting as well as published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Illuminati Exposed (This is the resistance)
Illuminati Exposed (This is the resistance)
Imagine that, them devious Chinese are using water to hide their submarines. Sneaky.
Thich Nhat Hanh offers a new definition of success so it is accessible to everyone.
Source: The Economy and Success According to Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh
Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Zen Buddhist master, Thich Nhat Hanh has a very different theory about why our ecosystems are dying and our financial systems are crumbling. The Vietnamese monk credited with bringing mindfulness to the West believes that our desperation to succeed at all costs fuels our voracious economic system. An innumerable number of worldly ‘sicknesses’ come from this singular philosophical vice.
On one of Hanh’s Facebook posts he said:
“Each one of us has to ask ourselves, What do I really want? Do I really want to be Number One? Or do I want to be happy? If you want success, you may sacrifice your happiness for it. You can become a victim of success, but you can never become a victim of happiness.”
Thay – as his followers call him, is no stranger to the ideology of the movers and shakers in our world economy. He was invited to speak in Silicon Valley by Steve Jobs once, and has met with the World Bank president Jim Yong Kim. He has also met with senior Google engineers to discuss how they could develop technologies which could be more compassionate and bring about positive change, instead of increasing people’s stress and isolation, taking them away from nature, and one another.
He recently explained his concern with how people pin their happiness on success in an interview with the Guardian.
“If you know how to practice mindfulness you can generate peace and joy right here, right now. And you’ll appreciate that and it will change you. In the beginning, you believe that if you cannot become number one, you cannot be happy, but if you practice mindfulness you will readily release that kind of idea. We need not fear that mindfulness might become only a means and not an end because in mindfulness the means and the end are the same thing. There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way.”
Thay warns, however, that practicing mindfulness just to be more productive at work, or only to enjoy more material success will leave the practitioner with a pale shadow of awareness compared to what true mindfulness can provide. He suggests:
“If you consider mindfulness as a means of having a lot of money, then you have not touched its true purpose. It may look like the practice of mindfulness but inside there’s no peace, no joy, no happiness produced. It’s just an imitation. If you don’t feel the energy of brotherhood, of sisterhood, radiating from your work, that is not mindfulness.”
As company executives in banking, oil production, agriculture, manufacturing, tech, and other fields strive to be successful, are they missing out on the true peace that might come from preserving an ecosystem, or helping to protect biodiversity? Are these titans of industry reflective of our social and political slant toward ever-increasing spending, a lack of accountability fiscally and environmentally, and the disassociation workers feel from their families and friends while constantly trying to work harder and earn more?
Thay says that all businesses should be conducted in such a way that all the employees can experience happiness. He says that helping to change society for the better can fill us with a sense of accomplishment that doesn’t come from focusing purely on profits.
When top CEOs make 300% more than their workers, and include stock incentives, luxury cars, and healthy expense accounts, how can balance truly be upheld?
When the world’s top 3,000 firms are responsible for over $2.2 trillion in environmental damage, how can we find joy from nature?
When even Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, who now heads up the software firm Asana calls out the tech industry for a lack of work-life balance, how can anyone find time to practice mindfulness or meditation?
Furthermore, even loss of life is acceptable in the name of profits. The ‘business’ of war has allowed the 100 largest contractors to sell more than $410 billion in arms and military services. Just 10 of those companies sold over $208 billion – while providing the means to kill millions.
Is it any wonder employees are broke, stressed out, and burned out from a lack of balance, no connection with other people, and an incessant work flow that promises very little reward, either financial or otherwise, from their toil?
Then there is the debt-based financial system of the Federal Reserve, propping up this entire show.
But the truth is that we don’t actually need the Federal Reserve. In fact, the greatest period of economic growth in United States history happened during the decades before the Federal Reserve was created.
We also don’t need CEOs who make 300 times what their employees do, or ridiculous government policies which allow the notion of corporations as people, while ignoring the basic needs of real people.
Our courts have extended constitutional protections to the most unconscious among us, preserving a way of life that does not allow true happiness. Our constant aim for success has warped our original goal – to be happy. Isn’t that why people want more money, more power, and more ‘things.’ But as Thay says, this is a false way to attain happiness.
What this quiet Zen monk is trying to tell us is that our entire society is upside down. Our economic system protects mindlessness, not mindfulness.
He says that the primary affliction of our modern civilization is that we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us and so we attempt to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.
Retailers peddle a host of devices to help us cover up the suffering inside. But unless and until we’re able to face our suffering, we can’t be present and available to life, and happiness will continue to elude us.
How do we change our economic policies so that all employees can be happy? It might help to look at our true goals. It might help to acknowledge the pain we’ve caused thousands of people by perpetuating war for the sake of profits. Success doesn’t automatically equal happiness, not if the definition of success only includes the bottom line.
We can measure success by our fulfillment in life, by the people we’ve been able to touch with our good deeds, or a mindful interaction, by having friends, experiencing love, being able to walk in a forest, or learn how to play a musical instrument.
Perhaps the true goal should be peacefulness instead of happiness, even. As Hanh has said:
“If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society will benefit from our peace.” This could be our new definition of success.
Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny, Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and *See the Big Picture*. Her blog is Yoga for the New World . Her latest book is Pharma Sutra: Healing The Body And Mind Through The Art Of Yoga.
Source: Nitrous, weed, opium and peach-pits: the intoxicants of 18th C England
http://www.blacklistednews.com
Jan 4, 2017
The 18th century — like the centuries before and after — were filled with people who were, frankly, high as fuck. But the 18th century marked a turning point in getting-high-ology, because of the opening of global trade routes, mass colonization, and the nascent industrial revolution, which brought more drugs, more cheaply, to England.
The summer of 1799 saw a new fixation in British society – the inhalation of laughing gas. Nitrous oxide had been discovered by chemist Joseph Priestley in 1772 after introducing iron filings to nitric acid – the resulting gas gave Priestley a painless and giddy feeling – and was synthesised later that year by his pupil Humphry Davy. Davy was delighted by the euphoric effects of the gas, which he had tested on himself at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol. It induced an elated state which motivated Davy to set about supervising the construction of a machine that could reliably produce large quantities of the gas with a property that he described as ‘the thrilling’.
Davy soon issued invitations to people in his circle to sample the wondrous gas and experienced ‘the thrilling’ for themselves. They met at an upstairs drawing room at the Pneumatic Institution in a series of gatherings over the summer. The guests inhaled nitrous oxide from portable bags made of oiled green silk and happily stumbled about in wild merriment, before drifting into a dreamy sedated state. News of the nitrous oxide capers travelled and came to be repeated at ‘laughing parties’ held all over the country. Davy held nitrous sessions with poets Coleridge and Southey, the potter Josiah Wedgwood and the thesaurist Peter Roget.
People could not get enough of a gas that allowed “uneasiness [to be]”, as Davy put it, “for a few minutes swallowed up in pleasure.” He proposed in 1799 that nitrous oxide might be used in surgical operations to deaden pain; but his suggestion went unheeded for another forty-five years. It’s a theme that recurs with any account of the history of mind-altering substances: that they can do medical good is overshadowed by their good-time nature.
High Times in the 18th Century [Debra Daley/The History Girls]
Source: Professors & Politicians Gather To Warn Us About The New World Order (NWO) – Collective Evolution
http://www.collective-evolution.com
“We are dealing with a criminal undertaking at a global level … and there is an ongoing war, it is led by the United States, it may be carried out by a number of proxy countries, which are obeying orders from Washington … The global war on terrorism is a US undertaking, which is fake, it’s based on fake premises. It tells us that somehow America and the Western world are going after a fictitious enemy, the Islamic state, when in fact the Islamic state is fully supported and financed by the Western military alliance and America’s allies in the Persian Gulf. … They say Muslims are terrorists, but it just so happens that terrorists are Made in America. They’re not the product of Muslim society, and that should be abundantly clear to everyone on this floor. … The global war on terrorism is a fabrication, a big lie and a crime against humanity.” (source) (source)
The quote above comes from prominent author and Canadian economist Dr. Michel Chossudovsky, who is the University of Ottawa’s Emeritus Professor of Economics, spoken at the International Conference on the New World Order, which was organized and sponsored by the Perdana Global Peace Foundation. You can find a full video of that conference at the end of this article.
“What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea, a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace, and security, freedom, and the rule of law.” – George Bush Sr. (source)
“I think his (Obama’s) task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period, when really a New World Order can be created.” – Henry Kissinger, CNBC
The conference featured numerous speakers, such as Dr. Thomas PM Barnett, an American military geostrategist and Chief Analyst at Wikistrat. He has also held numerous insider positions, one of them being adviser to former Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld. President of the International Movement for A Just World, Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, and Former Editor of the Japan Times, Yoichi Shimatsu, were also in attendance, and the event was headed by Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who was the fourth Prime Minister of Malaysia (for 22 years) and is currently the President of Perdana Global Peace Foundation.
It’s great to see a number of academics and professionals come together to create awareness about what seems to be a global military agenda towards a massive surveillance state and a new world order — more specifically, a one world government.
Prior to ‘credible’ people coming forward in an attempt to create awareness about the New World Order agenda, it was considered a conspiracy by most. It’s quite disturbing that a conference like this does not receive any mainstream media attention, and it’s even more disturbing that it would need to be aired on mainstream television in order to be taken seriously by the masses. The grip that corporate media has on the minds of the masses is strong, and it does a great job at keeping the world ignorant and oblivious to events and concerns being raised by many experts, in various fields, from all over the world.
The New World order is the supposed goal of a handful of global elitists who are pushing for a one world government and a heightened national security state. In order to accomplish this goal, this group uses false flag terrorism and the fear of global threats to impose increased security measures on domestic populations (like Bill C-51) to justify the invasion of other countries (like Iraq and 9/11, for example).
False flag terrorism is run by covert operations designed to deceive and manipulate in such a way as to appear as though they had been carried out by groups, nations, or entities other than those who actually planned and executed them.
“All three buildings were destroyed by carefully planned, orchestrated and executed controlled demolition.” – Professor Lynn Margulis, Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and National Academy of Science member, one of many academics who has been very outspoken regarding 9/11 (source) (source)
“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda, and any informed intelligence officer knows this. But, there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an intensified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the United States.” – Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook
“Another mythical and imaginary problem is what I can only call the hysteria the USA has whipped up over supposed Russian meddling in the American presidential election. The United States has plenty of genuinely urgent problems, it would seem, from the colossal public debt to the increase in firearms violence and cases of arbitrary action by the police.”
http://www.collective-evolution.com
Jan 5, 2017
(And he’s not the only one. You can see similar quotes in a previous article we published here.)
More people became aware of the world of secrecy when Edward Snowden, a former intelligence contractor, leaked the very first documentation that proved the existence of clandestine black budget operations. These programs go far beyond surveillance and have no oversight from Congress. (You can read more about that topic here.)
To become aware of these hidden truths, one must be curious about our world and capable of thinking critically. It’s hard to know who to trust, especially when it comes to international politics. Personally, I examine information and go with what resonates with me; after that, I can look at what different politicians are saying, determine how it fits in with everything I’ve looked at, and connect the dots accordingly.
When it comes to geopolitics, things have become quite clear within the past few years for many, and there is a general consensus among many political leaders and academics that, for a long, there has been a deliberate manipulation of the opinions of the masses, and that those who manipulate this “unseen mechanism, constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power” of global geopolitics. Our minds are “molded, our tastes formed” and our ideas are “suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” (Edward Bernays)
This was the sentiment expressed by multiple speakers, most notably Russian President Vladimir Putin, at the 13th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, whose theme this year was “The Future in Progress: Shaping the World of Tomorrow.”
He began his speech by arguing that the oligarchic ‘1 percent’ that dominate our world “abandoned substantive and equal dialogue with other actors in international life, chose not to improve or create universal institutions, and attempted instead to bring the entire world under the spread of their own organisations, norms and rules. They chose the road of globalisation and security for their own beloved selves, for the select few, and not for all.”
He is referring to the fact that the global elite continue to push their desire for a new world order. This, in my view, is most evident by what’s taken place in the Middle East, especially in the past decade. The United States has completely infiltrated and destroyed countries, all while manufacturing false events to justify these invasions. This is known as false flag terrorism. The Middle East is now full of U.S. military bases. But more on this later.
According to Putin, “If the powers that be today find some standard or norm to their advantage, they force everyone else to comply. But if tomorrow these same standards get in their way, they are swift to throw them in the bin, declare them obsolete, and set or try to set new rules.” (source)
Later on, he mentions that the “the powers that be” continue to “churn out threats, imaginary and mythical threats such as the ‘Russian military threat,’ ” explaining how it’s a “profitable business that can be used to pump new money into defence budgets at home, get allies to bend to a single superpower’s interests, expand NATO and bring its infrastructure, military units and arms closer to our borders.”
He then goes on to describe the anti-Russian propaganda the U.S. has spread in recent years:
“Another mythical and imaginary problem is what I can only call the hysteria the USA has whipped up over supposed Russian meddling in the American presidential election. The United States has plenty of genuinely urgent problems, it would seem, from the colossal public debt to the increase in firearms violence and cases of arbitrary action by the police.”
For years we’ve relied on mainstream media, but more people are starting to realize that it cannot be trusted, especially when it comes to covering major events like 9/11, the so called ‘war on terror,’ and other critical topics. Global corporate media has become a tool of deception and misinformation, and many of us still have yet to wake from our slumber and realize that this source of ‘information’ is simply an elite owned tool meant to push an agenda that has little to do with public interest.
(…)
You can view the full speech below. You can read the full English translation from the Kremlin HERE.
Sources Used:
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53151#sel=56:40,56:44
The report by Defense for Children International warned that Israeli forces are not being held accountable for using firearms against Palestinians.
Source: PressTV-Israel sets child killing record in 2016
A new report says 2016 saw the highest number of Palestinian children killed by Israeli troops over the past decade, warning that Tel Aviv is not being held accountable for its lethal attacks.
The report by Defense for Children International (DCI), a Geneva-based NGO focusing on children’s rights, noted that 35 children were killed and 83 others injured by Israeli troops in 2016.
It warned that Israeli forces are not being held accountable for using firearms against the Palestinian protesters and stone-throwers.
Thirty-two of them were killed in the occupied West Bank, out of whom 19 children were between the ages of 16 and 17 and 13 others were between 13 and 15 years old, the report said.
“We can say Israeli soldiers are encouraged to use lethal force against children in the absence of any kind of accountability. They do not observe the laws protecting civilians under occupation,” Ayed Abu Eqtaish, a DCI director, told Press TV correspondent in Ramallah.
“We have evidence where there was no reason to kill those children. They did not pose any kind of threat. In many cases, soldiers fired so many bullets at the slain children to make sure they were dead,” he added.
Helmi al-Arja, from the Hurryat Center for Defense of Civil Rights, told Press TV that Israeli forces are confident they will not be tried for their crimes.
“Trials will only be the mock ones, because the victims are Palestinians,” he added.
Unrest has flared up in the West Bank since 2015 when Israel imposed restrictions on the entry of Palestinian worshipers into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem al-Quds as part of Tel Aviv’s perceived moves to change the status quo on the Muslim holy site Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount).
Since October 2015, Israeli forces have killed at least 244 Palestinians, including unarmed protesters.
On Monday, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that since October 2015 they had documented over 150 cases in which Israeli forces had fatally shot Palestinian children and adults.
http://presstv.com/Default/embedattached/477995
“Video footage and/or witness accounts raise serious questions about the necessity of the use of lethal force,” it said.
The HRW also warned that some Israeli officials have been “encouraging” forces to kill Palestinians even when they do not constitute a threat.
In 2016, the Middle East Eye online news portal reported that Israeli forces were using a “shoot-to-cripple” policy against the youths in the West Bank.
According to a report by the BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian residency and refugee rights, 18 youths aged between 14 and 27 were shot in their legs during raids on the Dheisha refugee camp in the West Bank in 2016.
Palestinians participating in protests in the West Bank cited an Israeli commander, nicknamed “Captain Nidal”, as telling them he would “cripple half of you and let the other half push your wheelchairs.”
Source: The Kindergarten Art Class | ~Burning Woman~
shatara46.wordpress.com
Sha Tara
Jan 5, 2017
Thoughts from ~burning woman~
From my current level of awareness and observation, I see mankind as a bunch of unruly kindergarten kids crammed together and told they’re having an “art” day. To get them started, there’s a pile of paper sheets on the floor, and next, a big bowl full of crayons of every conceivable colour. The kids are sat on the floor and more or less arranged around the items. Predictably things don’t go as planned, or even as unplanned. Some kids just lie back on the floor sucking their thumbs, trying to fall asleep. Some just grab paper and fistfuls of crayons and begin to draw wildly across their papers. Some quietly and dutifully wait for some sort of instruction. Some look at the ceiling and smile at something. Some start to argue over the items, a fight erupts and a couple of kids start to cry. Pandemonium reigns supreme.
So far I’ve described our general interaction as social communities through academic, scientific, religious, political, business and financial processes. Basic Earthian interaction.
But I missed something, didn’t I. I forgot to add that there is here at least one adult, one supervisor, someone with presumably superior knowledge and wisdom to bring these children together for a purpose that will bear some fruit. At the end of the exercise, each child will have a piece of paper with something drawn on it to take home.
Obviously, the Teacher aspect is missing in earth’s kindergarten art class. There is no one to bring the kiddies to stop fighting and to cooperate together and share the items offered on the floor. So you have an entire planet running on a pre-interventionist-teacher anarchic condition.
We already know why the kiddies act the way they do: it’s how they were raised, what they’d already observed at home; what they’d seen on TV or what they’d already experienced on playgrounds, in doctors’ offices and daycare. Also, it’s something locked in their DNA. It’s what they are. It’s their nature running its course and without the teacher intervention, that will be the course of their entire lives. Nothing will ever fundamentally change for any of them. That last line is worth repeating because it is a truism if there ever was one: nothing will ever fundamentally change for any of them.
We’re not short of groups and organizations trying to shove the teacher aspect in our face. Put your faith in science and all will be well. Believe in Jesus and you will be saved. Convert to Islam and Allah will bless you. Vote for the Democrats. Join the army. Join this, join that; support this, protest that; love this, hate that. There’s stacks of papers and bowls of crayons and anybody can draw lines in any sort of colours they want. Or can they?
It’s complicated. Someone’s sitting in the wrong place and they won’t move. Someone’s using the wrong colours and they won’t stop using those colours. Someone’s got paper they didn’t pay for which they took from someone else’s stack; they stole from them and now the “victims” want them punished for their crime. There are threats: if they’re not punished we’ll get some friends (allies) together and we’ll beat them up ’cause we’re better than they are.
Earthian civilization, in a nutshell.
Faced with this incurable condition, what do you, as an intelligent person do? Basically you can do whatever you want. You can choose to become one of the bullies, or one of their victims. Or you can choose not to participate in the art class as long as there is no consensus on how it should proceed.
The Art Class:
No matter where you sit, it’s anarchy all around and you’re expected to share a space with people who fear and hate other people in the class. “Look at her: she’s black. She shouldn’t be allowed in here!” “Look at him, he’s got no shoes, that’s gross!” “Look at those two with their ragged clothes munching on a couple of pieces of stale bread: that’s disgusting!” “Him? Don’t even think of being friends with him, he’s a Jew and we hate Jews.” “Look, she wearing a hijab, she’s a Muslim and flaunting it; she needs to be taught a lesson. Those kids in the corner? Their parents are commies.”
We may not be able to have them thrown out of the class but at least we won’t associate with them and when we get the chance we’ll gang up on them and beat the hell out of them. That’ll scare them and they won’t come back. We don’t want them here. This is our place and this is our stuff now.
Let’s say you are a reasonably intelligent person and you realize it’s not possible to participate in the class without compromises. No matter what, if you choose to sit with the two eating the stale bread, you find out they hate the black girl. If you sit with the black girl she tells you she hates the kid in bare feet ’cause he’s Catholic. If you sit with the Muslim girl you discover that she has been taught to hate Jews and Christians and she tells you that as the enemies of Allah they must die. If you choose to sit with the bullies who by now have most of the paper and crayons, maybe they’ll let you borrow some paper and maybe one crayon but the deal is, you swear to join them in the bullying later.
Fortunately there is one more choice. You can turn your back on all of them and walk away, alone. No paper, no crayons, no personal space on the floor, just yourself and the wilderness: thorns and hail, flowers and butterflies, blizzards and loneliness, gently flowing streams and renewal. More chaos, surely, but this time it isn’t deliberately ignorant or evil. It accepts you without throwing a mantle of exclusivity around you. You swim or sink – nobody cares, it’s all up to you.
But what about that programming? What about that Earthian DNA shit? Well, that is a thorny problem ‘cause you can’t blame that on anyone else, you have to face it. You need to get rid of your Earthian programming, or at the very least you need to cancel its inimical effects on your mind.
That’s when you say, hey, I’m me! I’m not what I was born to be; I’m not white, French, doctor, politician, student, taxi-driver, female, male, mother, leader, young, old, voter, entertainer: I’m me. Just me.
Everything up to and until I left the kindergarten class was me according to society. Society had designed the pigeon holes and I could only choose to function as an adjunct of society from one of those holes. Not anymore. Now, I can be me, according to my own choices. To hell with society and civilization.
I am about to reinvent myself as something completely new. Everything I am from this point on is the chosen me; chosen and designed by myself, no one and nothing else. I will never again return to the kindergarten art class; not for love, not for money, not for reputation, not for salvation. Being in collusion with the denizens of the kindergarten class is something I will no longer do until the day when I can no longer do it.
Source: Standing Rock 2017: The Fight Against DAPL is Not Over | The Freedom Articles
freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com
Makia Freeman
Jan 4, 2017
The fight of the Native American Indian tribes, environmentalists and the water protectors (protestors) is not over. Although the Army Corps of Engineers announced on Sunday December 4th, 2016, that it would not be granting the DAPL easement access, there is nothing to stop the oil company from disobeying that and moving forward anyway. After all, the amount they would have to pay in fines in insignificant next to the lost revenue they are experiencing from the delay of the project. The announcement offered temporary relief, but the battle is not over. Some at the camps have stated that the announcement was propaganda to lull people into a false sense of security. You can expect Standing Rock 2017 to be just as newsworthy as Standing Rock 2016. Before going further, however, it is worth revisiting the legal facts of the Standing Rock / DAPL issue, since there was so much emotion, disinformation and confusion surrounding it.
First we need to understand the background. In 1851, the Laramie Treaty was struck which outlined the territorial claims of 8 American Indian tribes including the Sioux. However 11 years later in 1862, after many years of broken promises by the US Government (treaty land not honored, food and supplies not delivered as promised), a war raged between members of the Dakota nation and the US military in southern Minnesota. In fact, December 26th marked the 154th anniversary of the largest mass execution in US government history, when 38 Dakota men were publicly hanged in Mankato, Minnesota. Around this time gold and other minerals were discovered on Treaty reservation land, so the US Government took back the land, dug for uranium and poisoned the aquifer and thus the drinking water of the people there (now incidentally the Sioux must pump the Missouri River to make their water drinkable). In 1890, a horrible massacre took place. At the Battle of the Wounded Knee (not a battle but a massacre), white man shot Lakota Sioux women and children and killed their buffalo. History.com describes it as follows:
“The conflict at Wounded Knee was originally referred to as a battle, but in reality it was a tragic and avoidable massacre … a brutal massacre … in which it’s estimated 150 Indians were killed (some historians put this number at twice as high), nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men.”
Clearly there has been a lot of mistrust, broken promises, theft, violence and murder in the past. From the American Indian point of view, the DAPL is the black snake they have prophesized about which threatens their livelihood and lives. Those supporting the DAPL have made several claims substantiating why they believe it’s right, fair and legal. Let’s take a closer look at their claims.
This is technically true, but overall very misleading. Yes, the DAPL runs adjacent and parallel to an older 1982 pipeline in the same place. The pipeline passes by a point about 500 feet from Sioux land. Obviously, if some kind of oil spill were to occur, the probability is almost 100% that it would affect American Indian land. How could it not being that close? The Lakota Sioux on pine Ridge used to depend upon the Ogallala Aquifer for their drinking water. But since the uranium contamination, they now pump water from the Missouri River. They have had their drinking water permanently poisoned from resource extraction in the past. Clearly, it’s fair for them to protest a pipeline right next to them with such a potential of disruption and danger to their lives. And if you think that pipelines are “safe”, look at the next claim.
Another technically true but misleading point. Pipelines may be safer than other methods, but they still break and spill. Just in case you think that a domestic American oil spill is an unlikely event, consider this: only around 4 weeks ago another oil pipeline in North Dakota (not the DAPL, but a different one around 150 miles from Standing Rock) spilled into a creek. This happened at Ash Coulee Creek in North Dakota. 176,000 gallons of oil were spilled which contaminated around 5.4 miles of the creek. Oil is a dirty fuel; these kind of accidents are bound to happen. The more a country relies on oil, the more accidents it can expect to have. Did you know the Keystone XL pipeline leaked 12 times in its 1st year of operation?
In fact, there have been thousands of documented oil spills and pipeline breaks (averaging 31,500 barrels per year according to this source) in the USA alone in the last 15 years! That is an astonishing figure and truly goes to show that there is no way “safe” way to transport oil. This doesn’t even include the 100s of undocumented spills that we were not told about …
Both the DAPL and the Army Corps of Engineers have been claiming that the Sioux tribe didn’t respond in timely way to their requests for negotiation and consultation. Clearly there was a huge communication breakdown. Whose fault was it? It’s very difficult to determine. The article Everything You Need to Know About Standing Rock summarizes the situation:
“When it all comes down, through, the tribe was not involved in the process. Whose fault that is . . . well, depends on how you look at the world, really. The Corps and DAPL made significant effort, but the tribe also doesn’t have the money, means or special training that the organization’s have. This causes some pretty significant imbalance. One example: After several months of requests for meetings and input, the Tribe asks for clarification on the process all together – keep in mind they had already been getting notifications from DAPL prior to this. When Chairman Archambault got involved – almost a year into the process – he claims that form letters and public meetings don’t meet the obligation of the Corps to consult with tribes. In the final months, there is confusion over the Army Corps of Engineers jurisdiction and their completion of necessary research and inclusion. During this time Chairman Archambault also asserted that the Army Corp of Engineers “violated its own policy” by not holding an “active and respectful dialogue before decisions are made and actions are taken.””
There are more disputes in this area too, with the DAPL claiming the pipeline doesn’t go through burial grounds. Does this stand up? Unlikely. Right after the tribe submitted burial evidence to the court, the DAPL jumped 25 miles and starting ploughing a new area with bulldozers. Why? To eliminate evidence. Waterkeeper Alliance lawyer Daniel E. Estrie was outraged at Dakota Access LLC for these actions:
““Based upon reports from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s lawyers, on Friday, September 2, the tribe provided to the federal court in Washington, D.C. specific locations along the planned pipeline route where evidence of sacred burial and other culturally important sites had been identified by experts. The tribe’s intent was obviously to protect these irreplaceable sacred sites by requesting that the court consider them in connection with a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, on which a ruling is expected by this Friday. Shockingly, the day after the tribe notified the court of the specific locations of the sacred sites — and knowing the tribe would not be able to get into court over Labor Day weekend — Dakota Access LLC sent work crews with bulldozers and other heavy equipment out to the very locations that had been identified by the tribe and physically destroyed them. If these allegations against the pipeline company are true, in the 23 years that I have practiced and taught environmental law, I have never seen such an outrageous, unconscionable, and bad faith abuse of the legal process. It also plainly demonstrates that contrary to the pipeline company’s spin, it is the company, not the tribe, that is the aggressor here.””
The DAPL is certainly making a lot of dubious claims, but let’s turn away from its claims and onto its actions. The fact is that the DAPL broke the law in numerous ways in the lead up to this project. The main way they skirted the law was by engaging in segmentation (breaking up the project into lots of shorter projects in order to get more favorable legal treatment). They conspired to push the project through without doing an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) as required by law. DAPL tried to do a shortform EIS, but their proposed line is 7 miles longer than another similar project which did complete an EIS. They used a fast track method (Army Corps Permit 12) to avoid an EIS:
“The permits for the Dakota Access Pipeline project (DAPL) were granted using the Army Corps Nationwide Permit 12, a fast track permitting process that has allowed the oil and gas industry to build numerous fossil fuel pipelines across the country, even on private property, without any project specific environmental review or public input process.”
The theme of large corporations trying to avoid the EIS is a common one. This is exactly what happened when a joint consortium including the US Navy tried to force the military SuperFerry onto the island of Kauai, Hawaii, against the wishes of the local people and without an EIS. The consortium was headed by John Lehman, a member of the neocon PNAC group that agitated for 9/11 before it happened. Due to direct action and the bravery of many surfers who jumped in the water and blocked the ship from docking, the SuperFerry was never able to make it to Kauai.
The common theme is undeniable: large corporations have a habit of avoiding the responsibility of conducting a thorough environmental impact assessment regarding their plans – obviously because they don’t want scrutiny of their actions and for the public to realize just how much the corporations’ activities will affect the land, air, water, etc.
Another question worth asking is this: why was the pipeline moved from going through Bismarck (where it was originally planned) to going through Native land? Is it because Bismarck residents are whiter and have more political power, and thus a government that is less likely to cross them than a more disadvantaged and less politically powerful section of society?
Even if you believe the DAPL is in the right, how can the Government justify the police brutality dished out? The police used water cannons in already freezing conditions, which was widely and sharply denounced as inhumane. The police also used rubber bullets and conducted illegal strip searches on the protectors. In one video a woman claims some water protectors were being sprayed with chemtrails. There have also been unverified reports of cell phone jamming.
Standing Rock may have temporarily disappeared from the headlines, but the fight is not over. You can be sure that the oil company is either continuing anyway (and paying the relatively low fines) or considering doing so. There are 3 different camps at Standing Rock: Oceti Oyate (the main camp north of the Cannonball), and Rosebud and Sacredstone (on the south of the Cannonball). They have not always been in good communication with each other, so it has been hard to verify information. Ever since the Dec. 4th announcement, the elders (such as Chairman David Archambault in this video) have asked supporting people to go home because of the bitter cold and to make the camps more sustainable. The Standing Rock battle in 2017 will still be about access to correct information. Meanwhile, the people there are still in need of basic supplies such as firewood, propane and food. If you feel called to donate, the best way is via these 2 links – this for the legal fund, and this for food.
Thanks so much to Mark Morey for assistance in providing information for this article.
*****
Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com, writing on many aspects of truth and freedom, from exposing aspects of the worldwide conspiracy to suggesting solutions for how humanity can create a new system of peace and abundance.
Sources:
*http://www.activistpost.com/2016/12/dakota-38-154-years-ago-today-govt-carried-largest-mass-execution-us-history.html
*http://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/wounded-knee
*https://www.rt.com/usa/370331-over-5-miles-creek-polluted/
*http://grist.org/article/2011-09-01-the-last-keystone-pipeline-had-a-record-number-of-leaks/
*http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/americas_dangerous_pipelines/
*http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/25/north-dakota-oil-spill/3189101/
*https://thelittlelondonshow.com/2016/11/01/everything-you-need-to-know-about-standing-rock/
*https://www.desmogblog.com/2016/09/06/dakota-access-pipeline-sacred-sites-federal-judge
*https://www.kcet.org/shows/democracy-now/did-the-dakota-access-pipeline-company-deliberately-destroy-sacred-sioux-burial
*http://www.ienearth.org/open-letter-to-president-obama-halt-construction-and-repeal-permits-for-the-dakota-access-pipeline-project/
*http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/who-is-jeb-bush-really-part-2/
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRbWaTXqWkg
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z6rFRn2VTk
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv9q4ksio5I
*http://sacredstonecamp.org
*http://waterprotectorlegal.org/
*https://fundrazr.com/PleaseSupportWinonasKitchen