How Americans’ Most Respected Institution Secretly Stole at Least $90,000 From Each American Between 1998 and 2015
The US military is the most respected institution by the American people. According to investigations by the Inspector General of the US Department of Defense — investigations which were based on inspections of only portions of the Department’s financial records, not of all of them, and so the amount is incomplete — that Department had disappeared at least $21 trillion of funds from US taxpayers during the 18-year period 1998-2015. The US population, during that period, was around 300 million people; so, at a bare minimum, approximately $70,000 was being stolen (or otherwise disappeared at the US Defense Department) from each American during that time. However, $10 in 1998 was worth $14.54 in 2015; so, considering inflation, each American was robbed, during that period, of at least around $90,000, by the most respected institution. The average US household or “family” has 2.54 people. So, the average US household lost AT LEAST around $223,000, from thefts (or ‘lost money’) by the US military, during 1998-2015. (This fact has never been published before, because this calculation has never before been done; the loss to individual persons and families hasn’t previously been calculated.)
Where did this money go? Did it go to US soldiers? Maybe a tiny bit of it did, but the typical US soldier doesn’t seem to be rich. They even have an abnormally high suicide-rate. The US Government doesn’t publish any comparison of the average lifetime income of a military versus a non-military person, and obviously it would do so if soldiers made more than non-soldiers, because that fact (if it’s true) would greatly assist military recruitments. The present writer has contacted several US military recruitment offices, and each of them said they didn’t know the answer to the question as to whether the average lifetime income of a veteran is higher than the average lifetime income of a non-veteran. Wouldn’t they know it — and be publicizing the fact — if it were so? But they provide no answer to this question. Furthermore, according to Vice Admiral James Houck, speaking on 12 November 2014, “Veterans have a harder time getting jobs than other people do, and it makes me wonder why.” So: no indication seems to exist that this $21 trillion went to any typical soldiers.
Of course, generals and other brass who sit on boards of the US international corporations that sell to America’s military — corporations such as Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics — or who lobby for them in the US Congress, or who are fellows at Brookings Institution or other corporate-funded think tanks that routinely recommend to the US Congress, and in op-ed articles, new military invasions, might have gotten some of this money, but nobody knows. In fact, this lack of information is the reason why the Inspector General of the US Department of Defense has highlighted that $21T, in the first place.
During 2-6 March 2017, the Morning Consult and Politico “National Tracking Poll #170301” asked “a national sample of 1,992 registered voters” the question “Here is a list of federal departments and agencies. For each of the following, please indicate if you think the department or agency should have its annual budget increased, decreased, or kept about the same?” For “Department of Defense” (the Department that actually buys the weapons), 47% chose “Increased,” and 17% chose “Decreased.” The highest of all for “Increased” was Veterans Administration, which services the injured and disabled vets: 60% of respondents said “Increased,” and 10% said “Decreased.” By contrast, the EPA, which deals with global warming and the rest of the environment, was 33% “Increased,” and 24% “Decreased.” The FDA, which oversees the safety of foods and of drugs, was 30% “Increased,” and 22% “Decreased.” However, there’s no indication of anything like a trillion dollars a year being pilfered from the EPA or the FDA, both of which are agencies that produce additional costs to US corporations, instead of produce virtually all of the income to military US corporations (such as to the contractors to the US Department of Defense). The least popular federal departments and agencies, therefore, were the ones that large US corporations dislike the most, and love the least. Maybe the American people don’t care whether they are being robbed by the corporations whose main or only market is the US Government and the foreign governments that the US Government labels to be its ‘allies’, such as Saudi Arabia and Israel. Clearly, that’s a good type of business for a big investor to control, especially for a big investor who invests in politics as much or even more than in military corporations of any other types of corporations directly. It’s the way for a big investor to leverage political control into enormous personal profits, which might include some of the approximately trillion dollars a year that disappears annually at the Defense Department.
Incidentally: this trillion dollars a year is spent and is received, but whether it’s all in addition to the trillion-dollar-plus annual congressionally budgeted US expenditures on the military, is unknown, because nobody except the spenders and the recipients keep any track of any of this money. Conceivably, the US is actually spending two trillion dollars per year on its military. Furthermore, the entire Fiscal Year 2018 Enacted federal budget is only $1.208 trillion; so, the current annual federal deficits of around a trillion dollars that are being added each year to the existing (coincidentally) $21 trillion dollar federal debt might be from the constantly disappeared and disappearing DOD money.
The existence of this problem has been known, and increasingly documented, for many years. Back on 18 November 2013, Reuters headlined “Special Report: The Pentagon’s doctored ledgers conceal epic waste”, and reported that “At the … offices that handle accounting for the Army, Navy, Air Force and other defense agencies, fudging the accounts with false entries is standard operating procedure.” That report showed that at least a substantial portion of the waste is due to military procurements, monies that go to pay US Defense Department contractors: “Over the past 10 years, the Defense Department has signed contracts for the provision of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury, is a mystery.” It could have been pocketed by anyone along the payments-chain to the ultimate contractors, such as Boeing and United Technologies. Furthermore, the waste was okayed all the way to the top of the Pentagon: “A review of multiple reports from oversight agencies in recent years shows that the Pentagon also has systematically ignored warnings about its accounting practices.” This was wanted by the top people, not unwanted by them.
For some reason, this situation continues on for decade after decade, and yet Americans are far more worried about ‘illegal aliens’ and about ‘foreign tampering with American democracy’ than about this enormous documented theft from us — theft which is clearly being done on behalf of a small number of Americans much more than on behalf of any non-Americans. Are foreigners really the biggest threat to the American people, or are a few very wealthy Americans actually a much bigger threat to us — and far more responsible for America’s soaring wealth-inequality and spreading poverty (depriving the needs for “butter” so as to feed the military monster’s gluttons for “guns”), than any foreigners are?
Maybe America’s targets should be the people who now control what and whom America’s targets are. But that type of change can happen only in a democracy. Is the US a democracy? And, if we are, then why do pretty much the same group of mega-corporate-funded US Representatives and Senators and Governors and Presidents become re-elected, and advance in their careers, instead of being targeted for investigation and possible serious prosecution as maybe being even traitors who have tolerated these thefts? Can such people as that, really stand above the law, in a democracy? And, what about the people who control the ‘Defense’ contractors? Why are immigrants, and Iran, and Russia, and China, and North Korea, and Syria, and Yemen, and Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and Iraq, and Libya, being targeted as ‘America’s enemies’? Is it done so that there will be targets for those weapons to be used against? Is that the real business-plan here? When did any of those nations last invade America, or even threaten to invade America? Didn’t Israel do that, on 8 June 1967, and Saudi Arabia do that, on 11 September 2001? But they are our ‘allies’, and Saudi Arabia is even the largest foreign buyer of US weaponry. (And how transparent are those regimes?)
US President Barack Obama repeatedly said that America is “the one indispensable nation,” meaning that every other nation is “dispensable.” Is that, ultimately, the business-plan? Current US President Donald Trump seems to have adopted it with even more gusto than did his predecessor.
Hasn’t this business-plan been succeeding long enough, now? It’s not published (at least the finances of it aren’t); it’s never published; but all the evidence indicates that it exists. If it is ever to be investigated, then whom could be trusted to do the investigation? Is this situation actually hopeless? Do Americans accept that the actual perpetrators will never be punished, and that the perpetrators will never restore to us the trillions of dollars they’ve taken from us, to kill people in foreign lands, who never attacked ours? Is this, now, ‘patriotism’, in America?
There exists impunity at the very top in America, just as is the case in other regimes, such as in the Saudi regime, which is the American regime’s most important ally. However, the American regime is unique, because only it controls the world’s top reserve currency, the dollar. The Sauds are especially important because they perform the biggest role of any foreign power in continuing the dollar as the world’s top reserve currency. A Bloomberg News article recently explained how the US regime thus is able not only to get away with piling over a trillion dollars a year onto its Government’s debt and yet still retain its status as the supplier of the world’s chief reserve currency, but can and does even go beyond that, actually to make economic war with its currency, by means of imposing economic sanctions against any nation that it seeks to conquer, such as Iran and Russia. That Bloomberg article is titled “How the US Has Weaponized the Dollar: The currency’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ gives the nation extraordinary leverage.” (For example: what Mohammed bin Salman did to Jamal Khashoggi is what Donald Trump wants to do to Meng Wanzhou and to others who refuse to bully Iran.) A different Bloomberg News article explains how this reserve-currency system got finally instituted in 1974 by US President Richard Nixon and King Saud. It was titled “The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year US Debt Secret”.
That is the key to the current world order. It also explains how the US Government can now manage to spend, actually, around as many dollars on its military each year as all other nations in the world put together. This is the institutional reality, and it can be understood only if one acknowledges: impunity at the top (especially the head-of-state) tends to produce psychopathy at the top. This fact, this tendency toward psychopathy at the very top (and especially in the head-of-state), is the basic reality that is being displayed by today’s history — the history being made in our own time.
One can’t understand our time, without understanding this basic reality. For example: it explains why the average US household lost at least around $223,000, from thefts (or ‘lost money’) by the US military, during 1998-2015; and why the individuals who were responsible for it have never been punished, much less punished as traitors.
The world’s debt currently exceeds $86,000 per person on average, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The US, China, and Japan are the top three global borrowers, accounting for more than half of the global debt.
The world’s debt currently exceeds $86,000 per person on average, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The US, China, and Japan are the top three global borrowers, accounting for more than half of the global debt.
The IMF has calculated that their share of debt exceeds that of output. It stated that the emergence of China among the top ranking is, however, a relatively new development. Since the beginning of the millennium, China’s share in global debt surged from less than three percent to over 15 percent, underscoring the rapid credit surge in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
According to the IMF, global debt has reached a record high of $184 trillion in nominal terms. That’s the equivalent of 225 percent of the world GDP in 2017. The debt figure is $2 trillion higher than the estimated number released by the fund in October, because it includes the debts of several countries who had not previously reported their updated data.
“By including both the sovereign and private sides of borrowing for the entire world, the GDD (Global Debt Database) offers an unprecedented picture of global debt in the post-World War II era,” said the IMF. GDD is a comprehensive dataset covering public and private debt for 190 countries dating back to the 1950s.
It’s always good to have our profession honoured, albeit that the living martyrs of journalism should be accompanied by the ghost of another. But the moment I learned of Timemagazine’s person of the year front cover – the award going to Jamal Khashoggi and the other “guardians” who have “taken great risks in pursuit of greater truths” – I remembered Spielberg’s movie Bridge of Spies.
When captured Soviet agent Rudolf Abel’s defence lawyer (Tom Hanks) asks Abel (Mark Rylance) if he is worried, he replies: “Would it help?”
The right question. Would it make any difference? Is Time’s choice of its 2018 front page going to change anything? Or was it chiefly aimed at Trump? The raving lunatic in the White House was its “person of the year” in 2016, just before he took office. He said he expected the accolade again this year, and indeed he’s the 2018 runner-up. If he had known this, Khashoggi himself would surely turn in his grave – wherever the Saudis eventually reveal it to be.
But fair enough. Trump is fighting a war against truth, and it’s a noble gesture to whack a crackpot president by honouring those who oppose his kind of mendacity, even unto death. Many believe – as I suspect – that the five staff at the Annapolis newspaper would be alive today if Trump had not already accused us all of being “enemies of the people”. The “enemies” and journalists like Khashoggi, Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, are – or should be regarded as – “friends of the people”. But they are clearly regarded as enemies by Trumpites and supporters of dictator Duterte and the military masters of Myanmar.
Of course, I did look at Time’s list of names to see if Yasser Murtaja, the brave Palestinian cameraman shot dead by an Israeli sniper in April, made it to their hall of honour. He was hailed by The Nation magazine. Like Khashoggi, he gave his life for telling – or in his case, filming – the truth, the Palestinian protests at the Gaza border. But maybe he wasn’t filming a truth which Americans or Timemagazine are ready to accept, or to talk too much about without becoming “controversial”: the oppression of the people of Gaza. And maybe Murtaja was shot by the wrong people, if you see what I mean.
After all, if you drag Khashoggi’s corpse up onto the throne of martyrs, you know that it’s going to annoy Mohammed bin Salman – accused by the CIA and numerous senators of arranging Jamal’s demise – and you know that he remains a chum of Trump and that all this will upset him. Maybe. It won’t upset the Israelis, of course, although they themselves are rather keen on being chums with MbS.
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While it’s good to see that the enemies of dictators are acknowledged for their courage, it does raise a few questions about Time itself. For far too long, it supported some pretty gruesome wars around the globe. Vietnam comes to mind, in the conflict’s early years. And some pretty awful US presidents and politicians. But then we have to remember that Hitler made it to Time’sman of the year in 1938 – and Stalin made it twice, in 1939 and 1942 – and Time editors have never pretended that their yearly personalities must be evil or angelic to qualify.
Now, I suppose, they do. This year, those Time editors have clearly chosen their “persons” because they regard them as brave, good and representative of a craft which should be a profession; journalists who – alive or dead – believe (or believed) that comment is free but facts are sacred, and who are (or were) damned for believing this. Not bad. Journalists should be holding power to account, and if Time has often failed to do this, that’s no reason to get sniffy about their award for 2018.
But will it help? I don’t think so. The osmotic-parasitic relationship which still exists between power and the American media, between the US military and the defence correspondents, between the corporate world and American business editors is as powerful as ever, merely more discreet under the Trump regime.
Bring back a Democrat – Bernie – or a sane Republican, and I fear Time’s new-found courage will wither away. If Obama was still in power, and the Saudis were still America’s friends, and if they had knocked off their usual enemies rather than a guy who wrote for the Washington Post, we’d ask the same question: Jamal who?
So it appears the privatization of France isn’t going quite as smoothly as planned. As I assume you are aware, for over a month now, the gilets jaunes (or “yellow vests”), a multiplicitous, leaderless, extremely pissed off, confederation of working class persons, have been conducting a series of lively protests in cities and towns throughout the country to express their displeasure with Emmanuel Macron and his efforts to transform their society into an American-style neo-feudal dystopia. Highways have been blocked, toll booths commandeered, luxury automobiles set on fire, and shopping on the Champs-Élysées disrupted. What began as a suburban tax revolt has morphed into a bona fide working class uprising.
It took a while for “the Golden Boy of Europe” to fully appreciate what was happening. In the tradition of his predecessor, Louis XVI, Macron initially responded to the gilets jaunes by inviting a delegation of Le Monde reporters to laud his renovation of the Elysée Palace, making the occasional condescending comment, and otherwise completely ignoring them. That was back in late November. Last Saturday, he locked down central Paris, mobilized a literal army of riot cops, “preventatively arrested” hundreds of citizens, including suspected “extremist students,” and sent in the armored military vehicles.
The English-language corporate media, after doing their best not to cover these protests (and, instead, to keep the American and British publics focused on imaginary Russians), have been forced to now begin the delicate process of delegitimizing the gilets jaunes without infuriating the the entire population of France and inciting the British and American proletariats to go out and start setting cars on fire. They got off to a bit of an awkward start.
For example, this piece by Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian‘s Paris Bureau Chief, and her Twitter feed from the protests last Saturday. Somehow (probably a cock-up at headquarters), The Guardian honchos allowed Chrisafis to do some actual propaganda-free reporting (and some interviews with actual protesters) before they caught themselves and replaced her with Kim Willsher, who resumed The Guardian‘s usual neoliberal establishment-friendly narrative, which, in this case, entailed dividing the protesters into “real” gilets jaunes and “fake” gilet jaunes, and referring to the latter fictional group as “thuggish, extremist political agitators.”
By Sunday, the corporate media were insinuating that diabolical Russian Facebook bots had brainwashed the French into running amok, because who else could possibly be responsible? Certainly not the French people themselves! The French, as every American knows, are by nature a cowardly, cheese-eating people, who have never overthrown their rightful rulers, or publicly beheaded the aristocracy. No, the French were just sitting there, smoking like chimneys, and otherwise enjoying their debt-enslavement and the privatization of their social democracy, until they unsuspectingly logged onto Facebook and … BLAMMO, the Russian hackers got them!
And, see, this is the problem the corporate media (and other staunch defenders of global neoliberalism) are facing with these gilets jaunes protests. They can’t get away with simply claiming that what is happening is not a working class uprising, so they have been forced to resort to these blatant absurdities. They know they need to delegitimize the gilets jaunes as soon as possible — the movement is already starting to spread — but the “Putin-Nazi” narrative they’ve been using on Trump, Corbyn, and other “populists” is just not working.
No one believes the Russians are behind this, not even the hacks who are paid to pretend they do. And the “fascism” hysteria is also bombing.Attempts to portray the gilets jaunes as Le Pen-sponsored fascists blew up in their faces. Obviously, the far-Right are part of these protests, as they would be in any broad working class uprising, but there are far too many socialists and anarchists (and just regular pissed-off working class people) involved for the media to paint them all as “Nazis.”
Which is not to say that the corporate media and prominent public intellectuals like Bernard-Henri Lévy will not continue to hammer away at the “fascism” hysteria, and demand that the “good” and “real” gilets jaunes suspend their protests against Macron until they have completely purged their movement of “fascists,” and “extremists,” and other dangerous elements, and have splintered it into a number of smaller, antagonistic ideological factions that can be more easily neutralized by the French authorities … because that’s what establishment intellectuals do.
We can expect to hear this line of reasoning, not just from establishment intellectuals like Lévy, but also from members of the Identity Politics Left, who are determined to prevent the working classes from rising up against global neoliberalism until they have cleansed their ranks of every last vestige of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, and so on. These leftist gatekeepers have been struggling a bit to come up with a response to the gilets jaunes … a response that doesn’t make them sound like hypocrites. See, as leftists, they kind of need to express their support for a bona fide working class uprising. At the same time, they need to delegitimize it, because their primary adversaries are fascism, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and assorted other isms and phobias, not the neoliberal ruling classes.
Nothing scares the Identity Politics Left quite like an actual working class uprising. Witnessing the furious unwashed masses operating out there on their own, with no decent human restraint whatsoever, Identity Politics Leftists feel a sudden overwhelming urge to analyze, categorize, organize, sanitize, and otherwise correct and control them.
They can’t accept the fact that the actual, living, breathing working classes are messy, multiplicitous, inconsistent, and irreducible to any one ideology. Some of them are racists. Some are fascists. Others are communists, socialists, and anarchists. Many have no idea what they are, and don’t particularly care for any of these labels. This is what the actual working classes are … a big, contradictory collection of people who, in spite of all their differences, share one thing in common, that they are being screwed over by the ruling classes. I don’t know about you, but I consider myself one of them.
Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. According to The Guardian, as I am sitting here writing this, the whole of Europe is holding its breath in anticipation of the gilets jaunes’ response to Macron’s most recent attempt to appease them, this time with an extra hundred Euros a month, some minor tax concessions, and a Christmas bonus.
Something tells me it’s not going to work, but even if it does, and the gilets jaunes uprising ends, this messy, Western “populist” insurgency against global neoliberalism has clearly entered a new phase. Count on the global capitalist ruling classes to intensify their ongoing War on Dissent and their demonization of anyone opposing them (or contradicting their official narrative) as an “extremist,” a “fascist,” a “Russian agent,” and so on. I’m certainly looking forward to that, personally.
Oh… yeah, and I almost forgot, if you were wondering what you could get me for Christmas, I did some checking, and there appears to be a wide selection of yellow safety vests online for just a couple Euros.
A study from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) backs the age-old knowledge that losing weight requires reducing your caloric intake. However, the researchers say it’s not so your body doesn’t get more than it can burn – rather, it’s because eating fewer calories is what’s good for the bacteria in your gut.
The traditional view on weight loss is straightforward – physical activity burns calories you take in through food. If your caloric intake is so high that your body cannot use all of the energy from the food you eat, the surplus calories become stored as fat. Losing weight, therefore, means eating less and moving more so that no surplus is created in the long run.
The researchers from the UNIGE study say this is merely one side of the picture. They restricted the caloric intake of mice for 30 days and found that the animals had developed beige fat. Unlike white fat that stores energy, beige and brown fats burn energy and are beneficial to weight loss.
They then obtained caecum microbial communities from the calorie-restricted mice and transferred these to sterile mice that had no microbes living in their gut yet. They noted that despite eating regularly, the recipient rats also developed beige fats and appeared leaner than normal. They took this as a sign that just changing the composition of the gut microbiome can have a profound effect on the ability of animals to burn fat and lose weight.
The researchers observed many beneficial changes in the mice going through the calorie-restricted diet. Apart from having more beige fat, they also showed signs of lower blood sugar and the ability to burn more fat. They were also more resistant to cold temperatures.
Low calories create compounds for treating obesity
Gram-negative gut bacteria produce lipopolysaccharides (LPS), endotoxins linked to various diseases. Because of their potential risks, LPS automatically trigger an immune response against their source when levels get too high.
Interestingly, the bacteria in calorie-restricted mice produce fewer LPS than in normal mice. When the researchers restored the levels of LPS to normal levels, the mice lost the benefits they gained from their calorie-restricted diet.
What this means, according to the researchers, is that the immune system does more than controlling the body’s reaction to pathogens, it also regulates metabolism. By lowering the levels of LPS produced by gut bacteria, it’s possible to simulate the calorie-restricted state and reap its many health benefits.
Like pets, you need to pay extra attention to the bacteria in your gut and their needs if you want to obtain the benefits they offer. The following are steps to support a healthy gut microbiome.
Eat healthily – Fruits and vegetables, as well as whole grains, need to be a big part of your diet. These contain dietary fibers that your body cannot digest, but your gut bacteria can use as food. Try to diversify your food choices, too, as this will result in a more diverse microbiome that can protect you from various types of diseases.
Eat fermented food – Eating fermented food is one of the easiest ways to keep your probiotic populations replenished. Foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, and kimchi are full of probiotics and nutrients that support proper digestion and better overall health.
Eat foods rich in polyphenols – These are natural compounds that play several roles in the human body. For the most part, they are antioxidants that help protect the body from common diseases. Because they are not digested easily, they also serve as food for gut bacteria.
Learn about the benefits of gut bacteria in terms of weight loss at Slender.news.
The US Congress approved the Nica Act that will now go to President Donald Trump’s desk to sign.
The United States Congress (U.S.) approved Tuesday the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act (Nica Act) which seeks to sanction the government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
After the approval of Congress, U.S. President Donald Trump has a period of ten days to sign and formalize the law for the sanctions to come into effect. It’s largely expected that he will sign considering he signed an executive order in November personally sanctioning members of the Ortega’s government.
With the Nica Act the U.S. government will put restrictions on loans from international financial institutions destined for Nicaragua.
Upon passing the law, President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua rejected it as an interventionist law seeking to harm the economy of the Central American country. It was also rejected in a large part by the Nicaraguan people, who consider it to be detrimental to Nicaragua’s democracy, according to a survey by M & R Consultores.
The shock of rising interest rates isn’t just affecting the macro picture and grinding the US economy to a halt, but it is also having profound effects globally. In Canada, personal bankruptcies are on the rise as household debt lingers at, or above, all time highs and interest rates force the cost of servicing this debt even higher.
According to data from the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy Canada, insolvencies climbed to 11,641 in October, a 9.2% rise compared to the year prior. Even more alarming, month over month this rise was up a staggering and somewhat inexplicable 16%, as if something “broke”, pardon the pun, in October.
Bankruptcies increased 1.2% year-over-year and an astounding 13.5% on a month over month basis. Bankruptcy proposals increased 15.8% year-over-year and an even more dramatic 18.6% sequential increase.
hese year-over-year numbers are alarming but the sequential rate at which these proposals and bankruptcies are rising make it clear that even the smallest uptick in interest rates is having an immediate and dire effect.
In Canada, annual increases were the highest in British Columbia and Prince Edward Island but there were also double digit gains in provinces like New Brunswick.
Rates in Canada are only still at 1.75% and the Bank of Canada said as recently as last Thursday that they are targeting a neutral rate “somewhere around 2.5% and 3.5%” – a tightening process which is certain to keep the insolvency and bankruptcy trend accelerating.
Chantal Gingras, chair of the Canadian Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Professionals recently stated: “High consumer debt levels and rising interest rates have been a growing concern over the last few years and we are now starting to see this reflected in the number of insolvent Canadians filing bankruptcies or proposals.”
“Canada is in serious trouble”, we wrote back in April 2018, when we pointed out that the country’s over-reliance on its frothy, bubbly housing sector and the fact that the average Canadian household had failed to reduce its debt load would eventually come back to bite.
We look forward to the country continuing to prove us right.
“…the time has come to awaken from this nightmare of our own making and remember the truth about ourselves.” ~Graham Hancock
Such chaotic and divisive times these are. Corruption, stress and strife are chipping away at our happiness, clouding our purpose, and keeping us from re-connecting to what it means to be part of the human family.
But there is a messenger of truth in this world, found in the Amazonian shamanic plant medicine ayahuasca. It has a unique way of challenging those who have the courage to look deep within and attempt reconcile the real you with the person whom you pretend to be. In this is the power to transform into your greatest self, and when the individual awakens and transforms, then we can have hope for the world.
Author and researcher Graham Hancock has been a leader in the global movement to expand consciousness, and after taking a three year break from drinking ayahuasca due to unrelated health concerns, he recently returned to ceremony, leaving us with a hopeful note about the condition of the human race on planet earth.
Here he reflects on the incredible transformative power of ayahuasca, pointing out that it has the profound capacity to remind us of who we really are.
I have witnessed the almost miraculous effects that Ayahuasca has had on many members of our group during this week. There have been such profound realisations, such life-changing and life-affirming experiences, such beauty, such joy and such love. It is as though my closest family has suddenly expanded to encompass this wonderful new soul family that I have been integrated with through the enchantment of the brew and the magic of the ceremonies. There are people here from many different walks of life and from many different nations and ethnicities and what we have all found is the common ground that unites us.
Would it could be so, always, for the entire human family! There is so much division in the world today, so much hatred, so much fear, so much suspicion and so much greed that our species seems close to tearing itself apart and rendering the Earth uninhabitable in the process.
What fools we are to allow such a state of affairs to persist, and to allow politicians and religious mis-leaders – for their own short-term gain — to divide us from one another in order to rule us.
Brothers and sisters, wherever we are, no matter on which land or under which political or religious system chance brought us to be born, the time has come to awaken from this nightmare of our own making and remember the truth about ourselves — that we are all members of one family, no matter how widely scattered, that none of us have the slightest justification to claim superiority over any other, and that we all share the same hopes, fears, courage, fragility and capacity for love.
United we stand. It is just plain madness to continue to allow ourselves to be divided and defined by the artificial barriers of nation, race or creed. We must remember our common humanity, remember that we are one family, and put that realisation first before all other considerations if our species is to survive the challenges of the coming years and return once again to being good stewards of this precious garden of a planet.
Vic Bishop is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com. He is an observer of people, animals, nature, and he loves to ponder the connection and relationship between them all. A believer in always striving to becoming self-sufficient and free from the matrix, please track him down on Facebook.
(Natural News) Following a vegetarian or (the stricter) vegan lifestyle is rewarding, but it also comes with some challenges. Foregoing meat means you lose out on a major source of protein, but the list below includes other Paleo meat-free sources of this crucial nutrient.
The Paleo diet and protein
The Paleo diet mimics the diet of early humans, and paired with a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, this means being more careful with the kind of food you consume on a daily basis.
The human body requires protein, but primitive humans only consumed only about 20 percent protein in their total diet. Studies show that to age gracefully, you only need to consume at least 30 to 40 grams of protein to promote muscle protein synthesis rates in older adults post-exercise.
To stay healthy, you need to manage your protein consumption, especially since undigested protein is linked with conditions like kidney disease. As a vegan, you need to ensure that your diet has a lot of variety, instead of too much of a single nutrient like protein. Getting protein from other sources like plants will also provide you with more health benefits, like a good source of fiber and nutrients.
Meat-free sources of protein
Take note that other meat-free protein sources to avoid may include soy and most commercial whey. Unfermented soy may cause thyroid problems while most commercial whey is high-heated, which denatures the protein. The majority of commercial whey also has artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose, which are linked to diabetes and obesity. If you want to eat whey, choose 100 percent grass-fed and non-denatured whey.
Other than the exceptions above, here are some vegan-friendly protein sources.
Acai berry
Acai berries, which come from the Amazon River Delta, contain various amino acids and fatty acids. Acai berries have a similar amino acid and protein profile as an egg.
Chlorella
Chlorella is a green algae that’s full of protein. With a 62 percent amino acid content, chlorella is considered “one of the most complete foods on the planet.” It contains all essential amino acids and it’s a complete protein.
Chlorella also has:
Beta-carotene (vitamin A)
Biotin
Chlorophyll
Choline
DNA
Enzymes
Folic acid
Inositol
Minerals
Niacin
Pantothenic acid
RNA
Vitamins B1, B2, B6, B12, C, E, and K
Chlorella strengthens the immune system. It can also alkalize and heal the intestinal lining, improve digestion, and eliminate heavy metals and toxins from the body.
Chlorella also enhances health and muscle growth. This superfood can also detoxify the liver, increase the concentration of hemoglobin in red blood cells (for iron and oxygen), and reduce cholesterol. For optimum results, take chlorella on an empty stomach at least 20 minutes before you eat other foods.
Hemp seeds
Hemp seeds have 30 grams of protein per tablespoon. A popular source of protein in the health world, hemp seeds are rich in various minerals. It also contains all nine essential amino acids along with omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.
Mesquite flour/meal/powder
Mesquite flour is a smoky and sweet powder that is traditionally used as a staple food by desert dwellers. Full of protein, mesquite flour is also rich in calcium, iron, magnesium, potassium, and zinc. Additionally, it is a rich source of the amino acid lysine.
Nutritional yeast is a deactivated type of yeast that’s savory and full of all the essential amino acids. It also has nucleic acid that’s crucial for proper cell development.
This type of yeast is full of B vitamins. Nutritional yeast is also rich in minerals and protein, and it can help the liver break down fats. It can even help clear up acne and other skin problems.
Nutritional yeast is full of glutathione that can boost immune response and detoxification. Overall, nutritional yeast has powerful immune-enhancing properties and it can help you stay energized. Add several tablespoons of nutritional yeast in a glass of water, a smoothie, or on a salad every day.
Sea vegetables
The majority of seaweed is made up of at least 50 percent protein. Pound-for-pound, seaweed is just as good as animal proteins. Sea greens also contain more minerals than other foods. They’re also full of iodine, which is crucial for a healthy thyroid.
Sea vegetables rich in protein include arame (a Japanese kind of seaweed with a mild, sweet taste when cooked), dulse, kelp, kombu, nori, and wakame. Powdered kelp can be added to salads, smoothies, or soups.
Tocotrienols/rice bran solubles
Tocotrienols or rice bran solubles are a creamy powder that can be used to make a superfood ice cream. Tocotrienols are rich in vitamin E.
If you’re a vegan or a vegetarian, follow a Paleo diet to increase your intake of whole foods and nutritional sources of protein.
You can learn more about alternative food options for vegans and vegetarians by visiting Veggie.news.
A new major study has found a link between childhood infections, both serious and mild, and an increased risk of mental health disorders in later life.
A new major study has found a link between childhood infections, both serious and mild, and an increased risk of mental health disorders in later life.
Using health and medical data from over 1 million people born in Denmark between 1995 and 2012, the researchers found that childhood infections that required hospitalization were associated with a roughly 84 percent increased risk of mental disorder diagnosis and a 42 percent increased risk of using psychotropic drugs in the treatment thereof.
Less severe infections that were treated with medication like antibiotics were associated with a 40 and 22 percent risk respectively. The findings are published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
“The surprising finding was that the infections in general – and in particular, the less severe infections, those that were treated with anti-infective agents – increased the risk for the majority of mental disorders,” lead author Dr Ole Köhler-Forsberg, a neuroscientist and doctoral fellow at Aarhus University in Denmark, told CNN.
The increased risk relates to the onset of mental health issues ranging from spectrum disorders like schizophrenia and autism, to personality and behavioral disorders like OCD and ADD.
“For certain mental disorders, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, the risk increase was particularly high, reaching a staggering 8-fold risk increase in teenagers,” the researchers wrote in an accompanying editorial.
Importantly though, the team emphasized that correlation does not equal causation and that substantial additional research is required given the number of variables involved, including genetics and socioeconomic factors, that were beyond the scope of their research.
“We can not conclude any causality. So we can not say this infection led to this mental disorder. So we can only speculate,” Köhler-Forsberg said. “The overall take-home message is that there’s an intimate connection between the body, the immune system, infections, inflammation and the brain.”
The study also doesn’t account for potential misdiagnoses and misreporting in the medical data. The researchers believe theirs is the first study that indicates any treated infection is associated with such a wide range of both childhood and adolescent mental disorders.
“The Lobby,” the four-part Al-Jazeera documentary that was blocked under heavy Israeli pressure shortly before its release, has been leaked online by the Chicago-based website Electronic Intifada, the French website Orient XXI and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. The series is an inside look over five months by an undercover reporter, armed with a hidden camera, […]
“The Lobby,” the four-part Al-Jazeera documentary that was blocked under heavy Israeli pressure shortly before its release, has been leaked online by the Chicago-based website Electronic Intifada, the French website Orient XXI and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.
The series is an inside look over five months by an undercover reporter, armed with a hidden camera, at how the government and intelligence agencies of Israel work with U.S. domestic Jewish groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), The Israel Project and StandWithUs to spy on, smear and attack critics, especially American university students who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. It shows how the Israel lobby uses huge cash donations, often far above the U.S. legal limit, and flies hundreds of members of Congress to Israel for lavish and unpaid vacations at Israeli seaside resorts, bribing the American lawmakers to do Israel’s bidding, including providing military aid such as the $38 billion (over 10 years) that was approved by Congress in 2016. It uncovers Israel’s sleazy character assassination of academics, activists and journalists, its well-funded fake grassroots activism, its manipulation of press coverage, and its ham-fisted attempts to destroy marriages, personal relationships and careers. The film highlights the efforts to discredit liberal Jews and Jewish organizations as tools of radical jihadists, referring, for example, to Jewish Voice for Peace as “Jewish Voice for Hamas” and claiming that many members of the organization are not actually Jewish. Israel recruits black South Africans into an Israeli front group called Stop Stealing My Apartheid, in a desperate effort to counter the reality of the apartheid state that Israel has constructed. The series documents Israel’s repeated and multifaceted interference in the internal affairs of the United States, including elections; efforts to discredit progressive groups such as Black Lives Matter that express sympathy for the Palestinians; and routine employment of Americans to spy on other Americans. Israel’s behavior is unethical and perhaps illegal. But don’t expect anyone in the establishment or either of the two ruling political parties to do anything about it. It is abundantly clear by the end of the series that they have been intimidated, discredited or bought off.
“Imagine if China was doing this, if Iran was doing this, if Russia was doing this?” Ali Abunimah, the author of “The Battle for Justice in Palestine” and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, says in the film. “There would be uproar. You would have Congress going off to them. You would have hearings.”
Those of us who denounce and expose the Israeli crimes committed against Palestinians are intimately familiar with the sordid and nefarious tactics of the Israel lobby. The power of the film series is that in dealing with the reporter—a young Oxford postgraduate, James Anthony Kleinfeld, who goes by the name Tony in the film and poses as a pro-Israel student—major figures within the Israel lobby candidly explain and expose their massive covert campaign in the United States. There is no plausible deniability. And this is why Israel worked so hard to stop the film from being broadcast.
Clayton Swisher, who directed the series, wrote in the liberal Jewish newspaper The Forward that leaders from the Israel lobby met with the state of Qatar’s registered agent and lobbyist, a former aide to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz named Nick Muzin, to “see if he could use his ties with the Qataris to stop the airing.” Qatar funds Al-Jazeera. Muzin told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “he was discussing the issue with the Qataris and didn’t think the film would broadcast in the near future.” An anonymous source told Haaretz that “the Qatari emir himself helped make the decision” to spike the film.
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates severed ties with Qatar in June 2017 and imposed a land, sea and air blockade on the Persian Gulf state. They accuse Doha of supporting terrorism and radical Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. The four states have issued a list of demands for re-establishing ties that include Qatar’s shutting down Al-Jazeera, along with severing relations with Iran. Qatar has appealed to the United States to intercede and has, as part of this effort, reached out to the powerful Israel lobby in the United States for support. American Jewish leaders, including the former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, have met with the Qatari emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and have discussed with him what they describe as the network’s “anti-Semitism.” It is widely believed the series was sacrificed by Qatar in an effort to placate the Israel lobby and get its support for an end to the sanctions, although the blockade remains in force.
Episode 1
The series exposes how Israeli intelligence services monitor American critics of Israel and feeds real-time information about them to American Jewish organizations.
“We are for example in the process of creating a comprehensive picture of the campuses,” Brig. Gen. Sima Vaknin-Gil, director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, tells a gathering of pro-Israel activists in the film. “If you want to defeat a phenomenon you must have the upper hand in terms of information and knowledge.”
The Israeli government operates Israel Cyber Shield, a civil intelligence unit that collects and analyzes BDS activities and coordinates attacks against the BDS movement.
“We are giving them data—for example, one day Sima’s deputy is sending me a photo. Just a photo on Whatsapp,” Sagi Balasha, who was CEO of the Israeli-American Council from 2011 to 2015, says when speaking on an Israeli-American Council panel. “It’s written ‘Boycott Israel’ on the billboard.”
He shows a picture of a roadside billboard that reads: “BOYCOTT ISRAEL UNTIL PALESTINIANS HAVE EQUAL RIGHTS. StopFundingApartheid.org.”
“In a few hours our systems and analysts could find the exact organization, people, and even their names, and where they live,” says Balasha, who now works with cyber-intelligence organizations that target BDS activists. “We gave it back to the ministry, and I have no idea what they did with this. But the fact is, three days later there were no billboards.”
“We use all sorts of technology,” Jacob Baime, the executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, says in the film. “We use corporate-level, enterprise-grade social media intelligence software. Almost all of this happens on social media, so we have custom algorithms and formulae that acquire this stuff immediately.”
“Generally, within about 30 seconds or less of one of these things popping up on campus, whether it’s a Facebook event, whether it’s the right kind of mention on Twitter, the system picks it up,” says Baime. “It goes into a queue and alerts our researchers and they evaluate it. They tag it, and if it rises to a certain level, we issue early-warning alerts to our partners.”
Those recruited by the Israel lobby, including the undercover Al-Jazeera reporter in the documentary, are sent to training sessions such as Fuel the Truth. The film records a session in which trainees watch a video of Palestinian children as the narrator says, “Children are taught in UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees] Palestinian schools to hate Jews.” The trainees are told that scenes of devastation in Gaza are, in fact, misrepresented images disseminated by critics from Syria or Iraq. They are instructed in role-playing workshops how to brand all those who criticize Israeli policies as anti-Semites, members of a hate group or self-hating Jews.
The reporter is placed in the so-called war room run by The Israel Project, known as TIP, which monitors American media for stories on Israel and the Palestinians. The goal is “neutralizing undesired narratives.”
“We develop relationships … ,” David Hazony, the managing director of The Israel Project, says about how to influence journalists. “A lot of alcohol to get them to trust us. We’re basically messaging on the following—BDS is essentially a kind of a hate group targeting Israel. They’re anti-peace. We try not to even use the terms because it builds their brand. We just refer to boycotters. The goal is to actually make things happen. And to figure out what are the means of communication to do that.”
The BDS movement, which I support, was formed in 2005. It is an attempt by Palestinian civil rights groups to build a nonviolent international movement to boycott Israel, divest from Israeli companies and eventually impose sanctions—as was done against apartheid South Africa—until basic Palestinian rights under international law are achieved. While the movement has not gained traction financially in the United States, with most colleges and universities refusing to divest, it has been very effective at illuminating the injustices committed against Palestinians by Israel and severely eroded Israel’s credibility and support in the U.S. This ongoing shift in public opinion terrifies Israel, which has poured tremendous resources into crushing the BDS movement.
“Government ministers attacked me in person,” Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS movement, says in the film. “One of them threatening BDS leaders with targeted civil assassination. Others threatened to revoke my permanent residency [in Israel], along other threats.”
“We suffered from intense denial-of-service attacks, hacking attacks on our website,” Barghouti says. “Israel decided to go on cyber warfare against BDS. Publicly, they said, ‘We shall spy on BDS individuals and networks, especially in the West.’ We have not heard a peep from any Western government complaining that Israel is admitting that it will spy on your citizens. Imagine Iran saying it will spy on British or American citizens. Just imagine what could happen.”
“So, like nobody really knows what we’re doing,” says Julia Reifkind, who was director of community affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. “But mainly it’s been a lot of research, like monitoring BDS things and reporting it back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Like making sure everyone knows what’s going on. They need a lot of research done and stuff like that. When they talk about it in the Knesset, we’ve usually contributed to what the background information is. I’m not going to campuses. It’s more about connecting organizations and I guess campuses, providing resources and strategy if students need it.”
“I write a report and give it to my boss, who translates it,” Reifkind says. “It’s really weird. We don’t talk to them on the phone or email. There’s a special server that’s really secure that I don’t have access to because I’m an American. You have to have clearance to access the server. It’s called Cables. It’s not even the same [word translated] in Hebrew, it’s like literally ‘Cables.’ I’ve seen it. It looks really bizarre. So, I write reports that my boss translates into the cables and sends them. Then they’ll send something back. Then he’ll translate it and tell me what I need to do.”
“Is the Israeli Embassy trying to leverage faculty?” Tony, the undercover reporter, asks her.
“Yeah,” she says. “We are working with several faculty advocacy groups that kind of train faculty, and so we are helping them a little bit with funding, connections, bringing them to speak, having them to speak to diplomats and people at the MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] that need this information. So, I want to be that resource to show students what we’re doing, to see what you’re doing, here’s some information if you need anything at all. We can connect you. Just kind of be that person there for you.”
Reifkind was president of the pro-Israel group at the University of California at Davis and worked closely with the Israel lobby to attempt to crush the BDS movement on campus, especially after Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) brought a divestment motion to the student senate.
“We knew they were going to win because the entire student senate was all pro-BDS,” she says. “They ran for that purpose and won for that purpose. We have been pushed out of student government for months.”
Reifkind and a few supporters went to the senate meeting where the vote was scheduled.
“We have been ignored and disrespected year after year, but we have never been silenced,” she tells the student gathering. “We are a beacon of peace and inclusion on a campus plagued by anti-Semitism.”
“The intolerance that spawned this [divestment] resolution is the same kind of intolerance that spawned anti-Semitic movements throughout history,” she shouts.
She and her handful of supporters walk out, an action they had agreed on in advance and then carefully filmed.
The passing of the BDS motion at UC Davis set the gears of the Israel lobby and the Israeli government in motion.
“That day all of us released like 50 op-eds in major news sources so that when people made a hashtag, like a whole thing trending, so when people opened their Facebooks it wouldn’t be them celebrating their victory,” Reifkind says in the film. “It would be us sharing our stories. Once it blew up, then random people like The Huffington Post contacted me and was like, “Do you have anything to say?” And I was like, ‘Conveniently, I wrote an op-ed two weeks ago just in case.’ ”
Israel and its surrogates in the United States used their considerable resources to carry out vicious and anonymous personal attacks against the campus BDS activists at UC Davis, calling them “terrorists” and “Hamas sympathizers” who support Sharia on campus. The lobby also skillfully framed the narrative in the national media, claiming falsely that the pro-Israel students were forced out of the meeting room.
“Pro-Israel students were taunted by pro-Hamas students after an anti-Israel vote passed on campus,” says an announcer on Fox News as a caption underneath video reads, “RUNNING RAMPANT: UC Davis Plagued by Anti-Semitic Feelings.” “And right after the vote passed, a student senator posted this on Facebook, ‘Hamas and Sharia law have taken over UC Davis. Brb [be right back] crying over the resilience.’ ”
Shortly after the vote, Jewish students said they found two swastikas painted on their fraternity house in Davis. The media, tipped off, was at the fraternity house almost immediately. The BDS activists were blamed for the graffiti.
The film shows a CBS 13 news clip.
Television reporter: “Pro-Israel students said they feared recent events would lead to this.”
UC Davis male student: “This has been sort of a bad week to be Jewish on campus.”
Television reporter: “After years of heated meetings, the student body passed a resolution Thursday, urging UC Davis to end any affiliation with companies that support Israel.”
Episode 2
Another UC Davis male student, speaking in front of one of the swastikas: “So, this is not out of the blue. We’re pretty sure this is directly related.”
“StandWithUs helped us a little bit in terms of actual research on the speech,” Reifkind says in referring to her comments before the student senate. “They gave us some legal research type stuff. I’m always biased and want to work with AIPAC. They kind of helped, more like mold support. And David Projecthelped us a little bit. It was more help like gaining contacts in the media world. I guess we needed money to pay for someone to film the speech. We had a Davis Faculty for Israel group, and they were hugely helpful to us. Some of them were retired lawyers, they’d write legal documents for us. They knew the administration. They were tenured. They had pull.”
“After looking back on everything, I feel a little creepy because of what happened after the vote,” says Marcelle Obeid, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Davis. “People who were affiliated with the [pro-Palestinian] group were just smeared and had to deal with these very personal crises—the world calling us terrorists, the world thinking that we were this spiteful hate group. It’s pretty unequivocal how organized they were, how brutal and ruthless that narrative was, and how it affected us.”
The Electronic Intifada’s Abunimah says,
“There’s an intensive effort by Israel and pro-Israel groups to get governments, universities, legislative bodies to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticism of Israel and its state ideology, Zionism.”
“They have created this perverse definition of anti-Semitism where calling for everyone in Palestine and Israel to have equal rights is somehow an attack on Jews,” he says. “They’re trying to get this pushed into official definitions. This has been a key goal of the Brandeis Center so they can go after people who are advocating for equality and bring them up on charges that they’re actually anti-Semitic bigots.”
“You have to show that they’re racist hate groups, that they are using intimidation to get funded, and to consistently portray them that way.”
But despite its campaign, Israel is acutely aware that it is losing the public relations war, especially among the young.
“The polling isn’t good,” David Brog, executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, which combats BDS on American campuses, says in the film. “And all of you probably know that if you look at the polls, the younger you get on the demographic scales, the lower support for Israel is. … It seems to be achieving its goals. I think it threatens future American support for Israel. Younger people are leaving college less sympathetic to Israel than when they entered.”
And many of these young people are Jewish, finding their identity and meaning in values that Israel refuses to uphold.
“The work that Jewish Voice for Peace does is grounded in Jewish tradition, the most basic Jewish and human values that every single person has inherent worth and dignity and should be treated with respect,” Rabbi Joseph Berman says in the film. “We then see what’s happening to Palestinians, the occupation, the displacement, the inequality, and say we need to end these things.”
But while Israel may be losing in the court of public opinion, it tightly embraces elected officials in the United States, where legalized bribery is institutionalized.
“Does the war of ideas matter?” asks Eric Gallagher, who was a director at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I know that getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what AIPAC just did. That’s what I’m proud to have been a part of for so long. My job was basically to convince students that participating in the war of ideas on campuses is actually a distraction. You can hold up signs and have rallies on campus, but the Congress gets $3.1 billion a year for Israel. Everything AIPAC does is focused on influencing Congress. Congress is where you have leverage. So, you can’t influence the president of the United States directly, but the Congress can.”
“What the lobby is all about is to make sure that Israel gets special treatment from the United States, forever,” John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” says in the film.
Mearsheimer says,
“What AIPAC does is it makes sure that money is funneled your way if you’re seen as pro-Israel, and it will go to significant lengths to make sure that you stay in office if you continue to be staunchly pro-Israel.”
“What happens is Jeff [Talpins] meets with congressmen in the backroom, tells them exactly what his goals are,” David Ochs, founder of HaLev, says of the pro-Israeli hedge fund manager Jeff Talpins and how politicians receive sums of as much as $200,000 from the Israel lobby. “And by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million. Basically, they hand an envelope with 20 credit cards and say, ‘You can swipe each of these credit card for $1,000 each.’ ”
“If you wander off the reservation and become critical of Israel, you not only will not get money, AIPAC will go to great lengths to find someone who will run against you,” Mearsheimer says. “And support that person very generously. The end result is you’re likely to lose your seat in Congress.”
“They have questionnaires,” recalls former U.S. Rep. Jim Moran, a Democrat from northern Virginia who was in the House from 1991 to 2015. Moran, who opposed the 2002 congressional resolution to invade Iraq, became a target for the Israel lobby, which pushed hard for the war. “Anyone running for Congress is required [by the lobby] to fill out a questionnaire. And they [AIPAC] evaluate the depth of your commitment to Israel on the basis of [those questions]. And then you have an interview with local people. If you get AIPAC support, then more often than not you’re going to win.”
“There was a conservative rabbi in my district who was assigned to me, I assume, by AIPAC,” Moran says. “He warned me that if I voiced my views about the Israeli lobby that my career would be over, and implied that it would be done through the Post. Sure enough, The Washington Post editorialized brutally. Everyone ganged up.”
There is a screen shot of a Washington Post headline: “Sorry, Mr. Moran, You’re Not Fit For Public Office.”
Character assassination is a common tactic used by the Israel lobby against its critics. Bill Mullen, a professor of American studies at Purdue University, has been a campaigner for the BDS movement for years. His wife was sent a link to a website containing a letter addressed to her.
“It was a Sunday,” he says. “I was in the kitchen. My partner was in the living room with my daughter. Came in with her laptop and said, ‘You’ve got to see this.’ This letter, reported to be by a former student, said she had been sexually harassed by me. She had found other students at Purdue who have had the same experience. And she was writing this letter to tell their story. Within a very short time, within about 48 hours, we were able to establish that these multiple sites that were attacking me had been taken out [created] almost at the same time. And that they were clearly the work of the same people. One of the accounts said, in the process of supposedly putting my hand on her, I invited her to a Palestine organizational meeting. Well, I thought, ‘You’re sort of putting your cards on the table there,’ whoever you are.”
“With the anti-Israel people, what we found has been most effective, in the last year, you do the opposition research,” says Baime, the Israel on Campus Coalition official. “Put up an anonymous website. Then put up targeted Facebook ads. Every few hours you drip out a new piece of opposition research, it’s psychological warfare. It drives them crazy. They either shut down or they spend time investigating it and responding to it, which is time they can’t spend attacking Israel. That’s incredibly effective.”
“It was really an attempt, by people who didn’t know us, ‘Maybe I can destroy this marriage at the very least,’ ” Purdue’s Mullen says. “ ‘Maybe I can cause them horrendous, personal suffering.’ The same letter purporting to me harassment, sent to my wife, used the name of our daughter. I think that was the worst moment. We thought, ‘These people will do anything. They’re capable of doing anything.’ ”
Perhaps the film’s greatest investigative coup is the unwitting disclosure by Eric Gallagher at The Israel Project that the hedge fund manager Adam Milstein is “the guy who funds” the anonymous Canary Mission website. The website provides the names, backgrounds and photos of students, professors, invited speakers and organizations that are allegedly tied to terrorism and anti-Semitism through their support for Palestinian rights.
“There’s a guy named who you might want to meet,” Gallagher says to Tony about Adam Milstein. “He’s a convicted felon. That’s a bad way to describe him. He’s a real estate mogul. When I was working with him at AIPAC, I was literally emailing back and forth with him while he was in jail. He’s loaded. He’s close to half a billion dollars.”
Milstein was convicted of tax evasion and sent to prison for three months in 2009. The Israeli-American Council, which he leads, funds numerous pro-Israel organizations: Milstein also sits on the boards of AIPAC, StandWithUs and the Israel on Campus Coalition. He is close to billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the wealthiest donor to the pro-Israel lobby and the largest donor to the Trump campaign.
The promotional video for the Canary Mission, played in the film, says: “A few years later, these individuals are applying for jobs in your companies … ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”
“It was shattering to me because I had to look for a job, I had to start my life,” Obeid from UC Davis says. “And now I had this website smearing my name before I even got a chance to make a name for myself.”
“Somebody did contact my employer and asked for me to be fired based on my pro-Palestine activism,” says Summer Award, who campaigned at the University of Tennessee for Palestinian equal rights. “They said if they continued to employ me, their values are anti-Semitic. It can be really scary at first. I was mostly harassed via Twitter. They were tweeting me every two or three days. They take screen shots, even way back to my Facebook pictures that don’t even look like me anymore. Just digging and digging through my online presence.”
Israel’s moral bankruptcy is powerfully exposed in one of the last scenes in the film. Tony joins an “astroturf” protest organized by the Hoover Institution. Those in the protest have been paid to travel on a bus to George Mason University to disrupt a conference of Students for Justice in Palestine. They are coached by Lerman Mazar, the StandWithUs director of legal affairs, in what to shout.
“If you do happen to speak with any reporters just stay on message,” Mazar tells her lackluster protesters. “And what is the message? SJP is a ….”
“Hate group,” the protesters answer feebly.
*
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Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister.
Can I be the only one – apart from his own sycophants – to find the sight of America’s finest Republicans and Democrats condemning the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia for murdering Jamal Khashoggi a bit sickening? “Crazy”. “Dangerous”. A “wrecking ball”. A “smoking saw”. These guys are angry. CIA director Gina Haspel, who was happy to sign off on the torture of her Muslim captives in a secret American prison in Thailand, obviously knew what she was talking about when she testified about Mohammed bin Salman and the agony of Jamal Khashoggi.
US government leaks suggest that Haspel knew all about the shrieks of pain, the suffering of Arab men who believed they were drowning, the desperate pleading for life from America’s victims in these sanctuaries of torment in and after 2002. After all, the desperate screams of a man who believes he is drowning and the desperate screams of a man who believes he is suffocating can’t be very different. Except, of course, that the CIA’s victims lived to be tortured another day – indeed several more days – while Jamal Khashoggi’s asphyxiation was intended to end his life. Which it did.
A generation ago, the CIA’s “Operation Phoenix” torture and assassination programme in Vietnam went way beyond the imaginations of the Saudi intelligence service. In spook language, Khashoggi was merely “terminated with maximum prejudice”. If the CIA could sign off on mass murder in Vietnam, why shouldn’t an Arab dictator do the same on a far smaller scale? True, I can’t imagine the Americans went in for bone saws. Testimony suggests that mass rape followed by mass torture did for their enemies in Vietnam. Why play music through the earphones of the murderers?
But still it goes on. Here’s Democrat senator Bob Menendez this week. The US, he told us, must “send a clear and unequivocal message that such actions are not acceptable on the world’s stage”. The “action”, of course, is the murder of Khashoggi. And this from a man who constantly defended Israel after its slaughter of the innocents in Gaza.
So what on earth is going on here? Perhaps the “world’s stage” of which Menendez spoke was the White House – an appropriate phrase, when you come to think about it – where the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia has been no stranger. Yet when at least one recent US presidential incumbent of that high office can be considered guilty of war crimes – in Iraq – and the deaths of tens of thousands of Arabs, how come American senators are huffing and puffing about just one man, Mohammed bin Salman, who (for a moment, let us set aside the Yemen war) is only being accused of ordering the murder and dismemberment of one single Arab?
After all, world leaders – and US presidents themselves – have always had rather a soft spot for mass murderers and those who should face war crimes indictments. Trump has infamously met Kim Jong-un and invited him to the White House. We are all waiting for Rodrigo Duterte to take up his own invitation.
Obama lavished hospitality at the White House on a host of bloody autocrats – from Gambia, Burkina Faso and Cameroon – before we even recall Suharto, whose death squads killed up to half a million people; and Hosni Mubarak, whose secret police sometimes raped their prisoners and who sanctioned the hanging of hundreds of Islamists without proper trials, and his ultimate successor, Field Marshal-President al-Sisi, who has around 60,000 political prisoners locked up in Egypt and whose cops appear to have tortured a young Italian student to death. But Giulio Regeni wasn’t murdered in an Egyptian consulate. This list does not even include Ariel Sharon, who as Israeli defence minister was accused by an Israeli inquiry of personal responsibility for the massacre of 1,700 Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Chatila camps in Beirut in 1982.
So what is this “clear and unequivocal message” that senator Menendez is rambling on about? The message has been clear and unequivocal for decades. The US “national interest” always trumps (in both senses) morality or international crime. Why else did the United States support Saddam Hussein in his attempt to destroy Iran and his use of chemical warfare against Iran? Why else did Donald Rumsfeld plead with Saddam in December 1993 to allow the reopening of the US embassy in Baghdad when the Iraqi dictator (a “strongman” at the time, of course) had already used mustard gas against his opponents? By the time Rumsfeld arrived for his meeting, more than 3,000 victims had fallen amid Iraqi gas clouds. The figure would reach at least 50,000 dead. Which is, in mathematical terms, Jamal Khashoggi times 50,000.
Yet we are supposed to recoil with shock and horror when Haspel – who might herself have a few admissions to make to senators on other matters – suggests that America’s latest favourite Middle Eastern tyrant knew about the forthcoming murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Does Menendez think that Saddam hadn’t signed the death sentences of thousands of Iraqi men and women – which, as we know from his later “trial”, he did – before meeting Rumsfeld? Or that Duterte, who has compared himself to Hitler, doesn’t sign off on the killing of his murdered drug “suspects”? Or that Suharto had absolutely nothing to do with half a million murders in Indonesia?
It’s instructive, indeed, that the thousands of innocents killed in the Yemen war, an offensive undertaken by Mohammed bin Salman himself with logistical support from the US and UK – and it doesn’t need Haspel to tell us this – hasn’t exactly left US senators shocked. Just another bunch of Arabs killing each other, I suppose. Starvation didn’t get mentioned by the senators emerging from Haspel’s closed hearing. Yet the senators know all about the mosque bombings, wedding party bombings, hospital bombings and school bombings in Yemen. Why no tears for these innocents? Or is that a bit difficult when the US military – on every occasion by accident, of course – has bombed mosques, wedding parties, hospitals and schools in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria?
No, the shock and horror and the need for full disclosure about the Saudis is primarily about Trump, and the need to tie him in to the cruel murder of a Washington Post journalist and US resident whose gruesome demise has been blamed by the American president upon a “vicious world”.
But there is something more than this, the appalling fact – albeit only a folk memory, perhaps, for many with scarcely any institutional memory at all – that 15 of those 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, that Osama bin Laden was a Saudi, that George W Bush secretly flew bin Laden family members out of the US after 9/11, that the Saudis themselves are heir to a blighted, rural, cruel version of Sunni Islam – based on the pernicious teachings of the 18th century Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab – which has inspired the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Isis and all the other killer cults whom we have proclaimed to be the West’s Enemy No 1.
Nailing Mohammed Bin Salman to a crucifix – a method of execution favoured by the Wahhabis – is an easy kill for US senators, of course. You hit the president and smash those unhappy historical details all in one fell swoop.
But don’t bank on it. Oil and arms are a potent mix. Old Abd al-Wahhab’s home is protected in a new tourist haunt in the suburbs of Riyadh. Come to think of it, the national mosque of Qatar – hostile to rapacious Saudi Arabia but another recipient of US weapons and a supporter of Islamist forces in Syria and Iraq – has a capacity for 30,000 souls, was built only seven years ago and is named after Abd al-Wahhab himself.
This is the dangerous world in which America and its allies now tread, disdainful of the thousands of Muslims who perish under our bombs and missiles and mortars – proxy-delivered by those we should distrust – ignorant of the religious currents which rumble on beneath our feet and beneath the House of Saud. Even the virtually useless information Haspel learned in the CIA’s “black centres” could have told senators this. If they had bothered to ask.
The 2001 US-led military invasion in Afghanistan has caused incalculable suffering, civilian casualties, with record levels of territory retaken by a growing Taliban insurgency.
What Could NATO States Do With $1.07 Trillion Spent on Afghan War Since 2001?
The 2001 US-led military invasion in Afghanistan has caused incalculable suffering, civilian casualties, with record levels of territory retaken by a growing Taliban insurgency.
A damning 2016 report from the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) also revealed that US expenses on the War in Afghanistan were astronomically high, opaque and endless due to a mixture of corruption and substandard contracting work opening a black hole in NATO budgets.
As of 26 November 2018, the NATO Afghan National Army (ANA) Trust Fund estimated the defence bloc’s total contributions to surpass $2.5 billion alone, despite the Taliban controlling over 50 percent of Afghanistan.
17 years later, the US has spent $1.07 trillion, including a total initial cost of $773 and $243 Department of Defence (DoD0 increase, among others. People are left scratching their heads as Afghan High Peace Council and Taliban forces prepare to strike peace accords in Moscow, not Washington.
Analysts at Sputnik have crunched a few numbers to determine how $1.07tn could have been spent on better, more productive activities.
Ending Poverty Across the Planet
It would cost $175bn (£137bn) a year for 20 years to end world poverty, which is pence on the pounds for the wealthy elite and a mere four times the annual US military budget, according to the Borgen Project. With 3.5 trillion quid, you could pretty much make the whole planet great again.
With the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank worth twice that of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, $100bn alone is a worthwhile investment for tackling global inequality.
Paying Off the F-35 Nightmare
US taxpayers will pay roughly 1.508 trillion up to 2070 for the Pentagon’s F-35 Lightening II Joint Strike Force “flying boondoggle” programme. With the extra funds saved by using diplomacy, the US could have bought 11,888 F-35 units, or nearly 410 per NATO country. Conversely, the Pentagon could nearly pay off the cost of funding the programme altogether and fixed the fighter jet’s 966 deficiencies. However, one F-35 costs $30,000 per hour to fly, so budget accordingly.
Speeches from Hillary Clinton. Anytime. Anywhere.
Disgraced 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton received a one-off $675,000 payout from Goldman Sachs to speak privately at Wall Street functions in 2016, whilst earning a total of $22m in speeches since leaving her Secretary of State post 2013.
Costs saved from the Afghan invasion could have allowed Americans $4.4m per year, $366,666 per month and $12,222 per day to listen to Hillary Clinton squawk about Russian aggression and losing elections — a small price to pay for protecting freedom.
Hillary Clinton moments after making a racist joke in an interview with Recode.
The Great Border Wall of America
The Trump administration has asked Congress for a staggering $25bn to fund the roughly 2,000-mile-wide US-Mexico border wall, a Government Accountability Office report found. Should President Trump’s assessment prove correct, the US could have used its Afghan expenses to fund an efficient and timely border wall programme along the US border 42.8 times, surpassing the Great Wall (13,171 miles) of China 6.4 times in length.
According to 2016 figures, the UK Ministry of Defence spent £58.3bn, or 2.2% of GDP on NATO expenses, with plans to inject £178bn in weapons over 10 years, a 2017 UK government document showed. With the money UK’s defence ministers plan to spend, Britain could instead fund missing £350m NHS hole 509 times and could also pay off 4.5 Brexit divorce bills.
Conservative Party Leader and Prime Minister Theresa May dances as she arrives on stage to address delegates during a speech at the Conservative Party Conference at the ICC, in Birmingham, England, Wednesday, Oct. 3 , 2018.
Owning a dog will cost roughly £12k-17k throughout their lifetime, the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals states. Based on this, the US could have supplied 71.3m Americans with low-maintenance puppies. With a population of 35.5m people, you could buy every Afghan citizen two puppies for life instead, ending the war by uniting a divided and battle-weary Afghan population in mere minutes, with billions to spare.
Current scientific theories about the universe only account for roughly five percent of what’s in it. According to a new theory, everything we have observed so far actually floats in a mysterious, theoretical, ‘cosmic soup’.
The remaining 95 percent of the universe, we currently believe, is made up of dark matter or dark energy; theoretical entities that we’re only aware of because we have observed how their gravity affects things around them.
In a recently published paper, Oxford astrophysicist Jamie Farnes has proposed that dark energy and dark matter actually combine to form a “dark fluid” with negative mass that fills the universe.
Dark matter theory began development in the 1930s and the more recent dark energy theories began around 1998. These comprise our current version of the Standard Model – also known as the Lambda-CDM model – which is our ‘best guess’ as to what makes up the remaining 95 percent of our universe that we know little to nothing about. Lambda signifies dark energy as a universal constant and CDM stands for Cold Dark Matter.
“For example, electric charges (+ and −), magnetic charges (N and S), and even quantum information (0 and 1) all appear to be fundamentally polarized phenomena,” the paper states.
It could therefore be perceived as odd that gravitational charges – conventionally called masses – appear to only consist of positive monopoles.
Farnes’ new theory is based on the, as yet, hypothetical concept of negative mass, which is permissible under Newtonian physics.
Under negative mass, the rules of the game are switched: for example, if you push an object it accelerates towards you. Dark fluid would, at least theoretically, exert negative gravity, pushing things away rather than drawing them in.
With this in mind, the observed and ongoing expansion of the universe might be explained by this ‘negative gravity’ which would then essentially render galaxies of regular matter as ‘air bubbles’ trapped in a cosmos of this dark liquid.
“Previous approaches to combining dark energy and dark matter have attempted to modify Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which has turned out to be incredibly challenging,” says Farnes.
“This new approach takes two old ideas that are known to be compatible with Einstein’s theory – negative masses and matter creation – and combines them together. The outcome seems rather beautiful: dark energy and dark matter can be unified into a single substance, with both effects being simply explainable as positive mass matter surfing on a sea of negative masses.”
“If real, it would suggest that the missing 95 percent of the cosmos had an aesthetic solution: we had forgotten to include a simple minus sign.”
Farnes plans to use the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope to compare existing observations of the universe with his own theorized predictions to test whether his dark fluid theory stands up to questioning.
George H.W. Bush was laid to rest on Wednesday but some of his murderous policies lived on through his son’s administration and until this day, as Robert Parry reported on January 11, 2005.
How George W. Bush Learned From His Father
By refusing to admit personal misjudgments on Iraq, George W. Bush instead is pushing the United States toward becoming what might be called a permanent “counter-terrorist” state, which uses torture, cross-border death squads and even collective punishments to defeat perceived enemies in Iraq and around the world.
Since securing a second term, Bush has pressed ahead with this hard-line strategy, in part by removing dissidents inside his administration while retaining or promoting his protégés. Bush also has started prepping his younger brother Jeb as a possible successor in 2008, which could help extend George W.’s war policies while keeping any damaging secrets under the Bush family’s control.
As a centerpiece of this tougher strategy to pacify Iraq, Bush is contemplating the adoption of the brutal practices that were used to suppress leftist peasant uprisings in Central America in the 1980s. The Pentagon is “intensively debating” a new policy for Iraq called the “Salvador option,” Newsweekmagazine reported on Jan. 9.
The strategy is named after the Reagan-Bush administration’s “still-secret strategy” of supporting El Salvador’s right-wing security forces, which operated clandestine “death squads” to eliminate both leftist guerrillas and their civilian sympathizers, Newsweek reported. “Many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success – despite the deaths of innocent civilians,” Newsweek wrote.
Central America Veterans
The magazine also noted that a number of Bush administration officials were leading figures in the Central American operations of the 1980s, such as John Negroponte, who was then U.S. Ambassador to Honduras and is now U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.
Other current officials who played key roles in Central America include Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Central American policies at the State Department and who is now a Middle East adviser on Bush’s National Security Council staff, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a powerful defender of the Central American policies while a member of the House of Representatives.
The insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala were crushed through the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians. In Guatemala, about 200,000 people perished, including what a truth commission later termed a genocide against Mayan Indians in the Guatemalan highlands. In El Salvador, about 70,000 died including massacres of whole villages, such as the slaughter carried out by a U.S.-trained battalion against hundreds of men, women and children in and around the town of El Mozote in 1981.
El Mozote massacre. (Wikimedia Commons)
The Reagan-Bush strategy also had a domestic component, the so-called “perception management” operation that employed sophisticated propaganda to manipulate the fears of the American people while hiding the ugly reality of the wars. The Reagan-Bush administration justified its actions in Central America by portraying the popular uprisings as an attempt by the Soviet Union to establish a beachhead in the Americas to threaten the U.S. southern border.
By employing the “Salvador option” in Iraq, the U.S. military would crank up the pain, especially in Sunni Muslim areas where resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been strongest. In effect, Bush would assign other Iraqi ethnic groups the job of leading the “death squad” campaign against the Sunnis.
“One Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Perhmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with discussions,” Newsweek reported.
Newsweek quoted one military source as saying, “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving the terrorists. … From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”
Citing the Central American experiences of many Bush administration officials, we wrote in November 2003 – more than a year ago – that many of these Reagan-Bush veterans were drawing lessons from the 1980s in trying to cope with the Iraqi insurgency. We pointed out, however, that the conditions were not parallel. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Iraq: Quicksand & Blood.”]
In Central America, powerful oligarchies had long surrounded themselves with ruthless security forces and armies. So, when uprisings swept across the region in the early 1980s, the Reagan-Bush administration had ready-made – though unsavory – allies who could do the dirty work with financial and technological help from Washington.
Iraqi Dynamic
A different dynamic exists in Iraq, because the Bush administration chose to disband rather than co-opt the Iraqi army. That left U.S. forces with few reliable local allies and put the onus for carrying out counterinsurgency operations on American soldiers who were unfamiliar with the land, the culture and the language.
Those problems, in turn, contributed to a series of counterproductive tactics, including the heavy-handed round-ups of Iraqi suspects, the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and the killing of innocent civilians by jittery U.S. troops fearful of suicide bombings.
The war in Iraq also has undermined U.S. standing elsewhere in the Middle East and around the world. Images of U.S. soldiers sexually abusing Iraqi prisoners, putting bags over the heads of captives and shooting a wounded insurgent have blackened America’s image everywhere and made cooperation with the United States increasingly difficult even in countries long considered American allies.
Beyond the troubling images, more and more documents have surfaced indicating that the Bush administration had adopted limited forms of torture as routine policy, both in Iraq and the broader War on Terror. Last August, an FBI counterterrorism official criticized abusive practices at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more,” the official wrote. “When I asked the M.P.’s what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion … the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.”
Despite official insistence that torture is not U.S. policy, the blame for these medieval tactics continues to climb the chain of command toward the Oval Office. It appears to have been Bush’s decision after the Sept. 11 attacks to “take the gloves off,” a reaction understandable at the time but which now appears to have hurt, more than helped.
TV World
George W Bush as an infant with father George H W Bush at Yale University. (George Bush Presidential Library)
Many Americans have fantasized about how they would enjoy watching Osama bin Laden tortured to death for his admitted role in the Sept. 11 attacks. There is also a tough-guy fondness for torture as shown in action entertainment – like Fox Network’s “24” – where torture is a common-sense shortcut to get results.
But the larger danger arises when the exceptional case becomes the routine, when it’s no longer the clearly guilty al-Qaeda mass murderer, but it is now the distraught Iraqi father trying to avenge the death of his child killed by American bombs.
Rather than the dramatic scenes on TV, the reality is usually more like that desperate creature in Guantanamo lying in his own waste and pulling out his hair. The situation can get even worse when torture takes on the industrial quality of government policy, with subjects processed through the gulags or the concentration camps.
That also is why the United States and other civilized countries have long banned torture and prohibited the intentional killing of civilians. The goal of international law has been to set standards that couldn’t be violated even in extreme situations or in the passions of the moment.
Yet, Bush – with his limited world experience – was easily sold on the notion of U.S. “exceptionalism” where America’s innate goodness frees it from the legal constraints that apply to lesser countries.
Bush also came to believe in the wisdom of his “gut” judgments. After his widely praised ouster of Afghanistan’s Taliban government in late 2001, Bush set his sights on invading Iraq. Like a hot gambler in Las Vegas doubling his bets, Bush’s instincts were on a roll.
Now, however, as the Iraqi insurgency continues to grow and inflict more casualties on both U.S. troops and Iraqis who have thrown in their lot with the Americans, Bush finds himself facing a narrowing list of very tough choices.
Bush could acknowledge his mistakes and seek international help in extricating U.S. forces from Iraq. But Bush abhors admitting errors, even small ones. Plus, Bush’s belligerent tone hasn’t created much incentive for other countries to bail him out.
Instead Bush appears to be upping the ante by contemplating cross-border raids into countries neighboring Iraq. He also would be potentially expanding the war by having Iraqi Kurds and Shiites kill Sunnis, a prescription for civil war or genocide.
Pinochet Option
There’s a personal risk, too, for Bush if he picks the “Salvador option.” He could become an American version of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet or Guatemala’s Efrain Rios Montt, leaders who turned loose their security forces to commit assassinations, “disappear” opponents and torture captives.
Like the policy that George W. Bush is now considering, Pinochet even sponsored his own international “death squad” – known as Operation Condor – that hunted down political opponents around the world. One of those attacks in September 1976 blew up a car carrying Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier as he drove through Washington D.C. with two American associates. Letelier and co-worker Ronni Moffitt were killed.
With the help of American friends in high places, the two former dictators have fended off prison until now. However, Pinochet and Rios Montt have become pariahs who are facing legal proceedings aimed at finally holding them accountable for their atrocities.
[For more on George H.W. Bush’s protection of Pinochet, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
One way for George W. Bush to avert that kind of trouble is to make sure his political allies remain in power even after his second term ends in January 2009. In his case, that might be achievable by promoting his brother Jeb for president in 2008, thus guaranteeing that any incriminating documents stay under wraps.
President George W. Bush’s dispatching Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to inspect the tsunami damage in Asia started political speculation that one of the reasons was to burnish Jeb’s international credentials in a setting where his personal empathy would be on display.
Though Jeb Bush has insisted that he won’t run for president in 2008, the Bush family might find strong reason to encourage Jeb to change his mind, especially if the Iraq War is lingering and George W. has too many file cabinets filled with damaging secrets.
The late investigative reporter Robert Parry, the founding editor of Consortium News, broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. His last book, America’s Stolen Narrative, can be obtained in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Vibrant competition is absolutely essential in order for a capitalist economic system to function effectively. Unfortunately, in the United States today we are witnessing the death of competition in industry after industry as the biggest corporations increasingly gobble up all of their competitors.
Vibrant competition is absolutely essential in order for a capitalist economic system to function effectively. Unfortunately, in the United States today we are witnessing the death of competition in industry after industry as the biggest corporations increasingly gobble up all of their competitors. John D. Rockefeller famously once said that “competition is a sin”, and he was one of America’s very first oligopolists. According to Google, an oligopoly is “a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers”, and that is a perfect description of the current state of affairs in many major industries. In early America, corporations were greatly limited in scope, and in most instances they were only supposed to exist temporarily. But today the largest corporations have become so huge that they literally dominate our entire society, and that is not good for any of us.
Just look at what is happening in the airline industry. When I was growing up, there were literally dozens of airlines, but now four major corporations control everything and they have been making gigantic profits…
AMERICA’S airlines used to be famous for two things: terrible service and worse finances. Today flyers still endure hidden fees, late flights, bruised knees, clapped-out fittings and sub-par food. Yet airlines now make juicy profits. Scheduled passenger airlines reported an after-tax net profit of $15.5bn in 2017, up from $14bn in 2016.
What is true of the airline industry is increasingly true of America’s economy. Profits have risen in most rich countries over the past ten years but the increase has been biggest for American firms. Coupled with an increasing concentration of ownership, this means the fruits of economic growth are being monopolised.
If you don’t like how an airline is treating you, in some cases you can choose to fly with someone else next time.
But as a recent Bloomberg article pointed out, that is becoming increasingly difficult to do…
United, for example, dominates many of the country’s largest airports. In Houston, United has around a 60 percent market share, in Newark 51 percent, in Washington Dulles 43 percent, in San Francisco 38 percent and in Chicago 31 percent. This situation is even more skewed for other airlines. For example, Delta has an 80 percent market share in Atlanta. For many routes, you simply have no choice.
And of course the airline industry is far from alone. In sector after sector, economic power is becoming concentrated in just a few hands.
For a moment, I would like you to consider these numbers…
Two corporations control 90 percent of the beer Americans drink.
Five banks control about half of the nation’s banking assets.
Many states have health insurance markets where the top two insurers have an 80 percent to 90 percent market share. For example, in Alabama one company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, has an 84 percent market share and in Hawaii it has 65 percent market share.
When it comes to high-speed Internet access, almost all markets are local monopolies; over 75 percent of households have no choice with only one provider.
Four players control the entire U.S. beef market and have carved up the country.
After two mergers this year, three companies will control 70 percent of the world’s pesticide market and 80 percent of the U.S. corn-seed market.
I knew that things were bad, but I didn’t know that they were that bad.
Capitalism works best when competition is maximized. In socialist systems, the government itself becomes a major player in the game, and that is never a desirable outcome. Instead, what we want is for the government to serve as a “referee” that enforces rules that encourage free and fair competition. Jonathan Tepper, the author of “The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition”, made this point very well in an excerpt from his new book…
Capitalism is a game where competitors play by rules on which everyone agrees. The government is the referee, and just as you need a referee and a set of agreed rules for a good basketball game, you need rules to promote competition in the economy.
Left to their own devices, firms will use any available means to crush their rivals. Today, the state, as referee, has not enforced rules that would increase competition, and through regulatory capture has created rules that limit competition.
Our founders were very suspicious of large concentrations of power. That is why they wanted a very limited federal government, and that is also why they put substantial restrictions on corporate entities.
When power is greatly concentrated, most of the rewards tend to flow to the very top of the pyramid, and that is precisely what we have been witnessing. The following comes from the New York Times…
Even when economic growth has been decent, as it is now, most of the bounty has flowed to the top. Median weekly earnings have grown a miserly 0.1 percent a year since 1979. The typical American family today has a lower net worth than the typical family did 20 years ago. Life expectancy, shockingly, has fallen this decade.
So what is the solution?
Well, one of the big things that we need to do is to stop crushing small business.
In America today, the rate of small business creation has been hovering near all-time lows and the percentage of Americans that are working for themselves has been hovering near all-time lows.
In order for more competition to exist, we need more competitors to enter the marketplace, but instead we have been crushing “the little guy” with mountains of regulations and deeply oppressive taxes.
And you know what? Many of the big corporations actually like all of the red tape because they know that they can handle it much easier than their much smaller competitors can. That gives them a competitive advantage, and it creates a barrier to entry that is difficult to overcome.
When I was in school, I was taught that one of the reasons why the U.S. system was so much better than communist systems was because we had so many more choices.
But today our choices are very limited in industry after industry, and the gigantic corporate entities that dominate everything don’t really care if we like it or not.
We can do so much better than this, but in order to do so we must return to the values and principles that this nation was originally founded upon.
“A 2015 study, published in the journal, ‘Scientific Reports,’ suggests that smoking cannabis is roughly 114 times safer than drinking alcohol. Ironically, out of all the drugs that were researched in the study, alcohol was actually the most dangerous, and it was the only legal drug on the list.”
In a study published earlier this year by researchers at the National Institute of Scientific Research at the University of Quebec, cannabis can actually help counteract the harmful effects of alcohol to some degree.
The study found that cannabis use significantly lowered the odds of liver diseases like hepatitis, cirrhosis, steatosis, and even hepatocellular carcinoma, a type of liver cancer. Researchers formed these conclusions based on the medical records of roughly 320,000 patients who had a history of alcoholism.
According to the study:
“Abusive alcohol use has well‐established health risks including causing liver disease (ALD) characterized by alcoholic steatosis (AS), steatohepatitis (AH), fibrosis, cirrhosis (AC) and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Strikingly, a significant number of individuals who abuse alcohol also use Cannabis, which has seen increased legalization globally. While cannabis has demonstrated anti‐inflammatory properties, its combined use with alcohol and the development of liver disease remain unclear.”
Researchers have not determined why alcoholics who used cannabis had less of a chance of developing liver disease, but many suspect that it has something to do with the proven anti-inflammatory properties of cannabis.
These findings support the results of another study last year which concluded that cannabis helps with non-alcoholic liver disease as well.
According to last year’s study:
“It can be hypothesized that marijuana use may have potential beneficial effects on metabolic abnormalities such as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Whether marijuana use plays a role in NAFLD pathogenesis via modification of shared risk factors, or by an independent pathway remains uncertain. In this population-based study, we assessed the association between marijuana use and NAFLD in the US.”
Despite the proven health benefits of cannabis and the fact that it becoming legal in new states every year, lawmakers and mainstream media pundits refuse to give up on the reefer madness hysteria that they built their careers on.
Just after these studies were published, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control banned the sale of cannabis-infused alcoholic beverages, totally ignoring the science that this actually makes the alcohol less harmful.
This attitude can be seen in the hysteria that was created when Elon Musk took a hit of cannabis on the Joe Rogan Podcast, after spending two hours drinking liquor. Of course, even though the herb is legal in the state where they recorded, and it is far less harmful than alcohol, people decided to focus on the cannabis use because of the stigma against it.
A 2015 study, published in the journal, ‘Scientific Reports,’ suggests that smoking cannabis is roughly 114 times safer than drinking alcohol. Ironically, out of all the drugs that were researched in the study, alcohol was actually the most dangerous, and it was the only legal drug on the list.
Just behind alcohol, heroin and cocaine were listed as the next most dangerous, followed by tobacco, ecstasy, and meth. The criteria that these drugs were arranged by, was according to the likelihood of a person dying from consuming a lethal dose.
“The results confirm that the risk of cannabis may have been overestimated in the past. At least for the endpoint of mortality, the [margin of exposure] for THC/cannabis in both individual and population-based assessments would be above safety thresholds (e.g. 100 for data based on animal experiments). In contrast, the risk of alcohol may have been commonly underestimated,” the report states. “Currently, the MOE results point to risk management prioritization towards alcohol and tobacco rather than illicit drugs. The high MOE values of cannabis, which are in a low-risk range, suggest a strict legal regulatory approach rather than the current prohibition approach,” the report continues.
While this is not the first study to rank marijuana very low in terms of danger, it comes at a time when the debate surrounding marijuana legalization is more heated than ever before, with more and more people agreeing that it is time to end prohibition.
The US will lead a new liberal world order, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared. Organizations and treaties not fitting this picture must be scrapped or reformed, so that non-compliers could not use them against America.
The US will lead a new liberal world order, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared. Organizations and treaties not fitting this picture must be scrapped or reformed, so that non-compliers could not use them against America.
The vision of the bold new and prosperous (for the US and its supporters) world was delivered by Pompeo in a keynote speech to the German Marshall Fund on Tuesday.
The senior member of the Donald Trump administration said a multilateral approach is failing to produce a world of unrestricted capitalism, so the US should rule supreme – sorry, assume a leadership role – to ensure that countries like China didn’t try to offer an alternative way.
China, as well as Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and other nations on the US grudge list got their share of bashing in the speech, but its focus was more on international institutions, which Pompeo claimed to be incompatible with his grand vision.
The UN is a vehicle for regional powers to “collude” and vote in bad actors into the Human Rights Council. “Bad actors” are of course not Saudi Arabia. The World Bank and the International Monetary fund are in the way of private lenders. The EU is good, but Brexit should be a wake-up call for its bureaucracy, which doesn’t know how good nationalism actually is. The International Criminal Court is “rogue” because it attempts to hold Americans accountable for crimes in Afghanistan.
The Paris Agreement on climate change was bad for America, so it left. NAFTA was bad for America, so it forced a renegotiation. The nuclear deal with Iran didn’t make Tehran complacent, so it had to go.
But what organization was a good boy and doesn’t deserve a piece of coal from Uncle Sam? SWIFT was. The banking communications organization caved in to Washington and cut off Iranians from its system, so it has a place in the bright new world of US leadership.
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is letting everyone know he’s had enough with the Catholic Church’s opposition to his policies, deriding its leaders as “useless fools” who worship a “stupid” god.
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is letting everyone know he’s had enough with the Catholic Church’s opposition to his policies, deriding its leaders as “useless fools” who worship a “stupid” god.
Slamming the Catholic Church as “the most hypocritical institution” for casting doubt on his extrajudicial drug war, the outspoken leader ridiculed Catholic bishops as “useless fools,” exhorting his people to “kill them” in a speech on Wednesday. He also claimed that 90 percent of priests are homosexuals lacking any standing to “postulate on my morality.”
These bishops that you guys have, kill them. They are useless fools. All they do is criticize.
Catholic authorities have been among the most outspoken critics of Duterte’s extrajudicial war on drugs, which opposition senator Antonio Trillanes claims has caused more than 20,000 deaths since the president took power in July 2016. Duterte’s administration claims those numbers are wildly exaggerated – an official government report published in October puts the death toll at 4,999 since 2016. Human rights groups have also criticized the crackdown for targeting the poor instead of the kingpins responsible for the drug trade.
Citing their moral obligation to oppose murder, the Church has even extended assistance to some of the victims and survivors of Duterte’s heavy-handed campaign against drugs and crime, inspiring him to accuse Bishop Pablo Virgilio David of corruption and dealing drugs himself, even threatening him with decapitation while mocking his religious beliefs.
Also on rt.com‘My only sin is the extrajudicial killings’: Duterte’s strange ‘confession’ dismissed as ‘playful’The Catholic Church has urged Duterte to tone down the rhetoric after three Catholic priests were killed last December “because such attacks can unwittingly embolden more crimes against priests.” Unrepentant, he instead called on Filipinos last week to build their own chapels instead of lining religious leaders’ pockets, telling them, “You don’t have to go to church to pay for these idiots.”
Duterte, like 90 percent of Filipinos, was raised Catholic, and he clarified in a later speech to government officials that he is no atheist but merely believes in a different deity than the Catholics – one who “has a lot of common sense” instead of the “stupid God” who built original sin into a “perfect” creation.
Last month, Duterte mocked the International Criminal Court, dismissing its judges as “pedophiles,” “drunkards,” and “idiots” and threatening to slap one of its prosecutors as the Hague tribunal investigated him for crimes against humanity. Jude Sabio, an attorney who plans to run for Senate next year, filed suit against Duterte in the ICC in May 2017 on charges related to the rising death toll of his drug war.
Duterte, who presided over a wave of vigilante-style killings while serving as mayor of Davao City, rose to power on a “law and order” campaign, promising to execute drug dealers and users in an inflammatory election contest that even saw him cursing out Pope Francis and Barack Obama – for which he later apologized. He categorically dismisses the church’s “moral authority” to criticize him, pointing to the numerous sexual abuse scandals involving priests and denouncing church authorities as corrupt. Last year, he claimed he had been abused by a priest while at university.
Duterte’s hard-line approach has found an admirer in US President Donald Trump, who suggested in a tweet on Wednesday that Chinese authorities should impose the death penalty for trafficking fentanyl, the potent synthetic opioid that has contributed to skyrocketing overdose death rates in the US. Bangladesh has also taken a tip from the Filipino leader, enacting a law punishing the production, smuggling, sale, and use of methamphetamines with death in October, while Sri Lanka announced in July it would begin executing drug dealers after 40 years without imposing the death penalty.
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