The Elite Are Digging Their Own Grave

Today, Wednesday, May 16, on the Alex Jones Show, Alex welcomes long-time returning guest and contributing writer Dr. Paul Craig Roberts to discuss the impact of the Euro’s instability on world markets amidst looming fears of Greece’s departure. They’ll also touch on why governments feel compelled to blame events like 9/11, the Euro decline, and other manufactured crises on scapegoats. www.paulcraigroberts.org www.infowars.com www.prisonplanet.tv twitter.com www.facebook.com

Who is Jose Rodriguez? He is the criminal who ran the CIA torture program. Most of his victims were not terrorists or even insurgents. Most were hapless individuals kidnapped by warlords and sold to the Americans as “terrorists” for the bounty paid.

If Rodriguez’s identity was previously a secret, it is no more. He has been on CBS “60 Minutes” taking credit for torturing Muslims and using the information allegedly gained to kill leaders of al Qaeda. If terrorists were really the problem that Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA claim, Rodriguez’s name would be a struck through item on the terrorists’ hit list. He would be in his grave.

So, also, would be John Yoo, who wrote the Justice (sic) Department memos giving the green light to torture, despite US and International laws prohibiting torture. Apparently, Yoo, a professor at the Boalt School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, was ignorant of US and international law. And so was the US Department of Justice (sic).

Notice that Rodriguez, “The Torturer of the Muslims,” doesn’t have to hide. He can go on national television, reveal his identity, and revel in his success in torturing and murdering Muslims. Rodriguez has no Secret Service protection and would be an easy mark for assassination by terrorists so capable as to have, allegedly, pulled off 9/11.

Another easy mark for assassination would be former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who staffed up the Pentagon with neoconservative warmongers such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who in turn concocted the false information used to justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Rumsfeld himself declared members of al Qaeda to be the most vicious and dangerous killers on earth. Yet Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Richard Perle, together with neoconservative media propagandists, such as William Kristol and Max Boot, have been walking around safe for years unmolested by terrorists seeking revenge or bringing retribution to those responsible for as many as 1,000,000 Muslim deaths.

Condi Rice, Colin Powell, who delivered the Speech of Lies to the UN inaugurating the invasion of Iraq, and Dick Cheney, whose minimal Secret Service protection could not withstand a determined assassination attempt, also enjoy lives unmolested by terrorists.

Remember the deck of cards that the Bush regime had with Iraqi faces? If terrorists had a similar deck, all of those named above would be “high value targets.” Yet, there has not been a single attempt on any one of them.

Strange, isn’t it, that none of the above are faced with a terrorist threat. Yet, the tough, macho Navy Seals who allegedly killed Osama bin Laden must have their identity kept hidden so that they don’t become terrorist targets. These American supermen, highly trained killers themselves, don’t dare show their faces, but Rodriguez, Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice can walk around unmolested. Indeed, the Seals’ lives are so endangered that President Obama gave up the enormous public relations political benefit of a White House ceremony with the heroic Navy Seals. Very strange behavior for a politician. A couple of weeks after the alleged bin Laden killing, the Seals unit, or most of it, was wiped out in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

If you were a Muslim terrorist seeking retribution for Washington’s crimes, would you try to smuggle aboard an airliner a bomb in your underwear or shoe in order to blow up people whose only responsibility for Washington’s war against Muslims is that they fell for Washington’s propaganda? If you wanted to blow up the innocent, wouldn’t you instead place your bomb in the middle of the mass of humanity waiting to clear airport security and take out TSA personnel along with passengers? Terrorists could coordinate their attacks, hitting a number of large airports across the US at the same minute. This would be real terror. Moreover, it would present TSA with an insolvable problem: how can people be screened before they are screened?

Or coordinated attacks on shopping malls and sports events?

Why should terrorists, if they exist, bother to kill people when it is easy to cause mayhem by not killing them? There are a large number of unguarded electric power substations. Entire regions of the country could be shut down. The simplest disruptive act would be to release large quantities of roofing nails in the midst of rush hour traffic in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. You get the picture: thousands and thousands of cars disabled with flat tires blocking the main arteries for days.

Before some reader accuses me of giving terrorists ideas, ask yourself if you really think people so clever as to have allegedly planned and carried out 9/11 couldn’t think of such simple tactics, plots that could be carried out without having to defeat security or kill innocent people?  My point isn’t what terrorists, if they exist, should do. The point is that the absence of easy-to-do acts of terrorism suggests that the terrorist threat is more hype than reality. Yet, we have an expensive, intrusive security apparatus that seems to have no real function except to exercise power over American citizens.

In place of real terrorists carrying out easy plots, we have “terrorist” plots dreamed up by FBI and CIA agents, who then recruit some hapless or demented dupes, bribing them with money and heroic images of themselves, and supplying them with the plot and fake explosives. These are called “sting operations,” but they are not. They are orchestrations by our own security agencies that produce fake terrorist plots that are then “foiled” by the security agencies that hatched the plots. Washington’s announcement is always: “The public was never in danger.” Some terrorist plot! We have never been endangered by one, but the airports have been on orange alert for 11.5 years.

The federal judiciary and brainwashed juries actually treat these concocted plots as real threats to American security despite the government’s announcements that the public was never in danger.

The announcements of the “foiled” plots keep the brainwashed public docile and amenable to intrusive searches, warrantless spying, the growth of an unaccountable police state, and endless wars.

The “War on Terror” is a hoax, one that has been successfully used to destroy the US Constitution and to complete the transformation of law from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of the state. By destroying habeas corpus, due process, and the presumption of innocence, the “War on Terror” has destroyed our security.

This is an informational bulletin, not a new column.

For readers with research skills and for those who would like to develop such skills and/or explore new historical data now made available for the first time on the Internet, Ron Unz, an entrepreneur who is on his way to becoming a public intellectual, is offering a $10,000 First Prize for the best research based on the source materials he has provided. Here is his announcement:
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As some of you already know, I recently released a content-archiving website, www.unz.org, which had absorbed most of my time and effort over the last few years.

The website makes freely available a vast quantity of high-quality content material, including the archives of numerous important publications published during the first half of the 20th Century and earlier. Most of this important source material—millions of pages—has never previously been available to anyone except on the dusty shelves of major research libraries.
The Wilson Quarterly recently ran a brief description of the project entitled The Periodical Table.

As a means of publicizing this new website and the research value of the unique content material which it contains, I am announcing The Unz Historical Research Competition, offering a $10,000 First Prize for the most interesting and important historical research project derived from the website source materials. The competition begins [May 1], lasts until August 31, 2012, and is open to students, academics, independent scholars, or other interested individuals, both in the United States and around the world.

The exact details of the competition may be found on the Unz Competition website, which includes a partial listing of the periodical archives.
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This is an opportunity, especially for the underemployed and unemployed. The prestige of such a prize would certainly enhance one’s career prospects.

Readers continuously ask me, “what can I do.” My answer is that our country and the Constitution that protects us need our protection from the government and the powerful private interests that are destroying America. America needs many voices and many engaged patriots, not on the battlefield for the profits of the military/security complex, but on the battlefield for the Constitution and the truth and liberty that it supports.

Ron Unz, like myself, wants you to become engaged in the fight. If millions of you do not become engaged, liberty and truth are lost.

Ron Unz is offering you a chance at ten thousand dollars and recognition as a prize-winner. Become engaged.

Go for it.

Dear Readers, what do you think? Did Obama really kill Osama?

By Ralph Cinque
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31284.htm

May 09, 2012 “Information Clearing House” — We just passed the one-year anniversary of the (alleged) execution of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. But, did he really live until 2011? Ten years earlier, in 2001, his kidneys were failing, and he was on dialysis. Do you know what the life expectancy is for dialysis patients in the United States? Unless you get a kidney transplant (and Osama did not) the average life expectancy is 5 years. And that presumes that top-notch medical care is provided, which may be hard to come by in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. And being on the run and living in hiding can’t possibly help the situation.
However, Osama bin laden had a lot of other health problems besides kidney disease. They included insulin-dependent diabetes, hepatitis, osteoporosis, an enlarged heart, anemia, abnormally low blood pressure, and Marfan’s syndrome. [See Nicholas Kollerstrom, "Osama bin Laden: 1957-2001" which can be found onjamesfetzer.blogspot.com, and David Ray Griffin, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?

The picture below is of Osama bin Laden from 2001, and below it is an image of him from 2011 which was released by the Pentagon immediately after the raid. I think you’ll agree that in the first picture, he looks rather pale and ashen and quite sickly, and in the second picture he looks quite robust.

Which man looks older? They say that he dyed his hair, but forget about that. Hone in on the tired, weary eyes of the "younger" Osama. Compare the fullness of their faces, or I should say the lack of it in the older-looking, more decrepit Osama from 2001. Note that we tend to lose facial fullness with age for two reasons: the layer of sub-dermal facial fat tends to dissipate with age, and the facial skin cells don’t plump up as much with water as we get older.
Look at the firmness and solidness of the musculature around the shoulders of the latter bin laden compared to how he looked 10 years earlier. Sarcopenia, which is the age-related atrophy of somatic muscle, is a universal condition, but some people experience it more than others. But, it occurs to some degree in just about everybody, and it starts rather young, about age 30. But, those are some solid trapezoid muscles on the "older" Osama. What, was he lifting weights at his compound in Abbottabad?

With all his health problems and with the stress of living in hiding and being the most wanted man in the world, is there is any chance that bin laden could emerge in 2011 in the comparatively good, robust condition that you see above? We’re talking about 10 years on dialysis!

I happened to watch the movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which a man aged in reverse, where he got younger with each passing year. But, I needn’t have to tell you that that never happens in real life. People only age in one direction – from younger to older. Some people have the audacity to think that we may be able to slow-down the process of decline, and that includes me. But still, we know which direction it’s headed, and we don’t kid ourselves about that.

However, the 2011 Osama, above, seems to have defied the laws of biology completely. I’m starting to wonder if maybe he spent the whole time on a spaceship traveling at the speed of light so that he didn’t age, as per Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. But hey, he not only didn’t age, he actually got younger – a lot younger. And all the while on dialysis! It’s amazing! Maybe we should all sign up for it.

But, let’s look at it from another perspective: Is it the same guy at all? regardless of age? Is it even the same face?

Well, let’s compare that latter image of Osama to a familiar earlier image of him. At least in this other image, there is not the distracting effect of all the grey hair. Plus, he looks healthier. So, we can just compare their faces.

What do you think? Is it the same guy? I have the feeling that if you took away the Arab garb and all the facial hair, you wouldn’t think so, not at all. The real Osama (on the [bottom]) has a longer, leaner, and more triangular-shaped face. There seems to be more pointedness and deviation to his nose. And it’s not just his face that is more slender, but his whole body. Notice again how thick and substantial the trapezius muscle pad is on the latter-day Osama (on the left). Comparatively speaking, he looks like quite the he-man. But, the real Osama was never built that solidly, not even when he was younger, as you can readily see on the [bottom]. And, the trapezius muscle is definitely a muscle that tends to shrink spontaneously with age. It would take a whole lot of concerted effort in the gym to prevent a decline in that muscle over ten years’ time. The chances of making it grow are practically nil for most people. But the chances of a dialysis patient making it grow are absolutely nil. They waste muscle more rapidly than most people do. It is something that is written about in medical journals. Here, for example, is such an article from the journal Kidney International.

So, could Osama really have packed on major muscle over a 10 year course of dialysis and in the midst of all his other health problems? No. Of course not. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell.

Here is another picture of him that was released after the raid in April 2011:

Is it just me, or does he look like a wrestler?

In fairness, I should point out that after all this transpired, there were scattered reports in the media that he never suffered with kidney failure, that that was just a myth, that he only had kidney stones, and a mild case at that. Several media outlets reported that, but it was only sourced to one place: the CIA. Nowhere else. There were no sources outside the government for that claim.

However, there are independent sources that he had kidney failure. He was reported to have stayed at the American Hospital in Dubai in 2001 for dialysis treatment, and I believe it was first reported by the prominent French newspaper, Le Figaro. They said he bought two dialysis machines to take back with him to Afghanistan. They said he was visited twice by a CIA agent. And they named the Canadian kidney specialist who addressed his medical needs there: Dr. Terry Callaway. Radio France International also reported it. They also said that he first bought a mobile dialysis machine back in 2000 which was sent to his hideout in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

It was reported by CBS in 2002 that the night before 9/11/01, Osama bin laden was in a Pakistani military hospital receiving kidney dialysis treatment. Watch the segment with Dan Rather.

And, it was widely reported in many parts of the world that Osama bin laden had died long before 2011. Here is a Fox News Report about it from 2001.

But the big question is, why do Americans accept that Osama bin Laden was still alive in 2011? And why do they accept the images of him that were released? That wasn’t him. It could not possibly have been him. It is medically impossible for that to have been him. Those pictures are downright goofy and comical. If Americans believe that story, they are the most gullible people in the world. Does the psychological hold of offialdom have that much power over us to completely obliterate our judgment?

As a postscript, I note that just the other day, it was announced that the Pakistani government has finally released from custody the many wives of Osama bin laden, who were returning to Saudi Arabia. At the time of the raid, my first thought was that there needs to be a press conference with those wives. Let’s hear from them about whether the man who was killed was really Osama bin laden. But, I thought to myself at the time that we will never see those ladies sitting behind a swarm of media microphones and answering questions from reporters. And we never will. Ralph Cinque doctorcinque@hotmail.com has worked as a chiropractor, nutritionist, and health spa operator. Visit his blog

This article was first published at LewRockwell.com

We have had a second fake underwear bomb plot, a much more fantastic one than the first hoax. The second underwear bomber was a CIA operative or informant allegedly recruited by al-Qaeda, an organization that US authorities have recently claimed to be defeated, in disarray, and no longer significant.

This defeated and insignificant organization, which lacks any science and technology labs, has invented an “invisible bomb” that is not detected by the porno-scanners. A “senior law enforcement source” told the New York Times that “the scary part” is that “if they buil[t] one, they probably built more.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that “the plot itself indicates that the terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people.” Hillary said this while headlines proclaimed that the US continues to murder women and children with high-tech drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa. The foiled fake plot, Hillary alleged, serves as “a reminder as to why we have to remain vigilant at home and abroad in protecting our nation and in protecting friendly nations and peoples like India and others.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that the fake plot proves the need for warrantless surveillance in order to detect–what, fake plots? In Congress Republican Pete King and Democrat Charles Ruppersberger denounced media for revealing that the plot was a CIA operation, claiming that the truth threatened the war effort and soldiers’ lives.

Even alternative news media initially fell for this fake plot. Apparently, no one stops to wonder how al-Qaeda, which has become so disorganized and helpless that it is on the run and left its revered leader, Osama bin Laden, in a Pakistan village alone and unguarded to be murdered by US Navy Seals, could catch the CIA off guard with an “undetectable” bomb, to use the description provided by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein, who was briefed on the device by US intelligence personnel.

Notice that the Secretary of State has committed the bankrupt US and its unravelling social safety net to the protection of “India and others” from terrorists. But the real significance of this latest hoax is to introduce into the fearful American public the idea of an undetectable underwear bomb.

What does this bring to mind? Anyone of my generation or any science fiction aficionado immediately thinks of Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters.

Written in 1951 but set in our time, Earth is invaded by small creatures that attach to the human body and take over the person. The humans become the puppets of their masters. Large areas of America succumb to the invaders before the morons in Washington understand that the invasion is real and not a conspiracy theory.

On clothed humans, the creatures cannot be detected, and the edict goes out that anyone clothed is a suspect. Everyone must go about naked. Women are not even allowed to carry purses in their hand, because the creature can be in the purse attached to the woman’s hand.

Obviously, if the CIA, the news sources, and Dianne Feinstein’s briefers are correct that defeated al-Qaeda has come up with an “undetectable” bomb, we will have to pass through airport security naked.

If so, how will this be possible? If each airline passenger must go through a personal screening by disrobing in a room, how long will it take to clear “airport security”? I doubt there is any place in North or South America that the traveller couldn’t drive there faster. Or perhaps this is an answer to depression level US unemployment. Millions of unemployed Americans will be hired to view naked people before they board airliners.

As the Transportation Safety Administration division of Homeland Security has taken its intrusions, unchallenged, into train, bus, and highway travel, are we faced with the total collapse of the clothing industry? Stay tuned.

A couple of years ago a noted philosopher wrote an article in which he suggested that Americans live in an artificial or virtual reality. Another noted philosopher said that he thought there was a 25% chance that the philosopher was right. I am convinced that he is right. Americans live in the Matrix. Nothing that they know or think that they know is correct.

For example, our non-truth-telling “leaders” continually declare that “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.” This myth is one of the many reasons rolled out to justify American taxpayers’ declining incomes being taxed to provide the Israeli government with the means to murder Palestinians and steal their country.

Israeli democracy a myth you say? Yes, a myth. According to news reports compiled and reported by Antiwar.com (May 8), the September 4 Israeli elections have been cancelled, because the “opposition leader Shaul Mofaz is joining the government.”

Mofaz sold out his party for personal power, a typical politician’s behavior.

Mofaz’s treachery produced protests from his followers, but, according to news reports, “Israeli police were quick to crack down on the protest, terming it ‘illegal’ and arresting a number of journalists.”

Ah, “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.”

In truth Israel is a fascist state, one that has been in violation of international law and Christian morality during the entirety of its existence. Yet, in America Israel is a hallowed icon. Like Bush, Cheney, and Obama, millions of American “christians” worship Israel and believe it is “God’s calling” for Americans to die for Israel.

If you believe in murdering your opponents, not debating with them, dispossessing the powerless, creating a fictional world based on lies and paying the corporate media to uphold the lies and fictional world, you are part of what the rest of the world perceives as “The West.”

Let me back off from being too hard on The West. The French and Greek peoples have shown in the recent elections that they are unplugging from the Matrix and understand that they, the 99%, are being put by their elites in a position to be the sacrificial lambs for the mistakes of the 1% mega-rich, who compete with one another in terms of how many billions of dollars or euros, how many yachts, collections of exotic cars, and exotic Playboy and Penthouse centerfolds they have as personal possessions.

The central banks of the West–the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the UK bank–are totally committed to the prosperity of the mega-rich. No one else counts. Marx and Lenin never had a target as exists today. Yet, the left-wing is today so feeble and brainwashed that it does not exist as even a minor countervailing power. The American left-wing has even accepted the absurd official account of 9/11 and of Osama bin Laden’s murder in Pakistan by Navy Seals. A movement so devoid of mental and emotional strength is useless. It might as well not exist.

People without valid information are helpless, and that is where Western peoples are. The new tyranny is arising in the West, not in Russia and China. The danger to humanity is in the nuclear button briefcase in the Oval Office and in the brainwashed and militant Amerikan population, the most totally disinformed and ignorant people on earth.

US student loan crisis-On the Edge with Max Keiser-05-04-2012

In this edition of the show Max interviews Paul Craig Roberts, former US treasury official. He talks about the US student loan crisis, where the student debt has passed one trillion dollars but 50 percent of the young graduates are either jobless or under-employed. Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as a co-founder of Reaganomics. Watch this video on our Website: www.presstv.com Follow our Facebook on: www.facebook.com Follow our Twitter on: twitter.com

If I may give some examples: The other day Chuck Colson, one of the Nixon officials imprisoned for Watergate crimes, died. This gave NPR the opportunity to relive the Nixon horror.

What precisely was the Nixon horror? Essentially, there was no such thing. Watergate was about President Nixon lying about when he learned about the Watergate burglary.
When Nixon learned about the burglary, he did not act on it prior to his reelection, because he reasoned, rightly, that the Washington Post would blame him for the burglary, although he had nothing to do with it, in the hopes of preventing his reelection.

By going along with a cover-up, Nixon enabled the Washington Post to make an issue of the precise date on which Nixon learned of the burglary. White House tapes indicated that Nixon had learned of the burglary before he said he learned of it. So Nixon had permitted a cover-up and had to go, but what was the real reason?

What was the Watergate burglary? We don’t really know. A group of men including former CIA operatives were hired by the Committee to Re-elect the President to break into a Democratic campaign office in the Watergate complex. We don’t know the purpose of the burglary. Some claim it was to wire-tap the telephones in the belief that the Democratic Party was getting re-election money from communists in Cuba or elsewhere. Others claim that the burglars were looking for a list of call girls, that compromised a White House official, as his fiancee was allegedly one of the call girls.

Looking back from our time during which Bush and Obama have deep-sixed the US Constitution, violated numerous US and international laws, and behaved as if they were caesars unconstrained by any law or any morality, Nixon’s “crimes” appear so trivial as to be unremarkable. Yet, Nixon was driven from office and is regarded as a criminal.

What was Watergate really about?

I doubt we will ever know. But I can offer one possible explanation. Nixon, like John F. Kennedy before him, alarmed the military/security complex with his plans to withdraw US troops from Vietnam (Vietnamization) and his determination to open communication with communist China and improve relations.

As President Eisenhower warned in his last address to the American people, conflict brings power and profit to interest groups that benefit from conflict. Nixon, like Kennedy before him, was perceived as a threat by these powerful interests, because he was working to reduce conflict.

James W. Douglass in his documented book, JFK and the Unspeakable, attributes the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secret Service. Douglas reports that these powerful government institutions were concerned by Kennedy’s refusal to approve Operation Northwoods, to back the CIA’s invasion of Cuba, and to confront the Soviets militarily over the Cuban missile crisis and by Kennedy’s plans to end US military intervention in Vietnam. JFK also told his brother Robert that after his re-election he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces.

The right-wing view that Kennedy was too soft to stand up to communism was intensified when it was learned that Kennedy was working with Nikita Khrushchev through back channels to defuse the Cold War. In his “A Strategy of Peace” speech (June 1963), Kennedy announced the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the suspension of atmospheric nuclear testing.

“What kind of a peace do we seek?,” Kennedy asked. “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” With his words and deeds, President Kennedy made himself into a threat against the interests of the military/security complex.

There was enough suspicion of JFK’s assassination that yet another president assassinated by another “unhinged lone gunman” might raise more eyebrows. Nixon was disliked by the media, which made him a good candidate for political assassination. The Watergate burglary provided the opportunity. The Washington Post did the job with reports of “Deep Throat” meeting with reporters in spooky underground parking lots after midnight. Little, if any, information of consequence was contained in these reports. Instead, the newspaper’s reporting transferred the spooky danger of the deserted parking garages to Nixon and an aura of evil was attached to Nixon that eroded his support.

It is interesting that it is only presidents who work to reduce conflict who become targets for assassination. Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric was strong enough to fool the left-wing, but the military-security complex knew of Reagan’s intention to end the Cold War. The CIA, formerly headed by Reagan’s vice president, opposed Reagan’s plan to put the pressure of an arms race on the creaking Soviet economy. The CIA argued that the centrally planned Soviet economy allowed the Kremlin to control investment and that the Communist Party could allocate whatever percentage of Soviet GDP to the military as was needed to win the arms race. In other words, the CIA argued that the US would lose the arms race if Reagan raised the stakes as a means of bringing the Soviets to negotiate the end of the Cold War. Did the CIA really believe this, or was the military/security complex trying to keep the profitable Cold War stalemate going?

Washington cannot exist without conflict. Now that the “Muslim threat” is wearing thin, Washington is stirring up a conflict with China. Washington is sticking its nose into every dispute China has with its neighbors and building up its military presence in the Asian-Pacific. As I wrote in my previous column, a China threat is being created as a long-term threat to take the place of the former Soviet threat.

Moving on to another topic, americans are told that education is the answer to unemployment. Get that university degree and live happily every after.

As RT recently reported, the truth is that more than half of recent US university graduates are unemployed or very underemployed. So much for the mantra that “education is the answer.”

“Education is the answer” serves the colleges and universities who want the tuition payments. It serves the companies who make student loans. It helps the offshoring corporations disguise that they are the main cause of unemployment.

Education is not the answer when high value-added, high wage manufacturing and professional service jobs, such as software engineering, are moved offshore in order to enhance short-term profits for shareholders and multi-million dollar bonuses for CEOs, while domestic employment and purchasing power are destroyed. Unless American university graduates can emigrate to China and India, there is no one to employ them. Yet, we still hear the call to run up student loan debts beyond the ability of salaries to repay the loans.

Professional tradable service employment in the US is so scarce that the University of Florida has abolished its computer science department. As few of the graduates can find employment, the university has reallocated the department’s budget to football, a paying sport.

Americans plugged into the Matrix are programmed to believe that they have correct information provided by a varied and “independent media.” In fact the media is owned by 5 or 6 mega-media companies run by corporate advertising executives and Washington.

Recently, Bloomberg gave us the report that “Japan, Denmark and Switzerland are among the countries to rally this week to [IMF chief] Lagarde’s call for a bigger lending capacity beyond the current $380 billion to shield the world economy against any deepening of Europe’s debt turmoil.”

This Bloomberg report is nonsensical. The loans are not shielding the world economy. The loans are shielding the private banks from their own mistakes at the expense of the world economy. The Bloomberg report shows how completely the Western media is involved in forcing ordinary peoples to subsidize private bankers. It could not be more clear; yet, there is no embarrassment at Bloomberg for serving as the bankers’ propagandist.

Indeed, there is only honor. Serving the Matrix is where lie the rewards. Those who oppose the Matrix are the outcasts whose efforts might, as in the film, save the race of humans from the domination of evil, or else, if they lose, confine the outcasts to prosecution and death.

Across every front Americans are fed lies. The official media line is that the Japanese Fukushima nuclear threat from the earthquake and aftermath is well contained and over. However, the fact of the matter appears to be that an amazing radioactive inventory of both spent and unused fuel rods is in damaged cooling pools that could suffer collapse at any time (especially if there is another earthquake), thus releasing enormous radioactivity (reference link). This possibility presents a greater threat than the initial molten cores of the reactors themselves. Michael Chossudovsky points out that the media is yet to acknowledge the widespread contamination resulting from the Fukushima disaster, and there may be worse to come.

But who cares? Back to the Matrix and the “reality show.”

April 30, 2012, “Information Clearing House” —

You are all potential terrorists. It matters not that you live in Britain, the United States, Australia or the Middle East. Citizenship is effectively abolished. Turn on your computer and the US Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center may monitor whether you are typing not merely “al-Qaeda”, but “exercise”, “drill”, “wave”, “initiative” and “organisation”: all proscribed words. The British government’s announcement that it intends to spy on every email and phone call is old hat. The satellite vacuum cleaner known as Echelon has been doing this for years. What has changed is that a state of permanent war has been launched by the United States and a police state is consuming western democracy.
What are you going to do about it?

In Britain, on instructions from the CIA, secret courts are to deal with “terror suspects”. Habeas Corpus is dying. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five men, including three British citizens, can be extradited to the US even though none except one has been charged with a crime. All have been imprisoned for years under the 2003 US/UK Extradition Treaty which was signed one month after the criminal invasion of Iraq. The European Court had condemned the treaty as likely to lead to “cruel and unusual punishment”. One of the men, Babar Ahmad, was awarded 63,000 pounds compensation for 73 recorded injuries he sustained in the custody of the Metropolitan Police. Sexual abuse, the signature of fascism, was high on the list. Another man is a schizophrenic who has suffered a complete mental collapse and is in Broadmoor secure hospital; another is a suicide risk. To the Land of the Free, they go – along with young Richard O’Dwyer, who faces 10 years in shackles and an orange jump suit because he allegedly infringed US copyright on the internet.

As the law is politicised and Americanised, these travesties are not untypical. In upholding the conviction of a London university student, Mohammed Gul, for disseminating “terrorism” on the internet, Appeal Court judges in London ruled that “acts… against the armed forces of a state anywhere in the world which sought to influence a government and were made for political purposes” were now crimes. Call to the dock Thomas Paine, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela.

What are you going to do about it?

The prognosis is clear now: the malignancy that Norman Mailer called “pre fascist” has metastasized. The US attorney-general, Eric Holder, defends the “right” of his government to assassinate American citizens. Israel, the protege, is allowed to aim its nukes at nukeless Iran. In this looking glass world, the lying is panoramic. The massacre of 17 Afghan civilians on 11 March, including at least nine children and four women, is attributed to a “rogue” American soldier. The “authenticity” of this is vouched by President Obama himself, who had “seen a video” and regards it as “conclusive proof”. An independent Afghan parliamentary investigation produces eyewitnesses who give detailed evidence of as many as 20 soldiers, aided by a helicopter, ravaging their villages, killing and raping: a standard, if marginally more murderous US special forces “night raid”.

Take away the videogame technology of killing – America’s contribution to modernity – and the behaviour is traditional. Immersed in comic-book righteousness, poorly or brutally trained, frequently racist, obese and led by a corrupt officer class, American forces transfer the homicide of home to faraway places whose impoverished struggles they cannot comprehend. A nation founded on the genocide of the native population never quite kicks the habit. Vietnam was “Indian country” and its “slits” and “gooks” were to be “blown away”.

The blowing away of hundreds of mostly women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 was also a “rogue” incident and, profanely, an “American tragedy” (the cover headline of Newsweek). Only one of 26 men prosecuted was convicted and he was let go by President Richard Nixon. My Lai is in Quang Ngai province where, as I learned as a reporter, an estimated 50,000 people were killed by American troops, mostly in what they called “free fire zones”. This was the model of modern warfare: industrial murder.

Like Iraq and Libya, Afghanistan is a theme park for the beneficiaries of America’s new permanent war: Nato, the armaments and hi-tech companies, the media and a “security” industry whose lucrative contamination is a contagion on everyday life. The conquest or “pacification” of territory is unimportant. What matters is the pacification of you, the cultivation of your indifference.

What are you going to do about it?

The descent into totalitarianism has landmarks. Any day now, the Supreme Court in London will decide whether the WikiLeaks editor, Julian Assange, is to be extradited to Sweden. Should this final appeal fail, the facilitator of truth-telling on an epic scale, who is charged with no crime, faces solitary confinement and interrogation on ludicrous sex allegations. Thanks to a secret deal between the US and Sweden, he can be “rendered” to the American gulag at any time. In his own country, Australia, prime minister Julia Gillard has conspired with those in Washington she calls her “true mates” to ensure her innocent fellow citizen is fitted for his orange jump suit just in case he should make it home. In February, her government wrote a “WikiLeaks Amendment” to the extradition treaty between Australia and the US that makes it easier for her “mates” to get their hands on him. She has even given them the power of approval over Freedom of Information searches – so that the world outside can be lied to, as is customary.

What are you going to do about it?

www.johnpilger.com

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31194.htm

April 27, 2012 “Information Clearing House” — In these days of a dying, raving and hallucinating empire, its best known poet, and a master at being anti-war, is accepting a Presidential Freedom Award from a cynical if affable, still, to many people, master of war. What is Dylan thinking? He and Obama are no strangers. On February 9, 2010, Dylan performed “The Times They Are A-Changing” at the White House. If I remember correctly, Dylan seemed a bit sullen that night, and he skipped the final, feel good session at the end, when all the other performers gathered, beaming, around our Chief Executive, the one who can order you or anyone locked up without trial, or shot, sans fanfare, because we’re in a never ending war, remember? Dylan’s old squeeze, Queen Jane, sang at the same soiree, and before crooning, Baez even gazed at Obama and cooed, “Mr. President, you are much loved.” In our inverted country, grizzled peaceniks now serenade a war criminal.

To those who saw no irony that night, or now, is it because your gorgeous mind was too clogged up by Fox News, transfat, corn syrup or CNN to hold simultaneously two opposing concepts, such as peace and war, for example, and note that they didn’t quite match, but were clashing? Or you, Bob, can’t you tell that the battle outside that is a-ragin’ is a-causa by this missile-firing and slow jamming man? Can’t you see through his tiresome mask? It’s all a joke, really, as when Obama warned that the Jonas Brothers would be zapped by Predator Drones should they come close to his daughters, but I doubt that the world is laughing.

The Wall Street Journal muses if this latest honor will inch Dylan closer to a Nobel Prize, as if that award still has much legitimacy after its Peace version was bestowed on Obama not even a year into his Presidency, when he hadn’t a chance to really flaunt his bloody hands, though to the astute, there was already plenty of sick irony. The late, great Joe Bageant commented at the time, “The Nobel Committee awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to the very person who dropped the most bombs and killed the most poor people on the planet during that year.” Maybe these Scandinavians just like phony Americans, for in the previous year, the Swedes gave a serial joker, the dismal Paul Krugman, its honor in Economic Sciences. (The Peace Prizes are chosen by the Norwegian Parliament.) These recent gaffs top a long list of errors. Still, it’s a handsome pile of cash they give out, nearly $2 million now, so it’s rather remarkable that two men have turned it down, Jean Paul Sartre because he rejected all official honors, and Le Duc Tho because North Vietnam was still waging war even after it had signed a peace agreement. At least the Nobel Peace Prize never went to Adolf Hitler, although Gertrude Stein, one of America’s most celebrated poets, thought he should have received one. On May 6, 1934, Stein was quoted in the New York Times, “I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.”

If driving out everything that conduces to activity leads to peace, then present day America would be Arcadia, but with the collapse of our manufacturing base, with many factories fleeing overseas for cheaper labor, a process that still continues, despite the propaganda, Americans are more restless than ever, as evidenced by the recent Tea Party and Occupy outbreaks, though far worse eruptions lay just ahead, no matter what jive masters like Krugman and Obama have to say. As for the foreign fronts, America is busy, as usual, with several overlapping wars.

Maybe Dylan will surprise us all by refusing to receive his Freedom Medal from such a war-monger, and break all protocols by ambushing his bloody host with,

. Come you masters of war
. You that build all the guns
. You that build the death planes
. You that build the big bombs
. You that hide behind walls
. You that hide behind desks
. I just want you to know
. I can see through your masks.

But of course he won’t do anything so outlandish. In accepting this award, Dylan will drape Obama in another layer of cool and glamorize him further, just as Katy Perry did to our grunts and guns in a recent music video.

Breaking up with her cheating boyfriend, Perry impulsively joins the Marines. Instead of squirting a water gun at an arcade with her ex-weasel, Perry is now seen firing an M-16. Instead of lounging in a tub under the creepy eyes of her philandering asshole, Perry is now wrestling underwater with a fellow warrior-in-training. Instead of relying on a two-faced fuckface, Perry is now surrounded by tried and true comrades. The video ends with Perry singing ecstatically under a blue-hued flag, her new sky. Filmed at an actual Marines Corps base camp, this video features 80 Marines as extras, as well as tanks and helicopters, so it is a major collaboration between our entertainment and war industries, something we’ve become quite used to by now, and something we’ll see again when Dylan grasps Obama’s hand, looks into his eyes and smiles.

Linh Dinh is tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union

Washington has not made it clear what Washington’s stake is in the disputes. The reason Washington cannot identify why China’s disputes with the Philippines and Indonesia are threats to the United States is that there is no reason. Nevertheless, the undefined “threat” has become the reason Washington needs more naval bases in the Philippines and South Korea.

What this is all about is provoking a long-term cold war conflict with China that will keep profits and power flowing into Washington’s military-security complex. Large profits flow to armaments companies. A portion of the profits reflow into campaign contributions to “the people’s representatives” in DC and to presidential candidates who openly sell out their country to private interests.

Washington is going to construct new naval bases in the Philippines and on the environmentally protected Jeju Island belonging to South Korea. Washington will waste tax revenues, or print more money, in order to build the unnecessary fleets to occupy these bases. Washington is acquiring bases in Australia for US Marines to protect Australia from China, despite the lack of Chinese threats against Australia. Bush and Obama are the leading models of the “people’s president” who sell out the people, at home and abroad, to private interests.

Why is Washington ramping up a new cold war?

The answer begins with President Eisenhower’s warning to the American people in his last public address about the military/industrial complex in 1961. I won’t quote the warning as it is available online. Eisenhower pointed out to Americans that unlike previous wars after which the US demilitarized, after World War II the cold war with the Soviet Union kept the power and profits flowing into the military/industrial complex, now known as the military/security complex. President Eisenhower said that the flow of power and profit into the military/industrial complex was a threat to the economic wellbeing and liberty of the American people.

No one paid any attention, and the military/security complex was glad to be rid of the five-star general war hero president when his second term expired. Thanks to the hype about the “Soviet threat,” the military/security complex faced an unlimited horizon of mounting profits and power as Americans sacrificed their future to the interests of those who protected Americans from the Soviet threat.

The good times rolled for the armaments companies and security agencies for almost three decades until Reagan and Gorbachev reached agreement and ended the cold war. When the Soviet Union subsequently collapsed, the future outlook for the power and profit of the US military/security complex was bleak. The one percent was about to lose its fortunes and the secret government was about to lose its power.

The military/security complex went to work to revive the need for a massive “defense” and “security” budget. Among their willing tools were the neoconservatives, with their French Jacobin ideology and Israeli loyalties. The neocons defined America as the “indispensable people.” Such extraordinary people as Americans must establish hegemony over the world as the sole remaining superpower. As most neoconservatives are allied with Israel, the Muslim Middle East became the target of opportunity.

Muslims are sufficiently different from Westerners that Muslims are easy to demonize.
The demonization began in the neoconservative publications. Once Dick Cheney had the George W. Bush regime staffed with neoconservatives, the next step was to create “threats” to Americans out of verbiage about the Taliban’s responsibility for 9/11 and about “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction,” including verbal images from Bush’s National Security Advisor of “mushroom clouds” over US cities.

No one in the US government or the “free” US media or the media of the US puppet states in England, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, Australia and South Korea was struck by Washington’s proposition that “the world’s sole superpower” was threatened by the likes of Iraq and Iran, neither of which had any offensive military capability or any modern weapons, according to the unequivocal reports of the weapons inspectors.

What kind of “superpower” is threatened by Iraq and Iran? Certainly, not a real one.

No one seemed to notice that the alleged 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabians, not Afghans or Iraqis, yet it was Afghanistan and Iraq that were labeled “terrorist threats.” Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which do terrorize their subjects, are safe from having America bring them democracy, because they are Washington’s puppets, not independent countries.

As fear of nonentities swept over the population of “the world’s sole superpower,” the demands for war against “America’s enemies”–”you are with us or against us”–swept through the country. “Support the troops” plastic ribbons appeared on American cars. Americans went into a frenzy. The “towel heads” were after us, and we had to fight for our lives or be murdered in our beds, shopping centers, and airliner seats.

It was all a hoax to replace the Soviet threat with the Muslim threat.

The problem that developed with the “Muslim threat” is that in order to keep the profits and power flowing into the military/security complex, the promised six-week war in Iraq had to be extended into 8 years. The war in Afghanistan against a few thousand lightly armed Taliban has persisted for more than a decade, longer than the attempted Red Army occupation of Afghanistan.

In other words, the problem with hot wars is that the need not to win them in order to keep them going (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan are all long-term wars never won) in order that the profits and power continue to flow to the military/security complex demoralizes the US military and creates the world-wide impression that the “world’s sole superpower” cannot even defeat a few thousand insurgents armed with AK-47s, much less a real army.

In Iraq and Afghanistan more US soldiers have died from demoralization and suicides than from combat. In Iraq, the US was humiliated by having to end the war by putting the Sunni insurgents on the US military payroll and paying them to stop killing US troops. In Korea the US was stopped by an army of a backward third world country that lived on rice. What would happen today if the US “superpower’s” militarily confronted China, a country with an economy on which the US is dependent, about equal in size to the US economy, operating on its home territory? The only chance the evil in Washington would have would be nuclear war, which would mean the destruction of the entire world by Washington’s hubris.

Fortunately, profits are more important to Washington than ending life on earth. Therefore, war with China will be avoided, just as it was avoided with the Soviet Union. However, China will be presented by Washington and its prostitute media, especially the New York Times, Washington Post, and Murdoch’s collection of whores, as the rising threat to America. The media story will shift the importance of America’s allies from Europe to countries bordering the South China Sea. American taxpayers’ money, or newly printed money, will flow into the “new alliance against China.”

China’s rise is a great boon to the US military/security complex, which governs america in which there is a pretense of “freedom and democracy.” China is the profitable replacement for the “Soviet threat.” As the days go by, the presstitute media will create in the feeble minds of Americans “The CHINA Threat.”

Soon whatever little remains of the US living standard will be sacrificed to Washington’s confrontation with China, along with the seizure of our pensions and personal savings in order to deter “the China threat.”

If only Americans were an intelligent people. Then they might have some prospect of holding on to their incomes, remaining wealth, and liberty. Unfortunately, Americans are so thoroughly plugged into the Matrix that they present as a doomed people, incapable of thought, reason, or ability to comprehend the facts that the rest of the world sees clearly.

Can reality be brought to the American people? Perhaps a miracle will occur. Stay tuned.